A Death in Damascus: America's Oil War in Syria

Assad’s Death Warrant

by Mike Whitney - CounterPunch

September 15, 2016
 

“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria, Politico

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

The main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2. (See: Bill Blum here.) We’re talking about the United States of course.

Washington is the hands-down regime change champion, no one else even comes close. That being the case, one might assume that the American people would notice the pattern of intervention, see through the propaganda and assign blame accordingly. But that never seems to happen and it probably won’t happen here either. No matter how compelling the evidence may be, the brainwashed American people always believe their government is doing the right thing.

But the United States is not doing the right thing in Syria. Arming, training and funding Islamic extremists — that have killed half a million people, displaced 7 million more and turned the country into an uninhabitable wastelands –is not the right thing. It is the wrong thing, the immoral thing. And the US is involved in this conflict for all the wrong reasons, the foremost of which is gas. The US wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus so it can secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure that those reserves continue to be denominated in US Dollars that are recycled into US Treasuries and US financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining US dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future.

The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on protestors in the spring of 2011. That version of events is obfuscating hogwash. The war began in 2000, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria. As Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains in his excellent article “Syria: Another pipeline War”:

“The $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey….would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey… The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. ….

In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally….

Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world…”

Naturally, the Saudis, Qataris, Turks and Americans were furious at Assad, but what could they do? How could they prevent him from choosing his own business partners and using his own sovereign territory to transport gas to market?

What they could do is what any good Mafia Don would do; break a few legs and steal whatever he wanted. In this particular situation, Washington and its scheming allies decided to launch a clandestine proxy-war against Damascus, kill or depose Assad, and make damn sure the western oil giants nabbed the future pipeline contracts and controlled the flow of energy to Europe. That was the plan at least. Here’s more from Kennedy:

“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.”

Repeat: “the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline”, he signed his own death warrant. That single act was the catalyst for the US aggression that transformed a bustling, five thousand-year old civilization into a desolate Falluja-like moonscape overflowing with homicidal fanatics that were recruited, groomed and deployed by the various allied intelligence agencies.

But what’s particularly interesting about this story is that the US attempted a nearly-identical plan 60 years earlier during the Eisenhower administration. Here’s another clip from the Kennedy piece:

“During the 1950′s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers … mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism — which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism….

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation…. Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. (so)… the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime…..

(CIA agent Rocky) Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime….

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government….(Then) Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason.” (Politico)

See how history is repeating itself? It’s like the CIA was too lazy to even write a new script, they just dusted off the old one and hired new actors.

Fortunately, Assad –with the help of Iran, Hezbollah and the Russian Airforce– has fended off the effort to oust him and install a US-stooge. This should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of Assad as a leader, but of the principal that global security depends on basic protections of national sovereignty, and that the cornerstone of international law has to be a rejection of unprovoked aggression whether the hostilities are executed by one’s own military or by armed proxies that are used to achieve the same strategic objectives while invoking plausible deniability. The fact is, there is no difference between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Obama’s invasion of Syria. The moral, ethical and legal issues are the same, the only difference is that Obama has been more successful in confusing the American people about what is really going on.

And what’s going on is regime change: “Assad must go”. That’s been the administration’s mantra from the get go. Obama and Co are trying to overthrow a democratically-elected secular regime that refuses to bow to Washington’s demands to provide access to pipeline corridors that will further strengthen US dominance in the region. That’s what’s really going on behind the ISIS distraction and the “Assad is a brutal dictator” distraction and the “war-weary civilians in Aleppo” distraction. Washington doesn’t care about any of those things. What Washington cares about is oil, power and money. How can anyone be confused about that by now? Kennedy summed it up like this:

“We must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.”

That says it all, don’t you think?

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Tim Shorrock, Elizabeth Yake, Janine Bandcroft September 14, 2016

This Week on GR

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

September 13, 2016

If you follow the news regularly, you can be forgiven for not knowing much other than Trump's latest harrumph, or Hillary's health scares, but there is still a World out there spinning, independent of America's election cycle. Last week, North Korea again tested the nuclear waters with its second weapon test this year. This time they claim to have detonated a Hydrogen bomb.

With a thumb aimed squarely at Uncle Sam's eye, a Korean Central News Agency release said, "The U.S. will be made to clearly see how the DPRK rises imposingly out of chains of sanctions, blockade and pressure." (The Obama administration recently responded to a series of North Korean missile tests with promises of more sanctions.) We're all left to wonder, "What would/will president Trump do?"

Listen. Hear.

Tim Shorrock is a journalist, musician, and author of the web site, Money Doesn't Talk, It Swears, and the book, 'Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.' Tim's upbringing in the Far East especially informs his coverage of Japan and South Korea, and he spent much of the 1980's in Japan, following the financial intrigues of the then-biggest of the Asian Tiger economies. These days he's based in Washington, D.C.

Tim Shorrock in the first half.

And; living here, at this time, in this still magnificent remnant of creation called British Columbia, the sorrow of what of the wild world here has already been lost, and what is currently risked through unrelenting "resource" extraction may make it easier for we less imaginative, less passionate people to understand Grant Hadwin's last desperate act. The former logger and backwoodsman disappeared after felling, in a mad act of environmental apotheosis, the singularly majestic Golden Spruce, a tree sacred to all who beheld it.

Hadwin's life was immortalized in John Vaillant's book, 'The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed,' and now in a film inspired by that book, ‘Hadwin's Judgement.’

Elizabeth Yake is one of the producers of the film, who will appear with John Vaillant and Ken Wu and TJ Watts at the fundraiser screening for the Ancient Forest Alliance in Victoria Thursday, September 29th at UVic's Cinecenta theatre.

Elizabeth Yake in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good things planned for the streets of our city, and beyond there too, in the coming week. But first, Tim Shorrock and a World still restive, beyond the Beltway politics.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Wednesday, 1-2pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

9/11 Terror Trading 15 Years On

9/11 Terror Trading: 15 Years Later

Lars Schall interviews Professor Marc Chesney

Via The Saker

September 13, 2016  

Fighting for Justice in America and Palestine

The Native American, the Palestinian: A Spirited Fight for Justice

by Ramzy Baroud

September 13, 2016

Thousands of Native Americans resurrected the fighting spirit of their forefathers as they stood in unprecedented unity to contest an oil company’s desecration of their sacred land in North Dakota. Considering its burdened historical context, this has been one of the most moving events in recent memory.

The standoff, involving 5,000-strong Native American protesters, including representatives of 200 tribes and environmental groups, has been largely reduced in news reports as being a matter of technical detail – concerning issues of permits and legal proceedings.

At best, both the tribes and the oil company are treated as if they are equal parties in a purportedly proportionate tussle.

“‘Dakota’ means ‘friendly’ and yet, it seems, neither side has been too friendly to each other,” wrote Mark Albert in the website of the American broadcasting television network, CBS.

The Dakota Nation is justifiably alarmed by the prospect that its water supplies will be polluted by the massive pipeline, which will extend across four states and stretching over 1,100 miles.

The ‘other side’ is the company, Energy Transfer Partners, whose construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the cost of $3.7 billion is infringing upon the territorial rights of Native American tribes, destroying sacred burial grounds and threatening to pollute the main water sources of large communities of Native Americans.

Fear over future spills under the Missouri River is hardly a hype. The US is struggling with ongoing water crises, partly because of dilapidated infrastructure, but also because of numerous oil spills and natural gas leaks.

The recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the BP oil spill earlier in the Gulf of Mexico – both resulting in massive humanitarian and environmental crises – are only two recent cases in point.

But the problem is far deeper and constantly worsening.

Data obtained by the news network, CNBC from the government’s Environmental Protection Agency showed that “only nine U.S. states are reporting safe levels of lead in their water supply. These include Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee.”

As if that is not worrying enough, the massive crude oil pipeline will be going across several of these states, likely shortening the list of these states even further.

Discussion about the potential risks of the construction of the pipeline has been rife for years. The issue, however, received national and international coverage when Native American tribes mobilized to protect their land and water resources.

The mobilization of the tribes has been met with state violence. Instead of appreciating the serious grievances of the tribes, particularly those in the Standing Rock Reservation – which is located only one mile away, south of the pipeline - the state governor summoned all law enforcement agencies and activated the National Guard. Mace was used on protesters; they were beaten, arrested and chased out by armed men in uniform.

In the United States, when the people stand up to corporations, it seems that, more often than not, state violence is galvanized against unarmed people to protect the big businesses.

But missing from this story is an essential component: the mobilization and unity among Native American tribes has been the most awe-inspiring in many decades. As chiefs and representatives of tribes from all across the United States kept arriving at the encampment grounds, the collective spirit of Native American nations was being vigorously revived.

In fact, the ongoing mobilization of Native American tribes is far greater than the struggle against a money-hungry Corporation, backed by an aggressive state apparatus. It is about the spirit of the Native people of this land, who have suffered a prolonged genocide aimed at their complete eradication.

To see them standing once more, along with their families, riding their feather-draped horses and fighting for their very identity is a cause for celebration. It brings hope to oppressed people all across the world that the human spirit will never be destroyed.

The genocide of the Native Americans, similar to the ongoing destruction of the Palestinian Nation, is one of the lowest points of human morality. It is particularly disheartening that there are yet to be serious attempts at addressing that grave injustice.

For 500 years, Native Americans witnessed every attempt at erasing them from the face of the planet. Their numbers dwindled from ten million prior to the arrival of Europeans to North America to less than three hundred thousand at the turn of the 20th century. They were exterminated by colonial wars and ravaged by foreign diseases.

Calls to destroy Native Americans were hardly implicit but, rather, clearly-articulated. For example, Spencer Phips, Lieutenant Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Province issued this statement in 1755 on behalf of King George II: "His Majesty's subjects to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians."

The price list for the scalp of murdered Natives were as follows: “50 pounds for adult male scalps; 25 for adult female scalps; and 20 for scalps of boys and girls under age 12.”

The genocidal approach to Native Americans continued, unabated.

A century later, in 1851, California Governor Peter H. Burnett made this declaration: “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

Methods of extermination differed, from outright murder to disease-infected blankets, to, as of today’s standoff, threatening their most viable resource: water.

Yet, somehow, the spirit of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and numerous brave chiefs and warriors still roam the plains, urging their people to stand up and carry on with an overdue fight for justice and rights.

Palestinians have always felt that the legacy of the Native Americans is similar to their own.

“Our names: branching leaves of divine speech; birds that soar higher than a gun. You who come from beyond the sea, bent on war; don't cut down the tree of our names; don't gallop your flaming horses across the open plains.”

These were a few of the verses in Palestinian poet’s Mahmoud Darwish’s seminal poem “Speech of the Red Indian.”

I recall the day that magnificent piece of Arabic literature was first published in full in Palestine’s ‘Al-Quds’ newspaper. At the time, I was a teenager in a refugee camp in Gaza. I read it with much trepidation and giddiness - carefully, slowly, and repeatedly.

Those who could read, recited it out loud to those who could not.

Many tears were shed on that day, mostly because we all knew too well that we, in fact, were the ‘Red Indians.’ They were us.

Long before feminist critical theory coined the term ‘intersectionality’ – which contends that oppression is interconnected and one oppressive institution cannot be examined in isolation from others, Palestinians – as other victims of genocidal colonization – fully comprehended and held such a belief.

Palestinians are losing their lives, land and olive trees as they stand up to Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Their reality is a replay of similar experiences faced - and still being confronted - by Native Americans. Well into the 21st century, the Native American-Palestinian struggle remains one and the same.

“Our pastures are sacred, our spirits inspired,
The stars are luminous words where our fable
is legible from beginning to end..”

Wrote Mahmoud Darwish, of the Native Americans. Of the Palestinians.

- Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada” and his latest “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story”. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

Can the CBC Be Believed? Hypocrisy and Hyperbole in North Korea Analysis

Nuclear Hypocrisy: Exposing Shoddy Monopoly Media Analysis And Disinformation

by Kim Petersen  - ICH

September 13, 2016

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) conducted another nuclear test on Friday, 9 September.

President Barack Obama stated:

To be clear, the United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state... Today's nuclear test, a flagrant violation of multiple UN Security Council Resolutions, makes clear North Korea's disregard for international norms and standards for behavior and demonstrates it has no interest in being a responsible member of the international community.

With Obama's statement in mind, consider the answer to these relevant questions:

• Has the DPRK attacked another country? Can the same be said about the Republic of Korea (ROK)?
• Does every member of the United Nations not have the right to self defense under article 51 of the United Nations Charter?
• Does the US refrain from attacking other countries?
• Did the aggressions launched against Iraq, Libya, and Syria show a regard for international norms and standards?
• Has the US genuinely demonstrated an interested in being a responsible member of the international community?
• Has the US adhered to article VI of the NPT – a binding commitment for disarmament by the nuclear-weapon states?
• Would Iraq, Libya, and Syria have been attacked if they had been nuclear-weapon states?

Monopoly Media "Analysis" as Disinformation

Do state/corporate media in the West give a balanced reporting on the DPRK? Or independent media?

Consider the level of "analysis" by Saša Petricic of Canadian state media, the CBC.

From Petricic's "analysis": "Appeals, inducements or threats [against the DPRK] ... nothing seems to have worked."

Whose fault is that?

Petricic is ignorant of, or even worse, fails to mention that in 1994 the US and DPRK signed the Agreed Framework, whereby the DPRK would freeze operation and construction of nuclear reactors allegedly part of a covert nuclear weapons program in exchange for two proliferation-resistant nuclear power reactors. The US was to supply the DPRK with fuel oil pending construction of the reactors.

The George Bush II regime undermined this agreement brokered by the Bill Clinton regime. So much for that inducement.

Writes Petricic:

"Not even some of the toughest sanctions the UN Security Council has applied against any country, implemented in March. Those were meant to severely limit trade with North Korea, and choke off the money and supplies Pyongyang needs to continue its nuclear program."

In an Atlantic article titled "Why Is the U.S. Withholding Food Aid From Starving North Korea?," Morton Abramowitz questioned the morality behind US sanctions against the DPRK: "The American policy, meant to punish the regime, is worsening a humanitarian crisis." If there is any verisimilitude to the idiom – you catch more flies with honey than vinegar – then the US strategy is highly dubious, immoral, and at cross purposes.

Sanctions are commonly considered an act of war. The DPRK views the sanctions to be an act of war. Noam Chomsky criticized sanctions against Iraq as "murderous" and "devastating" – akin to a WMD. Hence, by placing the DPRK under sanctions, the US had orchestrated a state of war. But that is hardly surprising since the US has refused to entertain a peace or non-hostility pact with the DPRK.

Consider one contradiction within Petricic's article. He writes:

North Korea says its aim is to become a nuclear power, one with the means to threaten the United States with weapons powerful enough to wreak havoc, small enough to shoot overseas on the tip of a missile.

Compare with what follows later in article:

The North Korean people are "always ready to retaliate against the enemies," it said on state TV after Friday's blast. "It is part of practical countermeasures to the racket of threat and sanctions against [North Korea] kicked up by the U.S.-led hostile forces who have gone desperate."

Let's analyze! In quotation one, "North Korea says...," but there is no spokesperson cited, no source, no link, no footnote. How is one to verify or refute such a statement? It is shoddy journalism.

Petricic shreds his own analysis by the quotation in case two. Here North Korean state TV is provided as a source. Now compare what Petricic states in quotation one – "its aim is ... the means to threaten the United States with weapons powerful enough to wreak havoc" – to quotation two – "ready to retaliate against the enemies." [italics added] In the unsourced quotation the DPRK is presented as threatening; in the sourced quotation the DPRK is presented as defensive, i.e., "ready to retaliate." There is a world of difference between the two quotations, but that has seemed to elude Petricic's "analysis."

Petricic asserts, "And, it [the DPRK] continues to threaten the United States and South Korea."

How is it that Petricic determines and defines a threat? One might imagine that the DPRK has client states bordering the US where DPRK forces and missiles are stationed. No? Presumably, according to Petricic's logic, the mere possession of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capability is considered a threat by the world military superpower and its militarily occupied subaltern.

How then should the DPRK feel considering a peace pact has been rebuffed, that the use of US nukes were sought during the US war on Korea and that the nukes remained stationed in the Republic of Korea until 1991, that 28,500 US troops are still stationed in the south, and that the US-ROK engage in annual war games (ramped up in 2016)? Why is all this pertinent history and information undiscussed in the CBC "analysis"?

Petricic even found a Chinese source to cite: Xiaohe Cheng, the deputy director of Renmin University's Centre for China's International Strategic studies in Beijing who is quoted:

"I think the decision makers in Pyongyang have to think hard before they make further nuclear and missile provocations. China's tolerance of DPRK's bad behaviours is limited," he says.

"Don't push China too hard."

Indeed! That same advice ought to be viewed from all angles. It is not forgotten in China, and should not be forgotten in the US, what happened when the US pushed toward the Yalu River in its war-crimes galore, scorched earth campaign in Korea from 1950-1953 [See Korean Truth Commission, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea: 1945-2001 (New York: 2001)].

The obvious solution is perforating the bubble of media disinformation and pursuing peace, all parties entering into a binding peace treaty, withdrawal of US forces from the south of Korea, and an end to sanctions against the north of Korea.

Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of Dissident Voice.

New Leafs: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Now Opposed to Ethnic Cleansing

How Israel aims to redefine “ethnic cleansing”

by Jonathan Cook - Dissident Voice

September 12th, 2016

Netanyahu’s controversial comments have thrown another obstacle in the way of Palestinian statehood, analysts say

On one level, an incendiary video posted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend looked suspiciously like an own goal. In it, Netanyahu argues that a Palestinian demand to dismantle Jewish settlements amounts to the “ethnic cleansing” of some 650,000 Jews living in the occupied territories in violation of international law.

“The Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one pre-condition: no Jews,” he says in the short video posted on Facebook last Friday.

“There’s a phrase for that: It’s called ethnic cleansing.”

Netanyahu’s aim was not hard to decipher. He wants yet another obstacle in the way of Palestinian efforts to seek international backing for statehood. It comes as pressure mounts separately from France and Russia for the Israeli government to re-engage in peace talks.

Now Netanyahu can argue that when Palestinian leaders call for a state free of armed, Jewish-only colonies breaking up any hope of Palestinian territorial contiguity they should be labelled as ethnic cleansers.

Backed by Trump adviser

Early indications are that Netanyahu’s upending of international law may quickly win backing from the US right – and potentially from the next US administration, if Republican candidate Donald Trump is elected president in November.

On Sunday, the Haaretz daily quoted Trump adviser David Friedman as agreeing with Netanyahu and accusing the Palestinians of planning to make any future state “judenrein” – the term Nazis used to mean “empty of Jews”.

“It is an entirely racist and anti-Semitic position,” Friedman added.

Amal Jamal, a politics professor at Tel Aviv University, told Al Jazeera that Netanyahu’s video should be understood as the flipside of his earlier precondition for peace talks: that the Palestinians recognise Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.

That demand was intended as a trap for the Palestinian leadership, especially given that Israel includes 1.7 million Palestinian citizens who already suffer rampant and institutionalised discrimination.

Population swap

In Friday’s video, Netanyahu again exploited the existence of this large minority of Palestinians inside Israel to advance his right-wing agenda. He explicitly equated the settlers in the occupied territories with Israel’s Palestinian citizens, saying neither is “an obstacle to peace”.

The implication is that, should the Palestinian leadership insist on the settlers being “ethnically cleansed” from their illegal colonies, Israel would be justified in demanding tit-for-tat. If the settlers have to return to Israel, why not a population swap, with Israel’s Palestinian minority forced into the occupied territories?

Palestinian leaders in Israel understood the danger. Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, wrote at the weekend:

“We are not Israeli settlers, Mr Netanyahu … [We] are not foreign immigrants that came to Israel and applied for visas or citizenship … [We] are the indigenous population.”

Jamal said that Netanyahu’s claim would also help him to “set the domestic agenda” against political rivals on the far-right, such as Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Education Minister Naftali Bennett, both of them identified with the settler movement. Lieberman has repeatedly announced plans for land swaps that would redraw Israel’s recognised borders to move some Palestinian communities outside Israel in return for the annexation of the larger settlements.

“Neither Lieberman nor Bennett have gone as far as Netanyahu has now in suggesting that the evacuation of any settlement is ethnic cleansing,” Jamal said. “That will strengthen him with his power base on the right.”

Risky strategy

Nonetheless, this new condition – that Jewish colonies be treated as untouchable – is diplomatically a high-risk strategy.

If, as Netanyahu claims, “societies that demand ethnic cleansing don’t pursue peace”, what does that say about Israel, a state founded on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948?

Chemi Shalev, an analyst with the Haaretz daily, noted: “After years that Israel has toiled to prevent the loaded term ‘ethnic cleansing’ from entering the Israeli-Palestinian lexicon, Netanyahu is now pushing it in himself, through the front door.”

As a counter-video hurriedly produced by the Palestinian Authority pointed out, Israel’s founding fathers spoke out repeatedly in favour of ethnic cleansing.

Extending Netanyahu’s logic, another commentator in Haaretz observed that, if Jews had an inviolable right to live on Palestinian land, why should Palestinians expelled in 1948 not have an equivalent right to live in their former homes now inside Israel, in cities like Haifa and Jaffa?

Ongoing expulsions

Netanyahu’s claim not only shines an embarrassing light on Israel’s past crimes. Palestinians are currently being driven off their land to allow for the expansion of Jewish-only settlements, with Israel demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and in West Bank communities, in the Hebron Hills and Jordan Valley.

It is doing the same to Palestinian citizens inside Israel. The homes of 1,000 Bedouin residents of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev are about to be demolished so that an exclusively Jewish town – also called Hiran – can be built in their place.

In short, ethnic cleansing – of the kind defined by international law – is very much an ongoing project by Israel.

Then there is the matter of the United States, Israel’s patron. Netanyahu chose to issue his video in English, indicating that it was intended for a foreign as much as a domestic audience.

White House ‘livid’

Publicly, the Obama administration called Netanyahu’s comments “inappropriate and unhelpful”. Behind the scenes the White House was variously reported to be “seething” and “livid”.

That was entirely predictable. In the video, Netanyahu states that “some otherwise enlightened countries even promote this outrage [of ethnic cleansing of Jews]”.

It is hard not to read this as an attack on Washington. US President Barack Obama spent his first term trying unsuccessfully to force Netanyahu to freeze settlement expansion, and has regularly called the settlements an impediment to peace. Last month, US officials were reported to have warned of a “harsh response” if Israel demolished Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Susiya to make way for settler homes.

So why did Netanyahu choose this provocative course?

The video was certainly not a mistake. It is part of a strategy planned by Netanyahu’s foreign media spokesman, David Keyes. He was appointed in March after coming to prominence for controversial pro-Israel stunts on social media.

Netanyahu has issued eight such videos under Keyes’s direction, many of which have gone viral and are highly popular among his supporters, both in Israel and the US.

Reading US mood

The inspiration for the latest video appears to be Frank Luntz, a high-profile consultant to the Republican party and pro-Israel causes. Famously, he developed a document in 2009 advising Israel’s supporters on how best to make their case. Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing claim is set out almost word for word at the top of page 62 as the most effective argument with American audiences.

The Trump campaign’s apparent endorsement of the Netanyahu video suggests that the Israeli prime minister may be reading the political climate in the US correctly.

Jamal said that Netanyahu and his advisers intended to severely limit the terms of any future peace process. “Now anyone who demands the evacuation of settlements risks being accused of anti-Semitism,” he said.

Jeff Halper, a founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, agreed that Netanyahu’s goal was to reframe the international community’s assumptions.

“Netanyahu is telling them that there are no more occupied territories and no more settlers,” he told Al Jazeera.

“He’s saying, ‘Israel won, and it is time to get used to the reality of a single state’. This is the new normal and he wants the language and thinking of the international community to reflect that.”

• First published in Al Jazeera

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.

Republicans Will Purge for Trump: Vote-Registries Visited by GOP Suppression

Voter Registries Face Purges in Republican-Controlled States 

by TRNN

Sept. 12, 2016


Recently Donald Trump made ways when he claimed that if he loses in November in a state like Pennsylvania it will be because of vote rigging whereby some voters vote more than once. Last august though, investigative journalist Greg Palast published an article in Rolling Stone Magazine in which he presented his latest chiming’s about how Republicans are working to suppress the votes of minority voters in the US. Joining us to talk about the ways in which the vote might be manipulated is Greg Palast. Greg is an investigative reported for the BBC and the Guardian and he is also the author of the New York Times Best Seller, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Armed Madhouse, and Vulture’s Picnic.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast says Republicans are raising alarm over multiple-voting in order to purge millions of minority voters from voter registries

Canada's Other State Broadcaster: Ottawa's Policy Perception Management Program

Covering Canada on Government Dime

by Yves Engler - Dissident Voice

September 11th, 2016

By funding international journalism projects Ottawa shapes perceptions of Canadian policies abroad.

Last Saturday the Ottawa Citizen published a feature titled “The story of ‘the Canadian vaccine’ that beat back Ebola”. According to the article, staff reporter Elizabeth Payne’s “research was supported by a travel grant from the International Development Research Centre.” The laudatory story concludes with Guinea’s former health minister thanking Canada “for the great service you have rendered to Guinea” and a man who received the Ebola vaccine showing “reporters a map of Canada that he had carved out of wood and displayed in his living room. ‘Because Canada saved my life.’”

A Crown Corporation that reports to Parliament through the foreign minister, the International Development Research Centre’s board is mostly appointed by the federal government. Unsurprisingly, the government-funded institution broadly aligns its positions with Canada’s international objectives.

IDRC funds various journalism initiatives and development journalism prizes. Canada’s aid agency has also doled out tens of millions of dollars on media initiatives over the years. The now defunct Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has funded a slew of journalism fellowships that generate aid-related stories, including a Canadian Newspaper Association fellowship to send journalists to Ecuador, Aga Khan Foundation Canada/Canadian Association of Journalists Fellowships for International Development Reporting, Canadian Association of Journalists/Jack Webster Foundation Fellowship. It also offered eight $6,000 fellowships annually for members of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, noted CIDA,

“to report to the Canadian public on the realities lived in developing countries benefiting from Canadian public aid.”

Between 2005 and 2008 CIDA spent at least $47.5 million on the “promotion of development awareness.” According to a 2013 J–Source investigation titled “Some journalists and news organizations took government funding to produce work: is that a problem?”, more than $3.5 million went to articles, photos, film and radio reports about CIDA projects. Much of the government-funded reporting appeared in major media outlets. But, a CIDA spokesperson told J-Source, the aid agency “didn’t pay directly for journalists’ salaries” and only “supported media activities that had as goal the promotion of development awareness with the Canadian public.”

One journalist, Kim Brunhuber, received $13,000 to produce “six television news pieces that highlight the contribution of Canadians to several unique development projects” to be shown on CTV outlets. While failing to say whether Brunhuber’s work appeared on the station, CTV spokesperson Rene Dupuis said another documentary it aired “clearly credited that the program had been produced with the support of the Government of Canada through CIDA.”

During the 2001–14 war in Afghanistan CIDA operated a number of media projects. A number of CIDA-backed NGOs sent journalists to Afghanistan and the aid agency had a contract with Montréal’s Le Devoir to “[remind] readers of the central role that Afghanistan plays in CIDA’s international assistance program.”

The military also paid for journalists to visit Afghanistan. Canadian Press envoy Jonathan Montpetit explained, “my understanding of these junkets is that Ottawa picked up the tab for the flight over as well as costs in-theatre, then basically gave the journos a highlight tour of what Canada was doing in Afghanistan.”

A number of commentators have highlighted the political impact of military sponsored trips, which date back decades. In Turning Around a Supertanker: media-military relations in Canada in the CNN age, Daniel Hurley writes, “correspondents were not likely to ask hard questions of people who were offering them free flights to Germany” to visit Canadian bases there. In his diary of the mid-1990s Somalia Commission of Inquiry Peter Desbarats made a similar observation. “Some journalists, truly ignorant of military affairs, were happy to trade junkets overseas for glowing reports about Canada’s gallant peacekeepers.”

The various arms of Canadian foreign policy fund media initiatives they expect will portray their operations sympathetically. It’s one reason why Canadians overwhelmingly believe this country is a benevolent international actor even though Ottawa long advanced corporate interests and sided with the British and US empires.

Yves Engler is the author of Canada in Africa: 300 years of aid and exploitation.

Read other articles by Yves.

Fish Farms Face Rising Tide of Discontent

The Magical Sheen

by Ray Grigg - Shades of Green

September 12, 2016

The arrival in July of the Sea Shepherd's RV Martin Sheen on its “Operation Virus Hunter” expedition to examine salmon farms along the east coast of Vancouver Island had an unexpected effect. The ship's mere presence created a physical and symbolic place for First Nations to express their seething resentment about an industry that many of them have been opposing for nearly 30 years.

As the ship visited fish farms, it became a catalyst for action by the many chiefs and elders invited aboard. Their growing uneasiness inspired them to respond to the diminishing runs of salmon, herring and oolichans that represent their traditional way of life. These species constitute their life-blood. And they blame salmon farms for spreading the diseases, parasites and pollution that threaten their identity by contaminating their sacred waters.

The threat, they contend, constitutes cultural genocide, for they are literally “salmon people”, intimately bound for millennia to the natural cycles of the wild salmon's generosity. Since the arrival of salmon farms — without consultation in their “un-ceded waters and territories,” as hereditary chief George Quocksister Jr. explains — their anxiety has been growing. Visits to the actual salmon farms confirmed their worst fears.

The fetid carcasses of rotting dead salmon in the putrid “mort totes” represent the hidden reality of these sites. Schools of herring were feeding on fragments of food pellets laced with antibiotics and colourants. Just a few minutes of underwater videos revealed farmed Atlantics feeding on unidentified small wild fish — perhaps oolichans, a once plentiful fish now on the verge of extinction. Symptoms of viral diseases were immediately evident. Dozens of farmed fish were lined up facing the nets, swimming lethargically and demonstrating the typical symptoms of heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI), the physical manifestation of the highly infectious piscine reovirus now known to be epidemic in salmon farms. Other Atlantics were covered in boils, an indication of the highly contagious furunculosis, a disease that has been linked to the decimation of stream runs of coho and chinook. One farmed fish was bulging with a large tumour. Another, so emaciated that it resembled a large-headed eel, swam slowly and aimlessly toward an immanent death. Unseen but imagined were the viruses and parasites, spreading by the billions from such prisons of disease, sickness and suffering.

Some First Nations witnesses indicated their revulsion caused them to feel physical upset. Indeed, these people believe the persistence of salmon farming in its present form is a dire threat to the beloved wild salmon that are the foundation of their culture.

So, increasing numbers of them are taking the initiative to give eviction notices to the salmon farming corporations. In an August 29th ceremony, a procession of chiefs and elders in full regalia drummed a route along Campbell River's streets to their Big House. There, in the solemn presence of an open fire and their totem poles, they made speeches and pledges to rid their territories of ocean net-pen salmon farms. Then they drummed to the office of Marine Harvest, the largest of the salmon farming corporations.

A locked door and security guard prevented them from delivering their eviction notice. But, like the persistent power of water, they will find a way.

9/11 at 15: A Gulag Legacy

15 Years After 9/11, Still Waiting for the Closure of Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington

11.9.16

Exactly 15 years ago, terrorists attacked the United States, killing 2,996 people, in the World Trade Center and on two hijacked aeroplanes, and changing the world forever.

Within a month, the US had invaded Afghanistan, aiming to destroy al-Qaeda and to topple the Taliban regime that had harbored them. That mission was largely accomplished by early 2002, but instead of leaving, the US outstayed its welcome, “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” as Anand Gopal, the journalist and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, explained to me several years ago.

In addition, of course, the Bush administration — led by a president who knew little about the world, attended by two Republican veterans, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who believed in the president’s right to act as he saw fit in times of emergency, unfettered by any kind of checks and balances (the unitary executive theory) — also set up a secret CIA program of kidnap and torture on a global scale, and prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, where the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and where they tried to pretend that indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial was the new normal, rather than a dangerous aberration.

The use of torture, poisoning America’s lifeblood with the false notion that it was necessary, in reality led to very little useful information — and, certainly, no useful information that could not have been obtained through old-fashioned interrogations based on rapport-building rather than conscience-shocking brutality. It did, however, lead to false statements that led to the intelligence services being sidelined into countless wild goose chases, and, crucially, also led to false statements that were used to justify the second post-9/11 military invasion — the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In addition, of course, in response to the nearly 3,000 dead — and 6,000 wounded — in the US on September 11, 2001, the US has killed at least 1.3 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to a report by Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was published in March 2015.

The authors of the report — which identified a million lives lost in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan — also noted that the body count “could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.” The report also added that figure of 1.3m was “approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware,” which has been “propagated by the media and major NGOs.”

In addition, those compiling the report did not look at all the other countries targeted by the US in the years since the invasion of Iraq, which include Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Reflecting on the invasion of Iraq, in particular — a country that, demonstrably, had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, but where US actions have very clearly contributed to the rise of IS/Daesh — it seems reasonable to propose, as I first did many years ago, that Dick Cheney ought to be held accountable for treason for his role in securing and using the information about al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that Colin Powell delivered to the UN on Cheney’s behalf — and to his eternal shame — a month before the invasion in March 2003.

A key lie emerged though the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of an independent training camp in Afghanistan, who, under torture, made a false claim that al-Qaeda was seeking chemical weapons from Saddam Hussein. Al-Libi, eventually returned to Col. Gaddafi’s Libya by the Bush administration, died in dubious circumstances in a Libyan prison in May 2009.

The facilitator of al-Libi’s camp, on the other hand, was Abu Zubaydah, the first victim of Bush’s torture program, who, like other “high-value detainees,” held and tortured in CA “black sites,” is still held at Guantánamo, where, 15 years after 9/11, justice remains elusive, or, even worse, impossible to imagine.

61 men are still held at Guantánamo, and while 20 of those 61 have been approved for release, the rest are either facing discredited military commission trials whose progress is so slow that they may never happen (including, disgracefully, the five men charged with planning and implementing the 9/11 attacks, who would almost certainly have been convicted years ago if they had been prosecuted in federal court) or are still consigned to indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial. This is in spite of the fact that there has been no demonstration, in the last 15 years, that the US has been helped in any way by holding people indefinitely without charging them — and refusing to hold them as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, who, unlike those allegedly responsible for committing crimes, can be held without charge until the end of hostilities.

Responsible for inflaming tensions abroad, and especially in countries that can readily discern that Guantánamo is a prison for Muslims, and Muslims alone, the use of indefinite detention and torture also smacks of colossal hypocrisy, as the US continues to claim that it is a beacon of freedom, founded on the rule of law, and proudly proclaiming that it upholds the highest values.

On the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as we remember those who lost their lives on that terrible day, let us also remember those who have lost their lives in all the wars that have been launched since, let us recall that holding people without charge or trial at Guantánamo has been a horribly unacceptable response to the attacks, and that justice has not been delivered for the victims of 9/11, and let us also remember that those responsible for the warmongering, torture, rendition and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial since 9/11 must one day be held accountable for their actions.


Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp).

He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield.

He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Seeing 'Snowden'

Snowden: Best Film of the Year

by David Swanson - War Is a Crime

10 September 2016 

Snowden is the most entertaining, informing, and important film you are likely to see this year.

It's the true story of an awakening. It traces the path of Edward Snowden's career in the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and at various contractors thereof.

It also traces the path of Edward Snowden's agonizingly slow awakening to the possibility that the U.S. government might sometimes be wrong, corrupt, or criminal. And of course the film takes us through Snowden's courageous and principled act of whistleblowing.

We see in the film countless colleagues of Snowden's who knew much of what he knew and did not blow the whistle.

We see a few help him and others appreciate him. But they themselves do nothing. Snowden is one of the exceptions. Other exceptions who preceded him and show up in the film include William Binney, Ed Loomis, Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake. Most people are not like these men. Most people obey illegal orders without ever making a peep.

And yet, what strikes me about Snowden and many other whistleblowers I've met or learned about, is how long it took them, and the fact that what brought them around was not an event they objected to but a change in their thinking. U.S. officials who've been part of dozens of wars and coups and outrages for decades will decide that the latest war is too much, and they'll bail out, resign publicly, and become an activist. Why now? Why not then, or then, or then, or that other time?

These whistleblowers -- and Snowden is no exception -- are not passive or submissive early in their careers. They're enthusiastic true believers. They want to spy and bomb and kill for the good of the world. When they find out that's not what's happening, they go public for the good of the world. There is that consistency to their actions. The question, then, is how smart, dedicated young people come to believe that militarism and secrecy and abusive power are noble pursuits.

Oliver Stone's Ed Snowden begins as a "smart conservative." But the only smart thing we see about him is his computer skills. We never hear him articulate some smart political point of view that happens to be "conservative." His taste in books includes Ayn Rand, hardly an indication of intelligence. But on the computers, Snowden is a genius. And on that basis his career advances.

Snowden has doubts about the legality of warrantless spying, but believes his CIA instructor's ludicrous defense. Later, Snowden has such concerns about CIA cruelty he witnesses that he resigns. Yet, at the same time, he believes that presidential candidate Barack Obama will undo the damage and set things right.

How does one explain such obtuseness in a genius? Obama's statements making perfectly clear that the wars and outrages would roll on were publicly available. I found them with ordinary search engines, needing no assistance from the NSA.

Snowden resigned, but he didn't leave. He started working for contractors. He came to learn that a program he'd created was being used to assist in lawless and reckless, not to mention murderous, drone murders. That wasn't enough.

He came to learn that the U.S. government was lawlessly spying on the whole world and spying more on the United States than on Russia. (Why spying on Russia was OK we aren't told.) But that, too, wasn't enough.

He came to learn that the U.S. was spying on its allies and enemies alike, even inserting malware into allies' infrastructure in order to be able to destroy things and kill people should some country cease to be an ally someday. That, too, was not enough.

Snowden went on believing that the United States was the greatest country on earth. He went on calling his work "counter cyber" and "counter spying" as if only non-Americans can do spying or cyber-warfare, while the United States just tries to gently counter such acts. In fact, Snowden risked his life, refraining from taking medication he needed, so that he could continue doing that work. He defended such recklessness as justified by the need to stop Chinese hackers from stealing billions of dollars from the U.S. government. Apart from the question of which Chinese hackers did that, what did Snowden imagine it was costing U.S. taxpayers to fund the military?

Snowden's career rolled on. But Edward Snowden's brilliant mind was catching up with reality and at some point overtook it. And then there was no question that he would do what needed to be done. Just as he designed computer programs nobody else could, and that nobody else even thought to try, now he designed a whistleblowing maneuver that would not be stopped as others had.

Consequently, we must be grateful that good and decent people sometimes start out believing Orwellian tales. Dull, cowardly, and servile people never blow whistles.

Sonovabitch: Understanding Duterte and the Uppity Philippines

Hope for the Philippines?

by Gary Leupp - CounterPunch

September 9, 2016 

Son of a bitch (var. sonovabitch): Something that is very difficult or unpleasant. Used to express surprise, disappointment, anger, etc. (based on Merriam-Webster)

Rodrigo Duterte, elected president of the Philippines last May, was supposed to meet with President Obama in Laos on the sidelines of the ASEAN meeting Monday. He had referred to Obama as a putang ina (“son of a bitch”) in a news conference, and earlier to U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg with what was reported as a homophobic slur.

(I understand that Duterte routinely uses the word bakla or “gay” to refer to elite men, but—like most Filipinos—actually is fine with gayness. The city of Davao, where he was mayor for many years, has lots of gay establishments and he had no problem with them. He supports gay marriage. When asked last year if he would mind if his son Paolo had a gay partner, he replied that he had no problem at all.

“It’s more of the human dignity than anything else,” he replied, adding in his typical manner combing English and Tagalog,

“All human beings are created by God, So kung rerespetuhin mo ang totoong babae, tooting lalaki, at ito namang isa kung medyo alanganin sa babae, lalaki, then he is also a creation of good. So kaya magrespetuhan tayo.” 

I don’t understand Tagalog but this sounds pretty tolerant. I’m inclined to think his putative homophobia is actually State Department hyperbole designed to discredit him.

By the way, have you noticed how, following the rapid unexpected legal advances gay people have made in this country since the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 recognized same-sex marriages, the U.S. government itself has rapidly and shamelessly come to make homophobia—still rampant in this country, and indeed normative until recently—a cause for the vilification of selected regimes abroad? Regimes such as that in Russia—where homosexuality is in fact legal, and tourist literature advertises the “warm and vibrant gay club scene” and bars and saunas in St. Petersburg especially? And have you also noticed the ringing silence about close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, where guys get tossed to their deaths off buildings if convicted of sodomy?)

Duterte has boasted about the accusations against him of extrajudicial killings of drug-traffickers in Davao while he was mayor and since he became president. I suppose he deserves condemnation. But from whom? In biblical rhetoric: Who is entitled to cast the first stone? Who has the beam in their eye, rather than the mote?

Asked by reporters last week about the likelihood that Obama would raise criticisms of his human rights record, Duterte declared elliptically,

“I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You [Obama] must be respectful. Do not just throw questions. ‘Putang ina,’ I will swear at you in that [ASEAN] forum.”

The mainstream media was shocked at the insulting suggestion that the U.S. president would have to be respectful to the Filipino president or risk provoking some reactive rudeness. Asked in Beijing if he would meet as planned with Duterte, Obama affected mild amusement at the “colorful” Filipino leader, saying his staff was deciding when and if a meeting will happen. Its cancellation was announced soon afterwards. Obama would meet with the South Korean leader instead.

There seems reason to believe that Duterte, unlike any of his predecessors, is genuinely anti-imperialist. More than that, and quite surprisingly, he has expressed admiration for the Communist Party of the Philippines, and its guerrilla New People’s Army, that has been at war with the Philippines state for almost 50 years. He was actually a student of Jose Maria Sison, the party’s founder who has been in Dutch exile since 1987, in the 1960s; the two have been in touch and remain friends.

On August 26 the long-stalemated Oslo talks between Manila and the rebels resulted in an indefinite ceasefire. Meanwhile Duterte has offered the Communists cabinet posts overseeing the departments of agrarian reform, environment and natural resources, labor and employment, and social welfare and development. He has invited Sison to return home. Sison says he longs to do so but only after an agreement is finalized. This is looking increasingly possible, barring decisive U.S. intervention.

Washington, on the other hand, views the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the New People’s Army, as “terrorists.” Just as the U.S. views all left-wing armed movements as terrorists (unless and until they can be used for common purposes, as in the case of the Iranian MEK in Iraq). In 2002 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell took the unprecedented step of blacklisting the estimable Sison personally as a “terrorist” and the U.S. (spurred by then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) was surely behind the Dutch authorities’ raid on his house and his brief detention in 2007 on suspicion of ordering two murders in the Philippines the year before. (He was cleared of the charges and released.)

While cozying up to the Filipino Communists, Duterte has unexpectedly responded to the World Court’s judgment in favor of the Philippines’ South China Sea territorial claims over those of China, not with a tighter embrace of the U.S. and cooler relations with China, but with outreach to Beijing. Duterte has made it clear he sees China more positively than the imperialist U.S., which seized the Philippines as a colony following the Spanish-American War of 1898, slaughtered one-tenth of the Filipino people suppressing their resistance to colonization between 1899 and 1901, acquired total control over the Filipino economy and largely retained it after according the Philippines formal independence in 1946.

U.S.-led forces suppressed the communist-led Hukbalahap rebels who had spearheaded resistance to the Japanese occupation of 1942 to 1945, treated a succession of puppet presidents with astonishing contempt, and praised as “democratic” the vicious regime of Ferdinand Marcos (president from 1965 to 1986) that declared martial law in 1972 to suppress the communist threat. The U.S. backed Marcos until the “people’s power revolution” of 1986 forced President Reagan to issue him marching orders. (Marcos settled and died in Hawai’i.)

His initially popular successor Cory Aquino first sought peace talks with the CPP. Towards this end she freed Sison, who had been captured and imprisoned in 1977. But while Sison was touring the world in the year following his release—notably, accepting a literary award for a book of poetry he had composed from the hands of the king of Thailand in October 1986—the Aquino regime under army pressure decided to revoke his passport. Ever since he has been stuck in Utrecht, Holland, advising the CPP from abroad.

The prospect of his return to the Philippines, publicly embraced by Duterte, possibly taking a cabinet post along with other members of the CPP, must be producing shit-fits in the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. State Department spokespeople insist that the bilateral relationship remains strong. Duterte has now expressed “regret” for calling Obama a putang ina. He says he meant nothing personal. (In fairness, he calls lots of people that, including Pope Francis. That’s just Digong’s manner of expressing himself.)

But things do not actually seem normal. Not at all.

In 1992 the U.S. was forced to close its Subic naval base and its Clark air force base in the Philippines—voted out by the national legislature. It has been trying to worm its way back in since 9/11. Recall how George W. Bush once called the limited deployment of U.S. forces in Mindanao, to aid Filipino forces in defeating the tiny (and still surviving) Abu Sayyaf group supposedly aligned with al-Qaeda, the “second stage” in the “War on Terror” after Afghanistan? Even as she was further bought by a massive injection of new military aid from the U.S., she had to request that Washington stop using that phrase because the Abu Sayyaf threat was actually tiny and Filipinos getting nervous thinking their country would be the next Afghanistan.

(For a time, Georgia and the Pankisi Gorge became the next stage, and then Yemen. The neocons clustered around Dick Cheney were determined to use the post 9/11 atmosphere to expand the U.S. military presence everywhere in the world.)

Step by step, the U.S. military has returned to the Philippines. It continued port calls in Subic Bay after 1992 and by pressing Manila to sign the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement in April 2014 has acquired access to military bases in the country on a rotational basis. Meanwhile the Philippines has played a central role in the Southeast Asia Maritime Security Initiative, a U.S.-led effort to monitor and challenge the expanding Chinese presence in the South China Sea.

This is all part of what Washington calls its “pivot to Asia”—code term for its desire to just get the job done in the Middle East as soon as possible so as to focus attention on preparing for war with the inevitably rising China. But what does Duterte mean for that pivot?

In 1947 the Truman administration ordered its European allies including France and Italy to remove any Communist members from cabinets. Never mind that these parties were popular and enjoyed a reputation as having led the anti-fascist resistance. And it’s well known that CIA dirty tricks prevented a Communist electoral victory in Italy in 1948.

How would a President Hillary Clinton react, should the CPP acquire an established role in Philippines politics, Manila withdraw from recent military and “security” agreements, and the country draw closer to the PRC? Be assured her crooked cabal is already discussing coup plans. Because that’s what they do, thinking that as the “exceptional” nation they need not (as Hillary confidant Henry Kissinger once said in relation to Chile) “stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

But that was 1970, when the U.S. had twice the share in global GDP than it has today and the world was divided by the Cold War. Ruling classes of nations forced to take sides at that time have seen been obliged by market and geopolitical forces to align, re-align, and hold out options for the future. Obama cannot snap his fingers and demand that Duterte cooperate with an anti-China, pro-U.S. balikitan program. Nor will his successor be able to do so.

The next U.S. president might face an independent country whose people are attempting to resolve their own contradictions in their own way, rejecting interference from the putang ina in Washington. What could be more hopeful than that?
 

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu

More articles by:Gary Leupp

Public Confessions of a Secret Brexist

Confessions of a Brexist

by David Yearsley - CounterPunch

September 9, 2016 

London, “U.K.”

It’s my first trip back to Britain—or England as I now make a point of calling this parcel of the disunited island kingdom—since 2015 and since the Brexit vote of this past June.

As the early results filtered in from Sunderland on that fateful summer day and as tremors rippled through the world’s financial markets, I was monitoring the situation from Houston.

Continually I sneak-peeked at my recently inherited iPhone, although it was rude and wrong to do so. But I couldn’t help myself: I was at an organ concert introduced by a weightless astronaut on a big screen rising above the altar of gothic church made mostly of plastic. The orbital emcee was floating inside the international space station, strewing good tidings from above, even from God himself. Apparently our astronaut had no idea that God was at that moment otherwise occupied in letting his wrecking ball fall on the Tower of Babel that is—or was—the European Union.

Later that night, as the final tally became ever clearer and the cause of the “Remainers” had been declared statistically lost, I surveyed the sprawl of Houston from the infinity pool atop the downtown Hilton and tried to imagine how sweet a Texit would be. Since the days of Sam Houston there’s been a powerful separatist strain in the Lone Star state. Here’s hoping that the Brits bold example will fuel renewed secessionist impulses!

If you want to see it, the aftermath of June’s demolition job can be seen everywhere London. In the aftermath of the referendum, the failing infrastructure and dire outlook that have been endemic to post-colonial Britain can readily be chalked-up to Brexit.

On my arrival yesterday morning there was switching failure on the track for the Heathrow Express that is supposed to get you in from the airport to London’s Paddington Station in fifteen minutes. The journey took three times as long. No refunds were offered for the outrageously overpriced tickets for a service predicated on avoiding just this kind of teeth-grinding delay. Clearly a portent of the post-Brexit future.

After leaving Paddington, I made a brisk walk down the Marylebone Road towards the British Library for some off-the-plane commando-style research. My forced march was interrupted a block or two beyond Madame Tussaud’s and the Royal Academy of Music by a dark-suited, ear-pieced guy, who stopped my progress and informed me that the sidewalk was closed. He directed me around the block because panes of glass had been falling from the gleaming glass tower he motioned to above his head. Here’s betting that these flying windows were kicked out by the fleeing rats of the financial services industry—driven out and downsized by Brexit, of course!

Thus detoured, I arrived still later at the plaza leading down into the entrance of the British Library. I couldn’t help but notice that steps were worn, the no-slip safety strips peeled from the stone: Brexit! Many lockers in the basement were broken: Brexit! Inside the Music and Rare Books Reading Room the numbers in the brass panels at the back of each sumptuous, pig-skinned fitted reader’s desk no longer lights up magically when the materials you’ve ordered are ready for pick up. Now you’ve got to wait 70 minutes and inquire yourself about the status of your orders. What inefficient, inelegant indignities! Brexit, again!

And then there’s the worn carpet: not likely to get a redo any time soon, especially when it’s all those foreigners who are tramping their foreign boots on British carpetdom.

Happily, the staff remains buoyant and helpful in the face of cuts and all these post-Brexit blues. After renewing my lapsed library card—still at no cost!—I smiled gratefully at the clerk who was helping me.

“I love the British Library!” I cheered. He laughed ruefully.

 “Gotta be wary of these overenthusiastic Americans,” I admitted. “Better than the bloody Brits,” he replied.

The sheet music I examine from the library’s holding’s are bound volumes of Bach prints from around 1900. Now there’s the European spirit: the Brits of yore just kept on loving the great German even through two world wars fought against them. But then again the Brits have a German royal family and boasted the most vigorous Bach cult in the world from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even Bach couldn’t haved stopped the Brexit.

Blasting out into the bright of an 80 degree September afternoon—Brexit squirts lighter fluid on the barbecue coals of Climate Change—I made my way into the outlandish Victorian-Gothic castle that is St. Pancras’s station. From the announcement speakers a litany of delays and closures of services and stations beat down on throngs heading to the various underground lines. More Brexit grit on the subway rails!

Fighting my way through this underground morass I emerged into the pergola-ed light of Victoria station. After getting my ticket—no credit cards accepted at the ticket machines, clearly another bit of Brexit wagon-circling—I stared for a long time up at the big board of departures and arrivals. I simply couldn’t find the name of my destination Pulborough in West Sussex. The announcement soon came: Industrial Action in the South of England. What with pensions halved by the referendum and worker’s rights under assault it’s no wonder that during this hot end of summer one can’t help but think of the Winter of Discontent. A recent study to be read in yesterday’s papers showed that many in Britain will have to postpone retirement till their mid-eighties if they hope to get by.

Eventually, I devised a way to get to my mother-in-law’s Sussex village. As the train exited the post-industrial, post-Brexit gloom of London and began to make its way through the countryside, the conductor came through the carriage. I asked him about the reasons for the strike. It seems that the station guards in this privatized patch of the former national rail system want to retain their duty of signaling to the driver that the train is safe to leave the station. The company—called Southern—claims that this old-fashioned practice is no longer necessary and its elimination will lead to cost-savings. Naturally, the union sees this “efficiency” as a prelude to laying-off more workers.

“It’s an odd strike,” I opined. “If there’s one thing the Brits are good at doing on their own these days, it’s shutting the door.”

 

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His recording of J. S. Bach’s organ trio sonatas is available from Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com

More articles by:David Yearsley

America's Restless Proxies' Regional Rivalries

US Proxies and Regional Rivalries

by James Petras

09.10.2016

US empire building depends on regional regimes’ support, especially in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. These proxy regimes fulfill valuable military roles securing control over neighboring regions, populations and territory. 

In recent times, however, we witness the same proxies developing their own tendency toward expansionist policies - in pursuit of their own mini-empires.

Client regimes with local or regional ambitions now present Washington with new points of contention. At a time when the US empire has been forced to retrench or retreat in the face of its prolonged losses, a whole new set of conflicts have emerged. The post-imperial war zones are the new focus. Often, imperial client regimes take the initiative in confronting their regional adversaries. In other cases, competing proxies will brush aside their US ‘mentors’ and advance their own territorial ambitions.

The break-up of the US-dominated empire, far from ending wars and conflicts, will almost certainly lead to many local wars under the pretext of ’self-determination’, or ’self-defense’ or protecting one’s ethnic brethren - like Ankara’s sudden concern for the Turkmen in Syria.

We will examine a few of the most obvious case studies.

The Middle East: Turkish-Kurdish-Syrian Conflict

Over the past years, the Turkish regime has been in the forefront in the war to overthrow the secular nationalist Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

The Turks acted as proxies for the US - providing military bases, supplies, training and protection, as well as the point of entry, for overseas Islamist terrorist-mercenaries acting on behalf of Washington’s imperial ambitions.

As the ‘independent’ Islamist threat (ISIS) gained territory, targeting US objectives, Washington increasingly turned to its allied, mostly secular, Kurdish fighters. Washington’s Kurdish proxies took over territory from both the anti-US Islamists as well as the Syrian national government - as part of their own long-standing ethno-nationalist agenda.

Turkey saw Kurdish victories in northern Syria as a rallying point for autonomous Kurdish forces within Turkey. President Erdogan intervened militarily - sending tanks, warplanes and tens of thousands of troops into Syria, launching a war of extermination against the US-proxy Syrian Kurds! The Turkish invasion has advanced, taking Syrian territory, under the phony pretext of combating ‘ISIS’. In fact, Turkey has created a wide, colonial ’safe zone’ to control the Kurds.

The Obama regime in Washington complained but was totally unwilling to intervene as the Turks drove the Kurds out of their northern Syrian home in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. Thus, Turkish-Kurdish-Syrian warfare has broken out and the terms, conditions and outcome are well beyond US control.

The US quest for an imperial puppet regime in Syria has flopped: instead, Turkey gobbled up Syrian land, the Kurds resisted the Turks for national-self-determination instead of driving out the Islamist mercenaries and Damascus faces an additional threat to its national sovereignty.

This brutal regional war, started largely by the US and Saudi Arabia, will expose the extent to which the US-Middle East Empire has shrunk.

Asia: Japan, Vietnam, Philippine and China Conflict

The US Empire in Asia has seen the making and unmaking of proxy states. After WWII, the US incorporated Japan, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand as proxy states in an effort to strangle and conquer China, North Korea and Vietnam.

More recently India, Vietnam and Myanmar have joined the US in its new militarist scheme to encircle China.

Central to the Obama-Clinton ‘Pivot to Asia’ is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a singular effort to ‘unify’ Asian nations under US control in order to isolate and diminish China’s role in Asia.

The original, post-WW2 proxies, South Korea, Philippines and Japan provided military bases, troops, material and logistic support. Vietnam, the newest ‘proxy-on-the-block’, welcomes Pentagon weapons aimed at China - despite the millions of Vietnamese deaths during the US war in Indochina.

While most of the Asian proxies continue to pay lip service to Washington’s ‘Sinophobic agenda’, many do so on their own terms: they are reluctant to provoke China’s economic wrath through Washington’s policy of direct confrontation. During the recent ASEAN Conference in Laos (2016), nations resisted Washington’s pressure to denounce China despite the ‘international court’ ruling against Beijing’s South China Sea maritime claims. The US’ ability to influence events through its Europe-based ‘international tribunals’ seems to have waned. The US cannot implement its own transpacific economic ‘blockade’ strategy (TPP) because of both domestic and external resistance. Meanwhile, new proxy relations have emerged.

The proxy-stooges in Tokyo face growing anti-proxy opposition from the Japanese people over their nation’s role as a glorified US airbase. As a result Tokyo carefully pursues its own anti-China strategy by forming deeper economic links to new or minor proxy states in Indo-China, the Philippines and Myanmar. In the course of developing its relations with these weaker proxy regimes, Japan is actually laying the ground for autonomous economic and military policies independent of the US.

Notably, the Philippines under its new President Duterte, seeks to accommodate relations with China, even as its neo-colonial proxy military relations with Washington remain in place. The Western media kerfuffle over Duterte’s ‘colorful’ language and ‘human rights’ policies masks Washington’s imperial disapproval with his independent foreign policy toward China.

While India grows closer ties with the US and even offers military co-operation with the Pentagon, it is signing even greater Chinese investment and trade agreements - anxious to enter the enormous China market.

In other words, Washington’s Asian proxies have (1) widened their own reach, (2) defined autonomous spheres of action and (3) have downgraded US efforts to impose trade agreements.

Symptomatic of the decay of US ‘proxy power’ is the ‘disinclination’ among Washington’s clients to express overt hostility to Beijing. In frustration, the Washington-New York financial mouthpieces (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) provide bully pulpits for the most obscure, marginal characters, including a minor Hong Kong politician, a decrepit exiled Tibetan ‘holy man’ and a gaggle of Uighur terrorists!

Washington’s Ephemeral Proxies in Latin America

One of the most striking aspects of US empire-building is the ease with which it has secured proxies in Latin America… and how quickly they are undermined!

Over the past three decades the US propped up proxy military regimes, which were overthrown and replaced by independent governments in the last decade. These are currently being replaced by a new wave of neo-liberal proxies - a motley collection of corrupt thugs and elite clowns incapable of establishing a sustainable imperial-centered region.

A proxy-based empire is a contradiction in terms. The Latin American proxies are too dependent on outside support, lacking mass internal popularity and roots. Their very neo-liberal economic and social policies are unable to stimulate the industrial development required grow the economy. The Latin American proxies are mere predators, devoid of historical entrepreneurial skills of the Japanese and the disciplined nationalist ideology of the Turks.

In that sense, the Latin American proxies more closely resemble the Philippine ruling oligarchy: They preach submission and breed subversion. Proxy instability and policy shifts emerge as powerful forces to challenge the US empire - whether the Chinese in Asia or domestic internal conflicts - like the Trump phenomenon in the US.

Conclusion

Imperial wars continue . . . but so does an upsurge in domestic instability, mass rejection of imperial policies, regional conflicts and national wars. The decline of the empire threatens to bring on an era of intra-proxy wars - multiple conflicts, which may or may not benefit the US empire. The war of the few against the many is becoming the war of the many against the many. But what are the choices in the face of such historic shifts?

Only the emergence of truly class-conscious organized mass movements can offer a positive response to the coming deluge.

Please see James Petras latest book: “The end of the Republic and the Delusion of Empire”, Clarity Press 2016 ISBN 978-0-9972870-5-9