Just International

Superspy Confesses To MI6 Black Ops In Iran

 

Preposterously bizarre as it is, the head of MI6 foreign intelligence agency John Sawers made a rare appearance before Britain’s civil servants in London on Friday and warned that the Iranians are “determinedly going down a path to master all aspects of nuclear weapons; all the technologies they need,” and that they will by 2014 acquire a nuclear bomb.

Apart from his political fallacy concerning Iran nuclear energy program, he smugly owns up to the MI6 covert operations in Iran which the British government had denied for years. The superspy’s confession to MI6 covert operations in Iran comes at a time when a few weeks earlier, a book claims that the nuclear assassinations in Iran were orchestrated and carried out by Mossad agents.

There is a Persian fictional character innocently known as Uncle Napoleon in Persian literature who readily discerns the hand of Britain behind any social or political chicanery which takes place in Iran. An initial evaluation of such an attitude might strike one as somewhat illogical or even ludicrous but when you scrutinize all the available evidence with a critical eye, you will concur that Uncle Napoleon enjoys a bittersweet sense of the true nature of the British government.

Back to his Excellency Sir John Sawyers, one cannot help smiling with some considerable degree of amusement especially when one sees how he boasts that the MI6 men prevented Tehran from developing nuclear weapons earlier and that without intervention, Iran may have gone nuclear as early as 2008.

Britain’s black ops in Iran range from carrying out assassination attempts to sabotaging and staging coup d’état.

Perhaps the first instance of MI6 black ops in Iran dates back to the early fifties when MI6 spymaster Colonel Monty Woodhouse was serving in the spy agency. In that capacity, he engineered the notorious Operation Boot with the intention of overthrowing the government of Mohammad Mossadegh, the Iranian politician who had a penchant for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in favor of restoring the British-friendly Shah of Iran to his throne in 1953. Monty Woodhouse personally flew guns into Iran from Baghdad aboard an RAF aircraft. He then “bought Iranian rials for sovereigns and – at a secret rendezvous in the Tehran suburbs – handed the cash to one of two mysterious Iranian brothers to help finance plans for the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh.” In fact, the government of Mossadegh was overthrown through an inauspicious liaison of MI6 and CIA.

In 2010, Iranian Intelligence Ministry revealed that they had arrested four MI6-linked terrorists in the western city of Marivan. These British elements were behind five assassinations in 2007 and 2008 in Iran. The detainees said they had been promised USD 20,000 for every assassination. They reportedly received instructions from their commander Jalal Fattahi in Sulaimaniya, Iraq. Fattahi, who was also a commander with the terrorist Komala group, resides in London and has, on the strength of the detainees’ testimonies, conducted a number of assassinations in western Iranian cities since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The detained terrorists, Bakhtiar Me’mari, Hajeer Ebrahimi, Loqman Moradi and Zanyar Moradi, also belong to the Komala group. Founded in 1967, the Komala group, purportedly defunct now, is a Kurdish separatist group which garnered international attention for their sabotage and terrorist activities within Iran. Apart from conducting terrorist operations inside Iran, they are also responsible for helping the despotic Saddam regime attack and kill Iranian combatants during the Iran-Iraq war. The terrorist Komala group works under the aegis of the MI6.

In 2010, the British Foreign Office vehemently dismissed the claim, and said, “There is a long history of baseless Iranian allegations against the UK. This is just the latest,” a spokesman said.

“The UK does not support or encourage terrorist activity in Iran, or anywhere else in the world, and this claim will be seen as what it is: another in a long line of slurs against the United Kingdom from the government of Iran.”

Interestingly, earlier in the week, the head of MI6, John Sawers, had emphasized the importance of covert ops in Iran, and said, “Stopping nuclear proliferation cannot be addressed purely by conventional diplomacy. We need intelligence-led operations to make it more difficult for countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons.”

As the Persian saying goes, “the wall of denial is high.”

Further to that, the British government has been collaborating with the Mossad agents on a plot to topple the Iranian government. In this murky business was involved Adam Werritty, a close friend of former British Defense Secretary Liam Fox who resigned when the scandal was made public. Liam Fox’s right-hand man Werritty who speaks Farsi after a broken fashion was said to “have regularly met Iranian dissidents, Israeli spies and right-wing US groups with an interest in destabilizing President Ahmadinejad.”

Apparently, he had been briefed by MI6 after returning from overseas trips. Werritty reportedly worked closely with right-wing neoconservative groups in the US to push ahead with his anti-Iran sabotage plot.

Confession to black ops within the Iranian soil is an absolute source of shame for the British government, an egregious invitation to military invasion by the Zio-Americans and the knowledge of it is a bitter reality which will rankle in the Iranian collective memory for all the time to come.

So true was Uncle Napoleon’s mantra, “The Brits are to blame.”

 

By Ismail Salami

17 July, 2012

Countercurrents.org

 

Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.

 

Strait History And Iran ‘s Options

George Santayana wisely said: “” Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it .”  Oblivious to history and its lessons, America and its Western allies are repeating their actions of the  1950’s — that of imposing an oil embargo on Iran .   The American-led alliance has forgotten the past.

Iran remembers

When under the leadership of the nationalist Dr. Mossadegh, Iran opted to nationalize its oil industry,  the British Royal Navy blocked Iran ‘s oil exports to forcefully prevent if from nationalizing its oil.  In retaliation to Iran ‘s nationalistic ambitions, and to punish Iran for pursuing its national interests, the British instigated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil.

In the 1950’s, Iran did not have the military might to retaliate to the oil embargo and the naval blockade was aimed at crushing the economy in order to bring about regime change.   The subsequent events is described in The New York Times [i] article  as a “lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid” when an oil-rich Third World nation “goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.”    Iran learnt that sovereignty and nationalism necessitate tactical/military strength and determination.

Not heeding the aftermath of the 1950’s,  the American-led Western allies have once again imposed an oil embargo on Iran .  In retaliation,  Iran has drafted a bill to stop the flow of oil through its territorial waters – the Strait of Hormuz , to countries which have imposed sanctions against it.  This bill is not without merit and contrary to the previous oil embargo, it would appear that Tehran has the upper hand and the heavy cost associated with the embargo will not be borne by Iran alone.

Iran’s Legal Standing

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea stipulates that vessels can exercise the right of innocent passage, and coastal states should not impede their passage.  Although Iran has signed the Treaty, the Treaty was not ratified, as such, it has no legal standing.    However, even if one overlooks the non-binding signature, under UNCLOS framework of international law, a coastal state can block ships from entering its territorial waters if the passage of the ships harms “peace, good order or security” of said state, as the passage of such ships would no longer be deemed “innocent” [ii] .

Even if Iran simply chooses to merely delay the passage of tankers by exercising its right to inspect every oil-tanker that passes through the Strait of Hormuz , these inspections and subsequent delays would maintain or contribute to higher oil prices.    While higher oil prices would benefit Iran and other oil-producing countries, they would further destabilize the European economy which is already in crisis.

The  Military Option

Although American-led Western allies are flexing their muscles by sending battle ships to the Persian Gulf, Washington ‘s own war game exercise, The Millennium Challenge 2002 with a price tag of $250 million, underscored America ‘s inability to defeat Iran .  Oblivious to the lesson of its own making, by sending more warships to the Persian Gulf, the United States is inching towards a full scale conflict.   The inherent danger from the naval buildup is that unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, the forces in the Persian Gulf are not confined to two leaders who would be able to communicate to stop a run-away situation.   Nor would the consequences of such a potential conflict be limited to the region.

Given that 17 million barrels of oil a day, or 35% of the world’s seaborne oil exports go through the Strait of Hormuz, incidents in the Strait would be fatal for the world economy.    While only 1.1 millions barrels per day goes to the United States , a significant amount of this oil is destined for Europe .  Surely, one must ask why the United States demands that its “European allies” act contrary to their own national interest, pay a higher price for oil by boycotting Iranian oil and running the risk of Iran blocking the passage of other oil-tankers destined for them?

Again, history has the straight answer.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, the United States   and not the oil-producing countries has used oil as a weapon.  Some examples include the pressure the United States put on Britain in the 1920s to share its oil concessions in the Middle East with U.S. companies.  Post World War II,  the United States violated the terms of the 1928 Red Line Agreement freezing the British and the French out of the Agreement.

In 1956, the United States made it clear to Britain and France that no oil would be sent to Western Europe unless the two aforementioned countries agreed to a rapid withdrawal from Egypt .  The U.S.   was not opposed to the overthrow of Nasser , but as Eisenhower said: “Had they done it quickly, we would have accepted it “ [iii] .

Demonstrably, although Europe is a major trade partner of the United States , the U.S. does not concern itself with Europe ‘s well being when it comes to executing its foreign policy.   This should come as no surprise, especially since the United States sacrifices its own national interest to promote the Israeli agenda and that of the military industrial complex.   But this does not explain why Europe would shoot itself in the foot at a time when its economical woes have passed the crisis point.

It is possible that the leaders of Western European countries are beholden to special interest groups – the pro-Israel lobbies, as the United States is, or they believe Iran will not call their bluff by ratifying the bill passed by Majlis and their oil will be delivered unhindered; perhaps both.  Either way, they are committing financial suicide and their demise may well come before Iran ‘s resolve  is shaken.

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

05 July, 2012
Countercurrents.org

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is a Public Diplomacy Scholar, independent researcher and blogger with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby groups.

[i] “THE IRANIAN ACCORD”, The New York  Times , Aug 6,1954, cited by S. Shalom

[ii] Martin Wahlisch, The Yale Journal of International Law, March 2012, citing UNCLOS, supra note 12, , art. 19, para1, and art. 25, para1.

[iii] Stephen Shalom; The Iran-Iraq War citing Kennett Love, Suez : the Twice-Fought War, New York : McGraw Hill, 1969, p. 651

STATEMENT OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN ON RIO +20 AND THE GREEN ECONOMY

Defend Life and Peoples ‘Rights in Rio +20!

Reject the Green Economy and Commodification of Nature!

The world faces a crisis of civilization in which the global economic system based on the accumulation of capital has broken balance with mother earth. The current model is taking us to the limit, soon arriving at a point where the damage will be having irreversible impacts on and consequences for the peoples of the world.

10% of the world’s richest have more than half of the global income and people in rich countries consume ten times more natural resources than in poor countries, while globally, 1 billion people are hungry, 1.6 billion have no access to electricity and more than 1 billion do not have access to safe drinking water.

The current capitalist system has led to the empowerment of transnational corporations that profit from the natural resources and speculate in the financial market, going so far as that out of the 100 largest global economies, more than 40 are trans-national.

The commitments of governments for the reduction of greenhouse gas are by far insufficient, so many regions will suffer under extreme unpredictability, where billions of people will be affected and displaced.

In the midst of this financial, energy, climate, environmental and food crises, the G8, representing the most powerful countries in the world,  with their allies as Brazil and transnational corporations are seeking to save the capitalist system through the imposition of the “green economy”, rather than making changes to the structural causes of the crisis.

The civil society of Latin America and the Caribbean states:

On the proposal of the green economy

We denounce that the green economy is still pursuing to the erroneous idea of infinite economic growth in a world that has limits.

We reject the commodification of mother earth – of their life cycles and their functions, as well as payments for “environmental services” to create new financial products for the speculative market.

We denounce the green economy will not put an end to extractive industries, mining, hydrocarbons and the agro-exporting model that will continue to have negative impacts on the environment and the rights of peoples.

The green economy will strengthen the economic power of transnational corporations, being even much more influential than the more developed countries, having also self-protection mechanisms through free trade agreements, such as arbitration systems to protect their investment and future earnings, such as the ICSID.

The imposition of the green economy in Latin America and the Caribbean will be going far behind the achievements of the peoples’ struggles constituted as the right to water, the right to a healthy environment, the sovereignty and self-determination of indigenous peoples, among others.

We support the State of Acre letter signed by thirty civil society organizations in rejection of the commodification of nature and in defense of the territories. We call on the communities in other territories to be alert and to resist implementation of green economy and not to follow the example of the Government of Acre.

Facing the false solutions that are part of the proposal for a green economy, the North should take the initiative to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically and immediately and comply with its obligations on technology transfer and financing without any conditions. The green economy is a “permit” for large industries polluting the environment.

We denounce the false solutions to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases such as nuclear energy, capture and artificial storage of carbon, GM crops and bio-fuels. Solutions to the problem the planet is facing, are not the application of new technologies, but the transformation of structural policies.

We demand the immediate stop of all projects destructive to mother earth, such as open pit mining, the exploitation of hydrocarbons in ecologically sensitive areas, the mega-projects and the IIRSA projects.

We reject any process of regional integration dominated by the big capital.

Before the negotiations of Rio + 20

We demand from the national governments to actively defend the interests of their peoples in the current negotiating text and assume responsibility for future generations. We demand the governments to not endorse the green economy and to not accept the agreements of the Rio + 20. Governments should ensure that the negotiations will be comprehensive, open and transparent.

We require national governments to defend the right to water, the rights of mother earth and the rights of indigenous peoples as expressed in the resolutions of the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change (Tiquipaya, 2010).

We affirm the importance of upholding the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, the precautionary principle and the principle of access to information, public participation and justice.

We demand realistic and creative mechanisms such as the creation of a tax on financial transactions. It is necessary to construct instruments at the service of the people, with a system of democratic and transparent governance that promotes inclusive public policies, integration between peoples and a new model of development.

Trans-nationals of the G8, in complicity with the governments, have co-opted the UN system, have taken over the social and ecological discourse, and have greater participation in the Rio + 20 negotiations than civil society. Large private corporations have contaminated the planet most, along with the World Bank and the G20, promoting green economy and continue doing “business as usual”. Rio + 20 negotiations must be ” party driven ” with more participation of civil society.

Alternative models of the life – alternatives to the green economy

Living well, a holistic approach to the rights of mother earth are an alternative to the model of capitalist development, exploiting mother earth and human beings. We are not owners of the nature: we are part of mother earth and demand respect for her life cycles.

Likewise we demand governments to promote policies to support a genuine sustainable agricultural production and food sovereignty without GMOs, as the only way to stop the advance of transnational corporations profiting from the food production in the planet.

We must generate a new global alternative to the green economy to restore balance with mother earth and establish living well, with complementarity and solidarity between people and guaranty well being.

An alternative economy based on mutuality would mean a life model based on the interests of communities, peasant organizations, workers, peasants, women and indigenous peoples.

An equitable redistribution of wealth, establishing modes of production to meet the real needs of women and men.

Build an alternative to the concept of “environmental services” and “natural capital” which only aim to the commodification of nature. Management and integral management of forests, water, land, among other beings of nature is a viable alternative to the philosophy of the green economy.

We demand from governments to comply with the principles of living well, stated in the declaration of civil society at a global level in the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010, in order to not just leaving it a speech, but elaborating specific policies for a gradual transition to overcome capitalism in all its forms.

Immediate joint actions

We call upon the international civil society to build alliances to resist the imposition of the green economy in the region and to build a new model for living well in harmony with mother earth.

The governments, communities, international cooperation and other sectors must prevent the degradation of the environment either directly or indirectly, further violations of human rights and mother earth, (water, air, land),  and must ensure the restoration of the affected areas.

Let’s mobilize towards Rio + 20 in rejection to green economy!

Let’s build alternative models to defend life and achieve the living well!

Brasil

Amazon link (Acre)

Ecuador

PIDHDD – Plataforma Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, Democracia y Desarrollo

Frente Popular

CDES – Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales

Nicaragua

RENICC  – Fundación Red Nicaraguense de Comercio Comunitario

Honduras

Colectivo

Chile

Plataforma Rio+20

México

Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericana

Colombia

CIASE – Corporación de Investigación y Acción Social y Económica

RLIE – Res Latinoamericana sobre las Industrias Extractivas

ILSA – Instituto Latinoamericano para una Sociedad y un Derecho Alternativos

Perú

Propuesta Ciudadana

Construyendo Puentes

CAOI – Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas

Argentina

Abogados Ambientalistas

Guatemala

Movimiento Tzuk Kim-pop (Guatemala); Centro América por el Diálogo –CAD

R. Dominicana

Alianza ONG

Red regional

Movimiento Independencia, Unidad y Cambio

Equipo de Coordinación, Red Latinoamericana de Deuda, Derechos y Desarrollo  LATINDADD

Bolivia

Academia Diplomática

ACSUR LAS SEGOVIAS

AGRUCO – Agroecología  Universidad Cochabamba

Fundación Agua Sustentable

AIPE – Asociación de Instituciones de Promoción y Educación

AMUPEI – Articulación de Mujeres por la Equidad e Igualdad

AOPEB – Asociación de Organizaciones de Productores Ecológicos de Bolvia

Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní – APG

Asociación de Guías de Bolivia

Asociación de Regantes de Santa Cruz

Broederlijk Delen

CAFOD – Agencia oficial de la Iglesia Católica de Inglaterra y el País de Gales para el desarrollo y la ayuda en casos de emergencia

CCGTT-  Concejo de Capitanes Guaraní y Tapiete de Tarija

CDES – Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales

CEADESC – Centro de Estudios Aplicados a los Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culturales

CEDLA – Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral Agrario

CEEDI – Centro de Estudios Ecológicos y Desarrollo Integral

CEJIS – Centro de Estudios Jurídicos e Investigación Social

CENDA – Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino

COB – Central Obrera Boliviana

Centro para la Democracia

CEPA –  Centro de Ecología y Pueblos Andinos.

CESA – Centro de Servicios Agropecuarios

CESU – Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios

CIDEM – Centro de Información y Desarrollo de la Mujeres

CIOEC-  Coordinadora de Integración de Organizaciones Económicas Campesinas Indígenas Originarias de Bolivia

CIPCA – Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado

CLADEM – Comité de América Latina y el Caribe para la Defensa de los Derechos de la Mujer

CODEPIO-BENI  – Consejo Departamental de Pueblos Indígenas Originarios del Beni

Colectivo Cabildeo

CONAMAQ – Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Marcas del Qullasuyo

CPILAP – Central de Pueblos Indígenas de La Paz

CRHISTIAN AID – Una Agencia Oficial de las Iglesias Británicas e Irlandesas

CSIB – Confederación Sindical de Interculturales de Bolivia

CSUTCB – Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia

Democracy Center

FCA-AIS BOLIVIA –

FEDECEP-LP – La Federación Departamental de Centros y Comités Cívicos Provinciales de La Paz

Foro Indígena

FSTMB – Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia

FSUTC-BENI – Federación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos del Beni

Fundación CONSTRUIR

Fundación JUBILEO

Fundación SOLON

Fundación Gaia Pacha

GTCC – Grupo de Trabajo Conjunto de Cumbres

HERENCIA – Interdisciplinaria para el Desarrollo Sostenible

IESE – Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Económicos

LIDEMA – Liga de Defensa del Medio Ambiente

MOFISP – Movimiento Femenino Indoamericano Senti-Pensante

OXFAM – GB

Plataforma Boliviana Frente al cambio Climático

Plataforma Energética

PROBIOMA – Productividad Biosfera Medio Ambiente

PRODENA – Prodefensa de la Naturaleza

Programa NINA

Reacción Climática

Red de Comunicaciones Apachita

Red Habitat

REMTE – Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres Transformando la Economía

SERNAP – Servicio Nacional de Areas Protegidas

SOPE – Sociedad Potosina de Ecología

Subcentral TIPNIS – Territorio Indígena del Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure

TROCAIRE – Agencia Católica Irlandesa para el Desarrollo

UMAVIDA –  Asociación Boliviana Uniendo Manos por la Vida

UMSA – Universidad Mayor de San Andrés

UNICOR – Universidad Cordillera

UNITAS – Unión Nacional de Instituciones para el Trabajo de Acción Social

Filipinas

IBON Internacional

Solidaridad

SOMALIA: FAMINE FOR PROFIT AND THE EAST AFRICAN FOOD CRISIS

 

 

By Nile Bowie

Global Research, April 14, 2012

nilebowie.blogspot.com – 2011-08-13

Few parts of the world aptly fit the description of hell better than Somalia’s crumbling capital city, Mogadishu; a nation ravaged by imperialism, domestic instability and economic sabotage from foreign forces. Parades of malnourished Africans queuing up to receive rations are trumpeted in thirty second news pieces on most mainstream media outlets, of which offer embarrassingly insubstantial examples of journalism with little explanation for such images of unparalleled inequality, past the effects of droughts, while never missing the opportunity to highlight the threat of al-Qaeda. While it cannot be denied that the current droughts in East Africa, which have been reported to be the most dire in sixty years, have been negatively exacerbating the climate of food availability in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia; the mammoth aid conglomerates which ‘shake their coin cup’ for incoming donations from the predominately cash-strapped civilian populations of the ‘developed’ world and the reporting mainstream media outlets consistently fail to maturely scrutinize the basis for such economic dysfunction in East Africa,  responsible for the starvation of thousands of people. In Somalia’s case (a nation once self sufficient in it’s food production), the ‘economic medicine’ of the International Monetary Fund and the behest of colossal oil robber-barrens have contributed far more devastation than droughts towards producing the images of deprived and inebriated bodies you see on television.

While a percentage of people around the world enjoy the supersized culture of fast food Globalization in our age of 3D HDTV, quadruple-decker cheese burgers and senseless commodity overproduction, three billion people or nearly half the world’s population individually sustain themselves on less than two USD per day amidst an annual surge in the global price of food, which has increased by thirty seven percent since last year. The loathsomely bias individuals which comprise the International Community, of whom are capable of feeding the entire African content with the loose change in their couch cushions, use today’s reports of legitimate or fabricated human rights abuses in Africa and all over the world as a pretext for exercising avenues of modern imperial conquest in the morally bankrupt pursuit of private geopolitical, economic and militarily strategic gain; this should lend serious credence to the motivations of East African aid supplied by Western Political & Financial Institutions, which have contributed to the very economic genocide responsible for requiring such aid to begin with. The area designated as modern day Somalia is a region believed to have produced the first Homo sapiens, who were responsible for crafting vast anthropological treasures and archeological artifacts, evidence of a highly sophisticated ancient civilization. The region once thrived as a bustling hub of commerce and lucrative international trade, Somali merchants of the time were chieftains of commercial exchange between Asia, Persia and Africa during the time of the Ming Dynasty and were even responsible for influencing Chinese linguistics during the period. Today, the people of Somalia are regarded as little more than ants at a picnic for the Intelligence Agencies and Corporate Interests that seek to occupy this strategically located area. The weapon of choice against them is man made famine.

Somalians belong to a single homogenous ethnic group comprised predominately of nomadic tribesmen who place great importance on poetry and other oral traditions, they are historically characterized by fiercely striving for independence against foreign forces during the Scramble for Africa, most notably from the imposing agents of the British Empire in league with Christian Ethiopians and Italian Fascists in the late 19th century in their pursuit to control Somalia’s trading ports and strategic coastline. The religious cleric turned patriotic leader of the day, Sayid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan led several successful military ventures using guerilla armies of ethnically Somali fighters from across the Horn of Africa, which overpowered British imperial forces on several occasions. While its surrounding peers had been colonized or utilized as proxy forces, as such in Ethiopia, Hassan fathered the Dervish State in modern day Somalia built on the pillars of homogenous, linguistic and religious unity and national self sufficiency, which had remained the only independent Muslim State on the entire African continent. Like today, any governance that resists the command of Imperialists (now called ‘Globalists’) are dispensed militarily; the British launched the first modern airstrike in Africa against Dervish military bases in Somalia, effectively crushing the resistance of the rightful indigenous inhabitants for their own private objectives of which have continued to the present day in more sophisticated ways.

Somalia was once a progressive developing nation built on homogenous unity and agricultural self-sufficiency, which encouraged gender equality, the emerging roles of women in military and production, and the banning female circumcision.

With total disregard for anthropological requirements and ethnic distinctions of the people within the areas of foreign territory they carved up, the British invaders ceded regions populated by ethnic Somalis such as Haud and Ogaden over to their ally, the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik in 1948; later, crippling regional conflict would ensue in regaining these stolen territories. The geographical borders of the first Somali Republic, which achieved independence in 1960, were literally drawn by British and Italian forces. Mohamed Siad Barre declared Somalia a Socialist state after a military coup in ’69 and attempted to build a nation in Hassan’s vision of state unity and self-sufficiency through cooperative farming and nationalization programs of industry and mass production. While life in the times of Socialist Somalia was far from glamorous, it was absolutely blissful compared to the current state of affairs within the Horn of Africa. At the time Somalia was agriculturally stable and actively implementing sweeping public works programs and working to dramatically increase the nations literacy rate through urban and rural programs, while introducing the first Latin-based orthography of the Somalian dialect as the national language of education. The Islamic government exercised very progressive views towards improving the influence of women in society by offering unisex education and creating laws forbidding female circumcision, woman were actively recruited in the military and female employment in factory production was encouraged. Barre supported the model of Greater Somalia, which sought to regain ethnic Somali territories handed out by the preceding colonial administrations that would encompass Somalia, Djibouti, Ogaden (Ethiopia) and the North Eastern Province (Kenya); these aspirations led to the Ogaden War with Ethiopia, the superpowers of the time aided and funded this conflict in exchange for constructing military bases, thus effectively reducing the Horn of Africa to pliant client states and of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union was closely allied with Barre’s government and supplied vast military and economic aid, allowing Somalia to build up the largest armory on the continent before switching strategies and backing Ethiopia, which was synonymous for being an American proxy state prior to a military takeover which led to the rise of Ethiopian Marxist leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam. Somalia turned to the United States for aid and the resulting conflicts killed thousands of Africans and severely weakened Ethiopia and Somalia, as their lands were used as the inconsequential frontlines of foreign forces. Following the Somalia’s military withdrawal in the Ogaden War, the economy was crippled due to disproportionate military spending and looming foreign debt. In the face of increasing public discontent with Barre’s government and the loss of aid from the Soviet Union, Somalia called to the West; unfortunately for the Somali people, The International Monetary Fund answered. As part of the IMF’s loan protocol, the borrower country must accept the conditions stipulated within structural adjustment policies, thus requiring the suspension of public work programs, investments in education and nearly any outlet which gives priority towards improving people’s conditions and standards of living. Structural adjustment programs are designed to pry countries open to predatory capital, often purging the authority of national companies over the management of the resources in their own lands; these schemes of the IMF and other financial institutions are designed to secure the indebtedness the borrower country to total dependency on further loans and foreign aid; directly attacking national sovereignty and practices of self sufficiency which the Somalis gave their lives to protect.

Following the IMF-imposed austerity measures, Somalia began to grovel and churn by facing food shortages, record inflation and currency devaluation, to a point where a simple meal at a restaurant required paying with bundles of currency notes. Barre’s increasingly irrelevant leadership settled further loan agreements with the Paris Club and International Development Association, which required the Government to sell off vital public systems, such as the countries’ electricity generators, which cast Mogadishu into a nightly darkness.  As the situation in Somalia became increasingly unstable, Ethiopians armed and funded various militia clans such as the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and the Somali National Movement, which ousted President Barre after twenty-two years of military rule. Warring foreign funded clans sought to legitimize themselves as Barre’s successor, leading to a Civil War in ‘91, which plunged the nation into anarchy. James Bishop, the former United States ambassador to Somalia stated, “There is competition for water, pasturage, and cattle. It is a competition that used to be fought out with arrows and sabers, now it is fought out with AK-47’s”. Since that time, the nation of Somalia has been largely without a stable Government, after decades of intervention from foreign forces, the Somali people have been brought to their knees. In the present day, Somalia is trumpeted as an emerging front in the ever expanding and oxymoronic War on Terror.  Much of the country is under the control of Al Qaeda linked militia group, ‘Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen’, simply known as Al-Shabaab. Under further examination of the International Communities’ engagements in Somalia, the goal of cleansing the land of its indigenous inhabitants becomes glaringly obvious in its brazen criminality.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MAN-MADE FAMINE & THE CARTELIZATION OF FOOD

“The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.” – Initiative for the United Nations ECO-92 EARTH CHARTER

The key policy makers, in which the International Community is comprised of, are among the worst examples of human beings our globalized civilization has to offer; through the lenses of their own superiority complex, these individuals view the Third World as a place designated for their personal plunder, populated with third-rate individuals and useless eaters who are unworthy to consume the nourishments produced on their own indigenous lands. Presently, Somalia is weathering consecutively severe droughts, which prevail in the regions of southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle, partially controlled by jihadist militia group, Al-Shabaab. Traditionally, due to its harsh geographical climate, Somalia has always been a pastoral and rural economy of barter between nomadic herdsmen and resident agriculturalists. Despite persistent droughts, Somalia maintained agricultural self-sufficiency throughout the 1970’s and implemented programs, which led to sizeable commercial pastoral development. The IMF-World Bank intervened in the 80’s and set the stage for an agricultural crisis through economic reforms, which diluted the delicate exchange relationship between pastoralists and small farmers, in their relative nomadic and sedentary economies.

In order to service debt owed to the Paris Club and other Washington-based financial institutions, harsh austerity measures were imposed on the former Somali Government, which reinforced national dependency on imported grain, further contributing to bankruptcy and the need for additional loan supplements. Food aid increased by fifteen times between the mid seventies to mid eighties and continued to rise by thirty-one percent per annum. Sedentary agricultural producers were ruined by the IMF stipulated increase of commercial imports, traditionally consumed locally grown crops such as maize and sorghum were replaced with cheap foreign wheat and subsidized US grain in an effort to increase Somalia’s dependency – not its sovereignty. Prices of fuel, fertilizer and farm inputs rose exorbitantly following periodic IMF imposed devaluations of the Somali Shilling, which crushed the nations purchasing power and severely impacted domestic agricultural producers and irrigated farming. The real causes of impoverishment in Somali farming communities were caused by deregulation of the grain market, currency warfare and the influx of foreign food aid, such donations were made with the expectation that Somalia’s best-irrigated farmlands would be used to harvest fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and cotton, not for domestic consumption, but for export into lucrative grocery market shelves in the First World. Donors were able to take control of the entire budgetary process by providing food aid because its domestic sale became the principal source of revenue for the state.

“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the Third World, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”- Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize recipient & former US Secretary of State

In a country where fifty percent of the population is comprised of nomadic pastoralists, the role of camels and other livestock is integral to survival and wealth procurement; prior to the IMF’s involvement in Somalia, livestock contributed to eighty percent of export earnings. Ultimately, creating dependency is profitable and securing such relationships is the ultimate goal of a lending institution, loans are distributed attached to structural adjustment polices for that reason. The World Bank encouraged the privatization of livestock veterinary services, a private market for veterinary drugs, and administered the commercialization of water during times of drought, while effectively dissolving the functions performed by the government’s own Ministry of Livestock; thus forcing a traditional exchange economy onto a privatized for-profit system, not catered towards the needs of nomadic herders in remote pastoral areas, which yielded devastating results by wiping out herds and any semblance of the pastoralist economy. Bretton Woods’ institutions oversaw the restructuring of government budgeting and expenditure, which prevented the government from independently utilizing the available domestic resources, leading to an eighty five percent decline in agricultural expenditures from levels in the mid seventies.

The economic restructuring programs implemented by the IMF-World Bank have devastated the practices of nomadic pastoralists and driven them to impoverished austerity. The traditional exchange economy was undone; grain producers who bartered their grain for livestock were ruined as grazing herds faded from starvation, which contributed to dwindling foreign exchange earnings from international beef exports. It is no surprise that the governments once reasonably sound economic and social programs began to deteriorate. According to research published by Michael Chossudovsky, government expenditure on health in ’89 had declined by seventy eight percent in comparison with their relative mid seventies levels and the levels of recurrent annual expenditure on education was only four USD per student, when previously the budget in ’82 allowed for eighty two USD to be allocated per student, amidst a forty one percent decrease in school enrollment, resulting in the relative collapse of the education system. The average public sector wage was reduced to three USD per month and Somalia’s debt-servicing obligations represented a bleak 194.6 percent of export earnings, the situation became hopeless.The World Bank had permitted a structural adjustment loan for seventy million USD in ‘89, but was later frozen due to hemorrhaging economic performance; even if the country were to take new loans in an attempt to repay their debts, Somalia has been taken hostage by predatory capital, debt servicing and structural adjustment. Traditional economies in hundreds of different countries are under attack from the IMF; famines in the present day are not an outcome of a food shortage but the result of economic restructuring, unaffordability and global oversupply.

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” – Ted Turner, CNN founder and donor to the United Nations

The work of the IMF, World Bank and other Bretton Woods financial institutions is to secure the handcuffed dependency of the borrower country to world markets and the destruction of food security; environmental conditions and drought foster additional vulnerability towards food insecurity, as seen presently unfolding in the Horn. Somalia was cast further into economic dysfunction due to the subsidization of duty-free beef and dairy products, imported from the European Union; pastoral farmers are prevented from traditionally procuring wealth from their herds because low quality meat products imported from the EU sell for half the price of domestically produced product. Food aid to sub-Saharan Africa has increased more than seven times since 1974 and commercial grain imports have flooded local markets and more than doubled in availability in countries known to be agriculturally self-sufficient, such as Zimbabwe, where the population was subjected consuming tree bark during a food crisis in 1992, while their fertile lands were used for cultivating tobacco exports to service foreign debt. Financial institutions apply debilitating restructuring to the economies of borrower countries to effectively turn them into breadbaskets for cash crops and other money harvests, using the highest quality farmlands available to cultivate tobacco crops for export, while simultaneously flooding the local market with subsidized foreign grain and meat products; creating a deliberate express route to creating poverty and unraveling local economies. In addition to implementing crippling initiatives of austerity in the rural development, public works and agricultural infrastructure projects of African countries, their shameless pursuit of turning a profit has led the World Bank to trumpet the commoditization of water, which does nothing but actively contribute to food insecurity and famine in arid climates.

IMF-World Bank imposed structural adjustment is the ultimate attack on sovereignty and any local system of exchange that bypasses the global market. The ensuing economic dysfunctions are not a terrible coincidence or a result of mismanagement; they are designed to create dependency through Malthusian policies, market sabotage and contrived famines, resulting in intentionally culling the population of the developing world, out of fear that their indigenous resources and sovereign economies may potentially yield a bountiful amount of wealth and independent development. According to research conducted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the global price of food has skyrocketed more than two hundred and forty percent since 2004; the unwarranted upward mobility of such necessities must not be naively dismissed as market fluctuations, the price of food is directly manipulated by key constituents of the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss food cartel, comprised of a dozen pivotal companies, assisted by another three dozen, which literally hold a monopoly over the world’s food supply under the nauseating influence of the inbreeding feudalists within the Royal British House of Windsor. Never before in history have such powerful oligarchs been so blatant in expressing their advocacy for depopulation. Their control of the food supply is enough to loose sleep over.

“To really reduce population, quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease, like the Black Death.” –  Thomas Ferguson, US State Department Office of Population Affairs

The work of the Windsor-led food cartel directly serves to influence the deaths of millions of people annually, by means of starvation through man-made famines. The cartel is comprised of six leading private grain producing companies: Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and Born, André, and Archer Daniels Midland, which control the majority of the world’s grain, wheat, corn, oats, rye, sorghum, barley, meats, dairy, oils, fruits, vegetables, sugars and spices. In an effort to dominate the world’s natural resources, the institution of the House of Windsor has worked to centrally focus control over energy distribution, management of mineral/resources and the cultivation of food. Extensive research published by Richard Freeman in the Executive Intelligence Review thoroughly illustrate the central control of the food cartel, of whom have established four main export blocks used to fuel the global food economy. The regional breakdown of market control includes the United States, the European Union, the Commonwealth Nations such as Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Latin America (Argentina & Brazil); Although these regions account for much less than a quarter of the world population by today’s estimates, they are used to grow produce and other food products, which cheaply pour into the markets of the other 80% of the world.

While it is common for countries producing bountiful and nutritious food to become active in the export market, the four focus regions of the cartel were given unbridled priority as world distributors, effectively instilling forced dependency in the restructuring Third World, which fell into the trap of accepting adjustment loans from the very foreign forces which plundered them in colonization; the countries outside the four export regions could either import from the global market, or starve. War was waged against the independent farm economies of the four export regions, sparring nothing outside of corporate central control. In 1976, Russia was sold 12.4 million tons of grain produced in North America by Cargill and Continental, creating a grain shortage in America and Canada at time. Just because the food is grown in the four export regions, does not entitle those countries to guaranteed food security, or mean the ruling governments of those countries have any authority over the destination or prices of the products, because they are harvested and distributed by totally private entities who make their decisions based on profit, not merit or moral supremacy. In studies conducted by the Trade Analysis Branch of the US Department of Agriculture in 1994, the export regions account for eighty eight percent of the world’s wheat exports, when it comprised only thirty nine percent of the world’s wheat production of 522.4 million tons in ’94 – ’95; although these regions came nowhere close to producing the largest quantities of product, their preeminence is forced by the food cartel through flooding any semblance of a ‘free market’.

“AIDS and other diseases will be the COVER STORY for the decimation. The real causes will be starvation, contaminated water (which has existed for a long time), toxic vaccines given to people who are already immune-suppressed, wars, and of course, stolen farmland.“  – John Rappoport, author of Depopulation and HIV

The direct control apparatus of the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss food cartel are to blame for these tragic fluctuations within this intentionally Malthusian food system. Research published in the Executive Intelligence Review by Joseph Brewda highlight a memorandum authored by the openly eugenic Henry Kissinger, vainly discussing the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests”.  Kissinger, who was the former US Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford administrations, channels the racial pseudo science of the 1940’s by proposing the implementation of a covert plan to reduce population growth in selected developing countries through targeted birth control, war and famine due to the threat of population growth in the former colonial sector, which was subsequently adopted as official policy by President Gerald Ford in 1975, former National Security Advisor and then-CIA Director George Bush senior would be commissioned to implement the policy. Kissinger gloats, “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many least developed countries. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food. It is questionable, whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis” before subsequently warning of a “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades, a kind the world thought had been permanently banished”.

Mr. Kissinger is well aware that these anomalies are not products of backwards peoples, unable to feed themselves in their own countries, but orchestrated by deliberate financial policies designed to ‘stabilize’ populate levels in potentially competitive and more resource-rich countries. The sheer human suffering being experienced in the Horn of Africa right now is solely a product of decades of Malthusian policies, which harbor food as a weapon. Ironically, the authors of genocidal policies and Malthus advocates never volunteer themselves to starvation; perhaps Mr. Kissinger should experience the receiving end of his population stabilization, although one assumes he wouldn’t fair too well without two thousand-dollar bottles of champagne, foie gras and gourmet truffles. Most people assume the United Nations, with it’s World Food Program and ‘peacekeeping soldiers are on a bold mission to make the world a better place, however these agencies are at the forefront of implementing policies of central control by trumpeting genetically modified organisms, vaccination and sterilization programs in the developing world under the guise of sustainable development, orchestrated by people who can only be described as eco-extremists.

U.N. ENFORCING MASS POPULATION REDUCTION THROUGH VACCINES & GMO

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist.”

– Page 942 of ‘ECOSCIENCE’, authored by current US Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, John P. Holdren

Creating a solution to the current problems within the Horn of Africa is not an issue of unwillingness in utilizing the bountiful available resources of the unimaginably wealthy cabal of bankers, corporate profiteers, monarchs and the general ruling class, all of whom who can contribute such insignificant amounts of their relative fortunes to drastically offset this maltreatment. This is an issue of intentional depopulation, brought you to by the agencies administering the framework for a sounder ecological and sustainable world, which can only be administered through population reduction, primarily in the Third World. Over the past several years millions of dollars have been invested into slick corporate public relations campaigns attempting to subtly condition the public to what appears to be at first, a more reasoned consumer consciousness relating to the environmental impacts of human consumption and unwavering capitalism. While it may be reasonable to conserve water and adopt more ecological forms of waste disposal and packaging, the unwarranted flow of green propaganda is designed to centralize control of nations through a monogovernmental system, in addition to further transferring wealth between the public and the ruling class, by delicately molding public opinion into accepting new forms of taxation, such as a carbon tax.

The world being brought in by the International Community is one where total control is implemented under the guise of environmentalism, where human beings are viewed as liabilities and inadequate pollutants of carbon, of whom, must be culled through policies of enforced genocide and population reduction. The United Nations Population Division released a policy brief in 2009, which literally begins with the phrase, “What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?”. Another mention by the United Nations Population Fund in it’s 2009 State of the World Population Report entitled, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate“ goes on to say “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time” and also “Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns”. These eco-extremists attempt to rationalize reducing population levels through declaring carbon as a pollutant, effectively accusing human beings or carbon-based forms of life as ‘unsustainable’.

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill, but in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

– Page 104 of ‘The First Global Revolution’, authored by The Club of Rome, a prominent global think tank consisting of current and former Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe

These accusations of the International Community spiriting a genocidal consensus are not speculation and cannot be immaturely dismissed as ridiculous conspiracy theories, although the proponents of such policies are quite vocal of their intentions, one only has to observe the dire inequalities of the human condition around the world to aptly reach the conclusion that the architecture of our governing institutions are not designed to benefit the common man. Currently, there is a food war being raged against the people of the Horn of Africa and Somalia; the United States is currently working to block international food assistance to areas controlled by Al-Shabaab resistance forces. There is an internationally recognized Somalian Transitional Government, heavily influenced by the United States; the Americans have proposed limiting the distribution of incoming international aid strictly to areas in control of their own Somali proxy leaders, which effectively means starvation for about three million people, since only a few neighborhoods in Mogadishu would receive supplies, amidst an annually dwindling aid program; U.S. food relief to the UN’s Somali operations has been steeply declining since 2009.

The UN’ bankrolled World Food Program is happy to take your money to assist you in ‘saving lives’, the organization has syphoned $160 million dollars of aid money to UN employees, delivered 12% of food aid to intended poverty stricken areas of Ethiopia, used foreign aid donations to purchase arms and inflated shipping and trucking fees up to 300% over the actual cost.

The current Somali Transitional Government can aptly be described as American puppets, which have exhibited incapabilities in garnering public support, defending themselves without the aid of foreign forces and have essentially failed to maintain the infrastructure of a functioning government.  The actions of the US Government in the Horn have been a total failure and have only contributed to further civil chaos and domestic instability. Partnered with agencies such as the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), the Somali people are being starved in submission, while the West is refusing to authorize the release of grain piled high in Kenyan warehouses because American forces have failed to install a handpicked ruler can who adequately defend against resistance forces. While they have no problem exploiting the genuine morality and concern of ordinary individuals by fishing for donations to help save lives, the WFP has been accused of syphoning one hundred and sixty million dollars of aid money to UN employees and into arms trading deals with Islamic militants and hired defense contractors by the United Nation’s own Monitoring Group. Elsewhere in Georgia, the WFP proved to be totally incompetent by failing to provide a daily minimum diet to prevent malnutrition and starvation, after food rations were not adjusted during a harsh winter in ’09, in addition to providing terrible quality flour, which produced inedible hardened bread.

“I don’t claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population.” – Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund

The racial pseudo science of the 20th century resulted in the extermination of millions of people, motivated by the elimination of undesirable elements within the population. Eugenics is coined as the study of the hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding; these maniacal ideas have stealthily transitioned into the 21st century, where extraordinarily influential bodies such as the United Nations and other prominent think tanks lined with bureaucrats, government officials, scientists and global business leaders have explicitly called for reducing the world population, strictly cordoning areas of human habitat into designated population zones and the transition of environmentalism into the faith of the future. The vapid performance of the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations to adequately contribute to alleviating food-related disasters and their efforts to influence a reasoned system for food pricing and distribution only gives credence to the fact that although their organizations may market themselves on morally superior concepts such as global harmony and sustainability, individuals within these institutions themselves envision a single sterilization state, within a world absent of the majority of humans.

One may find it curious why bodies such as USAID, the UN’s World Food Program and many other NGO’s concerned with ‘reproductive rights’ still provide food relief to crisis zones if their true intent was the eventual depopulation of the regional occupants; In the Somalian context, creating dependency has been reached through the commoditization of food aid from the outside world, like the situation in Somalia, entire nations can be brought to grovel in impoverishment through economic restructuring and the bounties of ‘free trade’ brought to you by the World Trade Organization (WTO). In addition to reports of the WFP delivering only 12% of food aid to intended poverty stricken areas of Ethiopia, using foreign aid donations to purchase arms and of inflating shipping and trucking fees up to 300% over the actual cost (reflecting the total corruption of private organizations which hold billion dollar contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan), the organization, backed up tirades of UN collectivists actively attempt to coerce governments to adopt transgenic genetically modified organisms and mass vaccination schemes as the only contributable aid or face being cut off and to receive nothing, after all, beggars can’t be choosers.  In 1998, the mammoth American pesticide and GM-producing corporation, Monsanto authored an appeal entitled ‘Let The Harvest Begin’, which proposed the only hope in alleviating the plight of the world’s poor is through force-feeding GMO seeds without prior subjection to independent safety testing, onto African crops and distributed the document to the various African Heads of State, amidst staunch debate and objections from American and European consumers, healthcare experts, environmentalists and food retailers.

“The FDA has placed the interest of a handful of biotechnology companies ahead of their responsibility to protect public health. By failing to require testing and labeling of genetically engineered foods, the agency has made consumers unknowing guinea pigs for potentially harmful, unregulated food substances.”  – Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA)

In response to Monsanto’s appeal, representatives from every African nation except South Africa issued a collective response, stating “We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us. We think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia, and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves”.  Elsewhere, such as in Hungary, nearly one thousand acres of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed in an effort to rid the country of Monsanto’s GMO products; Peru has also recently issued a decade-long ban on GMO production. Monsanto has been systematically blocking researchers from using its patented gene modified GMO seeds to conduct independent research into the potentially debilitating health effects of consuming such products, the company is also the forerunner in attempting to privatize the world seed supply in an attempt to create a world where 100% of all commercial seeds are genetically modified and patented, the company already owns 90% of the world’s patents for GMO seeds including cotton, soybeans, corn, sugar beets and canola.

Monsanto has literally taken organic seeds from farmers to create genetically engineered copycat versions, promising higher yields and effectively committing bio-piracy by retaining all intellectual property rights of the seed; the company invested eighteen million USD to develop technologies to monopolize nature, which directly attack food sovereignty by creating seeds which only yield a single harvest and die before the second generation in an effort to force farmers in developing countries to abide by their agreements to continually purchase the junk seeds, resulting in the accumulation of enormous debt; in India, accounts of over two hundred thousand indebted farmer suicides have been reported. Ironically enough, a large amount of those farmers take their own lives by drinking Round Up Ready, a toxic herbicide produced by Monsanto. In their unwaveringly ethical pursuit of profit, Monsanto has actually filed patent infringement claims against conventional and organic farmers in both Canada and the US whose crops suffer with trace contamination from neighboring GMO crops, and often times, Monsanto is the victor, leaving local farmers with outrageous legal bills and fines, which forces them to shut down, allowing Monsanto to buy up the land. Representatives from Monsanto, The WPF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are annual guests of secret Bilderberg Group meetings, both prominent bodies enforcing sterilization and mass genocide.

“Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing a more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

– David Rockefeller, banker, honorary director of Council on Foreign Relations, honorary chairman of Bilderberg Group & founder of Trilateral Commission, praising Chairman Mao, whose policies resulted in the extermination at least 35 million people

Monsanto was one of the corporate sponsors of HR 875, a bill in the United States that would grant the US Federal Department Of Agriculture central authority to dictate strict laws over organic farming, which include the mandatory spraying of toxic herbicides such as Round Up Ready and control over livestock diets and veterinary services; these new stipulations backed the establishment intentionally mirror loan-restructuring protocol required by indebted countries such as Somalia. The enormously wealthy and influential Rockefeller Foundation, chaired by the robber-barren-Mao-praising David Rockefeller, has long influenced the movement towards sustainability by encouraging the widespread use of transgenic GM seeds, particularly in Africa. On behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, Representative Akinwumi Adesina stated the following before the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference in 2007: ‘”Regarding genetic engineering, by and large, African countries do not currently have in place regulatory frameworks that allow their use for food production. Many challenges face the introduction and cultivation of GM crops in Africa, including fear of GE crops. Assisting Africa to meet its food needs has other advantages for climate change. Increasing population pressure and reliance on extensive agricultural practices will likely lead to further deforestations and carbon dioxide emissions and contributions to climate change”.

While Adesina parrots the tired talking points and green pseudoscience of the International Community by trying to argue that traditional agricultural methods, which have been practiced on the African continent since the early days of human existence will lead to deforestation and that GMO seeds produced by transnational corporations such as Monsanto, backed by maniacal environmental extremists are good, documents released by the Rockefeller Foundation shed light on their strategic motives: “Major organizations such as the Population Council and the National and International Planned Parenthood Federations have been supported by the Foundation in a variety of ways. These and other existing organizations, as well as others that may come into being, represent exceedingly important instrumentalities for the extension of family planning information and contraceptive methods. Future initiatives of the foundation are described: ‘It will explore potentialities of training programs, seminars, public forums, symposia, and other devices for conveying information about the impact of population growth on economic and social development to government officials from ministries of health, planning commissions, and other appropriate agencies, in the interest of motivating greater action on population policy and population control programs.”

“The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet, in reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population’. Agribusiness and the Rockefeller Green Revolution went hand-in-hand.” – F. William Engdahl, author and researcher

Large swaths of land in Africa around the world are being converted into crops used for growing biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, an increasingly popular additive used in diesel-fueled vehicles and commercial trucks because it is popularly considered to be environmentally friendly due to it’s renewability. Surprisingly enough, recent studies issued by the European Union reveal that biofuels, or fuel made from living, renewable sources, produces 400 percent more CO2 than conventional fossil fuels do; take into consideration that many arguments used to promote transgenic seeds highlight their sustainability to the environment and their potential to reduce carbon emissions. We are told to believe traditional agricultural methods can contribute to famine, deforestation and environmental degradation, while the International Community is authoring authoritarian new green policing policies and claiming the environment is really a priority, when lush rainforests, up to twenty million acres of American farm land in states such as Iowa and the best lands in the Third World, which are traditionally used to grow food for the local communities, are taken over by corporations to grow corn-based ethanol thus, working to exacerbate the phony issue of carbon emissions in the first place.

The green dialogue we are being fed is phony, self contradictory and completely criminal. Biofuels have helped to fuel man-made famines by reducing the amount of local crops allowed to be grown, thus globally increasing the price of food, that includes the subsidized foreign foods used to flood developing markets. This is a sick and twisted scheme to use food as a weapon to achieve the desired culls of the surplus population. The sheer fact that a “marketplace” for life-sustaining goods exists let alone, the fact that such precious resources are subject to maniacal manipulations enforced by a speculative club of super-rich perverts who commoditize everything of value to humanity, leaves little wonder why people around the world are showing their discontent on the streets. Directionless people, totally disenfranchised by leading substance-less lives revolving around neglect and consumerism, the kind of people currently attempting to create chaos on the streets of London are a strong signification that something is really wrong with every foundation of our society, our culture of commodities and our mutual alienation of compassion for human life. Our civilization is looking very bleak at the moment; people loot liquor stores and steal iPads in the developed world, while people in the undeveloped world are viewed as liabilities and denied their sustenance because the International Community tell us, we cannot accommodate their carbon pollution.

“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” – Bill Gates, founder of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft

The threat of death, autism and other debilitating neurological disorders associated with pandemic vaccinations is a subject rarely, if ever, brought up by the mainstream media. An episode of 60 Minutes aired once in 1979 and later banned from being rebroadcasted attempted to touch on the subject of devastating vaccination side effects following a US Government sponsored Swine Flu hype, which resulted in the vaccination of 48 million people in 1976. The host interviews a middle-aged schoolteacher named Judy Roberts, who obediently took a vaccination after being influence by Swine Flu propaganda produced by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and subsequently began suffering from paralysis. She was later diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), a fatal disease affecting the peripheral nervous system, causing Roberts to become a quadriplegic. When the director of the vaccination program, Dr. David Sensor was interviewed, he uncomfortably admitted that the pro-vaccination hype generated CDC was unwarranted, because no confirmed cases of the Swine Flu existed. The CDC was responsible for authoring a consent sheet, which stated that scientists performed several safety checks on the vaccine, however the vaccination that was actually distributed, X53A, was another concoction entirely and was subject to no testing.

An interview was also conducted with Dr. Michael Hatwick, the Director of the Vaccination Surveillance team at the time who claimed the agency was fully aware of the health risks attributed to the X53A vaccination. In a blatant lie, Director David Sensor awkwardly claims to never have been aware of such health risks. The CDC was also responsible for creating a vaccination awareness campaign; the agency also used the names of celebrities and pop culture icons of the day without their consent to garner support for their program. It’s hard to distinguish which is more disturbing, the content of the story itself or the fact that the episode had been banned from air. There has been a longstanding demonization of medical doctors who face their careers and credentials being challenged by the establishment if they are viewed as vocal opponents of pandemic vaccinations. Ghislaine Lanctôt, a Canadian author and medical doctor investigated the ineffectiveness and dangers of vaccination and concluded that vaccinations are intentionally being used as a eugenics weapon for a massive and targeted reduction of the world population. Lanctôt writes, “Because of my professional status, my words weighed significantly in the public eye. The Medical Board’s reaction was immediate and strong. Its leaders demanded that I resign as a physician. I answered that I would do so as long as they could prove that what I had written was false. The Medical Board replied with a call for my expulsion. As I witnessed the disproportionate reaction of the Medical Board, I discovered that, despite official claims, vaccines have nothing to do with public health. Underneath the governmental stamp of approval, there are deep military, political and industrial interests.”

“Scientific evidence links vaccinations to chronic fatigue, autoimmune disorders, aids, learning disabilities, and other health problems. Viera Scheibner notes that the annual death rate in Europe prior to 1940 from diphtheria was negligible (less than 300 deaths per million).  After this date, when mass vaccinations against the disease were begun, “unprecedented” diphtheria epidemics followed in fully vaccinated subjects.”- Ron Garner, researcher and author of ‘Conscious Health’

Scientists and other prominent professionals who have bravely questioned the inconclusive official account of the September 11th attacks have similarly been blacklisted and subject to career suicide, equating any intellectual deviation from the Corporate media’s version of effects enough to warrant being burnt at the stake. Recently in Australia, the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccination group, The Australian Vaccination Network, which provides anti-vaccination information through its website, magazines and seminars, has been stripped of it’s charitable status by the government of New South Wales and can no longer appeal for public fundraising. The countries seasonal flu vaccine (which is pushed with priority towards loathed Australian Aboriginals and pregnant women), Fluvax, reportedly caused convulsions in ninety-nine children. The rate of seizures in 2010 were fifty times higher than would ordinarily be expected with a vaccine; similarly in Ghaziabad, India, two nine-month-old twins in died within fifteen minutes of receiving a measles vaccination, research published by Archie Kalokerinos, M.D. states that in some Aboriginal communities of Australia every second child given a vaccination died of crib death, but when fed high doses of vitamin C before and after vaccinations, not a single child died; according to the Australian Government, permitting any awareness toward these legitimate concerns is unacceptable.

In 2009, The World Health Organization declared the first flu pandemic of the 21st century during a propagated Swine Flu scare, which like in 1976, never came into fruition. However, the virus created to combat the much-hyped H1N1, which millions of people willfully accepted, contained some very alarming substances. One of the noted components was Thimerosal, a noted mercury derivative, a substance banned in Russia, Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and Scandinavian countries.

According to a Russian study conducted in 1977, adults exposed to ethylmercury, which is the form of mercury found in thimerosal, suffered brain damage and nervous system injury, which in many cases resulted in coma and death. The vaccine also contained Squalene, an experimental anthrax vaccine component given to returning Gulf War veterans who were used as guinea pigs and subsequently suffered from eveloped arthritis, non-healing skin lesions, aphthous ulcers, neuropsychiatric problems, anti-thyroid effects, anemia, systemic lupus erythematosus, chronic diarrhea and multiple sclerosis, to name a few. Author of the book “Vaccine-A” and journalist Gary Matsumoto commented, “Squalene adjuvants are a key ingredient in a whole new generation of vaccines intended for mass immunization around the globe. Eating and digesting Squalene isn’t a problem. But, injecting it galvanizes the immune system into attacking it, which can produce self-destructive cross reactions against the same molecule in the places where it occurs naturally in the body and where it is critical to the health of the nervous system” and has also stated “Squalene is a kind of trigger for a real biological weapon.” Numerous scientists and medical professionals have refused to take the vaccine.

“Despite the refusal of the conventional health establishment to investigate the long-term effects of childhood vaccinations, independent research reports have increasingly been made public. These link vaccination rates to the epidemic of childhood asthma, as well as to crib death, shaken baby syndrome, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, autism, and juvenile diabetes. Since the 1990s, there has been a tenfold or 1000-percent increase in autism, an increase which has been linked by some researchers to the organic mercury preservative commonly found in baby vaccines.” – Walter Last, author of ‘The Natural Way to Heal’

Despite the findings of medical professionals and numerous researchers, the establishment media and the International Community still find no problem with promoting the supposed ‘beneficial qualities’ of mass vaccination. Bill Gates, who has previously attended closed Bilderberg meetings lined with individuals attempting to influence global society with eugenics and strict breeding policies, has contributed 27.6 million USD on five hundred thousand shares of Monsanto stock between April and June 2010 and unsurprisingly, is an outspoken proponent of global vaccinations and touts goals of vaccinating every single child on the planet, claiming that vaccines are “one of the most effective health interventions ever developed.” Chillingly, Gates, when speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, pledged ten billion USD to developing new vaccines for the world’s poorest countries and while declaring “the decade of vaccines” and their huge impact.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have also contributed over 12.5 million USD since 1998 to the organization, Planned Parenthood. Founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921, a prominent eugenicist famous for quotes such as “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population”, “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race”, “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it” and “Eugenics is… the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.” In 1939, Sanger launched The Negro Project, with aim of steadily reducing the African American population. Sanger managed to cleverly recruit prominent and well-educated African American ministers into supporting her scheme by portraying birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites; abortion clinics were opened en masse in African American inner city neighborhoods. In 1942, the organization achieved federal status and today has 820 clinic locations in the US, with a total budget of approximately one billion USD. To date, according to studies by the CDC, over thirteen million African American fetuses have been aborted and 78% of their clinics are in minority communities. African Americans make up 12% of the US population and 35% of the domestic abortions, effectively making them the only minority in American with a declining population. Annually, the US Government contributes about three hundred and sixty million USD to Planned Parenthood. Jill Stannic, an Illinois hospital employee has testified before the US House Committee about her experiences with Induced Labor Abortions, where medicines inserted into the vaginal cavity produce a premature live birth, the child is the brought by nursing staff into a room where soiled linens are kept until the child dies. Unlike an abortion, the child receives a birth and death certificate.

“I have studied with great interest, the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”  – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Under the regime of Barack Obama, who has personally voted no against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which aims to protect the rights of children who survive abortion procedures, has unanimously passed four times, having been backed by every Democratic candidate include Hilary Clinton and John Kerry.  Barack Obama and the American establishment effectively support infanticide and the continued rates of abortion within African American communities. The President himself has personally advocated Planned Parenthood, an organization founded on the pillars of racial purity and eugenics: “There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield.”  The work of federally funded Planned Parenthood is not the leisurely use of contraceptives, a woman’s right to choose and advocating practices of safe sex; it is about culling racial undesirables and creating a cleaner white race. Unfortunately for Somalians and the people of the African continent, the aims of the Negro Project have not been confined to American borders.

Earlier this year, the United Nation’s news service reports a UN-backed campaign in rural areas of Somalia to vaccinate more than 1.8 million young children against polio, four years after Somalia was declared to be polio-free. The campaign is supported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and touts goals of reaching every eligible child in the country, despite the fact that the last recorded case of polio in Somalia was in March 2007. Despite numerous studies within the scientific community which indicate that autism may be the result of adverse reactions to childhood vaccinations, research published by environmental physician, Dr. Alan Cohen, stipulates that high levels of autism and attention deficit disorder (ADD) did not occur until the mandatory use of childhood vaccinations, which are still being trumpeted in Africa by the maniacal Neo-Malthusian International Community; officials in Somalia have stated that they hope to reach an estimated 800,000 children in the country’s south-central region, UNICEF’s representative in Somalia has called for the necessity of vaccination teams able to access every community, every household and every child aged under five. In reality these vaccinations offer little protection against yearly flu virus strains and are heavily promoted by the CDC, US Public Health Department and most physicians despite the fact that these substances have resulted in thousands of deaths and paralyzing illnesses. There is enough evidence from the medical community available to confirm that the development of the immune system after contracting the usual childhood diseases matures and renders it capable to fight future infections.

The use of multiple vaccines prevents natural immunity and promotes the development of detrimental side effects. Disturbingly, many hospitals have made flu vaccinations of the elderly a part of routine admission orders and studies have disclosed that 23% of vaccinated children develop asthma compared to zero in unvaccinated children. The vaccination of the Somalian masses was allowed to continue; despite reports from the Associated Press stating the accounts of Nigerian health officials claiming the paralyzation of 124 Nigerian children had been caused by a cheap oral polio vaccine used to fight the paralyzing disease, which was made from a live poliovirus and carries a risk of causing polio, even the vaccines used in the United States and other Western nations are administered in shots, which use a killed virus that cannot cause polio. Numerous members of the scientific and medical communities have published their studies against the detrimental effects of pandemic and immunizational vaccination and have bravely questioned disturbing movements designed to reach vast numbers of the population during stages of infancy. It is documented that immune systems are impaired by vaccinations because even though they may claim to protect the body from one strain of infectious disease, they weaken the immune system against future strains in people who have received vaccinations at a young age, who in the future may seek additional vaccinations to offset their weak immunities caused by infantile vaccination in the first place.

International studies have shown that immunization vaccination contributes to around ten thousand cases of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) annually and other studies have determined at least three thousand children die annually from vaccines within the United States. Because of the dire climate of food instability currently unfolding in Somalia, it difficult to track the adverse effects of vaccinations because most casualties may sooner perish from starvation or at least, that is what the mainstream media outlets will report. As a further indication of the true conditions of concern for the people of Somalia, one must investigate the origins of the heavily reported Somalian piracy and the reports of nuclear waste dumped in the Gulf of Aden off the coasts of Somalia. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia claims, “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. European companies found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, costing as little as $2.50 a tonne, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like $1000 a tonne. And the waste is many different kinds. There is uranium radioactive waste. There is lead, and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. There is also industrial waste, and there are hospital wastes, chemical wastes – you name it. Since the containers came ashore, hundreds of residents have fallen ill, suffering from mouth and abdominal bleeding, skin infections and other ailments.”

Much of the materials reported in the Somalian seas, which are contributing to new cases of radiation sickness, strange rashes, nausea, malformed babies and death, can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, that have apparently been passed to the Italian mafia to conduct it’s cheap disposal. During a tsunami in 2005, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore, Ould-Abdallah has claimed European governments were offering, “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.” Reports within certain circles of Somalian pirates who take over large cargo ships in exchange for millions in ransom money are commonplace, but the media rarely mentions that some pirates have pledged the money going towards cleaning up the radioactive material on their shores.  Januna Ali Jama, a spokesperson representing groups of Somalian pirates has claimed that ransom demand is a means of “reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years. The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas.” Additionally, other European ships have been illegally fishing in Somalia’s seas and harvesting seafood, their greatest resource. Vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas are stealing more than three hundred million USD worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life every year. Consider the fact that not only are millions of dollars worth of seafood illegally harvested annually, but also it is harvested off the coast of regions synonymous for recent food instability in waters where nuclear waste is being dumped; those fish are then sold at exorbitant prices in grocery stores all over Europe and elsewhere; the total negligence for human health and well being is astonishing.

Although holding hostages may not be justifiable or the best way to go about addressing solutions to the issues and surely several less-enlightened people take part in piracy to fuel their own personal gain, these are characteristics of people who have lost their livelihoods and have nothing else to loose; the mainstream media has totally neglected this perspective on the issue and only focuses on championing the dispatchment of UN paramilitary forces into Somalian waters, which is an excuse for furthering additional geopolitical objectives of the US. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods and the nation is starving. Mohammed Hussein, a local fisherman in the town of Marka told reporters, “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.” A group, who originally referred to them selves as the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia, was comprised of ordinary Somalian fishermen who were first to take out speedboats to try to dissuade foreign dumpers and trawlers and establish a fishing tax.

CONCLUSION

The evidence laid out in this article to support the complex array of sabotage being tragically committed against Somalians, residents with the Horn of Africa and the world is enough to leave one overwhelmed and with a very bleak world view. As if things couldn’t get worse for the Somali people, the Washington Post, New York Times and other major American newspapers have recently reported that the US has extended it’s illegal and oxymoronic War on Terror by beginning to launch drone missile attacks over Somalia, while the Pentagon has roughly three thousand troops from all four major branches of the military assigned to the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa stationed in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, Somalia’s neighboring country to the north. Under the guise of fighting Islamic extremists (the funding of which, will be subject to a separate in-depth article) and degenerate pirates, The US military is preparing to implement an East African military geo-strategy to control the maritime waterways and the movement of international shipping through the Gulf of Aden, as well as the prospects of descending looming multinational corporations to harvest the potential yields of the East African energy basin. Somalia’s lands can very well be subjected to predatory capital and resource-robbers, due to it’s untapped and unexplored potential, and the possibility of American oil giants such as Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips, who have been sitting quietly since nearly two-thirds of Somalia land was allocated to them in the final years before President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and thrown into disarray, to reap prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore millions of acres of the Somali countryside for potential petroleum deposits, once the Somalian people have been democratized and liberated by the United States, of course.

John P. Holdren

Concerned people, disenfranchised with what is taking place in the Horn need to drastically reexamine the claims of this article and adjust their vocalization of this issue away from “a failure of the International Community to make sure people have food to eat” to “a deliberate effort of the International Community to enforce austerity and use food as a weapon to enforce population reduction.” Perhaps there is no better example of the Neo-Malthusian philosophy and it’s role in influencing the future, than the genocidal material authored by John P. Holdren, the Obama administration’s US Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, Paul Ralph Ehrlich, biologist and founder of the Zero Population Growth group and his wife, Anne Howland Ehrlich. The lengthy book they published together is called ‘Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment’ and it provides incredible clarity into the intended directions of the Obama Administration and the United Nations policies on the future management of the world’s resources and society. The document encourages the creation of a Global State run by a Planetary Regime, which enforces mass sterilization, compulsory abortions and the rule of law through an International Police force that has control over the intimate and trivial details of our lives. Dr. Webster Tarpley has been critical in offering his insight into the document and the impacts it may have on the future direction of policy.

Holdren, who proudly boasts himself as a Neo-Malthusianist, views human life has a cancerous outgrowth and ridicules ‘Cornucopians’ or people who believe in the bounties of nature in relation to growth and production, contending that harsh limits must be taken to avoid production and innovation by living within the confines of whichever amount of growth he deems suitable, while actively enforcing deindustrialization. The authors of Ecoscience suggest triaging nations deemed too populous such as India and Bangladesh, withholding them from receiving any international food or monetary aid or any kind and the creation of a Science Court charged with the issuance and controls of innovative new sciences and technology. Holdren argues that the world’s population must be adjusted to ‘carrying capacity’ to be in harmony with nature and advocates reducing the population to one billion people by means of sterilization. Excerpts from the genocidal document suggest the following on page 786: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.” On page 942: “The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

On page 837, Holdren advocates compulsory abortion, “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society” and the right of the Government to take away children born in single parent households on page 786, “One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.” Certainly, we have come to a time of great transition in the human story and the prospects our leaders are advocating appear to be intentionally deceptive and contribute to enthusiastically killing any hope of offsetting the abuses described in this article. The eloquence of Mr. Kissinger may help to shed light on why all central authority is mounting towards the continuation of destroying the human condition.

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”   – Henry Kissinger

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Sec. Clinton In Laos Sees US Crimes Against Humanity Still Ongoing

NY Times photo shows Clinton at an artificial-limb center, visiting with a nineteen year old, who lost his forearms and sight from a blast of an unexploded bomb, dropped by the US Air Force during the Vietnam War. The bomb, unexploded for decades, finally blew up three years ago. The young man gesticulated with his arm stumps – US has not signed ban on cluster bombs. US Dropped 250 million bombs, 80 million failed to explode

Feature article in New York Times, 7/11/2012 Vietnam War’s Legacy Is Vivid as Clinton Visits Laos by Jane Perlez:

Accompanying photo shows Mrs. Clinton at an artificial-limb center, visiting with a nineteen year old, who lost his forearms and sight from a blast of an unexploded bomb, dropped by the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War. The bomb, unexploded for decades, finally blew up three years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/world/asia/on-visit-to-laos-clinton-is-reminded-of-vietnam-war.html

Clinton’s brief four hour stop-over in Laos was the first visit by an American secretary of state since President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, came here in 1955, and tried to persuade the Lao royal family to drop its neutrality in the cold war and join the American camp. (But already from 1953 on President Ike had had the CIA, not so covertly, operating on the side of the French colonal army in the First Indochinese war both in Laos and in Vietnam – just as he had the CIA overthrowing democratically eleccted, but insuffiently pro-American governments, in the Congo and Guatemala.)

“The young man, Phongsavath Sonilya, gesticulated with his arm stumps as he explained to Mrs. Clinton that more than three decades after the end of the war, not enough had been done to stop the use of cluster bombs and to support those who may be injured in the future by bombs still lying unexploded in the countryside. The United States has not signed the Convention on Cluster Bombs.”

Laos was hit by an average of one B-52 bombload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day. Between 1964 and 1973, US Bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos in this period that was dropped during the whole of the Second World War. Of the 260 Million bombs rainded down, some 80 million failed to explode, leaving a deadly legacy. Laos is the most heavily-bombed country, per capita, in the world. Because it was particularly heavily affected by cluster bombs during this war, Laos was, Laos was a strong advocate of the Convention on Cluster Munitions to Ban the Weapons and assist victimes, and hosted the first meeting of states parties to the convention in November 2010.(The US has consistently opposed the ban.) [The Guardian, UK]

“The government of Laos is run by the Communist Party, and five of the nine members of the Politburo, including the prime minister, … are veterans of the Pathet Lao guerrilla group that supported North Vietnam against the United States. … After Saigon fell, more than 1,200 Americans were evacuated from Laos.” In 1975, with the withdrawal of the massive US Army, Navy and Air Force from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the Pathet Lao, an intellectual Marxist nationalist independence movement born to fight against the US backed French restoration of brutal colonialism in 1949, that had bravely withstood all the inexpressively horrific US bombings, became the government of all Laos. This historic crime against humanity of bombing a tiny agricultural colonial population mercilessly flowed forward from Eisenhower dutifully preaching, in the name of the miltary-industrial-complex, that retaining control of Laos was the key to retaining control of all South-East Asia.

[The Guardian, UK]

Now Laos is closely aligned with China. The Chinese built many of the main buildings in this relaxed tropical capital and are now constructing a new convention center … for a European-Asian summit meeting in November, a meeting that does not include the United States.

There was no news conference with the prime minister but a carefully worded statement negotiated by both sides that noted the coming entry of Laos into the World Trade Organization, and cooperation between the United States and Laos on environmental protection.

At the center that provides artificial limbs, … Mrs. Clinton viewed a map embedded with red dots that showed where bombs were dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and on the Plain of Jars. There were more than 580,000 bombing missions by the United States Air Force, making Laos the most heavily bombed country on a per-person basis, the text said.

At the end of the war, more than 30 percent of the bombs remained unexploded, leaving Laos with a deadly problem in rural areas that persists today.

Each bomb contained about 600 bomblets, and in recent years about 100 people have been killed by unexploded ordnance, 40 percent of them children.”

… As she toured the center, … There was evidence, too, of the low-cost nature of some of the homemade limbs that farmers put together using bamboo, metal tubes from bombs and wood, while they awaited more professional limbs.

After the visit to the center, Mrs. Clinton said it was “a painful reminder of the Vietnam War era. “The international community will join us in our efforts to bring this legacy of the Vietnam War to a safe end.”

Reading this NY Times article, what immediately jumps up in one’s mind, is ‘boy if the “war’s legacy” had been millions of unexploded bombs in the soil of New Jersey, for instance, they would have been all cleaned up right away.

The article incredulously, reports that Mrs. Clinton “as she toured the center, asked several times “why more sophisticated technology could not be used to find the bombs”

Why indeed, “the international community” is busy in Afghanistan, in Syria and just about everywhere in the Middle East. Busy, not cleaning up, but laying down unexploded bombs that the locals will, as in Laos and elsewhere, eventually be trying to find and explode the unexploded that the US and other Colonial powers leave behind.

By Jay Janson

13 July, 2012

Countercurrents.org

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of article on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993. During his last years, Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Dissident Voice, OpEdNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News and others have published his articles, 250 of which are available at: clickhttp://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; articles China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator and founder of the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign click: (King Condemned US Wars)http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/and originator of Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign click: http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ with a country by country history of US crimes. Studied history at CCNY, Columbia U., U. Puerto Rico, Dolmetscher Institut München, Germany;

Scenarios for Syria: War & Stabilization

Diplomatic attempts to solve the Syrian crisis have been rejected by both members of the Syrian government and the opposition. As Ankara laments bold rhetoric and militarizes its border with Syria, this article attempts to foresee three possible outcomes to the ongoing crisis.

From the start of the crisis in Syria, the possibility of open foreign military intervention has loomed uncomfortably over the series of diplomatic measures taken in an attempt to diffuse the situation. While earlier attempts to implement the Peace Plan have failed to materialize, Kofi Annan has proposed a new Syrian solution, mandating the creation of a transitional national unity government consisting of both representatives of Assad’s administration and members of the opposition, insinuating that Assad would not have a place in the new government [1]. Although Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov would categorically oppose the idea of foreign powers dictating the future of Syria, stating, “We will not support and cannot support any meddling from outside or any imposition of recipes. This also concerns the fate of the president of the country, Bashar al-Assad,” a recent meeting of the “Syrian Action Group” (excluding Riyadh, Tehran and Damascus) in Geneva saw world powers agree to a basic roadmap for a Syrian-led power transition.

On June 28, 2012, two large bomb explosions targeting a government building rocked Damascus, prompting President Assad to reassert the Syrian government’s duty to “annihilate terrorists in any corner of the country,” adding, “We will not accept any non-Syrian, non-national model, whether it comes from big countries or friendly countries. No one knows how to solve Syria’s problems as well as we do” [2]. In response to the meeting, both Syrian state media and opposition groups condemned the UN-brokered peace plan for the formation of a unity government, amid ceaseless violence across the country. Burhan Ghalioun, a senior member and former head of the opposition Syrian National Council, offered, “this is the worst international statement yet to emerge from talks on Syria”. Ghalioun would call the UN-backed transitional plan a “mockery,” insinuating that Syrians should not have to negotiate with “their executioner, who has not stopped killing, torturing… and raping women for 16 months” [3].

From the imposition of the ceasefire, the Syrian government would claim that rebel fighters regularly ignored the Kofi Annan Peace Plan by committing various ceasefire violations, employing the use of bombing, kidnapping, murder, and arson as corroborated by Reuters in their article, “Outgunned Syria rebels make shift to bombs,” confirming that rebels had adopted tactics of suicide bombing, car bombing and the use of roadside explosions [4]. While outside elements provided arms and assistance to the militant Syrian opposition in full violation of the proposed ceasefire, the mainstream media would disproportionately lay the blame on the Syrian government for failing to meet its obligations as it attempted to restore order. On June 21, 2012, The New York Times would confirm what alternative media outlets and numerous geopolitical analysts had been reporting since the first months of the uprising in 2011, that outside forces, including the American CIA, were supplying Syria’s rebels with weapons and material assistance from Southern Turkey. In their article, “C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” the New York Times would state:

“A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers. The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said. The C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said. The Obama administration has said it is not providing arms to the rebels, but it has also acknowledged that Syria’s neighbors would do so.

By helping to vet rebel groups, American intelligence operatives in Turkey hope to learn more about a growing, changing opposition network inside of Syria and to establish new ties. ‘C.I.A. officers are there and they are trying to make new sources and recruit people,’ said one Arab intelligence official who is briefed regularly by American counterparts. American officials and retired C.I.A. officials said the administration was also weighing additional assistance to rebels, like providing satellite imagery and other detailed intelligence on Syrian troop locations and movements. The administration is also considering whether to help the opposition set up a rudimentary intelligence service. But no decisions have been made on those measures or even more aggressive steps, like sending C.I.A. officers into Syria itself, they said” [5].

Undeniably, this confirms that the West, led by the US and its Gulf State proxies, has been undermining the Kofi Annan Peace Plan by arming insurgent fighters, particularly those of the Muslim Brotherhood, while concurrently berating the Syrian government for “violating” a UN mandated cease-fire and for “failing to protect” its population. The implications of these mainstream admissions of state sponsored terrorism and illicit arms smuggling cast shadows of doubt over any serious implementation of the Kofi Annan Peace Plan coming to fruition. The Brookings Institution, a US think-tank noted for its influence on American foreign policy, would release a publication in March 2012 titled, “Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change,” which called for using the UN-brokered ceasefire and the Kofi Annan Peace Plan to rearm the militant opposition to secure the toppling of the Syrian government in a bid to further Washington’s geopolitical objectives in the region [6]. Additionally, TIME Magazine’s June 25, 2012 article “A War on Two Fronts,” would describe how the US State Department budgeted over $72 million to train armed Syrian dissidents in encryption, hacking, and video production:

“Washington has said it will not actively support the Syrian opposition in its bid to oust Assad. Officially, the U.S. says it abides by the U.N process led by Kofi Annan and does not condone arms sales to opposition groups as long as there are U.N. Observers in Syria. Nevertheless, as U.S. officials have revealed to TIME, the Obama Administration has been providing media-technology training and support to Syrian dissidents by way of small nonprofits like the Institute for War & Peace Reporting and Freedom House. Viral videos of alleged atrocities, like the footage Abu Ghassan produced, have made Assad one of the most reviled men on the planet, helping turn the Arab League against him and embarrassing his few remaining allies almost daily. ‘If the [U.S.] government is involved in Syria, the government isn’t going to take direct responsibility for it,’ says Lawrence Lessig, director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. ‘The tools that you deploy in Internet freedom interfere with tools deployed by an existing government, and that can be perceived as an act of aggression.’

The program actually began four years ago with a different target: China. In 2008, Michael Horowitz, a longtime religious-liberty advocate, went to his friend Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, and suggested setting aside funds to help Falun Gong, a religious group that Beijing has labeled a dangerous cult. The money was supposed to help the dissident distribute software to jump China’s massive firewall and organize online as well as communicate freely with the outside world. Wolf succeeded in appropriating $15 million. But U.S. diplomats feared that move would derail relations with Beijing, and little money was spent. Then in 2009 – 10 Iranian protests and last year’s Arab Spring made Internet freedom a much more fashionable term in Washington. Congress soon forked over an additional $57 million to State to spend in the next three years. The money is spilt among three areas: education and training; anonymization, which masks users’ identities, usually through encryption; and circumvention technology, which allows users to overcome government censors so that their work – and that of repressive regimes – can be see worldwide.

An ongoing challenge is that the flow of software goes to both sides. The regime has imported technology from the U.S. to track people online. ‘A lot of these technologies can be used for great good,’ says Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the Internet-in-a-suitcase project, ‘but they are also a Faustian bargain.’ The Obama Administration last month issued an Executive Order imposing sanctions on any company helping Syrian or Iran commit human-rights abuses. Washington’s high-tech campaign will not dethrone Assad. But is has given Syrian dissidents a measure of confidence as they face the regime’s advantage in firepower. In the months since finishing his training, Abu Ghassan has shot dozens of videos. Asked whether his AK-47 or his video camera is the more powerful weapon, Abu Ghassan laughs. ‘My AK!’ he says. He pauses for a few seconds. ‘Actually if there is an Internet connection, my camera is more powerful’” [7].

TIME’s report reflects the seemingly limitless degree of outside interference in the Syrian conflict, with foreign entities attempting to meticulously cultivate and shape every dimension of the situation to the detriment of the legitimate government in Syria. TIME’s report also mentions the Obama administration’s executive order imposing sanctions on any company “helping Syria or Iran commit human-rights abuses.” Unsurprisingly, this would not include the American companies that sold the Syrian government the internet technology it uses to filter its internet services – the very services the US government has allotted substantial public funds towards to train dissidents to bypass. The downing of a Turkish F-4 jet in late June further enflamed the situation, prompting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan to vow “proportionate” retaliation for its downed jet, pledging “all possible support to liberate the Syrians from dictatorship” of Bashar al-Assad’s government by offering support for Syrian rebels, while warning that any Syrian troops approaching Turkish borders would be considered a threat and dealt with as a military target [8].

On June 27th, 2012, Turkey sent a heavily guarded convoy of 15 long-distance guns and other military vehicles to the Syrian border, amid belligerent threats of retaliation [9]. While the situation on the Turkish-Syrian border remains tense as Turkish officials deploy 30 anti-aircraft batteries, the Turkish Defense Procurement Agency has recently announced its plans to seek a $4 billion contract for a long-range air-defense missile system [10]. Documents released by The Brookings Institution and The Council on Foreign Relations indicate that Turkey is the nation elected to lead the charge against Assad if the situation continues to deteriorate, ostensibly to annex regions of northern Syria to establish a series of long proposed “humanitarian corridors,” from which Syria’s militant opposition fighters would base their operations [11]. In reflection of the current situation, several scenarios can be proposed in an attempt to foresee how the crisis can be either diffused, or further enflamed:


Assad ignores UN calls for an interim government and attempts to quell the insurgency by force, reflecting the conduct of nations such as Algeria, who have successfully suppressed insurgents affiliated with AQIM. This course of action may work to further enflame the situation if outside forces increase their use of foreign mercenaries and continue to provide rebel fighters with more dangerous armaments, including chemical or biological weapons. If Syrian security forces were unable to immediately restore order and crush the insurgency, any authentic or manufactured atrocity or incursion into Turkish territory may be enough to tip the scale in favor of open military intervention (with or without the approval of the UNSC). If that occurred, the Turkish-Syrian border would see open exchanges of fire, with Ankara attempting to capture territory in northern Syria. Russia, Iran, and China would condemn Turkey and other allied NATO member states, with the potential of those nations opposed to regime change in Damascus offering military support to Assad. From that point, the potential for a wider regional conflict is plausible.

Assad ignores UN calls for an interim government and succeeds in quelling the insurgency by force, causing rebel militants to disperse, surrender and take refuge in rural areas and neighboring countries. Syrian security forces would increase their operations and attempt to maintain order in population centers. The military would secure tense areas and some form of normality would resume, although bombings and other attacks could persist on a smaller scale. Assad would step up internal security, and be portrayed as an international pariah in the international media. Syria would continue suffering under heavy economic sanctions. If Assad continues to hold onto power, failing to deliver reforms and political pluralism, internal dissent could again become problematic, potentially shifting moderates to embrace factions of the opposition. Political turmoil would ensue, but the security situation could be stabilized if insurgent activity is successfully subdued.

Assad accepts the interim government solution and submits his resignation, potentially encouraging insurgents to take advantage of the sensitive transitional period by increasing their operations against security forces, continuing the months of belligerent violence and killing. If insurgents pushed forward with their campaign and were able to maintain an upper hand amid political transition, rebels would attempt to capture territory in and around population centers. Armed gangs would persecute Assad loyalists, Alawites, Shi’a, and other religious minorities such as Christians and Druze if they successfully captured territory, reflecting the conduct of Libyan LIFG fighters toward ethnic minorities and loyalists. The interim government would struggle to maintain the security situation and likely be unable to implement coherent policy amid divisions in leadership. Political turmoil would ensue, and armed gangs could continue their campaign, amid increasing sectarian tensions.

Civilian casualties could inevitably result from all these potential scenarios, as an unintended consequence of infighting between Syrian security forces and militants in populated areas, or as an intentional act of sectarian belligerence as demonstrated by extremists in Houla and elsewhere. The ongoing perpetuation of violence in Syria is not attributable to the dominant media narrative of Assad “butchering his own people,” but to the calculated and meticulous formation of a violent Salafist-front, directed by foreign powers to overwhelm and topple the government of Syria. Journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 exposé published in the New Yorker titled, “The Redirection,” exposed a joint US-Israeli-Saudi operation to create a violent extremist Sunni-front to direct at the Shi’a leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon, President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the Iranian government, using extremist forces with direct ties to Al Qaeda in proxy. The New Yorker would report the testimony of a former senior intelligence official and US government consultant:

“We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture” [12].

While Kofi Annan’s original Peace Plan – if honestly implemented with both sides respecting the cease-fire – would have defused the situation, it is Annan and the member nations of NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council that disproportionately laid the blame for increasing violence solely on the Syrian government, while those nations took every measure possible to further enflame the situation by providing material assistance to sectarian extremists. Considering the level of subversion and deceit demonstrated by foreign powers operating in Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s ambitions to crush sectarian fighters by force may well be warranted. As with many other Western-backed uprisings operating under the cover of “democratic” jargon, the use of violence, snipers, mercenaries, and other armed provocateurs is part of a long established pattern of national destabilization through the barrel of a gun. Undoubtedly, there will come a time when those responsible individuals answer for their crimes against the nation of Syria, and it’s people.


Notes

[1] Kofi Annan proposes Syria ‘unity government,’ Al Jazeera, June 28, 2012

[2] Annan ‘optimistic’ about Syria talks, Tehran Times, June 29, 2012

[3] Syria transition plan denounced by both sides, Al Jazeera, July 1, 2012

[4] Outgunned Syria rebels make shift to bombs, Reuters, April 30, 2012

[5] C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition, The New York Times, June 21, 2012

[6] Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change, The Brookings Institution, March 2012

[7] Hillary’s Little Startup: How the U.S. Is Using Technology to Aid Syria’s Rebels, TIME Magazine, June 13, 2012

[8] Turkish PM vows to help ‘liberate Syria from dictatorship,’ Russia Today, June 26, 2012

[9] Ankara deploys military convoy to Syrian border: Turkish media, PressTV, June 28, 2012

[10] Missile shopping: Turkey to buy long-range missile system, Russia Today, June 29, 2012

[11] U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership, The Council on Foreign Relations, May 9, 2012

[12] The Redirection, The New Yorker, March 5, 2007

By Nile Bowie

Saudi Arabia plans to fund Syria rebel army

Exclusive: Command centre in Turkey organising weapon supply to opposition

Free Syria Army fighters are to be paid by Saudi Arabia in an attempt to encourage pro-Assad troops to defect. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Saudi officials are preparing to pay the salaries of the Free Syria Army as a means of encouraging mass defections from the military and increasing pressure on the Assad regime, the Guardian has learned.

The move, which has been discussed between Riyadh and senior officials in the US and Arab world, is believed to be gaining momentum as a recent flush of weapons sent to rebel forces by Saudi Arabia and Qatar starts to make an impact on battlefields in Syria.

Officials in the Saudi capital embraced the idea when it was put to them by Arab officials in May, according to sources in three Arab states, around the same time that weapons started to flow across the southern Turkish border into the hands of Free Syria Army leaders.

Turkey has also allowed the establishment of a command centre in Istanbul which is co-ordinating supply lines in consultation with FSA leaders inside Syria. The centre is believed to be staffed by up to 22 people, most of them Syrian nationals.

The Guardian witnessed the transfer of weapons in early June near the Turkish frontier. Five men dressed in the style of Gulf Arabs arrived in a police station in the border village of Altima in Syria and finalised a transfer from the Turkish town of Reyhanli of around 50 boxes of rifles and ammunition, as well as a large shipment of medicines.

The men were treated with deference by local FSA leaders and were carrying large bundles of cash. They also received two prisoners held by rebels, who were allegedly members of the pro-regime militia, the Shabiha.

The influx of weapons has reinvigorated the insurrection in northern Syria, which less than six weeks ago was on the verge of being crushed.

The move to pay the guerrilla forces’ salaries is seen as a chance to capitalise on the sense of renewed confidence, as well as provide a strong incentive for soldiers and officers to defect. The value of the Syrian pound has fallen sharply in value since the anti-regime revolt started 16 months ago, leading to a dramatic fall in purchasing power.

The plan centres on paying the FSA in either US dollars or euros, meaning their salaries would be restored to their pre-revolution levels, or possibly increased.

The US senator Joe Lieberman, who is actively supporting the Syrian opposition, discussed the issue of FSA salaries during a recent trip to Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

His spokesman, Whitney Phillips, said: “Senator Lieberman has called for the US to provide robust and comprehensive support to the armed Syrian opposition, in co-ordination with our partners in the Middle East and Europe. He has specifically called for the US to work with our partners to provide the armed Syrian opposition with weapons, training, tactical intelligence, secure communications and other forms of support to change the military balance of power inside Syria.

“Senator Lieberman also supports the idea of ensuring that the armed opposition fighters receive regular and sufficient pay, although he does not believe it is necessary for the United States to provide this funding itself directly.”

US defence secretary Leon Panetta said this week Washington was not playing a direct role in gun-running into northern Syria. “We made a decision not to provide lethal assistance at this point. I know others have made their own decisions.”

Earlier this week the New York Times reported the CIA was operating in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which opposition fighters would get weapons.

Diplomatic sources have told the Guardian two US intelligence officers were in Syria’s third city of Homs between December and early February, trying to establish command and control within rebel ranks.

Interviews with officials in three states reveal the influx of weapons – which includes kalashnikovs, rocket propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles – started in mid-May, when Saudi Arabia and Qatar finally moved on pledges they had made in February and March to arm rebel forces.

The officials, who insisted on anonymity, said the final agreement to move weapons from storage points inside Turkey into rebel hands was hard won, with Ankara first insisting on diplomatic cover from the Arab states and the US.

Turkey is understood to view the weapons supply lines as integral to the protection of its southern border, which is coming under increasing pressure as regime forces edge closer in an attempt to stop the gun-running and attack FSA units.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were all allies of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad until several months into the uprising, which now poses a serious threat to his family’s 42-year rule over the country.

All three states have become increasingly hostile as the revolt has continued, with Saudi Arabia in February describing the suggestion to arm rebel groups as an “excellent idea” and Qatar having offered exile to Assad and his family.

For the first few months of this year the three states were waiting for the US to take a proactive role in intervening in Syria, something Washington has so far not seriously considered.

With a presidential election later this year, and weighed down by the troubled legacy of Iraq, Barack Obama has shown no enthusiasm for a major foreign policy play. Polling in the US has consistently shown that voters have little appetite for intervention in Syria, while officials from Washington to London and Brussels have warned of grave risks to the region which may follow the fall of Damascus.

Assad continues to cast his regime’s battle for survival as an existential threat from radical Sunni Islamists, who he says are backed by foreign states.

The Free Syria Army says its members are almost exclusively Syrian nationalists who disavow the world view of jihadists who flocked to neighbouring Iraq from 2004-07. It acknowledges that some foreign Arab fighters have travelled to Syria to join its ranks, particularly in Homs and in Douma near Damascus, but claims they do not play a decisive role.

Intelligence officials say a power vacuum would provide an attractive environment for militants who espouse a global jihad world view. “The next three to six months are crucial in Syria,” one official said. “The ingredients are right for them [jihadists] to turn up and start acting decisively. That would not be a good outcome.”

By  in Beirut, Ewen MacAskill in Washington, John Densky in Idlib province

22 June 2012

@ The Guardian

Salil SARKAR

Phone (cell): +33 6 83 22 12 20

Skype ID: Salil SARKAR

Worldwide Movement To End Violence Gathers Momentum

Many people are concerned about wars being fought in various parts of the world. Others are motivated by images of poverty and starvation locally or in distant parts of the world. Increasing numbers of people are inclined to take action in response to the ongoing climate catastrophe. And for some people, the issue that concerns them is violence against women, or refugees, or nuclear power, or species extinctions, or the occupation of Palestine or Tibet, or …The list of issues is endless. And yet, something connects them all. They are all manifestations of human violence. But human violence, in itself, is not an issue about which groups campaign. That is, until now.

On 11 November 2011, a new movement to end human violence was launched around the world. Simultaneous launches took place in Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the USA. This worldwide movement, which invites individuals and organisations to sign a pledge to work to end human violence in all of its manifestations, has already attracted individual signatories in 40 countries and organizational endorsements in 15 countries.

‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ was conceived and launched by three Australians – Anita McKone, Anahata Giri and myself – based on several decades of research and nonviolent action. Tired of all of the violence we have experienced, witnessed and resisted throughout our lives, we decided to prepare and launch the Nonviolence Charter worldwide.

So what is unique about ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’? The Nonviolence Charter is an attempt to put the focus on human violence as the pre-eminent problem faced by our species, to truthfully identify all of the major manifestations of this violence, and to identify ways to tackle all of these manifestations of violence in a systematic and strategic manner. It is an attempt to put the focus on the fundamental cause – the violence we adults inflict on children – and to stress the

importance of dealing with that cause. (See ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence) It is an attempt to focus on what you and I – that is, ordinary people – can do to end human violence and the

Nonviolence Charter invites us to pledge to make that effort. And it is an attempt to provide a focal point around which we can mobilise with a sense of shared commitment with people from all over the world.

In essence then, one aim of the Nonviolence Charter is to give every individual and organisation on planet Earth the chance to deeply consider where they stand on the fundamental issue of human violence. Will you publicly declare your commitment to work to end human violence? Or are you going to leave it to others? And what, precisely, do you want to do? And with whom? The Charter includes suggestions for action in a wide variety of areas; for example, by inviting people to participate in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ – http://tinyurl.com/flametree – which is a simple yet comprehensive strategy for individuals and organisations to deal with the full range of environmental problems. It also provides an opportunity to identify and contact others, both locally and internationally, with whom we can work in locally relevant ways, whatever our preferred focus for action. In that sense, each participating individual and organization becomes part of a worldwide community working to end human violence for all time.

Since being initiated, the Nonviolence Charter has attracted considerable support from people in many countries and some of these have notable records of achievement for peace and justice already. Professor Chandra Muzaffar, Helen Ng and Nurul Haida Dzulkifli are key figures at the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) based in Malaysia, Dr Tess Ramiro heads Aksyon para sa Kapayapaan at Katarungan – Center for Active Non-Violence at the Pius XII Catholic Centre in the Philippines, and Tom Shea and Leonard Eiger have lengthy records as effective nonviolent activists, organisers and networkers at the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in the USA. Tom Shea co-organised the Charter launch in the USA

Other signatories include 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize nominees such as nonviolent activists Kathy Kelly (USA), Father John Dear (USA) and Angie Zelter (UK); significant community leaders such as Ade Adenekan of the Pan-African Reconciliation Centre in Nigeria; the prominent human rights lawyer and consultant, Salma Yusuf, in Sri Lanka; religious figures such as Rev. Brian Burch of Canada and Rev. Nathaniel W. Pierce of the USA; prominent nonviolent activists like S. Brian Willson (USA); anti-war author/activist David Swanson (USA); as well as professors including Glenn D. Paige, founder of the Center for Global Nonkilling in the USA; Dietrich Fischer, Academic Director of the World Peace Academy in Switzerland; Raafat Misak, professor of desert geomorphology and head of the Kuwait Campaign to Ban Landmines in Kuwait; Mazin Qumsiyeh, Chairperson of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochment between People in Palestine; Bradley Olson and Marc Pilisuk of the Program on Violence, War, and their Alternatives with Psychologists for Social Responsibility in the USA; and Kevin P. Clements and Richard Jackson, Director and Director of Research respectively at the The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

How long will this worldwide campaign take? It will undoubtedly take many years: ending human violence is no easy task. But the alternative – to tolerate human violence until we precipitate our own extinction is, surely, unthinkable. The Nonviolence Charter acknowledges our many differences, including the different issues on which we choose to work. But it also offers us a chance to see the unity of our overarching aim within this diversity. Hence, whatever our differences, we are given the chance to see that ending human violence is our compelling and unifying dream.

Would you like to consider joining the worldwide movement to end human violence? If so, you can read and, if you wish, sign ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ online at http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

By Robert J. Burrowes

09 August, 2012

Countercurrents.org

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach’, State University of New York Press, 1996. His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his personal website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Washington Puts Its Money On Proxy War

In the 1980s, the U.S. government began funneling aid to mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan as part of an American proxy war against the Soviet Union. It was, in the minds of America’s Cold War leaders, a rare chance to bloody the Soviets, to give them a taste of the sort of defeat the Vietnamese, with Soviet help, had inflicted on Washington the decade before. In 1989, after years of bloody combat, the Red Army did indeed limp out of Afghanistan in defeat. Since late 2001, the United States has been fighting its former Afghan proxies and their progeny. Now, after years of bloody combat, it’s the U.S. that’s looking to withdraw the bulk of its forces and once again employ proxies to secure its interests there.

From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing a multifaceted, light-footprint brand of warfare. Gone, for the moment at least, are the days of full-scale invasions of the Eurasian mainland. Instead, Washington is now planning to rely ever more heavily on drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world.

While the United States is currently engaged in just one outright proxy war, backing a multi-nation African force to battle Islamist militants in Somalia, it’s laying the groundwork for the extensive use of surrogate forces in the future, training “native” troops to carry out missions — up to and including outright warfare. With this in mind and under the auspices of the Pentagon and the State Department, U.S. military personnel now take part in near-constant joint exercises and training missions around the world aimed at fostering alliances, building coalitions, and whipping surrogate forces into shape to support U.S. national security objectives.

While using slightly different methods in different regions, the basic strategy is a global one in which the U.S. will train, equip, and advise indigenous forces — generally from poor, underdeveloped nations — to do the fighting (and dying) it doesn’t want to do. In the process, as small an American force as possible, including special forces operatives and air support, will be brought to bear to aid those surrogates. Like drones, proxy warfare appears to offer an easy solution to complex problems. But as Washington’s 30-year debacle in Afghanistan indicates, the ultimate costs may prove both unimaginable and unimaginably high.

Start with Afghanistan itself. For more than a decade, the U.S. and its coalition partners have been training Afghan security forces in the hopes that they would take over the war there, defending U.S. and allied interests as the American-led international force draws down. Yet despite an expenditure of almost $50 billion on bringing it up to speed, the Afghan National Army and other security forces have drastically underperformed any and all expectations, year after year.

One track of the U.S. plan has been a little-talked-about proxy army run by the CIA. For years, the Agency has trained and employed six clandestine militias that operate near the cities of Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad as well as in Khost, Kunar, and Paktika provinces. Working with U.S. Special Forces and controlled by Americans, these “Counterterror Pursuit Teams” evidently operate free of any Afghan governmental supervision and have reportedly carried out cross-border raids into Pakistan, offering their American patrons a classic benefit of proxy warfare: plausible deniability.

This clandestine effort has also been supplemented by the creation of a massive, conventional indigenous security force. While officially under Afghan government control, these military and police forces are almost entirely dependent on the financial support of the U.S. and allied governments for their continued existence.

Today, the Afghan National Security Forces officially number more than 343,000, but only 7% of its army units and 9% of its police units are rated at the highest level of effectiveness. By contrast, even after more than a decade of large-scale Western aid, 95% of its recruits are still functionally illiterate.

Not surprisingly, this massive force, trained by high-priced private contractors, Western European militaries, and the United States, and backed by U.S. and coalition forces and their advanced weapons systems, has been unable to stamp out a lightly-armed, modest-sized, less-than-popular, rag-tag insurgency. One of the few tasks this proxy force seems skilled at is shooting American and allied forces, quite often their own trainers, in increasingly common “green-on-blue” attacks.

Adding insult to injury, this poor-performing, coalition-killing force is expensive. Bought and paid for by the United States and its coalition partners, it costs between $10 billion and $12 billion each year to sustain in a country whose gross domestic product is just $18 billion. Over the long term, such a situation is untenable.

Back to the Future

Utilizing foreign surrogates is nothing new. Since ancient times, empires and nation-states have employed foreign troops and indigenous forces to wage war or have backed them when it suited their policy aims. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tactic had become de rigueur for colonial powers like the French who employed Senegalese, Moroccans, and other African forces in Indochina and elsewhere, and the British who regularly used Nepalese Gurkhas to wage counterinsurgencies in places ranging from Iraq and Malaya to Borneo.

By the time the United States began backing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, it already had significant experience with proxy warfare and its perils. After World War II, the U.S. eagerly embraced foreign surrogates, generally in poor and underdeveloped countries, in the name of the Cold War. These efforts included the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro via a proxy Cuban force that crashed and burned at the Bay of Pigs; the building of a Hmong army in Laos which ultimately lost to Communist forces there; and the bankrolling of a French war in Vietnam that failed in 1954 and then the creation of a massive army in South Vietnam that crumbled in 1975, to name just a few unsuccessful efforts.

A more recent proxy failure occurred in Iraq. For years after the 2003 invasion, American policy-makers uttered a standard mantra: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” Last year, those Iraqis basically walked off.

Between 2003 and 2011, the United States pumped tens of billions of dollars into “reconstructing” the country with around $20 billion of it going to build the Iraqi security forces. This mega-force of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police was created from scratch to prop up the successors to the government that the United States overthrew. It was trained by and fought with the Americans and their coalition partners, but that all came to an end in December 2011.

Despite Obama administration efforts to base thousands or tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for years to come, the Iraqi government spurned Washington’s overtures and sent the U.S. military packing. Today, the Iraqi government supports the Assad regime in Syria, and has a warm and increasingly close relationship with long-time U.S. enemy Iran. According to Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency, the two countries have even discussed expanding their military ties.

African Shadow Wars

Despite a history of sinking billions into proxy armies that collapsed, walked away, or morphed into enemies, Washington is currently pursuing plans for proxy warfare across the globe, perhaps nowhere more aggressively than in Africa.

Under President Obama, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years. These include last year’s war in Libya; the expansion of a growing network of supply depots, small camps, and airfields; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting regional operations; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; and a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders. (This mission against Kony is seen by some experts as a cover for a developing proxy war between the U.S. and the Islamist government of Sudan — which is accused of helping to support the LRA — and Islamists more generally.) And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.

In Somalia, Washington has already involved itself in a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against Islamist al-Shabaab militants that includes intelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and commando raids. Now, it is also backing a classic proxy war using African surrogates. The United States has become, as the Los Angeles Times put it recently, “the driving force behind the fighting in Somalia,” as it trains and equips African foot soldiers to battle Shabaab militants, so U.S. forces won’t have to. In a country where more than 90 Americans were killed and wounded in a 1993 debacle now known by the shorthand “Black Hawk Down,” today’s fighting and dying has been outsourced to African soldiers.

Earlier this year, for example, elite Force Recon Marines from the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (or, as a mouthful of an acronym, SPMAGTF-12) trained soldiers from the Uganda People’s Defense Force. It, in turn, supplies the majority of the troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) currently protecting the U.S.-supported government in that country’s capital, Mogadishu.

This spring, Marines from SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from the Burundi National Defense Force (BNDF), the second-largest contingent in Somalia. In April and May, members of Task Force Raptor, 3rd Squadron, 124th Cavalry Regiment of the Texas National Guard, took part in a separate training mission with the BNDF in Mudubugu, Burundi. SPMAGTF-12 has also sent its trainers to Djibouti, another nation involved in the Somali mission, to work with an elite army unit there.

At the same time, U.S. Army troops have taken part in training members of Sierra Leone’s military in preparation for their deployment to Somalia later this year. In June, U.S. Army Africa commander Major General David Hogg spoke encouragingly of the future of Sierra Leone’s forces in conjunction with another U.S. ally, Kenya, which invaded Somalia last fall (and just recently joined the African Union mission there). “You will join the Kenyan forces in southern Somalia to continue to push al Shabaab and other miscreants from Somalia so it can be free of tyranny and terrorism and all the evil that comes with it,” he said. “We know that you are ready and trained. You will be equipped and you will accomplish this mission with honor and dignity.”

Readying allied militaries for deployment to Somalia is, however, just a fraction of the story when it comes to training indigenous forces in Africa. This year, for example, Marines traveled to Liberia to focus on teaching riot-control techniques to that country’s military as part of what is otherwise a State Department-directed effort to rebuild its security forces.

In fact, Colonel Tom Davis of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) recently told TomDispatch that his command has held or has planned 14 major joint training exercises for 2012 and a similar number are scheduled for 2013. This year’s efforts include operations in Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and Nigeria, including, for example, Western Accord 2012, a multilateral exercise involving the armed forces of Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Gambia, and France.

Even this, however, doesn’t encompass the full breadth of U.S. training and advising missions in Africa. “We… conduct some type of military training or military-to-military engagement or activity with nearly every country on the African continent,” wrote Davis.

Our American Proxies

Africa may, at present, be the prime location for the development of proxy warfare, American-style, but it’s hardly the only locale where the United States is training indigenous forces to aid U.S. foreign policy aims. This year, the Pentagon has also ramped up operations in Central and South America as well as the Caribbean.

In Honduras, for example, small teams of U.S. troops are working with local forces to escalate the drug war there. Working out of Forward Operating Base Mocoron and other remote camps, the U.S. military is supporting Honduran operations by way of the methods it honed in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. forces have also taken part in joint operations with Honduran troops as part of a training mission dubbed Beyond the Horizon 2012, while Green Berets have been assisting Honduran Special Operations forces in anti-smuggling operations. Additionally, an increasingly militarized Drug Enforcement Administration sent a Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team, originally created to disrupt the poppy trade in Afghanistan, to aid Honduras’s Tactical Response Team, that country’s elite counternarcotics unit.

The militarization and foreign deployment of U.S. law enforcement operatives was also evident in Tradewinds 2012, a training exercise held in Barbados in June. There, members of the U.S. military and civilian law enforcement agencies joined with counterparts from Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Suriname, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to improve cooperation for “complex multinational security operations.”

Far less visible have been training efforts by U.S. Special Operations Forces in Guyana, Uruguay, and Paraguay. In June, special ops troops also took part in Fuerzas Comando, an eight-day “competition” in which the elite forces from 21 countries, including the Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay, faced-off in tests of physical fitness, marksmanship, and tactical capabilities.

This year, the U.S. military has also conducted training exercises in Guatemala, sponsored “partnership-building” missions in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, and Panama, and reached an agreement to carry out 19 “activities” with the Colombian army over the next year, including joint military exercises.

The Proxy Pivot

Coverage of the Obama administration’s much-publicized strategic “pivot” to Asia has focused on the creation of yet more bases and new naval deployments to the region. The military (which has dropped the word pivot for “rebalancing”) is, however, also planning and carrying out numerous exercises and training missions with regional allies. In fact, the Navy and Marines alone already reportedly engage in more than 170 bilateral and multilateral exercises with Asia-Pacific nations each year.

One of the largest of these efforts took place in and around the Hawaiian Islands from late June through early August. Dubbed RIMPAC 2012, the exercise brought together more than 40 ships and submarines, more than 200 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel from 22 nations, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Tonga.

Almost 7,000 American troops also joined around 3,400 Thai forces, as well as military personnel from Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea as part of Cobra Gold 2012. In addition, U.S. Marines took part in Hamel 2012, a multinational training exercise involving members of the Australian and New Zealand militaries, while other American troops joined the Armed Forces of the Philippines for Exercise Balikatan.

The effects of the “pivot” are also evident in the fact that once neutralist India now holds more than 50 military exercises with the United States each year — more than any other country in the world. “Our partnership with India is a key part of our rebalance to the Asia-Pacific and, we believe, to the broader security and prosperity of the 21st century,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter on a recent trip to the subcontinent. Just how broad is evident in the fact that India is taking part in America’s proxy effort in Somalia. In recent years, the Indian Navy has emerged as an “important contributor” to the international counter-piracy effort off that African country’s coast, according to Andrew Shapiro of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Peace by Proxy

India’s neighbor Bangladesh offers a further window into U.S. efforts to build proxy forces to serve American interests.

Earlier this year, U.S. and Bangladeshi forces took part in an exercise focused on logistics, planning, and tactical training, codenamed Shanti Doot-3. The mission was notable in that it was part of a State Department program, supported and executed by the Pentagon, known as the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI).

First implemented under George W. Bush, GPOI provides cash-strapped nations funds, equipment, logistical assistance and training to enable their militaries to become “peacekeepers” around the world. Under Bush, from the time the program was established in 2004 through 2008, more than $374 million was spent to train and equip foreign troops. Under President Obama, Congress has funded the program to the tune of $393 million, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by the State Department.

In a speech earlier this year, the State Department’s Andrew Shapiro told a Washington, D.C., audience that “GPOI is particularly focusing a great deal of its efforts to support the training and equipping of peacekeepers deploying to… Somalia” and had provided “tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment for countries deploying [there].” In a blog post he went into more detail, lauding U.S. efforts to train Djiboutian troops to serve as peacekeepers in Somalia and noting that the U.S. had also provided impoverished Djibouti with radar equipment and patrol boats for offshore activities. “Djibouti is also central to our efforts to combat piracy,” he wrote, “as it is on the front line of maritime threats including piracy in the Gulf of Aden and surrounding waters.”

Djibouti and Bangladesh are hardly unique. Under the auspices of the Global Peace Operations Initiative, the U.S. has partnered with 62 nations around the globe, according to statistics provided by the State Department. These proxies-in-training are, not surprisingly, some of the poorest nations in their respective regions, if not the entire planet. They include Benin, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Togo in Africa, Nepal and Pakistan in Asia, and Guatemala and Nicaragua in the Americas.

The Changing Face of Empire

With ongoing military operations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, the Obama administration has embraced a six-point program for light-footprint warfare relying heavily on special operations forces, drones, spies, civilian partners, cyber warfare, and proxy fighters. Of all the facets of this new way of war, the training and employment of proxies has generally been the least noticed, even though reliance on foreign forces is considered one of its prime selling points. As the State Department’s Andrew Shapiro put it in a speech earlier this year: “[T]he importance of these missions to the security of the United States is often little appreciated… To put it clearly: When these peacekeepers deploy it means that U.S. forces are less likely to be called on to intervene.” In other words, to put it even more clearly, more dead locals, fewer dead Americans.

The evidence for this conventional wisdom, however, is lacking. And failures to learn from history in this regard have been ruinous. The training, advising, and outfitting of a proxy force in Vietnam drew the United States deeper and deeper into that doomed conflict, leading to tens of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese. Support for Afghan proxies during their decade-long battle against the Soviet Union led directly to the current disastrous decade-plus American War in Afghanistan.

Right now, the U.S. is once again training, advising, and conducting joint exercises all over the world with proxy war on its mind and the concept of “unintended consequences” nowhere in sight in Washington. Whether today’s proxies end up working for or against Washington’s interests or even become tomorrow’s enemies remains to be seen. But with so much training going on in so many destabilized regions, and so many proxy forces being armed in so many places, the chances of blowback grow greater by the day.

By Nick Turse

09 August, 2012

@ TomDispatch.com

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several books, including the recently published Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt). This piece is the latest article in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can follow him on Tumblr.

Copyright 2012 Nick Turse

Egypt Launches Sinai Crackdown In Collusion With Israel

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government has launched a crackdown after an armed raid at the Rafah checkpoint near the border with Gaza and Israel killed 16 Egyptian soldiers and wounded eight more. The action testifies to how closely the Brotherhood now works with Israel and the United States.

While both Egyptian and Israeli intelligence had been warned of an attack in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian security forces apparently took no additional precautions. On Sunday evening, 35 masked gunmen launched an armed raid at Rafah. Several of the gunmen then seized two armoured vehicles and crossed into Israel. One of the vehicles exploded, apparently booby- trapped.

Israeli security forces, alerted by the Egyptian forces, then gave chase to the other, killing six men with aerial missiles. Most were found to be wearing explosive belts. Egyptian security forces killed and wounded a number of others who tried to escape into Gaza.

The raid follows an increasing number of attacks in the northern Sinai since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. There have been at least 15 attacks on the pipeline taking gas to Israel and Jordan, disrupting supplies. A few weeks ago, two Egyptian soldiers were killed.

Israeli intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi announced that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had stopped nearly a dozen recent attacks from the Sinai Peninsula.

Last August, Islamist militants crossed Egypt’s border into Eilat, in southern Israel, killing eight people, including two security personnel, and injured dozens more. Israeli forces chased the attackers across the border and kill at least seven people, including several Egyptian policemen.

Sinai’s 23,000 square miles is home to 600,000 Bedouin, many of whom are not registered as Egyptian citizens. Since the fall of Mubarak, some of the impoverished Bedouin tribes have begun to protest the tribal leaders and the Egyptian authorities. Others are believed to be making a good living through the smuggling of arms from Libya and Sudan for jihadist groups operating in the Sinai Peninsula, which is now awash with weaponry.

For some time, Israel has been ramping up the pressure on Egypt to mount a clamp down. A few weeks ago, Israel sent an official letter to the UN Security Council complaining about the security situation in Sinai. Last week, both Israel and the US warned their citizens not to travel to Sinai.

No group has claimed responsibility for the Rafah attack. Egyptian state TV said that the raid was carried out by foreign Islamic militants from a global jihad network with the help of Bedouins in the northern Sinai, who had entered from Egypt and Gaza.

Two leading officials in Fatah, the Palestinian ruling clique in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, accused its rival Hamas, which controls Gaza, of being responsible for the attack.

Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, accused Fatah of using the attack to create divisions between Egypt and Gaza. It denied any responsibility for the attack and, along with its Egyptian parent and Hezbollah in Lebanon, condemned it.

Hamas also condemned the Egyptian authorities for not taking pre-emptive action in the light of the warnings and also blamed Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, who they said were trying to undermine the Egyptian government and worsen relations between Egypt and Gaza.

In recent weeks, Egypt’s President Mohamed Mursi of the Brotherhood has received both Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas leader who has left Damascus and is now living in Dubai, and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza. He promised them that he would ease the tight restrictions at the Rafah crossing, the only one not under Israeli control. The tiny enclave of 1.7 million Palestinians has been blockaded by Israel for more than five years.

Aware of the deep anger of the Egyptian people at the role Mubarak played in sustaining the Israeli blockade, Mursi initially wanted to be seen as effecting some change in this regard.

Mursi responded to the raid on the Egyptian soldiers by calling it a “vicious attack” and vowed “those behind the attacks will pay a high price as well as those who have been co-operating with those attackers, be it those inside or anywhere in Egypt.”

He promised that the security forces would take “full control” over Sinai.

Additional pressure on Mursi was that he and Hisham Qandil, the newly installed prime minister, face accusations at home of involvement in the raid. Both attended the funeral prayers for the slain soldiers, where angry protestors chased Qandil, shouting, “You killed them you dogs” and chanted against the Brotherhood and Mursi. Neither man attended the military funeral on the advice of intelligence staff, who said they could not guarantee their safety.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the raid should be a “wake up call” for Egypt and demanded that Cairo take action. “The militants’ attack methods again raise the need for determined Egyptian action to enforce security and prevent terror in the Sinai,” he said.

Sources at Egypt’s presidential palace told Egypt Independent that the palace had received calls expressing concern about the security vacuum in Sinai, including one that suggested that Israeli “constraint” in the event of any further attacks emanating from Sinai could not be guaranteed.

Cairo dutifully fell in line, with Mursi allying himself in a joint offensive with Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and with Israel.

Mursi sent in the security forces to close down its border with Hamas-controlled Gaza, the only one not under Israeli control, completely isolating the Gaza enclave. Heavy machinery was sent in to seal entrances to tunnels–believed to number 1,000– used to smuggle goods, fuel and weapons into Gaza.

Military forces launched a massive security crackdown, raiding hundreds of homes in northern Sinai to search for suspects, arresting several people, and deploying helicopter gunships to search out militants in their desert hideouts. After a number of armed clashes, the military launched aerial attacks on towns and villages in northern Sinai, killing at least 20 people. This was the first time Egypt has fired missiles in Sinai since the 1973 war with Israel.

Hours later, Mursi sacked Egypt’s intelligence chief and the head of the North Sinai governorate. General Mohamed Murad Mowafi was quoted in the Egyptian media as confirming that the intelligence services had received warning of Sunday’s attack. He had apparently only passed the information on, saying that the intelligence services’ job was only to collect information. Mursi also dismissed the commander of the presidential guard and several other top security officials.

These actions were taken in close co-ordination with Israel, who agreed to the deployment of additional troops in Sinai over and above that set up in the 1978 and 1979 Camp David Accords. Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, said that Israel and Egypt would increase security cooperation.

By Jean Shaoul

09 August, 2012

@ WSWS.org