Power of Privilege: American Diplomacy Prepares for the Trump Era

Samantha Power Condemns Russia for Condemning a U.S. War Crime

by Gary Leupp - CounterPunch

September 21, 2016

U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power was furious Saturday when a Russian demand for an emergency closed-door session of the UN Security Council forced her to show up at the UN building to explain U.S. actions.

The Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin called the session to condemn the U.S. for an attack on a Syrian Army position in Deir Ezzor earlier that day that had killed at least 62 government troops (perhaps as many as 83) and injured over 100.

This was a clear, egregious violation of the weeklong ceasefire negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and generally observed by the Syrian army and the “moderate” armed opposition. The U.S. immediately ceased the strike after the Russians protested. The Pentagon announced that it was not targeting Syrian forces, indeed apologizing to Damascus via Moscow for the loss of life.

It says the incident is under investigation.

But the impact of the attack is quite serious. Nearby ISIL forces were able to capture the site and advance towards Deir Ezzor’s airport, which remains in government hands. To prevent this, Russia has reportedly deployed more forces in the area. Meanwhile Syria accuses Washington of deliberately aiding ISIL to bring down the Assad regime.

Power’s response? She showed up at the UN in a huff, told Churkin straightaway that she was not going to listen to him, and that the Russian demand for the meeting was a mere “stunt.” Leaving a deputy to chat with the other Security Council diplomats, she appeared at a podium before reporters to denounce the “stunt,” as a “cynical and hypocritical” effort by the allies of the horrible Syrian government to embarrass the U.S. Her angry statement alluded only in passing to the killing of the Syrian troops. Shortly afterwards, a clearly amazed Churkin recounted to the same reporters Power’s arrogant behavior.

The U.S. ambassador was plainly irked that she would have to spend her Saturday night explaining to the ambassadors from Russia, China, Britain, France, Angola, Egypt, Japan, Malaysia, Senegal, Spain, Ukraine, Uruguay and Venezuela why the U.S. did this, or how it could have happened. Why, from her point of view, should the U.S. ever have to apologize, or even explain its actions, when it is so exceptional, and indispensable, and fundamentally good, whereas other nations are good to the extent that they cooperate with the U.S. (as Saudi Arabia does so dependably) and bad to the extent that they impede U.S. objectives (such as ongoing NATO expansion or more Middle East “regime change”).

Power’s statement began:

“Good evening, everybody. We are still gathering information at this time, but we have been able to confirm that, earlier today, the United States struck what we believed to be an ISIL target. We halted the attack when we were informed by Russia that it was possible that we were striking Syrian regime military personnel and vehicles. We are investigating the incident. If we determine that we did indeed strike Syrian military personnel, that was not our intention, and we, of course, regret the loss of life.

“This said, even by Russia’s standards, tonight’s stunt – a stunt replete with moralism and grandstanding – is uniquely cynical and hypocritical. Since 2011, the Assad regime has been intentionally striking civilian targets with horrifying, predictable regularity… And yet, in the face of none of these atrocities has Russia expressed outrage, nor has it demanded investigations, nor has it ever called for a Saturday night emergency consultation in the Security Council – or a Monday day; or a Tuesday day; or a Wednesday day; Thursday day; Friday day, Saturday, Sunday – you name it. If there’s a day of the week, they have never called an emergency consultation on any of these practices…

“And a year ago, at the UN General Assembly, Russia decided to join the Assad regime, escalating the conflict, and – perhaps worst of all – itself adopting some of the regime’s worst practices: hitting hospitals, hitting refugee camps, hitting markets without a single public expression of remorse.”

Thus Power shifted focus from the illegal attack on the army of a sovereign state to the alleged crimes of that state. In her position of moral bankruptcy and with no leg to stand on legally, she was reduced to schoolyard bully’s wonted weapon of ridicule.

“Seriously? They’re calling this emergency meeting? Really? Now, because of a single airstrike – a strike that, if it struck regime forces, did so in error; a strike that we have swiftly acknowledged and committed to investigating – again, none of which the Assad regime or Russia have done in their airstrikes on innocent civilians. Now, of all times, Russia calls the entire UN Security Council to convene urgently so that it can stand up here and express outrage. Imagine how often this Council would be meeting if we were to gather every time the regime or Russia struck a hospital, or a school, or a bread line.”

Or, one might add, if it were to gather every time the U.S. struck a hospital, or school, or wedding party in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya or Pakistan. Notice that the Russians have not “demanded investigations” of these crimes. Russia did not call for a meeting last April, after the U.S. bombed a hospital in Kunduz, or in November 2008, when a U.S. airstrike killed 63 people including 37 civilians, mostly women and children, at a housing complex in the village of Wech Baghtu in Afghanistan.

Power treats the slaughter of Syrian soldiers in “a single airstrike” (just one, after all) as a trivial matter, an irritation only because Putin wants to make it one. Just as her former boss Hillary Clinton has, in connection with the DNC email leaks documenting who her nomination was rigged, tried to change the subject to “Russian efforts to influence the U.S. elections,” so Power is trying to change the subject here from one minor U.S. atrocity to Russian support for Assad’s military.

Churkin was diplomatically appalled. “I have never,” he told the press, “seen such an extraordinary display of American heavy-handedness as we are witnessing today.” He recounted how the livid Power had dissed him before storming out of the meeting room, leaving a deputy who merely stated that the attack was “under investigation.”

Now the Russians note that the Lavrov-Kerry deal for U.S.-Russian cooperation on Syria so painstakingly negotiated as of Sept. 9 is in danger of collapse. That would be very unfortunate, because the likely alternative is another U.S. regime change war, including a high possibility to aerial confrontations with Russia over Syria.

***

I won’t say I “support” that agreement on Syria, which was soon embraced by the Syrian government, Turkey, Iran and the EU. I would support a mass uprising of the Syrian people towards the establishment of an independent, secular and socialist society that that empowers working people and promotes religious tolerance and gender equality. But that is not in the cards, any time soon.

No, I’d say I’m relieved by the agreement, just as I was relieved by the announcement of the Iran “nuclear deal” in April 2015, as a sort of respite in the succession of horrible breaking news stories that is our time. It is a step back from war.

Lenin declared that for a revolution to occur there must be a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary party. I don’t see any such party in Syria; instead, there is a welter of armed groups both foreign and domestic whose ideologies range from Baathism to Islamism and whose tactics range from the truly demonic to the merely vicious. Among these assorted forces the Syrian Arab Army and its allies have been most effective against the al-Nusra-aligned “Free Syrian Army” (in fact a myriad of militias without a central command, led—to the extent that they have any leadership—by the CIA).

Before the outbreak of the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2011, Syria was (like most countries in the region) an oppressive, undemocratic police state with what U.S. State Department officials hypocritically and selectively term a “poor human rights record.” (This record includes accepting “extraordinary renditions” dispatched by the Pentagon for torturous interrogation in Syria from 2001.) It was on the U.S. list of “terror sponsoring” nations due to its support for groups that Israel considers terrorists. Still the U.S. had enlisted Syria in the 1991 attack on Iraq, maintained diplomatic relations with Damascus, and welcomed Bashar al-Assad as a “reformer” after he succeeded his father in 2000. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, had referred to him as such as late as 2010.

But meanwhile a faction in the State Department (best represented by the hideous neocon John Bolton during the George W. Bush administration) has pressed incessantly for regime change in Syria. Members of this faction have referred to Syria as “low-hanging fruit”—that is, easy pick countries ripe for the plucking. They have for some years been restrained by more cautious officials; Hillary Clinton, who if not a neocon by a technical definition is surely their most solid “liberal interventionist” ally, famously wanted to arm the Syrian “opposition” in 2011 (or rather, wanted to arm it more than Washington did covertly and through third parties) while Obama rejected her plan. But Clinton has positively boasted of this policy difference, as if to promote her war mongering credentials and win more endorsements from the likes of Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.

The months leading up to the Lavrov-Kerry agreement saw the publication of a dissent memo signed by 51 State Department officials urging that the U.S. target Assad, not ISIL, in Syria; the publication of a slough of columns by liberal pundits condemning U.S. “silence” and “inaction” in Syria; and Clinton’s repeated statements during her campaign that she favors imposing a “no-fly zone” over Syria (which really means war and regime change a la Libya). Hillary stated that after winning the election she would make Syria her foreign policy priority.

The writing seemed to be appearing on the wall. (Recall the Bible story of the fall of Balshazzar, the Chaldean king, in which his fall to the Persian Empire—the U.S.A. of the day—was foretold by “the fingers of a human hand” that “appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lamp stand in the royal palace;” Daniel 5:5). It really looked like more insane war, this time in Syria.

I found a Boston Globe column by “the Internationalist” Thanassis Cambanis on July 3 especially troubling. Entitled “Syria nears the abyss, now’s the time to act” it contained the bald assertion: “Military escalation in Syria today us the best of bad options. Even dissidents in the US Department of State have gone public with their desire for it.” Even the dissidents? What a shameless misrepresentation! In fact, what was at stake in July, following advances by the Russia-backed Syrian Arab Army, was whether the U.S. and Russia would work together to jointly target forces both consider terrorist and to jointly mediate a solution to the Syrian political conflict as favored by Kerry, or the State Department neocons and allies would push for more war, producing more “creative chaos” in another Muslim country that bothers Israel. Cambanis openly advocated U.S. military intervention.

The column conveyed the impression that everyone, right and left, agrees that of course the U.S should act—which necessarily means (not that he mentioned it), attacking a sovereign state, violating the UN Charter (again), facing Russian and Chinese opposition in the UNSC (unlike in 2011), and provoking Russia which has been helping Syrian state forces against the Nusra-ridden opposition since September 2015. As the TV anchor airheads responded to the viral video of the 5-year-old shell-shocked Aleppo boy rhetorically asking viewers Why are we doing nothing? it did look like Hillary as next president would pull another “humanitarian intervention” like her husband pulled with her encouragement in Bosnia and Kosovo, and like she pulled in Libya. And given Russia’s investment in the survival of the regime, such intervention could produce very frightening results.

But from the first week of August the Russian Foreign Ministry began to optimistically predict a U.S.-Russia agreement to coordinate bombing raids on agreed-upon terrorist targets. The concessions entailed in this agreement (although the state RT news channel hasn’t emphasized them) are principally from the U.S., and reflect the new facts on the ground since the Russian intervention beginning last fall. The Syrian regime has maintained control of most of the population centers, commands considerable support, and Assad is not going to step down tomorrow. The U.S. agreed to put the Assad issue on the back burner while focusing on the ISIL terror issue.

Samantha Power’s explosion of indignation at the UN suggests that priorities may soon reverse again.

The Russians have argued for a year that the U.S. and Russia need to draw up a list of groups to include on the terror list, since Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies fund some of these. And when the Russians have bombed them the U.S. has protested. It was announced earlier this month that the two governments had agreed on who is who, that the U.S. would instruct its clients to end ties with the targeted groups, that the government forces and opposition forces deemed legitimate (i.e. non-terrorist) would both observe a cease-fire, while the Syrian Air Force would suspend bombing operations and talks towards a political solution would resume in Geneva.

This arrangement appears to have been another deft chess move by the Russians, who as you recall saved Obama’s ass when in 2013 he almost attacked Syria in response to (probably false) reports that the Syrian state had used chemical weapons against its people. Lavrov called up Kerry and told him Assad would turn over all Syrian chemical weapons to the UN if the U.S. would back off on the regime-change plan. Thus Obama was spared a legacy more hideous than that of his predecessor. He wound up merely presiding over repeated failed efforts to construct a proxy army in Syria by the CIA and Special Forces, which have produced multiple embarrassments since June 2015.

The obvious inability of the U.S. to produce regime change in Syria using reliable creatures and allies, global revulsion at U.S. aggression, the stubbornness of the regime and its forces with their level of popular support pushed Washington to respond positively to Moscow’s repeated requests for talks. Thus the agreement to co-sponsor a “transition” (of some sort, of unspecified duration) avoiding confrontation.

Overextended and overexposed, the U.S appeared to be backing down in Syria. That could only be good. But now what happens? The main groups comprising the “Free Syrian Army” agreed to the ceasefire. So did the Syrian government. The Russians and Americans jointly warned the “legitimate opposition” to steer clear of al-Nusra (now Fateh al-Sham) and ISIL lest they be bombed. The cease-fire up to Saturday had been a general success, although the delivery of humanitarian aid to Aleppo has been stymied, not by Russian or Syrian action, but by Turkish obstruction. The cease-fire has been rejected by the Saudi- and Turkish-backed Ahrar al-Sham militia, an ally of al-Qaeda considered “moderate” by the amoral thugs who make these designations in the State Department (and include it within what they call the “Free Syrian Army”), among others.

Meanwhile over the weekend a group called Ahrar al-Sharqiya (within the FSA) drove out a small contingent of U.S. Special Forces from the Syrian town of al-Rai. Videos show a Pentagon convoy retreating back towards the Turkish border accompanied by locals calling U.S. troops “pigs” and “crusaders” and chanting “Down with America,” “Get out you dogs,” and “They are coming to Syria to occupy it.”

“We don’t want a single American fighting in Syria alongside us,” declares one man. “”We are Muslims, we are not infidels. Get out!” Is there any wonder the U.S. has been unable to recruit a puppet Syrian army to achieve its regime change goals?

***

It seems to me the Syrian armed opposition (as opposed to the peaceful protesters of the “Arab Spring”) is a kind of rainbow coalition ranging from truly secular soldiers who defected from the army out of some vague interest in fighting for human rights to jihadis happy to behead or crucify pro-Assad children or enslave Yezidi women. Many members of the myriad groups will feel uncomfortable sitting on the sidelines while a new coalition of bombers targets their erstwhile comrades. It might not be possible to separate the “moderates” from the “radicals” if the former’s numbers are small.

U.S. policy has centered (as have State Department talking points certainly) on the premise that there’s a popular movement in Syria, based not on religious fundamentalism and intolerance but on liberal democratic values, that deserves U.S. support in its desire to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad. (It should be pointed out, should it not, that Washington was conspiring to overthrow the Syrian government, which it labels a sponsor of terrorism, for its own reasons long before the Arab Spring? And that the U.S. has a long history of using and co-opting mass movements to produce regime change?)

The degree of success of the ceasefire from this point will show us how willing the opposition (legitimated by inclusion on a joint U.S.-Russian list) is to break ties with men that they (or many among them at least) have seen as brothers in the struggle, and watch them eradicated or dispersed by this unexpected alliance of pro- and anti-Assad forces. They know this weakens them as a military player, and as negotiators in Geneva in the future. It will be very hard for them to insist on Assad’s immediate removal as a precondition of peace talks if and when the main threats to the Syrian state have been vitiated and the national army is steadily advancing against the “Free Syrian Army” militias.

And (even) if Hillary wins the presidency and decides to ratchet up tensions with Russia starting in Syria, it might be more difficult as Moscow strikes the world (including the governments of China and India) as by far the more responsible, rational actor in the Middle East. Power’s Saturday night live performance at the UN, conveying sheer arrogance and contempt for world opinion, will not sway anyone over to the Syrian regime-change cause. It just draws the lines more clearly and reveals the depth of bad faith.

How could the U.S. Air Force, with all the intelligence at its disposal, including Russian intelligence Moscow is eager to share, kill 62 likely conscript Syrian boys fighting ISIL imagining they’re striking the really bad guys? I doubt it was done deliberately (although I wouldn’t rule it out either, given what we know about the U.S. has used Islamist forces in Syria in the past). But it shows a basic indifference to Syrian life, a willingness to screw up and then when criticized angrily fume that there’s lots of death going on. So why pick on the U.S.?

Sort of like Samantha Power saying at the UN—as she always does—that given all the Palestinian attacks on Israelis, why pick on Israel when it (say) bombs the hell out of Gaza? Different standards apply, don’t you see?

So if Russia in its determination to prevent an Islamist takeover of Syria and maintain a viable secular Syrian state takes on the terrorists, staving off the U.S. drive to topple Assad regardless (as in Iraq or Libya) of any consequences; and if the U.S., having realized its need to cooperate to some extent with Russia (to avoid the profound embarrassment of its destruction of Iraq leading to the conquest of Syria by bin Laden clones), cooperates for a week but then fucks up big-time by bombing the key participant in the cease-fire and infuriating Russia; and then the agreement collapses—hey, isn’t it obvious?

It was all a Russian cynical hypocritical stunt, designed to embarrass the leaders of the Free World in their ongoing noble efforts to spread freedom in the Middle East.
 

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

Why Topple Syria's Shaking Chance at Peace?

Why US Had to Kill the Syrian Ceasefire

by Finian Cunningham - SCF

September 20, 2016

There are several sound reasons for concluding that the US-led air strike on the Syrian army base near Deir Ezzor last weekend was a deliberate act of murderous sabotage. One compelling reason is that the Pentagon and CIA knew they had to act in order to kill the ceasefire plan worked out by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The compulsion to wreck the already shaky truce was due to the unbearable exposure that the ceasefire plan was shedding on American systematic involvement in the terrorist proxy war on Syria.

Not only that, but the tentative ceasefire was also exposing the elements within the US government responsible for driving the war effort. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter – the head of the Pentagon – reportedly fought tooth and nail with Obama’s top diplomat John Kerry while the latter was trying to finalize the ceasefire plan with Russia’s Lavrov on the previous weekend of September 9 in Geneva.

While Sergey Lavrov and media reporters were reportedly kept waiting several hours for Kerry to finally emerge to sign off on the deal, the American foreign secretary was delayed by intense haggling in conference calls with Carter and other military chiefs back in Washington. Even days before Kerry’s diplomatic shuttle to Geneva, Carter was disparaging any prospective deal with Russia on a Syrian ceasefire.

It is well documented that both the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been running clandestine programs for arming and training anti-government militants in Syria since the outset of the war in March 2011. Officially, Washington claims to be only supporting «moderate, vetted opposition». However, on occasion, Western media reports allude to the deeper sinister connections between the US military and terrorist groups when it has been reported that American weaponry «accidentally» finds its way into the hands of extremist jihadist networks.

This pretense by the US – and its other NATO and Arab allies – of supporting «moderate rebels» and of having no involvement with recognized terror groups like Al Nusra and Daesh (ISIS) was being exposed by the latest ceasefire.

It is conceivable that the diplomatic corps of the Obama administration, including President Barack Obama and his foreign emissary John Kerry, may be benighted about the full extent of America’s dirty war in Syria and its systematic connections to the terrorist brigades. Perhaps, this Obama flank is gullible and venal enough to believe in Washington’s propaganda of a dichotomy between «moderate rebels» and «terrorists».

Thus, when Kerry announced the ceasefire plan with Lavrov in Geneva on September 9, the American diplomat’s calls for the US-backed «moderate rebels» to separate themselves from the terror groups may have been made out a naive notion that such a distinction might exist. How else could we explain such a futile public appeal?

Not so, though, the Pentagon and CIA. The covert warmongers in the Pentagon and at Langley know the vile truth all along. That is, that all the militant groups in Syria are integrated into a terrorist front, albeit with a plethora of different names and seeming differences in commitment to al Qaeda Wahhabi ideology. The masters of war know that Washington is a sponsor of this terrorist front, along with its NATO and Arab allies.

Anyone with an informed knowledge about the origins of Al Qaeda from CIA authorship in Afghanistan during the 1980s would not be surprised in the slightest by such a systematic American role in the Syrian conflict.

This perspective reasonably explains why Carter. and the US military generally, were making conspicuous objections to Kerry’s ceasefire plan with Russia. They knew the ceasefire was not only infeasible because of the systematic links between the US and the terror groups, but also that a failing ceasefire would furthermore expose these systematic connections, and create wider public awareness about American complicity in the Syrian war.

And, as it transpired, the apprehensions of the Pentagon and the CIA terrorist handlers were indeed founded. Within days of the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire being implemented on September 12, the following was undeniable: there was no separation of «moderates» and «terrorists». All militant groups were continuing to violate the nominal truce in the northern battleground city of Aleppo and in other locations across Syria.

The US and Western media then began venting about the Syrian «regime» and its Russian ally not delivering on giving humanitarian aid access to insurgent-held areas of eastern Aleppo. But that rhetorical gaming could not disguise the fact that the ceasefire was being breached by all the militant groups, which made it impossible for humanitarian aid convoys to enter Aleppo. Another factor played down by the Western media was that the Turkish government refused to coordinate with the Syrian authorities in the routing of UN truck convoys from the Turkish border into Aleppo. Given Turkey’s past documented involvement in using «humanitarian aid» as a cover for supplying weapons to insurgents, the vigilance demanded by Damascus is understandable.

The floundering ceasefire was thereby providing a withering world exposure of American terrorist complicity in Syria. The US lie about backing «moderates» as opposed to «terrorists» was being shown once and for all to be a cynical delusion. Evidently, US claims of supporting a «legitimate» opposition were seen for what they are – an utter sham. That leads to an even more damning conclusion that the US government is a sponsor of a terrorist proxy army in Syria for its criminal objective of regime change in that country. In theory at least, this disclosure warrants legal prosecution of Washington and its allies for the commission of war crimes against the state of Syria.

Given the grave stakes for American international standing that the ceasefire was endangering, it is reasonable to posit that a decision was taken by the Pentagon to sabotage. Hence, on September 17, American, British and Australian warplanes struck the Syrian Arab Army elite forces’ base near Deir Ezzor, in eastern Syria, killing over 60 personnel and wounding nearly 100 more.

The US, Britain and Australia have since claimed that it was an accident, and that their aircraft were intending to attack Daesh militants in the area. The US-led coalition claims it will carry out an investigation into the air strike. As with many times before, such as when the US devastated a hospital in Afghanistan’s Kunduz killing more than 30 people last year, we can expect a cover-up.

Briefly, a few factors for doubting the US coalition’s claim of an accident are: why did the Daesh militants reportedly launch an offensive operation on the Syrian army base less than 10 minutes after it was struck by F-16s and A-10s? That suggests coordination between the coalition air forces and the terrorists on the ground.

Secondly, it defies credibility that sophisticated air power and surveillance could mistake an army base and adjacent air field containing hundreds of troops for ragtag guerrilla units.

Thirdly, as Russian military sources point out, the US coalition had previously not been active in that area over the past two years of flying operations. The Syrian army was known to be recently waging an effective campaign against Daesh around Deir Ezzor. That suggests that the US air power was being deployed to defend the terrorist units, as the Syrian and Russian governments were quick to claim after the US-led air strike on Deir Ezzor. That is consistent with the broader analysis of why and how the entire Syrian war has been fomented by Washington for regime change.

But perhaps the most telling factor in concluding that the US and its allies carried out the massacre at Deir Ezzor deliberately is the foregoing argument that the Pentagon and CIA war planners knew that the flawed ceasefire was exposing their terror tentacles in Syria. And certainly, if any US-Russian joint anti-Daesh operations were to take place as envisaged by the Kerry-Lavrov plan, then the charade would definitely be blown apart.

In that case, only one thing had to be done as a matter of necessity. The unwieldy, discomfiting ceasefire had to be killed off. And so the Pentagon decided to make a «mistake» at Deir Ezzor – a «mistake» that has gutted any minimal trust between the US and Russia, unleashing recriminations and a surge in ceasefire violations.

The American and Western media respond in the usual servile way to aid the cover-up. The massacre at Deir Ezzor is being largely ignored as a news story, with much more prominence given to a relatively minor bombing incident in New York City on the same weekend in which no-one was killed. Or, when reported on, the US media in particular have automatically accepted without question that the air strike was an accident. CNN also dismissed out of hand Syrian government claims of it being proof of American collusion with terrorists as «absurd». A claim that would otherwise seem fairly logical.

The New York Times had this gloss to paint over the air strike:

«The United States’ accidental bombing of Syrian troops over the weekend has put it on the defensive, undercutting American efforts to reduce violence in the civil war and open paths for humanitarian relief».

The American so-called newspaper-of-record then adds:

«The United States had thought that if a deal to ease hostilities in Syria, struck by Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart in Geneva nine days ago, fell apart, it would reveal Russia’s duplicity in the war, in which Moscow has supported the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad».

How ironic. According to The New York Times, the Americans anticipated that the ceasefire deal would reveal «Russia’s duplicity in the war». Maybe, they calculated that Russia and Syria would not abide by the cessation, which they very much did during the first week, showing discipline and commitment to finding a peaceful settlement.

Far from revealing Russia’s «duplicity», it is Washington that emerged as the culprit, as the Pentagon and CIA had feared all along because of their deep complicity with the terrorist proxies.

Killing the Syrian ceasefire was like the necessity to extinguish a spotlight that had suddenly come on and begun exposing the putrefaction and bloodied hands in America’s dirty war.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Robert Hunziker, Richard Atwell, Janine Bandcroft September 21, 2016

This Week on GR

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

September 21, 2016

It's hard to believe, five and a half years have passed since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that rocked Fukushima prefecture. Harder to believe still is the International Olympics Committee buying prime minister Abe's assertion that Fukushima is ready to host events at the 2020 games. Or maybe it wasn't the IOC doing the buying?

That in recent years the Olympic Games, both Winter and Summer, has become less associated with excellence and the upper limits of human achievement than with deceit, base corruption, and unparalleled venality - where the purity of amateur athleticism, and ideal of international cooperation, if only on a playing field and for a short while, is entirely transmogrified by a corporatist, win-at-all-cost ethos - is news to no-one; hardly worth mentioning, but what is interesting is the accelerating sense of doom the five-ringed circus has come to forebode.

Listen. Hear.

Whether the tremendous environmental price of industrial hyper-development, as glimpsed through Beijing's choking smog shroud, the spectres of Sochi's ethnically cleansed original inhabitants, or Rio's erased favelas and emergent Zika contagion, it's almost as though those rings carry a curse. If that's so, nothing seen so far can compare with the horror potential currently lurking just below the surface of the next planned Olympics in Japan.

Robert Hunziker is an environmental journalist whose climate clarion calls appear in numerous journals and multiple languages around the World and across the internet. He's also appeared in a variety of media to talk about global climate change and has written extensively about the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Robert Hunziker in the first half.

And; now they've done it! Last week, Capital Regional District directors voted to fund a new sewage treatment plant to be located at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt. The controversial issue of how best to handle the region's effluent has livened council meetings, and the local press for years now, but is the CRD greenlighting of the McLouglin Point plant an end to the contentious project, or just another log on the fire?

Richard Atwell is Mayor of Saanich, the region's largest municipality, and represents the sole dissenting vote on the CRD board's "almost unanimous" sewage vote. It was Atwell's advocacy for an alternative sewage plan for the region that led him into politics, and a stunning political upset rookie win against the near two decades-old administration of incumbent mayor, Frank Leonard in 2014.

Richard Atwell and finding a lasting regional pollution solution in the second segment.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio host, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good things going on in and around our town and beyond in the coming week. But first, Robert Hunziker and the Fukushima disaster past, present, and forever.

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.

Oil Cowboys and Indian Resistance: Standing Rock Updates of an Old Battle from the New Front

Indians and Cowboys: The 2016 Version of an Old Story on a New Planet

by Chip Ward - TomDispatch

September 20, 2016

Cowboys and Indians are at it again.

Americans who don’t live in the West may think that the historic clash of Native Americans and pioneering settlers is long past because the Indians were, after all, defeated and now drive cars, watch television, and shop at Walmart. Not so. That classic American narrative is back big time, only the Indians are now the good guys and the cowboys -- well, their rightwing representatives, anyway -- are on the warpath, trying to grab 640 million acres of public lands that they can plunder as if it were yesteryear. Meanwhile, in the Dakotas, America’s Manifest Destiny, that historic push across the Great Plains to the Pacific (murdering and pillaging along the way), seems to be making a return trip to Sioux country in a form that could have planetary consequences.

Energy Transfer Partners is now building the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.7 billion oil slick of a project. It’s slated to go from the Bakken gas and oil fracking fields in northern North Dakota across 1,100 miles of the rest of the Dakotas and Iowa to a pipeline hub in Illinois. From there, the oil will head for refineries on the Gulf Coast and ultimately, as the emissions from fossil fuels, into the atmosphere to help create future summers so hot no one will forget them. Keep in mind that, according to global warming’s terrible new math, there’s enough carbon in those Bakken fields to roast the planet -- if, that is, the Sioux and tribes allied with them don’t stop the pipeline.

This time, in other words, if the cavalry does ride to the rescue, the heroes on horseback will be speaking Lakota. 

Tomgram: Chip Ward, Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes

In our new political world, the phrase "follow the money" has real meaning. Consider the $1,530,000 that, according to OpenSecrets.org, billionaire Kelcy Warren has personally given away in the 2016 election cycle to influence your vote (or someone’s vote anyway). One hundred percent of his dollars, just in case you were curious, have gone to “conservative” candidates, including key congressional Republicans. Warren is a Texas oil pipeline magnate who's wildly rich. According to the Wall Street Journal, “his 23,000-square-foot Dallas mansion, bought for $30 million in 2009, includes a bowling alley and a baseball diamond that features a scoreboard with ‘Warren’ as one of the teams.” As Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies wrote recently, “With business partner Ray Davis, co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Warren built Energy Transfer Equity into one of the nation's largest pipeline companies, which now owns about 71,000 miles of pipelines carrying natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined products, and crude oil. The company's holdings include Sunoco, Southern Union, and Regency Energy Partners.”

And as Dr. Seuss used to say, that is not all, oh no, that is not all! Don’t forget Energy Transfer Partners, part of the Energy Transfer Equity empire. It's building the embattled Dakota Access Pipeline, which is supposed to bring fracked oil from North Dakota to the Gulf Coast. Through a PAC, it has given at least $288,000 to a bevy of Republican House and Senate candidates. In other words, election 2016 will, among other things, be an oil spill of an election. And should Donald Trump, a man who gives “conflict of interest” new meaning, take the Oval Office by storm and so ride to the rescue of the oil and coal magnates of America with his drill-baby-drill environmental policies, that “investment” will matter even more.

In the meantime, Warren’s latest project -- that pipeline across the Dakotas -- has run smack into resistance of an unexpected kind as it approached the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Faced with the prospect of fracked oil in their drinking water, the tribe rallied other tribes (including tribes of environmentalists) and, as of this moment, has miraculously stopped the pipeline dead in its tracks. Think of what’s been going on as an Indian version of Occupy Wall Street. As environmentalist and TomDispatch regular Chip Ward points out today, Native Americans, long ago discarded as the dispossessed and forgotten losers of American culture, have returned with a vengeance to protect not just the last wild places on our continent but the rest of us as well. It’s one hell of a story and on an overheating planet that, as is increasingly said, needs to “keep it in the ground,” it’s not just a heartwarming tale, but a matter of life or death. Tom

Indians and Cowboys: The 2016 Version 

of an Old Story on a New  Planet

by Chip Ward

Last Stand at Standing Rock

If built as planned, the Dakota Access Pipeline will snake through the headwaters of the Missouri River, a life-giving source of fresh water for millions of people who live downstream, including Native Americans. It’s supposed to pass under that river just a few miles from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. Protestors point out that, eventually, the pipeline is likely to leak into that vital watershed and the contamination could prove catastrophic. The Army Corps of Engineers, which green-lighted the project’s design, and Energy Transfer Partners have continued to insist that there is no such risk -- even though, suspiciously enough, they decided to change the pipeline’s route to avoid the water supply of North Dakota’s capital, Bismark. As ever, tribal leaders point out, they were ignored rather than consulted in the planning stages, even though the project was to pass directly through their lands.

When the Keystone XL Pipeline, slated to bring especially carbon-heavy tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, was killed thanks to years of fierce environmental protests, the stakes were raised for the Dakota Access Pipeline. Keystone was a disaster for the energy industry. In its wake, opponents claim, the new project was fast-tracked without the usual environmental reviews so that construction could be completed before a Keystone-style opposition formed. Fast as they were, it turns out that they weren’t fast enough.

Keep in mind that such a project wasn’t exactly a first for the native peoples of the region. In the wake of their defeat and confinement to reservations in the nineteenth century, they lived through a profound transformation of their landscape. Settlers let cattle loose on meadows cleared of wolves, cougars, and bears. The rude stamp of progress followed: fences, roads, dams, mines, sawmills, railroads, power lines, towns, condos, resorts, and in the twenty-first century, vistas increasingly pockmarked with fracking’s drill rigs and service roads.

In the Dakota prairies, hundreds of species of grass and flowers were replaced by monocultures of soy and corn, while millions of cattle were substituted for herds of free-roaming bison. As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, the neighboring Sioux and Cheyenne lost 200,000 more acres of valuable reservation farmland to dams built without their permission. Entire villages had to relocate. The Dakota Access Pipeline is just the latest of these assaults and yet, in every way, it’s potentially more disastrous. As Lakota Chairman David Archambault puts it, “To poison water is to poison the substance of life.”

Slaughter, internment, and neglect were bad enough, say tribal leaders, but threatening the people’s life-giving water was the last straw. As a result, thousands of Native Americans drawn from 280 tribes across the country and even around the world are now camping out at the construction site where the Dakota Access Pipeline nears the tip of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Almost two million signatures have been gathered on a petition opposing the pipeline; dozens of environmental groups have signed on to the resistance; and tribes nationwide have expressed their solidarity.

On September 3rd, the private security guards hired by Energy Transfer Partners used pepper spray and dogs on those trying to block the pipeline. This eruption of violence halted work until U.S. District Judge James Boasberg could rule on the tribe’s request for an injunction to block construction while its case was heard in court. On September 9th, while conceding that “the United States’ relationship with Indians has been contentious and tragic,” he denied that request. Then, in a move described even by the Sioux as stunning, the Obama administration suddenly stepped between the protesters and the pipeline construction crews. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and even the Army Corps of Engineers called for a halt to the process until the permitting procedure could be reviewed.

Although putting an oil pipeline under a major river should have triggered an environmental review, the Corps chose not to do one. Now, it will take a second look. The administration also committed itself to finding better ways to include Native Americans in future land-use decisions.

Where this goes next is anyone’s guess. The construction halt could, of course, be lifted if the protesters were to disperse under a false sense of victory. The Sioux now plan to litigate vigorously against the pipeline. One prediction, however, is easy enough. The unity and purpose experienced by the people in that encampment will resonate powerfully for years to come. A movement has been born along the banks of the Missouri River.

Native Americans have played the crucial role in this campaign to “keep it in the ground,” just as they were leaders in the successful struggle to block the Keystone XL Pipeline, the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline that would have carried dirty crude across Canada to the Pacific, and the building of a massive coal export port on Canada’s Pacific coast. As Native American leader Winona LaDuke puts it, “For people with nothing else but land and a river, I would not bet against them.”

This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the cowboys have been engaged in a not-so-old-fashioned range war over who can best manage 640 million acres of public lands now owned collectively by the American people. Backed by the Koch brothers and their American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, legislators across the American West, where most of the public lands are located, are calling on the federal government to cede control and management of them to counties and states. This would include some of our most beloved national parks.

In Utah where I live, the Republican-dominated legislature has put forward the Public Lands Initiative (PLI). It’s the latest round in a 30-year feud pitting conservationists and businesses tied to tourism and recreation against ranchers and miners. At stake: whether to give the last publicly controlled wild places in the state formal wilderness status and federal protection or (though this isn’t often directly said) let private interests exploit the hell out of them. Every few years the Utah legislature’s “cowboy caucus” has pushed just such a “wilderness bill” filled with poison pills and potentially devastating loopholes that the local conservation community can’t abide.

Billed this time as a potential grand bargain to settle who controls public lands and how they can be used, the PLI has proven no different. It was, in fact, generated by local fears that President Obama might use his wide-ranging powers under the Antiquities Act to create a new national monument in the state as he left the Oval Office. This was exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1996, establishing the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument on 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah’s spectacular canyon country, already the home of five national parks.

That 1906 act, passed while Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, gives the president wide-ranging authority to create national monuments from public lands in order to protect significant natural, cultural, or scientific features. Since activities like drilling for oil and gas, mining, timber cutting, and grazing are barred or tightly restricted on such protected lands, Western politicians tend to regard them as a tool wielded by conservationists to suppress economic development.

Grave Robbing for Fun and Profit

Sure enough, the nightmare of the cowboys is being realized. A coalition of five tribes, all either presently in Utah or claiming ancestral lands there, is now pushing a bold proposal for just such a national monument -- a park co-managed by the five tribes and the National Park Service (which in itself would be a significant first for the Native American community). It would include 1.9 million acres of the ancestral grounds of the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain, and Ute Indian tribes and would be known as the Bears Ears after the area’s most famous landmark, twin buttes that are said to resemble a bear's ears.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewel recently toured the proposed monument and was amazed by what she saw, including spectacular cliff-house ruins, as well as paintings and rock carvings depicting clan signs, shamanic visions, and ghostly herds of bighorn sheep and elk. Bears Ears would possess more than 100,000 archaeological sites, including many of the oldest and most spectacular ruins in the United States. Members of the coalition of tribes regard them and the ground littered with their ancestors’ artifacts and bones as sacred.

A grassroots group, Utah Dine Bikeyah, did extensive groundwork collecting data and interviews to create cultural maps of the region. The extraordinary archaeological and historical record they built effectively made their case that the ancestors of the coalition tribes have relied on that landscape for hunting, gathering, and ceremonial activities for centuries. The Utah conservation community, which had mapped out its own plans for such a monument, stepped aside for the tribal proposal.

Protecting the Bears Ears is considered an urgent matter. A mere handful of rangers currently patrol thousands of square miles of rugged canyons where the looting of archaeological sites for fun and profit is a rural tradition. In remote outposts like Blanding, Utah, Indian grave robbing was considered an acceptable family pastime until agents from the FBI infiltrated the black market for artifacts and busted a prominent local family. Ute leader Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk expresses a motivating concern of the tribal leaders. “Without swift action,” she says, “we fear that the archaeological and cultural riches of the Bears Ears will suffer shameful, disgraceful dissolution and obliteration.”

Her fear is well founded. In recent years, for instance, rural county commissioners have led illegal all-terrain-vehicle rallies on a route through Recapture Canyon that Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rangers shut to motorized traffic because it crosses several key archaeological sites. State and county politicians were not content to challenge the BLM’s closure of that canyon in court. Instead, they openly promoted such rides to defy the feds. The last of these protests in 2014 did, in fact, significantly damage unprotected archeological sites. The indigenous community saw it as a shocking show of disrespect, like driving directly over cemetery graves. The well-armed vigilantes who rode through Recapture Canyon were led by Ryan Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy and the famous hothead of the Bundy clan.

You may remember the colorful Bundy boys. After all, they became the stars of the “cowboy rebellion” against federal regulation on public lands. In 2014, BLM rangers were dispatched to Nevada to remove Cliven Bundy’s cows from lands on which they had been grazing illegally for 20 years. The feds claimed that he owed the taxpayers a million bucks in unpaid grazing fees. He, on the other hand, insisted that such public lands belonged to the ranchers whose grandparents first grazed them. The rangers sent to enforce the law were met by hundreds of armed cowboys, many of whom took up sniper positions around them. Faced with such overwhelming firepower and the prospect of bloodshed, they withdrew and a range war was on.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

That retreat in Nevada undoubtedly emboldened the Bundy clan and their militia allies to seize Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. Well-armed, they occupied the visitor center at that bird refuge, leaning on every cowboy cliché in the book. They dressed the part with chaps, boots, buckles, and Stetson hats, carried American flags, and regularly posed with their horses for news photographers.

In the end, despite the Marlboro Man look and the Clint Eastwood demeanor, the Bundyites came across as the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. The “constitutional revolution” they wanted to spark by seizing Malheur fizzled amid a festival of cognitive dissonance and irony: men carrying assault rifles and threatening to use them proclaimed themselves “peaceful protesters” and, while declaring it off limits, attempted to “return” land to the American people -- land that they already owned. Federal agents eventually arrested all of the principal players in both the earlier Nevada standoff and the Malheur fiasco, except for one killed at a roadblock when he charged armed rangers and reached for his gun. Trials began on September 7th and are slated to last for months.

Given the open hostility of state and local politicians to the protection of sacred sites, as well as their willingness to break the law and offer tacit support for vigilantes like the Bundys, tribal leaders decided to take their concerns about protecting their ancestral grounds to the top. A delegation traveled to Washington and met with President Obama, while a media campaign was begun to persuade others to endorse the plan.

A broader coalition of tribes and the conservation community rallied to the idea, especially because it was the first time that Native American tribes had proposed such a monument. The vision of a park to honor sacred indigenous lands, shaped and directed by Native Americans themselves, caught the public imagination. The New York Times and Washington Post have both written editorials urging the president to create such a park and Utah polls show a solid majority of citizens in favor of it.

Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes

The genocidal policies that accompanied settlement across North America crested in Sioux country at the close of the nineteenth century. The survivors of the vanquished indigenous nations there were interned on reservations. Their children were taken from them and sent to boarding schools where their hair was cut, and their language and ceremonies banished. This was -- and was meant to be -- a form of cultural genocide. In the Bears Ears and Sioux country today, however, the culture of Native Americans endures. The descendants of those warriors who died defending their homeland and of those children taken from their families and their native cultures have proven remarkably resilient. They are once again defending their world and, as it happens, ours too, because even if you don’t share the Missouri River watershed, you live on a planet that is being rapidly transformed by the sort of toxic cargo that will fill a future Dakota Access Pipeline.

In the Hollywood Westerns of my youth, Indians were often one-dimensional villains who committed atrocities on good white folks trying to bring civilization to the frontier. As with so many notions I inherited in my youth, reality has turned out to be another story.

Certainly, before the onslaught of colonialism, the way indigenous people across the planet viewed what we now call our environment has come to seem like sanity itself. The land, as the Sioux and other tribal peoples saw it, was a living being saturated with spirits that humans should both acknowledge and respect.

The Indians whom the cowboys and bluecoats fought didn’t share European concepts of cash, property, profit, progress, and, most importantly, technology. Once upon a time, we had the guns and they had the bows and arrows, so we rolled over them. But here’s the wondrous thing: a story that seemed to have ended long ago turns out to be anything but over. Times have changed, and in the process the previous cast of characters has, it seems, swapped roles.

An economy hooked on carbon is threatening life on Earth. The waters of seas and oceans are warming fast; the weather is becoming unpredictable and harsh. Perhaps it’s time to finally listen to and learn from people who lived here sustainably for thousands of years. Respecting Sioux sovereignty and protecting the sacred sites of tribes in their own co-managed national monument could write the next chapter in our American story, the one in which the Indians finally get to be heroes and heroines fighting to protect our way of life as well as their own.

Chip Ward, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded HEAL Utah and wrote Canaries on the Rim and Hope’s Horizon. Returning from hiking trips in the Bears Ears, he long kept his knowledge of the ruins he visited to himself, fearing the vulnerability of ancient cliff houses and granaries to looters. He is hopeful that they will now get the protection they deserve.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 Chip Ward

An Enduring Terror: Colombia's Death Squad Heroes

Our Terrorists in Colombia: Death Squads as “Freedom Fighters”

by Dan Kovalik  - CounterPunch

September 20, 2016
 
A recent article in The New York Times entitled, “The Secret History of Colombia’s Paramilitaries & The U.S. War on Drugs,” contains useful clues as to the U.S.’s true views towards the Colombian death squads and their massive war crimes and human rights abuses. [1] In short, it reveals a high-level of tolerance of, and condonation by, U.S. policy-makers for the suffering of the Colombian people at the hands of our long-time friends and allies, the right-wing paramilitaries.

The gist of the NYT story is that, beginning in 2008, the U.S. has extradited “several dozen” top paramilitary leaders, thereby helping them to evade a transitional justice process which would have held them accountable for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. They have been brought to the U.S. where they have been tried for drug-related offenses only and given cushy sentences of 10 years in prison on average. And, even more incredibly, “for some, there is a special dividend at the end of their incarceration. Though wanted by Colombian authorities, two have won permission to stay in the United States, and their families have joined them. There are more seeking the same haven, and still others are expected to follow suit.”

That these paramilitaries – 40 in all that the NYT investigated — are being given such preferential treatment is shocking given the magnitude of their crimes. For example, paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, “who the government said ‘may well be one of the most prolific cocaine traffickers ever prosecuted in a United States District Court,’” has been found by Colombian courts to be “responsible for the death or disappearance of more than 1,000 people.” Yet, as a result of his cooperation with U.S. authorities Mr. Mancuso “will spend little more than 12 years behind bars in the U.S.”

Another paramilitary, the one the article focuses on most, is Hernan Giraldo Serna, and he committed “1800 serious human rights violations with over 4,000 victims . . . .” Mr. Giraldo was known as “The Drill” because of his penchant for raping young girls, some as young as 9 years old. Indeed, he has been “labeled . . . ‘the biggest sexual predator of paramilitarism.” While being prosecuted in the U.S. for drug-related crimes only, Mr. Giraldo too is being shielded by the U.S. from prosecution back in Colombia for his most atrocious crimes.

And so, what is going on here? The NYT gives a couple reasons for why the U.S. would protect such “designated terrorists responsible for massacres, forced disappearances and the displacement of entire villages,” and give them “relatively lenient treatment.”

First, it correctly explains that former President Alvaro Uribe, the most prominent and outspoken opponent of the peace deal between the Colombian government and the FARC guerillas, asked the U.S. to extradite these paramilitary leaders because, back home in Colombia, they had begun “confessing not only their war crimes but also their ties to his allies and relatives.” The NYT also writes off the U.S. treatment of these paramilitaries as the U.S. giving priority to its war on drugs “over Colombia’s efforts to confront crimes against humanity that had scarred a generation.”

Unfortunately, these explanations let the U.S. off the hook too easily, for they do not tell the whole story behind the U.S.’s relationship with Colombia and its death squads.

First of all, let’s start with former President Alvaro Uribe who the NYT states has a “’shared ideology’” with these paramilitaries and their leaders. This is of course true. But what does this say about the United States which gave billions of dollars of military assistance to Colombia when Uribe was President, all the while knowing that he had a long history of paramilitary ties and drug trafficking and that his military was working alongside the paramilitaries in carrying out abuses on a massive scale? And, how about the fact that Uribe was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush who considered Uribe his best friend in the region?

The answer is that the U.S. also shares an ideology with both Uribe and his paramilitary friends, and that it has wanted to prevent the paramilitaries from not only confessing to their links with Uribe, but also from confessing their links to the U.S. military, intelligence and corporations.

The NYT, while ultimately pulling its punches here, at least touches upon this issue when it states that “the paramilitaries, while opponents in the war on drugs, were technically on the same side as the Colombian and American governments in the civil war.” But “technically” is not le mot juste; rather, it is an imprecise and mushy term used to understate the true relationship of the paramilitaries with the U.S. The paramilitaries have not just been “technically” on the side of the U.S. and Colombian governments; rather, they have been objectively and subjectively on their side, and indeed an integral part of the U.S./Colombia counter-insurgency program in Colombia for decades.

Indeed, the paramilitaries were the invention of the United States back in 1962, even before the FARC itself was formed (in 1964) and before the civil war there began in earnest. Thus, as Noam Chomsky explains:

“The president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, writes that it is “poverty and insufficient land reform” that “have made Colombia one of the most tragic countries of Latin America,” though as elsewhere, “violence has been exacerbated by external factors,” primarily the initiatives of the Kennedy Administration, which “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades,” ushering in “what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine,” which is not concerned with “defense against an external enemy” but rather “the internal enemy.” The new “strategy of the death squads” accords the military “the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists.”

As part of its strategy of converting the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security” — meaning war against the domestic population — Kennedy dispatched a military mission to Colombia in 1962 headed by Special Forces General William Yarborough. He proposed “reforms” to enable the security forces to “as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents” — the “communist extremists” to whom Vasquez Carrizosa alludes. [2]

While the paramilitaries have been ever-evolving, taking different forms over the years and receiving legal imprimatur at some times and not at others, they have remained until this day, carrying out the same essential functions enumerated by Chomsky above while giving plausible deniability to both the U.S. and Colombian governments.

The potential confession of paramilitary leaders to their links with the U.S. and Colombia, as well as to U.S. multinationals, was as much of a threat to the U.S. as there confessions were to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. And that is why the U.S. extradited the top paramilitary leaders and treated them with kid gloves.

As just one example, paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso told investigators nearly 10 years ago that it was not only Chiquita that provided financial support to the paramilitaries (this is already known because Chiquita pled guilty to such conduct and received a small, $25 million fine for doing so), but also companies like Del Monte and Dole. [3] However, given that Mancuso was never put on trial (the NYT notes that none of the paramilitary leaders have) but instead was given a light sentence based upon a plea deal, such statements have never gone on the court record, were never pursued by authorities and have largely been forgotten.

That there is more to the story than the NYT is telling us is revealed by the inherent contradictions of its story. Thus, the NYT at one point states that “[t]his is a crime story tangled up in geopolitics. Colombia is the United States’ closest ally and largest aid recipient in the region, and the partnership has focused on combating narcotics, guerillas and terrorism.”

Of course, it is quite true that the U.S. and Colombia have partnered together to fight both the guerillas as well as peaceful activists for social change. As just one example, Colombian President Santos just admitted and apologized for the Colombian government’s role in aiding and abetting the paramilitaries in murdering thousands of candidates and activists of the left-wing Patriotic Union party (UP) back in the 1980’s [4] – repression which scuttled the peace agreement with the FARC reached back then.

However, the other two listed goals of the partnership appear to be mere pretexts.

Let’s start with the claim, unchallenged in this story, that the U.S./Colombia partnership has been focused on combating terrorism. How could this possibly be given that the U.S. has in fact extradited the worst “designated terrorists” from Colombia – indeed, the NYT at one point acknowledges in the story that the paramilitaries have been the worst human rights violators in Colombia — and ensured that they will never answer for their acts of terrorism?

And, as for combating drugs, the NYT also points out elsewhere in the same story what many of us have been pointing out for years – that in spite of the U.S. dumping around $10 billion in military aid into Colombia since 2000, “[c]oca cultivation has been soaring in Colombia, with a significant increase over the last couple of years in acreage dedicated to drug crops.”

This leads us back to the more plausible claim that the U.S./Colombia partnership has in fact been all about instigating and supporting terror – that is, terror against the Colombian population in order to destroy any movement (whether armed or non-violent) for social change. That is why both the Colombian and U.S. governments are content to hold the paramilitaries harmless for their war crimes, for, after all, it was their job to commit such crimes and it was a job well-done. Indeed, the NYT quotes U.S. lawyers, a retired U.S. prosecutor and the U.S. Judge who gave a light sentence to vicious paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar-Pupo (alias, “Jorge 40”) for the proposition that these paramilitaries are viewed as “freedom fighters” whose role in the Colombian civil war is actually a “mitigating rather than aggravating factor in their cases.”

The paramilitaries in Colombia, and the role of the U.S. and Colombian governments in supporting them, should not be viewed as merely an academic matter for the history books. The paramilitaries are still very much alive in Colombia, and are still carrying out massive abuses such as the targeted killings of social leaders; mass displacements of peasants, Afro-Colombians and indigenous; disappearances; and torture. [5] And, the U.S. and Colombian governments, in order to continue to be able to shield themselves from any blame for the conduct of these paramilitaries, now simply deny that they exist at all. It is therefore more critical than ever that the truth about these paramilitaries, and their high-level backers in both the U.S. and Colombia, is exposed and their misdeeds denounced and punished.


Notes.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/world/americas/colombia-cocaine-human-rights.html?_r=0

[2] http://colombiasupport.net/archive/200004/znet-chomsky-0424.html

[3] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/19/336518/-

[4] http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/colombia-santos-apology-death-squads-1.3765044

[5] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr23/4814/2016/en/
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Daniel Kovalik lives in Pittsburgh and teaches International Human Rights Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

More articles by:Dan Kovalik

A Planet of a Different Colour: Saying Farewell to White

Loss of Planet Reflectivity an Impending Catastrophe

by Robert Hunziker - Pacific Free Press

September 19, 2016

The planet’s air conditioning system is on the blink, working intermittently, losing its glinting, lustrous white reflectiveness, as it turns deep blue, absorbing 90% of sunlight rather than reflecting it back into outer space. The repercussions of Arctic sea ice loss are immense.

“Our planet has actually changed colour,” Peter Wadhams, A Farewell to Ice (Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books, 2016). Loss of Arctic sea ice has such an overriding powerful impact on the planet, it warrants this 206-page book.

“It is Man’s first major achievement in reshaping the face of his planet, and it is of course an unintended achievement, with dubious and possibly catastrophic consequences to follow.” (p.3)

“There is no period in Earth history that we know about where the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2 is as great as it is today,” Professor Peter Wadhams brings fresh insight to the dynamics behind the interrelationship of Arctic sea ice and climate change/global warming. The conclusions by this preeminent ice scientist are sobering.

According to Professor Wadhams (Cambridge), who is the UK’s most experienced sea ice scientist (50 trips under or on Arctic ice): “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are already so high that when their warming potential is realized in a few decades, the resulting temperature rise will be catastrophic,” referencing the latency effect of CO2’s maddening dance with global warming.

Fascinatingly, when analyzing Earth’s climatic history, the Yucatan Peninsula asteroid event in Mexico 65 million years ago pales in certain respects to today’s anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change impact. That asteroid brought in its wake a global disaster, darkness and death as dinosaurs became extinct during a long period of excessive atmospheric sulfuric particles derived from vaporization of sulfate rocks, initially bringing cooling, followed by a long period of excessive CO2 derived from vaporized carbonate rocks, bringing warming.

During the course of the long aftermath of that catastrophe 4.5 gigatons of carbon released into the atmosphere. Over the years, CO2 levels rose at a rate of 0.2 ppm per year. Whereas, in shocking contrast to that rate of CO2, the current rate is off-the-charts at 3.0 ppm per year with humans trouncing by a factor of 15 times the aftermath of an asteroid slamming into Earth. Notably, as for CO2 emissions, mortals are currently one-upping a gigantic asteroid, hands down!

Ergo, with anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions kicking up CO2 faster than ever before in scientific history at 15 times the cataclysmic after-affects of an asteroid collision, what are the consequences?

For starters, the planet’s atmospheric carbon budget required to stay steadfast and calm, meaning the Goldilocks’ formula “not too hot, not too cold,” is filling up fairly quickly. Furthermore, as boldly stated by Professor Wadhams:

“We have destroyed our planet’s life support system by mindless development and misuse of technology. A mindful development of technology, first for geoengineering, then for carbon removal, is now necessary to save us. It is the most serious and important activity in which the human race can now be involved, and it must begin immediately.”

Still, many engineers and scientists have reservations about whether a “big fix,” like geo-engineering and carbon removal, will really work. And as of today, there is no practicable, workable, affordable “big fix” ready to go, only lots of chatter and plenty of theory.

A Farewell to Ice introduces the public to anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change that already borders on exceeding safe limits, thereby risking a collapse of the ecosystem. It’s when the ole clarion bells should be ringing loud and clear in the public square, warning of impending danger, or as the professor says, “a call to arms” (chapter 14).

Chapter 9 of the book, “Arctic Methane, a Catastrophe in the Making,” is far and away most alarming. His opening paragraph is a worthy synopsis:

“The potentially catastrophic feedback effect that I am about to describe arises from the combination of two phenomena: sea ice retreat, and the continued existence of offshore permafrost in shallow Arctic seas” (p.121). Albeit, this is but one of several feedback curses that comes along with loss of Arctic sea ice.

In a typical cautious mode, scientists do not use the word “catastrophe” lightly. Yes, it is easy to brush off characterizations like “catastrophe” as one of many, maybe too many, threats about the global warming/climate change juggernaut. Though, it is not a theory or a model that Professor Wadhams references. Bona fide scientists in the field are actually observing methane plumes bubbling up to surface in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf and as of recently, elsewhere in the Arctic as well. Field scientists see and measure the methane bubbles. No modeling necessary. The wide-open blue sea without its icy cover makes it easy for ships to traverse the water and much, much easier for heat from sunlight to penetrate ancient methane hydrates, i.e., methane trapped in a crystal structure of water aka: “fire ice.”

For example, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia expedition of the East Siberian Arctic Seas said he had never before witnessed the scale and force of methane being released:

“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing… Over a relatively small area we found more than 100 but over a wider area there should be thousands… We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometer or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal,” Vast Methane ‘Plumes’ Seen in Arctic Ocean as Sea Ice Retreats, Independent, Dec. 13, 2011. 

And, that was 5-6 years ago! Talk about sleepless nights! Batten down the hatches.

It should be noted that the Arctic methane issue is not a major concern of mainstream scientists, e.g., the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not address it as seriously as warranted, not even close. But, as explained by Professor Wadhams, the IPCC misses the crucial facts behind hard data and observation. Maybe their models are “not with it!”

As explained in Wadhams’ book, methane plumes are observable, and as he is fond of saying, he opts for direct personal observation over “modeling,” which is however a useful scientific tool. As far as that goes, here’s why scientific models probably overlook the obvious:

“We must remember --- many scientists, alas, forget – that it is only since 2005 that substantial summer open water has existed on Arctic shelves, so we are in an entirely new situation with a new melt phenomenon taking place” (p. 123).

Frustratingly, science is deliberately slow to reach conclusions, per Wadhams:

“There is a natural caution which causes scientists not to assign a new phenomenon to a definite cause-and-effect chain until it has recurred sufficiently often to make such an association statistically valid” (pgs. 136-37).

It’s the shallowness of the water in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf that’s the devil in disguise because shallow water columns allow the frozen methane hydrates, frozen in place ever since the last Ice Age, to come to surface rather than oxidize within the sea. Thereby releasing greenhouse gas CH4 into the atmosphere. In Wadhams’ words:

“The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is exceptionally shallow – more than 75 per cent of its entire area of 2.1 million square kilometres is shallower than 40 metres – so most of the methane gas avoids oxidation in the water column and is released into the atmosphere” (p. 123).

Accordingly, atmospheric concentrations of methane above sea surface have already been measured at 4 times normal atmospheric levels. That’s a lot! So, it’s happening right now, meaning the worst possible case has already started. The gravity of the issue is that CH4 is much, much more powerful, at least 20 times, per molecule than is CO2 at accelerating global warming.

Therein lies the heart of the problem; too much CH4 risks an acceleration of global warming, catching humankind with its pants down, and maybe something as horrendous as sudden runaway global warming at some indeterminate time in the future; that’s when earthlings congregate amongst swaying palm trees in Antarctica and the far reaches of northern/southern latitudes as “crowd control” takes precedence.

Accordingly, Dr. Wadhams’ summation of the methane threat:

“It is important that we recognize the threat that this poses to the climate, a threat which is immediate even though it has been belittled by the IPCC in its Fifth Assessment.” (p. 133)

Professor Wadhams’ research and theses do not necessarily agree with mainstream science; nevertheless, he stands by his work because he believes in old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground field research rather than “modeling,” which certainly has an important role to play in scientific research, but not when field studies and observable data show otherwise.

Peter Wadhams’ A Farwell to Ice is well written in a tone and style that reads easily for both a lay and professional audience. It is radical and informative and straightforward and scary. Those particulars combine as a tome that should prompt a fast and hard clanging of the ole clarion bells in the pubic square because that’s what alerts the townspeople to approaching danger.

In spooky fashion, Wadhams’ A Call to Arms, chapter 14 states: “… existing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is sufficient to cause unacceptable amounts of warming in the future. We no longer have a ‘carbon budget’ that we can burn through before feeling worried that we have caused massive climate change. We have burned through the budget and are causing the change now.” (p. 192)

That disturbingly provocative statement, which by all measures, should be highly controversial within the scientific community, is footnoted: Wasdell, D. (2015), Facing the Harsh Realities of Now, www.apollo-gaia.org. (P.219)

Enough said!

Postscript: “In the Polar Regions today, we are seeing what may be early signs of man-induced climate change.” Margaret Thatcher (a trained chemist) speaking to UN General Assembly Nov. 8, 1989. She ascribed her statement to “a British Scientist on board a ship in the Antarctic Ocean.” (P. 197) His name: Peter Wadhams.

Margaret Thatcher founded the Hadley Centre for Climate Research and Prediction at the UK Meteorological Office in 1990, and she pressed for international action on the issue.

Robert Hunziker
Los Angeles

Russia's UN Representative Responds to US Syria Attacks

Vitaly Churkin Response On Obama Attack In Syria

via ICH / UN Security Council

September 18, 2016

Russia representative to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin response on Obama actions in Syria.

"I've never seen such an extraordinary display over American heavy-handedness as we're witnessing today"

Russia Seeks Security Council Emergency Meeting Following American Attack on Syria

Russia Calls For “Emergency” UN Security Council Meeting Regarding US Bombing Of Syrian Military

by Brandon Turbeville - Activist Post

September 18, 2016

After the United States launched an attack against Syrian forces in Deir al-Zour early on Saturday morning, Russia is now calling for an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council and an immediate explanation from the United States.

The Americans claim that the bombing was merely a mistake; however, it is hard to make that claim when the two sides were in battle with one another at the time of the airstrikes. In addition, the United States did not inform the Russians of the attack plan and thus Russia was not able to inform the U.S. that the Syrian forces were in that location. As a result, many may legitimately wonder whether or not the U.S. did not contact the Russians in order to maintain plausible deniability.

“If previously we had suspicions that Al-Nusra Front is protected this way, now, after today’s airstrikes on the Syrian army we come to a really terrifying conclusion for the entire world: The White House is defending IS [Islamic State, formerly ISIS/ISIL],” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in an interview with Rossiya 24.

“We demand a full and detailed explanation from Washington. That explanation must be given at the UN Security Council,” Zakharova added.

“[US coalition] strikes have cleared the way for ISIS fighters to take over Deir ez-Zor city now,” said Syrian Minister of Defense Fahd Jassem al-Freij.

“It is only because of Russian Air Force support [that] the offensive of the terrorist group was stopped. We request that the air support for the Syrian armed forces be continued by the Russian air force in order to destroy the terrorists.”

The Russian military confirmed that it did indeed engage in airstrikes against ISIS forces immediately after learning about the U.S. “mistake.”

We are now witnessing a situation in which the world is teetering on the edge of a tragic confrontation between two nuclear powers. Within the span of one hour, the United States and Russia have bombed the same area and opposing forces.

We call on the United States to end its foolish and immoral proxy war on Syria and to immediately cease bombing and military efforts against the Syrian government before it is too late for all of us.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 850 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

This article may be freely shared in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

Trumps Dumps Catching Up: "The Blacks" Aren't Buying

Trumping bigotry: Don-The-Con's Record of Discriminatory Practices Trumps His Outreach to Blacks

by Linn Washington Jr. - This Can't Be Happening

September 18, 2016

The other Big Story from the recent press conference Donald Trump held at his new luxury hotel in Washington DC was not related to what Trump said about the bigoted ‘Birther’ issue that Trump exploited for years to burnish his brand as a political player.

That other Big Story, missed by the news media, was what Trump did not say about his professed outreach to African-Americans, those Trump labels “The Blacks.”

Protestor outside of Trump Tower in
New York City with item to handle
dung spread by The Donald. 
Photo - Linn B. Washington

During that press conference where Trump blithely backed away from the ‘Birther’ claim that President Obama was not born in America, Trump did not use that occasion to brag about the benefits black construction companies and black workers obtained from his $200-million luxury hotel project.

A Trump announcement that detailed how black businesses and workers benefited from his luxury hotel project could have boosted Trump’s recent campaign claims that he cares about “The Blacks.”

However, billionaire businessman Trump’s historic record of failing to do business with black businesses blocked even this serial false-claim-maker from falsely proclaiming blacks received benefits from the renovation project that produced Trump’s latest luxury hotel.

The fact that the Washington, DC area is home to large numbers of qualified black construction companies and black construction workers did not prompt news media inquiries about the paucity of blacks involved with Trump’s multi-million dollar hotel project typified news media failings on issues involving race/racism.

Trump’s alleged outreach to African-Americans is yet another example of the charade that parades as Trump’s presidential campaign. This charade gains traction by shallow coverage in mainstream news media. The same news media that has dutifully extended coverage to Trump’s belated claims that he dislikes high unemployment rates among minorities did not question the literal Black-Out on Trump’s hotel project.

Proof of this charade was provided – again – when Trump brought his “I Love My Blacks” tour through Philadelphia recently where that tour radiated the Republican Party’s signature faux outreach to black voters exhibited during presidential election campaigns.

Although Trump proclaimed that the handful of handpicked blacks he met with at that private meeting in Philadelphia were “Black Leaders” none are widely recognized leaders in Philadelphia’s black community. Further, that private meeting held in a black owned facility on the edge of the predominately black North Philadelphia excluded that city’s black owned news media.

The refusal of Trump to speak with black owned news media in Philadelphia and elsewhere speaks volumes about the sincerity of Trump’s outreach to black voters observed respected Philadelphia political reporter Vincent Thompson, the News Director for WURD900AM, the only African-American owned talk radio station in Pennsylvania.

“If you are appealing to the black community but not speaking to black media, that is a problem,” Thompson said.

Trump, during that cloistered meeting in Philadelphia, displayed his trademark insensitivity to and/or ignorance of issues of import in black communities when he called for more controversial Stop-&-Frisk policing. That police tactic has received vigorous rejection in black communities nationwide due in to its race-based targeting inclusive of repugnant dragnet harassment of law-abiding blacks.

Philadelphia’s Stop-&-Frisk policing, now under federal court ordered reform, has documented racially disproportionate impact. Statistics from the first half of 2015, for example, found blacks were nearly 70 percent of the stops and nearly 80 percent of the searches although blacks comprise just 44 percent of the city’s population.

Philadelphia Police Department statistics contradict Trump’s stated support for increased Stop-&-Frisks: to seize guns to reduce violence. Guns were recovered in just one quarter of one percent of the tens of thousands of stops conducted annually by Philadelphia police.

The pattern in Trump’s post-RNC-convention outreach to black voters through his private, photo-op meetings, in contrast to the large public rallies conducted with whites, accelerates a seminal accusation. Many argue that the actual audience of Trump’s outreach to blacks is really whites voters. Trump’s calculated appearance of outreach to blacks assuages whites outside of Trump’s base that Trump is not the bigot that his political campaign rhetoric and business career record reveal.

Republican candidate Trump has stridently criticized the anti-police brutality Black Lives Matter movement with racially inflammatory rhetoric. Trump’s BLM criticism occurred when black communities nationwide rallied in near unity against abusive policing from false arrests to fatal shootings. Trump has embraced Law-&-Order as a campaign theme, seizing the racially coded phrase that the repulsive Richard Nixon used to rally white voters during his successful White House run in 1968.

Black Lives Matter member outside a Trump 

campaign appearance in Philadelphia. LBW Photo

Trump’s contention that Democrats are those most responsible for the unemployment, poor housing and poverty that ravage too many African-Americans carry a peculiar stench wafting from the dismal track record of this candidate to utilize his billionaire stature to address any of America’s festering societal ills.

For example, no public evidence exists that Trump ever used his frequently proclaimed clout as a jobs generator to specifically address unemployment among blacks. The unemployment rate among blacks in Washington, DC is the highest in America according to government statistics released last year ironically during the wake of a ruckus arising from media reports that documented the employment of undocumented immigrants on Trump’s DC hotel project.

Mitigating Trump’s duplicitous outreach to blacks is the fact that it is a page from the playbook the Republican Party uses every four years.

During presidential elections throughout past decades the Republican Party has proclaimed that it wants support from blacks…the same voters who endure near daily onslaughts from Republican legislators nationwide who gleefully pass repressive laws like erecting restrictions on voting rights and shielding abusive police from accountability.