Cruise Control: The New Gunboat Diplomacy in Syria

Cruise Missile Attacks: A New Step in Washington’s Long Class War on Syria

by Stephen Gowans  - What's Left

April 8, 2017

Washington has added a new dimension to its long war on Syria: direct military intervention.

Since the mid 1950s, the United States has tried to purge Damascus of an Arab nationalist leadership which has zealously guarded Syria’s freedom from US domination and follows an Arab socialist development path which is at odds with the global free enterprise project advanced by Washington on behalf of its Wall Street patron.

Until now, Washington has refrained from directly attacking Syrian forces, though it has intervened manu militari in Syria to hold the Islamic State in check so that the militant group remains strong enough to weaken Syrian forces but not so strong that it captures the Syrian state. [1]

This limited Islamic State-directed US intervention in Syria has involved both airstrikes and an estimated 1,000 boots on the ground. [2] However, the principal modus operandi of Washington’s long war on Syria has been war waged through proxies, both Israel, which annexed Syria’s Golan Heights and has carried out innumerable small-scale attacks since, and Islamist guerrillas, who, from the 1960s, have waged a jihad against what they view as Syria’s heretical government. [3]

The United States contemplated direct military intervention in Syria in 2003, as a follow-up to its invasion of neighbouring Iraq, but found that its resources were strained by efforts to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq and that other means of regime change would have to be pursued. [4]

In place of a muscular boots on the ground strategy, Washington imposed an economic blockade in 2003, which, by 2012, had caused Syria’s economy to buckle, according to the New York Times. [5]

By the spring of 2012, sanctions-induced financial haemorrhaging had “forced Syrian officials to stop providing education, health care and other essential services in some parts of the country.” [6]

By 2016, “US and EU economic sanctions on Syria” were “causing huge suffering among ordinary Syrians and preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid, according to a leaked UN internal report.” [7] The report revealed that aid agencies were unable to obtain drugs and equipment for hospitals because sanctions prevented foreign firms from conducting commerce with Syria.

Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote that “the US and EU sanctions” resembled the Iraqi sanctions regime, and were “an economic siege on Syria”—a siege it might be recalled that led to the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, according to the UN, a death toll greater than that produced by all the weapons of mass destruction in history. [8] Cockburn surmised that the Syrian siege was killing numberless people through illness and malnutrition. [9]

On top of its merciless campaign of economic warfare, Washington enlisted the Arab nationalists’ longstanding foe, the Muslim Brotherhood, to provoke a civil revolt in Syria. The revolt, inaugurated by Islamist-instigated riots in Daraa in mid-March 2011, soon mushroomed into an all-out campaign of guerrilla warfare, fueled by Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, Jordanian and US money. U.S. and Western intelligence services trained thousands of guerrillas in Jordan and Qatar. [10]

In 2012, the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the insurgency was Islamist, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic State’s forerunner, and that Western powers and the kings, emirs and sultans who preside tyrannically over Gulf oil states, were the backers. According to the intelligence agency, Turkey’s Reccep Tayyip Erdogan, a man infatuated with dreams of becoming a neo-Ottoman sultan, and himself an Islamist, was also a major backer. [11]

But until Washington ordered cruise missiles to rain down on Shayrat Airfield near Homs on April 6, the United States had relied on proxies and siege to bring about regime change in a country which Moshe Ma’oz had termed “a focus of Arab nationalistic struggle against an American regional presence and interests.” [12]

The Shayrat Airfield attack was presented for world opinion as a response to Syrian forces allegedly gassing civilians at Khan Shaykum on 4 April. The allegations were levelled by blatantly partisan sources.

One source was the White Helmets, which bills itself as a neutral civil defense outfit, but is in reality funded by governments entangled with Washington in its long war on Syria. It is enmeshed, too, or at the very least, cooperates with, al-Qaeda. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a one-person outfit based in the UK which overtly supports the guerrillas, was another source.

Significantly, no one even remotely impartial has investigated the allegations to determine whether (a) chemical agents were indeed used, (b) whether they were used deliberately, and (c) who used them? The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons refuses to weigh in on any of these questions until an investigation has been completed, the only sound course of action.

All the same, Washington and its lickspittle allies, exuding colonial arrogance, immediately pronounced in Olympian fashion that the accusations were beyond dispute, an outcome which was hardly surprising given that the Western champions of neo-colonialism share with the White Helmets and Syrian Observatory for Human Rights a common goal of overthrowing Syria’s Arab nationalist government. Washington can always be counted on to publicize any calumny against its Syrian enemy, no matter how untenable.

Despite assurances that a gas attack had been undertaken at Khan Shaykum on 4 April, and that Syrian forces were responsible, the United States, France and Britain, if they, were not themselves implicated, could have had no certain knowledge of this, since these matters take weeks of on the ground investigation to offer sound judgment, and even then the question of attribution—that is, who did it?—is often unanswerable. The reality, of course, is that Western powers have no idea whether the accusation is valid but seized the opportunity to claim it was to establish a pretext for military action in furtherance of the United States’ long war on Syria.

Mainstream journalists also rushed to judgement in advance of even the barest resemblance of an impartial investigation, their assessments aligning with the assessments, sans evidence, of their own governments.

On top of being predicated on an untested allegation by unquestionably partial sources, the US attack was illegal—and on two levels: internationally, because it was undertaken without UN Security Council assent, and domestically, because it represented an unauthorized act of war. The act of war was ordered unilaterally by the White House, notwithstanding the fact that declarations of war are the exclusive remit of Congress, which did not confer—indeed, was not asked for—its authorization.

But the point is academic

The United Sates has already amassed a sizable record of crimes in Syria, and an even more sizeable record in the larger Arab world, not the least of which crimes is the intrusion of US military personnel on Syrian soil, an act of war itself.

As a military colossus, the United States is at liberty to violate international law with impunity, since there exists no higher authority capable of enforcing international law through the threat of a force greater than that which the Pentagon itself can wield. Expecting the United States to yield to international law is naïve and therefore any discussion of whether this or that act of the United States violates international law is a discussion of no consequence.

The White House is able to violate US law without punishment by eliciting at least the passive acceptance of the US public and its representatives for its wars of aggression; accordingly, with the Congress and the US public on side, there’s no one to hold the White House to account before the US constitution.

White House efforts to secure the acquiescence of the public, if not its jingoistic support, are facilitated by the measures the Pentagon takes to limit US troop casualties, so that no matter how devastating US military operations are for the victims, the US public is not inconvenienced or traumatized psychologically by an accumulation of US combat casualties.

Equally helpful from the point of view of mobilizing support for war in violation of US law is the demonization of Washington’s targets, an activity in which the news media, which accept the pronouncements of US officials on foreign policy at face value, engage with enthusiasm. Witness how easily the Bush administration and Blair government were able to dupe the Western mainstream media into believing (or if they weren’t duped, to ardently propagate) fairy tales about Arab nationalist Iraq concealing chemical and biological weapons.

Moreover, witness how easily Washington shapes the intellectual environment. It has persuaded the world that chemical and biological weapons (which can kill tens or at most hundreds of people under ideal conditions, and many fewer under typical ones) belong to the same class of weapons as nuclear arms (which can kill tens or hundreds of thousands.) This false conflation of minor weapons with authentic weapons of mass destruction has proved useful in portraying such military non-threats as Arab nationalist Iraq under Saddam as signal threats whose elimination is imperative for the safety of the world.

Demonizing targets—often by accusing them of having, using, or intending to use either falsely classified or genuine weapons of mass destruction—creates, from the vantage point of the public, a moral obligation for the United States to act. The Leftists who have an insatiable appetite for moral lapidation and florid language about “murderous regimes,” brutal dictators,” and “moral disgrace,” in connection with the leaders of former colonies which the United States is endeavouring to re-colonize, contribute to the mobilization of consent for war and to an international class struggle from above.

Left collaborators see only the completely powerless as occupying morally tenable ground. Any state which pursues emancipatory goals is denounced as brutal, murderous, or a moral disgrace and arguments are mounted that the state’s emancipatory goals are a sham. Only people without formal power, by this way of thinking, engage in class struggle against oppression and exploitation, while those who exercise formal authority are viewed as agents of oppression by definition.

This view is too simple

The Italian philosopher Domenic Losurdo argues for a tripartite model of class struggle linked to the division of labour on (1) an international level, (2) a national level and (3) within the household. [13]

Class struggle on an international level corresponds to the exploitation of the people of one nation by another nation; for example, by the relegation of one country by another to a subordinate role in the international division of labour.

Class struggle on a national level corresponds to the exploitation of labour by the owners of capital within a country, while class struggle within the household pertains to the exploitation of female domestic labour by males.

Class struggle so conceived can be coterminous as when, for example, the people in one country are exploited en masse as a source of labour by the owners of capital of a second.

Washington’s long—and now expanded—war on Syria, is a class struggle on an international level. It is a class struggle in which the United States, as champion of the profit-making interests of corporate America and the class of billionaires who lead it, seeks to permanently relegate Syrians to a subordinate role in the international division of labour, one in which they will be limited to low wage jobs in extractive and basic manufacturing industries, if not subsistence farming.

Washington aspires to sweep away the Arab socialist impediments to the free enterprise, free trade, and free market capitalist nirvana it seeks to establish on a global scale, where US corporations have space to dominate the commanding heights of every country’s economy, and local labour is relegated to low-wage roles, and permanent penury.

Former chief economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz put it this way:

Colonialism left a mixed legacy in the developing world—but one clear result was the view among people there that they had been cruelly exploited…the political independence that came to scores of colonies after World War II did not put an end to economic colonialism. In some regions…the exploitation—the extraction of natural resources and the rape of the environment all in return for a pittance—was obvious. Elsewhere it was more subtle. In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism…a notion idealized by Americans as ‘free and unfettered market.’ … Free-market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new forms of exploitation. [14]

Arab nationalists in Iraq and Libya waged a class war on an international scale, aiming to free the people of their countries from the disadvantages that colonialism had visited upon them and to end their continued economic exploitation by the West. Their struggle, while successful for a time, ultimately ended in failure, as the United States and its allies, through demonization, siege and warfare, overcame these struggles from below. These victories by Washington were victories in favor of exploitation.

The class struggle fought by Arab nationalists in Syria continues, despite the concerted efforts of Washington, its neo-colonial allies, its Arab satraps, apartheid Israel, and Leftist collaborators, to crush it. Concurrently, the Islamic Republic of Iran is conducting its own class struggle against Western efforts of re-colonization, though on a grander scale, with the larger Islamic world as the object of liberation.

The struggle between Iran and the United States is a class struggle on a colossal scale, with Washington seeking to open Iran while keeping the remainder of the Muslim world open to continued exploitation by US financial, industrial, commercial and petrochemical concerns, and Tehran leading a project to build “resistance” economies that prioritize the uplift of the people who live and work in the Muslim world over shareholders of US corporations. This struggle is intertwined with the class struggle at which Syria is the center.

Washington’s expanded war on Syria is, then, an expanded class war from above against an emancipatory struggle from below. Washington’s war-making relies on multiple weapons, from siege, to proxy war, to direct military intervention, and no less to information warfare aimed at demonizing Syria’s Arab nationalists.

Steve Gowans is an Ottawa-based writer and political analyst who blogs at: What's Left

Notes

1. See my Washington’s Long War on Syria. Baraka Books. 2017, chapter 4.
2. Thomas Walkom, “Putting Donald Trump’s strike against Syria in context,” The Toronto Star, April 7, 2017.
3. Washington’s Long War, chapter 2.
4. Ibid.
5. Nada Bakri, “Sanctions pose growing threat to Syria’s Assad”, The York Times, October 10, 2011.
6. Joby Warrick and Alice Fordham, “Syria running out of cash as sanctions take toll, but Assad avoids economic pain,” The Washington Post, April 24, 2012.
7. Patrick Cockburn, “US and EU sanctions are ruining ordinary Syrians’ lives, yet Bashar al-Assad hangs on to power,” The Independent, October 7, 2016.
8. John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999.
9. 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996; Patrick Cockburn, “US and EU sanctions are ruining ordinary Syrians’ lives, yet Bashar al-Assad hangs on to power,” The Independent, October 7, 2016.
10. Washington’s Long War, chapters 2, 3 and 4.
11. http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf
12. Moshe Ma’oz, Bruce Cumings, Ervand Abrahamian and Moshe Ma’oz, Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth about North Korea, Iran, and Syria, The New Press, 2004, p .207.
13. Domenico Losurdo. Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History. Palgrave MacMillan. 2006.
14. Quoted in Graham E. Fuller. A World without Islam. Back Bay Books. 2010. p. 262.

Kaput Afghanistan: Broken After All These Occupations

Afghanistan: “Small” Western Propaganda Lies, Huge Impact

by Andre Vltchek - Dissident Voice

April 8th, 2017 

Ask anyone on the streets of Kabul about the revolutions that in recent years transformed huge parts of Latin America, and the chances are you’ll encounter a blank stare.

Perhaps mentioning Cuba could evoke at least some recognition, but definitely not Venezuela, Ecuador or Bolivia.

I know because I tried on several occasions, and I failed.

Ask in the marvelous historic city of Herat, with its huge minarets and Italian military contingent, about Western imperialism, or about NATO and its murderous campaigns all over the world, and chances are that your question won’t even be understood.

“Chances are that those Afghan people who can speak English or other Western languages, are now actually working for the Westerners; either for their military, or for their ‘defense’ contractors… or for the embassies, the United Nations, or perhaps some NGO”, explained an Asian reporter who is based in Afghanistan for more than two decades. “These people are not going to rock the boat, dwelling on crimes committed by the West, here and all over the world.”

That appears to be the case.

After more than 15 years of brutal Western occupation, Afghanistan appears to be thoroughly ruined. Not only in terms of its infrastructure and standards of living, and not only when it comes to all basic indicators like life expectancy (15th lowest in the world, according to the WHO, 2015) or education: all those things I expected.

But perhaps even more significantly, the country is destroyed morally and intellectually.

The only resistance the West is facing here comes from extremist groups and movements such as the Taliban and Daesh (ISIS). All intellectual and artistic struggles against the occupation have been destroyed, contained, bought, or frightened into near absolute silence.

In fact, the occupation’ is not even called ‘occupation’, anymore. Pragmatic, opportunistic definitions are increasingly taking over those once mainstream narratives. As I was informed by a wealthy family on an outing in the Panjshir Valley:

We are fully dependent on the presence of NATO troops in our country. Only foreigners are offering us well-paid and stable jobs. If they leave, we’d have to follow them; to emigrate to the United States or Europe.

This is far from the once proud and brave Afghanistan, which managed to defeat British invaders, after that delivering a mortal blow to the Soviet Union.

While in the country, I tried to investigate and to analyze; how on earth did Afghanistan end up on its knees? What force, what strategy was applied to break what appeared to be shatterproof?

It was clear that the West has managed to unleash and to uphold a very complex and tremendously successful indoctrination campaign, enslaving the nation by applying various ‘weapons’, which it has used in all corners of the world.

One of those ‘weapons’ is, of course, ‘education’. For instance, the American University of Kabul is literally regurgitating thousands of young sons and daughters of the elites, who are set on staying, after the proper dose of indoctrination and colorful diplomas, permanently loyal to the West. The nation’s curriculum, I was told, has been defined during long meetings at the US Embassy and at the offices of the World Bank.

There is virtually an absolute control of information and media. As in all countries occupied by the West, as well as in all client states, the so-called social media plays a vital role, setting tendencies and directing discussion patterns.

There is rigorous grooming of oppressive local governments, military and police, the institutions that are then always ready to suppress any open criticism of the Western occupation, or even the word ‘occupation’ itself.

Then, naturally, as in all neo-colonies, there is that deadly interdependency between the elites and the West.

An academic Prof Jawid Amin from the Academy of Social Sciences of Afghanistan explained to me, bitterly, during our short encounter in Kabul:

We don’t have anyone openly critical of the US or the West here, because it is simply not allowed by the government. I personally don’t like the Americans, but I can’t tell you anything else… Even I work for the government. My brother and sister, as well as other relatives, are living in the United States. About critical arts: nothing could be exhibited here without permission from the government and since Karzai, the government is controlled by the West…

*****

To discredit the former Soviet Union as well as the present-day Russia, and to smear China by all available indoctrination means, is one of the main goals of the Western propagandists and their local lackeys.

It is because, if unchecked, both China and Russia could steal the hearts and minds of the local people.

China’s impressive plan for virtually all Central Asian countries, called OBOR (“One Belt One Road”), was never allowed to be fully presented for discussion to the local population. It is particularly absurd, even grotesque, considering that China considers Afghanistan to be an extremely important potential partner in the region.

The OBOR puts great accent on supporting local cultures, on true independence of the countries of Central Asia and beyond, and on the massive development of infrastructure, from telecommunication super highways, to real highways, railroads and airports, as well as ‘social infrastructure’, which would include schools, hospitals, public housing and sport facilities.

Implementing OBOR would create millions of new jobs for the local people, something crucial in a country like Afghanistan, where even in the capital Kabul (according to many calculations) the unemployment rate has reached about 50%, and over 80% in many provincial capitals and the countryside.

For the West, smearing China is essential. It has been building huge hospital wings, instead of watchtowers, which means it has been providing the wrong example to Afghan people, raising wrong expectations.

The best example of the toxic anti-Chinese propaganda has been Mes Aynak. This ancient archeological site contains many priceless cultural treasures, some over 5,000 years old.

It is also located in the area of arguably the greatest copper deposits in the region.

Several years ago, a Chinese state-owned company (MCC) signed a MOU with the Afghan government. The company paid for the mining rights, but until now has not extracted one single kilogram of copper, despite pressure from the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, which has been pushing for an immediate start to the excavation work. Why? Because the Chinese government gave orders to MCC to wait, so the archeological treasures could be safely excavated and preserved for the sake of Afghanistan and the world.

I was explained by various international experts based in Kabul, that the Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the Preliminary Session of the UN General Conference in New York, in November 2016, that his idea of OBOR is, in fact, a New Silk Road, and that it is based on the economic cooperation and on the promotion of the cultural preservation in the countries of the former Silk Road. Again, Afghanistan is clearly one of the most significant countries.

The Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum has for years been locked in a dispute with the hopelessly inept and disorganized (according to several of my sources who prefer to remain anonymous) Ministry of Information and Culture.

Corruption also appears to be a serious issue.

Until now, MCC has absolutely not done anything, except for some preliminary geological surveys conducted in 2008 and 2009. The company is losing a substantial amount of money, annually, but the orders from Beijing are clear: first the preservation of cultural treasures, and only then, economic interests.

A similar approach would, of course, be unthinkable from any Western mining company, many of which are murdering and displacing the local population, in such places as Papua or South America. That is why the professional propaganda has to be applied, and all good intentions dragged through dirt. This sort of ideological warfare is actually one of the mightiest weapons of Western imperialism, implemented in virtually all corners of the globe.

In March 2017, the Head of the Culture Unit of UNESCO, Mr. Masanori Nagaoka, told me clearly and frankly:

“The Chinese company (MCC) has not yet commenced any copper exploitation activity at the site … It is because they respect the Afghan government’s wish to preserve the cultural artifacts of Mes Aynak.”

UNESCO is now deeply involved in the process of saving all the valuable finds of the site.

I was shown several up to date photographs, proving that no work has yet begun, and that at Mes Aynak, absolutely no damage has been done to the cultural heritage of Afghanistan.

However, the more evidence there is proving that nothing sinister has happened, the more toxic the eruption of propaganda against China and its presence in Afghanistan, virtually all coming from Western and West-sponsored outlets. Entire ‘documentary films’ have been produced and broadcast, recounting the non-existent ‘crimes’ which have been, or ‘could soon be’, committed by China against Afghan culture.

The most notorious is a documentary film by Brent E. Huffman, which was broadcast, among others, by Al-Jazeera. To quote from its own site, the film is addressing “A race against time to save a 5,000-year-old archaeological site in Afghanistan threatened by a Chinese state-owned copper mine.”

Ms. Hiromi Yasui, a Kyodo News reporter who is based in Afghanistan since 1993, confirmed what I already heard from several independent sources:

At Mes Aynak, there is no digging whatsoever… The Ministry of Mines and Petroleum wants work to commence soon. Therefore, there is a clash between them and the Ministry of Information and Culture. Lots of money disappeared, too… there is corruption… Regarding China, whenever there is a slightest chance that it could be doing something wrong, an anti-Chinese propaganda gets immediately activated.

Now several legendary Chinese institutions of learning, including Renmin University and Northwest University in Xi’an, are getting involved, trying to help with the preservation of the site. This news is, however, hardly ever heard in Afghanistan and abroad.

“The propaganda against China or Soviet Union now Russia, is of course nothing new”, explained a renowned Afghan intellectual, Dr. Omara Khan Masoudi, who used to be, among many other things, the former head of the National Museum:

During the Cold War, the propaganda was truly extreme. Even such publications like ‘Le Monde’; they were writing that some of our greatest treasures were looted and siphoned to Moscow… We knew it was a lie, because we had hidden the treasures ourselves, in the premises of the Presidential Palace, and in the Ministries. And what was our answer to the Western propaganda? We created a small, one-day exhibition of our Afghan treasures, just 50-60 of the most important pieces, displayed for 2-3 hours, demonstrating that they are all still on the territory of our country.

*****

While other countries are trying to build and preserve, the United States and the west could hardly show any coherent strategy for how to help the country they have been persistently ruining for decades and centuries. Despite the huge sums of money spent, almost nothing tangible was constructed here since 2001. That is, if the monstrous air force bases like the one at Bagram do not particularly impress you, or those bizarrely tall concrete walls that could be seen everywhere, or the endless surveillance cameras, towers and drones, as well as the military centers at every corner, stuffed with grotesquely overpaid foreign ‘contractors’.

Andrew J. Bacevich wrote for the New York Times on 14 March 2017, trying to define (in the “Opinion” column) the chaos and perplexity of the ‘longest American war’:

Despite appropriating over three-quarters of a trillion dollars on Afghanistan since 2001, Afghan security forces continue to be plagued by the problem of inflated rolls, with local commanders pocketing American-supplied funds to pay for nonexistent soldiers…

Large-scale corruption persists, with Afghanistan third from the bottom in international rankings… Adjusted for inflation, American spending to reconstruct Afghanistan now exceeds the total expended to rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan; yet to have any hope of surviving, the Afghan government will for the foreseeable future remain almost completely dependent on outside support.

And things are getting worse. Although the United States has invested $70 billion in rebuilding Afghan security forces, only 63 percent of the country’s districts are under government control, with significant territory lost to the Taliban over the past year. Though the United States has spent $8.5 billion to battle narcotics in Afghanistan, opium production there has reached an all-time high.

After this, Andrew J. Bacevich makes a dramatic conclusion:

For this, over the past 15 years, nearly 2,400 American soldiers have died, and 20,000 more have been wounded.

Oh, that bad, terrible Afghanistan – money guzzling, ungrateful and corrupt monster-state!

Of course, anyone who has recently visited the country, and who is in possession of at least some ability of thinking objectively, must be rolling on the floor, dying from laughter, after consuming such reports.

Where is ‘over a three-quarters of a trillion dollars’ visible ‘on the ground’? Ask the internally displaced people who are pouring into Kabul from all corners of the country, escaping misery, joblessness and fighting. They have nothing; absolutely nothing!

Let’s do some simple math: three quarters of a trillion is 750 billion. Dollars. Afghanistan has almost 32 million inhabitants (estimate, 2014). Divide 750 billion by 32 million and you get 23,437 dollars and 50 cents, per capita per 15 years. Even a tiny Afghan family of two adults and two children could then count on $93,750! Which would be $6,250 per basic tiny family unit per year, for 15 consecutive years. Lucky, lucky country, Afghanistan!

Just a reminder, that with those mountains of money, since 2001, the United States didn’t build a single mile of a railroad, no large public hospital or a public housing block.

So where did the money go? Could it be possible that the West itself has wasted it on its greatest addiction – a perpetual conflict and chaos? Could it be that the Afghan people are simply being used, even sacrificed – that their nation is sinking into deeper and deeper poverty, their culture changing or disappearing altogether, their hope for recovery and better life now almost gone – just so that this tremendous ‘recycling action’ of three-quarters of a trillion dollars could go on and on?

The Afghanistan war, ‘the longest in the US history’, is yet another ‘secret war’ of the Empire. Everyone knows that it exists, but no one seems to understand what it is all about.

In the meantime, 2,400 American ‘boys and girls’ have already died. If anything, this seems to be the only preoccupation in the West.

I’m wondering how many Afghans have died? How many millions have been forced to become refugees, how many millions are now internally displaced? Do they matter; do they count? Nobody seems to talk about them. How many lives were lost, really; how many were broken, thoroughly ruined?

In the meantime, many Western reports and documentary films are more preoccupied with such issues as a Chinese mining company and the worries that ‘one day it may actually start digging’.


First published by NEO

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are the revolutionary novel Aurora and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: Exposing Lies Of The Empire and Fighting Against Western Imperialism. View his other books here. Watch his Rwanda Gambit, a documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. He continues to work around the world and can be reached through his website and Twitter.

Read other articles by Andre.

Exporting Hate: Canadian JDL Chapter Member Charged with D.C. Hate Crime

Toronto's Jewish Defense League is a Far Right Group with Powerful Friends

by Yves Engler - Rabble.ca

April 5, 2017

We live in strange and dangerous times. While Toronto thugs export their violence and extremist ideology to the U.S.A. and the Jewish Defence League works with neo-fascists to bash Muslims, the dominant Canadian media has placed a cone of silence over these disturbing developments. At the recent American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington, D.C., a mob organized by JDL Toronto attacked counter-protesters.
Image: Facebook/T'ruah

In the worst incident, a 55-year-old Palestinian-American teacher was punched, kicked and hit with flagpoles. Bruised across his body, Kamal Nayfeh needed 18 stitches around his eye.

Thornhill JDL member Yosef Steynovitz was charged with assault causing significant injury and a hate crime.

Despite video of JDL thugs assaulting protesters in the U.S. capital, no Canadian media except the Canadian Jewish News reported on the confrontation. Also ignored are JDL's efforts to parlay Donald Trump's xenophobia into a bigger presence down south. In January, JDL Toronto organized a meeting in the Big Apple. "We are trying to get something off the ground in New York. We have to resurrect it in other states in the U.S., in L.A., Chicago, Florida, Philadelphia, I get emails from all over the U.S., we have to get this thing going," JDL-Toronto leader Meir Weinstein told the New York meeting, according to a Ha'aretz story headlined "Drawing Inspiration From Trump, Far-right Kahane Movement Seeks U.S. Revival."

The U.S. JDL was labelled "a right-wing terrorist group" by the FBI in 2001. Its members were convicted of a series of acts of terror, including the killing of the regional director of the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee and a plot to assassinate a congressman. A member of the JDL's sister organization in Israel killed 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre two decades ago.

Most people involved in Palestinian solidarity activism in Toronto have experienced JDL thuggery. During Israel's brutal assault on Gaza in 2014, I was shoved, had my bike damaged and lock stolen by members of the JDL at a protest on the grounds of the Ontario legislature. The following day at Queen's Park, a JDL member who worked with children at the Schwartz/Reisman Jewish Community Centre and was on a B'nai Brith softball team, Isaac Ezra Nacson, knocked a pro-Palestinian counter demonstrator to the ground and kicked him in the face. Half an hour after Nacson's attack, a JDL member walked some 50 metres around a barricade to where I was standing alone chanting at the pro-war rally and spat on me three times. Both incidents were caught on tape by major media outlets, but little was done.

In 2014 the JDL sparked a violent confrontation at Palestine House in Mississauga. Three years earlier the RCMP launched an investigation against a number of JDL members who were thought to be plotting to bomb Palestine House.

While they've organized with the far right English Defence League and Pegida UK in the past, JDL has deepened its coordination with other local white supremacists in recent months. They've joined the Soldiers of Odin at Nathan Phillips Square on a couple of occasions to protest M-103, the anti-Islamophobia parliamentary motion.

Despite its racism and violence, the JDL finds support from much of the organized Jewish community and other powerful institutions. JDL has cosponsored demonstrations with B'nai B'rith and provided "security" for pro-Israel rallies. Canadian Jewish News coverage of the group has often been sympathetic, including publishing video of a speech by Meir Weinstein. Two years ago Barbara Kay penned a National Post column titled "In defence of the Jewish Defence League" and six weeks ago the Toronto Sun published an article headlined "Jewish Defence League alleges hate crime." In 2014 former Prime Minister Stephen Harper even included a JDL member in his official delegation when he traveled to Israel.

Tacitly accepted or actively supported by much of the establishment, the JDL is probably the most powerful far right group in Toronto. The group is now using its influence to build neo-fascist alliances in the city and export its toxic politics south of the border.

People should be concerned.

US Threatens More International Criminality at UN

US threatens more strikes after cruise missiles hit Syria

by Bill Van Auken - WSWS

8 April 2017

The day after US warships rained some 60 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian government airbase, US officials made it clear that this unilateral and criminal attack against an oppressed former colonial country is merely the first shot in what is to be an escalating and widening campaign of American military aggression. The governor of Syria’s central Homs province reported Friday that the missiles killed at least 15 people, including nine civilians.
Bolivian Ambassador Sacha Llorenti began 
the debate with a blistering denunciation

Four of the dead were children. Many more civilians were injured by two of the missiles, which struck nearby villages. Six of the dead were Syrian personnel at the al-Shairat airbase.

The missile strike was the first time that Washington has carried out a direct military attack against Syrian government forces since the US and its regional allies orchestrated a war for regime change utilizing Al Qaeda-linked Islamist “rebels” as its proxy ground troops. The attack on the airbase is a direct intervention in that war on the side of the Al Qaeda elements.

Russian Prime Minister Medvedev warned on Friday that the immensely reckless action had brought Washington to “the verge of a military clash” with nuclear-armed Russia, which had an air unit at the base struck by American missiles.

Washington seized on an alleged incident Tuesday involving chemical weapons in the village of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province as the pretext for Thursday night’s attack. Syria has denied any use of such weapons, and Washington and its allies have presented no evidence to support their allegations in relation to the incident, which has all the earmarks of a provocation staged by the CIA and its Islamist proxies.

The Russian government and others have pointed out the obvious fact that the elaborate attack carried out Thursday night from two US destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean had to have been planned well before the alleged incident even happened. The event was staged, with Al Qaeda-linked and US-funded “media activists” conveniently on hand to film it, in order to provide Washington with the propaganda pretext it required for its aggression.

In a heated exchange in the United Nations Security Council Friday, US Ambassador Nikki Haley brushed aside denunciations by other diplomats that the unilateral US action was a gross violation of the UN Charter and international law, instead provocatively insisting that US imperialism is prepared to the do the same thing again and far more.

“The United States took a very measured step last night,” Haley said.

“We are prepared to do more, but we hope that will not be necessary.”

Knowing full well that the US attack was imminent, Haley, who is acting as the council’s rotating president for the month of April, postponed a vote on a compromise resolution calling for an objective investigation into the alleged chemical attack that was being drafted Thursday by the 10 nonpermanent members of the Security Council.

Washington has no interest in such a probe, which would almost certainly reveal that the source of any chemical weapons incident was not the government of President Bashar al-Assad, but rather the Al Qaeda elements that control that area of Idlib Province. There is also no doubt that the US strike provides the Islamist elements in Syria with every motivation for staging more chemical weapons incidents to provide the pretext for a spiraling escalation of US military aggression.

The UN Security Council session was convened at the request of Bolivia, Russia and Syria. Bolivian Ambassador Sacha Llorenti began the debate with a blistering denunciation of the US attack, declaring that the US officials “believe that they are investigators, they are attorneys, judges and they are the executioners.”

He called the US strike “an extremely serious violation of international law,” while stressing that this was “not the first time.” Llorenti held up a picture of then Secretary of State Colin Powell delivering his February 5, 2003 speech to the same UN council insisting that Washington had irrefutable proof of nonexistent Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” the notorious pretext for the US invasion barely a month later.

This war based upon lies, the Bolivian envoy added, resulted in “a million deaths” and “a series of atrocities” throughout the Middle East.

Llorenti denounced Washington for its “double standard,” invoking “human rights,” “democracy” and “multilateralism” only when it serves its own strategic interests. He recalled the series of military coups orchestrated by the CIA in Latin America and the Pentagon’s training of Latin American security forces in the art of torture.

Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Vladimir Safronkov, similarly condemned the US bombardment as a “flagrant violation of international law,” warning that the “consequences for regional and international stability can be extremely serious.”

Safronkov charged that Washington had acted deliberately to derail any “independent and unbiased investigation” into the alleged April 4 incident in Khan Sheikhoun. “You were afraid of it,” he said, “as its results might wreck your anti-regime paradigm.”

The Russian ambassador ridiculed the performance given earlier by US Ambassador Haley in which she held up the photographs of two Syrian children and demanded, “How many more children have to die before Russia cares?”

“I will not stage a cynical show and hold up photographs,” he said, but asked why there was no such concern for the children of Mosul, where a single US bombing raid killed over 300 civilians, most of them women and children, last month. Thousands more have been killed and injured in US airstrikes carried out in both Iraq and Syria.

Syria’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Munzer Munzer, denounced the US attack as a “barbaric, flagrant act of aggression,” and a continuation of US support to Al Qaeda-linked “terrorists,” who he noted had repeatedly stockpiled and used chemical weapons in attacks inside Syria with the support of their patrons, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.

All of the representatives of the Western European powers voiced support for the US missile strike in terms that suggested that their governments may carry out their own military actions as part of an imperialist scramble for control of the oil-rich Middle East. Italy’s Ambassador Sebastiano Cardi was perhaps the most explicit along these lines, stressing his country’s “major and direct interests in the Mediterranean.”

The prospect for the US military action provoking a wider and potentially catastrophic world war was made clear on Friday, with Moscow’s announcement that it was suspending a 2015 memorandum of understanding reached with the Pentagon on “deconfliction,” which set up lines of communication between US and Russian military units operating in Syria to avoid clashes between the two countries’ warplanes. Russia also indicated that it would increase its missile defense systems around bases that it jointly uses with the Syrian military.

Meanwhile, senior Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters Friday that they were investigating possible Russian “complicity” in the alleged chemical attack, indicating that the US military command is looking to ratchet up the confrontation with Moscow.

In Washington, Trump’s sudden reversal of his previous policy eschewing conflict with the Assad government in Syria in favor of a US military intervention centered on combating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) drew vocal bipartisan support, particularly from Democrats who had previously demonized the administration for its alleged ties with Russia.

To the extent that leading Democrats qualified their enthusiasm for the act of US military aggression, it was to demand that Trump spell out a proposal for its continuation and escalation.

The US Senate’s Democratic Minority Leader Charles Schumer praised the attack on Syria. “Making sure that Assad knows that when he commits such despicable atrocities he will pay a price is the right thing to do.” He added, however,

“It is now incumbent on the Trump administration to come up with a coherent strategy and consult with Congress.”

Similarly, Senator Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged Trump, “Give us your Syria strategy, and come to us if you’re using force, because you need to get authorization.” He added that while Thursday’s attack could be a one-off attack, “circumstances could change.”

“I think it was the right thing to do,” Senator Amy Klobuchar (Democrat, Minnesota) said of the missile strikes Friday.

“Going forward I think we should have an Authorization for Use of Military Force, if in fact there are going to be additional actions taken.”

Unstated in the Democrats’ call for a new authorization to use of military force (AUMF) is the fact that both the Trump and the Obama administrations had previously invoked the 2001 authorization of military action against those responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Now, however, the US is intervening militarily in a civil war that the CIA itself orchestrated, providing military support to Al Qaeda, which claimed responsibility for 9/11. The Syrian government reported that in the immediate aftermath of the US missile strike, both the Al Nusra Front and ISIS launched new attacks.

The Democrats’ rallying around Trump in support of US military aggression in Syria makes clear that the party’s opposition to the new administration was based not on its reactionary attacks on democratic rights, immigrants and the social conditions of the broad mass of the American people, but rather the threat that it would pull back from the longstanding plans of the US military and intelligence apparatus to escalate aggression and provocation against not only Syria, but its principal ally, Russia.

With the military consolidating its control over the Trump administration’s foreign policy through figures like Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a recently retired Marine general, and H.R. McMaster, the active duty Army general who has taken over as national security adviser, the Democrats are rallying around Trump as the titular “commander-in-chief.”

No Free Dinner: The Cost of Christy

Vancouver Leader's Dinner April 10, 2017

by BC Liberal Party

The US Navy's Total War (on Alaska)

War in the Gulf (No, Not That Gulf!): The U.S. Navy's Anti-Environmental Broadside in the Gulf of Alaska

by Dahr Jamail - TomDispatch

April 9, 2017

[This essay is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.]

It’s war in the Gulf and the U.S. Navy is on hand to protect us. No, not that Gulf! I’m talking about the Gulf of Alaska and it’s actually mock war -- if, that is, you don’t happen to be a fin whale or a wild salmon.

This May, the Navy will again sail its warships into the Gulf of Alaska. There, they will engage in military maneuvers and possibly drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in activities that stand a significant chance of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for future battles elsewhere on the planet. Think of it as a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities.

And call it irony or call it American life in 2017, but the U.S. military's Alaska Command has branded Emily Stolarcyk "a troublemaker" for insistently pointing this out. In a state where such a phrase is the equivalent of an obscenity, some have bluntly called her "anti-military." The office of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski has termed her a "rabble-rouser," while a Kodiak Assembly member labeled some of what she’s been saying about the Navy "just silly."

Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, Alaska in the Crosshairs

In 2003, not long after the American invasion, Dahr Jamail, a youthful freelance journalist from Alaska, headed to Iraq. He wasn’t then a reporter for anyone or, put another way, he was at that moment perhaps the most “unembedded” reporter on the face of the Earth. In the years to come, he would visit that occupied country numerous times, traveling alone (except for a translator) and remarkably fearlessly, as he reported vividly for a variety of publications, including (begining in 2005) this website, on the kinds of devastation the U.S. military brought to Iraq. He would write a book, Beyond the Green Zone, on his experiences.

Meanwhile, his own land still seemed far away indeed from war. Small groups of protesters aside, most Americans, even as their country militarized and the national security state became the fourth branch of government, continued with their lives as if the distant wars being fought in their name had nothing to do with them. Existing under the implacable buzz of Hellfire-missile-armed drones, experiencing special-ops raids, finding jihadists spreading in your town or city, watching your country shatter before your eyes, being uprooted from your home and put to flight, all of that and more was the unimaginable experience of foreign peoples in distant lands. All of it had nothing to do with Americans (or our policies or our military), even as so many of them became refugees or terrorists (neither of whom we wanted in this country).

So imagine Jamail’s surprise on discovering in Alaska that the U.S. military and its depredations were anything but far from our shores. He first covered the Navy’s war games in the Gulf of Alaska and the ways in which they represented a kind of war against the American environment in May 2015. It was a joint report for this site and the invaluable Truthout (where he continues, among other things, to write stunning monthly summaries of the latest news and scientific information on the effects of climate change on our world). Now, he returns with a jolting update. Tom

War in the Gulf (No, Not That Gulf!): The U.S. Navy's Anti-Environmental Broadside in the Gulf of Alaska

by Dahr Jamail

As a resident of the tiny fishing town of Cordova, Alaska, the most radical rabble-rousing thing about Stolarcyk may be the passion with which she loves this region of the planet in all its majesty. It’s why she’s taken a fierce and unwavering stand for years now against the ongoing training exercises the Navy carries out in the Gulf of Alaska during one of the largest migrations of birds and marine life on Earth. These exercises, which inject tons of toxic materials into the Gulf and use significant explosive ordnance, are once again scheduled to take place just as Alaska's commercial fishing season opens.

Located in the state’s massive Chugach National Forest, coastal Cordova is nestled between the glacial-clad Chugach Mountains, Prince William Sound, and the Copper River. Fishing is the heart and soul of the town, as well as the foundation of its economy. A rough and tumble place, it regularly lands on lists of the top 10 American fishing ports, whether measured in pounds of fish caught annually or their value. A fish tax pays for its schools and the upkeep of most of its infrastructure. At least a quarter of its jobs are connected to the commercial fishing industry. "Without fishing, the town wouldn’t even be here," says Stolarcyk, who knows the intricacies of the Navy's plans better than most people in the Navy do, as we tour Cordova’s harbor.

It is impossible to overstate how iconic salmon are here. “What we have in Cordova is one of the last wild places left in the world, and one of the last places on Earth where we still have healthy salmon runs," she tells me. She’s the program director for the Eyak Preservation Council, an environmental and social-justice-oriented nonprofit based in Cordova, whose primary mission is to protect wild salmon habitat.

Her partner is about to start his seventh season as a commercial fisherman. Their apartment building even has a fish smoker. "Salmon bring this town to life, you can feel the energy once the fish start returning, it's palpable," she explains, excitement in her voice. "You can hear the boats coming in and people go to stand on the shore to welcome them back."

However, this year, as in 2015, the Navy plans to conduct its part of Northern Edge 2017 (NE 17), a training exercise, right in her neighborhood. These war games, which occur every other year, include ships, aircraft, ordnance, and the widespread use of sonar across more than 42,000 square nautical miles of the marine environment of the Gulf of Alaska. And it is well known that sonar causes injury and death to whales, dolphin, and other marine life. It has been shown that whales will even beach themselves to escape the noise, which is more than 100 decibels louder underwater than even the loudest rock concert. Thanks to a major lawsuit against them, the Navy agreed to limit the use of certain kinds of sonar in Southern California and Hawaii, due to its impact on the endangered Blue Whale along with other species. But not in the Gulf of Alaska.

Fishing for an Answer

As in 2015, the Navy's plans threaten an area of the Gulf that couldn’t be more biologically sensitive or rich in wildlife. Their training area includes a State of Alaska Marine Protected Area, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Protected Area, and both the Gulf of Alaska Seamount Protected and Slope Habitat Conservation areas.

Nevertheless, the Navy is requesting permits to use live ordnance including bombs, missiles, and torpedoes, along with active and passive sonar in "realistic" war-training exercises that could release as much as 352,000 pounds of "expended materials" into those waters including, according to the Navy’s own Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), missiles, bombs, and torpedoes.

These waters support some of the most valuable fisheries left in the United States and the commercial fishing industry is the single largest private sector employer in the state of Alaska, providing over 63,000 jobs. Nevertheless, the Navy's own EIS claims that fish in the area are at risk of chemical exposures of various sorts because the war games will introduce chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, and ammonium perchlorate, along with numerous other heavy metals and toxic substances, into Alaskan waters. According to the EIS, "Little is known about the very important issues of nonmortality damage in the short and long-term, and nothing is known about the effects on behaviour of fish." It adds that “potential effects” include “death or damage” and that "fish not killed or driven from a location by an explosion might change their behavior, feeding pattern, or distribution."

While the Navy itself is aware of some of the damaging impacts of its exercises, others remain unknown and that service is making no effort to learn what they might be. The precautionary principle of do no harm is clearly not operative here.

The Navy's EIS does estimate that, during the years in which these war games are to be conducted, there will be more than 182,000 "takes" -- direct deaths of marine mammals or disruptions of their essential behaviors like breeding, nursing, or surfacing. On fish deaths, it offers no estimates at all.

A partial list of affected species includes blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer whales, the highly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there are only about 30 left), as well as dolphins and sea lions. No fewer than a dozen native tribes including the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan, Tlingit, Sun'aq, and Aleut rely on the area for subsistence living, not to speak of their cultural and spiritual identities.

As the May 1st launching day for NE 17 looms, we already have at least some inkling of just what kinds of damage might result. Immediately following Northern Edge 15, Alaska witnessed the single largest whale mortality event ever to occur in its waters. Eighteen carcasses of endangered whales were found floating near Kodiak Island within the area in which the Navy had conducted its exercises, attracting national media attention.

Statewide, in the year that followed, Alaska had its worst pink salmon fishing season in four decades. A federal disaster declaration was even issued to give salmon fishermen some relief, deferring the repayment of loans. That year also saw the biggest die off of Murres, a small seabird, ever recorded in the state.

Human-caused climate disruption impacts had long been noted across the North Pacific, whose climate-change-affected waters were warming to record temperatures that year. While this obviously played a role in such events, what impact the naval exercises had across the Gulf of Alaska remains largely unknown, in part because the Navy refused in 2015 -- as it will again this year -- to allow independent observers on its ships or to conduct follow-up studies focused on how their war games impacted the environment and marine life.

Local opposition is strong, as 10 Alaskan communities have passed resolutions requesting that the Navy move the timing and location of Northern Edge 2017 and all future training events to the fall or winter months and further offshore to minimize their impact on fisheries and migrations. Furthermore, the mayors of Cordova, Girdwood, Tenakee Springs, and Valdez sent letters to Senator Murkowski, requesting that she ask the Navy to relocate NE 17. The senator, hardly a critic of the military, nonetheless wrote the secretary of the Navy last September to "express concern over the manner in which the Navy is approaching its participation in Northern Edge 2017," and called a lack of naval public affairs guidance "extremely troubling."

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Dennis McGinn replied, "I readily admit we could have done a better job reaching out to potentially affected stakeholders leading up to NE 15."

Stolarcyk is truly a David going up against the naval Goliath. Her dedication to this region of the planet has been and continues to be unwavering.

"How could you live in this place and experience all this beauty and not get how precious this is," she asks with typical intensity as we walk near her town’s harbor and bald eagles soar above us. 

"I love this place so much, and I can't even let myself feel all my emotions when I'm working on this issue, because I wouldn't be able to function."

The late afternoon sun is just beginning to hint at the evening to come as she stares out into the waters of the Gulf, takes several deep breaths, and says, “We have to defend our lifestyle here, because if we don't do it, who else is going to do it? If the Navy destroys the Gulf of Alaska, they can just leave, while we’re the ones who have to live with whatever is left."

“The Navy Is Getting Away With Murder”

My trip to Alaska to report on the upcoming war games began in the small ski town of Girdwood, a 40-minute drive east of Anchorage. There, Stolarcyk and I met up with her colleague, Christina Hendrickson, as they continued their efforts to push the Navy’s schedule for the war games out of prime wildlife season. Hendrickson, who specializes in environmental law, is a former defense contractor. Like two high-octane lawyers before a big trial, she and Stolarcyk instantly begin talking a mile a minute about what their next moves should be.

They bring me up to speed on the latest Navy maneuvers in what is now a publicity war over Northern Edge 17 and the way its officials have officially opted to "work with the stakeholders." On the other hand, as Hendrickson points out to me, “they have refused to meet with Emily and myself" -- and, as it happened at that point, me, too. I'd recently contacted Captain Anastasia Schmidt, director of public affairs for Alaska Command in Anchorage, to arrange a meeting and my request had been denied.

Unfortunately, as Hendrickson points out, the permits the Navy requested from both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service allow them to war game their hearts out in the Gulf for the next five years without taking the slightest responsibility for analyzing the potential impact of their actions or dealing with the myriad species migrating through the area during the training period. While those who fish here must adhere to environmental standards, the Navy doesn’t have to.

"Imagine that you have a friend who is a subsistence fisherman,” Hendrickson says, “who is looking at his nets each season, and on the seasons the Navy trains, there seems to be less fish in them, and there are less whales returning, and then there’s a huge Murre die off. There are sick sea otters or sea otters not returning at all. It's obvious to me that the Navy is not connecting these dots."

I ask her what exactly drives her on this issue and she stares out the window at the still snow-covered trees, then looks me dead in the eyes and says, "The Navy is getting away with murder and that upsets me."

“If It Walks, Swims, or Crawls, I’ve Fished It”

Stolarcyk and I fly on to Kodiak Island where we meet up with Tom Lance, the natural resources director for the Sun'aq tribe. We’re there so that the two of them can make a presentation to the island’s Borough Assembly in hopes of inspiring another Alaskan community to pass a resolution against the timing of the exercises.

Lance and I sit down in a café on the outskirts of town and he immediately begins describing the massive whale carcasses floating in the Gulf of Alaska after Northern Edge 15, many of which washed ashore on Kodiak. As he points out, just before those war games began, the Sun'aq and Afognak tribes "admonished the DOD [Department of Defense] for not respecting their people and their resources, and demanded that NE 15 not take place. The Navy told the tribal council representatives, basically, 'thank you.'"

After essentially being blown off, the tribes requested another meeting, which only happened after the exercises were over. At that time, they insisted that the Navy change the season for the next set of exercises to late fall or winter and the location as well. 

"Another condition was for them to account for fish take [that is, the disturbance or destruction of fish populations], as if it were a commercial fishing operation where they are given a total allowable catch. To this they responded that they don't harvest fish, so why should they have to track that?"

"From my observation,” Lance says, “I see an undercurrent of frustration within the tribes and the community of fishermen that the Navy is going to do what they are going to do no matter what we say." He takes a last sip of coffee and concludes, 

"Everybody is so focused on the short run right now, they’re forgetting about the long run. If we don't save the ocean as a potential place to farm, we're not going to be able to feed ourselves in the future."

Later, I visit with Alexus Kwachka, a Kodiak commercial fisherman for the last 30 years. A bear of a man, he shakes my hand vigorously while welcoming me into his home, which overlooks Kodiak's massive harbor. When I ask him what he’s fished for, he responds, "If it walks, swims, or crawls, I've fished it."

He wastes no time going after the Navy. “I question their timing. They say they don't want to train in the winter and instead they plan it for during the largest migratory period of marine life and birds here." Fishermen on the island, he assures me, are increasingly apprehensive about the Navy's plans and its impact on their livelihoods, even though "folks here are patriotic and support the military.”

Prior to Northern Edge 15, Kwachka lined his boat up with dozens of others in the harbor in protest. Now, he’s concerned again and feels slighted that the military doesn’t consider his voice worth listening to. He says emphatically, "We’re worried about the fact that they are allowed to bring in a load of boats and blow shit up all over the place." If they do that, he tells me, the ill effects "start out with the little guys then go up through the whole food web, which is another reason not to do it in the Spring when the forage fish are both reproducing and traveling." 

"It’s just not a good time to be introducing toxins and blowing things up on top of them. The chemical fallout from those explosions goes down through the food web and is eaten or absorbed by the fish."

“Food Security Is National Security”

That evening, Stolarcyk, Lance, and I head over to the Kodiak Island borough building for their meeting. In a small, cramped basement room, several members of the assembly are around a table, while the rest of us are seated on chairs along the walls.

The two of them give their brief talks with a slide show. As soon as they’re done, Councilman Matt Van Deale indicates that he’ll sponsor the resolution they want, adding, "Food security is national security and we are a fishing town." A second councilperson responds favorably to the resolution as others nod.

Suddenly, Councilman Kyle Crow speaks up, questioning the threat of toxic wastes. "I know about how hazardous waste is defined and I've seen folks declare a block of concrete with a chip of paint on it as hazardous waste." Stolarcyk promptly projects a slide she’s already shown that displays a chart taken from the Navy’s environmental impact statement indicating that more than five tons of toxic materials could be introduced into the fertile fishing areas of the Gulf each time the Navy conducts a training event.

Crow also questions the dangers of the Navy's use of sonar, comparing theirs to what he uses on his own fishing boat. Again, Stolarcyk pulls up a slide showing that the Navy's sonar generates audible blasts up to 235 decibels -- humans begin to suffer hearing damage at 85 decibels -- that travel for thousands of miles across the ocean. Crow nods in response to the new information, given that it is straight out of the Navy's own documents.

Councilman Larry LeDoux then requests that the assembly hear the Navy's side of the story and insists that such war games are necessary, as is the missile testing already happening on Kodiak, because of North Korea's ability to reach the United States with a missile. (Not that it can yet.)

Despite these bumps, the majority of the assembly appears to favor the resolution.

The next morning Lance shares an email he sent to councilman Van Deale, thanking him for volunteering to sponsor the resolution. "It is hard to understand,” he wrote to Van Deale, “how some people in Kodiak's local government (and outside) distrust others who work to protect the sustainability of the very resources that have built the same Kodiak Archipelago economy and heritage!"

Two weeks later, Kodiak became the 10th Alaskan community to pass a resolution opposing the timing and location of the Navy’s exercises.

A day after that, in a letter to the commanders of the Navy's Pacific Fleet and U.S. Pacific Command, Senator Murkowski, who is also the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, requested that the Navy “give serious thought” to changing the timing of the 2019 war games and moving their location due to impacts on marine life. “I expect to address these issues with senior leaders when the Navy appears before the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee next month,” she wrote.

“We Just Don’t Know How Bad It’s Going to Be”

Cordova is the image of what coastal Alaska once was. There are no cruise ships and the fishing industry still dominates the town, although some of its fisheries were wiped out in 1989 when the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled at least 11 million gallons of crude oil and they have never recovered.

Two years ago, I met James Wiese here. He is an engineer on an Alaska Department of Fish and Game research vessel. A third generation Cordova mariner, he’s also a local city councilman. At that time, he was already expressing his fears that someday his children might not be able to eat the food that comes out of these waters. He returned to the subject recently, telling me, "Anyone trying to consume seafood here knows how fragile everything is and is very concerned about what is going to happen to it because it's part of their everyday life." He adds that, within his department, the bulk of his colleagues support the resolutions calling on the Navy to alter its plans.

Cordova, he assures me, is "very much in opposition to the training" and still can’t believe the Navy is unable to find a time for their exercises when the salmon and the rest of the sea life in the Gulf aren't at their height. "It's a food web and if salmon get tested and show contaminants from the Navy, everything is at stake. There are safer places for these Navy drills to happen. They need to be conscientious about what they are affecting."

Clay Koplin is Cordova’s mayor. "It's pretty simple," he tells me. "The Navy has the whole span of the year to practice and they picked the absolute worst time to do their exercise. We asked for a conversation in hope of changing the timing," he adds, turning his hands over in a gesture of puzzlement. 

"That's how a conversation works. We hoped to find some middle ground, but thus far there's been nothing to indicate they are willing to find that middle ground."

That same day, I meet Kelly Weaverling, the first Green Party mayor ever elected in this country. He took office in Cordova in 1990, right after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. A former naval navigator in nuclear fast-attack submarines, he is now a Zen Buddhist monk as well as a fisherman.

Sporting a shaved head and dressed in a black Zen robe, grey turtleneck, and sandals with wool socks, Weaverling strides in quietly, yet purposefully, having come straight from leading a three-hour meditation for the community. "What the Navy is doing, we know it is going to be bad," he begins calmly. "We just don't know how bad it's going to be. It's pretty easy to figure out. Anybody can do that."

I ask him to explain and he responds, as though instructing me before one of his meditation sessions, "Is something positive, negative, or neutral is the question. Anything you do is going to have an effect, even if it’s a non-action... So the question is, what effect is it going to have? The Navy's action will not have a positive effect on the ocean or any of its creatures. It's going to be a negative effect, we just don't know how bad."

“In Your Backyard?”

In the end, I even received a response from Captain Schmidt of the Alaska Command, who agreed to answer some of my questions by email. I asked her what measures the Navy had taken in the wake of NE 15 to mitigate impacts on marine life. She responded by claiming flatly and without qualification that the new exercises would have "no significant impacts to marine life," and that the Navy had already gone through "an extensive and comprehensive permit process" with the National Marine Fisheries Service (as they are, in fact, required to do by law).

Why then, I wondered, do its commanders refuse to allow independent wildlife observers aboard their vessels during the training exercises?

To do so, she insisted "would result in unacceptable impacts to readiness," an odd response given that the only “impact” would assumedly be the use of binoculars.

As Northern Edge 2017 approaches, one thing is clear enough. Despite growing opposition in Alaska, the Navy continues to do just what it wants in the state’s once-pristine, biologically rich Gulf waters.

Who knows how long it will be before parts of its vast marine web begin to test positive for the Navy's toxins?

As a journalist, I’ve spent time in Iraq and seen the devastation the U.S. military can visit on a society firsthand. But I must admit that I never expected to see it in Alaska, whose tallest mountains I spent a decade of my life climbing -- where, thanks to Denali (the highest peak in North America), I fell madly in love with this planet. As someone who now regularly reports on climate disruption, I wonder daily how many more decades whole areas of the biosphere will even remain habitable. At a purely personal level, that makes the Navy’s ongoing war against Alaska’s waters and the wildlife in them unconscionable to me. And in the age of Trump, it’s unlikely the Navy high command will spend much time worrying about the environmental damage its war games are likely to cause.

For most Americans, Alaska is, of course, a distant, almost mythic place. But don’t be fooled. In Alaska, there’s a broader lesson to be learned from these war games. Christina Hendrickson makes the point in a way that speaks vividly to my own life experience. “If the Navy is able to come up to this pristine, biologically, ecologically and economically important area and train for war across three training cycles spanning six years and not engage local communities,” she says, “and if we're allowing this to happen in areas where subsistence is carried out by people who have relied on it for millennia, why couldn't this happen in your backyard?"

Dahr Jamail, a TomDispatch regular, is a recipient of numerous honors, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his work in Iraq. He is the author of two books: Beyond the Green Zone and The Will to Resist. His next book will be The End of Ice (the New Press). He is a staff reporter for Truthout. This is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Dahr Jamail

From Deir Yassir to Egypt

Deir Yassir to Egypt

by Mazin Qumsiyeh - qumsiyeh.org 

April 9, 2017

Today is the anniversary of the massacre at Deir Yassin. On 9 April 1948, my mother’s friend in school (both studying to be teachers school in Jerusalem) chose to go back to her village of Deir Yassin. That was the last time my mother saw her young friend Hayah Balbisi and this victim of Zionism remains etched in memory of my 84 year old mother.

Deir Yassin was not the first, last, or the largest massacre committed by Zionist  forces during that era of ethnic cleansing. But it was prophetic and emblematic for us because its deliberate effect was magnified to  scare the villagers (even some survivors were paraded in the streets of Jerusalem and loudspeakers told of more impending massacres).

Dar Al-Tifl AlArabi orphanage was created to house the surviving orphaned children. Dozens of massacres were committed just in the six weeks leading up to Israel’s creation and dozens after. Over 500 villages and towns were depopulated in the bizarre 20th century attempt to transform a multi-cultural/multi-religious Palestine to become the “Jewish state of Israel”. And the price tag is still being paid in areas like Iraq,  Yemen, Syria, and Egypt.

Today also saw terrorists bombing Christian Churches on Palm Sunday over 120 were killed or severely injured. Our condolences to the victims and our thoughts and prayers with the injured. I look back at seven years ago on a palm Sunday when we breached the wall of apartheid (at least for a short while before we got arrested).

Please see this video: https://youtu.be/wsX3P_ADk34

Jesus rode a humble donkey into Jerusalem then. Our donkey and mule (and accompanying humans) were all arrested on that Palm Sunday 9 April 2010.

What would Jesus do in our troubled world today?

Alas, so many lies flood our airways, so much misinformation, so many deluded people (some Palestinians even supported the US bombings in Syria and Yemen).

I will end with a poem I wrote in 2011 when we commemorated Deir Yassin as Israel bombed Gaza killing so many civilians. Then I need to go back for the long nights as we prepare to open our museum and botanical garden (palestinenature.org).

Deir Yassin to Gaza by Mazin Qumsiyeh 

(Written on the way back home, dedicated to Juliano*)

My kind old mother laments
Decades of memory that transcends
Fake Gods and fake peace offers
who bless nichsayon** and slaughter
our eyes fail to see or just lament
blood of a child licked off a pavement
By stray thirsty cats
with more morals than army brats
Our ears fail to hear
voice of Dr. Izzeldinne echoes
“I shall not hate” anguished cries
After three beautiful daughters
With a tank shell and a niece in slaughters
Our noses fail to smell
The whiff of death mixed with gun powder
Or the vomit of our tortured
Our hearts fail to feel
the punctured womb by the old home
the severed girl’s head by the mosque dome
Mutilated,
dismembered,
disconnected
Our fingers fail to touch
an anguished young mother
Looking for a child
Jews, Christian, Muslims wail
The lost humanity to no avail
the generals must have their joy
to test their newest toy
in Gaza white phosphorous back in use yesterday
impunity from war crimes thanks to the US of A
billionaires must make more dollars
zealots must sacrifice children at altars
Gabriel can stay a knife but not drones
And hate can murder a thousand Julianos
While the apathetic multitude watch TV
Obliviously focused on their shopping spree
Bypassing love and responsibility
Chasing gadgets, hate, and vanity
Next news bulletin.... get the experience
Next anniversary..awaken the conscience??

*The Jenin Freedom Theater and Juliano in his own words (excellent video by Jen Marlowe) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQGqmLyunm0

**Nichsayon: Hebrew for (Ethnic) cleansing

Stay human

Mazin Qumsiyeh
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine
http://qumsiyeh.org
http://palestinenature.org
Join me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/mazin.qumsiyeh.9

Trump Kills Babies in Syria Bombing AP Reports

Activists: Civilians among 21 killed in US-led Syria strikes

by ABC News/AP

Apr 8, 2017

BEIRUT —  U.S.-led coalition aircraft struck two locations in northern Syria on Saturday, killing at least 21 people, including a woman and her six children who were on a boat fleeing clashes between the Islamic State group and U.S.-backed fighters, activist groups said.

Activist groups that operate in IS-held territory and are opposed to the militants have reported increasing numbers of civilian deaths from U.S.-led airstrikes in recent weeks. The coalition is providing support to a Syrian Kurdish-led force that is on the offensive against the extremist group.

Thousands of people in areas held by IS are trying to flee the violence as preparations are underway to capture the northern city of Raqqa, the extremists' de facto capital. Activists and residents have said the militants are forcing civilians to stay in order to use them as human shields once the offensive on Raqqa begins.

Leaflets dropped by coalition warplanes in recent weeks gave confusing directions — one suggests areas closer to the Euphrates River are safer, but another warns that boats crossing the river will be struck.

Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, an activist group opposed to IS, said a boat carrying about 40 people was hit as it was crossing the Euphrates River in Raqqa province. It said the bodies of a woman and her six children were recovered, while the others are still missing. The Sound and Picture group, which tracks killings and other abuses in IS-held territory, reported the same casualty estimates. Journalists have virtually no access to areas held by IS, which has captured and killed a number of reporters.

The strike occurred in the Shuaib al-Zeker area, near where the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces are battling IS.

Earlier Saturday, activists and state media said an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on the northern IS-held village of Hneida killed at least 14 civilians, including children. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 15 people, including four children, were killed in the airstrike. The Sound and Picture group [claim] the airstrike hit an internet cafe, killing 14 people.