The Dictators Strike Back: Political Reversals Leading Egypt Towards Renewed Revolution

Mass Protests Grow as Military Drags Egypt Back to Dictatorship

by Roger Annis - Truthout

The military-dominated regime that seized power in Egypt in July 2013 has escalated its attacks on freedom and democracy in the country. A series of pronouncements were issued in late December, including the banning of the country's largest political movement - the Muslim Brotherhood. By all evidence, Egypt's economic and military elite are taking the country back to the darkest days of the rule of former dictator Hosni Mubarak or even farther into the abyss.

The regime's new measures have been accompanied by regressive court decisions and assaults on protesting citizens by police and soldiers backed by plainclothes thugs. A harrowing prospect threatens the country - that of a violent war by the regime and its backers against the population, similar to the bloody war that was waged by Algeria's government and military against the people of that country during the 1990s and 2000s.

Courageous protests by growing sections of Egyptian society are blocking the road of civil war that the regime seems hell-bent on taking. Civilian protest and organizing offer hope that the country can return to a path of democracy and social justice that opened with the overthrow of Mubarak in February 2011.

Banning of the Muslim Brotherhood

In its most draconian political measure yet, on December 25, the regime announced a banning of the Muslim Brotherhood. The ban will be applied against the Brotherhood-led political party, the Freedom and Justice Party. The two are being proscribed as "terrorist" organizations.

Membership in the organizations is grounds for harsh punishment. Members are banned from travel abroad. "Terrorism" charges will apply to anyone who finances or promotes the two organizations "verbally and in writing."

Hundreds of Brotherhood and FJP members have been arrested. The personal assets of many leaders have been seized by authorities, including those of the imprisoned Mohamed Morsi. He won the presidential election in Egypt in June 2012 on behalf of the Freedom and Justice Party. He was overthrown by the military on July 3, 2013. The coup unleashed a terrible wave of violence by the military regime that took power.

Publication of the Muslim Brotherhood's newspaper, Freedom and Justice, has been outlawed. Egypt's Interior Ministry has opened three telephone lines for citizens to snitch on their fellow citizens.

The government is preparing to seize schools operated by the movement and it says it will take over operations of Brotherhood-run hospitals and health centers. The regime also says it will take over all mosques belonging to banned organizations and replace their imams.

Interior Ministry spokesman Hany Abdel Latif told state television that henceforth anyone taking part in protests organized by the two mass organizations will be jailed for lengthy terms, up to life imprisonment. And "the sentence could be death" for those who lead the Muslim Brotherhood.

Morsi has been imprisoned since July 3 and faces serious criminal charges. His show trial had a brief, opening session November 4 and is due to resume this month.

Pretext Holds No Water

A long list of pretexts was read out by regime Prime Minister Hazem El Beblawi on Dec. 25 to justify the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood. These included an accusation that the group was behind the assassination of then-Prime Minister Mahmoud Nuqrashi more than 60 years ago.

The key accusation was responsibility for the bombing of a police station in the city of Mansoura on Dec 24. The bomb killed 16 and wounded more than 100. Mansoura is a city of half a million people 110 kilometers north of Cairo in the Nile River delta.

The police station also served as a jail. At the time of the bombing, it held dozens of prisoners detained for protesting the coup regime. Some of the prisoners were women.

Egyptian officials have provided no evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood was linked to the bombing. The organization condemned the bombing and has called for its perpetrators to be brought to justice.

Human Rights Watch has condemned the banning of the Brotherhood and the pretext for doing so. It said the banning was politically driven. A statement said, "The government blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the [Dec. 24] blast without investigating or providing any evidence."

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, said in the statement, "The government's decision on the Muslim Brotherhood follows over five months of government efforts to vilify the group. By rushing to point the finger at the Brotherhood without investigations or evidence, the government seems motivated solely by its desire to crush a major opposition movement."

Seven people were arrested Jan. 2 for the bombing. The regime has provided no evidence that any are members of the Brotherhood or were acting under its direction.

The Human Rights Watch statement also reports that on Dec. 23, Egypt's Central Bank froze the bank accounts of more than 1,000 NGOs reportedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Many of these organizations are essential providers of health care and education services.

Five days earlier, police stormed the office of the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights and assaulted and arrested six people - a staff researcher, staff lawyer and four volunteers. Equipment was broken, and computers were stolen. A statement of protest against the raid was issued the following day by 25 Egyptian organizations (here).

One of the complicating factors for the regime is the fact that it has no legal definition of "terrorism" with which it can charge or convict its opponents.

Attacks on Protests

The proscriptions by the coup regime follow months of low-intensity war in the streets of the country against opponents of the July coup. Half a year on, the generals have failed to establish the "order" and "normalcy" they promised. The price of protesting is high, and many have been killed or injured, but the protests continue.

Street protests, general strikes in neighborhoods and cities, massive student actions, some strikes by workers and many other forms of struggle have weakened the regime.

The regime has struck out fiercely. While there has been no repeat of the terrible massacres that marked July and August 2013, including the very worst at the Rabaa Al-Adawiyya Mosque on August 14, killings by regime thugs as well as arrests and beatings have continued. The scale of the repression has far outstripped the rights violations committed during the declining years of the Mubarak regime.

A new regime weapon is a special law against the right to protest adopted in November. A first, major test of that law concluded December 22 with the conviction of three activists of the April 6 Youth Movement - Ahmed Maher, Ahmed Douma and Mohamed Adel. They are well-known symbols of the democracy movement. It arose in 2010 and played a key role in the overthrow of the Mubarak dictatorship.

The three were convicted and sentenced to prison labor and fines. (A detailed examination by Human Rights Watch of the new law banning protests is here.)

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Anti-Coup Pro-Legitimacy National Alliance have issued a statement condemning the conviction of the three young activists. The alliance is the broad coalition that has spearheaded the ongoing protest movement against the military regime.

A broad coalition of human rights groups in Egypt issued a statement in November condemning the anti-protest law.

Ahmed Maher, a founder of the April 6 movement, lashed out at Egypt's National Council of Human Rights in a note smuggled out of prison Dec. 18. His note harshly criticized members of the Council.

Maher charged that some members of the council were "agents for the state who used to report about activists to security before the revolution." He wrote further, "There is no difference between this council and Mubarak's mock councils."

The Middle East Monitor has broadcast and transcribed into English an interview with Maher in which the activist reflects very critically on the Tamarod movement, in which the April 6 Movement participated. He says it was a mistake to take part in the mass demonstration June 30, 2013, that called for the removal of Morsi. That action was understood by his movement to be a call for "correction" of the course of the Morsi government, not its overthrow by the military. "We do not deny that Morsi did wrong. ... But what is happening now is seriously a return to the old regime. ... "

"Everything we rose against in the January 25 revolution is back and is even worse than before." The interview is undated.

The MENA Solidarity Network is reporting that six activists in Alexandria, including two members of the Revolutionary Socialists, have just been sentenced to two years of hard labor and fines for contesting the same law.

Three other activists are facing convictions for political accusations dating back to 2012 in a case being followed closely by Amnesty International. One of them, Ahmed Abdallah, was also a prominent member of the April 6 Youth Movement.

Students Particularly Targeted

Students have waged especially courageous and sustained protests against the coup regime. Breaking with past precedent, the regime repeatedly has invaded campuses with its repressive forces. But students are continuing their resistance.

Campuses across the country once again were rocked by protest Dec. 27, this time against the decision to ban the Muslim Brotherhood. Students joined a national day of protest that day called by the Anti-Coup Alliance.

The regime lashed out, killing some 19 people that day, including three students. Women students at Al-Azhar University in Cairo came under attack by pro-regime thugs (see a short video here). Some university buildings in Cairo were torched.

In response to the attack at Al-Azhar, the group Students Against the Coup organized a march to the campus the following day. Madr Masa reports that they protested at entrances to the university against the holding of exams in the violent climate created by the regime. Once again, police and thugs attacked. Some 60 students were arrested.

Youssof Salhen, 21, spokesperson for Students Against the Coup, told the UK Observer that 14 of those arrested on Saturday were women. He said, "We are not going to stop [protesting] until we achieve justice for those who have died and those who have been jailed.

"The security forces and the coup forces will continue to try to frighten students for trying to exercise their rights to peaceful protest, but we will continue."

Crackdown on Journalists

Press freedom is under heavy attack. Journalists at the banned newspaper of the Freedom and Justice Party have taken their campaign to reopen the newspaper to the Press Syndicate, the union of journalists in Egypt. The Syndicate has opposed the banning, saying that the FJP is a legitimate political party that cannot be banned on a whim.

Back in September, the Syndicate voiced solidarity with journalists following a police raid on the newspaper offices. (See an essay on the history of Egypt's Press Syndicate here.)

Also condemning the newspaper banning is the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression. It says the measure is a "blatant assault on freedom of expression."

Four journalists of Al Jazeera’s English broadcast were arrested at the news agency’s office in a hotel in Cairo on the night of Dec. 29. One was later released. Three are charged with belonging to a terrorist organization, including bureau chief Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and veteran correspondent Peter Greste. Fahmy is a Canadian citizen, and his detention was reported in the Toronto Star on January 7 by the Cairo-based journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous. Greste is Australian.

The Arab Network For Human Rights Information (ANHRI), a Cairo-based human rights watchdog, has condemned the Egyptian regime for the Al Jazeera arrests and for "ongoing use of gag policy." Press freedom organizations internationally also have called for the release of the three.

Two other Al Jazeera journalists, Abdulla al-Shami and Mohamed Badr, have been held without charge for more than five months.

Constitutional Referendum

The regime is revising Egypt's post-Mubarak constitution that was approved in a referendum in December 2012. They will put the revised document to a referendum January 14-15. Among many regressive measures in it, the revised document will remove civilian oversight of the military, require that the defense minister be a military officer, and fully restore trials of civilians by military courts.

The Freedom and Justice Party and the Anti-Coup Alliance have announced they will boycott the constitution referendum. So, too, will the April 6 Youth Movement and other political parties and social movements. (For a detailed look at the proposed constitution, see this analysis by FIDH.)

Human rights organizations and a broad cross-section of Egyptian society have long demanded an end to military trials of civilians.

Peaceful but Uncompromising Resistance

The Anti-Coup Alliance has, from the outset, affirmed that it will wage peaceful but unrelenting opposition to the regime. It rejects armed resistance. Anti-coup resistance is growing as social and economic conditions deteriorate and the regime demonstrates that it is utterly bereft of plans to move the country forward. It has only violence and dictatorship to offer.

The sustained civil protests have encouraged growing sections of the population to see through the phony claim by Egypt's elite and sections of the country's middle class that the coup represented some kind of "salvation" for the nation from Islam-inspired political movements.

Egyptians hope and quite reasonably expect that world opinion will support their struggle for democracy. But the big powers of the world are playing coy, quietly backing the regime while at the same time keeping some distance to avoid being tainted with the worst of its abuses.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced December 24 that he was "seriously concerned" about the deteriorating human rights situation. He has made no announcement about the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood and related measures.

The US State Department stated a "concerned" posture at a news briefing Dec. 30. Canada has said nothing.

Back in August in an online story in the Ottawa Citizen that has since been removed from the newspaper site, minister of foreign affairs John Baird spoke about the July coup to reporters while visiting a Coptic church in Ottawa. He said, "The former president became autocratic and did not want to build a peaceful, inclusive society."

He went on, "We're certainly not calling for them to be restored to power." (See a report on Baird's statement by the present author included here in an August 2013 news posting.)

Canada's statements on Egypt have been limited to cautionary calls upon unnamed agencies in Egypt to cease "violence." At the time of the July coup against the elected president and government, Baird smoothly stated, "Canada urges all parties in Egypt to remain calm, avoid violence and engage in meaningful political dialogue."

Leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood are seeking to convince the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prefer charges of crimes against humanity against the coup regime.

The big powers' aloofness to the ongoing assaults on people and democracy is a sharp contrast to the hailing of the "Tamarod" movement in the spring and summer of 2013. The quite legitimate grievances of many participants in that movement against the government of President Morsi were cynically manipulated to help set the stage for the coup.

Sara Khorshid, an Egyptian journalist, recently penned a commentary in The New York Times about Egypt's counter-revolution. She writes about the illusions of her fellow citizens in believing that the July 2013 coup and army rule could bring improvement to the country. Her views are also a useful reminder to those actors outside Egypt whose dislike of a Muslim Brotherhood-led government clouded their political judgment and their defense of democratic rights for all.

Khorshid concludes her commentary, "Ultimately, those who saw the military as a better alternative to the Brotherhood will realize the magnitude of injustice that the military's wide-ranging authorities could bring to all aspects of Egyptian life."

The MENA Solidarity Network is urging concerned people to sign a petition it has initiated against the anti-protest law in Egypt. The petition is here. You can also download a print version to circulate. The names of signatories will be delivered to the Egyptian Embassy in the UK on January 25, 2014.

The Egyptian-Canadian Coalition for Democracy is holding activities across Canada to build solidarity with the Egyptian people, including a public forum in Vancouver on January 25. Read about its work on its web site, http://eccd-cecd.ca/. The coalition is a co-founder of the recently launched Egyptians Worldwide for Democracy and Justice. Read its founding statement here.

Roger Annis  is a writer and activist in Vancouver, British Columbia. He publishes the website A Socialist in Canada. He can be reached at rogerannis@hotmail.com.

 Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Who Are You Going to Trust: Truth, War Propaganda, CIA and Media Manipulation

Truth, War Propaganda, CIA and Media Manipulation

by Global Research

Never before has it been so important to have independent, honest voices and sources of information. We are – as a society – inundated and overwhelmed with a flood of information from a wide array of sources, but these sources of information, by and large, serve the powerful interests and individuals that own them. The main sources of information, for both public and official consumption, include the mainstream media, alternative media, academia and think tanks.

The mainstream media is the most obvious in its inherent bias and manipulation. The mainstream media is owned directly by large multinational corporations, and through their boards of directors are connected with a plethora of other major global corporations and elite interests. An example of these connections can be seen through the board of Time Warner.

Time Warner owns Time Magazine, HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN, among many others. The board of directors includes individuals past or presently affiliated with: the Council on Foreign Relations, the IMF, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Warburg Pincus, Phillip Morris, and AMR Corporation, among many others.

Two of the most “esteemed” sources of news in the U.S. are the New York Times (referred to as “the paper of record”) and the Washington Post. The New York Times has on its board people who are past or presently affiliated with: Schering-Plough International (pharmaceuticals), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chevron Corporation, Wesco Financial Corporation, Kohlberg & Company, The Charles Schwab Corporation, eBay Inc., Xerox, IBM, Ford Motor Company, Eli Lilly & Company, among others. Hardly a bastion of impartiality.

And the same could be said for the Washington Post, which has on its board: Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Warren Buffett, billionaire financial investor, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; and individuals associated with (past or presently): the Coca-Cola Company, New York University, Conservation International, the Council on Foreign Relations, Xerox, Catalyst, Johnson & Johnson, Target Corporation, RAND Corporation, General Motors, and the Business Council, among others.

It is also important to address how the mainstream media is intertwined, often covertly and secretly, with the government.

Carl Bernstein, one of the two Washington Post reporters who covered the Watergate scandal, revealed that there were over 400 American journalists who had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Interestingly, “the use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA.” 

Among organizations which cooperated with the CIA were the “American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.”

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. The CIA even ran a training program “to teach its agents to be journalists,” who were “then placed in major news organizations with help from management.”

These types of relationships have continued in the decades since, although perhaps more covertly and quietly than before. For example, it was revealed in 2000 that during the NATO bombing of Kosovo, “several officers from the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters.”

This same Army Psyop outfit had “planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration’s Central America policies,” which was described by the Miami Herald as a “vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory.”

These Army PSYOP officers also worked at National Public Radio (NPR) at the same time. The US military has, in fact, had a strong relationship with CNN.

In 2008, it was reported that the Pentagon ran a major propaganda campaign by using retired Generals and former Pentagon officials to present a good picture of the administration’s war-time policies. The program started in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and continued into 2009. These officials, presented as “military analysts”, regurgitate government talking points and often sit on the boards of military contractors, thus having a vested interest in the subjects they are brought on to “analyze.”

In 2013, Public Accountability reported:

During the public debate around the question of whether to attack Syria, Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to George W. Bush, made a series of high-profile media appearances. Hadley argued strenuously for military intervention in appearances on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg TV, and authored a Washington Post op-ed headlined “To stop Iran, Obama must enforce red lines with Assad.”

In each case, Hadley’s audience was not informed that he serves as a director of Raytheon, the weapons manufacturer that makes the Tomahawk cruise missiles that were widely cited as a weapon of choice in a potential strike against Syria. Hadley earns $128,500 in annual cash compensation from the company and chairs its public affairs committee. He also owns 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate ($77.65 on August 23, making Hadley’s share’s worth $891,189). Despite this financial stake, Hadley was presented to his audience as an experienced, independent national security expert.

The major philanthropic foundations in the United States have often used their enormous wealth to co-opt voices of dissent and movements of resistance into channels that are safe for the powers that be. As McGeorge Bundy, former President of the Ford Foundation once said, “Everything the Foundation does is to make the world safe for Capitalism.”

Examples of this include philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation providing immense financial and organizational support to Non-Governmental Organizations. Furthermore, the alternative media are often funded by these same foundations, which has the effect of influencing the direction of coverage as well as the stifling of critical analysis.

This now brings us to the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research.

As an institution which acts as a research centre as well as a source of alternative news through the website www.globalresearch.ca, the CRG has become a much needed voice of independence seeking to break through all the propaganda and misinformation.

To maintain our independence, Global Research does not accept assistance from public and private foundations. Nor do we seek support from universities and/or government.

While the objective is to expand and help spread important and much-needed information to more people than ever before, Global Research needs to rely upon its readers to support the organization.
Thank you, dear readers, for your tireless support.

Supporting Global Research is supporting the cause of truth and the fight against media disinformation.

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Proxy War II for Lebanon? Hezbollah/Palestinian Rifts

Pressures Mounting… A Palestinian-Hezbollah War in Lebanon?

by Franklin Lamb - Ain el Helweh camp, Lebanon

It’s not just the leadership of the Zionist regime still occupying Palestine, six decades after the 1948 Nakba, that appears to be salivating at the current stoking of current tensions between the Palestinian Resistance and in some respects, its historic off-spring Hezbollah.

From Tel Aviv, to Amman, Riyadh, the Gulf Kingdoms to Washington DC and beyond, the forces allied against the Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah-Palestinian Resistance are working on yet another project to weaken and hopefully destroy all four.

It won’t be easy, but it is reportedly a key element among the anti-Resistance forces still seeking regime change in Syria. Even while some of these governments have been playing down their central goal of regime change in public. The same governments appear to be fantasizing that by building up the Lebanese army with a pledged $ three billion from Riyadh, its troops will somehow confront Hezbollah and its allies as part of a long-term “beat em or bleed em” project.

Patrick Cockburn writing recently in the UK Independent and Counterpunch accurately summarized situation of “Anti-Shia hate propaganda spread by Sunni religious figures sponsored by, or based in, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, is creating the ingredients for a sectarian civil war engulfing the entire Muslim world.”

The egging on the Palestinian and Hezbollah to confront each other has increased over the past three months in Lebanon’s camps and particularly from some of the local Sunni and Christian power centers. This in addition to continuing support for various ‘militia of the month’ groups terrorizing the population of the Syrian Arab Republic, as well as essentially imprisoning without food and medical care the remaining 17,000 out of a March 2011 population of 250,000 Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk camp in Damascus.

This is not to say that there are no continuing, and sometimes long held tensions among a small percentage of the Palestinians in Lebanon and some among Hezbollah and its allies, the Amal Movement and Michele Aoun’s, Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). It is the latter who is among the most anti-Palestinian of the Christian warlords and who some in Hezbollah and Palestinian factions cite for blocking Hezbollah from pushing for the right to work and to own a home for Palestinians in Lebanon. As for Amal, this Hezbollah’s Shia ally, is widely believed to have killed more Palestinians in Lebanon during the 1985-88 camp massacres ( it’s a misnomer to call them “wars” as the camps were basically defenseless) than Zionists have in the past 60 years. To this day, many Palestinians take deep umbrage with the long-time Amal leader posters placed outside Shatila and other camps since he is fairly universally despised by Palestinians in Lebanon for giving the orders for slaughtering so many of them. Attempts to remove his posters-portraits from Palestinian camps which are considered a provocation by many, risk facing his armed militia that occupies part of Shatila. The Sunni and Shia populations in the camps largely co-exist in a tense but generally peaceful juxtaposition with refugees from Syria. But it’s not the quality of relations that obtained before the Syria crisis and Hezbollah’s involvement there.

Hezbollah also has several reasons to question Palestinian support of the “National Lebanon Resistance” which the Party of God leads. There has been some evidence of individual Palestinians supporting anti-Hezbollah militia forces and political parties in Lebanon, and, according to camp officials they admit that some individual Palestinians go and return to Syria to fight against the Assad regime. Some who are close to Hezbollah claim that many Palestinians don’t appreciate that the organization is the main supporter of their cause to return to Palestine and are ingrates for all that Hezbollah does for them. Rebuttals include that regrettably Hezbollah has done little for Palestinians living in Lebanon’s camps and that Hezbollah has to date refused to use its political power to force Lebanon to comply with international law and grant elementary civil rights to them, including the rights to work and to own a home.

Against this backdrop, Al-Nusra Front leader Abou Mohammed al-Jawlani said that the Al-Qaeda-linked organization is active on Lebanese soil in order to help the Sunnis including Palestinians face the “injustice” of Shiite Hezbollah. “Lebanon’s Sunni are requesting that the mujahideen intervene to lift up the injustice they are suffering from at the hands of Hezbollah and similar militias,” Jawlani said in an interview on Al-Jazeera recently.

Shiite-populated areas across Lebanon have been the target of terror attacks since Hezbollah declared it was fighting on the side of the Syrian regime in May. Three car bomb attacks have targeted southern Beirut in recent months while a number of IED attacks have occurred in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley.

The head of the Islamic Jihadist Movement in Ain al-Helweh camps, Sheikh Jamal Khattab, voiced fears on 1/8/14 of a possible armed sectarian confrontation between Hezbollah and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon if the party did not revise its policies at home and in Syria. Sheikh Khattab told the Beirut Daily Star that “any fighting between Palestinians and Hezbollah could be worse than the three year violence between the Amal militia and Palestinians in the 1980’s, known as the “war of the camps.” (read: massacres) That conflict in which largely Shia forces attacked Sunni was not considered particularly sectarian and Hezbollah helped end it and protect the overwhelmingly Sunni Palestinians civilian population. Today it would be a Sunni vs. Shia war with regional and international consequences given the poisonous sea-change in sectarian relations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In Ain al-Helweh and other camps, posters of local men killed while fighting alongside Syrian rebels or against U.S. troops in Iraq are tacked up throughout the camp. Lebanese security sources claim that Palestinian Islamist groups in Ain al-Hilweh, particularly Usbat al-Ansar, Jund al-Sham, Fatah al-Islam, other Salafist groups and supporters of controversial fugitive Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir have all finalized preparations to defend Sidon against any attack by Hezbollah’s organized and trained “Resistance Brigades”. Rumors abound that these groups are being financed for this purpose by certain of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries and some Lebanese pro-Western March 14 parties. These groups and some of their sponsors consider conditions ripe in Lebanon for an expanded war against “Shia infidels” and have plans to bring it here. Several groups now fighting in Syria claim to seek a wider war “against Shia infidels “and pledge to bring the Sunni-Shia war here.

The Palestinian Follow-Up Committee, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Fatah and the Palestinian National Security Forces have all strongly condemned as haphazard any irresponsible accusations against Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp after the assassination of ex-Finance Minister and former Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s adviser, Mohammed Shatah, Also recent harassment of passersby near Ain el Helweh camp remind some of the tight grip the army continues on Nahr al Bared, near Tripoli in the north of Lebanon. Based on interviews by this observer with residents of Ain el-Helweh, there clearly are supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades among others. But one can find the same across Lebanon especially in Sunni areas. The officials claim that while they cannot prevent anyone from joining the fighting in Syria, all Palestinian groups in Lebanon and Syria and elsewhere have consistently maintained their policy of non-involvement in the Syrian crisis. Yet some Palestinian Islamist factions and camp residents criticize Hezbollah’s armed support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

For their part, some pro-Hezbollah groups and many Lebanese citizens are suspicious of possible Palestinian involvement in recent terror attacks in Dahiyeh and the recent bombing of the Iranian Embassy. In point of fact, one of the two suicide bombers who attacked the Iranian Embassy on 11/17/13 was a Palestinian named Mouin Abu Dahr. His mother is a Shiite and his father a Sunni. Ain al-Hilweh is also in the spotlight currently due to the arrest of Majid al-Majid, the leader of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades. Majid is believed to have lived in Ain al-Hilweh since 2012.

Israel and its new and longtime allies seek Sunni-Shia war and the sooner the better. They also favor the continuation of the Syria crisis for the reason they consider Hezbollah is squandering some of their best fighters and commanders and well as their weapons stores. Western Diplomats have spoken about US-Israeli hopes that Syria will be Hezbollah’s Achilles heel and Iran’s Vietnam. Meanwhile Israeli media has commented on the views of some officials who are claiming that Hezbollah has shifted its attention to Syria and away from the southern front with occupied Palestine.

Time will tell.

But for its part Hezbollah maintains that by defending Lebanon and fighting ” takferi terrorists” it is using only five percent of its capacity to confront Israel. One source close to the Resistance reported that “Hezbollah has self-sufficiency when it comes to the missiles, strategic and non-strategic weapons. All these weapons are quite abundant. Any additional equipment will constitute a negative factor because there is no need for them. All the weapons that are manufactured by Iran or owned by Syria are also available for Hezbollah. The land forces and the Special Forces fighting in Syria have acquired a lot of practical and intelligence related experience and a force of maneuvering on the land. This experience will be used when the war with Israel begins again.”

The Sunni and the Shia just as with the Palestinians and Hezbollah need each other for many reasons including to confront growing Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate propaganda and the deepening and broadening Apartheid occupation of Palestine.

All must work to tamp down their differences publicly and privately while working to neutralize both Sunni and Shia sectarian provocateurs, domestic, regional and international that today are seeking internecine and sectarian violence in order to weaken both.

Franklin Lamb is a former Democratic National Committee Member representing Oregon. He volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.org)

Flagged to Death: Facebook's (Fascist?) Standards

Fascist Facebook? The Social Network Giant's Double Standards

by Ben Norton - CounterPunch

Is Facebook flirting with fascism? The question might prove difficult to answer with a resounding “yes or no,” but, to those who have been keeping track of its recent censorship practices, the answer appears to lean heavily toward the affirmative.

Yesterday, on 9 January 2014, after over five years of operation, popular Facebook page Anarchist Memes was permanently taken down by Facebook. With approximately 90,000 likes and hundreds of comments each day, Anarchist Memes established itself as one of the radical left’s most prominent Facebook pages. It posted feminist, anti-racist, pro-LGBT*QA, and anti-capitalist content numerous times a day. For years, the page and its administrators experienced endless harassment and trolling, yet it demonstrated an outstanding, resolute commitment to establishing a safe, non-oppressive digital environment. Racism, misogyny, cisheterosexism, ableism, classism, anti-Islamic prejudice, and other forms of bigotry were never tolerated. The page’s many administrators have, true to the cooperative anarchist tradition, created a democratic system of accountability to determine how to delete particular oppressive comments, as to prevent needless censorship while simultaneously creating a genuinely nonthreatening, non-hierarchical space for readers—a true rarity on the internet today.

Facebook, nonetheless, demonstrated on numerous occasions that such a feminist, anti-racist, anti-cisheteronormative environment would not be tolerated. The page was flagged numerous times for content that “violated” Facebook’s Community Standards and “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” rather ambiguously-delineated guidelines that suggest a commitment to liberal principles without dabbling in the difficulties that come with concretely articulating the specific moral values on which those principles are based. Facebook claims to be opposed to expression that supports “Violence and Threats,” “Bullying and Harassment,” “Hate Speech,” “Graphic Content,” and “Nudity and Pornography.” In actual practice, however, it is clear that the company is only opposed to particular kinds of violence, harassment, hate speech, and more.

Just a few months ago, Facebook generated much controversy for its intransigent refusal to remove photos glorifying rape and violence against women. Soraya Chemaly wrote of “Facebook’s big misogyny problem,” noting Facebook takes no issue in hosting pages like “I kill b**ches like you” and “Domestic Violence: Don’t Make Me Tell You Twice,” featuring scores of photos of beaten women. These individual pages were taken down as a result of the controversy the article generated, yet, today, many similar misogynist pages still exist. Spreading even more egg on its face, Facebook proceeded to lash out against those critiquing its censorship practices, blocking administrators of feminist pages who uploaded pictures protesting the site’s misogyny.

A page titled “Rapebook” was formed to protest Facebook’s misogynist practices. It explained that Facebook had no problem with “collections of pictures of naked children or very graphical [sic] pictures of victims of all sorts of violence and incidents.” After a bit of press coverage was generated around this issue, Facebook quickly deleted the child porn, but allowed pages “lathered with sexually explicit comments” to continue posting, unhindered. Rapebook began to report content that “promote[d] hate speech towards minorities” or took “enjoyment in crimes like rape and murder,” but Facebook refused to remove the material, calling it “controversial humor.”

At the same moment, Facebook had no problem targeting what was obviously feminist activism. In the words of Rapebook administrators, it will “leave a picture of a woman who lies, obviously physically hurt, at the bottom of stairs, captioned ‘next time don’t get pregnant’. At the same time Facebook will delete a picture, taken from a news item, of a woman who displayed her breasts at a political protest and temporarily ban all the administrators of a page that displayed it.” Administrators of pages that regularly promoted violence and threats, bullying and harassment, hate speech, and graphic content subsequently sicced their fans on the administrators of Rapebook. The latter began to regularly receive death threats, harassment, and more explicit content on their page, but Facebook insisted that such comments did not entail violations of its hallowed “Community Standards.”

Rapebook declared itself no longer active on 5 April 2013, writing it had “achieved what it was set up to do. It has shown that Facebook’s terms and conditions are null and void. We will leave the rest of the work for Facebook to do – or not.” Much to the chagrin of any seeker of justice, it appears as though Facebook has chosen the “or not” option.

Anarchist Memes has been one among Facebook’s many political targets. The company’s attack on the page stands as a salient example of how Facebook’s Community Double Standards work in actual practice. In the past several years, Facebook has removed harmless material and banned administrators many a time. In the past months, this censorship has been particularly vehement, with several instances of the company removing Anarchist Memes’ content. In each incident, Facebook’s reasoning was needlessly severe at best, flagrantly reactionary at worst.

In the first incident, Anarchist Memes posted a picture of a Klansman who had accidentally set himself, instead of a large wooden cross, on fire, accompanied by the words “IRONY, it strikes at the best of times.” Facebook took the picture down, claiming it violates its community standards.



In the second incident, Facebook took down a picture featuring a portrait of famous Ukrainian anarchist communist Nestor Mahkno with the text “You may be anti-racist… but are you shoot anti-Semites on sight anti-racist?” Again, Facebook took the picture down and banned several of the page’s administrators.


Some might argue that removing these two instances could be justified according to Facebook’s “Violence and Threats” guideline. Neither of the two constitutes a threat, by any stretch of the imagination, but the two might be considered violent, if one were loose enough with the definition. The problem, of course, arises in that Facebook has no problem conveniently applying a much more specific definition of the term when it comes to allowing sadistic images of, say, rapist men beating their partners, but it takes issue with harming racists. Strange? Of course, but this is how the corporation’s Community Double Standards work.

While these first two pictures might be contested vis–à–vis Facebook’s “terms and conditions,” the third and fourth instances of Facebook censoring Anarchist Memes in these past months are so resoundingly draconian as to verge on the absurd.

In the third, Anarchist Memes posted a picture simply reading “Some women have penises. Get over it!” No violence, no graphic image (no image at all), no nudity, no pornography, simply text that happens to say the word “penis.” Facebook, however, took the photo down and banned some of the page’s administrators. Transphobic much? Facebook apologists would argue in the negative; those who have been keeping track of Facebook’s well-documented transphobic and homophobic tendencies in the past few years, on the other hand, would know that the site has an ugly history of allowing anti-LGBT*QA hate speech.



In the fourth incident, Anarchist Memes posted an Eat That Toast! cartoon depicting how strange stalkers who consider themselves “nice guys” really look to others. So-called “men’s rights ‘activists’” went berserk. While Facebook might have puerilely objected to the use of the word “penis” in the third instance—an instance of censorship that can hardly be justified in light of its allowance of sexually violent comments on countless bigoted pages—in this fourth case, the censorship absolutely, positively cannot be justified.



In response to this ridiculous censorship, only several weeks ago, Anarchist Memes declared a “Feminist Week,” devoting itself to posting more feminist material than usual. It changed the header of its site to feature eminent anarchist Emma Goldman, and changed its characteristic logo from the red and black that traditionally signify anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism to the purple and black that signify anarcha-feminism.

This brings us to yesterday. 9 January 2014 was the last straw. Facebook took Anarchist Memes down for good.



Anarchist Memes has since appealed Facebook’s decision, in last efforts to get the site back up, but the chances do not look good. In the meantime, the page’s administrators have not given up. They revived an old version of the page that had been created as a backup (because of similar problems in the past with harsh Facebook censorship) but had been inactive for months. In just one day, this new Anarchist Memes page garnered over 2000 new likes—a telltale sign that Anarchist Memes has developed a community of committed activists around the world devoted to fighting oppression in all of its forms.

An Anarchist Memes administrator provided a statement on the affair.

White supremacist groups have their Facebook pages allowed up and are able to get away with whatever racist material they want to post, but anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-racist pages are constantly harassed by MRAs [so-called "men's rights 'activists'"], ancaps [so called "'anarcho'-capitalists"], white nationalists, and fascists and Facebook will take down those pages without batting an eye. I have reported several posts from pages that were overtly bigoted and had Facebook tell me that it doesn’t violate their standards and that I need to read their rules and stop abusing the reporting process.

The moral of the story: You can post pictures of men beating women; but you can’t mention the mere existence of a particular sexual organ on a transgender individual. You can post racist, white supremacist content until the cows come home, but, if you criticize creepy male stalkers, you will be banned. This is Facebook. It uses its ambiguous “terms and conditions” to its advantage. It can cry “Graphic content!” or “Nudity!” when it opposes particular content, and it can allow graphic content and nudity go unaddressed when it is not opposed to it.

If this were any other website, perhaps the issue would not be as big of a deal. After all, the mainstream corporate media publishes racist, misogynist, cisheterosexist, ableist, classist, and anti-Islamic material quite regularly. Facebook, however, is an interesting beast because it is such an important website, culturally, socially, and economically.

It is common for individuals, especially those influenced by the right-”libertarian” movement in the U.S., to say “Well, if you don’t like Facebook, just stop using it.” These are the same people who say, “If you don’t like your job, boss, and/or work environment, then just quit and start your own small business”—as though anyone can simply drop everything and find the capital to start a small business—the very same ones who insist, “If you are racially and/or sexually harassed at that store, then just stop going there and shop somewhere else”—as though that is always a tenable economic opportunity. For those of us in the real world, however, we see that life is never, under any circumstance, this simple. Utilization of Facebook is not a matter merely of “use it if you want; don’t use it if you don’t.”

Facebook is a not just a private corporation; Facebook is a crucial component of contemporary popular culture. Facebook is a place and an activity that large portions of the world use today. According to a 2013 Pew study on the social networking practices of Americans, as of September 2013, 71% of online adults use Facebook (the numbers for young adults are even higher). For many people, Facebook is essentially a required social activity. For those who do not wish to become social pariahs, it has become an obligatory ritual, an inextricable part of the contemporary global sociocultural fabric. For organizations, clubs, artists, musicians, bands, writers, photographers, fans of all sorts, and more, it is an invaluable, nonpareil way to spread the word, to connect like-minded individuals around the globe.

When such a critical part of global human culture, when the world’s de facto social media platform, is privatized, monetized, owned by a private company whose primary concern is not creating a safe, non-oppressive environment in which individuals can share their experiences, interests, and ideas with one another without fear of harassment or attack, but rather extracting profit from every possible social interaction, there is great reason to be concerned. Facebook’s attack on Anarchist Memes has demonstrated that Facebook’s bigotry extends beyond misogyny, beyond an unwillingness to take down pages that are blatantly white supremacist, racist, fascist, cisheterosexist, and more. Facebook’s censorship practices are political.

In making this point, I am not suggesting that Facebook has chosen to harshly target Anarchist Memes strictly because the page is explicitly anarchist; I would, however, posit that discounting such a point entirely would prove a fool’s errand. In mainstream Western public consciousness, the term anarchy still carries absurd connotations of chaos and violence; the term is often employed as a synonym for “disorder.” Actual anarchism, on the other hand, has a long and noble history of devotion to human justice, equality, and liberation, boasting some of human history’s most important political thinkers, figures, and organizations, including Peter Kroptokin, Noam Chomsky, Goldman, Makhno, the IWW, Revolutionary Catalonia, the Free Territory, the autonomous Shinmin region, the Zapatistas, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and much, much more.

Historically speaking, the anarchist movement adopted an intersectional approach to oppression decades before other radical left movements, indefatigably criticizing cisheteronormativity, misogyny, and racism at a time when some well-established Marxist-Leninist parties were overtly discriminating against members for being Jewish, or for refusing to conform to a heterosexual, cisgender binary, considering homosexuality (and feminism) “bourgeois decadence.” Fortunately, today, the vast majority of the radical left (including most Marxist-Leninists) has adopted the intersectional approach to oppression pioneered by many anarchist organizations, and has too incorporated anarchism’s invaluable ideals of direct-democratic organization, horizontalism, direct action, and more. Ignorant of this history, many might, without any research, side with Facebook in its reactionary criticism of Anarchist Memes, justifying knee-jerk partisanism with tired, historically baseless myths. Anarchist Memes, nevertheless, was guilty of nothing save for doing its best to fight back digitally against the racism, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity that dominate mainstream discourse and culture.

All of this established, it is important that I herein offer one final, yet very significant comment. Although Facebook’s censorship practices are certainly political, they do not evince some kind of right-wing conspiracy to silence all leftist dissent. It is important that we do not adopt this kind of conspiratorial conception of the site. The problem is not that Facebook hires a bunch of racist, misogynist, cisheterosexist moderators to ban content they deem problematic. Nay, Facebook is a corporation. Like all economic institutions operating within a capitalist system, its only commitment is ultimately to its shareholders. It may (and does) make political decisions in that process, but its exclusive goal is to increase its profit. Any political decisions necessarily contribute to this exclu$ive goal.

Accordingly, Facebook has outsourced as much of its labor as possible. The Telegraph ran a story in March of 2012 titled “The Dark Side of Facebook,” explaining that actual human beings are the ones doing Facebook moderation, not bots, not algorithms, and that these people are located in the so-called Third World. They are underpaid, overworked, exploited workers who merely follow the rules they are told to follow. An ex-worker described his work day as one in which he sits for hours flagging pictures of “Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc.”, admitting “I left [because] I value my sanity.” Another worker, a 21-year-old Moroccan, explained “It’s humiliating. They are just exploiting the third world.” These moderators—located in Morocco, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, and India—have three options when confronted with flagged content: “delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California (who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities).”

The problem is not with these moderators. This isn’t some right-wing contingent, bent on silencing all of the world’s activists; they, like most of us in the global capitalist economy, are exploited workers, seeking simply to put bread on the table. We should not blame them for following the orders of their superiors, nor should we blame them for “missing” racist, misogynist, and cisheterosexist content.

Facebook might try to defer responsibility, to blame its employees—a common practice among powerful corporations enduring public scrutiny—but the problem isn’t with its employees, mere individuals working within a corporate institution. The problem is with the structure. The problem is with Facebook’s Community Double Standards. The problem is with Facebook itself.

Ben Norton is an artist and activist. His website can be found at http://bennorton.com/.

Consciousness Change: A Climate Prerequisite

Climate Change Requires Consciousness Change

by William T. Hathaway

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about climate change but no one does anything about it. No one, particularly those in power, wants to make the necessary sacrifices. The latest round of international negotiations served mainly to postpone decisions and action. The Japanese government announced that their CO2 emissions would be increasing rather than decreasing as promised. The US government still refuses to comply with international environmental agreements.

Clearly we need a global reordering of priorities, away from short-term economic gain and towards long-term sustainability. But we've known this for decades, and the problem continues to worsen although scientists insist we could solve it if we had the will. Generating the will to make these changes, both in our personal lives and in the economic structures we are caught in, is going to require a change of consciousness.

A new book, Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness, approaches ecology from that dimension. The novel is set in 2026 as the earth's ecosystem has broken down under human abuse. Water supplies are shrinking. Rain is rare, and North America is gripped in the Great Drought with crops withering and forests dying. In the midst of environmental and social collapse, an old woman and a young man set out to heal nature and reactivate the cycle of flow by using techniques of higher consciousness. But the corporations that control the remaining water lash out to stop them.

In the story water is analogous to consciousness. People are out of contact with their own inner wellsprings of consciousness, so their lives are withering. And their ignorant actions have driven the earth's water deep underground, so nature is withering. Human life and the earth's life are trapped in suffering. The book shows the two main characters evolving their consciousness to a level where they can sense the water and restore its natural flow for humanity and the earth. A blend of adventure, ecology, and mystic wisdom, Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness is a frightening but hopeful look into a future that is looming closer every day.

It's also a love story, which is of course also good for our consciousness.

The book begins with the narrator, Bob, leaving his hometown in California after graduating from high school. He meets Jane, a meditation teacher who is convinced North America's water has retreated into a deep subterranean aquifer. She is searching for the place where it comes close enough to the surface to access it, and Bob agrees to help her with her quest.

Yosemite

As Jane drives over the Tioga Pass, the east entrance to Yosemite, the sun is setting over the Sierras, shooting rays of golden light through the haze, shining the clouds pink and violet. With a last gleam it drops behind the mountains and lights them from behind into miles of blue craggy peaks.

We have plenty of time to enjoy the view because her motor home is weak on hills; we're lugging at thirty m.p.h. It's dark by the time we get to the campground. I like it much better here than the desert -- the air is cool and fresh, and I can pitch my tent under a tree.

I wake up several times in the night to the sound of little things falling onto the taut nylon of the tent. Raindrops! I go back to sleep with a smile.

In the morning everything is still dry. Instead of rain, the tent and ground are strewn with pine needles. The tree above me is shedding needles and small branches as it withers. Its bark is gray and flaky, limbs limp.

After breakfast we take a walk to the nearby Tuolumne River, which turns out to be a meandering creek about six inches deep. The meadows on both sides are brown.

We stroll in the Sequoia grove among trees soaring over two hundred feet towards the sky with massive trunks as wide as a house. Some are over a thousand years old. But they won't get any older -- an army of dead soldiers left standing at attention.

We drive into Yosemite Valley, the main part of the park. I remember the pictures I've seen of it, taken before the drought: Bridal Veil and Yosemite Falls with tons of white water cascading over granite cliffs, crashing down into deep pools on the canyon floor that's covered with verdant grass and ferns.

But now the glaciers have melted and snow and rain are rare, so the falls are thin ribbons of water spilling over the cliffs then trickling through brown grass into what used to be the Merced River. We hear an occasional bird, but we don't see them or any other animals. Jane finds a blue jay feather, which she sticks in her hair -- but the jay is probably dead. We're very quiet as we drive away from the park -- as if we've been to Mother Nature's funeral.

Mt. Shasta

(Jane teaches Bob Transcendental Meditation, and their visions help them find the cavern that connects to the water.)

Jane and I drive around to the north side of Mt. Shasta, hoping to be able to sense the subterranean springs from there. In the moonlight the mountain looks like a silver pyramid soaring up from the horizon into the starry purple night. The ancient volcano is lord of all it surveys. Veils of clouds are blowing around its peak.

We find a grassy glade in the forest, but the grass is dry and brittle and the tree branches droop from the drought. As we are spreading our blankets out to meditate, motion on the other side of the clearing catches our eyes. Out of the trees steps a black-tailed doe. She sees us and pauses, one foot raised, sniffing, listening, looking. Jane and I stare enthralled. As the doe gazes at us, our eyes join across the space, across the species. Communication flows between us: cautious curiosity about a fellow creature. She breaks contact, begins nibbling, then looks back at us as if saying, As long as you stay on your side, it's OK.

We watch her in delight until she trots off, then we close our eyes to meditate. At first my mantra goes with my heartbeat then slows and goes with my breath. The sound stretches out into a long hum floating through me. I seem to be beyond my skin, filling the whole clearing. I feel like I'm sinking into the earth. I want to hold on, to keep from disappearing, but something tells me to let everything go. I free-fall through space, then realize it's impossible to fall because there's no down. I'm hovering ... like a dragonfly over water. The sound fades away, leaving me without thoughts. I seem to expand beyond all space and boundaries to unite with everything. For a moment I know I am everything, the whole universe, but as soon as I think, I'm everything, I'm not anymore. I'm just Bob Parks sitting on a blanket over cold ground.

I start the mantra again. Its whisper clears my thoughts away, and my mind becomes quiet. Part of me is watching the quietness of my mind and enjoying it. I never knew I had this watching part before. It doesn't need to think. It's just there, aware of everything but separate from it -- a wise old part of me.

I realize I'm off the mantra, drifting on thoughts, so I pick up the sound again and follow it as it gets fainter and finer until it becomes more visual, pulsing light behind my closed eyes. It seems to shine into something, a big cavern that's inside of me but also outside of me. The boundaries between me and everything else disappear -- no difference now between inside and outside. I can see dimly into the cavern. The walls and ceiling are crystal, its facets glinting in the mantra light. Below them in all directions stretches a vast dark sea of water, its ripples gleaming. It's deep, deep as the earth, and I want to plunge in and dive all the way to the bottom. I'm sitting above it. Down there beneath me, beneath these rocks and dirt, rests the water.

I can sense this sea's immensity, stretching from California under the Great Basin of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, the parched American desert, the last place the corporate drillers would've looked. We're sitting by the tip of it closest to the surface. From here it goes deeper and deeper, soaking through strata of sand and porous rock, a huge aquifer waiting to be freed and flow again.

I want to jump up and yell, "I found it!" but that thought makes it disappear. I take a deep breath and am back sitting cross-legged on my blanket. Too stunned to say anything, I lie back and feel the ground under me, this dry ground with all that good water under it.

Further samples are posted at www.cosmiceggbooks.com/books/wellsprings.

William T. Hathaway's other books include A World of Hurt (Rinehart Foundation Award), Summer Snow, and Radical Peace. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

Saviour of the World's Kings: King of the World

The Anti-Empire Report

by William Blum - KillingHope.org

“At last the world knows America as the savior of the world!”

– President Woodrow Wilson, Paris Peace Conference, 1919

The horrors reported each day from Syria and Iraq are enough to make one cry; in particular, the atrocities carried out by the al-Qaeda types: floggings; beheadings; playing soccer with the heads; cutting open dead bodies to remove organs just for mockery; suicide bombers, car bombs, the ground littered with human body parts; countless young children traumatized for life; the imposition of sharia law, including bans on music … What century are we living in? What millennium? What world?

People occasionally write to me that my unwavering antagonism toward American foreign policy is misplaced; that as awful as Washington’s Museum of Horrors is, al-Qaeda is worse and the world needs the United States to combat the awful jihadists.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. “They are different from you and me.”

And let me tell you about American leaders. In power, they don’t think the way you and I do. They don’t feel the way you and I do. They have supported “awful jihadists” and their moral equivalents for decades. Let’s begin in 1979 in Afghanistan, where the Moujahedeen (“holy warriors”) were in battle against a secular, progressive government supported by the Soviet Union; a “favorite tactic” of the Moujahedeen was “to torture victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their nose, ears, and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another”, producing “a slow, very painful death”.

With America’s massive and indispensable military backing in the 1980s, Afghanistan’s last secular government (bringing women into the 20th century) was overthrown, and out of the victorious Moujahedeen arose al Qaeda.

During this same period the United States was supporting the infamous Khmer Rouge of Cambodia; yes, the same charming lads of Pol Pot and The Killing Fields.

President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was a leading force behind the US support of both the Moujahedeen and the Khmer Rouge. What does that tell you about that American leader? Or Jimmy Carter – an inspiration out of office, but a rather different person in the White House? Or Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama, who chose Brzezinski as one of his advisers?

Another proud example of the United States fighting the awful jihadists is Kosovo, an overwhelmingly Muslim province of Serbia. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began an armed conflict with Belgrade in the early 1990s 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 Serbia. But Washington’s imperialists, more concerned about dealing a blow to Serbia, “the last communist government in Europe”, supported the KLA.

The KLA have been known for their torture and 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.

More recently the US has supported awful jihadists in Libya and Syria, with awful consequences.

It would, moreover, be difficult to name a single brutal dictatorship of the second half of the 20th Century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population. And in recent years as well, Washington has supported very repressive governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia, Egypt, Colombia, Qatar, and Israel.

Not exactly the grand savior our sad old world is yearning for. (Oh, did I mention that Washington’s policies create a never-ending supply of terrorists?)

And what do American leaders think of their own record? Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was probably speaking for the whole private club when she wrote that in the pursuit of its national security the United States no longer needed to be guided by “notions of international law and norms” or “institutions like the United Nations” because America was “on the right side of history.”

If you’ve never done anything you wouldn’t want the government to know about, you should re-examine your life choices.

“The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment,” a senior American defense official said in 2003, “so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited.”

One must wonder: When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, CIA torture renditions, and round-the-world, round-the-clock surveillance become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and John Brennan will be too embarrassed to defend?

Last month, a former National Security Agency official told the Washington Post that the Agency’s workers are polishing up their résumés and asking that they be cleared – removing any material linked to classified programs – so they can be sent out to potential employers. He noted that one employee who processes the résumés said, “I’ve never seen so many résumés that people want to have cleared in my life.”

Morale is “bad overall”, said another former official. “The news – the Snowden disclosures – it questions the integrity of the NSA workforce,” he said. “It’s become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, ‘Why are you spying on Grandma?’ And we aren’t. People are feeling bad, beaten down.”

President Obama was recently moved to declare that he would be proposing “some self-restraint on the NSA” and “some reforms that can give people more confidence.” He also said “In some ways, the technology and the budgets and the capacity [at NSA] have outstripped the constraints. And we’ve got to rebuild those in the same way that we’re having to do on a whole series of capacities … [such as] drone operations.”

Well, dear readers and comrades, we shall see. But if you’re looking for a glimmer of hope to begin a new year, you may as well try grabbing onto these little offerings. When the American Empire crumbles, abroad and at home, as one day it must, Edward Snowden’s courageous actions may well be seen as one of the key steps along that road. I’ve long maintained that only the American people have the power to stop The Imperial Machine – the monster that eats the world’s environment, screws up its economies, and spews violence on every continent. And for that to happen the American people have to lose their deep-seated, quasi-religious belief in “American Exceptionalism”. For many, what they’ve been forced to learn the past six months has undoubtedly worn deep holes into the protective armor that has surrounded their hearts and minds since childhood.

A surprising and exhilarating example of one of these holes in the armor is the New Year’s day editorial in the New York Times that is now well known. Entitled “Edward Snowden, Whistle-blower” – itself a legitimation of his actions – its key part says: “Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service.”

The president has been moved to appoint a committee to study NSA abuses. This of course is a standard bureaucratic maneuver to keep critics at bay. But the committee – Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies – did come up with a few unexpected recommendations in its report presented December 13, the most interesting of which perhaps are these two:

“Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry secrets to advantage their domestic industry.”

“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems.”

The first recommendation refers to a practice, though certainly despicable, that is something the United States has been doing, and lying about, for decades. Just this past September, James Clapper, Director of US National Intelligence, declared:

“What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies.”

Clapper is the same gentleman who told Congress in March that the NSA does not intentionally collect any kind of data on millions of Americans; and, when subsequently challenged on this remark, declared: “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no’.”

The second recommendation had not been revealed before, in a Snowden document or from any other source.

“That was a strangely specific recommendation for something nobody was talking about,” observed the director of a government transparency group.

ABC News reported that “A spokesperson for the NSA declined to comment on the issue of bank account hacking, and a representative for U.S. Cyber Command did not immediately return an emailed request for comment.”

Manipulating bank records is about as petty and dishonorable as a superpower can behave, and could conceivably, eventually, lead to the end of the NSA as we’ve all come to know and love it. On the other hand, the Agency no doubt holds some very embarrassing information about anyone in a position to do them harm.

The bombing of Flight 103 – Case closed?

When the 25th anniversary of the 1988 bombing of PanAm Flight 103 occurred on December 21 I was fully expecting the usual repetitions of the false accusation against Libya and Moammar Gaddafi as being responsible for the act which took the lives of 270 people over and in Lockerbie, Scotland. But much to my surprise, mingled with such, there were a rash of comments skeptical of the official British-US version, made by various people in Scotland and elsewhere, including by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Libya.

In a joint statement the three governments said they were determined to unearth the truth behind the attack. “We want all those responsible for this brutal act of terrorism brought to justice, and to understand why it was committed”, they declared.

Remarkable. In 1991, the United States indicted a Libyan named Adelbaset al-Megrahi. He was eventually found guilty of being the sole perpetrator of the crime, kept in prison for many years, and finally released in 2009 when he had terminal cancer, allegedly for humanitarian reasons, although an acute smell of oil could be detected. And now they speak of bringing to justice “those responsible for this brutal act of terrorism”.

The 1988 crime was actually organized by Iran in retaliation for the American shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of 290 people. It was carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a 1968 breakaway from a component of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with some help from Syria. And this version was very widely accepted in the Western world, in government and media circles. Until the US buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed. Then, suddenly, we were told that it was Libya behind the crime.

If the US and UK now wish to return to Iran, and perhaps Syria, as the culprits, they will have a lot of explaining to do about their previous lie. But these two governments always have a lot of explaining to do. They’re good at it. And the great bulk of their indoctrinated citizens, with little resistance, will accept the new/old party line, and their mainstream media will effortlessly switch back to the old/new official version, since Iran and Syria are at the top of the current list of Bad Guys. (The PFLP-GC has been quiescent for some time and may scarcely exist.)

If you’re confused by all this, I suggest that you start by reading my detailed article on the history of this case, written in 2001 but still very informative and relevant. You may be rather surprised.

The UK, US and Libyan governments have now announced that they will co-operate to reveal “the full facts” of the Lockerbie bombing. And Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, said he believes more people will be charged. This could be very interesting.

Free books of historical value

The complete set, less one volume, of the 15 Church Committee (1975-6) volumes. Lacking only Final Report, book 6: “Congressional Research Service. Supplementary Reports on Intelligence Activities.”

The complete set, less one volume, of the 6 Pike Committee volumes. Lacking only volume 6: “Committee Proceedings, part II”

The Rockefeller Commission Report, one volume.

Hearings on FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) before Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (same as Church Committee), one volume.

Total of 21 volumes, all from 1975-1976, all in good condition. Either pick them up in Washington, DC or send me $10 for postage.

Notes

Washington Post May 11, 1979; New York Times, April 13 1979
William Blum, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” (2005), chapter 10
RT TV (Russia Today, Moscow), May 4, 2012
Associated Press, December 14, 2010
Foreign Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations), January/February 2000 issue
New York Times, January 17, 2003
Washington Post, December 7, 2013
Washington Post, December 18, 2013
Washington Post, December 7, 2013
“Liberty and Security in a Changing World”, p.221
See Anti-Empire Report, #118, June 26, 2013, second part
Statement by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Allegations of Economic Espionage, September 8, 2013
NBC News, June 9, 2013
Kel McLanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, speaking to ABC News Radio, December 23, 2013
ABC News Radio, December 23, 2013
Reuters news agency, December 22, 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.


← Issue #123

Back to Fallujah: A Legacy that Keeps on Killing

US imperialism and Iraq’s descent into civil war

by Bill Van Auken - WSWS

A decade after the US military waged two barbaric sieges of Fallujah, the Iraqi city is once again facing a bloody armed conflict.

The army of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has massed artillery and tanks on Fallujah’s outskirts and has already bombed and shelled civilian neighborhoods, inflicting an unknown number of casualties. Thousands have fled the city in fear for their lives, and the United Nations has warned that the cut-off of water, food and fuel is creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Maliki has vowed to launch a full-scale assault on the city unless its inhabitants succeed in persuading armed insurgents to surrender.

In April and again in November-December of 2004, Fallujah was turned into a killing field by the US occupation. From the air it was pummeled by AC-130 Specter gunships, F-16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters. On the ground, a force of over 10,000 US troops backed by tanks and artillery was assembled to attack the city. Bombs, missiles and white phosphorous shells—chemical weapons banned under the Geneva conventions—were unleashed against the population. Hospitals and ambulances were targeted.

In the end, fully one out five buildings in the town were destroyed, while two-thirds of what remained were damaged. Hundreds of thousands were turned into homeless refugees. At least 120 US troops were killed in the two sieges, while no accurate count of how many thousands of Iraqis were killed has ever been made.

Much of the US media coverage of the current situation in Fallujah, Ramadi and elsewhere in Iraq’s western Anbar province, has begun from the standpoint of what a shock and disappointment these events represent, given the enormous “sacrifice” made by the US occupation to pacify the area a decade ago. The Iraq war is once again being cast as a humanitarian venture aimed at fighting terrorism and bringing democracy to the Iraqi people.

The barbaric attack on Fallujah constituted a war crime. In its aims, scope and ferocity, it was comparable to the kind of collective punishment meted out by the Nazis against resisting populations in occupied Europe. It was emblematic of the criminal character of the entire US war. Foisted onto the American people with lies about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and ties between Baghdad and Al Qaeda, the war was a premeditated act of aggression launched to further US imperialist aims to assert hegemony over the Middle East and its vast energy reserves.

Having failed to secure a guarantee of legal immunity for remaining US troops, Obama ordered the last of them withdrawn from Iraq little more than two years ago. The Iraqi people, however, have been left to deal with the bitter legacy of nearly nine years of US military occupation. Meanwhile, Washington’s quest for hegemony in the region has continued, most notably through the war to topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and its fomenting and support for a war for regime change against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. In Fallujah and Ramadi, the consequences of the crimes of US imperialism, both past and present, have come together in an explosive form.

The confrontation, presented by the corporate media as a struggle against Al Qaeda terrorists, has deep roots in the sectarian divisions that were instigated by the US war and occupation as part of a deliberate divide-and-rule strategy. They succeeded in pitting Iraq’s majority Shi’ite population against the minority Sunnis, while the Kurdish minority in the north has been allowed to pursue regional autonomy, while conflicts over borders and rights to oil wealth threaten to erupt into civil war there as well.

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, installed under the US occupation, has pursued an openly sectarian agenda, ruthlessly purging leading Sunni political figures, using the security forces to crack down on the population of Anbar and branding protests against these abuses of power as acts of Al Qaeda terrorism.

At the end of December, the Maliki regime touched off the present conflict by moving to arrest Ahmed al-Alwany, a prominent Sunni member of parliament in Ramadi—killing his brother and five bodyguards in the process—and then on December 30 sending in security forces to break up a protest encampment that had existed in the same city for months, killing at least 17 more.

Amid seething popular anger, armed groups, including both the Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and local tribesmen, seized control of police stations, drove out the security forces and set up local checkpoints, effectively taking over Fallujah and much of Ramadi.

The Obama administration has responded by declaring its full support to Maliki and rushing weapons, including Hellfire missiles, drones and other equipment to his military. It is exerting maximum pressure on Congress to end its delay on shipment of Apache attack helicopters and F-16s to the regime. That this weaponry, in the hands of a regime that has become ever more sectarian and authoritarian, may soon be used to massacre civilians has presented no obstacle to the Obama White House.

Washington has presented its military aid as an imperative driven by the threat of Al Qaeda, with Secretary of State John Kerry describing those who have seized Fallujah as “the most dangerous players in that region.”

The reality is that such aid is one of the principal means of control and influence that Washington still exerts over Baghdad. While the troops have left, a 1,000-man Office of Security Cooperation-Iraq based at the US embassy remains, including both US military personnel and contractors. It has managed hundreds of military sales contracts amounting to over $9 billion since the end of the occupation. US contractors, most of them ex-special operations troops, remain “embedded” with Iraqi forces as “advisors.”

As for the supposed threat from Al Qaeda, that is also largely of Washington’s own making. The ISIS has been vastly strengthened by the US-backed war for regime change across the border in Syria, where it has been armed and funded by the US’s closest allies, particularly Saudi Arabia. The hypocrisy and cynicism of US policy in the region is summed up in Washington’s denunciation of Syria’s bombardment of ISIS forces in Aleppo, even as it rushes more missiles to Iraq so that Maliki can bomb them in Fallujah.

Embodied in this glaring contradiction is the dual use that Washington makes of Al Qaeda, employing it as a proxy where it suits is purposes—as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and more recently in Libya and Syria—and then using it as a bogeyman to justify intervention, as in Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago and once again in Iraq today.

The prospect that US imperialism may be able to further warm its hands over the fire it has ignited in Fallujah was indicated by the New York Times on Monday, in an article highlighting the “common enemies” shared by Washington and Tehran in Iraq. It suggested that the rapprochement between the US and Iran can extend beyond a deal on the Iranian nuclear program into turning Iran into a force for “stability” in the region.

Such a realignment, however, would hardly resolve the deep social, political and class conflicts tearing apart the Middle East, and would only be exploited by US imperialism to further its broader quest for global hegemony, particularly through confrontation with China.

Israel Rejects “Auschwitz Borders” Planting Instead "Villas in the Jungle"

Incitement against Palestine: Israel not ready to give up ‘villa in the jungle’

by Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

US Secretary of State John Kerry spent last week testing the waters with Israelis and Palestinians over his so-called framework agreement – designed to close the gaps between the two sides. But the issues he is trying to resolve appear more intractable by the day.

As he headed to the region, Israel’s hawkish cabinet ministers gave their blessing to legislation to annex the Jordan Valley, a large swath of the West Bank that might otherwise be the Palestinian state’s economic backbone and gateway to the outside world.

To underscore their point, the interior minister, Gideon Saar, a close friend of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, led a group of rightwing politicians on a tour of the valley during which they held a dedication ceremony for a new settlement neighbourhood.

In a speech there, the deputy foreign minister, Zeev Elkin, averred that the Jordan Valley must remain under “Israeli sovereignty forever”. Without it, Israel would return to what he called the “Auschwitz borders” before the 1967 occupation began.

On Sunday, as Kerry left, the defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, added a new condition: peace was impossible, he argued, as long as the Palestinians and their schoolbooks “incited” against Israel, even quoting from a government-compiled “Palestinian incitement index”.

The hyperbole overshadowed two Israeli surveys that might one day provide a yardstick by which to judge an equivalent “Israeli incitement index”.

An opinion poll revealed that nearly two-thirds of Israeli Jews believe the conflict’s Palestinian narrative – including the nakba, the great dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 to create Israel – should be taught in schools.

This flies in the face of Netanyahu’s own view. His government passed a law in 2011 effectively banning public institutions from giving a platform to nakba commemorations.

The other study, following an experiment in a handful of schools, demonstrated that, when Jewish students are exposed to spoken Arabic at an early age, between 10 and 12, they hold dramatically less hostile and stereotypical views of Arabs. Currently, many Jewish students never learn Arabic.

With the experimental programme employing teachers from Israel’s large Palestinian minority, the study noted that for most of the Jewish children it was the first time they had developed a close relationship with an Arab.

The education ministry, however, was reported to have waved aside the findings and is apparently failing to fund the existing, small programme, let alone expand it.

This is no oversight. Successive Israeli governments have carefully engineered the structure of Israeli society to ensure that Jewish and Palestinian citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population, are kept in separate linguistic, cultural, educational and emotional worlds.

The reasoning is not hard to discern. The last thing Israeli leaders want is for Jewish and Palestinian citizens to develop shared interests, forge friendships and act in solidarity. That would start to erode the rationale for a Jewish state, especially one premised on the supposed need of the Jews to defend themselves from a hostile world – “the villa in the jungle”, as former prime minister Ehud Barak once characterised Israel.

In short, a Jewish state’s future precisely depends on the anti-Arab stereotypes inculcated in young Israeli minds.

It may not therefore be coincidental that, as Israel has faced increasing pressure over the past 20 years to make peace, the separation of Jews from Palestinians has entrenched.

Today most Israeli Jews rarely meet a Palestinian, and especially not one from the West Bank or Gaza. It is easy to forget that before the 1993 Oslo accords, many Israeli Jews regularly ventured into Palestinian areas, to shop, eat and fix their cars. Palestinians, meanwhile, were evident in Israeli communities, even if only as builders or waiters.

It may have been a very unequal, even colonial encounter, but nonetheless it made it hard for Israelis to demonise their neighbours.

Such contacts are now a distant memory. And that is precisely how leaders like Netanyahu want to keep it.

Inside Israel, the direction of policy is the same. In recent weeks, the government has insisted on raising the electoral threshold in a barely concealed effort to rid the parliament of Arab parties. Legislation is also being revived to tax into oblivion human rights organisations, those that give a voice to Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

Last weekend Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, argued that a peace agreement must include disappearing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian citizens by transferring their homes to a future, very circumscribed Palestinian state.

Palestinian legislator Ahmed Tibi’s complaint that Palestinian citizens were viewed by Israel’s leaders as nothing more than “chess pieces” goes to the heart of the matter. It is easy to dehumanise those you know and care little about.

Israel’s separation policy – and its security justifications – requires not only that Jews and Palestinians be kept apart, but that Palestinians be confined to a series of discrete ghettos, whether in the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza or Israel.

These divisions are the cause of endless suffering. A recent study of Gaza, the most isolated of these ghettos, found that a third of Palestinians there were physically separated from a close relative. Israeli-imposed restrictions force Palestinians to forgo marriages, learn of relatives’ deaths from afar, miss college courses, and lose the chance for medical treatment.

The prioritising of Israelis’ security over Palestinians’ freedom was a central weakness of the Oslo process, and the same skewed agenda pollutes the current peace talks.

In a commentary for the Haaretz newspaper last week, a leading general, Gadi Shamni, set out at length the many military reasons – quite apart from political ones – why Israel could never risk allowing the Palestinians a viable state. On the army’s best assessments, he argued, Israel would need to control such a state’s borders and much of its territory, including the Jordan Valley, for a period ranging “from 40 years to forever”.

The reality is that no arrangement on earth can guarantee protection for those in the villa from the beasts lurking outside. Either it is time to abandon the villa, or to start seeing the jungle as a forest to be explored.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

US Department of Injustice: Little Ones Squashed while the Large Ones Skate

The US Department of Injustice: Harsh Prosecution for the Little People and the Big Guys Skate

by Dave Lindorff - ThisCantBeHappening.net

The US Department of “Justice” has a distinctly nuanced concept of that term, taking a tough, no-holds-barred stance when it comes to individuals -- especially little people without much power or influence -- and trying at all costs to avoid prosecution when it comes to the powerful, and to big corporations -- especially big financial corporations. That schizoid approach to prosecution is personified in the recent actions--and inaction--of the DOJ’s man in Manhattan, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.

You remember Preet. He’s the guy who came down so hard on a deputy consul general of the Indian Consulate in New York who was accused by his office of “human trafficking.” Specifically, 39-year-old Devyani Khobragade stands accused of lying to US visa officials in New Delhi when she applied for a visa to bring an Indian maid to the US to work in her home, allegedly claiming to them that she would be paying the woman some $4500 a month, when the maid, who left the job, claimed she was paid just $573 monthly.

The US prosecutor (himself a naturalized citizen and native of India who grew up in the US) had Khobragade arrested as she dropped her two children off at school, brought her to the federal lock-up in Manhattan, where she claims she was strip searched and cavity searched several times, and finally released her on $250,000 bond, to face felony charges that could potentially result in 10 years’ jail time. (Khobragade has denied the charges and claims that the maid in question was extorting her family.)

Explaining his tough approach to the case, Bharara has stated that Khobragade’s treatment under arrest was not harsh, and that she was simply subjected to “routine procedures of the US Marshal’s Service” for persons being placed in detention following arrest.

In fact, he claimed she had been extended “special courtesies” such as being allowed to make multiple phone calls to assure that her children would be cared for in her absence, and being offered coffee by her arresting officers. Bharara also defended his department’s tough approach in this case saying that human trafficking is a serious crime and that “Foreign nationals brought to the United States to serve as domestic workers are entitled to the same protections against exploitation as those afforded to United States citizens.”

He went on to declare that the alleged lying to visa officials and the alleged “exploitation of an individual” were something that “will not be tolerated.”

Some might immediately point out that exploitation of low-paid American workers is rampant -- including in Bharara’s jurisdiction of New York--and that the Justice Department largely ignores it. (US workers routinely are defrauded out of overtime, get paid below minimum wage, are denied unemployment benefits they are owed, are forced to work in dangerous conditions, and are abused on the job and the “Justice” Department does nothing.) But even putting that huge hypocrisy aside, there’s the matter of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.

US Prosecutor Preet Bharara (center): On the one hand, $65-billion fraud-abetting bankster Jamie Dimon gets no prosecution or arrest, on the other, Indian consular worker Devyai Khobragade gets arrested, strip-and-cavity-searched and hit with a felony charge for lying on a visa application

This past week, Preet Bharara also announced that his office had reached an agreement with the nation’s largest “too-big-to-fail” bank on a fine and penalties of $2.5 billion for violating the Bank Secrecy Act. Specifically, JPMorganChase was accused of turning a blind eye to the record-breaking pyramid scheme of Wall Street scammer extraordinaire Bernie Madoff, who bilked clients out of a staggering $65 billion over two decades, largely working through one account he had at JPMorganChase.

Now, you’d think that for a crime that large and egregious, someone -- and ideally it would be bank head Jamie Dimon -- ought to have been frog-marched in cuffs out of JPMorganChase headquarters, and then brought down to the same lock-up Bharara had Khobragade taken to, there to be similarly given the “routine” treatment of strip searches and cavity searches that she got. (After all, Dimon became the bank’s president and chief operating officer back in July 2004, later becoming chairman and CEO too, and over that period the bank concedes there had been plenty of internal warnings about Madoff, who was essentially using the bank to execute his massive fraud.)

Nope. Didn’t happen.

In fact, while the the US Attorney’s Office claims Bharara and his prosecution team technically “filed” criminal charges against the bank (though not against any bank officials), when they met in a “congenial” setting with Dimon and his attorneys, it was agreed that there would be no criminal prosecution at all. Instead, the bank agrees to a fine of $1.7 million plus a payment of $350 million to the Comptroller of the Currency as well as some $500 million in compensation to victims, and said it would accept a “deferred prosecution agreement,” giving the bank two years to “overhaul its controls against money laundering.”

After that time, all is to be forgotten, and the charges will be dropped. Under this sweetheart agreement, the bank did not have to plead guilty to anything as part of this deal, but was allowed instead to “stipulate to the facts of the case.” This is even though JPMorganChase admitted that its own office in the UK, in 2008, sent a detailed warning explaining to senior managers that Madoff’s whole operation appeared to be a scam. (Wouldn’t you get a deal like that after an arrest for pot possession or for DWI!)

Bharara insisted, at a press conference announcing the settlement and the agreement to drop any criminal prosecution against the bank, that it was a good deal. He went to great lengths to insist that the bank’s failure was “institutional,” implying that it would not be appropriate to prosecute individuals. He refused to comment on the suitability of Dimon to continue running the bank, though his office could easily have insisted on Dimon’s departure as part of any non-prosecution settlement. He also several times repeated that there were “concerns” about possible “collateral consequences” of a criminal prosecution. At one point, when questioned by a reporter, he explained that those “consequences” might include “employees being laid off, the bank failing, or shareholders losing money.”

Of course, JPMorganChase failing would merely mean that the institution would be broken up, with the pieces being taken over by other institutions under supervision of the Office of Comptroller. Lost jobs? What about all the jobs lost because of Madoff’s scams? And as for shareholders, aren’t they the owners of the bank, who are supposed to be insisting that it is well run and acting in accordance with the law, not to mention looking out for fraud? If they weren’t doing that, then they deserve to lose money!

What’s really going on, though Bharara struggled mightily to avoid having to admit it, is that if you’re big enough and powerful enough, you don’t get criminally prosecuted by the DOJ.

Remember that phrase “Equal justice under the law”? It’s engraved on the front facade of the US Supreme Court an is supposed to be a fundamental American principle. Apparently it’s just a slogan though. If you’re the nation’s largest bank, or the boss of that bank, it doesn’t apply to you. Just ask US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.

Maybe we should just change the name of Bharara’s parent agency to US Department of Injustice. At least that would be honest.


Source URL: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2107

More than 250 Killed in Week of Intensive Iraq Violence

Sectarian War Arises in Iraq as Violence Kills 250+ in a Single Week

by TRNN

Raed Jarrar: Growing violence in Iraq is the result of the US-backed central government cracking down on grassroots Sunni protestors in Ramadi.

Raed Jarrar is an Arab-American architect, blogger, and political advocate based in Washington, DC. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Jarrar led the first door-to-door civilian casualties survey in the country. He then he founded an organization that completed hundreds of community-based reconstruction projects. After moving to the United States in 2005, Jarrar dedicated himself to ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He organized dozens of high-level meetings between Iraqi officials and their international counterparts. In addition to helping organize Congressional hearings with Iraqi members of parliament, Jarrar himself appeared before Congress in hearings and briefings. His frequent trips to Iraq, his strong relationships with Iraqi leaders, and deep knowledge of Iraqi political and economic developments have made him a sought after analyst who frequently appears on English and Arabic media outlets. 

Iraq Violence Triggers Instability, Dampens Oil Production Ambitions

Violence Threatens to Thwart Iraqi Oil Resurgence

by Nicholas Cunningham - Oilprice.com

A wave of violence has swept parts of Iraq at the start of 2014 as the central government fights back against Al-Qaeda aligned militants in Anbar Province. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) reportedly took control of Ramadi and Fallujah, bombing police headquarters and killing dozens.

On New Year's Day Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent in reinforcements to take back control of Anbar Province's two largest cities. The clashes kick off 2014 in much the same way as 2013 ended – a return to violence in a country that had seen important security gains in recent years.

Over 7,800 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2013, the bloodiest year over the past five. The latest violence occurred in Anbar Province, a region that dogged the U.S. military during its decade-long war. ISIL is also engaged in fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the latest string of events indicates that the violence of the Syrian civil war is spreading deeper into Iraq.

The conflict has yet to affect Iraq's oil fields, and production hit 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in December, the most since August 2013, according to Bloomberg. To be sure, the violence does not pose an immediate threat to Iraq's oil output, as three-fourths of the country's production comes from the South, and much of the rest from Kurdistan in the North. In fact, according to the EIA, a majority of Iraq's oil production comes from three fields – Kirkuk, and the North and South Rumaila fields near Basra. The latest violence is not located near these areas.

Still, the instability and the loss of control of key cities by the Iraqi government underscores the intense security challenge facing the country as it seeks to ramp up oil production in the coming years. Iraq has a stated goal of tripling oil production to 9 million bpd by 2020. In a 2012 special report on Iraq, the IEA estimates a slightly less rosy figure of 6.1 million bpd by the end of the decade in its central scenario.

With the immense challenges facing Iraq's oil sector, even doubling today's output over the next six years looks rather ambitious. Iraq still has not agreed on a hydrocarbons law that would outline oil governance. Kurdistan is making brazen moves aimed at increasing its independence from the central government in Baghdad. This may help to boost Kurdish oil production, but political conflict between the semi-autonomous region and the Maliki government casts a shadow of uncertainty over the country's oil industry. Most importantly, however, is the violence that threatens the stability of Iraq, which is now the second largest OPEC producer after Saudi Arabia.

While Iraq's failure to meet its ambitious oil production goals may seem to be a problem solely for Iraq, oil consumers around the world may be more dependent than they realize on the oil fields of Rumaila and Kirkuk.

Over the next 20 years, according to the IEA's latest World Energy Outlook, Iraq will account for the largest source of additional oil production to global markets. Yet, its failure to live up to those hopeful projections – and given the latest reports of violence, that seems entirely plausible – will send prices much higher than the 2035 price of $128 per barrel that the IEA predicts, as supply does not keep pace with demand.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Wave-of-Violence-Threatens-Ambitious-Iraqi-Oil-Goals.html