Ten Years After Katrina the Pain Remains, But Where Are the People?

New Orleans Katrina Pain Index at Ten: Who Was Left Behind

by Bill Quigley - CounterPunch

New Orleans - When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, the nation saw tens of thousands of people left behind in New Orleans. Ten years later, it looks like the same people in New Orleans have been left behind again.

The population of New Orleans is noticeably smaller and noticeably whiter. While tens of billions poured into Louisiana, the impact on poor and working people in New Orleans has been minimal. Many of the elderly and the poor, especially poor families with children, never made it back to New Orleans.

The poverty rate for children who did made it back remains at disturbingly high pre-Katrina levels, especially for Black children. Rents are high and taking a higher percentage of people’s income. The pre-Katrina school system fired all it teachers and professionals and turned itself into the charter experiment capital of the US even while the number of children in public schools has dropped dramatically.

Since Katrina, white incomes, which were over twice that of Blacks, have risen three times as much as Blacks. While not all the numbers below are bad, they do illustrate who has been left behind in the ten years since Katrina hit.

33: Rent in New Orleans is up 33 percent for one bedroom apartments and 41 percent for two bedroom apartments since Katrina hit. This is very tough because in New Orleans, 55 percent of residents rent. The national average is 35 percent. In 2005, one bedroom was $578 and two was $676. In 2015, it is $767 for one and $950 for two. CNN/Money recently named New Orleans as one of the worst cities in the US for renters. Before Katrina the average renter spent 19 percent of its income on rent. The Data Center, a terrific resource for information on the region, reports 37 percent of renters in New Orleans now spend more than 50 percent of their income to rent. Rental apartments are mostly substandard as well with 78 percent, nearly 50,000 apartments, in the city needing major repairs.

38: In 2005, 38 percent of the children in New Orleans lived in poverty, 17 percentage points higher than the US as a whole. The most recent numbers show 39 percent of the children in New Orleans live in poverty, still 17 percentage points higher than the national average. 82 percent of these families have someone working in the family so the primary cause is low wages.

44: New Orleans now has 44 school boards. Prior to Katrina, nearly all the public schools in New Orleans were overseen by the one Orleans Parish School Board. 91 percent of the public schools in New Orleans are now charter schools, the highest rate in the country. Only 32 percent of African Americans believe the new nearly all charter school system is better than the public school system before the storm versus 44 percent of whites even though precious few whites attend the public schools.

50: 50 percent of the Black children in New Orleans live in poor households, a higher percentage than when Katrina hit.

59: New Orleans is now 59 percent African American, down from 66.7 percent in 2000; 31 percent white, up from 26 percent in 2000; and 5.5 percent Hispanic, up from 3 percent in 2000.

67: Prior to Katrina, New Orleans incarcerated more of its citizens than any city in the US, five times the national average. Ongoing efforts by community members and local officials have reduced the number of people held in the jail by 67 percent.

73: 73 percent of New Orleans students who start high school graduate on time.

3221: There are now 3221 fewer low income public housing apartments in New Orleans than when Katrina hit. In 2005 there were5,146 low income public housing apartments in New Orleans, plus thousands of other public housing apartments scheduled for renewal or maintenance, nearly 100% African American. The housing authority now reports having 1925 public housing apartments available for low income people on the sites of the demolished complexes, less than half of the number promised, and less than half of those completed have rents set at rates which are affordable to those who lived in public housing before Katrina, meaning the majority of their public housing units now require higher incomes from renters than the people who were living in public housing prior to Katrina. That is why only about half of the families who lived in the four public housing developments which were demolished after Katrina made it back to New Orleans at all by 2011. And only 7 percent of those original families were living in the new housing which replaced their homes.

6,000: There are 6,000 fewer people on Social Security in Orleans Parish than before the storm. Orleans parish had 26,654 people on Social Security, either old age or disability, in 2004. Orleans parish had 20,325 people on Social Security in the latest report. There are similar drops in the numbers of people on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in New Orleans. There were just over 3,000 families receiving state temporary assistance in New Orleans in May 2005. As of May 2015, that number was down to 463.

7,500: Over 7,500 public school teachers and paraprofessionals, mostly African American, were fired after Katrina when Louisiana took over the New Orleans public school system. The US Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal in May 2015.

9,000: There are 9,000 fewer families receiving food stamps than before. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the old food stamps program. In May 2015, Orleans Parish had just under 40,000 households receiving SNAP benefits. In May 2005, New Orleans had 49,000 households receiving food stamps.

17,392: There are 17,392 fewer children enrolled in public schools in New Orleans now than before Katrina. There were over 63,000 enrolled pre-Katrina and now there are 45,608.

35,451: The median income for white families in New Orleans is $60,553; that is $35,451 more than for Black families whose median income was $25,102. In the last ten years the median income for Black families grew by 7 percent. At the same time, the median income for white families grew three times as fast, by 22 percent. In 2005, the median income for Black households was $23,394, while the median for white households was $49,262. By 2013, the median income for Black households had grown only slightly, to $25,102. But the median for white households had jumped to $60, 553.

44,516: The New Orleans metro area (Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist, and St. Tammany Parishes) has 44,516 more Hispanic residents in 2013 than in 2000. The total is now 103,061, just over 8 percent of metro population according to The Data Center.

71,000: Seventy one thousand fewer people live in New Orleans now than before the storm. In 2005, New Orleans had a population of 455,000 and in 2014 its population was 384,000.

99,650: There are 99,650 fewer African Americans living in New Orleans now than in 2000, compared to 11,000 fewer whites.

71,000,000,000: Seventy one billion dollars was received by the State of Louisiana for Katrina repairs, rehabilitation and rebuilding. One look at this index and you see who did NOT get the money.

Bill Quigley teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans and can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com.

#Hacking Team and Its Clients in Low Places

#HackedTeam and Colombia: How Surveillance Helps a Violent State

by Justin Podur - TelesurEnglish

A series of 2013 emails discuss a US$60M deal with Colombia's directorate of police intelligence (DIPOL). 

In the past few years, debates about universal surveillance, software and internet freedom, privacy and civil liberties have opened through the efforts and sacrifices of people like Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Anonymous. The governments and private security industry that have been exposed through leaks, hacks, and whistleblowing, have been forced to respond. Some of these responses involved attacking and prosecuting the messengers. Others have involved denial, apology, and the perpetually fresh doctrine of the "change of course": "yes, we used to violate people's rights, but that's all over now".

Some public figures attempted to argue against privacy on principle: "If you have nothing to hide, why should you need privacy?" But, as Glenn Greenwald wrote, none of these anti-privacy people were willing to give him their email passwords on television, despite having nothing to hide.

A small number of those implicated in surveillance violations took a defiant stance, as in: "yes, we violate privacy, and we are very good at it." One security company, dedicated to offensive hacking, stood out as particularly defiant: The Italy-based Hacking Team, headed by David Vincenzetti. Go to their website today and watch the banners flash along: "DEFEAT encryption." "Total control over your targets." "Thousands of encrypted communications per day. Get them. In the clear." While many of Hacking Team's competitors were more sheepish, or at least discrete, about their violations of people's privacy rights, Hacking Team staked out a marketing space based on flamboyance.

With such a casual attitude to violating citizens privacy on behalf of their clients, the hack against Hacking Team that occurred on July 5 was almost inevitable, and it is very difficult to find any sympathy for Hacking Team's cries that their privacy has been violated. The hashtag #HackedTeam trended for quite a while, along with others like #IsHackingTeamAwakeYet.

The hackers released into the public domain the specialized software that Hacking Team uses to violate people's systems, exploits HT had discovered and were keeping secret to sell, as well as 400GB of email archives, presentations and documents. Wikileaks speedily made the email archives searchable online.

The main piece of software, Remote Control System or RCS, that Hacking Team sells, allows the client to monitor someone else's computer. Such a system is of great interest to repressive governments and agencies of all types, and that's why Hacking Team's client list includes Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia (about which University of Toronto's Citizen Lab wrote a report) and many other human rights violators.

In the Americas, Mexico is the biggest client, but HT does substantial business both with, and in Colombia. In Bogota, HT works with the US Embassy and the DEA. Much of the RCS business with Colombia is done through the Israeli surveillance firm, NICE. A series of 2013 emails discuss a US$60M deal with Colombia's directorate of police intelligence (DIPOL). Many emails report on the success of demonstrations of the software. A 2009 email discusses the demo method that later became standard:

"Anti Narcotics Police is very interested in the product. Have you been able to advance on the demo over the Internet. As we discussed the idea would be to infect a computer (and maybe a phone) here in Colombia and have it connected to the > Internet. We would be watching your server using Adobe Connect, we let the customer play with the infected computer, write documents, email, surf the web, chat, Skype, etc, and at the same time we are showing them the info come up on the server. I would really like to be able to do a demo soon, please let me know." 

HT has promised that they don't sell their systems to anyone responsible for gross human rights violations (how they define gross is unknown). Their job is to sell software, in any case, so they presumably don't track or know what is done with their systems once sold – even if, like the machines IBM custom-built for the Nazis (see "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black) the technology is hardly neutral. Because HT is just selling the software and not running it for their clients, we probably won't be able to tell from their email archives what exactly Colombia (or any other government) has done with HT's software, and who they are doing it to.

But we have other information that can provide us with some ideas. What would Colombia do with the Remote Control System? Will they be using it to catch cyber criminals? What kind of regime is Colombia? It has elections, after all. It has elected politicians from across the political spectrum. It is currently in negotiations to end its long civil war. Its 1991 Constitution is progressive in many ways. So, why shouldn't Colombia's police get some help trying to catch cyber criminals?

Unfortunately, Colombia's civil war is not a 19th-century civil war of armies battling against each other on a field. It's a modern war of a state and paramilitaries killing civilians and controlling territories for profit, and guerrillas that took up arms defensively decades ago and have turned them against the people far too many times since.

The targets of state violence (and surveillance) in Colombia - when state violence is targeted at all, and not generalized - are unionists, human rights defenders, journalists; indigenous, afro-Colombian, women, and peasant leaders. If it were possible to find out whose computers were infected by HT's malware, I would wager that most of the infected devices would belong to such people.

But, as Human Rights Watch documented again just last month, violence isn't always targeted. The 'false positives' scandal in Colombia involved military units capturing ordinary people, killing them, and dressing them up as guerrilla combatants to present high casualty numbers. It is hard to imagine a more evil, statistics-driven exercise. The commanders in charge of the units committing these atrocities are still in charge, and some have risen through the ranks on the bodies of those killed as false positives.

The Colombian state didn't need HT's software to murder peasants and dress them up as guerrillas. But to anticipate and prepare for human rights criticism? To stay one step ahead of the FARC at the negotiating table? To target and surveil the country's many remarkable unarmed movement activists - and put targets on them for murderous paramilitaries? For any of these - all proven tactics of the Colombian regime - HT's systems sure would come in handy.

When War is Its Own End

Seeking War to the End of the World

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

July 19, 2015

If the neoconservatives have their way again, U.S. ground troops will reoccupy Iraq, the U.S. military will take out Syria’s secular government (likely helping Al Qaeda and the Islamic State take over), and the U.S. Congress will not only kill the Iran nuclear deal but follow that with a massive increase in military spending.

Prominent neocon intellectual Robert Kagan.
(Photo: Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl)

Like spraying lighter fluid on a roaring barbecue, the neocons also want a military escalation in Ukraine to burn the ethnic Russians out of the east, and the neocons dream of spreading the blaze to Moscow with the goal of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin.

In other words, more and more fires of Imperial “regime change” abroad even as the last embers of the American Republic die at home.

Much of this “strategy” is personified by a single Washington power couple: arch-neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and an early advocate of the Iraq War, and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who engineered last year’s coup in Ukraine that started a nasty civil war and created a confrontation between nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

Kagan, who cut his teeth as a propaganda specialist in support of the Reagan administration’s brutal Central American policies in the 1980s, is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post’s neocon-dominated opinion pages.

On Friday, Kagan’s column baited the Republican Party to do more than just object to President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal. Kagan called for an all-out commitment to neoconservative goals, including military escalations in the Middle East, belligerence toward Russia and casting aside fiscal discipline in favor of funneling tens of billions of new dollars to the Pentagon.

Kagan also showed how the neocons’ world view remains the conventional wisdom of Official Washington despite their disastrous Iraq War. The neocon narrative gets repeated over and over in the mainstream media no matter how delusional it is.

For instance, a sane person might trace the origins of the bloodthirsty Islamic State back to President George W. Bush’s neocon-inspired Iraq War when this hyper-violent Sunni movement began as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” blowing up Shiite mosques and instigating sectarian bloodshed. It later expanded into Syria where Sunni militants were seeking the ouster of a secular regime led by Alawites, a Shiite offshoot. Though changing its name to the Islamic State, the movement continued with its trademark brutality.

But Kagan doesn’t acknowledge that he and his fellow neocons bear any responsibility for this head-chopping phenomenon. In his neocon narrative, the Islamic State gets blamed on Iran and Syria, even though those governments are leading much of the resistance to the Islamic State and its former colleagues in Al Qaeda, which in Syria backs a separate terrorist organization, the Nusra Front.

But here is how Kagan explains the situation to the Smart People of Official Washington: “Critics of the recent nuclear deal struck between Iran and the United States are entirely right to point out the serious challenge that will now be posed by the Islamic republic. It is an aspiring hegemon in an important region of the world.

“It is deeply engaged in a region-wide war that encompasses Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf States and the Palestinian territories. It subsidizes the murderous but collapsing regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and therefore bears primary responsibility for the growing strength of the Islamic State and other radical jihadist forces in that country and in neighboring Iraq, where it is simultaneously expanding its influence and inflaming sectarian violence.”

The Real Hegemon

While ranting about “Iranian hegemony,” Kagan called for direct military intervention by the world’s true hegemonic power, the United States. He wants the U.S. military to weigh in against Iran on the side of two far more militarily advanced regional powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose combined weapons spending dwarfs Iran’s and includes – with Israel – a sophisticated nuclear arsenal.

Yet reality has never had much relationship to neocon ideology. Kagan continued: “Any serious strategy aimed at resisting Iranian hegemony has also required confronting Iran on the several fronts of the Middle East battlefield. In Syria, it has required a determined policy to remove Assad by force, using U.S. air power to provide cover for civilians and create a safe zone for Syrians willing to fight.

“In Iraq, it has required using American forces to push back and destroy the forces of the Islamic State so that we would not have to rely, de facto, on Iranian power to do the job. Overall, it has required a greater U.S. military commitment to the region, a reversal of both the perceived and the real withdrawal of American power.

“And therefore it has required a reversal of the downward trend in U.S. defense spending, especially the undoing of the sequestration of defense funds, which has made it harder for the military even to think about addressing these challenges, should it be called upon to do so. So the question for Republicans who are rightly warning of the danger posed by Iran is: What have they done to make it possible for the United States to begin to have any strategy for responding?”

In Kagan’s call for war and more war, we’re seeing, again, the consequence of failing to hold neocons accountable after they pushed the country into the illegal and catastrophic Iraq War by selling lies about weapons of mass destruction and telling tales about how easy it would be.

Instead of facing a purge that should have followed the Iraq calamity, the neocons consolidated their power, holding onto key jobs in U.S. foreign policy, ensconcing themselves in influential think tanks, and remaining the go-to experts for mainstream media coverage. Being wrong about Iraq has almost become a badge of honor in the upside-down world of Official Washington.

But we need to unpack the truckload of sophistry that Kagan is peddling. First, it is simply crazy to talk about “Iranian hegemony.” That was part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rhetoric before the U.S. Congress on March 3 about Iran “gobbling up” nations – and it has now become a neocon-driven litany, but it is no more real just because it gets repeated endlessly.

For instance, take the Iraq case. It has a Shiite-led government not because Iran invaded Iraq, but because the United States did. After the U.S. military ousted Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, the United States stood up a new government dominated by Shiites who, in turn, sought friendly relations with their co-religionists in Iran, which is entirely understandable and represents no aggression by Iran. Then, after the Islamic State’s dramatic military gains across Iraq last summer, the Iraqi government turned to Iran for military assistance, also no surprise.

Back to Iraq

However, leaving aside Kagan’s delusional hyperbole about Iran, look at what he’s proposing. He wants to return a sizable U.S. occupation force to Iraq, apparently caring little about the U.S. soldiers who were rotated multiple times into the war zone where almost 4,500 died (along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis). Having promoted Iraq War I and having paid no price, Kagan now wants to give us Iraq War II.

But that’s not enough. Kagan wants the U.S. military to intervene to make sure the secular government of Syria is overthrown, even though the almost certain winners would be Sunni extremists from the Islamic State or Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front. Such a victory could lead to genocides against Syria’s Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other minorities. At that point, there would be tremendous pressure for a full-scale U.S. invasion and occupation of Syria, too.

That may be why Kagan wants to throw tens of billions of dollar more into the military-industrial complex, although the true price tag for Kagan’s new wars would likely run into the trillions of dollars. Yet, Kagan still isn’t satisfied. He wants even more military spending to confront “growing Chinese power, an aggressive Russia and an increasingly hegemonic Iran.”

In his conclusion, Kagan mocks the Republicans for not backing up their tough talk: “So, yes, by all means, rail about the [Iran] deal. We all look forward to the hours of floor speeches and campaign speeches that lie ahead. But it will be hard to take Republican criticisms seriously unless they start doing the things that are in their power to do to begin to address the challenge.”

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs 

Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, 

Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)

While it’s true that Kagan is now “just” a neocon ideologue – albeit one with important platforms to present his views – his wife Assistant Secretary of State Nuland shares his foreign policy views and even edits many of his articles. As she told The New York Times last year, “nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’”]

But Nuland is a foreign policy force of her own, considered by some in Washington to be the up-and-coming “star” at the State Department. By organizing the “regime change” in Ukraine – with the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 – Nuland also earned her spurs as an accomplished neocon.

Nuland has even outdone her husband, who may get “credit” for the Iraq War and the resulting chaos, but Nuland did him one better, instigating Cold War II and reviving hostilities between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States. After all, that’s where the really big money will go – toward modernizing nuclear arsenals and ordering top-of-the-line strategic weaponry.

A Family Business

There’s also a family-business aspect to these wars and confrontations, since the Kagans collectively serve not just to start conflicts but to profit from grateful military contractors who kick back a share of the money to the think tanks that employ the Kagans.

For instance, Robert’s brother Frederick works at the American Enterprise Institute, which has long benefited from the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex, and his wife Kimberly runs her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Gen. David Petraeus posing before the U.S. Capitol

with Kimberly Kagan, founder and president of the

 Institute for the Study of War. 

(Photo: ISW’s 2011 Annual Report)

According to ISW’s annual reports, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host of national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan.

Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded U.S. forces in those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War.”]

So, to understand the enduring influence of the neocons – and the Kagan clan, in particular – you have to appreciate the money connections between the business of war and the business of selling war. When the military contractors do well, the think tanks that advocate for heightened global tensions do well, too.

And, it doesn’t hurt to have friends and family inside the government making sure that policymakers do their part to give war a chance — and to give peace the old heave-ho. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “A Family Business of Perpetual War.”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Taking Palestine Off the Air: Israeli Government orders TV channel closed for "links to Palestinian Authority"

Israel Cracks Down on TV Station for Palestinian Minority

by Jonathan Cook - Dissident Voice

Government orders TV channel closed for links to Palestinian Authority, while Israel’s culture minister vows to "censor" critics

The Israeli government has declared war on a Palestinian TV channel that launched last month from a mobile studio-truck near the city of Nazareth in Israel.

The station, which broadcasts six hours a day to Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian Arab citizens, focuses on news, arts, food and celebrities, as well as offering children’s programmes and quiz shows.

Despite the channel’s modest budget and ambitions, however, Israel’s public security minister, Gilad Erdan, ordered its closure last week, describing its operations as a “breach of Israel’s sovereignty”.

The satellite channel – called Palestine ’48 – is the first to serve Israel’s Palestinian minority that is funded by the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas’ government-in-waiting in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli officials have claimed that the channel is being used by the PA to “gain a foothold” in Israel to promote misinformation and incitement.

But critics say the crackdown on the station is part of a much wider assault being led by the new culture minister, Miri Regev, on the cultural life of Palestinians in Israel, who make up a fifth of the population.

Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, recently told the news website Ynet: “Regev acts towards Arab artists as Israeli policemen act towards the Arab protester – as an enemy that must be eliminated.”

Connecting to the Arab world

The launch of Palestine ’48 has generated special excitement, according to Makbula Nassar, a presenter with the commercial station Radio Ashams in Nazareth, because Israel’s Palestinian minority has lacked the resources to develop its own vigorous media.

“It has been like a prison here in terms of the media,” she told Middle East Eye.

“For a long time we had access to few sources of information apart from those provided by the state, which totally ignored the needs of our community.

“Now there is at least the hope that we can develop a TV station that offers new ideas and perspectives free of Israeli propaganda. We are part of the Arab world and we have to break free of our isolation and connect to it.”

The PA’s communications minister, Riad Hassan, stated that the channel’s goal was to offer a platform for Israel’s Palestinian minority to “expose to the Arab world everything they must go through, regarding their social, cultural and economic difficulties”.

Yet Netanyahu, who is communications minister in addition to being prime minister, appears to have other ideas.

He ordered officials to find a way to close the new channel after its launch last month was timed to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan, when TV viewing figures are high across the Arab world.

Last week Erdan accused the PA of violating the 1994 Oslo accords, claiming that a clause forbids Palestinian funding of activities on Israeli soil.

Palestine ’48 has countered that it is simply buying in programming from Israeli TV companies, while the signal is broadcast not from Israel but from the West Bank city of Ramallah via an Egyptian satellite. As a result, the station argues, it does not need an Israeli licence.

“There is no legal basis to the order,” Jafar Farah, a member of Palestine ’48’s advisory board, told MEE.

“This is a purely political move by the right wing in a competition to show who can be more extreme in silencing the Arab minority.”

So far the channel has managed to keep broadcasting, despite the order.

Starved of government funds

Palestinian leaders in Israel warn that under Regev’s stewardship the culture ministry is mounting a much wider assault on Arab arts and culture.

A former Israeli army spokeswoman and military censor, Regev took on her new role in May. She soon announced to Israel’s arts establishment: “If it is necessary to censor, I will censor.”

Regev’s combative stance comes in the wake of an official report showing that Palestinian communities in Israel receive only a tiny fraction of the state’s budget for culture.

Under pressure from the courts, the ministry of culture was recently forced to produce data showing that only 3 percent of its budget went to the Palestinian minority in Israel.

According to official figures, four-fifths of Palestinian communities received no ministry funds at all. In 83 per cent of the communities, there were no musical activities. Half had no festivals or children’s shows, and a third lacked a library. Not one Palestinian community had a theatre or arts centre that met government standards.

Jafar Farah, who also heads the Mossawa advocacy centre for Palestinians in Israel which went to court to demand the spending figures, said Arab culture in Israel was being starved of funds.

“The government is doing its best to prevent its Arab citizens from getting a fair allocation of the budget,” he said.

“It wants to silence critics of its policies, especially about the occupation and human rights violations.”

Cultural landscape reinvented

In recent weeks Regev has threatened the state funding of two prominent havens for Arab culture: Israel’s only Arab national theatre, and a Jewish-Arab children’s theatre.

The government recently pulled funding from Haifa’s Al-Midan theatre, after complaints that it had produced a play in Arabic about the experiences of political prisoners in Israeli jails.

Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily called Regev’s move “ugly”, “Stalinist” and designed to “delegitimize” Al-Midan, adding: “The culture ministry is turning into the censorship ministry with dizzying speed.”

Al-Midan’s manager, Adnan Tarabash, has since resigned but, with the theatre in financial crisis, its officials are reported to be considering appealing to the European Union for help.

Regev also hit the headlines last month when she threatened to scratch promised funding for the Elmina children’s theatre in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, one of the few artistic projects promoting Jewish-Arab coexistence.

She said the theatre would be punished after it emerged that actor Norman Issa, the theatre’s Palestinian co-founder along with his Jewish wife, had refused to perform in a settlement in the occupied West Bank. Regev reversed her decision only after Issa agreed to take part in the touring production.

Ala Hlehel, an award-winning Palestinian author living in Acre, said Netanyahu’s government was punishing Palestinian artists first because they presented “an easy target”.

“This is just the beginning,” he told MEE. “The right wing feels there are no constraints on it now and intends to reinvent the whole cultural landscape to get rid of dissidents and critics of the government, whether they are Arabs or Jews.

“Arabs are easy to attack first because they lack wider support in Israel. But what the right really wants is to dominate public opinion by controlling the media and cultural discourse.”

Films must be ‘Israeli’

The Israeli government has insisted that all film-makers receiving state funding must commit to identifying their movies as “Israeli”.

Other high-profile Palestinian film-makers in Israel, such as Hany Abu Assad, have tried to find ways to bypass Israeli controls. His film Omar, nominated last year for an Oscar for best foreign-language film, became the first to be financed exclusively by Palestinian funders.

Nassar, of Radio Ashams, said Israel’s goal was to make life as hard as possible for Palestinian artists in Israel. “The message to them is that writers, journalists, intellectuals must keep their heads down, not rock the boat, if they want to survive.

“My fear is that, without jobs or opportunities to create, our artists will emigrate. And that will further threaten our identity as Palestinians.”

• Article first published in Middle East Eye

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of 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). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website. 

Parádosi̱ Vαί - But to Whom?

Greece Surrendered: But to Whom Exactly?

by Diana Johnstone - CounterPunch

Paris - On July 12, Greece surrendered abjectly and totally. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who had promised to combat the austerity measure that are driving the Greek people to ruin, poverty and suicide, betrayed all his promises, denied the will of the people expressed in the July 5 referendum, and led the Greek parliament to accept an agreement with the nation’s creditors even worse than all those that had already caused the economy to shrink and which further abandoned the last scraps of national sovereignty.

Yes, Greece surrendered unconditionally, as has been thoroughly and eloquently expressed here on CounterPunch and elsewhere.

But one crucial question appears not to have been adequately answered. To whom, exactly, did Greece surrender?

A common answer to that question is: Germany. The poor Greeks surrendered to the arrogant Germans. This theme has served to revive anti-German feelings left over from World War II. Frau Merkel is portrayed as the heartless villain. One thing is sure: the animosity between Greece and Germany aroused by this debt catastrophe is proof that the “European dream” of transforming the historic nations of Western Europe into one single brotherly federation, on the model of the United States of America, is a total flop. The sense of belonging to a single nation, with all for one and one for all, simply does not exist between peoples whose languages, traditions and customs are as diverse as those between Finns and Greeks. Adopting a common currency, far from bringing them together, has driven them farther apart.

But was this disaster actually dictated by the wicked Germans?

In reality, very many Germans, from the right-wing Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaüble all the way to the former leader of the left party “Die Linke” Oskar Lafontaine would have preferred a very different solution: Greece’s exit from the Eurozone. Schaüble was thinking of German finances, while Lafontaine was thinking of what would be best for the people of Greece – and of Europe as a whole.

Between those two extremes, a German compromise could have averted the abject surrender of July 12, by organizing Greece’s return to its national currency, the drachma.

Indeed, by the time of the Greek referendum, a majority of European Union creditor governments would have preferred to see Greece leave the Eurozone.

The one government that crowed with victory over the Greek surrender was the French government of François Hollande. In last minute negotiations, France took the position that Greece absolutely must be kept in the Eurozone, in order to “save Europe”. French commentators are jubilant that Hollande “stood up to Merkel” and saved both the sacrosanct “Franco-German couple” and the European Union itself by insisting that Greece stick to the hard currency that is killing it.

So can we conclude that Greece surrendered to France?

Let’s not be ridiculous. The French debt rivals that of Greece, with the difference, of course, that France has a real economy. France owns the largest share of Greek debt after Germany. But nevertheless, France is also eventually threatened by the Eurozone rules that are imposing debt servitude on southern European member states. France is in no position to dictate economic policy to Germany.

And that observation brings us around to the factor that has been overlooked in the case of Greece: the relationship of forces within the “trans-Atlantic community” and its military branch, NATO.

The United States has been relatively discrete during this crisis, but Washington’s will is known. Greece must stay tightly within the European Union, for geopolitical reasons. Just look where Greece is, and what it is: an Orthodox Christian country with traditional good relations with Russia, located on the Mediterranean not so far from “Putin’s Russia”. Greece must not be allowed to drift away. Period.

Another question that has been totally overlooked: is it possible for a NATO member country to shift policy in a way contrary to U.S. interests? Is it free to move toward truly friendly relations with Russia? Greece has seen a military putsch in the not so distant past. The command and control of NATO member countries is closely monitored by the United States military.

Since former President Nicolas Sarkozy reversed General de Gaulle’s strategic move to ensure national independence and returned France to the NATO command, France has indeed aligned itself with Washington to an unprecedented extent. With his brief show of “standing up to Madame Merkel”, François Hollande was in fact carrying out the policy of Victoria Nuland.

The European Union (including Germany) will continue to wrestle with its “Greek problem”, while Greece will continue to be strangled by the European Union.

The European surrender to the United States occurred about seventy years ago. It was welcomed as a liberation, of course, but it has turned into lasting domination. It was simply reconfirmed by the July 12, 2015, Greek surrender. And that surrender has been enforced by an increasingly hegemonic ideology of anti-nationalism, particularly strong in the left, that considers “nationalism” to be the source of all evil, and the European Union the source of all good, since it destroys the sovereignty of nations. This ideology is so dominant on the left that very few leftists dare challenge it – and Syriza was leftist in exactly that way, believing in the virtue of “belonging to the European Union”, whatever the pain and suffering it entails. Thus Syriza did not even prepare for leaving the Eurozone, much less for leaving the European Union.

As a result, only “right-wing” parties dare defend national sovereignty. Or rather, anyone who defends national sovereignty will be labeled “right-wing”. It is too easily forgotten that without national sovereignty, there can be no democracy, no people’s choice. As the Greek disaster obliges more and more Europeans to have serious doubts about EU policy, the mounting desire to reassert national sovereignty faces the obstacle of left-right stereotypes. Much of the European left is finding itself increasingly caught in the contradiction between its anti-nationalist “European dream” and the destruction of democracy by the EU’s financial bureaucracy. The Greek drama is the opening act of a long and confused European conflict.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book, Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, will be published by CounterPunch in September 2015. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

Who Created Lyme Disease? It's No Secret

NBC Dares Mention Climate in Spread of Lyme Disease, But Not Who Created Lyme Disease

by David Swanson - War Is a Crime

16 July 2015


Climate change is apparently encouraging the spread of Lyme disease, and a report by NBC News dares to say so. This may seem like a fresh breath of honest sanity in a media context in which even the weather reports usually avoid the topic of human global destruction.

However, another topic is clearly still off limits: the topic of who created Lyme disease.

Who created it is not in any real doubt. The facts have been well reported and never refuted.

The relevance of the disease's creators to this and numerous other news reports about Lyme disease is indisputable. If you're going to report on what's facilitating the disease's spread, you should report on what started it, and how it was intentionally created to spread and why.

That NBC News knows the information is easily shown. In 2005 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on MSNBC and on NBC's Today Show (where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection). Lab 257 hit the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list soon after its publication.

And what did that book say? Well, the wonderful thing about books is that you can still go and read them. But I'll give you a brief summary of the part about Lyme disease. For a wide array of other diseases, some far worse, you'll have to read the book.

Less than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government makes biological weapons, including weapons consisting of diseased insects that can be dropped from airplanes on a (presumably foreign) population. One such insect is the deer tick, pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans.

Deer swim to Plum Island

I wasn't aware that deer swam at all, but apparently they are ocean swimmers. A quick internet search finds plenty of reports and photos and videos of deer swimming, miles from shore, including in Long Island Sound. And people are often so surprised (and kind hearted) that they rescue the deer -- which may in some cases not actually be needed. Deer frequently swim between Long Island and Plum Island; there's not any dispute about that fact.

Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. "Ticks," Carroll writes, "find baby chicks irresistible."

In July of 1975 a brand new disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. It wasn't a disease that gradually grew and finally attracted attention. It was 12 cases of a disease that, as far as anyone knows, had never been seen before. Scientists' efforts to find it in the past haven't gotten any further than the 1940s in the areas right around Plum Island.

And what was on Plum Island? A germ warfare lab to which the U.S. government had brought former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors. After all, it was on an island. What could go wrong? Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s. Even the indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.

By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.

Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease -- and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

So, by all means blame ExxonMobil and all the other climate liars, and their servants in government, for the spread of Lyme disease, among other horrors. But save a little blame for the military industrial complex. Either it murdered the victims of Lyme disease, or -- if you believe in the nobility of its mission -- then perhaps we'd better say they are collateral damage.

UPDATE: People have come back to me with claim that 5,000 year old IceMan has Lyme disease, which would mean military found and weaponized it but not exactly created it from nothing. It would not however suggest any origin for the modern outbreak other than Plum Island.

Apache Stronghold Caravan Vows to Protect Sacred Sites from Miners

Apache Stronghold Caravan Calls to Protect Sacred Sites After Clause Slipped into NDAA Allows Mining

by DemocracyNow!

Members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe are fighting to preserve sacred sites in Arizona after lawmakers slipped a clause into the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow copper mining in the area. The land in question includes parts of Tonto National Forest, including Oak Flat and Devil’s Canyon, and could also impact nearby Apache Leap, an important historic site where a group of Apache who were being pursued by U.S. cavalry plunged off a cliff to their deaths rather than be captured.

Resolution Copper Mining, a subsidiary of British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, has long sought ownership of the land. But the battle is not over. Earlier this month, a group called the Apache Stronghold began a caravan from Tucson, Arizona, to Washington, D.C., to call for this land to once again be protected. On their way, they stopped in New York today and joined us in our studio. We speak with Wendsler Nosie Sr., Peridot District Council member and former chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. He’s the founder of the Apache Stronghold. His granddaughter, Naelyn Pike, also joins us.

Canadian Government Silent on Gaza Slaughter at One

Canadian silence on one year anniversary of Israeli attack on Gaza

by Stefan Christoff - The Media Co-Op

July 9, 2015

Today in Canada, there is a dangerous alignment across the official political spectrum to not speak the truth about Israeli apartheid, or to acknowledge in full, the large scale systemic human rights abuses taking place against the Palestinian people.

On the one year anniversary of the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza, a military attack that extended over 51 days, that took the lives of more than 2,250 Palestinians, the great majority civilians, there has been a resounding hush from the Canadian political establishment.

Imagining such heavy and intentional political silence on the first anniversary of any other major conflict, involving one of Canada’s closest international allies today, is impossible. Canada strongly backed the Israeli bombardment, the Conservatives largely repeated Israeli government talking points throughout the bombings and during the disastrous attempt at a ground invasion into Gaza, which saw major incidents of Palestinian civilians being slaughtered, such as in the Shujayea district.

Also during the bombardment last summer upwards of 500 Palestinian children were killed and well over 10,000 Palestinians were injured, many seriously, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

To imagine the incredible scale of destruction in Gaza is difficult, at times statistics can work to compartmentalizing things and sanitizing the deep human suffering involved. In this context, highlighting that the Israeli military strikes largely hit densely populated civilian areas is important, strike that aimed to terrorize, as part of an intentional policy to kill Gazans, a military strategy increasingly coming to light in the year after the mass bombing.

Beyond direct deaths, there is the sustaining damage to Palestinian society in Gaza, where Israeli bombs destroyed an estimated 20,000 homes, the great majority of which haven’t been rebuilt until today, due to the sustaining joint Israeli-Egyptian military blockade of Gaza.

On a cultural level, the Israeli strikes on Gaza last summer targeted university buildings, agricultural areas, factories, public infrastructure like Gaza’s water treatment systems and particularly mosques, with over 70 mosques destroyed and many others damaged in the bombings. In real terms the Israeli bombing of Gaza last summer was a military campaign driven by collective punishment, a war against a largely besieged civilian population with no exit.

Legal arguments outlining the Israeli war crimes inherent to the bombings of Gaza last summer are clear and focused, with a case developing at the International Criminal Court, that the Israeli state is desperately attempting to diffuse.

Back to Canada

On this one year anniversary of the bombing of Gaza the resounding inability for any politicians in Canada to speak up for the Palestinian people is haunting, but also really does reveal the lack of humanist principles on the table within mainstream Canadian politics.

There is little question that Israel engaged in systematic war crimes against the Palestinian people last summer. There is also little serious question about the fact that Israel practices a military and legal system of apartheid against the Palestinian people, yet despite growing international condemnation toward these Israeli policies, Canadian politicians remain not only silent on the issue, but are in many cases actively complicit in these Israeli state crimes.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has also taken up the Israeli apartheid mantel, issuing a statement last summer during the bombings that essentially backed the deadly attack on Gaza. Months later, in spring 2015, Trudeau called for the silencing of the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli apartheid. Trudeau has been consistently and openly complicit in the Canadian context with this wave of systematic Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.

By extension the NDP is still refusing to take a clear position against the ongoing Israeli besiegement of Gaza, a military siege working to ensure that tension and conflict remain deep rooted. Today according to the UN, not even 1 Palestinian home, of the over 10,000 destroyed homes in Gaza has been rebuilt, a reality directly linked to the Israeli military siege, banning the entrance of most construction materials.

NDP officials urgently need to face a grassroots challenge to this policy of complicity toward Israeli apartheid, like seen last summer during the Gaza bombings. The NDP, despite being a political party asserting narratives about social justice, still has not taken the side of justice in the case of Palestine.

At the level of official power in Ottawa, the Conservatives have been fully backing the Israeli state and military machinery over the past decade. From the halls of global power at the UN, to the massive pro-Israel delegation organized by the Conservatives and Harper to assert excessive complicity with the Israeli state, the neo-colonial, pro-Israel position in Ottawa is clear.

In fact the Conservatives have been working diligently to put into full political practice a 2005 assertion by former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, who stated that “Canada’s values, are Israel’s values,” a essentially truthful phrase, due to the colonial settler foundational identity to both states, that is now being asserted more and more brazenly.

Beyond politicians, the complicity of arms manufactures and corporations, who despite clear knowledge that their technology and manufactured parts will be used by the Israeli military in the context of systemic war crimes, continue to sell deadly technologies to Israel.

CAE corporation in Montréal, that specializes in flight simulators and “real-time operation systems” has secured multiple contracts involving the Israeli military, including a project with the military company Elbit Systems, to train Israeli military personnel to operate "next-generation combat aircraft.” Another CAE project focuses on operating systems for Israeli air force Black Hawk utility helicopters, corporate military work being done in the heart of Québec, CAE’s ominous buildings can clearly be seen from the Chomedey autoroute in Montréal.

Additionally the engines for the Bell “cobra” helicopter, nicknamed the “viper” on the Israeli Air Force website, are produced in the Montréal region by Pratt & Whitney Canada. Also the Israeli military uses helicopters produced in Mirabel, Québec by Bell Helicopter Textron Canada, a company also represented on a recent Conservative governmental delegation to Israel.

So political and corporate complicity with the Israeli state is clear, in both Québec and Canada. Silence from the political class on this one year anniversary equals and illustrates this open complicity.

In response, our challenge now, for those living on these indigenous lands called Québec and Canada, is to continue to build the global BDS campaign at home and beyond. In so many ways the BDS campaign is a clear process that can work to catalyze people, pushing toward collective action in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Also the BDS movement in the long term, does represent a real challenge to the impunity and institutionalized violence of the Israeli colonial system and that is why the Israeli state is now panicking.

On this one year anniversary let us also highlight and celebrate the steadfast Palestinian resistance, taking place against incredible odds.

Also let us recall the consistent steps forward that the BDS campaign is making, in Canada and internationally. Including the major cancellations of concerts, by artists like Lauryn Hill, as part of the global cultural boycott campaign against the Israeli state. Also there is the increasing impact of boycott actions against Israeli agricultural products in Europe, while on campuses there is the systematic advance of boycott resolutions within student unions, including a key vote by the Concordia Student Union in Montréal this past winter.

In basic terms there is a growing gap between grassroots opinion and the halls of power on this issue. As more and more people become involved and engaged with the global Palestine solidarity movement, those walking the halls of power are going to have a harder and harder time justifying their support for Israeli apartheid, that’s a basic political fact.

In so many ways this also illustrates clearly a deep political and moral bankruptcy of official power politics in Canada, to which our collective response to take action in solidarity with Palestine despite the official state complicity, shows both the importance for grassroots international solidarity work and also the critical role that activist networks can play in challenging structures of power.

Today there is little question that in the long term the Israeli siege on Gaza and the generalized apartheid policies won’t sustain, under the pressure of Palestinian resistance, both armed and civilian on the ground, taking place in parallel to a strong global solidarity movement, lead-by the BDS campaign, now it's only a question of time before the system of Israeli apartheid falls.

Stefan Christoff is a writer, community organizer and musician living in Montréal, you can find Stefan @spirodon

London's Black Cab Cabbies v. Uber

Support Cabbies vs Tax Avoiding Uber

by Russell Brand - The Trews

Cabbies livelihoods are under threat from Uber which avoids paying UK taxes. But it's OK because David Cameron is best mates with Uber's top brass.

Subscribe Here Now: http://tinyurl.com/opragcg and send 

links to video news items of topical stories that you'd like me to analyse.
Buy a 'Trews' Tshirt here: http://www.russellbrand.com/trinkets/
 

Produced directed & edited by Gareth Roy.
Trews Theme by The Rubberbandits
Thanks to Jimi Mackay: @jimimackay
and Urban Nerds: www.urbannerdscollective.com for our creative services

MH-17 as the New Gulf of Tonkin?

MH-17 Mystery: A New Tonkin Gulf Case? 

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

July 17, 2015

In 1964, the Tonkin Gulf incident was used to justify the Vietnam War, although U.S. intelligence quickly knew the facts were not what the U.S. government claimed. Now, the MH-17 case is being exploited to justify a new Cold War as U.S. intelligence again is silent about what it knows.

One year ago, the world experienced what could become the Tonkin Gulf Incident of World War III, the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs
the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, Aug 10,1964
authorizing him to wage unlimited war in Vietnam

As with the dubious naval clash off the coast of North Vietnam in 1964, which helped launch the Vietnam War, U.S. officials quickly seized on the MH-17 crash for its emotional and propaganda appeal – and used it to ratchet up tensions against Russia. 

Shocked at the thought of 298 innocent people plunging to their deaths from 33,000 feet last July 17, the world recoiled in horror, a fury that was then focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin. With Putin’s face emblazoned on magazine covers, the European Union got in line behind the U.S.-backed coup regime in Ukraine and endorsed economic sanctions to punish Russia.

In the year that has followed, the U.S. government has continued to escalate tensions with Russia, supporting the Ukrainian regime in its brutal “anti-terrorism operation” that has slaughtered thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kiev have even dispatched neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias, supported by jihadists called “brothers” of the Islamic State, to act as the tip of the spear. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.”]

Raising world tensions even further, the Russians have made clear that they will not allow the ethnic Russian resistance to be annihilated, setting the stage for a potential escalation of hostilities and even a possible nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia. 

  

Buk missile firing platform 

But the propaganda linchpin to the West’s extreme anger toward Russia remains the MH-17 shoot-down, which the United States and the West continue to pin on the Russian rebels – and by extension – Russia and Putin. The latest examples are media reports about the Dutch crash investigation suggesting that an anti-aircraft missile, allegedly involved in destroying MH-17, was fired from rebel-controlled territory.

Yet, the U.S. mainstream media remains stunningly disinterested in the “dog-not-barking” question of why the U.S. intelligence community has been so quiet about its MH-17 analysis since it released a sketchy report relying mostly on “social media” on July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down. A source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the reason for the intelligence community’s silence is that more definitive analysis pointed to a rogue Ukrainian operation implicating one of the pro-regime oligarchs.

The source said that if this U.S. analysis were to see the light of day, the Ukrainian “narrative” that has supplied the international pressure on Russia would collapse. In other words, the Obama administration is giving a higher priority to keeping Putin on the defensive than to bringing the MH-17 killers to justice.

Oil painting by Cmdr. E.J. Fitzgerald depicts the supposed engagement 

between USS Maddox and three Vietnamese motor torpedo boats 

on Aug. 2, 1964. (Naval History and Heritage Comand)

Like the Tonkin Gulf case, the evidence on the MH-17 case was shaky and contradictory from the start. But, in both cases, U.S. officials confidently pointed fingers at the “enemy”. President Lyndon Johnson blamed North Vietnam in 1964, and Secretary of State John Kerry implicated ethnic Russian rebels and their backers in Moscow in 2014. In both cases, analysts in the U.S. intelligence community were less certain and even reached contrary conclusions once more evidence was available.

In both cases, those divergent assessments appear to have been suppressed so as not to interfere with what was regarded as a national security priority – confronting “North Vietnamese aggression” in 1964 and “Russian aggression” in 2014. To put out the contrary information would have undermined the government’s policy and damaged “credibility.” So the facts – or at least the conflicting judgments – were hidden.

The price of silence

In the case of the Tonkin Gulf, it took years for the truth to finally emerge and – in the meantime – tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese had lost their lives. Yet, much of the reality was known soon after the Tonkin Gulf incident on Aug. 4, 1964.

Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1964 was a young Defense Department official, recounts – in his 2002 book Secrets – how the Tonkin Gulf falsehoods took shape, first with the panicked cables from a U.S. Navy captain relaying confused sonar readings, and then with that false storyline presented to the American people.

As Ellsberg describes, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced retaliatory airstrikes on Aug. 4, 1964, telling “the American public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on ‘routine patrol in international waters’; that this was clearly a ‘deliberate’ pattern of ‘naked aggression’; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was ‘unequivocal’; that the attack had been ‘unprovoked’; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war.”

Ellsberg wrote: “By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that each one of those assurances was false.” Yet, the White House made no effort to clarify the false or misleading statements. The falsehoods were left standing for several years while Johnson sharply escalated the war by dispatching a half million soldiers to Vietnam.

In the MH-17 case, we saw something similar. Within three days of the July 17, 2014 crash, Secretary Kerry rushed onto all five Sunday talk shows with his rush to judgment, citing evidence provided by the Ukrainian government through social media. On NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory asked, “Are you bottom-lining here that Russia provided the weapon?”

Kerry: “There’s a story today confirming that, but we have not within the Administration made a determination. But it’s pretty clear when – there’s a build-up of extraordinary circumstantial evidence. I’m a former prosecutor. I’ve tried cases on circumstantial evidence; it’s powerful here.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment.”]

Two days later, on July 22, the Director of National Intelligence authorized the release of a brief report essentially repeating Kerry’s allegations. The DNI’s report also cited “social media” as implicating the ethnic Russian rebels, but the report stopped short of claiming that the Russians gave the rebels the sophisticated Buk (or SA-11) surface-to-air missile that the report indicated was used to bring down the plane.

Instead, the report cited “an increasing amount of heavy weaponry crossing the border from Russia to separatist fighters in Ukraine”; it claimed that Russia “continues to provide training – including on air defense systems to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia”; and its noted the rebels “have demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft.”

Yet, despite the insinuation of Russian guilt, what the public report didn’t say – which is often more significant than what is said in these white papers – was that the rebels had previously only used short-range shoulder-fired missiles to bring down low-flying military planes, whereas MH-17 was flying at around 33,000 feet, far beyond the range of those weapons.

The assessment also didn’t say that U.S. intelligence, which had been concentrating its attention on eastern Ukraine during those months, detected the delivery of a Buk missile battery from Russia, despite the fact that a battery consists of four 16-foot-long missiles that are hauled around by trucks or other large vehicles.

Rising doubts

I was told that the absence of evidence of such a delivery injected the first doubts among U.S. analysts who also couldn’t say for certain that the missile battery that was suspected of firing the fateful missile was manned by rebels. An early glimpse of that doubt was revealed in the DNI briefing for several mainstream news organizations when the July 22 assessment was released.

The Los Angeles Times reported, “U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery of a Ukrainian ‘Defector.’”]

The Russians also challenged the rush to judgment against them, although the U.S. mainstream media largely ignored – or ridiculed – their presentation. But the Russians at least provided what appeared to be substantive data, including alleged radar readings showing the presence of a Ukrainian jetfighter “gaining height” as it closed to within three to five kilometers of MH-17.

Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov also called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine and why Kiev’s Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.

The Ukrainian government countered by asserting that it had “evidence that the missile which struck the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation,” according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, using Kiev’s preferred term for the rebels.

On July 29, amid this escalating rhetoric, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of mostly retired U.S. intelligence officials, called on President Barack Obama to release what evidence the U.S. government had, including satellite imagery.

“As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information,” the group wrote.

“As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence.”

But the Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its earlier suppositions.

Then, in early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had begun shifting away from the original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible, funded by one of Ukraine’s rabidly anti-Russian oligarchs. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shifts”and “Was Putin Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?”]

Last October, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, also had concluded that Russia was not the source of the missile battery – that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base – but the BND still blamed the rebels for firing it. The BND also concluded that photos supplied by the Ukrainian government about the MH-17 tragedy “have been manipulated,” Der Spiegel reported.

And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to MH-17, the magazine said, reporting on the BND’s briefing to a parliamentary committee on Oct. 8, 2014. But none of the BND’s evidence was made public — and I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.”]

Dog still doesn’t bark

When the Dutch Safety Board investigating the crash issued an interim report in mid-October, it answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH-17 apparently was destroyed by “high-velocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.” The 34-page Dutch report was silent on the “dog-not-barking” issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who fired it.

In January, when I re-contacted the source who had been briefed by the U.S. analysts, the source said their thinking had not changed, except that they believed the missile may have been less sophisticated than a Buk, possibly an SA-6, and that the attack may have also involved a Ukrainian jetfighter firing on MH-17.

Since then there have been occasional news accounts about witnesses reporting that they did see a Ukrainian fighter plane in the sky and others saying they saw a missile possibly fired from territory then supposedly controlled by the rebels (although the borders of the conflict zone at that time were very fluid and the Ukrainian military was known to have mobile anti-aircraft missile batteries only a few miles away).

But the larger dog-not-barking question is why the U.S. intelligence community has clammed up for nearly one year, even after I reported that I was being told that U.S. analysts had veered off in a different direction – from the initial blame-the-Russians approach – toward one focusing on a rogue Ukrainian attack.

For its part, the DNI’s office has cited the need for secrecy even as it continues to refer to its July 22 report. But didn’t DNI James Clapper waive any secrecy privilege when he rushed out a report five days after the MH-17 shoot-down? Why was secrecy asserted only after the U.S. intelligence community had time to thoroughly review its photographic and electronic intelligence?

Over the past 11 months, the DNI’s office has offered no updates on the initial assessment, with a DNI spokeswoman even making the absurd claim that U.S. intelligence has made no refinements of its understanding about the tragedy since July 22, 2014.

If what I’ve been told is true, the reason for this silence would likely be that a reversal of the initial rush to judgment would be both embarrassing for the Obama administration and detrimental to an “information warfare” strategy designed to keep the Russians on the defensive.

But if that’s the case, President Barack Obama may be acting even more recklessly than President Johnson did in 1964. As horrific as the Vietnam War was, a nuclear showdown with Russia could be even worse.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here. 

Read also: Case closed: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, by Capt. Carl Otis Schuster, U.S. Navy (ret.), from the June 2008 issue of Vietnam magazine