Obama's Strange Syrian Bedfellows: Al Qaeda Offshoot and Assorted Jihadists Join President's 'War on Terror'

How Obama and Al-Qaeda Became Syrian Bedfellows

by Shamus Cooke

For a president that is executing Bush's "war on terror" against Al-Qaeda and "it's affiliates,” it seems odd that President Obama has targeted the secular Syrian government for "regime change.”

Equally odd is that Obama's strongest military ally on the ground in Syria- the best equipped and effective fighting force against the Syrian Government — is Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that has affiliated itself with al-Qaeda, and aims to turn Syria into an extremist Islamic state that enforces a fundamentalist version of Sharia law.

It's difficult to know exactly how al-Nursa received its guns, but one can make an educated guess. For example, The New York Times explained in detail how the CIA has been in a massive arms trafficking operation that has already funneled thousands of tons of guns from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Syria:

"The C.I.A. role in facilitating the [weapons] shipments… gave the United States a degree of influence over the process [of weapon distribution]…American officials have confirmed that senior White House officials were regularly briefed on the [weapons] shipments."

Where are the guns winding up in this massive arms trafficking operation? An important question to ask is: which rebels in Syria have guns and which ones don't. The Guardian reports :

“The [secular] Free Syrian Army's shortage of weapons and other resources compared with [jihadist] Jabhat al-Nusra is a recurrent theme... ‘If you join al-Nusra, there is always a gun for you but many of the FSA brigades can't even provide bullets for their fighters,'...3,000 FSA [Free Syrian Army] men have joined al-Nusra in the last few months, mainly because of a lack of weapons and ammunition...Al-Nusra fighters rarely withdraw for shortage of ammunition..."

While it's difficult to know if CIA trafficked guns are going directly or indirectly to al-Nursa, it's extremely likely that these guns are going directly into the hands of ideological cousins of al-Nursa, since the Syrian rebels are completely dominated by Islamic extremists.

For example, when the Economist magazine was outlining the most important fighting groups in Syria, "Who's Who in the Syrian Battlefield,” they noted with regret that the only important non-Islamist group was in the Kurdish areas, which is virtually an autonomous zone. As far as the secular U.S.-backed fighting group, The Supreme Military Command, the Economist conceded it "has little control on the ground.” Keep in mind that the Economist is very much in favor of a U.S.-NATO military intervention in Syria.

The New York Times also confirmed the complete dominance of extremists on the rebel side:

"Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of."

Thus, the minority of secular rebel fighters are not leading the civil war and will not be in power if Assad falls. Instead, honest Syrian revolutionaries will instantly fall victim to the extremists, who will immediately proceed to a mopping-up mission of their former allies.

It's now clear that Obama's foreign policy in Syria is actively encouraging terrorism. Many rebel-controlled areas in Syria are now new safe havens for terrorists, and there have been hundreds of terrorist bombing attacks against the Syrian government, many of which have targeted civilian areas.

While the U.S. is pouring arms into the jihadist-controlled areas, they have also downplayed the atrocities committed by these rebels, which are well documented on Youtube and include a multitude of war crimes that include beheadings, group execution of prisoners, ethnic cleansing , and the recent episode where a famous rebel commander was videotaped mutilating a dead Syrian solider and eating his heart.

By minimizing this barbarism the Obama administration ensures that it will continue, since the extremists are empowered by U.S. support and are shielded in the U.S. media and protected from international political pressures.

One question the U.S. media never thinks of asking is: Where did all these Islamic extremists come from and why? The Sunni Islamic opposition inside Syria has long been religiously moderate, implying that many of the extremists are foreigners.

The ideological source of this extremism came from Saudi Arabian religious figures and their allies, who use Islam as a political tool to target nations "unfriendly" to Saudi Arabia and the United States. The most glaring example of this in regard to Syria was the Fatwa (official interpretation/statement) issued by 107 Islamic scholars that denounced the Syrian government and encouraged Muslims to fight against it. The statement essentially encouraged jihad, though the word wasn't mentioned explicitly.

The statement includes:

"It is a duty for all Muslims to support the revolutionaries in Syria [against the government] “so that they can successfully complete their revolution and attain their rights and their freedom.”

The hypocrisy of such a statement is almost too glaring: the many Saudi figures who signed the document that want "freedom" in Syria are not demanding freedom in Saudi Arabia, by far the country with the least amount of freedoms in the world.

With Saudi Arabia and Qatar providing guns to the Syrian rebels — with help from the CIA — the Saudi religious figures attached to the Saudi regime give religious/political support by misleading devout Muslims to flock to Syria to attack a country of Muslims, thus creating the giant sectarian divisions we now see throughout the Islamic world.

The vast majority of this Islamic sectarian warfare is exported by Saudi Arabia, which funds radical Islamic schools all over the Middle East that attract the downtrodden of these countries by providing basic social services that the host country is too poor — or unwilling — to provide. There is an informative chapter on this dynamic in Vijay Prashad's excellent book, A People's History of the Third World.

Now the debate among U.S.-NATO countries is whether to give more sophisticated weaponry to the extremist-dominated rebels in Syria. The Obama Administration is pressuring the European Union to drop its arms embargo on Syria so that a new torrent of weapons can flood the country (apparently the CIA operations haven't yet completely drenched Syria with guns).

In response to the "drop the embargo" discussion, Oxfam intelligently responded by saying:

"Sending arms to the Syrian opposition won't create a level playing field. Instead, it risks further fueling an arms free-for-all where the victims are the civilians of Syria. Our experience from other conflict zones tells us that this crisis will only drag on for far longer if more and more arms are poured into the country."

One EU diplomat gave a scathing rebuke to the Obama Administration's claim that it could ensure that new weapons wouldn't wind up in "the wrong hands" in Syria:

"It would be the first conflict where we pretend we could create peace by delivering arms," the diplomat said. "If you pretend to know where the weapons will end up, then it would be the first war in history where this is possible. We have seen it in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Weapons don't disappear; they pop up where they are needed."

In Syria the weapons are needed by those doing the brunt of the fighting. Again, the al-Nursa extremists are widely acknowledged to be the most effective fighting force against the Syrian government, the guns will thus flow to them.

Obama has taken the saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” to irrational heights, and in so doing is helping to produce a new generation of Islamic extremists that will help fuel the U.S.-led never-ending "war on terror.” The real intention of the War on Terror is not to stop terrorists, but to target nation states that are opposed to U.S. foreign policy: Iraq and Libya — like Syria — were both secular countries at the time of their being invaded; Afghanistan was invaded even though the vast majority of those involved in the 9-11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia. There was no terrorist problem in Iraq before the U.S. invaded, just like there was no terrorist problem in Syria before the U.S.-backed rebels came onto the scene.

It's blatantly obvious to most Americans that Syria and Iran are at the top of Obama's war list, a much higher priority than any terrorist group. This is why Obama is tolerating the terrorist groups inside Syira; they are being used as tools against his real target, Syria and then Iran.

The Syrian people must be left to themselves to decide their future. The United States is utterly incapable of "helping" countries by using military means, as the fractured nations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya painfully prove. The global anti-war movement must demand Hands Off Syria!


Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action www.workerscompass.org . He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

Notes

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrian-rebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html?hp&_r=1&

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/08/free-syrian-army-rebels-defect-islamist-group

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-chart-12

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/world/middleeast/islamist-rebels-gains-in-syria-create-dilemma-for-us.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&hp&

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/opinion/syrias-crumbling-pluralism.html?_r=3&

http://www.islam21c.com/fataawa/2407-fatwa-on-syria-by-107-scholars

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/22/syria-arms-embargo-rebels

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/22/syria-arms-embargo-rebels?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-3%20Main%20trailblock:Network%20front%20-%20main%20trailblock:Position5

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/divided-europe-imperils-syrian-arms-embargo-8632376.html

Gaza Freedom Flotilla Killings Case Grinds On at Third Anniversary of Mavi Marmara Attack

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla: From the High Seas to the High Court and Beyond

by Richard Lightbown

Israel’s raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on 31 May 2010 caused the severance of diplomatic relations with Turkey and spawned legal actions in several countries. Claims in compensation cases in Turkish courts from only 40 victims have already amounted to the equivalent of more than 6 million Euros. Meanwhile the case against four former senior commanders on behalf of 490 plaintiffs is slowly progressing through the 7th High Criminal Court in Istanbul.

The prosecution alleges that at the time of the raid Chief of Staff Gavriel Ashkenazi, Naval Forces Commander Eliezar Marom, Head of the Military Intelligence Directorate Amos Yadlin and Air Forces Intelligence Director Avishai Levi jointly and personally “ordered the operation in which war crimes and crimes against humanity are alleged to have been committed”.

The defendants have not attended the hearings and the Israeli government does not recognize the trial. Its position has always been that its commandos were safeguarding their country’s security when they were attacked by terrorists. This spurious narrative has been supported by media misinformation such as Panorama’s false assertion that flotilla members used firearms against the commandos, by a UN Panel (the Palmer Committee) devoid of expertise in international maritime law which presumed to declare the Israeli blockade a legal entity, and by Israel’s official investigation (the Turkel Committee) whose report does not withstand scrutiny. Supporters have also ensured that the Wikipedia entry on the raid is sympathetic to the Israeli narrative.

Having gained the advantage in the common perception of the raid, Israel has still to confront the more serious legal challenges which constitute a nuisance and a problem to its interests. The nuisance is illustrated by the fact that the defendants have not left Israel since the Istanbul trial opened. The problem lies in the fact that Turkish courts are independent of government interference. There is also scope for further charges to be brought against other defendants, including those considered directly responsible for the nine deaths and 156 casualties, 52 of whom suffered serious injury.

To help free Israel of these legal impediments while making minimum concessions to justice, President Obama stage-managed an apology via telephone link from Prime Minister Netanyahu to Prime Minister Erdoğan on 22 March. Without consulting the victims, Mr Erdoğan accepted the apology “on behalf of the people of Turkey”. (It was not thought necessary for Mr Netanyahu to apologize to Mr Obama for the unlawful killing of 19-year-old Furkan Doğan who had sole US citizenship.) However, many Turks were disappointed when it became apparent that their Premier had agreed to immunity from prosecution while accepting that Israel will pay a lump sum into a fund to finance compensation agreed between the governments or awarded by the courts.

Mr Erdoğan had previously said that his requirements for the restoration of diplomatic relations were an apology, compensation for all the victims, and the lifting of the Gaza closure. This was not understood to be a bargaining position, but were minimum requirements for a settlement. Israel has since made it plain by word and deed that its siege of Gaza will continue. The fishing zone has again been unilaterally reduced from six miles to three miles offshore, while last month the sole commercial crossing at Kerem Shalom was closed for
17 days and Erez crossing was also closed for seven days. It was this collective punishment which originally inspired the Freedom Flotilla, and it is only the compliance of the Turkish government (which continues to withhold the requisite maritime permits) which prevents the Mavi Marmara from making a second attempt
to break the Gaza blockade.

Nevertheless negotiations between the governments of Israel and Turkey continue apace. In order to facilitate immunity from prosecution it is thought that Article 19 of the Turkish Constitution might be invoked whereby international agreements overrule domestic legislation. But since the Turkish parliament is not allowed to make decisions adversely affecting basic human rights, such legislation could be annulled by the Constitutional Court.

Meanwhile the families of the martyrs along with İHH (the ship’s owners) and lawyers working on the case have publicly declared that any agreement which fails to meet all criteria will be a complete waste of time. They remain steadfast in demanding justice and adequate compensation for all the victims, regardless of nationality. They also reject the apology as inadequate, recalling that in June 2010 Benjamin Netanyahu described the victims of the assault as ‘terrorists’. For this malicious slander they insist that he must personally and publicly apologize. They also demand an unreserved apology for all the Israeli crimes committed during the attack, including willful killing, attempted willful killing, intentionally causing serious injury, plunder, hijacking maritime vessels on the high seas, intentionally causing damage to property, and instigating violent crime.

At its next session on 10 October the Istanbul court is expected to declare the four defendants fugitives from justice, issue binding arrest warrants and ask INTERPOL to issue extradition orders. But Israel’s greatest problems may yet come from The Hague. The scope of jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) includes war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Because this incident meets all the criteria of the Rome Statute, the Union of the Comoros (the flag state of the Mavi Marmara) deposited a referral with the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC on 14 May. The Chief Prosecutor announced a preliminary investigation the same day, and a pre-trial chamber will decide whether or not to proceed further. Any investigation accepted by
the ICC cannot subsequently be withdrawn but must complete its legal process.

In Istanbul on 31 May a vigil will be held on the Mavi Marmara during which there will be a ceremony of commemoration starting at the time the ship was attacked. Survivors of the voyage recall how prior to that savage act of state terrorism, the members of the 32 nations on board had created a remarkable commonality of humanity which many remember as the best days of their lives. With that as inspiration they are not going to abandon their struggle against abuses of human rights.

Radical! The New Normal

Why Radical is the New Normal: Get Apocalyptic

by Robert Jensen - Yes! Magazine

Feeling anxious about life in a broken-down society on a stressed-out planet? That’s hardly surprising: Life as we know it is almost over. While the dominant culture encourages dysfunctional denial—pop a pill, go shopping, find your bliss—there’s a more sensible approach: Accept the anxiety, embrace the deeper anguish—and then get apocalyptic.

We are staring down multiple cascading ecological crises, struggling with political and economic institutions that are unable even to acknowledge, let alone cope with, the threats to the human family and the larger living world. We are intensifying an assault on the ecosystems in which we live, undermining the ability of that living world to sustain a large-scale human presence into the future. When all the world darkens, looking on the bright side is not a virtue but a sign of irrationality.

In these circumstances, anxiety is rational and anguish is healthy, signs not of weakness but of courage. A deep grief over what we are losing—and have already lost, perhaps never to be recovered—is appropriate. Instead of repressing these emotions we can confront them, not as isolated individuals but collectively, not only for our own mental health but to increase the effectiveness of our organizing for the social justice and ecological sustainability still within our grasp. Once we’ve sorted through those reactions, we can get apocalyptic and get down to our real work.

Perhaps that sounds odd, since we are routinely advised to overcome our fears and not give in to despair. Endorsing apocalypticism seems even stranger, given associations with “end-timer” religious reactionaries and “doomer” secular survivalists. People with critical sensibilities, those concerned about justice and sustainability, think of ourselves as realistic and less likely to fall for either theological or science-fiction fantasies.

Many associate “apocalypse” with the rapture-ranting that grows out of some interpretations of the Christian Book of Revelation (aka, the Apocalypse of John), but it’s helpful to remember that the word’s original meaning is not “end of the world.” “Revelation” from Latin and “apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden, a coming to clarity. Speaking apocalyptically, in this sense, can deepen our understanding of the crises and help us see through the many illusions that powerful people and institutions create.

But there is an ending we have to confront. Once we’ve honestly faced the crises, then we can deal with what is ending—not all the world, but the systems that currently structure our lives. Life as we know it is, indeed, coming to an end.

Let’s start with the illusions: Some stories we have told ourselves—claims by white people, men, or U.S. citizens that domination is natural and appropriate—are relatively easy to debunk (though many cling to them). Other delusional assertions—such as the claim that capitalism is compatible with basic moral principles, meaningful democracy, and ecological sustainability—require more effort to take apart (perhaps because there seems to be no alternative).

But toughest to dislodge may be the central illusion of the industrial world’s extractive economy: that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption. The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social norms and illegitimate authority, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: The high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.

We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.

Does that seem histrionic? Excessively alarmist? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species, and reduction of biodiversity—and ask a simple question: Where are we heading?

Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a major reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds daily life. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of “extreme energy,” using ever more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop coal removal, tar sands extraction).

Oh, did I forget to mention the undeniable trajectory of global warming/climate change/climate disruption?

Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing Earth beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience,” which means that “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.”

That conclusion is the product of science and common sense, not supernatural beliefs or conspiracy theories. The political/social implications are clear: There are no solutions to our problems if we insist on maintaining the high-energy/high-technology existence lived in much of the industrialized world (and desired by many currently excluded from it). Many tough-minded folk who are willing to challenge other oppressive systems hold on tightly to this lifestyle. The critic Fredric Jameson has written, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” but that’s only part of the problem—for some, it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of air conditioning.

We do live in end-times, of a sort. Not the end of the world—the planet will carry on with or without us—but the end of the human systems that structure our politics, economics, and social life. “Apocalypse” need not involve heavenly rescue fantasies or tough-guy survival talk; to get apocalyptic means seeing clearly and recommitting to core values.

First, we must affirm the value of our work for justice and sustainability, even though there is no guarantee we can change the disastrous course of contemporary society. We take on projects that we know may fail because it’s the right thing to do, and by doing so we create new possibilities for ourselves and the world. Just as we all know that someday we will die and yet still get out of bed every day, an honest account of planetary reality need not paralyze us.

Then let’s abandon worn-out clichés such as, “The American people will do the right thing if they know the truth,” or “Past social movements prove the impossible can happen.”

There is no evidence that awareness of injustice will automatically lead U.S. citizens, or anyone else, to correct it. When people believe injustice is necessary to maintain their material comfort, some accept those conditions without complaint.

Social movements around race, gender, and sexuality have been successful in changing oppressive laws and practices, and to a lesser degree in shifting deeply held beliefs. But the movements we most often celebrate, such as the post-World War II civil rights struggle, operated in a culture that assumed continuing economic expansion. We now live in a time of permanent contraction—there will be less, not more, of everything. Pressuring a dominant group to surrender some privileges when there is an expectation of endless bounty is a very different project than when there is intensified competition for resources. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done to advance justice and sustainability, only that we should not be glib about the inevitability of it.

Here’s another cliché to jettison: Necessity is the mother of invention. During the industrial era, humans exploiting new supplies of concentrated energy have generated unprecedented technological innovation in a brief time. But there is no guarantee that there are technological fixes to all our problems; we live in a system that has physical limits, and the evidence suggests we are close to those limits. Technological fundamentalism—the quasi-religious belief that the use of advanced technology is always appropriate, and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences can be remedied by more technology—is as empty a promise as other fundamentalisms.

If all this seems like more than one can bear, it’s because it is. We are facing new, more expansive challenges. Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time; never have we had so much information about the threats we must come to terms with.

It’s easy to cover up our inability to face this by projecting it onto others. When someone tells me “I agree with your assessment, but people can’t handle it,” I assume what that person really means is, “I can’t handle it.” But handling it is, in the end, the only sensible choice.

Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities—those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult—not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.

Adopting this apocalyptic framework doesn’t mean separating from mainstream society or giving up ongoing projects that seek a more just world within existing systems. I am a professor at a university that does not share my values or analysis, yet I continue to teach. In my community, I am part of a group that helps people create worker-cooperatives that will operate within a capitalist system that I believe to be a dead end. I belong to a congregation that struggles to radicalize Christianity while remaining part of a cautious, often cowardly, denomination.

I am apocalyptic, but I’m not interested in empty rhetoric drawn from past revolutionary moments. Yes, we need a revolution—many revolutions—but a strategy is not yet clear. So, as we work patiently on reformist projects, we can continue to offer a radical analysis and experiment with new ways of working together. While engaged in education and community organizing with modest immediate goals, we can contribute to the strengthening of networks and institutions that can be the base for the more radical change we need. In these spaces today we can articulate, and live, the values of solidarity and equity that are always essential.

To adopt an apocalyptic worldview is not to abandon hope but to affirm life. As James Baldwin put it decades ago, we must remember “that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere.” By avoiding the stark reality of our moment in history we don’t make ourselves safe, we undermine the potential of struggles for justice and sustainability.

As Baldwin put it so poignantly in that same 1962 essay, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

It’s time to get apocalyptic, or get out of the way.

-----------------------------------

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue, http://www.amazon.com/Arguing-Our-Lives-Constructive-Dialog/dp/0872865738/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361912779&sr=1-10, and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out, in print at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/148195847X/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER and on Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BAWQO84.

Jensen is also the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing” (Media Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. An extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff is online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/abeosheroffinterview.htm.
Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Twitter: @jensenrobertw.

Turning Back the TPP Internet Threat

This Won't Last

by OpenMedia.ca

You won't believe this. We just found out that anti-Internet lobbyists are hosting happy hour parties in Washington to increase their influence over key TPP decision makers.[1] They're sipping cocktails and literally making their careers out of criminalizing our day-to-day Internet use.

But we have a unique opportunity to push back if we act fast...

A generous supporter has just announced that they'll provide matching funds for contributions made in the next 48 hours toward our special campaign ad. We need you to chip in right now so we can unlock time-limited matching funds and stand strong against this global threat to the open Internet.

The TPP as it stands will radically change the rules around copyright online, censoring popular web services and giving Big Media a scary amount of power to control and even turn off your Internet with no due process.

We need your support now to stop this threat. Indie ISP Acanac will provide matching funds, but only if you contribute now – just $15 today can help put your ad in front of their faces.

We need to amplify our voices in Washington by publishing a large, impactful ad telling TPP negotiators like Michael Froman, politicians, and industry lobbyists that we won't back down when it comes to a fair deal for the Internet and our future.

Let's make it known to TPP decision-makers that they're accountable to the Internet.

If you pitch in $15 now, we can put $30 towards this attention-grabbing ad in a key Washington publication. Please take this last chance to join us now before this opportunity ends. [ http://openmedia.org/donate?utm_source=130527blast&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fundraising ]

Thank you so much for your attention and support,

Steve, on behalf of your OpenMedia team

P.S. It's not often that an ISP like Acanac makes this kind of matching offer. Seize this chance to double your impact and contribute today to fight for a fair deal. [ http://openmedia.org/donate?utm_source=130527blast&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fundraising ]

Footnotes

[1] Source: WITA [ http://www.wita.org/en/cev/1547 ]

Sloth's Price Exacted Still in Iraq

From Iraq, a tragic reminder to prosecute the war criminals

by John Pilger

The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr Teaching Hospital in Basra, Dr. Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. "Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."


Along the corridor, Dr. Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuroplastoma. "Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same."

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf War battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warhog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare."

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer programme of the World Health organisation (WHO) in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq Sanctions Committee]." He told me, "We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics."

Recently, Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers."

Today, a WHO report, the result on a landmark study conducted jointly with the Iraqi Ministry of Health has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains "damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains "top secret". The report says that birth defects have risen to a "crisis" right across Iraqi society where DU and other toxic heavy metals were by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire families.

Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess".

The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.

Their "mess" is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost both parents. "This means a horrific 14 per cent of Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

In her book 'Dispatches from the Dark Side', Gareth Peirce, Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, "human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently... in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.'" The very concept of war was mutated to "our values versus theirs". And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiques reveal no dissent".

For Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantanamo was "the best way to meet our counter terrorism objective". These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution.

But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?


 Follow John Pilger on twitter @pilgerwebsite - johnpilger.com

Syria's Latest Irrefutable "Offer"

US Makes Syria an ‘Offer it Can’t Refuse’ – again

by Finian Cunningham - Strategic Culture Foundation

"SCF" - In Mafia terms, it’s called “making an offer that can’t be refused”. The “offer” is not one of free choice between options that may benefit the object party. In reality, it is about setting up a scenario of duress, under which the object party is coerced to capitulate to detrimental terms of extreme prejudice determined cynically by the other party.

This is the scenario that Washington and its NATO allies are contriving for the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad…

The so-called international peace conference that may take place in the coming weeks, at the behest of Washington and Moscow, is ostensibly aimed at finding a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria that is now in its third year and which has resulted in up to 80,000 deaths. At least half of these deaths are believed to be civilian.

Russian officials have confirmed that the Syrian government is willing to participate, in principle, in the conference with factions of the Syrian “opposition” – provided, says Damascus, that the latter participants do not have “blood on their hands”.

That criterion may yet turn out to make the forthcoming conference a non-runner since the main opposition group – the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition (SNC) – is entwined with a host of mercenary forces on the ground that are drenched in blood from a relentless campaign of terrorism and sabotage.

However, it is not even clear if the fractious and mainly exile-based SNC has any authority over the motley crew of militant groups – more than 75 per cent of whom are foreign self-styled jihadi extremists that emanate from 30 or more Arab and other countries, according to United Nations reports.

Chief among these groups that comprise the so-called Free Syrian Army is the Al Nusra Front, the main fighting force, which is aligned with the Al Qaeda-affiliated network that stretches from Russia’s Caucus region, through Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya, Mali and Niger.

It has to be said that Russia’s intentions for a negotiated peace settlement seem to be honourable – and based on the principle of arriving at some kind of internal Syrian consensus. To that end, Russia maintains the position of not setting preconditions about the political fate of the incumbent President Assad. Russia is supported in this view by Iran and China. It is not, they say, for foreign governments or their regional allies and proxies to determine the outcome of the conference and in particular the political future of Assad.

Contrast that with the position of the other broker – Washington. At a preliminary meeting in Jordan this past week, the US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted, along with NATO allies, Britain, France, Italy and Germany, as well as the Persian Gulf Arab sheikhdoms, that Assad “must go”.

Kerry told the assembled “Friends of Syria” that the US was not dictating the outcome of the planned peace conference, but then contradicted himself flatly by repeating the assertion that President Assad would not be part of any Syrian political transition.

“Can a person who has used artillery shells and missiles and Scuds and tanks against women and children and university students – can that person possibly be judged by any reasonable person to have the credibility and legitimacy to lead that country in the future?” asked Kerry.

The veracity of these allegations against the Assad regime is more than a moot point. There is substantial evidence that the violations Kerry was attributing to Syrian government forces, such as the rocket attack on Aleppo University in January that resulted in more than 80 deaths, were in fact committed by Western-backed militants. The use of chemical weapons near Aleppo in March has also been shown recently by Russian RTR journalists to be the work of Western-backed militants, not the regime, as Western governments have been insinuating.

But that aside, the immediate point here is that Kerry and his “Enemies of Syria” coalition are very much trying to dictate terms on the anticipated political process. That same Western intransigence was largely why the Geneva accord reached last June by the UN Security Council came unstuck – and tens of thousands more Syrian deaths followed.

Adding to the warped framework of negotiations, the US, Britain and France are also insisting – in contrast to Russia and China – that Iran should not be permitted to take part in the process. Of course, the NATO powers can rely on their Sunni allies among the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to endorse that stipulation. Why the Western powers and their Arab dictator friends have any more right than Iran – an ally of Syria with vital interests at stake in the conflict – is beyond their permitted rationale or discussion.

So, the upshot is that Assad is being offered a poisoned political chalice. On one hand, he is being told to forfeit the sovereign rights of his people to have him as their leader, and by all accounts a leader with a popular mandate, to give way to a negotiation with “opposition” parties who are solely designated, funded and patronised by foreign powers.

The SNC’s Ghassan Hitto, a Texas-based Syrian businessman, is designated by Washington, London and the former colonial power Paris as Syria’s premier-in-waiting. It is fair to say that Hitto, as with many other American-accented members of the SNC, has negligible popular support within Syria. That is, without any mandate from the Syrian population, these exiles are being foisted to negotiate the political future of Syria – a future that is extremely prejudicial in favour of Western geopolitical interests.

On the other hand – and this is where the Mafia analogy takes hold – the Western powers are making thinly veiled threats that if Assad does not conform to the warped political framework, that is, drink from the poisoned chalice, then all hell will break lose on this country with an even greater escalation of Western-backed violence.

“The United States is lobbying European governments to back a British-led call to amend [lift] the EU arms embargo on Syria,” reported the British Guardian this week, as Washington and its friend were gathering in Jordan.

Up to now, Washington has at least been maintaining the fiction that it is not arming the anti-Assad militants. It has, of course, been plying the mercenaries covertly with weaponry and logistics, along with its NATO allies and the Gulf Arab dictatorships.

Militant commander Brigadier General Salim Idriss has been pleading for Washington to begin openly supplying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles – not just the assault rifles and explosives that have come so far through the clandestine CIA/MI6 conduits of Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Since last month, Washington officials have begun briefing media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, that the Obama administration is moving towards more direct military intervention in aid of the militants in Syria. “We’re clearly on an upward trajectory,” a senior US official said somewhat cryptically on 30 April. “We’ve moved over to assistance that has a direct military purpose.”

Days later, in the first week of May, US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel hosted a press conference at the Pentagon with his British counterpart, Philip Hammond. “Arming the rebels, that’s an option,” said Hagel, indicating an apparent reversal of White House policy of ostensibly only sending “non-lethal aid”.

And this week a US Senate committee voted in favour of Washington arming the “rebels” in Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry is adding to this increasingly articulated threat. Voice of America reported from the Jordanian meeting last week: “Kerry says the Obama administration hopes President Assad ‘will understand the meaning of that’ [shift in US military policy towards Syria].”

This latent threat of greater aggression against Syria by the US, if it does not toe the political line as ordained by Washington, is not a new tactic in America’s underlying objective of regime change.

Last month, the Iranian FARS news agency reported that Syrian envoy to Iran, Adnan Mahmoud, disclosed that as far back as March 2011 – when the conflict was kicking off in Syria – that the then US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, had starkly told the Damascus government that it faced “a choice”.

The Syrian envoy to Iran was quoted by FARS as saying: “Of course, in the very first weeks of the conflict in Syria, the US Secretary of Defence [Robert Gates] sent a message to the Syrian government, and said we should have cut our ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran if we wanted to stop the war, and stressed that if we did so, they [the US] would provide us with whatever we want”. In other words, Washington was making Syria back then “an offer it couldn’t refuse”. Well, Syria did refuse back in early 2011 to comply with US demands to cut its strategic ties with Iran, and as time has shown Damascus has since paid a heavy price in terms of human lives and the destruction of the country.

Now again, as the American-backed “peace conference” is being dangled in front of Damascus, Washington is replaying that same cynical offer. Either, drink from this poisoned political chalice – or “we’ll send the boys around to do their worst”.

  Strategic Culture Foundation

Foxes in the Coop: Banksters Write Their Own "Reform" Bill

Bankster Lobbyists Writing Regulatory 'Reform' Legislation

by Tom Burghardt - Antifascist Calling…

Nearly six years since massive financial fraud and speculative market manipulation drove the global capitalist economy off the rails, congressional grifters in both benighted political parties have turned over the legislative process to bankster lobbyists.

Talk about technocratic efficiency!

Last week, The New York Times revealed that "Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves."

According to emails leaked to the Times, a bill that "sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month--over the objections of the Treasury Department--was essentially Citigroup's."

Despite huge losses during the capitalist economic meltdown, which included heavy exposure to toxic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) which cost shareholders some 85 percent of asset value by early 2009, by 2012 the bank had built up an enormous cash horde to the tune of $420 billion (£277.7bn), derived from selling some $500 billion (£330.6bn) of "special assets" placed in Citi holdings that were guaranteed from losses by the US Treasury Department; this included untaxed overseas profits of some $35.9 billion (£23.74bn) according to Bloomberg.

As I reported last month, Citigroup was handed some $45 billion (£29.78bn) in TARP funds while the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve secretly backstopped more than $300 billion (£197.31bn) in toxic assets on their books. In addition to receiving "$2.5 trillion [£1.64tn] of support from the American taxpayer through capital infusions, asset guarantees and low-cost loans," as Wall Street on Parade analyst Pam Martens pointed out, like other too-big-to-jail banks such as Wachovia and HSBC, the Citi brand has long been associated with washing dirty cash for drug cartels.

Hit with a toothless Consent Order by the Federal Reserve in March over "deficiencies in the Banks' BSA/AML [Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering] compliance programs," federal regulators charged that Citigroup and their affiliate Banamex "lacked effective systems of governance and internal controls to adequately oversee the activities of the Banks with respect to legal, compliance, and reputational risk related to the Banks' respective BSA/AML compliance programs."

The Federal Reserve "action" followed an anemic Consent Order last year by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) which also cited Citi's failure to "adopt and implement a compliance program that adequately covers the required BSA/AML program elements due to an inadequate system of internal controls." Additionally, the OCC charged that the "Bank did not develop adequate due diligence on foreign correspondent bank customers and failed to file Suspicious Activity Reports ('SARs') related to its remote deposit capture/international cash letter instrument activity in a timely manner."

Nevertheless, as with other criminogenic banks such as JPMorgan Chase, similarly hit with an equally toothless Consent Order by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in January, in their infinite wisdom the Federal Reserve averred that their Citigroup action was issued "without this Order constituting an admission or denial by Citigroup of any allegation made or implied by the Board of Governors in connection with this matter, and solely for the purpose of settling this matter without a formal proceeding being filed and without the necessity for protracted or extended hearings or testimony."

In other words, let's sweep this under the rug as quickly as possible and move on. But before we do, let's step back for a moment and wrap our heads around a few salient facts.

Here's a bank with a documented history as the GAO revealed in 1998, of laundering drug money for well-placed Juárez and Gulf Cartel crony Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas, charged with amassing a multimillion dollar fortune from narcotics rackets and then squirreling it away in London, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

Does this evoke any memories?

According to GAO investigators, "Mr. Salinas was able to transfer $90 million to $100 million between 1992 and 1994 by using a private banking relationship formed by Citibank New York in 1992. The funds were transferred through Citibank Mexico and Citibank New York to private banking investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland."

Beginning in 1992, Citibank "assisted Mr. Salinas with these transfers and effectively disguised the funds' source and destination, thus breaking the funds' paper trail." And they did so by creating "an offshore private investment company named Trocca, to hold Mr. Salinas's assets, through Cititrust (Cayman) and investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland," and then failed to "prepare a financial profile on him or request a waiver for the profile, as required by then Citibank know your customer policy."

Keep in mind that when Swiss prosecutors completed their money laundering investigation, The New York Times disclosed that "Swiss police investigators have concluded that a brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari played a central role in Mexico's cocaine trade, raking in huge bribes to protect the flow of drugs into the United States."

That Swiss report stated, "When Carlos Salinas de Gortari became President of Mexico in 1988, Raúl Salinas de Gortari assumed control over practically all drug shipments through Mexico. Through his influence and bribes paid with drug money, officials of the army and the police supported and protected the flourishing drug business."

Does the name of former Banamex CEO Roberto Hernández ring any bells?

Described as "the single biggest winner" of Mexican bank privatizations engineered by the Bush and Clinton regimes during the 1990s as Narco News disclosed, a subsequent investigation revealed that "Hernández had been accused--publicly and via a criminal complaint--by the daily newspaper Por Esto! of trafficking tons of Colombian cocaine through his Caribbean costa properties on that peninsula since 1997."

And when Citigroup acquired Banamex in 2001 for the then-princely sum of $12.5 billion (£8.27bn), it was described as the largest US-Mexican corporate merger in history. Should it surprise us that this Citi subsidiary was named alongside parent Citigroup by the OCC and Federal Reserve for repeated failures to adequately police dirty money flowing into their coffers?

Members of the House Financial Services Committee should examine why they would turn over the legislative process to a criminal financial cartel!

As Times' journalists Eric Lipton and Ben Protess reported, "Citigroup's recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee's 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)"

Proving yet again, that Washington lawmakers are beholden to their Wall Street masters, MapLight, a nonpartisan research group that "reveals money's influence on politics in the US Congress," disclosed that legislators "serving" on the House Financial Services Committee "approved six bills that would roll back pieces of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to improve regulation of the derivatives market."

Lawmakers who voted "yes" on HR 992, the Orwellian-named Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act, "received, on average, 2.6 times more money from top banks than committee members" who voted "no." MapLight further disclosed that lawmakers who voted "yes" on this pernicious piece of legislative detritus "received, on average, 3 times more money from the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) sector," than committee members who voted "no."

The $700 trillion derivatives market, 93.2 percent of which is controlled by the four largest too-big-to-fail-and-jail US banks, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, is a cash cow and shadow market for crooked financial insiders. HR 992, which rolled-back a key provision of 2010's anemic Dodd-Frank financial "reform" legislation, Sec. 716, would have required banks to spin off their derivatives activities into separate units that would not have access to federal bank subsidies, i.e., taxpayer bailouts.

"In recent weeks, the Times reported, "Wall Street groups also held fund-raisers for lawmakers who co-sponsored the bills. At one dinner Wednesday night, corporate executives and lobbyists paid up to $2,500 to dine in a private room of a Greek restaurant just blocks from the Capitol with Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a co-sponsor of the bill championed by Citigroup."

Responding to questions, Financial Services Committee member Jim Himes, a former Goldman Sachs banker, third-term Connecticut Democrat and one of the top recipients of Wall Street largess to the tune of $194,500 according to OpenSecrets told the Times: 

 

"It's appalling, it's disgusting, it's wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It's unfortunately the world we live in."

No Mr. Himes, it's the world you live in.

While your colleague across the aisle, Stephen Fincher (R-TN), cites Bible verses to justify gutting federal nutritional assistance to 47 million hungry Americans while being the "the second largest recipient of farm subsidies in the United States Congress" according to Forbes, and received some $3.48 million (£2.3m) since 1999 in USDA farm subsidies while doing the "Lord's work" according to the Environmental Working Group, the US Congress, including "liberal" Obama Democrats have promoted every filthy piece of legislation that facilitates Wall Street's plundering of the American people.

Referencing the recent vote on HR 992, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that in the first quarter of 2013, members of the Financial Services Committee "received more than $1.3 million in donations to their campaigns and leadership PACs from the securities and investment industry and commercial banks."

According to OpenSecrets, "By far the largest source of cash from the two industries was the Investment Company Institute, a trade association representing Wall Street firms. The ICI gave at least $129,000 to members of the House Financial Services Committee. Other trade groups representing banks and investment firms, including the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America, were also major contributors."

OpenSecrets reported that "Banking industry companies increased their contributions in 2013 to $640,286, from $497,169 in early 2011. Citigroup, in particular, jumped from $19,500 in donations to committee members to $39,500. UBS went from $64,250 to $88,000. Wells Fargo also opened its checkbook a little wider this year, giving $80,000, compared with $31,250 in 2011."

Commenting on this latest gift to Wall Street criminals, the World Socialist Web Site observed: "Flush with the $85 billion in cash printed up and handed to the banks every month by the Federal Reserve, business at the Wall Street casino is booming. Stock values are at record levels and so are bank profits, amidst declining wages and mass poverty."

"Under these conditions," Marxist critic Andre Damon averred, "the banks have been pushing to rip up even the very modest restrictions on financial speculation, while broadening the scope of government bailout laws. The aim is simple: to give banks the maximum ability to speculate without constraint, while getting the maximum possible government assistance if and when the bubble collapses."

None of this should surprise anyone who has paid the least attention to the cronyism and financial parasitism of the Obama regime.

From get-out-of-jail-free-cards passed out to drug money laundering banks by Eric Holder's Justice Department, to the appointments of Citigroup alumnus and Cayman Islands tax-dodger Jacob Lew as Treasury Secretary, Debevoise & Plimpton partner Mary Jo White over at the Securities and Exchange Commission to the nomination of billionaire Hyatt Hotel heiress, subprime mortgage "pioneer" and union-buster Penny Pritzker to lead the Commerce Department, it's a bankster world, all the time.

How's that for Hope and Change™!

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Baiting Mothers: Mr. Bateman, Please Consider

Robert Bateman, HOW COULD YOU? 

by Betty Krawczyk - Betty's Early Edition

As if women didn’t bear enough blame for just about everything that goes wrong in this world, now Robert Bateman, that esteemed nature artist, has wagged his finger at mothers in severe reproach. It is primarily mothers who are to blame for their children’s ignorance of nature, he says.

A CBC News report posted 5/24/ 2013 Robert Bateman as quoted:

"The mothers think, 'Well if the kid is busy with a screen, he’s safe, he’s not going to fall out of a tree, he’s not going to be abducted.' Yes, but have you ever head of internet predators? Have you ever heard of internet pornography? it’s not dangerous to go outside"

First, Mr. Bateman, not all kids are boys.

I personally get tired of men who seem to think only of little boys when they speak of children.

And yes, Mr. Bateman, mothers have heard about internet predators. And yes, mothers have also heard about internet pornography. And mothers have heard about bullying at school, cut backs in children’s services, the rise in mental illness of children, the overuse of Ritalin, the startling early puberty of girls, the rise in boys with undescended testicles at birth, the children suffering right here in this province from malnourishment, the children dying in other countries not only from hunger, but from disease and war, the staggering rise in birth defects in countries like Iraq caused by the depleted uranium left behind from US weapons…we have heard it all, Mr. Bateman. And we don’t need any lectures from you who have quietly practiced your art in public forests that have been decimated by private logging companies that don’t give a dam about nature, and have been and still are, in the process of poisoning the public land and waters they leave behind for the rest of us.

Just for starters, Mr. Bateman, consider the tons of Round Up and Vision (courtesy of Monsanto) that have been sprayed or injected into BC public forests after clear cutting (to keep unwanted species from crowding out new tree seedlings). Round Up and Vision contain glyphosate which, according to French-trained Pediatrician, Josette Wier as she brought this charge recently to court supported by West Coast Environmental Law, also contains an ingredient known as POEA that is toxic to amphibians and perhaps to humans and human embryos.

Perhaps?

Glyphosate is now being linked to all manners of human ills, including being a hormone disruptor which can cause birth defects, Attention deficient disorder, breast milk contamination, and the drop in male sperm count. And our beautiful outdoors?

The logging companies and governments of BC have sprayed and injected tons of Round Up and Vision (Monsanto’s darlings) all over Vancouver Island. And are still doing it. Glyphosate stays in the ground, it doesn’t dissipate. BC rains ( and we are a rain forest) wash newly sprayed river and creek banks and the glyphosate runs into the creeks and rivers and into main water supplies. Robert Bateman, it is not mothers causing all this environmental mayhem and putting children at risk.

Mothers do the very best they can under the burden of trying to keep kids safe while working both in and out of the home and at the same time try to protect their kids from traffic crazies, sex crazies and power crazies who are killing the earth itself, and of whom the overwhelming majority are male.

What about this suggestion, Mr. Bateman?

What about fathers talking their kids into the woods (avoid newly sprayed or replanted areas, don’t drink the water, and don’t let the little ones play in the dirt or long grass or slide down creek inclines) instead of to a hockey game. Wouldn’t that be good?

DC March Against Monsanto

Protest in DC Denounces "Monsanto Protection Act" 

by TRNN

One thousand rally as part of global protest against Monsanto's political power and its role in spreading GMO throughout the world's food supply.

 

CROWD: Hey, hey! Ho, ho! GMO has got to go!

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Laray Polk, Robert Parry, Janine Bandcroft May 27, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Pacific Free Press

Those listening who remember the release of Duran Duran's 'Rio' video may too recall; more than MTV, life in the nineteen eighties also meant living under the shadow of nuclear destruction. MAD Ronnie Ray Gun ruled America and, aided by sinister side-kick, George Bush seemed poised to take the world down a dark path towards the conflagration of an inevitable nuclear Armageddon.

As doomsday's children, many a night we tossed restless, only to rise the day after to find our nightmares of atomic hellfire were not imagined but the realpolitik of our times. It's an age we who lived through firsthand would have relegated to the dust bin of history, but sadly the insanity didn't end with the fall of the Soviet empire, nor with the welcome demise of the demigod figure heads of the Free World. Today, none of us can afford the comfortable illusion humanity, having dodged the bullet of imminent destruction in the last century, is now out of the woods.     

Listen. Hear.

Laray Polk is a journalist, multimedia artist, and author whose articles have appeared in her adopted home town paper, The Dallas Morning News, and online at Common Dreams, CounterPunch, D Magzine, In These Times, Znet and Pacific Free Press, among others. Laray was also a recipient of a grant from The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund which she used to expose the threat posed to the Ogallala Aquifer by Texas radioactive waste disposal site. Laray Polk's latest project is the book, 'Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe.' Co-authored with Noam Chomsky, it's a series of interviews conducted with the famed American academic dissident, intended as a warning and reminder that, "talking about the unspeakable can still be done with humor, with wit and indomitable spirit."

Laray Polk in the first half.

And; while the Reagan/Bush tag team terrorized me and the rest of the world with the promise of instant nuclear annihilation back in the eighties, they and their allies were fulfilling that promise in a more prosaic way throughout Latin America. Guatemala recently made the news in North America with the singular story of former dictator and dedicated US ally and commie hunter Efrain Rios Montt's conviction for crimes against humanity committed against the mainly indigenous people of his country. It was an incredible, undreamed of halcyon moment of justice prevailing for we grey beards still remembering the terror brought down against the Maya people in pursuit of American corporate interests in that place then. But, it seems now to be a victory too good to believe.  

Robert Parry is an investigative reporter, author, editor, and co-founder of Consortium News.com, the Internet's first news magazine website. Parry broke many stories from Latin America during the dirty war years for Newsweek and the Associated Press, and followed those with revelations of the Iran-Contra scandal that contributed greatly to George H.W. Bush's single term presidency. His book titles include: 'Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq,' 'Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush,' and his latest 'America's Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison, to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, to Barack Obama'.

Robert Parry remembering Guatemala and more in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good to do in and around our city and beyond in the coming week. But first, Laray Polk and waking from nuclear nightmares and other environmental catastrophes.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

A Second Hand in the Guatemalan Genocide

Israel’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

Exclusive: The Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s does not just implicate President Ronald Reagan and his senior aides but the Israeli government which secretly supplied helicopters, guns and computers that were used to hunt down and exterminate Ixil Indians and other perceived enemies of the state, reports Robert Parry.

At the height of Guatemala’s mass slaughters in the 1980s, including genocide against the Ixil Indians, the Reagan administration worked with Israeli officials to provide helicopters that the Guatemalan army used to hunt down fleeing villagers, according to documentary and eyewitness evidence.

During testimony at the recent genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, one surprise was how often massacre survivors cited the Army’s use of helicopters in the scorched-earth offensives.

Journalist Allan Nairn, who covered the war in Guatemala and attended the Rios Montt trial, said in an interview, “one interesting thing that came out in the trial, as witness after witness testified, was a very substantial number of them talked about fleeing into the mountains and being bombed, attacked and machine gunned from U.S. planes and helicopters.

“At the time this was going on, I was aware this was happening in some cases, but from the testimony of the witnesses, it sounded like these attacks from U.S. planes and helicopters were more frequent than we realized at the time. That’s an example of how we don’t know the whole story yet – how extensive the U.S. complicity was in these crimes.”

Part of the mystery was where did Guatemala’s UH-1H “Huey” helicopters come from, since the U.S. Congress continued to resist military sales to Guatemala because of its wretched human rights record. The answer appears to be that some helicopters were arranged secretly by President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff through Israeli intelligence networks.

Rios Montt began pressing the United States for 10 UH-1H helicopters in June 1983, as his military campaign was ramping up. Since Guatemala lacked the U.S. Foreign Military Sales credits or the cash to buy the helicopters, Reagan’s national security team looked for unconventional ways to arrange the delivery of the equipment.

On Aug. 1, 1983, NSC aides Oliver North and Alfonso Sapia-Bosch reported to National Security Advisor William P. Clark that his deputy Robert “Bud” McFarlane was planning to exploit his Israeli channels to secure the helicopters for Guatemala, according to a document that I discovered at Reagan’s presidential library.

“With regard to the loan of ten helicopters, it is [our] understanding that Bud will take this up with the Israelis,” wrote North and Sapia-Bosch. “There are expectations that they would be forthcoming. Another possibility is to have an exercise with the Guatemalans. We would then use US mechanics and Guatemalan parts to bring their helicopters up to snuff.”

By then, McFarlane had a long and intimate relationship with Israeli intelligence involving various backdoor deals. [For more on McFarlane's Israeli channels, see Consortiumnews.com's "How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast."]

Israeli Channel

McFarlane’s approach to Israel for the helicopters was successful, according to former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, who described some of the history behind Israel’s activities in Guatemala in his 1992 memoir, Profits of War.

Ben-Menashe traced the Israeli arms sales to Guatemala back to a private network established in the 1970s by Gen. Ariel Sharon during a gap when he was out of the government. Sharon’s key representative in Guatemala was a businessman named Pesach Ben-Or, and through that channel, Israel supplied military gear to Guatemala’s security services in the 1980s, Ben-Menashe wrote.

In an interview on Thursday, Ben-Menashe said the Israelis supplied a total of six helicopters to the Guatemalans along with computers and software to keep track of alleged subversives who could then be identified and executed. Ben-Menashe said he learned of the mass slaughters during his travels to Guatemala and reported back to his Israeli superiors about the atrocities involving the equipment that they had authorized. The response, he said, was concern but inaction.

“They weren’t for killing these people, not at all,” Ben-Menashe said. “But they thought their interest was to help the Reagan people. If the Reagan people wanted it [the equipment sent to Guatemala], they would do it. [They thought,] ‘this is bad, but is it any of our business? Our American friends are asking for our help, so we should help them.’”

After our phone interview had ended, Ben-Menashe called me back to stress that the Israelis were unaware of the genocidal nature of the Guatemalan military campaigns against the Ixil Indians, although the Israelis did recognize that they were assisting in mass murders of dark-skinned Guatemalans.

“As we saw it, they [Guatemalan military authorities] were targeting all non-white villagers who were sitting on fertile lands that the white Guatemalans wanted,” he said, adding that when he reported this information to his superiors, “the Israelis rolled their eyes [in dismay] but said, ‘this is what our friends in the Reagan administration want.’” [For more on Ben-Menashe's work for Israeli intelligence, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege and America's Stolen Narrative.]

Besides the helicopters for hunting down villagers who fled into the jungles, the computer equipment and the sophisticated software made the Guatemalan killing machine vastly more efficient in the towns and cities. A former U.S. Green Beret operating in Guatemala once told me that he witnessed Guatemalan security forces stopping buses and inputting identification numbers of the passengers into a computer to select those who would be dragged off to the side of the road and summarily shot.

Death Lists
From first-hand reporting in Guatemala, journalist Nairn also observed the security advantages gained from detailed death lists. Nairn said soldiers under Gen. Otto Perez Molina, the current president, “described how they would go into town armed with death lists provided them by G2 military intelligence, death lists of people who were suspected of being collaborators of the guerrillas or critics of the army.

“They told how they would strangle people with lassos, slit women open with machetes, shoot people in the head in front of the neighbors, use U.S. planes, helicopters and 50 gram bombs to attack people if they fled into the hills.”

Nairn said, “The U.S. had also arranged for Israel to step in and become the principal supplier of hardware to the Guatemalan army, in particular assault rifles, the Galil automatic rifle. This was because the administration was running into problems with Congress, which wouldn’t go along with a lot of their plans to aid the Guatemalan military, so they did an end run by using the government of Israel.”

Though the focus of the case against Rios Montt has been the genocide inflicted on Ixil villages in the northern highlands – where some 626 villages were eradicated by the Guatemalan military – those massacres were only part of the estimated 200,000 killings perpetrated by right-wing Guatemalan regimes since a CIA-sponsored coup ousted an elected government in 1954.

The bloodbath was at its worst in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as he encouraged the anti-leftist slaughters that claimed the lives of some 100,000 Guatemalans. Reagan expanded his support for the Guatemalan security forces even though the CIA was keeping his administration informed of the systematic killings underway.

Another document that I discovered in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to Guatemala’s dictators so they could pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but people associated with their “civilian support mechanisms.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide.”]

As for Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala for 17 especially bloody months in 1982-83, the 86-year-old ex-general was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by a criminal court on May 10 and was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

But that conviction was overturned on Monday on a 3-2 vote by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court which is still dominated by allies of the military and the oligarchy. As for the Reagan administration officials and the Israelis who aided and abetted Rios Montt and his fellow generals, there is no indication that any accountability will be exacted.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

M25 March Against Monsanto: Stopping the Most Evil Entity in the World

March Against Monsanto: How The March Against Monsanto Can (and will) Change The World

by Nick Bernabe - TheAnti-Media.org

The March Against Monsanto was started by a handful of millenials with a passion for change, a passion that we all have within us. Many people make the mistake of looking for someone to make change for them when the real change in this world comes from within.

The top-down approach for making the world a better place, i.e. electing politicians to do our bidding has come and gone, with little success.

There's a revolution happening right before our eyes, and before I had the opportunity to help with the world-wide March Against Monsanto, I was largely oblivious to this sea change that is coming.

The rules of change, of activism, of consciousness, and of helping people are being rewritten by you and me, one connection at a time. The new revolution of good is coming from the grass-roots and making its way upward; this bottom-up effect is exactly what those who would like to see us silent are afraid of.

This new way of media and activism cannot be controlled by the likes of corporations or governments; these are ideas and they cannot be stopped. This new paradigm shift starts with you, your friends and family, and the way you can connect with people around you; the way information is disseminated makes all the difference in this new paradigm.

The mainstream media controls 95% of the information that we see, from television to newspapers, to magazines. This is the top-down technique, where you have no choice but to consume what's being served, making for a fickle population that was manipulated by commercials and where money made the major difference between a bill passing or failing, and a politician being elected or losing. The new media is a media of choice, where people can choose to get information on a topic that they choose.

What does this mean? 

This means that a person that participates in the new media is more passionate, better informed, in turn a much more valuable asset to a social movement. These people are well versed in the information, founded in fact, and immune to the manipulation of a mainstream media establishment that is 90% owned by 6 monopolistic corporations. These new activists are warriors for truth and justice, and for those currently controlling the agenda, this can be a scary situation.

You see, the government and corporations are ingrained into the establishment; they're comfortable in their positions. This will be their downfall. History and science have shown that the comfortable devolve and the oppressed evolve; struggle is the essence of innovation and of change. This is why good always prevails over bad.

The March Against Monsanto has grown beyond my wildest dreams; a few months ago it was just an idea. It has grown into a full blown movement and the people that started it wouldn't be able to stop if they wanted. You see, the people have taken over the March, the decentralization has come in a natural way, an intuitive way. Movements can no longer be over-centralized, as over-centralization is detrimental to any organization, institution, business and government.

The new paradigm which is forming will be driven by people who care, not people who care for power. The old idea of inorganic manipulation, which used to be the norm, has fallen to the side in favor of this new movement of information: this new Revolution. Information is spreading in grass-roots, open source fashion, all the old rules are being thrown out.

How the March Against Monsanto can and will change the world. The beginning of the Food Revolution.

The March does not and cannot end on May 25, 2013. For many of the participants in the March Against Monsanto, this is their first protest or march that they have ever taken part of. This movement has awakened a very large group of people that care about their food supply and care about other people’s food supply. These courageous marchers have put aside all of their political and ideological differences to stand in solidarity for what is right.

How do we carry on this March Against Monsanto, this new food revolution passed the 25th?

Capture the momentum of this movement and harness it at the local level. Keep your local march network alive and growing.

All of the connections that you are making in your local areas, all of the people you are meeting through the organizing, planning, and marching process must be kept active for this march to have a lasting effect. If we just march on the 25th and nothing more, then the movement ends right then and there.

Each event page for each local city is full of great contacts, activists, and people that care. Compile these lists, make email lists, start a newsletter, make a local Facebook page and keep the pressure on to continue this fight. Pass around signup sheets at your local marches to collect emails. Even if you don't have a plan of action for what to do with the emails you compile, put them into a spread sheet and save them until you figure it out.

I recommend that once your march is over on Saturday evening that you change the Date of your local Facebook event to 5/24/14; this will keep the event page up and will make it easier to access your local food revolutionaries. Use open source organizing techniques to lower the burden and to keep your local movement decentralized. Using an open platform will make it easier for your local community and activists to add information into your spread sheets, email lists, and other data rich documents. Monsanto is not going away without a fight: They've been around for over 100 years and deeply entrenched in the political establishment of both parties.

After the March, take real steps to improve your food fate locally. Remember that people on a low or fixed income don’t have a choice to eat organic with their given incomes.

It’s not enough to simply tell people to eat organic, or vote for initiatives that will label GMOs. The very first thing you can do is plant your own garden. If you have the space, plant a garden larger than what you need to feed your family and help someone that is less fortunate with some fresh homegrown food from your garden.

What if you don’t have a yard to plant in?

One option is growing indoors. There is a growing industry of indoor gardeners that are starting to change the way we think about gardening through the use of hydroponics . You should be able to find a local hydroponics store near you and get it all set up and growing food for a couple hundred dollars. There are also plenty of online retailers of indoor growing equipment; try Craigslist if you're on a tight budget. What if you don’t have a yard and growing indoors in not an option for you? At this point we need to look to our fellow local activists from the March Against Monsanto.

Community gardens are a great way to bring in a fresh and organic food source into an urban area. 

Find a plot of land that is vacant or belongs to the local city, find out who is on charge of it and get the ball rolling on starting a community garden. Enlist some people that you have met though the march to help you physically, technically, and financially. Look to the local community to crowd source labor and resources. If none of these are an option for you, there’s still hope for you within the food revolution.

Share cropping is a way of getting some space to grow a garden that you can secure for free or a very low cost. Many urban sharecroppers will offer free food from the garden to the land owner in exchange for offering them some space to grow a garden. Share cropping is just like a community garden on a smaller scale. If you live in an area where there are many small yards with space available, think about setting up a sharecropping co-op where food can be traded and shared for little or no money. Always remember that the low income community is at the highest risk of GMO and chemical exposure from their food. Look into new technologies and techniques when setting up your new gardens. Vertical gardeningis great way to maximize limited space a make your garden virtually maintenance free. There’s an ancient technique of hydroponics that is just being rediscovered and developed: aquaponics.






Aquaponics is arguably the most efficient way to grow organic vegetables…and edible fish at the same time. This technique has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years, but new attention is being brought to aquaponics because of its efficiency and ability to grow both edible fish and vegetation. A Wisconsin man was able to grow over one million pounds of food in one year by utilizing these new and innovative growing techniques.

Activism

There are many forms of activism that we can use to improve our food fate and continue the food revolution. The March Against Monsanto is a perfect example of a mass movement that disseminates information to millions of people, awakening the masses to the injustices of the world. Activism can be done on a much smaller scale and many different ways. As I detailed earlier, the networks are being rebuilt in a new, more just way. Utilize your new local network of activists to keep pressure on local politicians and hold them to their promises. Organize mass emailing and mass calling to their offices when a critical vote is about to be made. Let them hear your voice amplified by your entire network. Build relationships with other activists from other causes, reach out to other interests and help support them, and they will support you. Spreading awareness is key to the food revolution; many people don't know what GMOs are, let alone know the negative effects on their health and environment that they cause.

Mobilize your local activist network often and keep them engaged in the community; you are the leaders of this movement! It's up to you to let your neighbors know what's in their food and how they can make real world progress to take their food back. These techniques can also be replicated on the national and global level, which is why it's important for you to stay connected to the national MAM campaign. We can find and spot things like the Monsanto Protection Act before they are passed into law and put out a call to action to all the local networks to help us get them stopped.

Support alternative media

Remember seeing the warnings about the dangers of the 'Monsanto Protection Act' on MSNBC and FOX News before it became a law? Me neither. That's because there was no warning from the mainstream media; in fact very few have even covered it to this day. We did find out about this bill when it was only a proposal from multiple reports by independent journalists, including SpreadLibertyNews on 12/17/12.

The pattern that we see from the mainstream is a dangerous one. As I noted earlier, over 90% of the media is owned by 6 companies, and just like Monsanto, these companies have also slipped into bed with the government.

Comedians have become the only mainstream media sources that are willing to challenge the establishment's political and economic might. Yet pundits like Jon Stewart who have been shown in polls to be more trusted for news than some major news outlets, only bring light to these harmful pieces of legislation after they are already passed into law. This is why supporting and finding alternative news sources is so important: Do you want to find out about harmful legislation before it's passed while we still have time to mobilize and try to stop them, or do you want to find out about it on TV when it's too late? Find and support independent journalists on sites like TheAnti-Media.org that aggregate news from many diverse sources, find the ones you like and subscribe to their posts.

The mainstream media has major interests in other industries, including military adventurism and yes you guessed it, GMOs. In a court ruling in 2003, it was determined that news companies can legally lie to their viewers and readers. The case was brought about when two FOX News journalists tried to publish a report about the negative health effects of Monsanto's bovine growth hormone (BGH) and were subsequently fired when they refused to censor their story to fit FOX's agenda.

Supporting alternative media is key in decentralizing our supply of unbiased information and getting news from sources that do not have billion-dollar agendas, finding like-minded activists, and keeping the pressure on politicians who seek to only enrich themselves and their corporate lackeys.

Note: I hosted a special radio show on 5/22/13, on The Anti-Media Radio where we went into more depth on all of these fundamental building blocks of the Food Revolution which included a panel of experts from each field I listed in this article. Please listen here here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxS7QJbmCY&feature=youtu.be