Letters to the Colonel: Etiquette and the Finer Points of Surveillance

The Etiquette of War and Surveillance: Letters to Colonel Manners (Ret.)

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch

[Editor’s Note: In the sequester and government-shutdown era, the classic military newspaper Stars and Stripes is facing some of the problems of its civilian brethren and so downsizing its print edition. Among the features to go: Dear Abby. As it happens, TomDispatch is ready to step into the breach. We’ve called on an old and knowledgeable friend, Colonel Manners (ret.), whose experience in military and surveillance matters is evident from his impressive CV (unfortunately, a classified document). His assignment: to answer letters from Americans puzzled by the etiquette, manners, and language of the arcane national security world of Washington. Here is a first sampling from a column that, in syndication, could go global.]

Dear Col. Manners,

I’m an embattled newspaper editor. Recently, I read a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta that included this disturbing passage about the New York Times: "In early August, the Times was working on a story about an intercepted terror threat when James R. Clapper, the administration’s director of intelligence, asked the paper’s Washington bureau to withhold certain details. Clapper warned that, if the full version were made public, the Times 'would have blood on our hands.'" The Times withheld those details. However, with so many classified documents pouring out of Washington and the possibility that some might come into the possession of my paper, I worry about finding blood on my hands, too. On a personal note, I’m extremely squeamish. In college, I had to leave my biology class when the professor showed a film on Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory system. While watching Grey’s Anatomy, I have to close my eyes whenever surgery comes on screen. I grow faint if I get a paper cut. Any suggestions?

Stressed and Bloody Anxious in Chicago

Dear Stressed and Bloody Anxious,

I see your problem. Fortunately, I can assure you that it’s all in your head. To understand why, you need to grasp a distinction that’s clear in Washington, but might be less so in Chicago. When a government official suggests that an outsider might have “blood” on his or her hands -- as happened repeatedly, for instance, during the Bradley Manning imbroglio -- they are talking about prospective blood, future blood. Negative reactions to blood, according to scientific studies, are due, in part, to its alarming red color. Future blood, being metaphorical, is not red. If it gets on your hands, you will not actually “see” it.

In Washington, this is similarly true of past blood. Take National Intelligence Director Clapper. From 2001-2006, he was the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, then undersecretary of defense for intelligence, before being nominated in the Obama years to head the office of national intelligence. In other words, he has served in Washington throughout the Iraq and Afghan Wars, as well as the Global War on Terror. Like many Washington officials, military and civilian, who supported the American global mission in those years, he might be said to have some responsibility for any number of deaths and so to have “blood on his hands.” Think of the almost 4,500 Americans who died in Iraq or the nearly 2,300 who have, thus far, died in Afghanistan, or the tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who died in those years.

Now, here’s the point: Washington is not disturbed by such blood. The reason is simple. It, too, can’t be seen. I’ve met Clapper and I can assure you that, when he shakes your hand, there is not the slightest trace of a reddish tint anywhere on it. (He’s got an impressively firm grip, by the way!) This, I hope, will lighten your unnecessarily grim mood. Like so many other stalwarts in our national security universe, Clapper is a model. He is unfazed, and his “blood” is far more real than the highly speculative and metaphorical blood that might someday be on your hands for a killing related to the release of a classified document. Note that, despite the appearance of startling numbers of such documents in recent years, there is no record of prospective blood actually being spilled.

Yours truly,
Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

As the owner of a furniture store in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I’ve been worried about our competitors, especially IKEA, getting a step on us. So here’s what I want to know: recently, speaking of Iran, President Obama said that he was keeping “all options on the table,” adding that “we will do anything to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon.” I’ve noticed that this phrase has, since 9/11, grown ever more popular in Washington. I was wondering about that table everyone is talking about. Given that it seems to be reserved for major weapons systems of various sorts and nothing else (at least nothing else is ever mentioned), who manufactures such a table? Can I order it somewhere? Does it really exist or is it just an image meant to stand in for a future military assault on Iran (or wherever)? Would it be too big to fit in my store? I’m most appreciative for any information you could give me on the subject.

Tabled in Kalamazoo

Dear Tabled in Kalamazoo,

That table is quite real. I saw one once. I obviously can’t say where, though it held a set of bunker-busting missiles. I should add that it is not a table in the normal sense -- i.e., one of those four-legged, flat-topped structures we tend to place in our dining rooms or kitchens. Again, I can say no more. Rest assured, however, that when the president says “all options are on the table,” he means it. And you are quite accurate in pointing out that on such tables “all” the options are indeed military. Though always referred to in the singular, in reality, there are a number of such tables for each country mentioned; the Syrian ones, for example, hold Tomahawk missiles and B-2 bombers; the Iranian ones, those bunker-busters, among other major weapons systems.

I don't know if you noticed, but on the night before the recent government shutdown, the Pentagon went on a buying spree, dumping $5 billion into the accounts of major weapons makers (and others). According to someone I trust in Washington, the intelligence community similarly dipped into its black budget accounts and bought a number of things, including at least three back-up “option tables” at a cost of millions of dollars. (Again, I can’t tell you exactly how much.) Unfortunately, you cannot purchase such products for your store. The good news is that neither can IKEA.

Sincerely,
Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

I have to ask for your discretion, for reasons that will quickly become apparent. There are 12 documented cases in which a National Security Agency employee used NSA surveillance programs to hack into a partner’s, lover’s, or romantic interest’s email or listen in on his or her phone calls. And this is generally considered just “the tip of the iceberg.” I am a civilian employee of the NSA. Consider me the unlucky thirteenth case. I know that such acts are sardonically known as LoveINT, but in my case that wasn’t it. As I’ve told my former partner, I just wanted to know if she and a friend of ours were planning a surprise birthday party for me. (I’m one of those people who doesn’t like to be caught off-guard.)

The Agency took no action against me, but my partner has never forgiven me. (She’s now living with our former mutual friend.) She still insists that I should apologize. I consider this irrational. I say that no harm was done. I’ve pointed out to her that the NSA hacked into the emails and phone calls of Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian president, and the president of the United States has refused to apologize. His only response was to launch a many months-long “broad review” of NSA practices. (Believe me, there’s nothing to investigate. We did it.) As far as I can see, there’s an equivalency in the two cases: like my partner, Rousseff responded in an overly emotional way, calling off a long planned trip to Washington and later denouncing the U.S. at the United Nations. Here’s my question: if the president doesn’t have to apologize, why should I? Who’s in the right here? Please settle this dispute for me.

Unlucky 13

Dear Unlucky 13,

I’m afraid that the rules of etiquette are different in the two cases you cite. While I regret to tell you this, you are in the wrong and should apologize. In our personal lives, it is important to say we’re sorry to those we treat badly, and hacking into your partner’s email is, by definition, bad manners.

Similarly, on a global scale, if, say, the Argentinean government had hacked into President Rousseff’s email, an apology would indeed be in order. It’s clearly not a good neighborly thing to do. But I hardly need to add the obvious: the United States is not a normal nation. It’s the planet's sole superpower. It goes by a different rulebook, which it writes itself, and that is as it should be. So if we Americans have been playing by house rules in the case of the NSA and Rousseff, then what is there to apologize for?

It’s common knowledge that an American president does not apologize for the acts of his hackers or his soldiers or his spies or his officials or his drones. In addition, it’s obvious that such an apology would be impractical and set this country on the road to hell. After all, once a president stopped playing by the superpower rulebook and started apologizing, just consider the Pandora’s box he would open (without a hint of hope at the bottom). If we were a normal nation, there would be a vast list of things he would have to apologize for, including, just in the last decade, kidnappings, torture, abuse, murder, imprisonment in black sites, assassination, and so on and so forth.

So, Unlucky 13, swallow your bad luck and say you’re sorry, but don’t ask the president to do the same.

Confidentially yours,
Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

I’m a housewife in Tulsa and I had a question for you about the president’s plan for a Syrian intervention. I know that, in the end, it didn’t happen, and I hope you won’t think it’s frivolous of me to bring it up a month later, but I simply couldn’t get it out of my mind. Here’s what I’ve been wondering about: Why is it called “humanitarian intervention” when the president’s (and Pentagon’s) plan, as best I understood it, was to loose Tomahawk missiles and bombers on Damascus? I don’t see anything “human” or "humanitarian" in that. And here’s another related question: why are such strikes always referred to as “surgical” and “precise” when, as far as I can tell, they invariably kill civilians?

Oklahoma Gal

Dear Oklahoma Gal,

Nothing frivolous about your thinking! Let me start with that “surgically precise.” The answer is: American weapons makers are the best in the world and so all of our latest weapons are indeed surgical and precise in their impact. Keep in mind, however, that, as studies have shown, “surgically precise” is a term with significant latitude. Consider, for instance, that, according to a report published in the Archives of Surgery, in a six-and-a-half-year period, Colorado doctors operated on the wrong patient at least 25 times, and another 107 times on the wrong body part. So, surgically precise -- yes, indeed!

As for that term “humanitarian intervention,” as you probably know, the Supreme Court long ago turned the corporation into a “person” for matters of law. The Pentagon has functionally done the same thing for weapons like the Tomahawk missile for matters of war. That transformation may not have the force of law, but it does have force, so to speak. Because the Tomahawk is an American missile (produced by the Raytheon corporation, a genuine American outfit), and because, by definition, what we Americans do always comes from the best of intentions and an essential goodness of heart, because, that is, we are as exceptional, as one of a kind, in war as in peace, a missile attack on Syria (or elsewhere) would, by definition, be both “human” and “humanitarian” -- and to complete the phrase in question, no one could deny that, had it happened, it would also have been an “intervention.” After all, Washington’s record on interventions speaks for itself. No country in memory has been as prolific an interventionist as the U.S.A. -- and it’s a record, like all records, worth taking some pride in.

Yours definitionally,
Col. Manners (ret.)

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 (now also 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

Death and Defiance: Two Giants Pass

‘Defined Voices’: Giap, Wallace, and the Never-Ending Battle for Freedom

by Ramzy Baroud  - Palastine Chronicle

“Nothing is more precious than freedom,” is quoted as being attributed to Vo Nguyen Giap, a Vietnamese General that led his country through two liberation wars. The first was against French colonialists, the second against the Americans. And despite heavy and painful losses, Vietnam prevailed, defeating the first colonial quest at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954) and the second at Ho Chí Minh Campaign (1975).

General Giap, the son of a peasant scholar, stood tall in both wars, only bowing down to the resolve of his people. “Any forces that would impose their will on other nations will most certainly face defeat,” he once said. His words will always be true.

He died on Friday, October 4, at the age of 102.

On the same day, the former black panther Herman Wallace, who had spent 41-years of his life in solitary confinement in Louisiana State Penitentiary, died from incurable liver cancer at the age of 71. Just a few days before his death, Judge Brian Jackson had overturned a charge that robbed Herman of much of his life. According to Jackson, Herman’s 1974 conviction of killing a prison guard was ‘unconstitutional.’

Despite the lack of material evidence, ‘discredited’ witnesses and a sham trial, Wallace, who was a poet and lover of literature, and two other prisoners known as the Angola Three, were locked up to spend a life of untold hardship for a crime they didn’t commit.

Now that Wallace is dead, two remain. One, Robert King, 70, was freed in 2001, and the other, Albert Woodfox, 66, is still in solitary confinement and “undergoes daily cavity searches,” reported the UK Independent newspaper.

“When his conviction was overturned it cleared the slate - he could die a man not convicted of a crime he was innocent of,” King said of the release of Wallace, who died few days later.

One of the last photos released while on his hospital bed, showed Wallace raising his clinched right fist, perpetuating the legendary defiance of a whole generation of African Americans and civil rights leaders. While some fought for civil rights in the streets of American cities, Wallace fought for the rights of prisoners. The four decades of solitary confinement were meant to break him. Instead, it made it him stronger.

"If death is the realm of freedom, then through death I escape to freedom" Wallace quoted Frantz Fanon in the introduction to a poem he wrote from prison in 2012.

In "A Defined Voice", Wallace wrote, “They removed my whisper from general population, To maximum security, I gained a voice; They removed my voice from maximum security, To administrative segregation, My voice gave hope; They removed my voice from administrative segregation, To solitary confinement, My voice became vibration for unity ..”

“Literature can and must elevate a man's soul,” General Giap once said. The son of the ‘peasant scholar’ was right, as Wallace’s own words attest:

“The louder my voice the deeper they bury me,

“I SAID, THE LOUDER MY VOICE THE DEEPER THEY BURY ME!..”

There was so much in common between Giap and Wallace, and surely the two men knew it even though they had never met.

Giap fought colonial powers and died free. Wallace, known as the “Muhammad Ali of the Criminal Justice System”, spent most of his life a prisoner, but never lowered his clasped fist, not until he died. But then again, “If death is the realm of freedom, then through death I escape to freedom.”

The words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish can always find space in any discussion concerning freedom:

“It is possible...

It is possible at least sometimes...

It is possible especially now

To ride a horse

Inside a prison cell

And run away...

“It is possible for prison walls

To disappear,

For the cell to become a distant land

Without frontiers ..”

Can death be that ‘distant land without frontiers’, where Fanon, Darwish and Wallace meet and exchange notes on freedom and resistance?

Of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, 1,200 suffer from various illnesses, and among them, according to UFree Network, 44 suffer from cancer. Among the nearly 5,000 prisoners, 320 are children. There is little doubt that each of these children sees Nelson Mandela as a hero. Herman Wallace is also a hero.

“Free all political prisoners, prisoners of war, prisoner of consciousness.” Wallace ended his poem. His words were not directed at himself and his prison mates. From Palestine, to Afghanistan, to Guantanamo, to Louisiana, his words are loaded with meaning, and relevance.

“When we started out we weren’t thinking about ourselves, we were dealing with the system. That goes on,” said Robert King. And it will go on, because, as Giap had said, there is nothing more precious than freedom.

And those who fight against the ‘system’, any ‘system’, need to understand that without unity no battle can be won, not those of liberation wars, as in Palestine, nor those fought from solitary confinements.

In an interview with CNN in 2004, Giap, speaking of the US war on Iraq said that a nation that stands up and knows how to unite will always defeat a foreign invader. “When people have the spirit to reach for independent sovereignty ... and show solidarity, it means the people can defeat the enemy,” the Vietnamese general said.

Like Wallace, Giap, 102, was expectedly very frail. Yet, along with Wallace, these ‘defined voices’ continue to define history.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is a media consultant, an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press).

Tea Party Adopts CIA's Economic Warfare Model to Ruin American Economy

Making the Economy ‘Scream’

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

Americans who have studied CIA destabilization campaigns around the world may see some striking parallels to the strategy of Tea Party Republicans who have provoked a government shutdown and now are threatening a credit default. The idea is to make the country appear ungovernable and to make the economy “scream.”

This approach is similar to what CIA operatives do to get rid of disfavored political leaders in other countries, such as when President Richard Nixon ordered the spy agency to sabotage Chile’s economy and upset its political stability in the early 1970s.

The CIA’s thinking is that most people just want a chance to make a living. So, if an economic crisis can be ginned up – while propaganda outlets put the blame on the government leaders who are ostensibly in charge – then the people will ultimately turn against those leaders in an effort to restore normality.

In effect, the CIA takes the political process hostage by inflicting economic pain on the average citizen, sponsoring “populist” disorders, spreading confusion through propaganda outlets and then waiting for a weary population to give in. This technique has worked in many countries over the years – and surely the idea long predated the formation of the CIA in the late 1940s.

The Chilean Episode

But some of the best-studied examples of CIA operations have similar patterns to what the American Right is doing now to destabilize the U.S. economy and discredit President Barack Obama. For instance, in the early 1970s, Salvador Allende, a socialist politician, won the presidency through free and fair elections and began taking steps aimed at improving the conditions of the country’s poor.

To stop this perceived spread of “socialism,” President Nixon directed the CIA to engage in psychological warfare against Allende’s government and to make the Chilean economy “scream.” U.S. intelligence agencies secretly sponsored Chilean news outlets, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio, and supported “populist” uprisings of truckers and housewives. On the economic front, the CIA coordinated efforts to starve the Chilean government of funds and to drive unemployment higher.

Worsening joblessness was then spun by the CIA-financed news outlets as proof that Allende’s policies didn’t work and that the only choice for Chile was to scrap its social programs. When Allende compromised with the Right, that had the additional benefit of causing friction between him and some of his most ardent supporters who wanted even more radical change.

As Chile became increasingly ungovernable, the stage was set for the violent overthrow of Allende, the installation of a rightist dictatorship, and the imposition of “free-market” economics that directed more wealth and power to Chile’s rich and their American corporate backers.

There was other fallout from Allende’s ouster and death. Chile’s fascist Gen. Augusto Pinochet executed thousands of dissidents and sent assassins far and wide, including Washington, D.C., where former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, were murdered in a car bombing along Massachusetts Avenue in 1976.

Though the Allende coup in Chile is perhaps the best known example of this intelligence strategy (because it was investigated by a Senate committee in the mid-1970s), the CIA has employed this approach frequently around the world. Sometimes the target government is removed without violence, although other times a bloody coup d’etat has been part of the mix.

In the case of Nicaragua in the 1980s, the leftist Sandinista government was presiding over a reasonably healthy economy when President Ronald Reagan ordered the CIA to achieve “regime change.” The Reagan administration went to work strangling the Nicaraguan economy, while the CIA trained a terrorist army known as the Contras.

Though the Sandinistas prevailed in an election in 1984, Reagan kept up the pressure, eventually breaking the back of the Nicaraguan economy, leaving children searching through garbage dumps for food while U.S.-financed media outlets blamed the Sandinistas and called for reconciliation on terms demanded by the U.S. government.

In 1990, amid threats of renewed Contra terrorism and an economic catastrophe, the coerced Nicaraguan people elected the U.S.-backed presidential candidate Violeta Chamorro. After Chamorro took office, much of the CIA-created pain subsided, but the conditions for many Nicaraguan peasants continued to deteriorate.

Home to Roost

So, it is perhaps fitting that a comparable approach to politics would eventually come home to roost in the United States, even to the point that some of the propaganda funding comes from outside sources (think of the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)

Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile or Nicaragua or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side.

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame it for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are elected to office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are the ones setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

This vertically integrated media machine allows useful information to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to conservative magazines and book publishing. Right-wing propagandists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to mainstream news outlets to hammer home the talking points, regardless of the truth.

Thus, you have embarrassments like CNN’s “Crossfire,” where it doesn’t matter that the Democrats are actually telling the truth when they cite evidence that the Tea Party, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, provoked the government shutdown after refusing to allow House-Senate budget negotiations for six months and even after the Senate agreed to accept the House budget figures.

You still have the Republican voices repeating their talking points, laying the blame for the fiscal crisis on President Obama and the Democrats for refusing to negotiate. The dialogue of pathetic shows like “Crossfire” can be summarized as “talking point, talking point, counter-talking point, cross-talk talking point, another talking point.”

But the GOP’s politics of disruption have not only been the rule during Obama’s presidency. Though the ugliness of the Clinton years has largely faded from memory, the blueprint for the current chaos was drafted then. Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, was treated as an illegitimate interloper on the rightful Republican ownership of the White House.

The Clinton Case

After getting elected in 1992, Clinton complained that his “honeymoon” period – when presidents are generally afforded the benefit of the doubt and their policies get respectful attention in Congress – didn’t even last through the transition, the two-plus months before a new president takes office.

Clinton found himself facing especially harsh hazing from the Washington press corps, as the mainstream media – seeking to shed its “liberal” label and goaded by the right-wing media as “soft on Clinton” – tried to demonstrate that it would be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican.

The mainstream press hyped minor “scandals” about Clinton’s Whitewater real estate investment and Travel-gate, a flap about some routine firings at the White House travel office. Meanwhile, the Right’s news media spread false stories implicating Clinton in the death of White House aide Vince Foster and other “mysterious deaths.”

Republicans in Congress did all they could to feed this press hysteria, holding hearings and demanding that special prosecutors be appointed. When the Clinton administration relented, the choice of prosecutors was handed over to right-wing Republican Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle, who consciously picked political enemies of Clinton to oversee zealous investigations.

The use of scandal-mongering to destabilize the Clinton administration peaked in late 1998 and early 1999 when the Republican-controlled House voted impeachment because of Clinton’s extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky and Clinton had to endure (but survive) a humiliating trial in the Senate.

The Republican strategy, however, continued into Campaign 2000 with Vice President Al Gore facing attacks on his character and integrity. Gore was falsely painted as a delusional braggart, as both right-wing and mainstream media outlets freely misquoted him and subjected him to ridicule (while simultaneously bowing and scraping before Republican candidate George W. Bush).

When Gore managed to win the national popular vote anyway – and would have carried the key state of Florida if all legally cast ballots were counted – the Republicans and the Right rose up in fury demanding that the Florida count be stopped before Bush’s tiny lead completely disappeared. Starting a riot at the vote-counting center in Miami, the Republicans showed how far they would go to claim the White House again.

Then, five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court – wanting to ensure that the new president would keep their side in control of the courts and recognizing that their party was prepared to spread disorder if Gore prevailed – stopped the counting of votes and made Bush the “winner.” [For details, see the book, Neck Deep.]

Democratic Timidity

Despite the partisan Supreme Court ruling putting Bush in the White House, Gore and the Democrats stepped back from a political confrontation. The right-wing press cheered and gloated, while the mainstream news media urged the people to accept Bush as “legitimate” for the good of the country.

For most of Bush’s disastrous presidency, this dynamic remained the same. Though barely able to complete a coherent sentence, Bush was treated with great deference, even when he failed to protect the country from the 9/11 attacks and led the nation into an unprovoked war with Iraq. There were no combative investigations of Bush like those that surrounded Clinton.

Even at the end of Bush’s presidency – when his policies of bank deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and massive budget deficits combined to create the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression – the prevailing message from the Establishment was that it was unfair to lay too much blame on Bush. Shortly after Barack Obama took office in 2009, a Republican/right-wing talking point was to complain when anyone took note of the mess that Bush had left behind: “There you go again, blaming Bush.”

The Republicans and the Right also set to work demonizing and undermining Obama’s presidency. For weeks, instead of letting the Democrats enact legislation to address the financial and economic crisis, Senate Republicans launched filibuster after filibuster.

When Obama and the Democrats did push through emergency legislation, such as the $787 billion stimulus package, they had to water it down to reach the 60-vote super-majority. The Republicans and the Right then quickly laid the blame for high unemployment on the “failed” stimulus.

There also were waves of propaganda pounding Obama’s legitimacy. The Right’s news media pressed bogus accusations that Obama had been born in Kenya and thus was not constitutionally eligible to be president. He was denounced as a socialist, a Muslim, a fascist, an enemy of Israel, and pretty much any other charge that might hit some American hot button.

When Obama welcomed American students back to school in 2009, the Right organized against his simple message – urging young people to work hard – as if it were some form of totalitarian mind control. His attempt to address the growing crisis in American health care was denounced as taking away freedoms and imposing “death panels.”

Soon, billionaires such as oil men David and Charles Koch and media mogul Murdoch, were promoting a “grassroots” rebellion against Obama called the Tea Party. Activists were showing up at presidential speeches with guns and brandishing weapons at rallies near Washington.

The high-decibel disruptions and the “screaming” economy created the impression of political chaos. Meanwhile, the mainstream press faulted Obama for failing to live up to his campaign promise to bring greater bipartisanship to Washington.

The Tea Party Victory

By November 2010, the stage was set for a big Republican comeback. The party swept to victory in the House and fell just short in the Senate. But Congress was not the Republicans’ ultimate goal. What they really wanted was the White House with all its executive powers. However, following Obama’s success in killing Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, the Right’s best hope for regaining complete control of the U.S. government in 2012 was to sink the U.S. economy, which had just recently begun to right itself.

Despite worries about the fragile recovery – and a warning from Moody’s about a downgrade on U.S. debt if Congress delayed action on raising the debt limit – the Republicans pushed the debt-limit vote to the brink before extracting major reductions in government spending (the so-called “sequester”).

By paying the ransom and avoiding default in 2011, Obama kept the weak economic “recovery” moving forward, achieving sufficient job growth to win reelection in 2012. But the Tea Party Republicans were no more chastened by their political reversals than the Republican “revolutionaries” were in 1998. They simply ramped up the pain.

It was the Clinton impeachment then; it is the double-barreled fiscal crisis of shutting down the government and threatening to default on the debt now. In both cases, there was some method to the madness.

By inflicting maximum political damage on Clinton, the Republicans weakened Al Gore’s candidacy in 2000; by confronting Obama with a new economic crisis now, the Tea Partiers feel they can expect a win-win, either Obama succumbs to their demands or he oversees a new recession, possibly even a depression.

The economy will be screaming so much – with the Right’s media blaming the collapse on Obama’s “failed” policies – that many Americans may be desperate for a change, perhaps even the radical “free-market” prescriptions and “small government” nostrums of the Libertarians and the Tea Party.

Those tattered old ideas won’t help most Americans, who have seen the middle class shrink over the past several decades amid right-wing economics and deregulatory extremism. More of Ayn Rand’s winner-take-all capitalism will only concentrate more wealth at the top one percent while further hollowing out the 99 percent.

However, if Republicans are allowed to get their way and the Democrats, as usual, give way, the deliberate infliction of pain on the national political structure will likely end. Thus, the public screaming will be more muted, heard only in the desperation of individual Americans scrambling to make ends meet.

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.

R2P RIP: Gaza the Constant Exception

R2P Gaza

by Eva Bartlett  - In Gaza

It is important to recall, with the current lack of coverage, that the siege on Gaza continues full steam ahead, leaving Palestinians in Gaza (and analysts, human rights organizations, and the casual observer) to say that it is now as bad as it was in 2007.

As much potential, culture, and knowledge as Palestinians have, they are forever being forced backwards, grateful for whatever stop-gap for whatever crisis is at the time inflicted upon them. In these times of rolling power outages, fuel and cooking gas crises, medicines and equipment shortages (“zero stock”), inventions and innovations to get around the lack of fuel or deal with no electricity are prized. But shouldn’t Palestinians be allowed just a little more than the reward of figuring out the latest way to cook without gas, electricity or wood, or how to get to university and work without public transport?

Perhaps in addition to these small rewards they might also get a vestige of justice, equality, freedom of movement, and the ability to produce and export and provide for their families.

I spoke with three Palestinians in their early to mid twenties on what is life like now in Gaza.

On life under siege

Awni Farhat:

I am sick of the current situation in Gaza. It is suffocating me.

Living in Gaza under siege is unbearable .Palestinians have suffered for many years but no one listens: the continued closure of the Rafah border, the fuel crisis, the lack of basic human needs, the ongoing power cuts, the lack of clean water, the strict Israeli and Egyptian policies with Palestinian fishermen…

Thousands of university graduates don’t have jobs. Finding a job is something like a miracle here in Gaza. As a result, most youths are depressed, hopeless, desperate, lost …

We lose electricity eight hours per day. Sometimes we have no electricity for long as 12 hours a day. Patients suffer lack of medicine and equipment.Every single person who lives in the Gaza Strip is impacted by the closures.

Yousef al Jamal [website]:

Life is getting tougher everyday. We are back to fighting to get the most basic needs to survive such as fuel and electricity. There is a serious transportation crisis. Prices of goods doubled. Unemployment increased. 100s of stuck patients and students’ future is at risk.

Electricity goes off 12 hours a day. This paralyzes life in Gaza completely. Factories, bakeries and businesses stop.

In 2007, my eldest sister died because she was denied a permit to get medical care in Jerusalem. The Rafah crossing was shut down. The situation today is almost the same. Two people passed away so far because of the closure of the border.

[also: Yousef al Jammal's 'Waiting in Gaza, where nothing makes sense']

Omar Ghareib:

Gaza is small and generally (in good times) easy to get around. Taxis are cheap compared to other countries. But, with the constant lack of fuel, transportation is always dwindling. Sometimes, its almost impossible to find a taxi and if you do, it will cost you more than the usual cab fair, sometimes doubled, because the fuel is scarce and getting it is expensive.

I see great potential and beauty in this little bit of land, tarnished by Israeli attacks and the siege. However, living here is challenging. There are many bad aspects to living in Gaza but perhaps the most prominent are: power outages, lack of fuel and water, and the most of all is the freedom of movement or to be more accurate the lack of it. The Rafah border is Gaza’s only breather, but its always closed, and when/if its opened and you managed to cross it into Cairo by a miracle, it will be a hellish experience. But at least the Rafah crossing is a possibility. The Erez crossing (linking Gaza to the West Bank and controlled fully by Israel) is not on the table for the majority of Gaza’s citizens.

Perhaps the most affected by the siege are the patients who suffer from severe illnesses and need urgent medical care outside of Gaza, students with scholarships for higher education abroad, and basically everyone else who lives in Gaza and is inevitably affected by any of the previously mentioned difficult aspects.

Gaza is always, I mean ALWAYS, suffering from one or more things. Israeli attacks, the siege, Egypt’s siege (the closure of Rafah border), power outages, fuel shortages, water shortages, cooking gas shortages. But life goes on and we try to survive.

The closure of borders means the death of people and their dreams. If patients cant exit Gaza, and they remain trapped (as they usually do), they die. Many have already died here after being denied exit for urgent medical care.

With the closure of the Rafah tunnels, prices are slowly skyrocketing. I am also affected by the closure of Rafah border, I couldn’t attend a UN media seminar I was invited to. I can’t attend any other international conferences and training courses and I was offered a job in San Francisco and they waited for me for over three weeks but I couldn’t leave so they had to hire somebody else.

Education Impaired

Awni Farhat:

In 2007, after finishing high school, I got a full scholarship to study abroad. I was madly happy, and tried for more than 4 months to travel through the Rafah crossing. But I wasn’t able to leave the Gaza Strip; all my dreams vanished at the Rafah Crossing gate.

Now I have a bachelors degree in English language, and I am still dreaming of traveling outside of Gaza to pursue further studies in at a European university. But the closed Rafah crossing again threatens my dreams and plans, another nightmare for me.

Most students here in Gaza daily suffer from a transportation crisis, especially the ones who live in the south, in Khan Younis and Rafah. They wait for hours to find a car or a mini bus to take them to their universities, and often miss their morning lectures.

Hundreds of students have lost their scholarships and visas because of the ongoing closure of Rafah crossing.

Last Saturday, only about 130 travelers managed to pass through the Rafah crossing, 130 of thousands of Palestinians who were hoping to get out of this big prison

Yousef al Jamal:

I am MA student I am stuck in Gaza. I may lose my scholarship if I don’t travel soon.

[see Yousef al Jamal's “Don't Crush Our Dreams: a please from a student trapped in Gaza”]

Omar Ghareib:

The dreams of students are shattered everyday. Students around the world find the hard part to be obtaining scholarships, but Palestinians in Gaza earn scholarships yet are trapped and denied the opportunity of pursuing their dreams because they can’t exit. Palestine came number 1 in the countries that has the lowest illiteracy rates, and Gaza is has the lowest rate of illiteracy in Palestine.

Who is to blame?

Awni Farhat:

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who is the responsible for this, but the blame is first on deaf Arab communities and then on the rest of the world, who are still silent till now.

I think Israeli, Egyptian, Palestinians and international decision-makers are trying to increase pressure on Hamas by increasing the strict strategies against Gaza, closing the borders with Gaza to make people rise up against Hamas.

The new regime in Egypt doesn’t stand with the Palestinian government in Gaza, Hamas, which stood with Morsi.

Yousef al Jamal:

Israel is responsible the most being the occupying power, then Egypt. Borders are used to collectively punish the people if Gaza to reach political compromises.

Omar Ghareib:

Israel and Egypt are behind the closure of borders. Israel, because it is the occupier. And Egypt because they want to blame whats happening in their country on Hamas and collectively punish Palestinians after seeing Israel doing it for years.

“Peace talks”

Awni Farhat:

Peace talks have never worked and never will. They will bring no justice whatsoever to Palestinians because there is no intention of trying to achieve a peace with the Palestinian people and there never has been … The mandate for Palestine was prepared long before WW2 with the intention of creating an Israel which includes all of Palestine and many neighboring countries.

Peace talks are a sham, only there to keep the west misinformed and disinterested. All the general public hears about Palestine is the same message repeated year after year in the news: Palestine-Israel peace talks….brainwashing them to stop listening.

It gives them also the opportunity to say that Palestine isn’t cooperating. There are no peace talks, there is simply a will by the powers that be to remove Palestine from the map and create greater Israel with as little interference as possible.

Even now, we often hear drones and sometimes Israeli F-16s. There’s no cease-fire! There are more than 230 Israeli cease-fire violations as “peace talks” go on.

Yousef al Jamal:

The best way to waste time is to get involved in this useless ‘process’ which gives Israel the umbrella to confiscate more Palestinian lands.

The buzz of Israeli drones over Gaza and the shootings from Israeli warships is very usual in Gaza. It’s a part and parcel of our daily struggle to survive.

Omar Ghareib:

The thought of Kerry having genuine concern for Palestinians is ridiculous. Of course he doesn’t.

I don’t support any so-called “Peace talks” between Israel and Palestine. What have those peace talks every achieve for Palestinians before? We only made compromises and lost more land. I don’t think we can afford to give up anything we have left, because what we have now is not much. Israel will never allow for the siege on Gaza to be broken or ended, specially now that its being highly supported by Egypt.

In the 2008-2009 Israeli attacks, I lost a few neighbors and a friend, which is nothing compared to other people who lost their families and houses. Some moved to other houses, some couldn’t afford moving or rebuilding so they lived in tents, some went to humanitarian organizations and some are still suffering losses till now. You can rebuild your houses but you can never bring back your family or relatives or friends from death. A friend of mine finished rebuilding his house just recently, he was a newlywed during the 2008-2009 attacks, he lived in his new house for two weeks before Israel bombed it, he paid everything he owned to build it. He moved in with his parents and is still waiting to furnish it and finish completing it.

Israel is constantly present in Gaza. If Israeli drones aren’t buzzing over our heads, then F-16s will definitely be roaring in the skies of Gaza. They shoot at and harass farmers and fishermen on a daily basis. Israel continually breaks ceasefires, no wonder the number of violations of the recent ceasefire is 235. And that wont be the last one for sure.

Why is there never an R2P for Palestine?

Awni Farhat:

It’s obvious that Israel and America are two faces of the same coin. US and western intervention in Syria is part of dividing the whole Arab region. What they want is to control the Arab region.

Yousef al Jamal:

Israel feels it is at risk, the interests of global powers in Syria is at risk, thus they intervene under the pretext of human rights, but in Gaza, their interests are not threatened, this they don’t care.

Omar Ghareib:

The US will never intervene in Palestine because they fully support Israel, even though Israel has chemical (and nuclear) weapons. But Syria is seen to be a threat by Israel, the US intervened in Iraq and is still there even though the weapons of mass destruction was a lie, so for sure now they want to eliminate Syria because Syria is strong and strategic. Israel used chemical weapons during its 2008-2009 war on Gaza and the US said nothing and did nothing but supports Israel. Why the double standards?

see also:

Gaza Students Stranded By Rafah Border Closure

One-day-old baby died at Egyptian side of Rafah crossing

Gaza to run out of drinking water by 2016!

Egypt attacks fishermen in Gaza’s waters

Crisis in Gaza following Rafah Tunnel Closures: Police Called in to Transport Public

Egyptian Navy Launches Assault on Gaza Fishermen

State of the Gaza Strip’s Border Crossings 01 – 30 June 2013

The humanitarian impact of reduced access between Gaza and Egypt

Gaza health ministry: One third of basic medicines no longer available

Israeli forces shot and injured a Palestinian farmer in the Gaza Strip

Gazans say Egypt is now turning the screw

Full List of 236 Documented Israeli Cease Fire Violations

Gaza Strip faces water crisis

Egypt military court gives five Palestinians one-year jail sentence

Syria's Chemical Attack: A Chorus of Crap from Media Giants

Structural Inclinations - The Leaning Tower of Propaganda: Chemical Attacks in Ghouta, Syria

by David Edwards - Media Lens

A UN report this month found that, 'Torture and brutality are rife in Libyan prisons two years after the overthrow of leader Muammar Gaddafi.' Around 8,000 prisoners are currently being held without trial in government jails on suspicion of having fought for Gaddafi.

But then, in the aftermath of Nato's 'humanitarian intervention', torture, bombings and assassinations are now par for the course in Libya, as described here by the excellent Interventions Watch.

In similar vein, late last month, thirteen bombs were detonated on a single day in Baghdad killing at least 47 people. More than 5,000 people have been killed so far this year, according to the UN.

Despite all of this - after years of unmissable, terrible carnage in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - the Pew Research Journalism Project finds that 'the No. 1 message' on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, and Al Jazeera, was 'that the U.S. should get involved in the conflict' in Syria.

It seems that no level of suffering and chaos are sufficient to impede the structural 'mainstream' inclination to support state violence.

No surprise, then, that much of UK journalism had decided that the current Official Enemy was responsible for the August 21 attacks in Damascus long before the UN published the evidence in its report on 'the alleged use of chemical weapons in the Ghouta area' on September 16.

Just one day after the attacks, a Guardian leader claimed there was not 'much doubt' who was to blame, as it simultaneously assailed its readers with commentary on the West's 'responsibility to protect'. An Independent front page headline one week later read like a sigh of relief: 'Syria: air attacks loom as West finally acts' (Independent, August 26, 2013).

This was a close copy of the media response to the May 2012 massacre in Houla, which was also instantly and personally blamed on Syrian president Assad.

Fog Of War

The rapid media conclusion on Ghouta was particularly striking because the issues are complex – literally, rocket science - and evidence has again been gathered under live fire in the middle of a notoriously ferocious civil, proxy and propaganda war. Earlier claims relating to use of chemical weapons had been adjudged 'a load of old cobblers' by veteran journalist Robert Fisk. It was also clear that instantly declaring Assad's guilt a 'slam-dunk' fed directly into a rapidly escalating US-UK propaganda blitz intended to justify a massive, illegal attack on Syria without UN approval.

With Qatar reportedly supplying 'rebels' to the tune of $3 billion and Saudi Arabia $1 billion, and with Russia supplying the Syrian government with $1 billion in weapons, the stakes are high indeed. The fog of both the propaganda and conventional war obstructs and falsifies the facts at every turn. Who to trust? How can we know the lengths to which different agencies might be willing to go to secure outcomes of vast geopolitical significance?

For example, it is not clear how many people were killed in the August 21 attacks. A preliminary US government estimate, commonly cited by the media, claimed that 1,429 people had been killed, including 426 children. But as investigative journalist Gareth Porter noted:

'That figure, for which no source was indicated, was several times larger than the estimates given by British and French intelligence.' (Our emphasis)

The day before the US estimate was released, British intelligence reported just 350 dead. A couple of days later, a French report concluded that at least 281 people had died. These discrepancies, particularly when contrasted with the precision of the US figures, naturally raise suspicions.

On September 13, three days before the UN report on the Ghouta attacks was published, an incredulous David Aaronovitch of The Times, asked Mehdi Hasan, Huffington Post UK's political director:

'I ask again. Do you seriously doubt Syrian government used chemical weapons two weeks ago?'

Hasan replied:

'Gun to my head, I think he probably did. But... I want to wait & see what inspectors say & hear more about our "intel".'

A few days earlier, Hasan had written:

'I want Assad gone and I believe him to be a brutal and corrupt dictator. I wouldn't be surprised either if it turns out that his troops did use sarin against civilians in Ghouta.'

On August 29, one week after the attacks, the Guardian's George Monbiot commented:

'Where we are: 1. Strong evidence that Assad used CWs [chemical weapons] on civilians. 2. But v hard to see airstrikes producing any improvement. Agree?'

We certainly agreed with Monbiot's second point, but we simply had not seen the evidence justifying his first. We wrote to him quoting chemical weapons expert Jean Pascal Zanders, who worked for the European Union Institute for Security Studies from 2008 to 2013:

'No, where's the "strong evidence"? CW expert Zanders: "In fact, we – the public – know very little". http://tinyurl.com/q4np9qn'

Monbiot replied:

'Perhaps I shd've said strong balance of prob. Rebels wld need a lot of hardware to have done it. Either way, case 4 interv v weak'

In a Guardian article two weeks later, Monbiot wrote:

'None of this is to exonerate Bashar al-Assad's government – or its opponents – of a long series of hideous crimes, including the use of chemical weapons.'

Thus, 'strong evidence', walked back to a 'strong balance of prob', had become an assertion that the Syrian government had committed hideous crimes with chemical weapons.

The comments above pretty much sum up the 'mainstream' view on Syrian government guilt, perceived as ranging from certain to probable. We cite Hasan and Monbiot because they are two of the most vocal and respected anti-war voices working in the corporate media.

The point is not that Aaronovitch, Hasan and Monbiot are wrong – the Assad dictatorship has committed many horrific war crimes, and may have again in Ghouta. But these and numerous similar media claims were not rooted in any evidence we had seen at the time they were made. In other words, UK journalists appeared yet again to be succumbing to the influence of state propaganda demonising an Official Enemy, exactly as happened with Iraq and Libya.

Predicting The UN Report

On September 7, Reuters reported a key point rarely even mentioned by journalists considering the merits of a Western attack on Syria:

'No direct link to President Bashar al-Assad or his inner circle has been publicly demonstrated, and some U.S. sources say intelligence experts are not sure whether the Syrian leader knew of the attack before it was launched or was only informed about it afterward.

'While U.S. officials say Assad is responsible for the chemical weapons strike even if he did not directly order it, they have not been able to fully describe a chain of command for the August 21 attack in the Ghouta area east of the Syrian capital.'

On August 30, the Independent reported:

'The report by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) on the Syrian attacks... failed to make a case for war. There was no evidence directly linking President Assad and his coterie to the attack, the blame attached to the regime was by default, inasmuch it was held the opposition did not have the wherewithal to mount such an operation.'

Gareth Porter exposed how the initial US government response to the attacks, released prior to the UN report, was based on 'intelligence that is either obviously ambiguous at best or is of doubtful authenticity, or both, as firm evidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack'.

Porter added, disturbingly, that 'the Obama administration's presentation of the intelligence supporting war' was arguably 'far more politicized than the flawed 2002 Iraq WMD estimate that the George W. Bush administration cited as part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq'.

Brushing these reservations aside, many media predicted that the UN report would go beyond its remit and blame the Syrian government, and even Assad personally. Thus, the Observer: 'some officials [are] claiming it will point the finger at the Assad regime'. (Peter Beaumont, 'US and Russia seal deal over end to Syria chemical arms,' Observer, September 15, 2013)

The Telegraph headlined the same prediction:

'UN report will point to Syrian regime's responsibility for sarin attack' (Ruth Sherlock, Telegraph, September 12, 2013)

And the Daily Mail:

'UN report will point the finger at Assad regime for huge chemical attack... but insiders admit there is only circumstantial evidence' (Simon Tomlinson, Daily Mail, September 12, 2013)

The fiercely pro-war Times headline for September 13, 2013 went further still:

'Assad is to blame for chemical strike — UN'

After publication of the report, the Independent claimed that 'UN weapons inspectors find "clear and convincing" evidence of regime gas attack.' (David Usborne and Kim Sengupta, i-Independent, September 17, 2013)

Despite these numerous predictions and affirmations of blame, the Guardian's Simon Tisdall wrote that the report had been 'shamefacedly cautious'. Why?

'It also seems clear that those responsible for the Ghouta attack, from Assad downwards, are unlikely to face justice soon, or at all. The UN report declined to blame the regime, let alone to name those behind the atrocity.' (Our emphasis)

Commentators, indeed, were wrong to suggest that the UN report had blamed Assad.

If the UN was disgracefully cautious on September 16, Human Rights Watch (HRW) had been bold in blaming the Syrian government one week earlier:

'"Rocket debris and symptoms of the victims from the August 21 attacks on Ghouta provide telltale evidence about the weapon systems used," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. "This evidence strongly suggests that Syrian government troops launched rockets carrying chemical warheads into the Damascus suburbs that terrible morning."'

HRW presents itself as a neutral, dispassionate observer of events in Syria. But HRW director Ken Roth has openly supported, not just a US attack on Syrian government forces, but one that is more than symbolic:

'If Obama decides to strike #Syria, will he settle for symbolism or do something that will help protect civilians?'

John Tirman, Executive Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies, replied to Roth on Twitter that this was:

'Possibly the most ignorant & irresponsible statement ever by a major human-rights advocate. #Syria Escalating war ≠ civ protect'

'Grave Doubts' Expressed By UN Officials

Serious doubts remain about exactly what happened on August 21 in Damascus. Nafeez Ahmed, who writes for the Guardian on the geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises, provided a reasonable assessment of the evidence on September 20, here. Ahmed later commented on responsibility for the attacks:

'I remain open-minded about the CW issue and as the article above shows, have drawn no specific conclusions either way.'

Much has been made of the trajectory of rockets that landed in Ghouta calculated by the UN. But the UN report stated:

'The time necessary to conduct a detailed survey ... as well as take samples was very limited. The sites [had] been well travelled by other individuals both before and during the investigation. Fragments and other possible evidence [had] clearly been handled/moved prior to the arrival of the investigation team.'

Robert Fisk noted that he could not recall seeing these words in any media analysis. He commented:

'...it also has to be said that grave doubts are being expressed by the UN and other international organisations in Damascus that the sarin gas missiles were fired by Assad's army. While these international employees cannot be identified, some of them were in Damascus on 21 August and asked a series of questions to which no one has yet supplied an answer. Why, for example, would Syria wait until the UN inspectors were ensconced in Damascus on 18 August before using sarin gas little more than two days later – and only four miles from the hotel in which the UN had just checked in? Having thus presented the UN with evidence of the use of sarin – which the inspectors quickly acquired at the scene – the Assad regime, if guilty, would surely have realised that a military attack would be staged by Western nations'.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), including Thomas Drake, Ray McGovern, Matthew Hoh, Philip Giraldi and others, sent a memorandum to Barack Obama on September 6:

'We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this.'

Ben Caspit, a contributing writer for Al-Monitor's Israel Pulse, has also commented:

'This week I met with an unofficial Israeli source with a background in IDF's [Israeli Defence Force] intelligence branch, though that was quite some time ago... He is a high-tech person with many achievements and great experience in that field. He developed methods for comparing and cross-checking information, methods that have mainly proven themselves when hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of sources are involved. He wrote a document that rebuts one by one the claims and evidences by which the Assad regime is held responsible for the use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21 in Syria.'

Caspit concluded:

'It's not that I am now convinced that Assad is innocent. It's that now I am a little less convinced that the hands of the Syria president were involved in the chemical attack on Aug. 21.'

Again, none of this means that the Syrian government, and indeed Assad himself, was not to blame for the August 21 attacks. The point is that the corporate media's staggering lack of scepticism again indicates that it is structurally inclined to favour the view of US-UK state power. As former Guardian journalist, Jonathan Cook, has written:

'We should expect the corporations that own our media to be promoting the same agendas as the political elites they own too. It's a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing system.'

Genuinely independent 'mainstream' journalists would of course be energetically exploring and debating the uncertainties surrounding US-UK claims, particularly in light of the catastrophic Iraq deception and the clear difficulty of assessing the quality of all information coming out of Syria.

But in fact almost all detailed discussion of the UN report and the different claims surrounding it has appeared outside the 'mainstream', on small websites and specialist blogs. As ever, corporate media employees have been content to give a lazy nod to US-UK claims so that, as Fisk comments, 'now the world has convinced itself that the Assad regime fired the sarin gas shells on 21 August'.

And as the lesson of Iraq makes clear, with Syria very much in US crosshairs, that conviction may yet result in great calamities in the near future.

This Alert is Archived here:
Structural Inclinations - The Leaning Tower of Propaganda: Chemical Weapons Attacks In Ghouta, Syria

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Plutocrats' Plan to Swipe Public Workers' Pensions

Exposed: California's Secret Plan to Gut Public Pensions

by TRNN

Lynn Parramore: California memo just latest example of Wall St's attack on workers' pensions.

 

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore. 

Getting It Back: Catching Up With Tony Hayward's Life

Balancing Geological Potential and Political Risk: Interview with Tony Hayward

 by James Stafford of Oilprice.com

From Kurdistan to Somaliland, for independent oil companies, getting your hands on new exploration acreage where both technical risk and political risk are low is impossible. Exploring for oil and gas in new frontiers is all about striking the right balance between geological potential and political risk. Take it from Anglo-Turkish Genel Energy, the largest producer in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), where it seems nothing can shake investor confidence right now.

In an exclusive interview with Oilprice.com, former BP chief and current CEO of Genel Energy , Tony Hayward, discusses:

• Why Kurdistan is a great place to be right now
• Why the attacks in Erbil won't shake investor confidence
• What the next milestone will be—and when
• How the relationship with Turkey is helping Kurdistan forge oil and gas independence
• How Kurdistan's oil and gas progress could benefit Iraq as a whole
• What we can expect for future exploration
• The massive geological potential and high political risk of Somaliland
• What we can expect to find in Ethiopia
• What makes Malta and Morocco high-impact prospects
• Why investors should be excited about offshore Cote d'Ivoire
• How to strike the right balance in frontier venues

James Stafford: On 29 September, a series of attacks targeting security forces in the Kurdish capital of Erbil killed six, sparking fears that the conflict in Syria maybe be spreading Kurdistan. Will this do anything to investor confidence in the region?

Tony Hayward: Kurdistan has been a beacon of stability and security in an unstable region, but sadly nowhere is immune to terrorism. As this is the first such incident in Kurdistan for six years, we have no reason to think that it will or should change investor perception.

James Stafford: Right now, Kurdistan is one of the hottest emerging venues out there, and the media is fascinated with the Kurds' success in forging oil and gas independence despite threats emanating from Baghdad. As the largest oil producer in Kurdistan, Genel naturally fields the majority of tricky questions related to these political dynamics. Is there anything that can stop Kurdistan from continuing to pursue oil independence at this point?

Tony Hayward: The impending completion of the pipeline is clearly a significant milestone for the oil industry in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The relationship between the KRI and Turkey is now very strong, and this has helped the Kurdistan Regional Government to take control of its own exports. The strength of this relationship has helped to give significant momentum to the Kurdistan oil and gas industry.

The signing of an Energy Framework Agreement between Turkey and the KRG in March 2013 was an important step, and we have seen clear evidence of its implementation - KRI crude oil is exported by truck to international markets via Turkey, and a Turkish state-backed energy company has also entered the upstream sector in the KRI, signing 6 PSCs with the KRG and partnering with Exxon in a number of licences. Finally, Turkey and the KRG have agreed a framework for the export of KRI gas to the Turkish gas market – we expect this Gas Sales Agreement to be signed by the end of the year.

Kurdistan has always had the resources, now it is building the infrastructure and has a significant market for its oil and gas. It is a good place to be.

James Stafford: How far along is the pipeline at present?

Tony Hayward: The pipeline from Taq Taq to Fishkabur is very close to completion – welding is now in sight of the pumping station. We expect the entire system, capable initially of exporting some 300,000 barrels a day, to be fully operational around the end of the year. This will be a major inflection point for the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and of course for Genel, allowing us to increase production and realise international prices for our exports.

James Stafford: What can we expect in terms of production once the new pipeline to Turkey comes on line, as planned for the fourth quarter?

Tony Hayward: We have not yet given guidance for production for 2014, but developments at Taq Taq and Tawke are on track to deliver 140,000 barrels a day of working interest production capacity by year end-2014.

James Stafford: What will Baghdad's response be?

Tony Hayward: While it is difficult for us to speculate on this, we believe that the pipeline will be a positive political benefit, allowing for increased exports of oil from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq with regular and stable payments that will benefit Iraq as a whole.

James Stafford: How much oil is reaching Turkey now? Can you take us through the transport route and the costs?

Tony Hayward: At present we are exporting around 30,000-40,000 bopd a day by truck from Taq Taq to Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast in Turkey, where it is sold on the international market. Contractors are receiving full entitlement for the barrels sold.

James Stafford: What can we expect from new exploration in Kurdistan, and what is the average hit rate for exploration?

Tony Hayward: Hopefully more of the same. High impact exploration drilling is continuing in the KRI, and planned wells are targeting around 1bn boe of gross unrisked resources. We also still have work to do to fully assess our recent discoveries, and so the full potential of the region has yet to be evaluated. We remain very excited about the potential volumes in place. Results from Chia Surkh 11 and Taq Taq Deep are expected in Q4, while Miran Deep will spud in 2014. With the African portfolio taken into account, we are targeting over 4bn boe.

We've enjoyed a great run of exploration success in Kurdistan this year, with three successes from three wells adding in excess of 50% to our net contingent resources. While this isn't typical, our hit rate in Kurdistan has been very pleasing and due in no small part to the extensive preparatory work conducted by our technical teams ahead of drilling.

James Stafford: There are plenty of junior oil companies eyeing Kurdistan right now. What does an E&P company need to know about operating in Kurdistan?

Tony Hayward: We have found Kurdistan to be a very good place to operate. As with all places, you should ensure good working relationships with the local government and communities. As one of the first movers in the KRI we were in a very fortunate position – such has been the success in the region the majors have unsurprisingly now got involved, albeit focusing on exploration and appraisal opportunities so far

James Stafford: Genel is no stranger to high-risk venues, and that brings us to Somaliland. What's the political risk of exploring in a country that broke away from Somalia 20 years ago but still is not recognized internationally?

Tony Hayward: As an independent oil company I'm afraid the potential for now finding acreage with a very low technical and political risk is nigh on impossible – you have to have one or the other. Kurdistan was a low technical risk, and we were happy with the level of political risk – and we believe the momentum over the last 18 months has proven us correct.

Somaliland is geologically hugely exciting, and so the risk is on the political side.

James Stafford: Why Somaliland? How explored is Somaliland, and what do you expect to find—and when?

Tony Hayward: Somaliland looks analogous with the prolific Yemen Rift Basins – geologically it looks exceptional, and it is a very underexplored area.

James Stafford: What other areas are worth exploring in terms of geological analogy to the prolific Jurassic Rift Basins of Yemen?

Tony Hayward: We like Ethiopia, hence our decision to farm in to the Adigala Block last month. The Block borders Somaliland, and oil seeps and surface outcrops support the presence of a mature and active Jurassic oil prone system, which we believe is analogous to the Yemen basins. We have identified several large potential structures, with further planned seismic and technical work to be done to identify these leads into drill ready prospects. We are also actively reviewing other opportunities in the region.

James Stafford: Where do you predict the next big find to be in this area, and why?

Tony Hayward: Hopefully in our acreage! We like the geology and we are excited about the prospects, but if we could predict the next big find then we would be in a very blessed position indeed. The only way to ascertain whether hydrocarbons are present in commercial quantities is to drill.

James Stafford: What attracted you to Malta and Morocco? What are your expectations?

Tony Hayward: As with all of our acreage – geology. As we have expanded outside Africa we have targeted opportunities to take material interests in high impact prospects, with the potential for field sizes of at least 250 million bbls. Malta and Morocco both fall firmly in these categories and, while expectations are dangerous in this business, we are confident in the geology and look forward to drilling them both. Morocco will be our first well to spud outside the KRI when it does so in the last quarter of this year.

James Stafford: How excited should investors be at the continued prospects for offshore Cote d'Ivoire due to the fact that it is the same basin where Western Ghana's Jubilee field was discovered?

Tony Hayward: Our prospect is in the same sub basin as the West Coast of Ghana, and the discovery rate there has been 44%. There are clearly proven petroleum systems in the area and there are geological similarities – if the result is the same we will be delighted.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Interviews/Balancing-Geological-Potential-and-Political-Risk-Interview-with-Tony-Hayward.html

Interview by James Stafford of Oilprice.com

GWOT Milk?

The Anti-Empire Report #121

By William Blum – Published October 7th, 2013

The War on Terrorism … or whatever.

“U.S. hopes of winning more influence over Syria’s divided rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed political opposition coalition and announced the formation of an alliance dedicated to creating an Islamist state. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group.” 1

Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country’s role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government seeks to do good … What is he to make of all this?

For about two years, his dear American government has been supporting the same anti-government side as the jihadists in the Syrian civil war; not total, all-out support, but enough military hardware, logistics support, intelligence information, international political, diplomatic and propaganda assistance (including the crucial alleged-chemical-weapons story), to keep the jihadists in the ball game. Washington and its main Mideast allies in the conflict – Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – have not impeded the movement to Syria of jihadists coming to join the rebels, recruited from the ranks of Sunni extremist veterans of the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, while Qatar and the Saudis have supplied the rebels with weapons, most likely bought in large measure from the United States, as well as lots of of what they have lots of – money.

This widespread international support has been provided despite the many atrocities carried out by the jihadists – truck and car suicide bombings (with numerous civilian casualties), planting roadside bombs à la Iraq, gruesome massacres of Christians and Kurds, grotesque beheadings and other dissections of victims’ bodies (most charming of all: a Youtube video of a rebel leader cutting out an organ from the chest of a victim and biting into it as it drips with blood). All this barbarity piled on top of a greater absurdity – these Western-backed, anti-government forces are often engaged in battle with other Western-backed, anti-government forces, non-jihadist. It has become increasingly difficult to sell this war to the American public as one of pro-democracy “moderates” locked in a good-guy-versus-bad-guy struggle with an evil dictator, although in actuality the United States has fought on the same side as al Qaeda on repeated occasions before Syria. Here’s a brief survey:

Afghanistan, 1980-early 1990s: In support of the Islamic Moujahedeen (“holy warriors”), the CIA orchestrated a war against the Afghan government and their Soviet allies, pouring in several billions of dollars of arms and extensive military training; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year; pressuring and bribing Pakistan to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary.

It worked. And out of the victorious Moujahedeen came al Qaeda.

Bosnia, 1992-5: In 2001 the Wall Street Journal declared:

It is safe to say that the birth of al-Qaeda as a force on the world stage can be traced directly back to 1992, when the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic issued a passport in their Vienna embassy to Osama bin Laden. … for the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade. 2

A few months later, The Guardian reported on “the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims – some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in “the war against terrorism”. 3

In 1994 and 1995 US/NATO forces carried out bombing campaigns over Bosnia aimed at damaging the military capability of the Serbs and enhancing that of the Bosnian Muslims. In the decade-long civil wars in the Balkans, the Serbs, regarded by Washington as the “the last communist government in Europe”, were always the main enemy.

Kosovo, 1998-99: Kosovo, overwhelmingly Muslim, was a province of Serbia, the main republic of the former Yugoslavia. In 1998, Kosovo separatists – The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) – began an armed conflict with Belgrade to split Kosovo from Serbia. The KLA was considered a terrorist organization by the US, the UK and France for years, with numerous reports of the KLA having contact with al-Qaeda, getting arms from them, having its militants trained in al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, and even having members of al-Qaeda in KLA ranks fighting against the Serbs. 4

However, when US-NATO forces began military action against the Serbs the KLA was taken off the US terrorist list, it “received official US-NATO arms and training support” 5 , and the 1999 US-NATO bombing campaign eventually focused on driving Serbian forces from Kosovo.

In 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, an independence so illegitimate and artificial that the majority of the world’s nations still have not recognized it. But the United States was the first to do so, the very next day, thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of another country’s territory.

The KLA have been known for their trafficking in women, heroin, and human body parts (sic). The United States has naturally been pushing for Kosovo’s membership in NATO and the European Union.

Nota bene: In 1992 the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs reached agreement in Lisbon for a unified state. The continuation of a peaceful multi-ethnic Bosnia seemed assured. But the United States sabotaged the agreement. 6

Libya, 2011: The US and NATO to the rescue again. For more than six months, almost daily missile attacks against the government and forces of Muammar Gaddafi as assorted Middle East jihadists assembled in Libya and battled the government on the ground. The predictable outcome came to be – the jihadists now in control of parts of the country and fighting for the remaining parts. The wartime allies showed their gratitude to Washington by assassinating the US ambassador and three other Americans, presumably CIA, in the city of Benghazi.

Caucasus (Russia), mid-2000s to present: The National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House have for many years been the leading American “non-government” institutions tasked with destabilizing, if not overthrowing, foreign governments which refuse to be subservient to the desires of US foreign policy. Both NGOs have backed militants in the Russian Caucasus area, one that has seen more than its share of terror stretching back to the Chechnyan actions of the 1990s. 7

“Omission is the most powerful form of lie.” – George Orwell

I am asked occasionally why I am so critical of the mainstream media when I quote from them repeatedly in my writings. The answer is simple. The American media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission. It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. So I can make good use of the facts they report, which a large, rich organization can easier provide than the alternative media.

A case in point is a New York Times article of October 5 on the Greek financial crisis and the Greeks’ claim for World War Two reparations from Germany.

“Germany may be Greece’s stern banker now, say those who are seeking reparations,” writes the Times, but Germany “should pay off its own debts to Greece. … It is not just aging victims of the Nazi occupation who are demanding a full accounting. Prime Minister Antonis Samarass government has compiled an 80-page report on reparations and a huge, never-repaid loan the nation was forced to make under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945. … The call for reparations has elicited an emotional outpouring in Greece, where six years of brutal recession and harsh austerity measures have left many Greeks hostile toward Germany. Rarely does a week go by without another report in the news about, as one newspaper put it in a headline, ‘What Germany Owes Us’.”

“The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt. … Some members of the National Council on Reparations, an advocacy group, are calling for more than $677 billion to cover stolen artifacts, damage to the economy and to the infrastructure, as well as the bank loan and individual claims.”

So there we have the morality play: The evil Germans who occupied Greece and in addition to carrying out a lot of violence and repression shamelessly exploited the Greek people economically.

Would it be appropriate for such a story, or an accompanying or follow-up story, to mention the civil war that broke out in Greece shortly after the close of the world war? On one side were the neo-fascists, many of whom had cooperated with the occupying Germans during the war, some even fighting for the Nazis. Indeed, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, acknowledged in August 1946 that there were 228 ex-members of the Nazi Security Battalions – whose main task had been to track down Greek resistance fighters and Jews – on active service in the new Greek army. 8

On the other side was the Greek left who had fought the Nazis courageously, even forcing the German army to flee the country in 1944.

So guess which side of the civil war our favorite military took? … That’s right, the United States supported the neo-fascists. After all, an important component of the Greek left was the Communist Party, although it wouldn’t have mattered at all if the Greek left had not included any Communists. Support of the left (not to be confused with liberals of course) anywhere in the world, during and since the Cold War, has been verboten in US foreign policy.

The neo-fascists won the civil war and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency, named and modeled after itself, the KYP. For the next 15 years, Greece was looked upon much as a piece of real estate to be developed according to Washington’s political and economic needs. One document should suffice to capture the beauty of Washington’s relationship to Athens – a 1947 letter from US Secretary of State George Marshall to Dwight Griswold, the head of the American Mission to Aid Greece, said:

During the course of your work you and the members of your Mission will from time to time find that certain Greek officials are not, because of incompetence, disagreement with your policies, or for some other reason, extending the type of cooperation which is necessary if the objectives of your Mission are to be achieved. You will find it necessary to effect the removal of these officials. 9

Where is the present-day Greek headline: “What The United States Owes Us”? Where is the New York Times obligation to enlighten its readers?

The latest step in the evolution of America’s Police State

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

So say many Americans. And many Germans as well.

But one German, Ilija Trojanow, would disagree. He has lent his name to published documents denouncing the National Security Agency (NSA), and was one of several prominent German authors who signed a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to take a firm stance against the mass online surveillance conducted by the NSA. Trojanow and the other authors had nothing to hide, which is why the letter was published for the public to read. What happened after that, however, was that Trojanow was refused permission to board a flight from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, to Miami on Monday, September 30. Without any explanation.

Trojanow, who was on his way to speak at a literary conference in Denver, told the Spiegel magazine online website that the denial of entry might be linked to his criticism of the NSA. Germany’s Foreign Ministry says it has contacted US authorities “to resolve this issue”. 10

In an article published in a German newspaper, Trojanow voiced his frustration with the incident: “It is more than ironic if an author who raises his voice against the dangers of surveillance and the secret state within a state for years, will be denied entry into the ‘land of the brave and the free’.” 11

Further irony can be found in the title of a book by Trojanow: “Attack on freedom. Obsession with security, the surveillance state and the dismantling of civil rights.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who oversees the NSA and other intelligence agencies, said recently that the intelligence community “is only interested in communication related to valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes.” 12

It’s difficult in the extreme to see how this criterion would apply in any way to Ilija Trojanow.

The story is a poignant caveat on how fragile is Americans’ freedom to criticize their Security State. If a foreigner can be barred from boarding a flight merely for peaceful, intellectual criticism of America’s Big Brother (nay, Giant Brother), who amongst us does not need to pay careful attention to anything they say or write.

Very few Americans, however, will even be aware of this story. A thorough search of the Lexis-Nexis media database revealed a single mention in an American daily newspaper (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), out of 1400 daily papers in the US. No mention on any broadcast media. A single one-time mention in a news agency (Associated Press), and one mention in a foreign English-language newspaper (New Zealand Herald).

15

Notes
Washington Post, September 26, 2013 ↩
Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2001 ↩
The Guardian (London), April 22, 2002 ↩
RT TV (Moscow), May 4, 2012 ↩
Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2001 ↩
New York Times, June 17, 1993, buried at the very end of the article on an inside page ↩
Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post, “Barbarians at the Gate: Terrorism, the US, and the Subversion of Russia”, August 30, 2012 ↩
Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, October 16, 1946, column 887 (reference is made here to Bevin’s statement of August 10, 1946) ↩
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Vol. V (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 222-3. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 3 for further details of the US role in postwar Greece. ↩
Associated Press, October 2, 2013 ↩
Huffington Post, “Ilija Trojanow, German Writer, Banned From US For Criticizing NSA”, October 1, 2013 ↩
Washington Post, October 5, 2013 ↩

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.


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