Armed and Dangerous: Watching the Watchers

Police are More Dangerous to the Public Than Criminals

by Paul Craig Roberts - CounterPunch

The worse threat every American faces comes from his/her own government.

At the federal level the threat is a seventh war (Syria) in 12 years, leading on to the eighth and ninth (Iran and Lebanon) and then on to nuclear war with Russia and China.

The criminal psychopaths in Washington have squandered trillions of dollars on their wars, killing and dispossessing millions of Muslims while millions of American citizens have been dispossessed of their homes and careers. Now the entire social safety net is on the chopping bloc so that Washington can finance more wars.

At the state and local level every American faces brutal, armed psychopaths known as the police. The “law and order” conservatives and the “compassionate” liberals stand silent while police psychopaths brutalize children and grandmothers, murder double amputees in wheel chairs, break into the wrong homes, murder the family dogs, and terrify the occupants, pointing their automatic assault weapons in the faces of small children.

The American police perform no positive function. They pose a much larger threat to citizens than do the criminals who operate without a police badge. Americans would be safer if the police forces were abolished.

The police have been militarized and largely federalized by the Pentagon and the gestapo Homeland Security. The role of the federal government in equipping state and local police with military weapons, including tanks, and training in their use has essentially removed the police from state and local control. No matter how brutal any police officer, it is rare that any suffer more than a few months suspension, usually with full pay, while a report is concocted that clears them of any wrong doing.

In America today, police murder with impunity. All the psychopaths have to say is, “I thought his wallet was a gun,” or “we had to taser the unconscious guy we found lying on the ground, because he wouldn’t obey our commands to get up.”

There are innumerable cases of 240 pound cop psychopaths beating a 115 pound woman black and blue. Or handcuffing and carting off to jail 6 and 7 year old boys for having a dispute on the school playground.

Many Americans take solace in their erroneous belief that this only happens to minorities who they believe deserve it, but psychopaths use their unaccountable power against everyone. The American police are a brutal criminal gang free of civilian control.

Unaccountable power, which the police have, always attracts psychopaths. You are lucky if you only get bullies, but mainly police forces attract people who enjoy hurting people and tyrannizing them. To inflict harm on the public is why psychopaths join police forces.

Calling the police is a risky thing to do. Often it is the person who calls for help or some innocent person who ends up brutalized or murdered by the police. For example, on September 15 CNN reported a case of a young man who wrecked his car and went to a nearby house for help. The woman, made paranoid by the “war on crime,” imagined that she was in danger and called police. When the police arrived, the young man ran up to them, and the police shot him dead.

People who say the solution is better police training are unaware of how the police are trained. Police are trained to perceive the public as the enemy and to use maximum force. I have watched local police forces train. Two or three dozen officers will simultaneously empty their high-capacity magazines at the same target, a minimum of 300 bullets fired at one target. The purpose is to completely destroy whatever is on the receiving end of police fire.

US prosecutors seem to be the equal to police in terms of the psychopaths in their ranks. The United States, “the light unto the world,” not only has the highest percentage of its population in prison of every other country in the world, but also has the largest absolute number of people in prison. The US prison population is much larger in absolute numbers that the prison populations of China and India, countries with four times the US population.

Just try to find a prosecutor who gives a hoot about the innocence or guilt of the accused who is in his clutches. All the prosecutor cares about is his conviction rate.

The higher his conviction rate, the greater his success even if every person convicted is innocent. The higher his conviction rate, the more likely he can run for public office.

Many prosecutors, such as Rudy Giuliani, target well known people so that they can gain name recognition via the names of their victims.

The American justice (sic) system serves the political ambitions of prosecutors and the murderous lusts of police psychopaths. It serves the profit motives of the privatized prisons who need high occupancy rates for their balance sheets.

But you can bet your life that the American justice (sic) system does not serve justice.

While writing this article, I googled “police brutality,” and google delivered 4,100,000 results. If a person googles “police brutality videos,” he will discover that there are more videos than could be watched in a lifetime. And these are only those acts of police brutality that are witnessed and caught on camera.

It would take thousands of pages just to compile the information available.

The facts seem to support the case that police in the US commit more crimes and acts of violence against the public than do the criminals who do not wear badges. According to the FBI crime statistics in 2010 there were 1,246,248 violent crimes committed by people without police badges. Keep in mind that the definition of violent crime can be an expansive definition. For example, simply to push someone is considered assault. If two people come to blows in an argument, both have committed assault. However, even with this expansive definition of violent crimes, police assaults are both more numerous and more dangerous, as it is usually a half dozen overweight goon thugs beating and tasering one person.

Reports of police brutality are commonplace, but hardly anything is ever done about them. For example, on September 10, AlterNet reported that Houston, Texas, police routinely beat and murder local citizens.

The threat posed to the public by police psychopaths is growing rapidly. Last July 19 the Wall Street Journal reported: “Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment–from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers–American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the US scene: the warrior cop–armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”

The Wall Street Journal, being an establishment newspaper, has to put it as nicely as possible. The bald fact is that today’s cop in body armor with assault weapons, grenades, and tanks is not there to make arrests of suspected criminals. He is there in anticipation of protests to beat down the public for exercising constitutional rights.

To suppress public protests is also the purpose of the Department of Homeland Security Police, a federal para-military police force that is a new development for the United States. No one in their right mind could possibly think that the vast militarized police have been created because of “the terrorist threat.” Terrorists are so rare that the FBI has to round up demented people and talk them into a plot so that the “terrorist threat” can be kept alive in the public’s mind.

The American public is too brainwashed to be able to defend itself. Consider the fact that cops seldom face any consequence when they murder citizens. We never hear cops called “citizen killer.” But if a citizen kills some overbearing cop bully, the media go ballistic: “Cop killer, cop killer.” The screaming doesn’t stop until the cop killer is executed.

As long as a brainwashed public continues to accept that cop lives are more precious than their own, citizens will continue to be brutalized and murdered by police psychopaths.

I can remember when the police were different. If there was a fight, the police broke it up. If it was a case of people coming to blows over a dispute, charges were not filed.

If it was a clear case of assault, unless it was brutal or done with use of a weapon, the police usually left it up to the victim to file charges.

When I lived in England, the police walked their beats armed only with their billysticks.

When and why did it all go wrong? Among the collection of probable causes are the growth or urban populations, the onslaught of heavy immigration on formerly stable and predictable neighborhoods, the war on drugs, and management consultants called in to improve efficiency who focused police on quantitative results, such as the number of arrests, and away from such traditional goals as keeping the peace and investigating reported crimes.

Each step of the way accountability was removed in order to more easily apprehend criminals and drug dealers. The “war on terror” was another step, resulting in the militarization of the police.

The replacement of jury trials with plea bargains meant that police investigations ceased to be tested in court or even to support the plea, usually a fictitious crime reached by negotiation in order to obtain a guilty plea. Police learned that all prosecutors needed was a charge and that little depended on police investigations. Police work became sloppy. It was easier simply to pick up a suspect who had a record of having committed a similar crime.

As justice receded as the goal, the quality of people drawn into police work changed. Idealistic people found that their motivations were not compatible with the process, while bullies and psychopaths were attracted by largely unaccountable power.

Much of the blame can be attributed to “law and order” conservatives. Years ago when New York liberals began to observe the growing high-handed behavior of police, they called for civilian police review boards. Conservatives, such as National Review’s William F. Buckley, went berserk, claiming that any oversight over the police would hamstring the police and cause crime to explode.

The conservatives could see no threat in the police, only in an effort to hold police accountable. As far as I can tell, this is still the mindset.

What we observed in the police response to the Boston Marathon bombing suggests that the situation is irretrievable. One of the country’s largest cities and its suburbs–100 square miles–was tightly locked down, while 10,000 heavily armed police, essentially combat soldiers armed with tanks, forced their way into people’s homes, ordering them out at gunpoint. The excuse given for this unprecedented gestapo police action was a search for one wounded 19-year old kid.

That such a completely unnecessary and unconstitutional event could occur in Boston without the responsible officials being removed from office indicates that “the land of the free” no longer exists. The American population of the past, suspicious of government and jealous of its liberty, has been replaced by a brainwashed and fearful people, who are increasingly referred to as “the sheeple.”

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format.

Sons and Daughters of the Security State: An Open Letter to the Next Whistleblower

Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower - How the Security State’s Mania for Secrecy Will Create You

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch

Dear Whistleblower,

I don’t know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee well along in years. You might be someone who entered government service filled with idealism or who signed on to “the bureaucracy” just to make a living. You may be a libertarian, a closet left-winger, or as mainstream and down-the-center as it’s possible to be.

I don’t know much, but I know one thing that you may not yet know yourself. I know that you’re there. I know that, just as Edward Snowden and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning did, you will, for reasons of your own, feel compelled to take radical action, to put yourself in danger. When the time comes, you will know that this is what you must do, that this is why you find yourself where you are, and then you’re going to tell us plenty that has been kept from us about how our government really operates. You are going to shock us to the core.

And how exactly do I know this? Because despite our striking inability to predict the future, it’s a no-brainer that the national security state is already building you into its labyrinthine systems. 

 

Tomgram: Engelhardt, How to Build a National Security Blowback Machine
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I wanted those of you who were kind enough to send in a donation for a signed, personalized copy of Andrew Bacevich's widely hailed new book, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, to know that it is now officially in the mail to you! He's been on a book tour, which has slowed the process. (Most recent appearance: the Colbert Report on Monday!) Anyone who still wants a signed book in return for a contribution of $100 (or more), the offer remains open. Just visit our donation page to check it out. Tom] 

 

Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower - How the Security State’s Mania for Secrecy Will Create You

by Tom Engelhardt

In the urge of its officials to control all of us and every situation, in their mania for all-encompassing secrecy, in their classification not just of the millions of documents they generate, but essentially all their operations as “secret” or “top secret,” in their all-encompassing urge to shut off the most essential workings of the government from the eyes of its citizenry, in their escalating urge to punish anyone who would bring their secret activities to light, in their urge to see or read or listen in on or peer into the lives of you (every “you” on the planet), in their urge to build a global surveillance state and a military that will dominate everything in or out of its path, in their urge to drop bombs on Pakistan and fire missiles at Syria, in their urge to be able to assassinate just about anyone just about anywhere robotically, they are birthing you.

In every action, a reaction. So they say, no?

Give our national security managers credit, though: they may prove to be the master builders of the early twenty-first century. Their ambitions have been breathtaking and their ability to commandeer staggering amounts of our taxpayer dollars to pay for those projects hardly less so. Their monuments to themselves, their version of pyramids and ziggurats -- like the vast data storage center the National Security Agency is building for almost $2 billion in Bluffdale, Utah, to keep a yottabyte of private information about all of us, or the new post-9/11 headquarters the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built, again for almost $2 billion, so that its 16,000 employees could monitor our system of satellites monitoring every square inch of the planet -- are in their own way unique. In their urge to control everything, to see everything from your Facebook chatter to the emails of the Brazilian president, they are creating a system built to blowback, and not just from the outside or distant lands.

Chalmers Johnson, who took “blowback,” an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, and embedded it in our everyday language, would have instantly recognized what they’re doing: creating a blowback machine whose “unintended consequences” (another term of his) are guaranteed, like the effects of the Snowden revelations, to stun us all in a myriad of ways.

They have built their system so elaborately, so expansively, and their ambitions have been so grandiose that they have had no choice but to embed you in their developing global security state, deep in the entrails of their secret world -- tens of thousands of possible you’s, in fact. You’s galore, all of whom see some part, some corner, of the world that is curtained off from the rest of us. And because they have built using the power of tomorrow, they have created a situation in which the prospective whistleblower, the leaker of tomorrow, has access not just to a few pieces of paper but to files beyond imagination. They, not you, have prepared the way for future mass document dumps, for staggering releases, of a sort that once upon time in a far more modest system based largely on paper would have been inconceivable.

They have, that is, paved the way for everything that you are one day guaranteed to do. They have created the means by which their mania for secrecy will repeatedly come a cropper. They have created you.

Worse yet (for them), they have created a world populated with tens of thousands of people, often young, often nomadic in job terms, and often with remarkable computer skills who have access to parts of their vast system, to unknown numbers of secret programs and documents, and the many things from phone calls to emails to credit card transactions to social media interactions to biometric data that they so helpfully store away.

And it doesn’t matter what they, in their post-Snowden panic, may do to try to prevent you from accessing their system. None of the new rules and programs they are installing to prevent the next Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning from collecting anything right down to the national security equivalent of the kitchen sink will stop you. After all, you may even be one of the ones they have chosen to install those safeguards, to put those measures in place. You may be one of the ones they have specially trained in the intricacies and failsafe mechanisms of their system.

And here’s the uncanny thing about you: just doing what comes naturally, you will overcome any measures they try to install and make a mockery of any measures or training programs they put in place to help your co-workers spot you. Almost by definition, they won’t be able to find you until it’s too late. You’ll dispay none of the traits that someone about to betray their world should exhibit. And no wonder, since you’ll be one of the many recognizable cogs in their machinery until almost the moment -- already too late in the game for them -- when you aren’t.

You are, in that sense, the perfect double agent. Until you, in essence, become a spy for the American people, for the old democratic system in which government was the people’s property and those we elect were supposed to let us know what they were doing in our name, you aren’t just masquerading as one of them, you are.

I have no way of knowing what will first strike you as wrong. I just know that something will. It might be very specific and close at hand -- something amiss you see in the program you’re working on, some outrageous expenditure of money or set of lies about what an agency or outfit is doing, or some act or set of acts that you, in growing up, had been taught were un-American. The possibilities are legion. After all, the national security system that they’ve built and engorged with taxpayer dollars, using fear and the excuse of American “safety,” has dispatched armies, and special ops outfits, and drones all over the world to commit mayhem and increase global instability, to kill civilians, wipe out wedding parties, kidnap and torture the innocent, assassinate by robot, and so on.

Or maybe it all just sneaks up on you, the wrongness of it. Maybe, even if you’re too young to remember the totalitarian states of the previous century, something about the urge of our national security managers to create total systems of control, trump the law, and do as they please in the name of their need for knowledge will simply get under your skin. You’ll know that this isn’t the way it was supposed to be.

At some point, it will just creep you out, and even though until that moment you didn’t know it, you’ll be ready. They won’t be able to avoid you. They won’t be able to eliminate you. They won’t even be able to find you. You are, after all, part of their landscape, like the grass on the hillside or the steps to a house.

Even now, they are undoubtedly giving you tips on how to blowback on them. As the latest articles about the National Security Agency tell us, they have begun excusing their sins by claiming that the system they have created is now beyond even their understanding or control, so what hope do they have of understanding or controlling you? They have out-built even themselves.

Manning and Snowden were the first harbingers of the new world of whistleblowing. Snowden learned from Manning and other whistleblowers who preceded him and were persecuted by the state. You will learn from all of them. Each of them was a small tornado-like version of the blowback machine they are still in the process of creating. Each changed how the world looks America and how many of us look at ourselves. Each put in place some small part of the foundation for a world in which such a blowback machine would not be the creation of choice for those with the money and power to build monuments to themselves. Each was a raging embarrassment, a dent in the amour-propre of the national security state. Each was an insult to its ability to control much of anything, including itself.

Those running the government and many of those who write about you in the mainstream will revile you. You will be denounced as a traitor, a defector, a criminal, and your acts called treasonous, even if you’re one of the last hopes of the American republic. Right now, those like you are sure to be prosecuted, jailed, or chased implacably across the planet. But this won’t last forever. Someday, your country will recognize what you did -- first of all for yourself, for your own sense of what’s decent and right in this world, and then for us -- as the acts of an upright and even heroic American.

In the meantime, just remember: the national security state is a giant blowback machine and you, whoever you are, will be part of the answer, the remedy, to it.

Sincerely,

Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture (recently published in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

 

Remembering the Steps on the Way to Becoming a Police State

The Origins of Our Police State

by Chris Hedges  - Truthdig

ELIZABETH, N.J.— JaQuan LaPierre, 22, was riding a bicycle down a sidewalk Sept. 5 when he noticed a squad car pulling up beside him. It was 8:30 on a hot Thursday night at the intersection of Bond Street and Jackson Avenue here in Elizabeth, N.J. LaPierre had 10 glass vials of crack cocaine—probably what the cops were hoping to find—and he hastily swallowed them. He halted and faced the two officers who emerged from the cruiser.

“We are tired of you niggers,” he remembers one of the officers saying. “We’re tired of all this shooting and robberies and violence. And we are going to make you an example.”

He was thrown spread-eagle onto the patrol car.

“What I bein’ arrested for?” LaPierre asked.

A small crowd gathered.

“Why you harassin’ him?” someone asked the cops. “He ain’t resisting. Why you doin’ this?”

One of the officers went though LaPierre’s pockets and took his keys and $246 in cash. LaPierre kept asking why he was being arrested. He was pepper-sprayed in the face. One officer threw him onto the street, and, while he was handcuffed, the two cops kicked and beat him.

“What you beatin’ my nephew for?” his uncle, Antoine, said to the cops.

“It was so hot on my face,” LaPierre said of the pepper spray when we met a few days ago. “I was gasping for air.”

More police arrived. They pushed back onlookers, including the uncle. LaPierre was gagging and choking. He was dragged across the asphalt. By the time the beating was over, blood was coming out of his mouth. He was unconscious. The assault was caught on a camera, even though when the police saw they were being recorded they pointed a flashlight beam into the lens.

The only visible crimes LaPierre had committed was riding a bicycle on a sidewalk and failing to wear a safety helmet.

Police abuse is routine in Elizabeth, as it is in poor urban areas across the country. This incident did not make news. But it illustrated that if you are a poor person of color in the United States you know what most us are about to find out—we have no civil liberties left. Police, who arrest some 13 million people a year, 1.6 million on drug charges—half of those for marijuana counts—carry out random searches and sweeps with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many of those they arrest, even some eventually found to be innocent, to build a nationwide database. They confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions based on allegations of illegal drug activity and direct the proceeds into police budgets. And in the last three decades the United States has constructed the world’s largest prison system, populated with 2.2 million inmates.

As in most police states, cops serve as judge and jury on city streets—“a long step down the totalitarian path,” in the words that U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1968 when he decried expanding police powers. And police departments are bolstered by an internal surveillance and security apparatus that has eradicated privacy and dwarfed the intrusion into personal lives by police states of the past, including East Germany.

Under a series of Supreme Court rulings we have lost the rights to protect ourselves from random searches, home invasions, warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping and physical abuse. Police units in poor neighborhoods function as armed gangs. The pressure to meet departmental arrest quotas—the prerequisite for lavish federal aid in the “war on drugs”—results in police routinely seizing people at will and charging them with a laundry list of crimes, often without just cause. Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.

The tyranny of law enforcement in poor communities is a window into our emerging police state. These thuggish tactics are now being used against activists and dissidents. And as the nation unravels, as social unrest spreads, the naked face of police repression will become commonplace. Totalitarian systems always seek license to engage in this kind of behavior by first targeting a demonized minority. Such systems demand that the police, to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, be, in essence, emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society.

“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

“The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

Once you are branded a felon, as Michelle Alexander points out in her book “The New Jim Crow,” you are “barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to ‘check the box’ indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions.” And this is for people who might have had only a small quantity of drugs, perhaps a few ounces of marijuana. There are 6 million people who because of felony convictions are permanently shut out from mainstream society. They are second-class citizens, outcasts. The war on drugs—aided by hundreds of millions of federal dollars along with federal donations of high-velocity weapons, helicopters, command vehicles and SWAT team military training—has become the template for future social control. Poor people of color know the truth. They were the first victims. The rest of us are about to find it out.

LaPierre was taken unconscious to a hospital. He woke up with both hands handcuffed to a gurney. He was vomiting blood. Two of the glass vials, each worth $10 on the street, came up with his vomit. The police, ecstatic, had the drugs they had hoped to find when they stopped him.

“It’s over for you,” he heard an officer say. “You’re goin’ down.”

“You spittin’ at an officer?” one of the cops said laughingly. “Your boys are not here to protect you now, are they?”

LaPierre could not see. He heard the officers discussing the charges and making sure the official story was coherent. One officer, inexplicably, yanked out some of LaPierre’s hair, braided in cornrows, and stuffed the hair into the handcuffed man’s pants “on my private parts.”

“Trying to disarm an officer,” he heard one say as they tallied the charges. “Possession. Resisting arrest. Starting a riot.” By the time he was transferred out of the hospital five days later there would be nine charges and a $35,000 bail.

“During the last couple of days the police have been telling people in the neighborhood that if they go to court to testify about the beating of JaQuan they will be arrested and go to jail too,” Myrtice Bell, LaPierre’s grandmother, told me.

LaPierre, who was on probation for allegedly resisting arrest during another routine stop, a charge he says was false, and who has a pending charge of being in a vehicle with other men in which an illegal weapon was found by police, appears destined to be swallowed into the vast prison system. He will become, if he is railroaded into prison, one more person among the more than 2 million behind bars in the U.S. His experience, and the experience of others in poverty-stricken communities, should terrify us. Our failure to defend the rights of the poor in the name of law and order, our demonization of young black men, our acceptance that they can be stripped of the power to protect themselves from police abuse or find equality before the law, mean that their fate will soon become ours.

Is Whodunnit? Not Relevant in Syria Inquiry?

Do Syrian Rebels Have Sarin?

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

 President Barack Obama talks with Ambassador Samantha Power, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, following a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Sept. 12, 2013.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Exclusive: A U.S.-Russian agreement calls for the Syrian government to disclose and dispose of its chemical weapons, but that doesn’t resolve the mystery of who was behind the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus – or the question of whether Syrian rebels have their own stores of CW, reports Robert Parry.

As the Syrian government agrees to relinquish its chemical weapons, questions remain about whether some elements of the fractious Syrian rebel forces have obtained their own CW. There have been scattered news reports to that effect although rebel leaders deny the accounts.

Yet, one of the many questions left unanswered by the sketchy U.S. “Government Assessment” on the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack outside Damascus is whether U.S. intelligence analysts are among those who believe the rebels possess some stockpiles of chemical weapons.

The four-page white paper, issued on Aug. 30, danced around the question of whether the rebels possess CW by focusing only on whether the rebels were responsible for the attack. “We assess that the scenario in which the opposition executed the attack on August 21 is highly unlikely,” the white paper said. “Our intelligence sources in the Damascus area did not detect any indications in the days prior to the attack that opposition affiliates were planning to use chemical weapons.”

The dog-not-barking in that phrasing is the U.S. government’s silence on whether some rebels have these weapons. After all, why would the U.S. intelligence agencies employ this narrow phrasing discounting the likelihood of a rebel attack on this one occasion if they could simply assert that the rebel forces could not have been responsible because they have no chemical weapons, period?

The likely explanation is that U.S. intelligence agencies have indications that at least some rebel groups possess CW and may have used it in the past. That is a view that was expressed last May by Carla Del Ponte, a senior United Nations official responsible for Syrian investigations.

Del Ponte told a Swiss-Italian TV station, “Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report … which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.”

Del Ponte added, “This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”

Though other UN officials distanced themselves from Del Ponte’s comments, he was not alone in raising the possibility of Syrian rebels with chemical weapons. Former Defense Department official F. Michael Maloof wrote on Sept. 11 for the right-wing World Net Daily’s web site that WND had obtained a classified U.S. document in which “the U.S. military confirms that sarin was confiscated earlier this year from members of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the most influential of the rebel Islamists fighting in Syria.”

Though Maloof has a checkered reputation for accuracy – having been part of President George W. Bush’s propaganda campaign for invading Iraq – he cites specific information from what he describes as a document classified “Secret/Noforn” produced by the U.S. intelligence community’s National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC.

According to Maloof, “The document says sarin from al-Qaida in Iraq made its way into Turkey and that while some was seized, more could have been used in an attack last March on civilians and Syrian military soldiers in Aleppo. … It revealed that AQI had produced a ‘bench-scale’ form of sarin in Iraq and then transferred it to Turkey.”

Quoting from the NGIC’s report, Maloof wrote that it “depicts our assessment of the status of effort at its peak – primarily research and procurement activities – when disrupted in late May 2013 with the arrest of several key individuals in Iraq and Turkey. … Future reporting of indicators not previously observed would suggest that the effort continues to advance despite the arrests.”

Maloof further reported that a 100-page report sent by the Russian government to the UN claims that rebel sarin gas was “manufactured in a Sunni-controlled region of Iraq and then transported to Turkey for use by the Syrian opposition, whose ranks have swelled with members of al-Qaida and affiliated groups.”

Last week, prosecutors in southern Turkey obtained an indictment alleging that two Syrian rebel groups were seeking to buy precursor chemicals for the production of sarin gas, Turkish media reported. The indictment named six defendants, including Syrian national Hytham Qassap, and accused them of seeking the chemicals for Islamist rebels in Al Nusra Front and the Ahrar al-Sham Brigades.

The Turkish prosecutors said they found no actual sarin during the May arrests that led to the indictment, but the case provided further evidence that some Syrian rebel groups have tried to arm themselves with chemical weapons. The Syrian government has blamed rebels for several apparent chemical attacks, including the one on Aug. 21, but the United States and its allies have fingered the Syrian army instead.

In the case of the Aug. 21 attack, which led to threatened U.S. military retaliation against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the Obama administration has asserted with “high confidence” that the Syrian government was responsible, but the U.S. “Government Assessment” presented no verifiable evidence pointing to Assad’s guilt.

Meanwhile, an Italian journalist and a Belgian teacher who were just freed after months of captivity at the hands of Syrian rebels reported that they overheard the rebels claiming responsibility for the Aug. 21 chemical attack. Domenico Quirico, the journalist, and Pierre Piccinin, the teacher, reported that they overheard their captors discussing the Aug. 21 attack on Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, and saying that Assad’s forces were not behind it.

“It wasn’t the government of Bashar al-Assad that used sarin gas or any other gas in Ghouta,” Piccinin said on Belgian RTL radio. “We are sure about this because we overheard a conversation between rebels. It pains me to say it because I’ve been a fierce supporter of the Free Syrian Army in its rightful fight for democracy since 2012.”

Other on-scene reports have raised doubts about the certainty of the U.S. “Government Assessment” blaming the Syrian government. For instance, an article by MintPress News – based on interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta – presented evidence that “the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit. …

“[F]rom numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, … many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the … gas attack.”

The article also cited comments by rebel-connected Ghouta residents indicating that the release of the poison gas may have resulted from a conventional artillery strike by government forces accidentally hitting a rebel storage site for chemical weapons or from careless rebel handling of the dangerous material.

One intelligence source following the Syrian conflict told me that some U.S. analysts believe that the Syrian rebels do possess chemical weapons, possibly obtained with the help of Saudi intelligence which has been providing much of the military equipment and money for the rebels, including some of the most radical Islamist elements.

Given these various accounts – and the Syrian government’s acceptance of Russian demands that it surrender its chemical weapons – the United States may want to make a similar demand of the rebels. At least, the Obama administration might clarify what its own intelligence files contain about rebel possession of chemical weapons.

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). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Kinder, Gentler? Humanitarian Serial Murder

Humanitarian Murder

by David Swanson - War is a Crime

This past Sunday night on "60 Minutes" John Miller of CBS News said, "I've spoken with intelligence analysts who have said an uncomfortable thing that has a ring of truth, which is: the longer this war in Syria goes on, in some sense the better off we are."

Now, why would that be uncomfortable, do you suppose? Could it be because encouraging huge numbers of violent deaths of human beings seems sociopathic?

The discomfort that Miller at least claims to feel is the gauge of our moral progress, I suppose, since June 23, 1941, when Harry Truman said, "If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible."

On Monday, Time magazine's Aryn Baker published an article under the headline "Syria's Rebels Turn on One Another, and That's Not a Bad Thing." Baker's point wasn't that more would die this way, but that this would allow the U.S. to escalate the war (which of course would mean more dying).

Remember that President Obama's reason for wanting to attack Syria is to "confront actions that are violating our common humanity." How is it that support for mass killing rarely seems to violate our common humanity if it's that other 96 percent of humanity getting killed, and especially if it's this 4 percent doing it? Why is the excuse to kill more people always that people are being killed, while we never starve people to prevent them from starving or rape people to protect them from rape?

The uncomfortable "60 Minutes" interviewer addressed his remarks to a former CIA officer who replied by disagreeing. He claimed to want the war to end. But how would he end it? By arming and aiding one side, just enough and not too much -- which would supposedly result in peace negotiations, albeit with a risk of major escalation. While nobody ever works to extend peace in order to generate war, people are constantly investing in war in the name of peace.

As this man may be very well aware, arming one side in this war will encourage that side's viciousness and encourage the other side to arm itself further as well. But suppose it were actually true that you could deescalate a war by escalating a war. Why are the large number of people who would be killed in the process unworthy of consideration?

We've seen lawyers tell Congressional committees that killing people with drones is either murder or perfectly fine, depending on whether Obama's secret memos say the killings are part of a war. But why is killing people acceptable in a war? We've just watched public pressure deny Obama missile strikes on Syria. Those strikes were optional. Had they happened that would have been a choice, not an inevitability. What of the immorality involved?

The best news is that we're beginning to feel uncomfortable.

Canadians Held without Charge by Egypt Mount Hunger Strike for Release

Tarek and John are on hunger strike: Canadians detained in Egypt refuse food to protest the arbitrary nature of their detention

by Justin Podur

Canadian filmmaker, John Greyson, and emergency room physician, Tarek Loubani, have informed friends and supporters through their Egyptian lawyers that they will be refusing food beginning September the 16th to protest the arbitrary nature of their detention by Egyptian authorities.

Greyson and Loubani, who were transiting through Cairo on their way to Gaza where Loubani was carrying on a medical aid project, and Greyson was preparing for a film project, have been detained in Cairo’s Tora prison for the past 31 days. During that time, Egyptian officials have not provided any reason for the ongoing detention.

Greyson and Loubani’s detention could be extended up to 2 years without formal charges being laid according to new emergency measures put in place in Egypt.

“We can only imagine the anguish that John and Tarek feel after realizing that their detention could be extended for so long in what can only be described as an arbitrary process that lacks any credibility,” said Cecilia Greyson. “We know that they did not take the decision to begin a hunger strike lightly, and we want them to know we will do everything we can to support them and get them home soon,” she added.

“We have been overwhelmed by all of the support we have received in our campaign to bring Tarek and John back home,” said Mohammed Loubani. “We are also grateful to the many Department of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade (DFATD) employees, and consular officials who have worked so tirelessly to make sure Tarek and John stay safe and are returned to us as soon as possible,” he added.

“We also want to thank Prime Minister Harper, Minister Baird, and Minister Yelich for advocating for John and Tarek’s release at the highest levels of the Egyptian Government,” said Mohammd Loubani. “We are especially looking forward to the results of discussions with the Egyptian Prime Minister, Mr. Hazem El-Beblawi; Deputy Prime Minister, Gen. Abdul-Fatah Al-Sisi; and Minister of Interior, Mr. Mohamed Ibrahim about John and Tarek’s ongoing detention,” he added.

A change.org petition calling for the release of the two Canadians has received 115,000 signatures to date. In addition, 311 prominent cultural and academic figures have signed a letter calling for John and Tarek’s release. Among the signatories are Alec Baldwin, Alex Gibney, Arundhati Roy, Atom Egoyan, Ben Affleck, Charlize Theron, Danny Glover, Sarah Polley, Naomi Klein and Michael Ondaatje

Amnesty International has issued an urgent action (http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/uaa24813.pdf) about Tarek and John, asking for letters and phone calls directly to Interim President Adly Mahmoud Mansour, Minister of Defence General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Public Prosecutor Hesham Mohamed Zaki Barakat.

Supporters of Tarek and John will be gathering at the Egyptian Consulate in Montreal at 1pm on Tuesday September 24. “The Egyptian authorities seem to be sending the message that Egypt is not a safe place to travel to, that if you go there, you can be jailed for a long time and with no recourse,” said Justin Podur. “We want to send the message that we will not forget our friends, and we will not settle for anything less than their immediate release.”


 September 16, 2013
12:00pm

For immediate release –

Contact: Justin Podur, justin@podur.org Cecilia Greyson, cgreyson@gmail.com

Syria and the 800 Pound Ape

The People Against the 800 Pound Gorilla

by Jean Bricmont/Diana Johnstone - CounterPunch

The past ten days have seen what could be the start of an historic turning point away from endless war in the Middle East. Public opinion in the United States, in harmony with the majority of people in the world, has clearly rejected U.S. military intervention in Syria.

But for this turn away from war to be complete and lasting, greater awareness is needed of the forces that have been pushing the United States into these wars, and will surely continue to do so until they are clearly and openly rejected.

An American friend who knows Washington well recently told us that “everybody” there knows that, as far as the drive to war with Syria is concerned, it is Israel that directs U.S. policy. Why then, we replied, don’t opponents of war say it out loud, since, if the American public knew that, support for the war would collapse? Of course, we knew the answer to that question. They are afraid to say all they know, because if you blame the pro-Israel lobby, you are branded an anti-Semite in the media and your career is destroyed.

One who had that experience is James Abourezk, former Senator from South Dakota, who has testified: “I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear – fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress–at least when I served there – have any affection for Israel or for its lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I’ve heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they’re pushed around by the lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the lobby’s animosity by making their feelings public.”
Abourezk added : “The only exceptions to that rule are the feelings of Jewish members, who, I believe, are sincere in their efforts to keep U.S. money flowing to Israel. But that minority does not a U.S. imperial policy make.”[1]

Since we do not have to run for Congress, we feel free to take a close look at that highly delicate question. First, we’ll review the evidence for the crucial role of the pro-Israel lobby, then we’ll discuss some objections.

For evidence, it should be enough to quote some recent headlines from the American and Israeli press.

First, according to the Times of Israel (not exactly an anti-Zionist rag): “Israel intelligence seen as central to U.S. case against Syria.”[2] (Perhaps the fact that it is “central” also explains why it is so dubious[3].)

Then, in Haaretz[4]: “AIPAC to deploy hundreds of lobbyists to push for Syria action”. Or, in U.S. News and World Report[5]: “Pro-Israel lobby Seeks to Turn Tide on Syria Debate in Congress”. According to Bloomberg[6]: “Adelson New Obama Ally as Jewish Groups Back Syria Strike”. The worst enemies of Obama become his allies, provided he does what “Jewish groups” want. Even rabbis enter the dance: according to the Times of Israel[7], “U.S. rabbis urge Congress to back Obama on Syria”.

The New York Times explained some of the logic behind the pressure: “Administration officials said the influential pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC was already at work pressing for military action against the government of Mr. Assad, fearing that if Syria escapes American retribution for its use of chemical weapons, Iran might be emboldened in the future to attack Israel. … One administration official, who, like others, declined to be identified discussing White House strategy, called AIPAC ‘the 800-pound gorilla in the room,’ and said its allies in Congress had to be saying, ‘If the White House is not capable of enforcing this red line’ against the catastrophic use of chemical weapons, ‘we’re in trouble’.”

Even more interesting, this part of the story was deleted by the New York Times, according to M.J. Rosenberg[8], which is consistent with the fact that the lobby prefers to act discreetly.

Now, to the objections:

There are indeed forces other than the Israel lobby pushing for war. It is true that some neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia or Turkey also want to destroy Syria, for their own reasons. But they have nowhere near the political influence on the United States of the Israel lobby. If Saudi princes use their money to try to corrupt a few U.S. politicians, that can easily be denounced as interference by a foreign power in the internal affairs of the United States. But no similar charge can be raised against Israeli influence because of the golden gag rule: any mention of such influence can be immediately denounced as a typical anti-Semitic slur against a nonexistent “Jewish power”. Referring to the perfectly obvious, public activities of the Israel lobby may even be likened to peddling a “conspiracy theory”.

But many of our friends insist that every war is driven by economic interests. Isn’t this latest war to be waged because big bad capitalists want to exploit Syrian gas, or use Syrian territory for a gas pipeline, or open up the Syrian economy to foreign investments?

There is a widespread tendency, shared by much of the left, especially among people who think of themselves as Marxists (Marx himself was far more nuanced on this issue), to think that wars must be due to cynically rational calculations by capitalists. If this were so, these wars “for oil” might be seen as “in the national interest”. But this view sees “capitalism” as a unified actor issuing orders to obedient politicians on the basis of careful calculations. As Bertrand Russell put it, this putative rationality ignores “the ocean of human folly upon which the fragile barque of human reason insecurely floats”. Wars have been waged for all kinds of non-economic reasons, such as religion or revenge, or simply to display power.

People who think that capitalists want wars to make profits should spend time observing the board of directors of any big corporation: capitalists need stability, not chaos, and the recent wars only bring more chaos. American capitalists are making fortunes in China and Vietnam now that there is peace between the U.S. and those countries, which was not possible during hostilities. As for the argument that they need wars to loot resources, one may observe that the U.S. is buying oil from Iraq now, and so does China, but China did not have to ruin itself in a costly war. Like Iraq, Iran or Syria are perfectly willing to sell their resources, and it is the political embargoes imposed by the U.S. that prevent such trade. As for the “war for oil” thesis in the case of Libya, the Guardian recently reported that “Libya is facing its most critical moment since the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi with armed groups blockading oil fields and terminals, choking output to a 10th of normal levels and threatening economic disaster.”[9]As for Iraq, Stephen Sniegoski has shown, in The Transparent Cabal, The Neoconsevative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, that the war was only due to the neoconservatives and that the oil companies had no desire whatsoever to go to war. Indeed, there is no evidence of an “oil lobby” sending its agents to urge Members of Congress to vote for war, as AIPAC is doing.

And how does one explain that many of the most determined opponents of war are found on the right of the political spectrum? Do the Tea Party, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Justin Raimundo and antiwar.com, Paul Craig Roberts, among others, fail to see the wonderful profits to be made by capitalists in a devastated Syria?

The fact is that in the post-colonial period, wherever profits can be made through war, they can be made much more reliably in peaceful conditions, and most capitalists seem to have understood that. There is no need to conquer countries in order to purchase their resources, invest in their economies or sell them our products. Most countries are in fact eager for legitimate trade.

On the other hand, it can be argued that the huge military-industrial complex (MIC) benefits from wars. Doesn’t the MIC need wars to maintain the lifeblood of military appropriations? Here the matter is complex. The MIC benefits above all from various hyped-up threats of war, most notably the Soviet threat during the Cold War, which kept the credits and contracts flowing through the Pentagon. But long, botched wars such as in Afghanistan or Iraq tend to give war a bad name, are economically ruinous and lead to questioning the need for the huge U.S. military. The MIC doesn’t need another one in Syria. Many military officers are openly hostile to mounting at attack against Syria.

The interests that profit directly from recent U.S. wars – and not from mere “threats” – are very few. They are above all the giant construction firms, Bechtel, Halliburton and their subsidiaries, which, through their connections with officials such as Dick Cheney, win contracts to build U.S. military bases abroad and sometimes to rebuild infrastructure destroyed by the U.S. Air Force. This amounts to a recycling of American taxpayers’ money, which in no way “profits” the United States, or American capitalism in general; besides, those construction firms are not big compared to major U.S. corporations. These profiteers could never pose as a “justification” for wars, but are the mere vultures feeding off conflicts.

The basic responsibility for war of the U.S. military-industrial complex is simply that it is there. And as Madeleine Albright famously said, “what is the use of having that splendid military if we don’t use it?” In fact, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union (and indeed arguably ever since the end of World War II), there is no obviously good reason to use it, and it might well be dismantled and resources redirected toward modernizing U.S. infrastructure and other useful and profitable activities. However, an intellectual industry called “think tanks” has developed in Washington devoted to justifying the perpetuation of the MIC. It specializes in identifying potential “threats”. Over the years, these think tanks have increasingly come under the influence of billionaire benefactors of Israel such as Haim Saban (founder of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution). Since there are in reality virtually no serious threats to the United States calling for such colossal military strength, alleged “threats to U.S. interests” in the Middle East are invented by adopting supposed threats to Israel as threats to the United States. Example number one: Iran.

People on the left are not wrong in supposing that Washington would want to defend “American geo-strategic interests”. Those certainly exist, and are a proper object of controversy. But the crucial question here is whether support for Israeli policy aims in the Middle East is among them. Indeed, there is a sector of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that promotes an aggressive global foreign policy that amounts to a sort of world conquest, with U.S. military bases and military exercises surrounding Russia and China, as if in preparation for some final showdown. But the fact is that the most active advocates of this aggressive policy are the pro-Israel neoconservatives of the Project for the New American Century that pushed the Bush II presidency into war against Iraq, and now, as the Foreign Policy Initiative, are pushing Obama toward war against Syria. Their general line is that U.S. and Israeli interests are identical, and that U.S. world domination is good, or even necessary, for Israel. Such close identification with Israel has caused the United States to be intensely hated throughout the Muslim world, which is not good for the United States in the long run.

Perhaps because genuine, material or economic U.S. interests in going to war are so hard to find, the emphasis has shifted in the past decade to alleged “moral” concerns, such as “the responsibility to protect”, packaged with a catchy brand name, “R2P”. Today, the strongest advocates of going to war are the various humanitarian imperialists or liberal interventionist, who argue on the basis of R2P, or “justice for victims”, or alleged “genocide prevention”.

There is a large overlap between humanitarian interventionism and support for Israel. In France Bernard Kouchner, who first invented and promoted the concept of the “right to intervene”, stated in a recent interview that “Israel is like no other country. It is the result of the terrifying massacre of the Holocaust.” It is therefore “our duty” to protect it. Bernard-Henry Lévy prodded the French government to start the war against Libya, making no secret that he considered he was acting as a Jew for the interests of Israel; he is now the foremost and fiercest advocate of bombing Syria. In both France and the United States, advocates of “humanitarian” intervention justify bombing Syria by referring to the Holocaust in the past and to a hypothetical, and totally unsubstantiated, intention by Iran to risk national suicide by attacking Israel in the future.

In the United States, these concerns of the Israel lobby are given ideological and institutional expression by such influential advisors as Samantha Power, Madeleine Albright and the two Abramowitz’s (Morton the father and Michael the son, in charge of “genocide prevention efforts” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). The argument is used repeatedly that because “we” did not intervene quickly enough against Auschwitz, we have an obligation to intervene militarily to prevent other possible slaughters.

On September 6, the Cleveland Jewish News published a letter from “leading rabbis” urging Congress to support President Obama’s plans to strike Syria. “We write you as descendants of Holocaust survivors and refugees, whose ancestors were gassed to death in concentration camps,” the letter said. By authorizing bombing raids, the rabbis said, “Congress has the capacity to save thousands of lives”…

Without such dramatization, obscuring the reality of each new crisis with images of the Holocaust, the whole notion that the best way to promote human rights and protect populations is to wage unilateral wars, destroy what is left of the international legal order and spread chaos would be seen for the absurdity it is. Only the fervor of the champions of Israel enables such emotional arguments to swamp reasonable discussion.

But one may reasonably ask what are the interests of Israel itself in inciting the United States to fight in Syria? Israelis seem to have frightened themselves into believing that the very existence of another power in the region, namely Iran, amounts to an existential threat. But the mere fact that a policy is pursued does not mean that it is necessarily in the interests of those who pursue it. That is again ignoring the “ocean of human folly”. Napoleon and Hitler had no interest or desire in bringing Russian troops to Paris or Berlin, but their policies led to precisely that. The emperors of Germany, Austria and Russia had no interest in launching the First World War, since, in the end, they all lost their thrones as a result of the war. But launch it they did. The future is unpredictable, and that is why it is difficult to deduce intentions from consequences. Israel’s hostile policy toward its neighbors can reasonably be seen as self-defeating in the long run.

Oddly enough, some observers deny the obvious, arguing that Bashar al Assad has allowed Israel to occupy Syrian territory on the Golan Heights and has kept the border quiet (without explaining what else he could have done, given the relationship of forces) and concluding that Israel has no interest in toppling him. But what matters is that Assad is allied with Hezbollah and with Iran. Israel hates Hezbollah for its successful resistance to Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and sees Iran as the only potential challenge to Israeli military supremacy in the region.

Even so, it is not certain that Israel’s war aim would be to overthrow Assad. A clue to Israel’s strategy is provided by a September 5 article in the New York Times[10]: “Israeli officials have consistently made the case that enforcing Mr. Obama’s narrow ‘red line’ on Syria is essential to halting the nuclear ambitions of Israel’s archenemy, Iran. More quietly, Israelis have increasingly argued that the best outcome for Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, is no outcome. For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.”

“This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”

So, the real goal of the limited strikes (and the reason why they ought to be limited) would be to send a message to Iran, about its nonexistent nuclear arms program and, in Syria, let both sides “bleed to death”. How nice! Waging a war based on the flimsiest of evidence only to prolong a bloody conflict may not be a very moral endeavor for all those who claim to act out of passion for “our values” and for deep concern over the “suffering of the Syrian people”.

In its zeal to serve what it considers Israel’s interests, AIPAC and its affiliates practice deception concerning the issues at stake. The lobby misrepresents the interests of the United States, and even ignores the long term interests of the Jewish people whom it often claims to represent. It is pure folly for a minority, however powerful and respected, to try to impose an unpopular war on the majority. Since Israel often claims to represent the Jewish people as a whole, if the majority of Americans are forced to pay an unacceptable price for “defending Israel”, sooner or later voices will be raised blaming “the Jews”. Indeed, this can be seen by a brief look at what already gets written, anonymously of course, on social media, ranging from various conspiracy theories to outright Jew-bashing.

We, who are totally opposed to the notion of collective guilt, wish to avoid such an outcome. Far from being anti-Semitic, we deplore all forms of “identity politics” that ignore the diversity within every human group. We simply want to be able to say “no” openly to the pro-Israel lobby without being subjected to moral intimidation. This has nothing to do with Jewish religion or identity or culture: it is entirely political. We claim our right to refuse to be drawn into somebody else’s war. We believe that these endless wars are not “good for the Jews” – or for anyone else. We want to contribute to efforts at mutual understanding, diplomacy, compromise and disarmament. In short, to strengthen “the fragile barque of human reason” adrift on the ocean of human folly. Otherwise, that folly may drown us all.

For now, the threat of war has been avoided, or at least “postponed”. Let us not forget that Iraq and Libya also gave up their weapons of mass destruction, only to be attacked later. Syria is likely to abandon its chemical weapons, but without any guarantee that the rebels, much less Israel, won’t retain such weapons. The popular mobilization against the war, probably the first one in history to stop a war before it starts, has been intense but may be short-lived. Those whose war plans have been interrupted can be expected to come up with new maneuvers to regain the initiative. These past days have given a glimpse of what can be accomplished when people wake up and say no to war. This must be an inspiration for continued efforts to make diplomacy prevail over bullying, and mutual disarmament over endless war. If people really want peace, it can be possible.

JEAN BRICMONT teaches physics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is author of Humanitarian Imperialism. He can be reached at Jean.Bricmont@uclouvain.be

DIANA JOHNSTONE is author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She lives in Paris and can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr

Notes.

[1] http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m28769


[2] http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-intelligence-seen-as-central-to-us-case-against-syria/


http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-intelligence-seen-as-central-to-us-case-against-syria/


[3] For a discussion of the “evidence,” see, for example, Gareth Porter: How Intelligence Was to Support an Attack on Syria, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18559-how-intelligence-was-twisted-to-support-an-attack-on-syria.

[4] http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.545661


[5] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/09/06/jewish-lobby-seeks-to-turn-tide-on-syria-debate-in-congress

[6] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-04/adelson-new-obama-ally-as-jewish-groups-back-syria-strike.html


[7] http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-rabbis-urge-congress-to-back-obama-on-syria/

[8] http://mjayrosenberg.com/2013/09/03/new-york-times-deletes-this-paragraph-in-which-white-house-says-aipac-is-key-to-war/


[9] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/03/libya-oil-supplies-tripoli


[10] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/world/middleeast/israel-backs-limited-strike-against-syria.html?_r=0

Pipeline Breaking News: Colorado Floods Heighten Fears of Chemical Pollution of State's Iconic Rivers

Colorado Flood Raises Fears of Fracking Chemical Spill

by Damien Gillis - The Canadian.org

A Colorado citizens’ group is raising alarm bells about the possible release of toxic chemicals into local rivers from flood-stricken fracking operations. At least one broken pipeline has been confirmed by local authorities.

The group, East Boulder County United – which aims to keep the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing out of its communities - has been posting photos of natural gas infrastructure and chemical storage tanks inundated by recent floods to its facebook page. See this staggering collection of photos here, continued at bottom of story.

The group began sharing these images in an effort to wake the public and media up to this untold chapter of Colorado’s widely-covered flood story. Says East Boulder County United spokesperson Cliff Willmeng:

Our concern is that all of these sites contain various amounts of hazardous industrial wastes that are now capable of spilling into the waterways and onto the agricultural land. Many of these chemicals are carcinogenic, neurotoxic, and known disruptors of the human endocrine system. As of today there is no testing taking place, industrial, independent or otherwise to determine the extent of the contamination, nor any talk of it. And one can guarantee that this week the COGCC will be issuing more drilling permits even as the hydrocarbons flow into the rivers.

According to one of the few local media stories to report on the oil and gas dimension of the flood, from The Denver Post yesterday, at least one pipeline leak has been confirmed by Weld County Emergency Manager Roy Rudisill. “Other industry pipelines are sagging as saturated sediment erodes around the expanding river,” the Post reports.

Industry crews “are shutting in the lines, shutting in the wells,” Rudisill told the paper.

The photos were taken on Friday and Saturday afternoon throughout several northern Colorado farming communities at the centre of the state’s “500 year flood” – in neighbouring Boulder and Weld counties.

According to The Denver Post:

Oil drums, tanks and other industrial debris mixed into the swollen river flowing northeast. County officials did not give locations of where the pipeline broke and where other pipelines were compromised.

Willmeng partly blames a lack of regulatory oversight for the situation he and his fellow landowners find themselves in. “There are over 20,000 oil and gas wells in Weld County alone,” Willmeng told me via email. “By comparison there are only 17 inspectors for the entire state of Colorado.

“Prior to the floods we knew that the oil and gas industry was left to police itself. Now the rivers, agricultural zones and residences get to bear that decision.”

Colorado has been one of a number of states hit by the recent boom in fracking operations – including Pennsylvania, New York State, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansas, North Dakota and Louisiana.

Willmeng’s group is also concerned the oil and gas companies whose operations are flooded will downplay the risk of contamination:

The industry is going to claim that it remotely shut in all of the relevant wells. Unfortunately not all the hydrocarbons are protected within the well bore. There are exposed pipes, VOC burners and infrastructure related to the storage of oil, gas and toxic industrial waste that all sit above the ground. The flood waters have hit all of these structures where they sit.

The Common Sense Canadian has covering the issue of water contamination from fracking for some time. Stay tuned for more updates on this developing story.

Damien Gillis is a Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker with a focus on environmental and social justice issues - especially relating to water, energy, and saving Canada's wild salmon - working with many environmental organizations in BC and around the world. He is the co-founder, along with Rafe Mair, of The Common Sense Canadian, and a board member of both the BC Environmental Network and the Haig-Brown Institute.

More articles by Damien Gillis

Fighting for Roşia Montană: An End to a Week of Historic Solidarity in Romania

The first week of protests in Romania: another message for international solidarity!

by Grecu Cristian-Dan - Centrul de Cultură Anarhistă

 This is a message for immediate international distribution. Re-post and share!

If you don’t know exactly what’s happening right now in Romania, the motives, more precisely, read this short text, it could give you a clue or two: The two big struggles in Romania: a message for international solidarity!

It’s Monday, and an old man is cleaning in front of my block of flats. It’s quiet outside, as if yesterday was a very big party allover the city. And you could say it was, but not in that certain way.

Yesterday was Sunday, and this meant one whole week of protests in Romania and abroad. It all started because the Government proposed to the Parliament to vote for a law project that will permit the destruction of Roşia Montană, actually, the kick-off of the biggest open-pit mining project in Europe. What remains between a law project and reality is the decision of the Parliament.

But the people said NO. This NO was for gold mining with cyanide, this NO was for shale gas fraking, this NO was for many actions that could damage, for ever, the nature that still surrounds us.

In the first Sunday, the 1st of September, we were more than 15.000 in total, in all the cities that were protesting against gold mining and shale gas fracking. We were more than last year, in 2012, when, for more than 40 days, we protested against the Government. Two Governments fell, and the third, the present one, made more illegal and bad things to the people, than those before it. Including the Roşia Montană project, and shale gas fracking.

There were protests in more than 40 cities, in Romania, Europe, and even North America. But the press didn’t see anything. For the last 7-8 days, it was not the Police that made us trouble, not the people of the corporation (the miners of Roşia Montană Gold Corporation – RMGC), but the press.

They didn’t write anything in the news paper, show anything at the TV, maybe there were one or two radio stations that said what was happening in Romania. And, as far as I know, the radio stations remained to be the ones that continued to talk about the protests and about the project.

When reporters from TV appeared, they were telling only lies or that they were pushed, cursed, and things like this, by the protesters. Oh my!, their honor was washed away by these filthy protesters that didn’t like the media for one good reason: all the big mass-media trusts were bought by RMGC, and they were showing only what the corporation was paying for.

The first night went just fine. The first protest. We were feeling very powerful, we didn’t have this kind of big public demonstrations for more than a year; many have forgotten the feeling of being in the streets, with thoulsands of people that share a common goal, a common struggle.

We decided, in the city of Cluj, that we will meet next Sunday (yesterday). But our friends from Bucharest continued to protest even next day. They managed to maintain a critical mass of 1000-2000 people each and every night. From Monday, they started occupying squares, cross-roads, the parks in front of different Governmental institutions. On Tuesday, we did the same in Cluj. With only a 15 hours notification of the protests, more than 1500 people managed to gather in the Unirii square, and we started doing the same: occupying the streets and the squares.

The teachings from Gezi park came to Romania too: in Bucharest, they had working and discussion groups, in the streets, during the protests. They even come every day with some tents – that are more as a symbolic thing „we are not leaving the streets!” In Cluj we had public meetings to discuss how to organize for the next days. During this time, other cities were protesting. More and more independent journalists started to write on what is happening – and many wrote so nicely. People regained their power of making the stories, so they were writting opinions, posting photos, videos, proposals on their Facebook accounts. There is a big crave for real information, for real and true information. We don’t give up. We will not surrender.

The international press call this the Romanian Autumn. The Arab Spring, the Turkish Summer and the Romanian Autumn. More and more people decide that it is time to act. Too much not-acting hurts, not for the individual, but for the collective, for the future of our children and for the children that will be born sometimes in the future. We cannot permit a corporation to destroy nature!

So more and more people (from Romania, and not only) start acting. In New York, in Tokyo, in the steppes of Mongolia, in the skies. People send their solidarity messages to the people struggling in Romania. We start being more and more conscious.

People protested in front of the Romanian National Television, the TVR. TVR is OUR television, but they are bought too. They don’t show what they should show: what is happening in the streets.

A couple of days ago, there was a big match: Romania vs. Hungary. Except the fact that many Hungarian fascists supporters came, destroing the train they came with, and fighting with the Gendarmerie (destroying many terraces in their way), 3000 Romanian supporters shouted during the match: UNITED WE SAVE ROŞIA MONTANA! You didn’t hear this on the TV. And when the cameras were filming the banners of the supporters, they put a piece of paper in front of it. It is illegal to show the truth.

The second Sunday came. Tens of cities are protesting again, not only in Romania, but allover the world.

In Bucharest, the marches started from the sectors (neighborhoods with their own townhouse). Six marches, towards a single square. In Cluj, Eugen David, the president of Alburnus Maior, the NGO that started the struggle in Roşia Montană (it is the NGO of the villagers that oppose the project), came along with his daughter and other villagers. He had a very motivational discourse. That the struggle will continue until all the demands will be met.

10.000 in Cluj. Almost 20.000 in Bucharest. And who knows how many thoulsands in other cities. It’s only one week we are protesting, but we are more than double. And the numbers will rise, each and every day.

People start feeling the alternatives. And that all of us are one big family, that must help eachother and those that are arround us. In Turkey, the protesters were called „capulcu”. We are called „hipsters”. We are the hipsters that will change Romania. And many people have faith in us, as we have in them.

Today, Prime-Minister Victor Ponta, one of the big enemies of the people, said that „We reject the Roşia Montană project, and we end the discussion”. They are afraid to be accused for undermining the national economy, as some politicians were a couple of days ago. They are afraid of us. They see we are spreading and we are more and more powerful. So they try to kill the movement however they think they could.

What was the respons of Eugen David?

„We won a battle, but not the war!

Following the declaration of Prime-Minister Victor Ponta, the Save Roşia Montană Campaign announces that the street protests will continue until:

- The Parliament, through the Senat and Chamber of Deputies will vote to reject the law project;

- The Governments will reject the emergency procedure through a governmental environmental approval;

- Roşia Montană will be included in the Romanian list for UNESCO;

- Cyanide will be prohibited by law in mining activities in Romania;

- The four founders of the law project: the Minister for Large Projects (Dan Şova), the one for Environment (Rovana Plumb), the one for Culture (Daniel Barbu) and the ANRM director (Gheorghe Duţu) will be dismissed;

Roşia Montană,

The 9th of September, 2013”

The struggle continues!

_____

For more pictures, videos, and live updates (the majority in Romanian), please follow these pages:

Alburnus Maior (the NGO of the villagers from Roşia Montană)

Roşia Montană în UNESCO World Heritage

Uniţi Salvăm (the official page of the protests, mainly Bucharest)

Jurnalism mişto în România

Grupul Independent de Informare (an independent group formed by people from different cities, centered on the protests from now, 24/7)

The hashtags used are: #unitisalvam #rosiamontana #salvamrosiamontana

_____

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Jamie Kneen, Saul Landau, Janine Bandcroft Sept. 16, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

What happens when a gold rush is rejected? That's what's happening in countries around the world, where the people living near, or on top of prized resources are choosing to leave the minerals in the ground, preferring to preserve the waters, wildlands, and agricultural heritage trans-national capital would undermine.

Just one such instance is the resistance to a Canadian-listed mining corporation's proposed operation in the Apuseni Mountains of western Romania.

Listen. Hear.

According to ROARMAG.org, Toronto Stock Exchange-listed Gabriel Resources' plans to open the biggest open-pit mining project in Europe which would, quote:

"[E]rase the village of Roşia Montană and four mountain tops, only to be replaced by a lake full of cyanide. [...] What will be next is a regional environmental catastrophe, with extremely high chances of toxic contamination across Romania, Hungary, the Danube River and even the Black Sea."

Jamie Kneen is Communications and Outreach Coordinator with MiningWatch Canada, a quote: 

"pan-Canadian initiative supported by environmental, social justice, Aboriginal and labour organizations from across the country." There he provides "strategic support and advice for campaigns, consultation and negotiation efforts for MiningWatch members and partners." Jamie has more than twenty years experience in environmental impact assessment, mining, and indigenous rights work.

Jamie Kneen in the first half.

And; in 2001 five Cuban nationals risked their lives infiltrating US-based terrorist networks mounting operations against Cuba from Miami, where Cuban exiles boasted of attacks targeting hotels, airliners, and merchant shipping. When details of these plots was revealed to the FBI by the Cuban government, the Americans responding by arresting not the suspected terrorists, but the Cuban agents watching them!

Saul Landau died last week, but not before leaving a legacy of more than 40 films in a career most concerned with human dignity and the rights of the downtrodden. He was in Victoria last in 2011 to screen his last film, 'Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up,' which, quote:

"Chronicles half a century of hostile US-Cuba relations by telling the story of the Cuban Five, intelligence agents sent to penetrate Cuban exile terrorist groups in Miami and now serving long prison sentences." 

Saul was an emeritus senior fellow at Berkeley, and is sadly missed by Cuba and all those his work touched over the decades. I spoke to Saul just prior to his appearance at UVic. Presente! Saul Landau in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us from a remote location at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good going on on Victoria's streets and beyond. But first, Jamie Kneen and all that doesn't glitter; Romania's gold rush discontent.

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.