Iranian Expert's Analysis of UN Syria Report

CW Expert Opinion on the UN Report on Syria

by Sharmine Narwani - Sandbox

While investigating the UN Report on chemical weapons (CW) use in Ghouta, Syria, we sought a multitude of opinions from experts and others who offered insightful observations. We published our findings in an article entitled: Questions Plague UN Report on Syria.

To learn more about Sarin and other nerve gases used in warfare, you would be hard pressed to find any better hands-on experience than in Iran, a country that suffered directly – and repeatedly – from Iraq’s use of CWs during the 1980-88 war between the two countries.

In Iran itself, there are few as qualified to speak about Sarin and other nerve gases as Dr. Abbas Foroutan, whose 2004 articles were reviewed in Neurology by Col. Jonathan Newmark of the Chemical Casualty Care Division, US Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense.

The reviewer refers to Dr. Foroutan’s work as “the only firsthand clinical descriptions of battlefield nerve agent casualties in the world literature” and is viewed as a valuable contribution to the US and NATO understanding of the treatment of casualties in chemical warfare:

“Foroutan’s lessons learned reassure us that a robust medical evacuation system, coupled with timely and appropriate medical care of nerve agent poisoning, will save many more lives on future battlefields.”

Upon our request, Dr. Foroutan reviewed the UN Report on Syria and provided us with some critical insights, addressing the issues of environmental and human sampling conducted by the UN investigators in Ghouta.

Based on his unique experience with casualties of nerve gas, Dr. Foroutan pointed out stark symptom irregularities displayed by Ghouta patients:

1. Sarin gas does not cause inflammation in the eye. We have observed many cases during Iraq’s war against Iran and victims presented with only brief and temporary redness in the eye. Here, 22% of cases still displayed inflammation after 5-7 days.

2. Miosis [constricted pupils] has been observed in 14% of cases while disorientation has been seen in 39% of the cases. This ratio is not logical. It is obligatory that complete raw data charts of the patients be published so that the correlation index between signs and symptoms of this case and other cases be calculated.

3. Regarding the 19% convulsion report: the reports from the victims themselves are not acceptable as they would have been unconscious at the time of convulsion. Unless others report the convulsion in the victim, these reports are otherwise unreliable.

4. The prescription of Atropine: this medicine is the most essential antidote for Sarin exposures and if a large amount of it is taken quickly and intravenously, it will save the patient . Rapid recovery of a severe case with high dose of atropine suggest the patient was exposed to a substance similar to nerve gas[sarin]. Unfortunately the information given is very incomplete and it has not been noted how exactly the patients have reacted to this cure.

5. Mentioning the vital signs like the pulse rate and blood pressure, which because of sarin classically become slow and low and subsequently atropine raises it up, is also an important diagnostic sign which unfortunately has not been recorded in the patients documents. Another important sign is auscultation of “wheezing” in the victims lungs, similar to the noise coming from an asthmatic patient, has not been mentioned. This neglection is abnormal.

6. Activity of an enzyme called “acetylcholinesterase” in the plasma and red blood cells will reduced immensely with nerve gases like sarin; and will reactivate (re-synthesize) after weeks until it becomes normal. Sarin is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor substance. Experts across the world are well informed of the importance of this lab data[reporting enzyme activity]. During the holy defense (Iran Iraq war) we would measure it in the frontline emergency center as a routine diagnostic test. The importance is that in moderate to severe cases, it decreases heavily without exception. Why has this examination not been done?

7. The claim of the identification of sarin molecules a week later in the biological samples needs an exact report of methodology of measurement for other experts of the world because of the high chance of technical error.

8. Regarding the environmental samples: according to the pictures, a lot of the places have been under the sunlight and due to the fact that sarin is very volatile, the claim of sarin detection should be accompanied with more description by the experts.

Overall in my view this report should be received/accepted medically with great caution and should be observed again by a team of international expert clinicians. My intention is not the denial of sarin but at least from the clinical point of view, the evidences of this report are not enough to prove the existence of a nerve gas [sarin] in this incident.

Dr. Foroutan also brought up a very important point about the UN’s assumption of Sarin in its testing, which can lead to false positives. In Appendix 7 of the UN Report, a notable number of the samples tested by two separate labs register different results:

“There is a possibility of a false positive recognition/diagnosis of sarin and by-products caused by natural decomposition and impurities with the primary gas.

An important point is that it seems the team has set up its experiment methods according to the pre-assumption that sarin had been used.

That is why it should be requested that all of the experiment/lab measurements should be published with the details of sample preparation and analysis methods and also even the pictures and files of the curve from the analysis devices.

During the imposed war (Iran Iraq war) a case of poisoning of the Iranian soldiers by Mycotoxins was reported by a credible lab in Belgium. They were definitely found in the urine and plasma samples but later we were informed that it was a false positive. In the UN study after the war it was proven that Iraq had no activity regarding the production of mycotoxins.”

I was informed that the above observations “were discussed in a medical gathering at the Shaheed Beheshti University of Medical Sciences led by Professor Abbas Foroutan.”

While we were fortunate to reach Dr. Foroutan for his insights on the UN Report, I am publishing this information now because he took the trouble of writing it out and sending it to me via an academic colleague who translated his comments in their entirety.

Syria's Gas Attack Mystery: Unanswered Questions and Easy Assumptions

The Sarin Mysteries: Syria, Sarin, and Casus Belli

by Michael Parenti

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that on August 21 the Assad government slaughtered 1,429 people, including 426 children, in a sarin chemical attack in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb. (Doctors Without Borders put the total at about 300.) Secretary Kerry insisted that now the United States had no choice but to launch U.S. bombing attacks against President Bashar al-Assad, devolving into another of America's "humanitarian wars."

The Sarin Mysteries

Following Kerry, President Obama announced that the situation in Syria had changed irredeemably since August 21. The United States would have to attack. But, on second thought, Obama decided to leave the decision up to (a seemingly reluctant) Congress.

A few weeks later, Turkish prosecutors issued a lengthy court indictment charging the Syrian rebels with seeking to use chemical weapons. The indictment suggested that sarin gas and other "weapons for a terrorist organization" were utilized by the opposition and not by the Assad government.

The "Syrian freedom fighters" include men who are not even Syrian, much like the many mujahedeen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan but who were not Afghani. As reported in the Wall Street Journal (September 19, 2013), the ISIS, an Iraqi al Qaeda outfit operating in Syria, "has become a magnet for foreign jihadists" who view the war in Syria not primarily as a means to overthrow Assad "but rather as a historic battleground for a larger Sunni holy war. According to centuries-old Islamic prophecy they espouse, they must establish an Islamic state in Syria as a step to achieving a global one."

Wrong Hands

Meanwhile, a Mint Press News story quoted residents in Ghouta who asserted that Saudi Arabia gave chemical weapons to an al Qaeda-linked group. Residents blamed this terrorist group for the deadly explosions of August 21. They claimed that some of the rebels handled the weapons improperly and thereby set off the explosions. Anti-government forces, interviewed in the article, said they had not been informed about the nature of the weapons nor how to use them.

“When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle them,” complained one rebel militant.

At the same time, the Russian government submitted a 100-page report to the United Nations in early September, regarding an attack upon the Syrian city of Aleppo in March 2013. It concludes that the rebels---not the Syrian government---used the nerve agent sarin. According to a member of the U.N. independent commission of inquiry, Carla Del Ponte, there were "strong, concrete suspicions . . . of the use of sarin gas." Del Ponte added: "This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not the government authorities." Many of those killed by the gas attack were Syrian soldiers, according to the report.

If true, then we might wonder why are chemical weapons and other weaponry and supplies being supplied to various al Qaeda-type groups? Is not al Qaeda a secret terrorist organization that delivers death and destruction upon people everywhere? Are we Americans not locked in a global struggle with the demonic jihadists who supposedly hate us because we are rich, successful, and secular, while they are impoverished failures? That certainly is the scenario the U.S. public has been fed for over a decade.

The United States claims it provides military assistance only to "vetted" rebel groups, "free ones" that are friendly toward America and are not Islamic fanatics. (Although, as Senator Croker, Republican from Tennessee, admitted: we sometimes make "mistakes" and give weapons to the wrong rebels.) On September 17, President Obama waived a provision in the federal law that prohibits supplying arms to terrorist groups. To many of us this was an unspoken admission that Washington was giving aid to extremist Islamic groups, of which al Qaeda was only the best advertised.

Remember the Casus Belli

It is difficult for me to accept the charge that on August 21 the Syrian government waged a chemical onslaught in Ghouta against its own people in a situation that was bound to backfire in the worst possible way---by handing over to the U.S. war hawks a casus belli, a perfect excuse to wreak retaliatory "humanitarian" death and destruction upon Syria. This is the last thing the Assad government wants.

Remember how the Spaniards asked the Americans not to send the USS Maine to Havana Harbor in 1898. They feared that something might happen to the ship and the U.S. would use that mishap as a casus belli, putting the blame on Spain. Sure enough, the Maine blew up while sitting in the harbor, sending U.S. public opinion into a jingoistic fury against the Spaniards. But why would Spaniards perpetrate the very act that would give the Americans an excuse and an inducement to wage a war that Spain most certainly did not want and could not win?

And let us not forget the hundreds of imaginary Kuwaiti babies torn from incubators and dashed upon hospital floors by snarling, maniacal Iraqi soldiers. And remember the never-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that Saddam supposedly was preparing to use but never got around to doing so. And then there's that Serbian general---never identified or located---who purportedly told his troops (also never identified) to "go forth and rape." And Qaddafi who reportedly handed out Viagra to his Libyan troops so they could go forth and rape with a drug-driven vigor, a story so obviously fabricated that it was dropped after two days.

Choice: Satellite or Enemy

Why do (some) U.S. leaders seek war against Syria? Like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and dozens of other countries that have felt America's terrible swift sword---Syria has been committing economic nationalism, trying to chart its own course rather than putting itself in service to the western plutocracy. Like Iran, China, Russia and some other nations, Syria has currency controls and other restrictions on foreign investments. Like those other nations, Syria lacks the proper submissiveness. It is not a satellite to the U.S. imperium. And any nation that is not under the politico-economic sway of the U.S. global plutocracy is considered an enemy or a potential enemy.

The Assad government had social programs for its people, far from perfect services but still better than what might be found in many U.S. satellite countries. When Iraqi refugees fled to Syria to escape U.S. military destruction, the Assad government gave them full benefits. So with the Libyan refugees who crossed over a few years later. Generally Damascus presided over a multi-ethnic society, relatively free of sectarian intolerance and violence.

Syria has been ruled by the Ba'ath Party which has dominated the country's parliament and military for half a century. The party's slogan is "Unity, Freedom, Socialism." Socialism? Now that gets us closer to why the trigger-happy boys in Washington will continue to pursue a "humanitarian war" of attrition and a prolonged campaign of demonization against Assad and his "regime."

Weapons of Mass Destruction Redux

On September 10, the Syrian government welcomed a Russian proposal calling for Syria to place all of its chemical weapons under international control and for the weapons to be destroyed. Here was a chance to avoid false charges of mass murder by sarin. If Assad no longer had such an arsenal, no one could accuse him of using it. (In any case, the Syrian government's campaign against the rebels was going well enough using just conventional weapons.)

Instead of winning approval from the humanitarian warriors of the West, Syria's eager agreement to surrender its chemical arsenal set off a newly framed barrage of threats from U.S. and French leaders, with the irrepressible Secretary Kerry leading the charge. Was this a ploy on Syria's part or a genuine offer? Kerry asked in a scoffing tone. How can we be certain that Assad would not sequester its enormous stock of chemical weapons? Kerry issued a whole barrage of tough-guy threats. Syria will be treated most harshly if it pursued a path of deception. French President François Hollande called for a United Nations Security resolution that would authorize the use of force if Syria failed to hand over its chemical weapons. One would think that Syria had refused to do so.

The August charge had been that Syria had used chemical weapons , a claim that might be refuted. Now the new charge was that Syria possessed such weapons---which was true. And possession itself was suddenly being treated as a crime deserving of swift and severe retaliation.

Now Assad would have to demonstrate the indemonstrable. He would have to convince the western aggressors that he has handed over his entire stockpile of chemical weapons. At the same time, he asserts that a thorough inspection must not come at the expense of disclosing Syrian military sites or causing a threat to its national security.

Recall how the Saddam government in Iraq, hoping to avoid war, cooperated fully with U.N. inspectors hunting for WMDs. Every facility in the country was opened to investigation. Even after all of Iraq was occupied, the hunt continued. We were told that the WMDs could be anywhere, maybe out in some remote part of the desert. It was impossible to be sure.

I fear that the Syrian population is facing more years of painful attrition. The one faintly positive development is that the FSA and the ISIS and all the murderous, Allah-is-great grouplets continue to attack not only the government forces but each other. Dozens of rebels have been killed in clashes with each other within the last few months.

Meanwhile young Syrian children, now living in refugee camps in Lebanon, go every morning to work long days in the fields, earning the few dollars a day upon which their families depend for survival. Some are as young as 5. When asked what they miss most about Syria, the children say, "school."

Michael Parenti is the author of "The Face of Imperialism" and "Waiting for Yesterday:Pages from a Street Kid's Life." See his website for more information: www.michaelparenti.org

More by Michael Parenti

Richmond, Ca. v. Wall Street

Can a Small California City Take on Wall Street—And Survive?

by Hannah Appel and JP Massar ­ – Strike Debt Bay Area

More than ten million foreclosures have piled up nationwide since the beginning of the mortgage crisis (Silver-Greenberg), forcing untold millions of people out of their homes. Egregious but all-too-common corporate practices contributed to the disaster: robo-signed or plainly fraudulent paperwork; borrowers with prime credit scores receiving subprime loans based on race. A series of government “settlements” benefitted too-big-to-fail banks far more than struggling homeowners. As people lost jobs and struggled to stay in their homes, multiple forms of debt began to intersect, leaving many to choose between mortgage payments and medical bills, groceries, or student loan installments.

A few hundred homes out of millions have been saved with direct action. Groups like Occupy Oakland Foreclosure Defense have focused their efforts on individual homeowners with tragic stories like that of Jodie Randolph in Alameda, CA, who was being forced to choose between chemotherapy and a roof over her head. Others have pursued lawsuits with lackluster results. Government programs and monies from “settlements” with the big banks have only reached a small percentage of those affected, and even then it is often too little, too late. In other words, we’ve barely made a dent. We need a more radical solution.

Enter Richmond, California, a small city of roughly a hundred thousand people (39% Latino, 31% white, 26% African American.) Richmond has been hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis and recently decided to do something about it. In late July of 2013, the city approached banks and other holders of 624 underwater properties, offering to buy the mortgages at fair market value in order to refinance them and give residents substantial principal reductions (see Appendix II). Not a single mortgage holder responded. Richmond then decided to explore the option of seizing the mortgages through eminent domain.

The 1% has other ideas.

In response to the whisper of eminent domain, Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank filed a lawsuit[i] demanding an injunction forbidding Richmond from continuing this process; analysts predicted that banks would never write a mortgage in Richmond again, and Wall Street managed to blackball the city to such an extent that no one was willing to buy a standard, vanilla municipal bond offering they floated in August, 2013. Ratings agencies also threatened to downgrade Richmond’s A- credit rating.

No one seems to bat an eye when eminent domain is used to seize land in the name of “economic development,” but where it’s being used to directly improve the economic well-being of homeowners and the city at large Wall Street unleashes its wrath.

Swayed by the intense pressure, Richmond’s city council now seems divided on how to proceed – but Richmond’s citizens seem more united. At a September 2013 meeting, one councilmember opposed to the plan asked the packed crowd, “Do you really want a tiny city like Richmond to take on Wall Street?” “YES!” was the uproarious response. While the banks’ initial lawsuit was dismissed (but can still be re-filed), there is no doubt that Wall Street and the Obama administration will continue to pressure Richmond to drop the plan. (The Federal Housing Finance Agency has all but threatened to file suit itself).

Why is Wall Street so frightened? After all, investors would be paid fair market value for the mortgages they are holding. Indeed, the original version of the plan, written by Professor Richard Hockett of Cornell University, posed it not as radical but as a “market corrective.” Hockett designed the plan as a win for creditors as well as homeowners, a method to bring the market back in a way that returns steady, predictable profits to investors and helps communities fund their operations by recuperating the local tax base. So again, if the plan’s original architect had such conservative intentions (at least to radical ears), why the hullabaloo? And why might those of us interested in more radical approaches to systemic debt support this particular plan? Here are a few thoughts:

In most cases banks don’t actually own these mortgages. Mortgages were and continue to be repackaged into securities by banks and then sold in tranches to investors across the world. What banks do is service these mortgages. They get paid fees for collecting mortgage payments; they get paid fees for dealing with homeowners questions and refinance requests; if a home goes into foreclosure, they get paid to handle all the foreclosure proceedings and a fee to handle an eviction if necessary. Were the Richmond plan to go through, many banks would no longer act as servicers and would thus lose that revenue stream.

In some cases, investor holdings of mortgage securities may be on their books at still-inflated rates rather than at current market value. In other words, the mortgage-backed securities may be priced based on the original principal amount and current revenue stream (optimistically forecasting the probability of default as small) rather than on what someone would pay for the security at the present time. Were the Richmond plan to go through, these holdings would be “marked to market” and pension funds, hedge funds and other entities which hold these securities would find themselves with less on their books than they had previously been able to claim.

The Federal government has so far forbidden Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from allowing principal reductions. This has set a national precedent putting principal reductions outside the realm of possibility. If Richmond were to set a new precedent, no one knows what effect it might have on the mortgage securities market. Financial markets, of course, are a confidence scheme, based as much (if not more) on trust, perception and affect than on quantitative modeling or microeconomic theorems. If it is shown that a single municipality can take on Wall Street successfully and possibly spread its ideas across the country, the mortgage securities market could collapse.

Risk is always calculated into any investment scheme and becomes a major factor in price. The concept of seizing mortgages, something previously unheard of, introduces risk of an entirely new nature and might radically change the calculus of investing in mortgage securities.

Finally, the mortgage market has been the exclusive province of bankers, and there is no way they will cede power over this lucrative business to the public without a fight.

These are just five reasons why Wall Street might be scared, though there are likely many more we haven’t thought of. Generally, it’s a fair bet that you’re onto something when both big banks and big government want to sue you. We sense that there may be more profound reasons for their fear—ways in which the ongoing mortgage crisis makes vulnerable the very infrastructures of capitalism. For instance, hundreds of thousands of mortgages have broken chains of title (as just one example, we cite Your Mortgage Documents Are Fake), which means no one knows who, if anyone, owns them. Despite pathetic “settlements” trying to wish this reality away, these broken chains throw the nature of private property across the country into question in an unprecedented way. If Richmond and other municipalities are emboldened by a win with eminent domain, more radical agendas then seem increasingly possible—simply taking mortgages that no one can prove ownership of and using the capital to start a public bank, or redistributing those homes to their owners with clear title and no mortgage.

The Richmond situation presents ethical quandaries for the radical imagination. In order to come this far, and to continue, Richmond has relied on the pro bono services of a for-profit firm, Mortgage Resolution Partners (MRP). They are currently covering all of Richmond’s legal fees, offering technical assistance and, theoretically, providing access to the mortgage securities markets. Should mortgages ultimately be taken by eminent domain and restructured, MRP stands to gain $4,500 per mortgage (a relative pittance, considering all the resources they have and will have expended). For MRP, Richmond is clearly a loss leader; to make a profit, they would almost certainly have to take this program statewide or nationwide.

At this time we take no position on MRP’s role other than to note that without its existence and its promise to cover costs, Richmond would never have embarked on this battle. We do observe that much of MRP’s role could be played by a local or state public bank, a non-profit institution that has as an existence proof the Public Bank of North Dakota.

Richmond’s next step will be to create a Joint Powers Authority, which will allow Richmond to work with other willing municipalities in California on this project. The wider the participation, the less the risk to any single municipality, and the more Wall Street will tremble. And yet, this fight has just begun. If Richmond’s Mayor decides she has no choice but to go the eminent domain route, she will need a fifth, supermajority-giving vote from her fellow councilmembers, as necessitated by California law. Even if she gets that vote, there is a series of complicated legal issues that may affect the strategy in court. (For instance, Richmond may have the right to seize things within its borders, but does a mortgage—held by a set of investors around the globe— actually exist “within” Richmond? Does it matter?) Finally, even clearing the legal hurdles, this particular iteration of the eminent domain plan only helps a certain subset of debt-owners: those whose homes are underwater, but who are not yet in foreclosure. In other words, this is not yet the radical, systemic solution we envision and toward which we will work tirelessly. It is, however, people taking power back from Wall Street in imaginative ways, and may serve as a kind of radical calisthenics, getting us in shape for the bigger fights to come.

Appendix I: If you think this is a good idea, here’s what you can do to help:
1) Spread the word! You never know who might pick up on the idea and try to implement it.

2) If you live in California, try getting your city or town to consider the idea and join the Joint Powers Authority (Patrick Lynch, Director of Richmond’s Housing and Community Development Division). Or attempt to get your city council to issue a letter in support of Richmond’s efforts to fight foreclosures in this novel fashion.

3) If you are not in California, check to see if your state allows intangible property seizures by eminent domain. If so, suggest the process to a municipality in your state that is drowning in foreclosures.

4) Consider getting a group together to research mortgages with broken chains of title in your area. A big push here could yield radical results.

5) If you are local to the Bay Area, join Strike Debt Bay Area, ACCE and/or the Richmond Progressive Alliance, three groups working on various aspectsof this fight.

Appendix II: An example of how eminent domain principal reduction might work:

Suppose John and Mary Smith own a house on which the outstanding mortgage balance is $400,000. Suppose that if the house were sold today, its fair market value would be $200,000.

Suppose someone offered to sell the Smith’s mortgage to you (i.e.,transfer to you the right to the monthly payments and to foreclose if payments stopped). How much would you be willing to pay?

We can assume that Wall Street analysts have sophisticated computer programs that can accurately estimate how much any mortgage is worth. Suppose the value of the Smiths’ mortgage via this analysis is $180,000.

What Richmond wants to do is go to the mortgage holder and say, “Look, I know that if you offered this mortgage for sale on one of your fancy mortgage trading markets, someone might be willing to pay you $180,000 for it. Here’s $180,000. Give us the mortgage.”

A rational mortgage holder would then say, “Well, I don’t know. How about $190,000?” And then Richmond might say, “$185,000.” And the current mortgage holder would likely say, “Okay, done!”

Richmond, now the owner of this mortgage, would then turn around and give the Smiths a new mortgage with a principal amount of $200,000 (the current market value). At this point the Smiths’ home is no longer underwater, the Smiths’ monthly payment drops significantly, their chance of being forced into default has been massively reduced, there is no reason for them to “walk away” from the property, the investor-owners of the previous mortgage have been fairly compensated, the Smiths might well spend the money they are saving on their mortgage payment at local shops—in other words, everyone is happy. Richmond would sell this new, improved, mortgage on the open market for the $180,000 they paid for it—or more, because now the prospect of default is very, very low— recouping the money it spent on the original purchase.


[i] Wells Fargo Bank National Association, as Trustee, et al. v. City of Richmond, California and Mortgage Resolution Partners Llc, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, Case No. CV-13-3663


Strike Debt is an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street

Sudan Latest Beneficiary of Spring-like Liberation Movement

Old Dog, Old Trick: US, Saudis, Qatar Attempt “Arab Spring” Retread in Sudan

by Tony Cartalucci - Global Research

Protests are smokescreen for unfolding US-Saudi-Qatari backed violence seeking regime change in Sudan.

The Associated Press reveals that recent and ongoing “Arab Spring-style” unrest in Sudan’s capital of Khartoum is led by Sudan’s Western-backed opposition, the National Umma Party, and the various faux-NGO’s and “independent media” organizations created by the West to prop it up. This reveals yet another Western-engineered uprising designed for regime change in favor of a new, Western friendly client regime.

The AP article, “Sudanese protesters demand the regime’s ouster,” first claims:

Activists acknowledge they have no unified leadership or support from political parties but express hope the spontaneous nature of the current round of protests means they’re gaining momentum.

However, AP then admits [emphasis added]:

One of Sudan’s most prominent opposition leaders, Sadiq al-Mahdi of the National Umma Party, told worshippers at a mosque in the district of Omdurman that al-Bashir has been spending the state’s budget on “consolidating power” and failed “to lift the agony off the citizens’ shoulders.”

After the sermon, protesters marched through the district, a longtime opposition stronghold, chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime,” the slogan heard in Arab Spring uprisings that began in late 2010 and have led to the ouster of the leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

Clearly, the “activists” indeed have a leader – Sadiq al-Mahdi of the National Umma Party who was literally leading the protesters out into the streets. And while comparisons to the “Arab Spring” invokes images of peaceful “pro-democracy” protests – AP admits that the protesters are already turning to violence:

Angry protesters torched police and dozens of gas stations and government buildings, and students marched chanting for al-Bashir’s ouster.

AP, perhaps hoping readers would not bother researching the matter further, also quotes “local blogger and journalist Reem Shawka” to bolster their narrative. Shawka is a columnist at Sudan’s 500 Words Magazine. While 500 Words maintains that it is “a Sudanese independent online magazine,” it proudly advertises in the right column of its website an upcoming US Institute of Peace “Sudanese and South Sudanese Youth Leaders Program.” Like Thailand’s deceitful US-funded propaganda front Prachatai, 500 Words is most likely directly funded by the US government, and is most certainly in tune with the US State Department’s agenda and talking points regarding Sudan.



Image: Sudan’s “independent online magazine,” 500 Words proudly advertises for the US Institute of Peace on its website (right-hand side), exposing the predictable ties between its support for Western-backed opposition inside of Sudan and the US State Department through the National Endowment for Democracy and others, who most likely funds the online propaganda front.
….

Indeed 500 Words’ editor-in-chief, Moez Ali, has his own page on “Open Democracy” – funded by Open Society Institute, the Oak Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, TIDES, and many others.

It should be mentioned that the US Institute of Peace – advertised for on 500 Words - has played an instrumental role in the Western-engineered “Arab Spring,” where it literally crafts the constitutions and structure of proxy regimes the West plans to create once targeted nations have been overthrown.

Who is Opposition Leader Sadiq al-Mahdi?

Sadiq al-Mahdi, leader of Sudan’s National Umma Party, is a member of the EU-US-Saudi-Qatari run Arab Democracy Foundation and the Club de Madrid which features former US President Bill Clinton as a “full member” amongst many others, and is backed by Wall Street and London’s myriad of “international institutions” and foundations including the World Bank, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, Walmart, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Microsoft, and many others.

Al-Mahdi himself was Oxford educated, according to his official Club de Madrid biography, which also states [emphasis added]:

Al-Mahdi was elected president of the Umma party in November 1964, and led a campaign to promote political activity, develop political Islam, and reform the party by expanding its base and promoting democracy behavior. Despite his efforts towards a democratic government, there was another coup d´état in 1969 that led to a dictatorship referred to as the May Regime.

He was soon arrested by the military government, exiled to Egypt, and detained in Sudanese prisons repeatedly until 1974. Later that year, he traveled abroad and toured Arab and African Capitals where he delivered a number of lectures. While in exile, he formed the National Democratic Front (NDF), comprised of Umma, the Democratic Unionist Party, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Through his efforts, the NDF was able to make an accord of national reconciliation in 1977 with the May Regime that mandated democratic reform.

His direct association with the Muslim Brotherhood is important, as this is the organization that as far back as 2007, under then US President George Bush, began receiving US-Saudi-Israeli support to prepare the violent overthrow of several nations, including in particular, Syria. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redireciton: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” would reveal US-Saudi-Israeli support behind funding and arming the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria:

“the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations.”

Hersh also reported that a supporter of the Lebanese pro-US-Saudi Hariri faction had met Dick Cheney in Washington and relayed personally the importance of using the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in any move against the ruling government:

“[Walid] Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.”

The article would continue by explaining how already in 2007 US and Saudi backing had begun benefiting the Brotherhood:

“There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.”

That al-Mahdi, whose coalition included the Muslim Brotherhood that’s played an instrumental role executing recent Western designs in Syria and Egypt, and whose uprising and calls for faux-reform is echoed by the likes of Sudanese extremist leader Hassan al-Turabi (who had in fact invited Osama Bin Laden to Sudan), is now leading protesters through the streets of Sudan’s capital, torching infrastructure, government buildings, and police stations (just as was done across Egypt and Syria), indicates another attempt by the West to overthrow the Sudanese government via proxy militancy.

That the West has once again “coincidentally” arrayed its vast resources behind al-Mahdi’s “revolution,” which includes Al Qaeda-linked leaders like al-Turabi, once again illustrates that so-called “Islamic” extremism is a geopolitical tool both created and intentionally perpetuated by the West, both as a pretext for direct military invasion and occupation (Mali, Afghanistan) and as an inexhaustible proxy mercenary force for overthrowing targeted nations (Libya, Egypt, Syria).

What to Watch For

Sudan shares borders with NATO-overthrown Libya, destabilized Egypt, and US military proxy Ethiopia. It is also across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia itself. Both Libya and Egypt have sizable US-Saudi-Israeli-Qatari-backed terrorist organizations and their affiliated political arms – the Muslim Brotherhood being the most prominent. Sudan is a potential tinderbox made more volatile in recent years due to the Muslim Brotherhood’s US-Saudi-Qatari-Israeli enabled rise, along with the Western-backed terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, that form it’s armed factions.

The West’s interest in Sudan is not causal or spontaneous. It was listed as one of several nations the US had intended to violently overthrow and subjugate as a client regime since at least 2001, revealed in a speech given by US Army General Wesley Clark in 2007.

With a recent terrorist attack by US armed and backed Al Qaeda in Nairobi Kenya threatening to justify new joint African Union-US AFRICOM incursions into Somalia, and destabilizations ongoing in both Egypt and to a much greater extent in Syria, the words of General Wesley Clark are both prophetic and indicative of the true nature of both the so-called “Arab Spring” and the attempted violent regime changes being organized behind the smokescreen of “pro-democracy protesters.”

While Sudan may not seem to have significance to most across the West, the geopolitical implications of an entire region from Mali to Pakistan under Western destabilization directly impacts oil, logistics, and stability across the globe. Nations like China which relies on African and Middle Eastern trade, are directly impacted by US attempts to destabilize and overthrow Sudan - and is in fact one of the driving motivations of the West’s so-called “Arab Spring.”

Following the “Arab Spring” playbook, we should expect attempts to justify the increased militarization of the so-called “opposition,” who will at first be portrayed as “pro-democracy” moderates forced to “defend themselves,” but will be fully revealed as Al Qaeda as full-scale proxy military operations get underway. The only way to avert a destructive military conflict is for the Sudanese government to swiftly and severely crush the opposition and secure the borders where NATO-backed militants and their equipment are most likely to flow.

Sudan’s government must also make real attempts at reform, while exposing the foreign-backed nature of opposition leaders trying to divide and destroy the nation. By breaking the predictable “evil dictator” mold Sudan’s leadership has been cast in by the Western media, it, and other nations targeted by Western regime change can even the odds leveled against them by the still formidable Western press and their partners in propaganda across Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel.

Unprecedented amounts of resources have been committed to the geopolitical reordering of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. It would be a considerable mistake for any nation overtly listed by the US as “pending regime change” to underestimate any beginnings of unrest clearly backed by foreign interests. While some operations may be “testing the waters,” the final push can come at any time with fully militarized proxies pre-positioned and prepared to sow the same genocidal destruction US-backed terrorists in Syria are carrying out.

After the Choir Leaves: Obama Preaching to the Pews

A World in Which No One Is Listening to the Planet’s Sole Superpower: The Greater Middle East’s Greatest Rebuff to Uncle Sam

by Dilip Hiro  - TomDispatch

What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known -- repeatedly -- and finds that no one is listening? Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension. Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East.

In the future, the indecent haste with which Barack Obama sought cover under the umbrella unfurled by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis will be viewed as a watershed moment when it comes to America’s waning power in that region. 

In the aptly named “arc of instability,” the lands from the Chinese border to northern Africa that President George W. Bush and his neocon acolytes dreamed of thoroughly pacifying, turmoil is on the rise. Ever fewer countries, allies, or enemies, are paying attention, much less kowtowing, to the once-formidable power of the world’s last superpower. The list of defiant figures -- from Egyptian generals to Saudi princes, Iraqi Shiite leaders to Israeli politicians -- is lengthening.

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Mystery of Washington's Waning Global Power

Among the curious spectacles of our moment, the strangeness of the Obama presidency hasn’t gotten its full due. After decades in which “the imperial presidency” was increasingly in the spotlight, after two terms of George W. Bush in which a literal cult of executive power -- or to use the term of that moment, “the unitary executive” -- took hold in the White House, and without any obvious diminution in the literal powers of the presidency, Barack Obama has managed to look like a bystander at his own funeral.

If I had to summarize these years, I would say that he entered the phone booth dressed as Superman and came out as Clark Kent. Today, TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro, author most recently of the invaluable A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East, points out that, as far as Obama’s foreign (and war) policy, it’s almost as if, when the American president speaks, no one in the Greater Middle East -- not even our closest allies or client states -- is listening. And true as it may be for that region, it seems, bizarrely enough, no less true in Washington where the president’s recent attempts to intervene in the Syrian civil war were rejected both by Congress (though without a final vote on the subject) and by the American people via opinion polls.

It should be puzzling just how little power the present executive is actually capable of wielding. He can go to the U.N. or Kansas City and make speeches (that themselves often enough implicitly cast him as a kind of interested observer of his own presidency), but nothing much that he says in Washington seems any longer to be seriously attended to. In the foreign policy arena, he is surrounded by a secretary of defense who ducks for cover, a secretary of state who wanders the world blowing off steam, and a national security advisor and U.N. ambassador who seem like blundering neophytes and whose basic ideological stance (in favor of American -- aka “humanitarian” -- interventions globally) has been rejected in this country by almost any constituency imaginable. Unlike previous presidents, he evidently has no one -- no Brent Scowcroft, Jim Baker, or even Henry Kissinger -- capable of working the corridors of power skillfully or bringing a policy home.

Domestically, who ever heard of a presidency already into its second term that, according to just about all observers, has only one significant achievement -- Obamacare (whatever you think of it) -- and clearly hasn’t a hope in hell of getting a second one? Just as he’s done in Syria, Obama will now be watching relatively helplessly as Republicans in Congress threaten to shut the government down and not raise the debt ceiling -- and whatever happens, who expects him to be the key player in that onrushing spectacle? America’s waning power in the Greater Middle East is more than matched by Obama’s waned power in this country. In our lifetime, we’ve never seen a president -- not even the impeached Clinton -- so drained of power or influence. It’s a puzzle wrapped in an enigma swaddled by a pretzel. Go figure. Tom

A World in Which No One Is Listening to the Planet’s Sole Superpower: The Greater Middle East’s Greatest Rebuff to Uncle Sam

by Dilip Hiro

 The signs of this loss of clout have been legion in recent years. In August 2011, for instance, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ignored Obama’s unambiguous call for him “to step aside.” Nothing happened even after an unnamed senior administration official insisted, “We are certain Assad is on the way out.” As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Similarly, in March 2010, Obama personally delivered a half-hour-long chewing out of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a politician Washington installed in office, on the corruption and administrative ineptitude of his government. It was coupled with a warning that, if he failed to act, a cut in U.S. aid would follow. Instead, the next month the Obama administration gave him the red carpet treatment on a visit to Washington with scarcely a whisper about the graft and ill-governance that continues to this day.

In May 2009, during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama demanded a halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem. In the tussle that followed, the sole superpower lost out and settlement expansion continued.

These are among the many examples of America’s slumping authority in the Greater Middle East, a process well underway even before Obama entered the Oval Office in January 2009. It had, for years, been increasingly apparent that Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with several lesser campaigns in the Global War on Terror, were doomed. In his inaugural address, Obama swore that the United States was now “ready to lead the world.” It was a prediction that would be proven disastrously wrong in the Greater Middle East.

Afghanistan and Pakistan

Invaded and occupied Afghanistan was to be the starting point for phase two in the triumphant singular supremacy of Uncle Sam. The first phase had ended in December 1991 with the titanic collapse of its partner in a MAD -- that is, mutually assured destruction -- world, the Soviet Union. A decade later, Washington was poised to banish assorted “terror” constellations from nearly 80 countries and to bring about regime change for the “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea). Having defeated the “Evil Empire” of the Soviets, Washington couldn’t have felt more confident when it came to achieving this comparatively modest aim.

Priority was initially given to sometime ally and client state Pakistan, the main player in creating the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s. Much to the chagrin of policymakers in Washington, however, the rulers of Pakistan, military and civilian, turned out to be masters at squeezing the most out of the United States (which found itself inescapably dependent on their country to prosecute its Afghan war), while delivering the least in return.

Today, the crumbling economy of Pakistan is in such a dire state that its government can keep going only by receiving handouts from the U.S. and regular rollover loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since the IMF arrangement is subject to Washington’s say-so, it seemed logical that the Obama administration could bend Islamabad to its diktats. Yet Pakistani leaders seldom let a chance pass to highlight American diplomatic impotence, if only to garner some respect from their own citizens, most of whom harbor an unfavorable view of the U.S.

A case in point has been the daredevil actions of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder-leader of the Lashkar-e Taiba (Army of the Pure, or LeT), listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations following its involvement in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which killed 166 people, including six Americans. In April 2012, the State Department announced a $10 million reward for information leading to Saeed’s arrest and conviction. The bearded 62-year-old militant leader promptly called a press conference and declared, “I am here. America should give that reward money to me.”

He continues to operate from a fortified compound in Lahore, the capital of Punjab. “I move about like an ordinary person -- that’s my style,” he told the New York Times’s Declan Walsh in February. He addresses large rallies throughout the country and is a much sought-after guest on Pakistani TV. According to intelligence officials based in the country, the militants of his organization participate in attacks on NATO forces and Indian diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan.

In August, when Saeed led a widely publicized parade on the nation’s Independence Day, protected by local police, all that a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad could helplessly say was: “We remain concerned about the movements and activities of this person. We encourage the government of Pakistan to enforce sanctions against this person.”

Far more worrisome for Washington was the critical role that the al Qaeda-affiliated Pakistani Taliban, also listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department, played in determining the outcome of the country’s general election in May. It threatened to attack the public rallies and candidates of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) because its membership was open to non-Muslims. This tied the party’s hands in a predominantly rural society where, in the absence of reliable opinion polls, the size and frequency of public rallies is considered a crucial indicator of party strength. The outcome: a landslide victory by the opposition Pakistan Muslim League led by Nawaz Sharif, which drastically reduced the strength of the PPP in the National Assembly.

In mid-September, Prime Minister Sharif returned the favor by securing an all-party consensus in the National Assembly to negotiate peace with the Pakistani Taliban without conditions. Militant leaders then raised the stakes by insisting that his government first devise a policy to halt the ongoing U.S. drone campaign against them in the country’s tribal borderlands.

This compelled the Sharif government to announce that it would raise the issue of the American drone campaign at the United Nations General Assembly. Its move is likely to coincide with a report by Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, on U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia to be presented to the General Assembly in October. Emmerson has already described Washington’s drone campaign as a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty.

In addition, ignoring Washington’s reported disapproval, Sharif’s government has started releasing Afghan Taliban prisoners -- one of them “of high value” in the lexicon of the White House -- from its jails to facilitate what it calls “reconciliation” in Afghanistan. As yet, however, there is no sign that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Afghan Taliban (widely believed to be under surreptitious Pakistani protection), is ready to negotiate with the government of Karzai whom he regularly denounces as an American puppet.

In early August, in his annual Eid al Fitr (Festival of Breaking the Fast) message, Omar was unmistakably hawkish. “As to the deceiving drama under the name of elections 2014, our pious people will not tire themselves out, nor will they participate in it,” he said. He then called for continued struggle against U.S.-led NATO troops and their Afghan allies, and urged Kabul's security forces to direct their guns at foreign solders, government officials, and Afghans cooperating with the U.S.-led troops.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been pressuring Karzai to sign an agreement that, among other things, would allow the Pentagon to maintain a significant “footprint” in Afghanistan under the rubric of “training Afghan forces” after the withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO combat troops by December 2014. So far, despite his dependence on Washington for his political survival, Karzai has been playing hardball.

In this, Washington is heading down a familiar path. In Iraq, both the Bush and Obama administrations tried to reach an agreement with a government the U.S. had helped install to leave behind 10,000-20,000 military trainers and special operations troops. It failed when the pro-Tehran, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki doggedly refused.

These days, despite the repeated U.S. complaints and requests, the Maliki government continues to allow Iranian arms to be sent overland and through its air space to the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. In late August, during the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, Iraq even declared that it wouldn’t allow its airspace to be used for military strikes on Syria.

The Diminishing “Coalition of the Willing”

In a controversial New York Times op-ed on September 11th, Russian President Putin wrote of President Obama’s plan to launch a military strike against Damascus, “It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts has become commonplace for the United States... Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan, ‘you’re either with us or against us.’”

Only days earlier, however, President Obama had failed to form a “coalition of the willing” on the Syrian issue at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, managing to rally only 10 members. Those who opposed military strikes against Syria without a U.N. Security Council mandate included the five-strong BRICS powers -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- along with Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and Argentina.

A week earlier, the British parliament defeated a motion to join a U.S.-led operation against Syria. With the British “poodle” slipping Washington’s leash -- an unprecedented act in recent memory -- Obama was lost.

In desperation, he turned to Congress, where, thousands of miles from the Greater Middle East, only a minority tuned in. Responding to the overwhelming sentiments of their constituents and opinion polls showing that remarkably few Americans believed an attack on Syria in national interest, the lawmakers started lining up to give Obama a resounding thumbs-down. It was only then, after an offhand remark by his Secretary of State John Kerry was taken up by Moscow, that Obama went on television and accepted the outlines of Putin’s proposed plan for Syria’s chemical weapons.

A Landmark Deal Underscores U.S. Decline

Undoubtedly, the Syrian deal struck in Geneva between Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov favored the Kremlin. It put any American attack firmly on the back burner. It brought the U.N. Security Council, earlier skirted by the Obama White House, center-stage as the primary agency to implement and supervise the deal. In the process, it underscored the continuing influence of Russia as a permanent member of the Council with a veto. Moscow also managed to spare the Assad regime the degradation of its military capabilities that would have resulted from the Pentagon’s strikes. In so doing, it enabled the Syrian leader to maintain the current battlefield superiority of his forces. Overall, the Syrian rebels and Washington were unmitigated losers.

Among other losers were Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan. On the opposite side of the equation were Iran and the military rulers of Egypt, albeit for diametrically contrary reasons. For Tehran, a Syria governed by Assad, a member of the Alawi sub-sect within Shiite Islam, is a linchpin in the axis of resistance against Israel. For the generals in Cairo, the demon is the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Syrian branch is the foremost foe of Assad.

Having overthrown Muhammad Morsi, the first democratically elected ruler in Egypt’s long history, the generals are now busily attempting to eradicate the Brotherhood itself, the oldest political party in the region. Following their July 3rd coup, they were reassured when Obama, though perturbed by their actions, meticulously avoided using that word "coup," which would have resulted in a suspension of aid as mandated by the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act. In contrast, his administration did suspend aid to the African state of Mali in March 2012 when, in a bloodless coup, the military toppled democratically elected President Amadou Toure.

If Obama was having second thoughts on his Egyptian policy, “marathon phone calls” from Jerusalem evidently ensured that no significant action would be taken against the military junta.

Israel’s prime minister and foreign minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defense minister Moshe Yaalon, and national security adviser Yaakov Amidror engaged their American counterparts -- Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and Susan Rice -- in telephone conversations urging them not to freeze the $1.3 billion in military aid to the post-Morsi regime.

To the delight of the generals in Cairo, Israel’s lobbying continued unabated in Washington. Among others, Michael B. Oren, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, argued forcefully for an uninterrupted flow of U.S. aid. “Israel has been waging an almost desperate diplomatic battle in Washington,” wrote Alex Fishman, a leading Israeli columnist, in Yediot Aharonot on August 25. That was just 10 days after Egypt’s Interior Ministry troops had massacred nearly 1,000 Brotherhood supporters while clearing two protest sites in Cairo where pro-Morsi partisans had been staging peaceful open air sit-ins. Obama responded by saying, “Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back.” But all he did was to cancel an upcoming annual joint military exercise with Egypt.

The evident impotence of Washington before yet another client state with an economy in freefall was highlighted by the revelation that since the ouster of Morsi, Secretary of Defense Hagel had 15 telephone conversations with Egyptian Defense Minister General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, the coup leader, pleading with him to “change course” -- but in vain -- a repeat of Washington’s experience with Karzai, the Pakistani leaders, and Assad.

The threat that Washington might cut-off its military aid to Egypt was promptly countered by its long-standing ally in the region: Saudi Arabia. In a gesture of undisguised defiance of U.S. wishes, Saudi foreign minister Saud al Faisal pledged publicly that his country would fill any financial gaps left if the U.S. and the European Union withdrew aid to Cairo. With Riyadh’s budget surplus of $103 billion last year, his words carried weight.

Within a week of the coup in Cairo, the three oil-rich states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates -- each dependent on the Pentagon for its external security -- poured $12 billion into the bankrupt Egyptian treasury. In this way, these autocratic monarchies encouraged the military junta to defy Washington’s pleas for a return to democracy.

Launching a blitz of jingoistic propaganda and pumping up Egyptian xenophobia, the generals have gone beyond thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam. They have even concocted wild theories about how Washington has colluded with the Muslim Brotherhood. These are now being assiduously peddled through the state-controlled media and its compliant private sector counterpart.

In late August, for instance, the state-owned newspaper, Al Ahram, citing “security sources,” published a sensational front-page story by its editor-in-chief Abdel Nasser Salama. It claimed the authorities had foiled a plot involving U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson, Brotherhood leader Kharat El Shater (by then under arrest), “37 terrorists,” and 200 Gaza-based jihadists to infiltrate the Sinai Peninsula through clandestine tunnels between the two territories, and create chaos. This was to be a preamble to isolating Upper Egypt and declaring it independent of Cairo. In response, Ambassador Patterson did no more than send a note of protest to Salama. Such stories have become grist for the Egyptian rumor mill and are transforming fantasies into facts in the popular psyche.

At the turn of the century, who could have imagined that barely a decade later an official mouthpiece for an emergent military dictator in Egypt, a client state of Uncle Sam for a quarter of a century, would have the audacity to malign Washington in this way while its generous aid package continued to flow in uninterrupted? If you need a marker for the waning of American power in the Greater Middle East, look no further.

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, has written 34 books, including After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. His latest book is A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East (Interlink Publishing Group).

Copyright 2013 Dilip Hiro

Barrett Brown from Behind the Information Barricade

The Cyber-Intelligence Complex and Its Useful Idiots

by Barrett Brown - In Communicado

July 1, 2013

 

It's a fine thing to see mainstream American media outlets finally sparing some of their attention toward the cyber-industrial complex – that unprecedented conglomeration of state, military and corporate interests that together exercise growing power over the flow of information. It would be even more heartening if so many of the nation's most influential voices, from senator to pundits, were not clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends.

Summing up the position of those who worry less over secret government powers than they do over the whistleblowers who reveal such things, we have New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who argues that we can trust small cadres of unaccountable spies with broad powers over our communications. We must all wish Friedman luck with this prediction. Other proclamations of his – including that Vladimir Putin would bring transparency and liberal democracy to Russia, and that the Chinese regime would not seek to limit its citizens' free access to the internet – have not aged especially well.

An unkind person might dismiss Friedman as the incompetent harbinger of a dying republic. Being polite, I will merely suggest that Friedman's faith in government is as misplaced as faith in the just and benevolent God that we know not to exist – Friedman having been the winner of several of the world's most-coveted Pulitzer Prizes.

If Friedman is, indeed, too quick to trust the powerful, it's a trait he shares with the just over half of Americans, who tell pollsters they're fine with the NSA programs that were until recently hidden from their view. Why, our countrymen wonder, ought we to be disturbed by our state's desire to know everything that everyone does? Given the possibility that this surveillance could perhaps prevent deaths in the form of terrorist attacks, most Americans are willing to forgo some abstract notion of privacy in favor of the more concrete benefits of security.

Besides, the government to which we're ceding these broad new powers is a democracy, overseen by real, live Americans. And it's hard to imagine American government officials abusing their powers – or at least, it would be, had such officials not already abused similar but more limited powers through repeated campaigns of disinformation, intimidation and airtight crimes directed at the American public over the last five decades. Cointelpro, Operation Mockingbird, Ultra and Chaos are among the now-acknowledged CIA, FBI and NSA programs by which those agencies managed to subvert American democracy with impunity. Supporters of mass surveillance conducted under the very same agencies have yet to address how such abuses can be insured against in the context of powers far greater than anything J Edgar Hoover could command.

Many have never heard of these programs; the sort of people who trust states with secret authority tend not to know what such things have led to in the recent past. Those who do know of such things may perhaps contend that these practices would never be repeated today. But it was just two years ago that the late Michael Hastings revealed that US army officials in Afghanistan were conducting psy-ops against visiting US senators in order to sway them towards continued funding for that unsuccessful war. If military and intelligence officials have so little respect for the civilian leadership, one can guess how they feel about mere civilians.

Not that anyone need merely guess. Discussing the desirability of such "information operations" in his 2001 book, retired USAF Lt Col George Crawford noted that voters tend to view these sorts of programs with suspicion. "Consequently," he concludes, "these efforts must take place away from public eyes."

And so they do. If we want to learn a thing or two about the latest round of such programs – that is, if we are willing to disregard the Thomas Friedmans of this world – we must look not just towards the three letter agencies that have routinely betrayed us in the past, but also to the untold number of private intelligence contracting firms that have sprung up lately in order to betray us in a more efficient and market-oriented manner. Our lieutenant colonel, scourge of "public eyes", is among the many ex-military and intelligence officials who have left public service, or public obfuscation – or whatever we're calling it now – to work in the expanding sphere of private spookery, to which is outsourced information operations by the Pentagon, spy agencies, and even other corporations who need an edge over some enemy (in Crawford's case, the mysterious Archimedes Global).

So, how trustworthy is this privatized segment of the invisible empire? We would know almost nothing of their operations were it not for a chance turn of events that prompted Anonymous-affiliated hackers to seize 70,000 emails from one typical firm back in early 2011. From this more-or-less random sampling of contractor activity, we find a consortium of these firms plotting to intimidate, attack and discredit WikiLeaks and those identified as its key supporters, including the (then Salon, now Guardian) journalist Glenn Greenwald – a potentially illegal conspiracy concocted on behalf of corporate giant Bank of America, which feared exposure by WikiLeaks, and organized under the auspices of the Department of Justice itself.

We find several of the same firms – which collectively referred to themselves as Team Themis – involved in another scheme to deploy sophisticated software-based fake people across social networks in order to infiltrate and mislead. For instance, Themis proposes sending two of these "personas" to pose online as members of an organization opposed to the US Chamber of Commerce, another prospective Themis client, in order to discredit the group from within. Yet another revelation involves a massive cross-platform military program of disinformation and surveillance directed at the Arab world; still another relates how one NSA-inked firm can monitor and attack online infrastructure throughout the world, including western Europe, and will rent these capabilities out to those with a few million dollars to spend on such things.

And Booz Allen Hamilton, which has received some belated scrutiny as the eminently powerful employer of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, was apparently in talks with Themis participant HBGary Federal regarding its own still-secret "project" involving, again, WikiLeaks. These are simply a few of the revelations stemming from a portion of the email correspondence among a handful of major contracting firms – a tiny, serendipitous sampling of what such firms are doing for their government and corporate clients as they compete for contracts.

Hundred of these sorts of companies have come about in the last few years, operating in close partnerships with the state, yet existing beyond the view of Congress, the media and "public eyes". Even in the unlikely instance when their activities come to light, potentially illegal behavior goes unpunished; even calls by congressmen to investigate the sordid Themis conspiracy were ignored by the Department of Justice, which, of course, set the whole thing in motion to begin with through its recommendation.

This, then, is the environment in which public officials and Beltway insiders like Friedman are asking us to trust the intelligence community and its private partner firms with increasing power over information. It's an age in which even the limited rules in place can be broken with impunity by the powerful – even as journalists and activists who cross them are targeted for destruction by state-corporate alliances armed with increasingly sophisticated cyber weapons, propaganda techniques and surveillance authority.

This is the world we accept if we continue to avert our eyes. And it promises to get much worse.

 

Who Are CSEC and Why Are They Spying on Canadians?

CSEC’s spying: What Canada’s elite don’t want the public to know

by Ed Patrick - WSWS

Even as documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden continue to surface, further revealing the massive scope and scale of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance of the world’s electronic communications, the Canadian political and media establishment have closed ranks and draped a cloak of deafening silence around the activities of Canada’s own NSA—the Communications Security Establishment Canada or CSEC.

The politicians and corporate media would have Canadians believe that they have only “moved on” from discussing CSEC’s activities because there is nothing for Canadians to worry about.

In fact, the elite’s silence about the CSEC is only the follow-up to the concerted disinformation campaign that Canada’s Conservative government mounted after the Globe and Mail revealed in early June that CSEC has been mining the metadata of Canadian electronic communications —including telephone and cell phone calls, e-mails, and text-messages—since at least 2005.

The corporate media and the opposition parties, including the trade union-supported New Democratic Party (NDP), abetted this cover-up, refusing to challenge the lies, half-truths, and obfuscation of the government.

Recently the NDP held several press conferences to discuss the issues it intends to raise in the coming parliamentary session. Not once did it make any reference to the undemocratic, clandestine operations of CSEC.

Government spokespeople, including the Defence Ministers responsible for overseeing CSEC’s operations, have sought to counter the evidence that CSEC is spying on Canadians by asserting that the agency is only concerned with “foreign threats”—no matter that it is specifically mandated to support the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and other police agencies in countering “domestic subversion.”

Furthermore, the government has disingenuously implied that the CSEC’s activities are largely, if not almost exclusively, devoted to tapping into the communications of Islamist terrorists, such as Al Qaeda, in order to prevent terrorist attacks on Canadian soil.

In reality, the CSEC is a vital tool of the Canadian ruling class that plays an important role in the pursuit of its imperialist foreign policy and in the surveillance and suppression of opposition at home. The size of CSEC’s staff—it employs almost 2,000 people and a further thousand military personnel assist its work—give an inkling of the scale of its activities.

These include everything from supporting the overseas operations of the Canadian military, to spying on governments that are reputed allies of Canada and assisting CSIS and the RCMP in conducting a vast program of domestic surveillance. Of especial importance is the CSEC’s partnership with the NSA. According to former NSA technical director William Binney, the two organizations “have integrated personnel”—i.e. swap personnel to improve seamless collaboration. They also share Internet surveillance programs.

The extensive and intimate relationship between CSEC and NSA dates back to the end of the Second World War when they joined with the signals intelligence agencies of Britain, Australia and New Zealand to create the “Five Eyes” alliance. The group was created with the explicit purpose of sharing signals intelligence with each member taking on a part of the globe and Canada assuming the major responsibility–from the perspective of Cold War-era capitalism–of monitoring Russia.

These relationships continue unabated. For instance, the US agency shares information on Canadians’ communications with Canada’s national security apparatus in exchange for information that CSEC gathers on Americans. According to former Liberal Party MP Wayne Easter, who was Canada’s Solicitor-General from 2002 to 2003, the cabinet minister responsible for CSIS and the RCMP, it was “common” for the NSA “to pass on information about Canadians.”

At that time, Canada’s allied security agencies would scan global intelligence signals and would be “looking for key words on Canadians … and they’d give it to the Canadian agencies,” said Easter.

Easter’s comments are confirmed in some of the Edward Snowden-leaked documents on the NSA spying tool xKeyscore, which show multiple show headers that read “ TOPSECRET/COMINT [Communications Intelligence]/ REL [Relay] to USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL .” Since almost all Canadian internet traffic passes through the United States–an email from Montreal or Toronto could pass through several American locations before being returned to Canada–Canadian communications are inevitably intercepted en masse by the NSA, which has no legal-constitutional restrictions on eavesdropping on Canadians. In response to direct questions on the subject, the Canadian government has systemically refused to deny that the NSA passes on information to Canada’s national-security apparatus.

As a further element of its collaboration with the Five Eyes alliance, CSEC was relied on in the project of spying on diplomats and officials during the 2009 London G20 meeting according to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian, which was based on documents supplied by Snowden. The highly sensitive operation involved the penetration of delegates’ smartphones to monitor their email messages and calls.

This operation would be far from the first time that CSEC has spied on supposed allies. In the mid-1990s a former linguist for the organization, Jane Shorten, explained that since 1990 Canada had spied on Japan and South Korea for economic reasons. During this period, CSEC is also known to have monitored the Mexican government regarding the negotiation and ratification of the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Other documents leaked by Snowden point to the key role CSEC played in the NSA’s years-long efforts to crack encrypted data on the internet.

According to a recent New York Times story, CSEC had been tasked with working on the standards process for the International Organization for Standardization. During this time, the NSA “finessed” CSEC into handing over control of the standards process, allowing the US agency to construct a “backdoor” to secretly decrypt data that millions regarded as safe.

A classified NSA memo reads: “After some behind-the-scenes finessing with the head of the Canadian national delegation and with [CSEC], the stage was set for NSA to submit a rewrite of the draft … Eventually, NSA became the sole editor.”

When Maclean’s journalist Jesse Brown posed a direct question to CSEC on the content of the NSA memos, the agency’s Director of Public Affairs and Communications Andy McLaughlin only offered an obtuse response that avoided denying that CSEC assisted the NSA in its secret anti-encryption campaign.

If CSEC’s own propaganda is to be believed, a large part of its operations are directed towards tactical and other assistance to the Canadian Armed Forces. During the Canadian military’s most intense involvement in the occupation of Afghanistan, CSEC reportedly contributed intelligence in nearly every major battle or operation involving Canadian troops.

The 2002 Anti-Terrorism Act stipulates that the third of CSES’s three core mandates is “to provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement agencies and security agencies”—most importantly CSIS, the RCMP, and the Canadian Border Agency (CBA).

The collaboration between CSIS and CSEC, which has effectively no parliamentary, let alone public, oversight (see http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/22/csec-j22.html), allows the Canadian state to ruthlessly pursue domestic groups and even private citizens who are perceived as threats to the predatory interests of the ruling elite. The rules that reputedly protect Canadians from CSEC surveillance fall-off when the CSEC is working with CSIS and the RCMP.

Moreover, CSEC has insisted and the government has endorsed in its ministerial directives to CSEC the anti-democratic claim that the meta-data of Canadians electronic communications is not constitutionally protected communication and therefore can be “mined”, i.e. collected and scrutinized, at will.

Documents released under freedom of information laws and published by The Guardian show that the RCMP and CSIS are deliberately blurring the distinctions between “terrorism” and civil disobedience and other forms of peaceful protest, so as to justify widespread surveillance of anti-government groups. According to the Guardian, Canada’s national-security apparatus defines activities such as blocking roads and buildings as “forms of assault,” while everything from sit-ins to marches can be considered “threats” or “attacks.”

CSIS and the RCMP have employed this spurious catch-all definition of terrorism to justify surveillance of environmentalist groups, opponents of the Vancouver Olympic Games, the Idle No More movement, and the opposition to the 2010 Toronto G-20 summit. A secret RCMP intelligence assessment asserts that, “Multi-issue extremists and aboriginal extremists … have demonstrated the intent and capability to carry out attacks against critical infrastructure in Canada.”

“Security and police agencies have been increasingly conflating terrorism and extremism with peaceful citizens exercising their democratic rights to organise petitions, protest and question government policies,” explains Jeffery Monaghan of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario

Under conditions of the greatest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression and mounting popular anger over poverty, economic insecurity, and increasing social inequality, it is no rhetorical flourish to insist that the Canadian ruling elite views the mass of the Canadian population as a domestic threat.

As more and more Canadian workers and young people enter into direct conflict with big business and their political hirelings in mass demonstrations, strikes, and occupations, they must anticipate and politically prepare for the police state-apparatus that has been constructed in recent decades to be employed to criminalize and ruthlessly suppress opposition to the capitalist status quo.

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Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Carol Linnitt, Steve Anderson, Janine Bandcroft Sept. 30, 2013

This Week on GR

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

If J.R.R. Tolkien's Mordor, with its fantastical population of Ringwraiths, Orcs, and Trolls strikes a chord in the popular imagination today, it may be due to a recognition, however unconscious, of the transcendence of greed and selfishness as the motif governing our modern world, and the ever ratcheting up of social and environmental injustice needed to sustain it.

But for British Columbians, Mordor, Land of Shadows is much more than metaphor, it is the very real prospect of a great fouling of our lands, air, and waters by the distant, Alberta-Across-the Mountain's Tar Sands project.

Carol Linnitt is a research fellow and Site Manager and Director of Research for DeSmogBlog Canada, an organization dedicated to: "clear[ing] the PR pollution that is preventing us from having sensible public conversations about critical issues around the environment, social justice and the economy."

Listen. Hear.

With a core team of on-line news and opinion producers, and a broad spectrum of guest contributors, DeSmogBlog focuses on analysis of what they see as a deterioration of public discourse on issues of science and the environment in this country, in order to: "[E]xplore solutions for cleaning up Canada's polluted public square." Carol is also a doctoral student, right here at UVic, in the English, and Cultural, Social and Political Thought programs.

Carol Linnitt in the first half.

And; approaching the fourteenth anniversary of the Battle of Seattle, that famed convergence of the Orcs, Ringwraiths, and Trolls of international capital gathered to ratify the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, or MAI, arrayed against the forces of civil society, organized labour, student unions, and a variety of unaligned anarchist collectives determined to stop them, little has changed. The TPP, or Trans-Pacific Partnership is the latest manifestation of that creeping effort to undermine social governance in favour of an international Corporatocracy, and as with its MAI predecessor, the deal-making going on behind closed doors is barely known to most of those whose lives it promises to radically effect.      

Steve Anderson is founder and Executive Director of OpenMedia.ca, the award-winning civic engagement organization behind some of the most successful internet and emerging communications technology campaigns. Steve is an open Internet advocate and commentator, whose writing has appeared in print outlets like The Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and National Post, and in a variety of on-line publications too. Steve is a contributing author to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives book, 'The Internet Tree,' and publishes his blog at OpenMedia.ca.

Steve Anderson and what the Trans-Pacific Partnership could mean for how you access and use the Internet 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 the good things going on on the streets of our city, and beyond. But first, Carol Linnitt and B.C. looking east to Mordor coming.

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.

Trans- Pacific Partnership Looms: The Latest "MAI" Agreement Garnerning Opposition

TPP Protestors Scale Trade Building To Bring Attention to Secretive Deal

by TRNN

Kevin Zeese: The Trans-Pacific Partnership has nothing to do with trade or freedom, and ongoing demonstrations could encourage those on the inside to speak up.

Leaders of 12 countries considering an extensive trade pact will meet in Indonesia next week for negotiations. The Trans-Pacific Partnership would be the largest U.S. free trade agreement in history, covering 60 percent of the global economy. Now joining us in-studio to discuss all this is Kevin Zeese.

Kevin Zeese is co-director of It's Our Economy, an organization that advocates for democratizing the economy. He's also an attorney who is one of the original organizers of the National Occupation of Washington, DC. He has been active in independent and third party political campaigns including for state legislative offices in Maryland, governor of California and U.S. president, where he served as press secretary and spokesperson for Ralph Nader in 2004. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and was the only person ever nominated by the Green Party, Libertarian Party and Populist Party. His twitter is @KBZeese.