Iran: "Sanctions" War by Another Name

US, Allies Wage Economic War On Iran

by Finian Cunningham

The havoc hitting Iran’s national finances should leave no-one under any illusions. The country is facing economic warfare from the US and its European allies. In financial terms, it is equivalent to attacking the country with a weapon of mass destruction.

The disruption and hardship being inflicted on Iranian citizens is criminal and unspeakably callous. But let’s make no mistake: the suffering of Iranian people is the direct result of conscious decisions being made in Washington, London and Brussels. These sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking industries are outrageous acts of aggression based on specious and malicious claims about the country’s legally entitled civilian nuclear development. The sanctions are unwarranted, criminal acts of war and crimes against humanity, initiated by Washington and its Western lackey governments.

It is important to understand the source of aggression. Recently, some commentators and analysts have overplayed the rift between Washington and Israel with regard to Iran. Some have taken delight at the rebuffs issued to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the White House. When US President Barack Obama declined to grant Netanyahu a personal meeting at the White House during the UN summit last week, some commentators interpreted this as another slap from Washington to Israel over its belligerence towards Iran. There was even a hint of hope that the White House is as last coming to its senses about Netanyahu’s nuttiness.

Other commentators have lamented the supposed excessive influence of Tel Aviv on American government foreign policy. In this view, the reason why America is so hated around the world is because of Zionists hijacking Washington’s foreign policy in general and towards Iran in particular.

Yes indeed, Zionist lobbyists, corporate media and presidential fundraisers do have huge influence on American government. But let’s not kid ourselves. The tail does not wag the dog. American imperialist aggression is a function of America’s position as the executive power overseeing global capitalist domination. The state of Israel was set up historically as a garrison of American military power projection in the Middle East to augment the imperatives of capitalist control. In this role the Zionist state still serves as a subcontractor of American imperialism, in the same way as Britain, France and other Western lackey powers perform.

To believe that America is somehow misled by a miscreant Israel and its unhinged leaders in pursuing US foreign policy in the Middle East is to gravely misunderstand the real source of international aggression. If somehow we could magic Israel out of the equation that would not suddenly lead to a civilizing of US foreign policy in the world. American aggression and lawlessness exists with or without Israel as its imperialist depredations throughout Latin America and the Pacific in the 19th and early 20th centuries all too clearly show.

This inherent violence in American foreign relations stems from its dominance as the defender of corporate capitalist power. The problem of American aggression is rooted in the capitalist system, not in its alliances with other countries, whether European or Zionist Israel.

Getting back to the issue of sanctions implemented by Washington, London and Brussels: there can be little doubt that these powers have unilaterally chosen a warpath towards Iran. It is their policy-making over many years, not the reckless vicissitude of some rogue interlocutor.

These sanctions are aimed at causing maximum damage to the Iranian economy and society, delivering the kind of disruption that would be comparable to ballistic missiles. They are of course deliberately disproportionate to the alleged concerns over nuclear enrichment. As an Iranian commentator wrote in Iran Review this week, Western accusations over Iran’s nuclear research date back 28 years.

This relentless spurious speculation about Iran’s imminent nuclear weapons capability is a ridiculous scandal, which serves to underscore the belligerent policy.

On the back of these baseless allegations, the Western powers are committing acts of war on the Iranian economy. That is not hyperbole.

Earlier this year, the American business magazine Forbes conjectured that the Federal Reserve Bank had a stealth plan to devalue the dollar by 33 per cent - over 20 years - as a way of making the American economy more competitive. That caused outrage among many US commentators who lambasted the treachery of the Fed for “stealing” the savings and earnings of millions of ordinary Americans.

Following the worldwide financial crash in 2008, the British pound depreciated by 30 per cent against the US dollar over a period of a year or so. That prompted the Bank of England to make an historic intervention to stabilize the British economy by injecting £75 billion of new capital in an extraordinary rescue measure known as “quantitative easing”.

When the Euro was launched in 2002, it lost some 30 per cent in value over 20 months, which triggered the European Central Bank to step in and salvage the single currency with unprecedented massive financial support.

These fluctuations over periods of years give some idea as to the havoc Iran is now being subjected - over a period of weeks. On top of the financial turmoil and inflation, Iran is also being physically embargoed over essential exports and imports of oil, food and medicines. Can you imagine how the US, Britain or the EU would react in that context? And especially given that the havoc is not being caused by anonymous market forces, but by specific governments' decisions.

This week, a US government spokesperson commented on Iran’s financial disruption with callous relish: “The [Iranian] currency is plummeting and firms all over the world are refusing to do business with Iranian companies,” adding that “these are the most punishing sanctions we have ever been able to amass as an international community”.

The most punishing sanctions ever. That is saying something given that the US-led sanctions against Iraq between 1990 and 2003 were reckoned to have caused over one million children to die from preventable causes.

Such barbaric conduct is the systematic aggression of the world’s biggest imperialist power. It is not the misguided conduct of a hapless power that is being hijacked by a Zionist stooge.

By the way, Obama may not have shared a photo-op with Netanyahu in the White House last week. But the pair were reported to have had a friendly telephone chat after ‘they closed ranks” in their respective speeches at the UN in which they both repeated outrageous threats of war against Iran. In other words: “Attaboy Bibi, easy puppy”.



Finian Cunningham is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He specialises in Middle East and East Africa issues.

This article was originally posted at Press TV

Japan-China Contretemps Triggers Boom for Arms Dealers

Hardliners, Weapons-Makers the Real Winners in Japan-China Dispute 

by TRNN

Japanese and Chinese nationalists are willing to bet their countries' futures for the sake of national pride and a handful of uninhabited islands in the sea, but it may be the global weapons-making industry that walks away with the pot.

 

Watch full multipart China

Michael Penn: This is Michael Penn with The Real News in Tokyo. Much of the world has been surprised in recent weeks by political bickering between the world’s second- and third- largest economies, China and Japan, over a group of five tiny islands where nobody even lives. In spite of the apparent insignificance of the territories involved, they have engendered passions which spread a crisis throughout East Asia.

Cop Caught on Film Beating Up Wheelchair Bound Man

Police Officer Brutally Attacks Man In Wheelchair

Duluth, Minnesota Police Officer Richard Jouppi has been charged with assault after a surveillance video showed him hitting a drunk 50-year-old man, Anthony Jon Jackson, in a wheelchair.

The Duluth News Tribune reports that Officer Jouppi has been placed on paid administrative leave while an independent prosecutor investigates the Sept. 21 incident.

Media Part of the Global Warming Problem

The Ice Melts Into Water: Arctic Ice Melt, Psychopathic Capitalism And The Corporate Media

by David Cromwell and David Edwards

Last month, climate scientists announced that Arctic sea ice had shrunk to its smallest surface area since satellite observations began in 1979. An ice-free summer in the Arctic, once projected to be more than a century away, now looks possible just a few decades from now. Some scientists say it may happen within the next few years.

The loss is hugely significant because Arctic sea ice reflects most solar energy into space, helping to keep the Earth at a moderate temperature. But when the ice melts it reveals dark waters below, which absorb more than 90 per cent of the solar energy that hits them, leading to faster warming both locally and globally.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, warns that the Arctic may be ice-free in summer as soon as 2015. Such a massive loss would have a warming effect roughly equivalent to all human activity to date. In other words, a summer ice-free Arctic could double the rate of warming of the planet as a whole. No wonder that leading NASA climate scientist James Hansen says bluntly: ‘We are in a planetary emergency.’

In a comprehensive blog piece on the Scientific American website, Ramez Naam points out that:

‘The reality of changes to the Arctic has far outstripped most predictions. Only a few years ago, in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the bulk of models showed the Arctic ice cap surviving in summer until well past 2100. Now it’s not clear that the ice will survive in summer past 2020. The level of sea ice we saw this September, in 2012, wasn’t expected by the mean of IPCC models until 2065. The melting Arctic has outpaced the predictions of almost everyone – everyone except the few who were called alarmists.’

As well as global warming from carbon dioxide (CO2), there is the additional risk of warming from methane (CH4) being released into the atmosphere. Huge quantities of methane are locked up in land permafrost. But even vaster quantities exist as methane hydrates frozen below the shallow waters of the Arctic Ocean’s continental shelves. Naam warns:

'If even 10% of the northern permafrost’s buried carbon were released as methane, it would have a heating effect over the next decade equivalent to ten times all human greenhouse emissions to date, and over the next century equivalent to roughly four times all human greenhouse emissions to date.'

That's just the methane on land, trapped in the permafrost. If the methane hydrates buried on the Arctic continental shelves were to be released, that would have a warming effect equivalent to hundreds of times the total human carbon emissions to date.

Although Namm says 'we are probably not in danger of a methane time bomb going off any time soon', recent observations show that Arctic methane is being released into the atmosphere. And there is scientific controversy over how serious and how rapid this release is.

In summary, Naam points to a triple whammy effect:

1. Warming from the greenhouse gases we are currently emitting.

2. Warming from the loss of ice and permafrost in the Arctic, and the exposure of dark water and dark land below.

3. Warming from the release of more carbon into the atmosphere as the permafrost and the Arctic sea floor methane begin to melt.

The situation is already dire. According to a new report commissioned by twenty governments, more than 100 million people will die by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change. Five million deaths already occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies. This death toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue. More than 90 per cent of those deaths will occur in developing countries.

On a sane planet, action would have been taken long before now to limit the risk. But, as Greenpeace International head Kumi Naidoo notes, fossil fuel industries have been working hard to corrupt the political process:

‘Why our governments don't take action? Because they have been captured by the same interests of the energy industry.’

As we noted in an alert last year, a Greenpeace study titled Who's Holding Us Back? reported:

'The corporations most responsible for contributing to climate change emissions and profiting from those activities are campaigning to increase their access to international negotiations and, at the same time, working to defeat progressive legislation on climate change and energy around the world.'

Greenpeace added:

‘These polluting corporations often exert their influence behind the scenes, employing a variety of techniques, including using trade associations and think tanks as front groups; confusing the public through climate denial or advertising campaigns; making corporate political donations; as well as making use of the "revolving door" between public servants and carbon-intensive corporations.’

Unsurprisingly then, meaningful action on tackling climate change is nowhere on the political agenda.
Drilling To Oblivion

Around the same time that a record low in Arctic sea ice was being recorded, a new report from the UK’s House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee urged a halt to all oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, at least 'until new safeguards are put in place.' Committee chair Joan Walley MP said:

'The shocking speed at which the Arctic sea ice is melting should be a wake-up call to the world that we need to phase out fossil fuels fast. Instead we are witnessing a reckless gold rush in this pristine wilderness as big companies and governments make a grab for the world’s last untapped oil and gas reserves.'

Caroline Lewis, member of the committee, warned that ‘the race to carve up the Arctic is accelerating faster than our regulatory or technical capacity to manage it.’

But the record of corporate capitalism shows that powerful industrial forces will do all they can to lobby governments to allow for continued economic exploitation of the planet’s resources. According to the US Geological Survey, within the Arctic Circle there are some 90 billion barrels of oil - 13 per cent of the planet's undiscovered oil reserves - and 30 per cent of its undiscovered natural gas. The race for corporate profits is now on, with Shell already committed to a ‘multi-year exploration program’ in the Arctic.

The receding Arctic ice is a 'business opportunity' for those wishing to exploit newly available shipping routes. Cargo that now goes via the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal will, in many cases, have a shorter Arctic route, ensuring ‘efficiency savings’ for big business.

Companies are also licking their lips at the prospect at getting their hands on vast deposits of minerals as Greenland’s ice cap recedes.

‘For me, I wouldn’t mind if the whole ice cap disappears,’ said Ole Christiansen, the chief executive of NunamMinerals, Greenland’s largest homegrown mining company, with his eyes on a proposed gold mining site up the fjord from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. ‘As it melts, we’re seeing new places with very attractive geology.’

A good example of the psychopathic mind-set at the heart of corporate capitalism. Science writer Peter Gleick responded incredulously on Twitter: '25 foot sea rise?' For that is indeed the catastrophic scale of global sea level rise that would occur with the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

The BBC Parks The Problem

The BBC’s extremely poor and biased coverage of climate change continues to dismay seasoned observers. As Verity Payne and Freya Roberts noted on The Carbon Brief website, the corporation’s ‘fondness for pitting non-experts against each other over particularly complex areas of climate science reached surreal heights’ in a recent BBC2 Newsnight segment on Arctic sea ice loss. The encounter between Conservative MP Peter Lilley and the Green Party’s new leader Natalie Bennett eventually degenerated into an argument over the merits of locally-sourced food. Payne and Roberts concluded:

‘It's hard to understand how, over a year after the BBC Trust reviewed the corporation's science coverage, paying particular attention to topics such as climate change, this is what we end up with.’

In fact, the BBC's awful performance is not that much of a mystery. The corporation has always been a reliable supporter of state and corporate power. But particularly since the fallout from reporting the government’s ‘sexing-up’ of discredited claims about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, when heads rolled at the BBC, the broadcaster has been at pains not to offend the government and allied interests. Its abysmal failure to inform the British public of the coalition’s effective dismantling of the National Health Service is another key example.

According to former BBC correspondent and editor Mark Brayne, who was privy to internal editorial discussions in 2010, the BBC has ‘explicitly parked climate change in the category “Done That Already, Nothing New to Say”.’ Brayne added:

‘On climate change, that BBC journalistic urgency to be seen to be fair now means, after a period between Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and the disaster of [the 2009 UN Climate Summit in] Copenhagen when global warming was everywhere in the output, that the Corporation has been bending over backwards to reflect the opposite, sceptical view.’

Consider the analogy of two men at a bar, says Brayne. One man claims that two plus two equals four, and the other that two plus two equals six. The BBC solution to this disagreement? ‘Put them both on the Today Programme, and the answer clearly lies somewhere in the middle.’

The Today programme, BBC Radio 4’s ‘agenda-setting’ morning programme, is a serial offender when it comes to irresponsible climate coverage. On July 13 this year, veteran interviewer John Humphrys interviewed Ralph Cicerone, president of the US National Academy of Sciences. Part of the interview went like this:

JH: ‘But to say nearly every spot on the globe has warmed significantly over the past 30 years and indeed the entire planet is warming is different from saying it's going to continue to warm to such an extent that we have to spend vast and unimaginable amounts of money to protect ourselves against a catastrophe that many people, some distinguished scientists say, isn't actually proven.’

RC: ‘Well of course the way you've worded it, it was quite strong; "vast and unimaginable sums of money", I don't think I've heard anybody make such a proposal.’

Moments later, Humphrys made the idiotic assertion that:

‘You can’t absolutely prove that CO2 in the atmosphere is responsible for global warming.’

As climate writers Christian Hunt and Ros Donald put it politely:

‘If the Today programme brought this level of research and preparation to interviewing politicians, it probably wouldn't be taken particularly seriously.’

In fact, the standard of political debate on Today, as with the rest of BBC News, is on a similarly appalling level: routinely tilted towards state-corporate power, and all at public expense.

Meanwhile, BBC News happily chunters along issuing a stream of articles and broadcasts about Britain’s ‘dreadful weather’ this year and how it has, for example, ‘cost rural Britain £1bn’ in lost income. But you would be hard pressed to find any links drawn between this and human-induced climate change.

Guarding The Mythology Of 'Feeble Response'

Greens like to flock to the Guardian almost as though it were the house paper of the environment movement. One recent Guardian editorial noted that: ‘pessimists in the climate change community warn that within the next century global mean temperatures could rise by 6C. A fierce, sustained drought in the US, with 170 all-time US heat records broken in June alone, has already hurt world food stocks.’

These are important points. But given the observed rapid changes in the Arctic under global warming, the Guardian’s pejorative use of ‘pessimists’ should probably be replaced with ‘realists’. The Guardian continued:

‘The global response to these signals of potential calamity has so far been feeble.’

This hugely understates the problem. But, even more damning, it diverts attention from root causes. As mentioned earlier, huge vested interests have mounted decades-long campaigns of disinformation, fierce lobbying and intimidation to subvert and bully governments into (a) avoiding what needs to be done in the face of climate chaos; and (b) providing tax breaks, subsidies and other measures to enhance rapacious corporate practices under the guise of boosting economic ‘growth’ and ‘job creation’ (newspeak terms for corporate profits).

Senior Guardian editorial staff seem unable to move beyond the same anodyne waffle they have been publishing for thirty years:

‘Britain's “greenest government ever” has shown what it thinks of scientific evidence, by placing a homeopathic medicine enthusiast in charge of the National Health Service, and a reputed climate sceptic as environment secretary. The outlook is not promising.’

The Guardian has almost nothing to say about the deep-rooted changes required to redress the imbalance of power in society; or about its own role in pushing climate-damaging policies and practices. The Guardian is a corporate newspaper dependent on advertisers for around 70 per cent of its income. Put simply, like other corporate media, it is part of the problem.

Media Malpractice - Challenging The Decline In Coverage

In the US, climate blogger Joe Romm notes that the decline in corporate media climate coverage has been well documented, both in print and the evening news. Bill Blakemore of ABC News observes that a number of the climate scientists ‘are perplexed by — and in some cases furious with — American news directors.’ Blakemore elucidates:

‘“Malpractice!” is typical of the charges this reporter has heard highly respected climate experts level — privately, off the record — at my professional colleagues over the past few years.

‘Complaints include what seems to the scientists a willful omission of overwhelming evidence the new droughts and floods are worsened by man made global warming, and unquestioning repetition, gullible at best, of transparent anti-science propaganda credibly reported to be funded by fossil fuel interests and anti-regulation allies.’

Blakemore adds that he has spoken with climate scientists who ‘agree with those, including NASA scientist James Hansen, who charge that fossil fuel CEOs are guilty of a “crime against humanity,” given the calamity that unregulated greenhouse emissions are quickly bringing on.’ With 100 million deaths from global warming predicted by 2030, the charge is no hyperbole. Indeed this surely represents the greatest crime in all human history. And yet governments and big business, shielded by the corporate media, are getting away with it.

It probably comes as no surprise that the worst US media offenders belong to the Murdoch stable. A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) shows that Fox News had been 'misleading' viewers about climate science in 93 per cent of primetime programmes that addressed the subject over a six-month period in 2012. Fox News hosts and guests ‘mocked and disparaged statements from scientists and drowned out genuine scientific assertions with cherry-picked data and false claims.’ The opinion pages of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal performed slightly better: only 81 per cent of the examples studied were misleading, according to the UCS analysis. Similar surveys of the UK media are sorely needed. And, more to the point, action taken to challenge this corporate media complicity in history's premier crime.

We have to re-examine our assumptions about what might be most effective in changing things for the better. For years, left and green activists have argued that we should work with corporate media to reach a wider public. For a long time the argument may have seemed unassailable. But after decades of accelerating planetary devastation and rapidly declining democracy, the argument has weakened to the point of collapse. By a process of carefully rationed corporate 'inclusion', the honesty, vitality and truth of environmentalism have been corralled, contained, trivialised and stifled.

Corporate media 'inclusion' of dissent has deceived the public with the illusion of openness and change, while business-as-usual has taken us very far in the opposite direction. Ironically, meek 'cooperation' has handed influence and control to the very forces seeking to disempower dissent. And in the absence of serious left/green criticism, corporate media performance has actually deteriorated.

Why should progressives help this system sell the illusion that the corporate media offers a ‘wide spectrum of views’ when its biased output overwhelmingly and inevitably promotes Permanent War for resources and war on the planet? The corporate media must be confronted with the reality of what it is, and what it has done. It is vital that this be highlighted to the public it has been deceiving.

While the power of the internet remains relatively open, there is a brief window to free ourselves from the shackles of the corporate media and to build something honest, radical and publicly accountable. Climate crisis is already upon us, with much worse likely to come. The stakes almost literally could not be higher.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to:
Helen Boaden, head of BBC News.
Email: helen.boaden@bbc.co.uk
Fraser Steel, Head of the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit.
Email: fraser.steel@bbc.co.uk
Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor.
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Twitter: @arusbridger
John Vidal, Guardian environment editor.
Email: john.vidal@guardian.co.uk
Twitter: @john_vidal

The Forever Quagmire: US Cornered in New Middle East

 

The Empire Trapped: The US’s Unpromising Role in the New Middle East

by Ramzy Baroud

Editors representing many Asian newspapers stood in a perfect line. They were nervous and giddy at the prospect of meeting Li Changchun, China’s powerful member of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee. Personally, the Great Hall of the People and the fortitude of Chinese society mesmerized me. Despite its challenges and repeated accusations of corruption and power struggles, China appeared composed while an unwavering forward movement was propelling it. As for the country’s foreign policy, it is governed by a cautious slowly churning agenda, which is unambiguously clear in its long-term objectives.

On that day, nearly two years ago, we knew that Li was awaiting our arrival, for a solitary old jacket, which bore his name with a sticker fastened on the hanger, hung in a closet in the hallway leading to the room where the meeting took place. Li Changchun spoke frustratingly slow as if he were a Hollywood stereotype of a Chinese emperor. Self-assertive and unperturbed by our presence and the many probing questions, Li’s perception of history was much more far-reaching than one expected from the chief of propaganda. Li clearly saw his country’s foreign policy in light of US global military adventures, geopolitical advances and setbacks. No other country seemed to matter. It was a competition and China was determined to win.

A few months later, upheaval struck the Middle East. Its manifestations – revolutions, civil wars, regional mayhem and conflicts of all sorts – reverberated beyond the Middle East. Shrinking and rising empires alike took notice. Fault lines were quickly determined and exploited and players changed positions or jockeyed for advanced ones, as a new Great Game in the resource and strategic rich region was about to begin. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ was rapidly becoming a game-changer in a region that seemed resistant to transformations of any kind. China was wary of its existing investment in the region. So they moved with predictable caution: Wobbled at times, as in Libya, appearing firmer in Syria, and almost entirely aloof in Bahrain.

For China however, the space for future political movement is boundless. Unlike the United States, a ‘new’ or stagnant Middle East will not change the fact that China is barely associated with an atrocious history of military onslaughts or economic exploitation, with which western powers are undeniably associated. The speed of the political transition underway in the Middle East may require Li Changchun to speak a bit faster, a tad louder and with greater clarity, but it will hardly demand a complete shift in China’s policies. It is the interests and rank of the US, as the dominant foreign power in the region, that will consequently suffer irreparable damage.

When discussed through the prism of sheer political analysis, history can be narrow, selective and problematically short. But based on a methodical historical investigation, reality is much less confusing, and the future is far less unpredictable. The seemingly unbridled conflict in the Middle East is no exception.

In his review of Fredrik Logevall’s recently published book: “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam,” Gordon Goldstein wrote, “Over the centuries, strategic overextension by great powers acting on the periphery of their national interests has hobbled ancient empires and modern states” (Washington Post, September 28). Goldstein was referring to US conduct in Southeast Asia, where the US adopted as its own, the disastrous legacy of French colonialism in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). Both powers were squarely and humiliatingly defeated.

Empires don’t crumble overnight, however. A fall of an empire can be as agonizingly long as its rise. Signs of that collapse are oftentimes subtle and might not be followed by a big boom of any sort, but can be unambiguous and definite.

Since the Second World War, US foreign policy has been largely predicated on military adventures, by severely punishing enemies and controlling ‘friends’. Diplomacy was often the icing on the cake of war, wars that seemed to follow similar patterns such as targeting powerless, economically browbeaten and isolated countries. It was a successful brand while it lasted. It allowed the generals to speak of the invincibility of their military might, the politicians to boast of their global responsibilities and the media to tirelessly promote American values. Few seemed to care much for the millions of innocent people who bore the brunt of that supposed quest for democratization of the Third World.

Few US foreign policy disasters can be compared to that of the Middle East. Similar to its Southeast Asia inheritance from the French, the US ‘inherited’ the Middle East from fading British and French empires. Unlike European imperial powers, US early contacts with the region were marred with violence, whether through its support of local dictatorships, financing and arming Israel at the expense of Palestinians and other Arab nations, or finally by getting involved – some say, entangled – in lethal wars.

The problem of ‘great’ empires is that their ability to maneuver is oftentimes restricted by their sheer size and the habitual nature of their conduct. They can only move forward and when that is no longer possible, they must retreat, ushering in their demise. US foreign policy is almost stuck when it is required to be most agile. While the Middle East is finally breaking away from a once impenetrable cocoon, and China – and Russia, among others – is attempting to negotiate a new political stance, the US is frozen. It took part in the bombing of Libya because it knows of no other alternative to achieving quick goals without summoning violence. In Syria, it refuses to be a positive conduit for a peaceful transition because it is paralyzed by its military failure in Iraq and fearful over the fate of Israel, should Syria lose its political centrality.

Even if the US opts to stave off a catastrophic decline in the region, it is shackled by the invasive tentacles of Israel, the pro-Israel lobby and their massive and permeating network, which crosses over competing media, political parties and ideological agendas. The US is now destined to live by the rules – and redlines – determined by Israel, whose national interests are barely concerned with the rise or demise of America. Israel only wants to ensure its supremacy in the ‘new’ Middle East. With the rise of post-revolutionary Egypt, Israel’s challenges are growing. It fears that a nuclear Iran would deprive it from its only unique edge - its nuclear technology and massive nuclear arsenal. If Iran obtains nuclear technology, Israel might have to negotiate in good faith as an equal partner to its neighbors, a circumstance that Israel abhors. Between the Israeli hammer and the anvil of the imminent decline of all empires, the US, which has held the Middle East hostage to its foreign policy for nearly six decades, is now hostage to the limitations of that very foreign policy. The irony is an escapable.

Listening to the monotonous voice of Li Changchun, it was clear that China was in no great hurry. Nor are the other powers now eyeing with great anticipation, the endgame of the Middle East upheaval.

Listening to US President Barack Obama’s lecture to the UN’s General Assembly on September 25, as he spoke of democracy, values and the predictable and self-negating language, it seems that there is no intention in changing course or maneuvering or retreating or simply going away altogether. The empire is entangled in its own self-defeating legacy. This is to the satisfaction of its many contenders, China notwithstanding.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London.)

Eco Warriors Legal Trust Established

Announcing the Eco Warriors Legal Trust: "Legal aid for environmentalists"

by VIC FAN

At a time when the Harper government tries to brand environmental activists as "radicals" and "extremists," one group is pushing back and claiming the banner of "Eco Warriors."

One week ago, Vancouver Island Community Forest Action Network (VIC FAN) established the Eco Warriors Legal Trust. The legal defence fund is a "community chest" for court costs arising from environmental activism, especially opposition to tankers,  pipelines, and the tar sands.

Catherine Boies Parker and the public-interest law firm of Underhill Boies Parker will administer the trust at the direction of VIC FAN. On Monday, October 1, Zoe Blunt presented the trust with a cheque for $250, which represents the first week's fundraising and five percent of the campaign's $5000 goal.

The Forest Action legal trust was established in 2009 for VIC FAN vs. City of Langford, a Supreme Court petition challenging abuse of process at Langford's public hearings. The trust was transferred to Catherine Boies Parker in 2010 for the Marine Trail Resort file. It funded the legal opinion that demolished real estate baron Ender Ilkay's plans for a huge subdivision west of China Beach.

On October 22, David Suzuki and others are calling for the "largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history" in Victoria. Thousands of people are expected to risk arrest at the BC Legislature to stop tankers and pipelines. http://defendourcoast.ca

"People who risk their freedom to protect the coast are heroes," says VIC FAN director Zoe Blunt. "The least we can do is make sure they have legal representation."

*(Note: The Eco Warriors Legal Trust is not affiliated with the 2012 documentary film Eco Warriors produced by Vancouver Islander Jennifer Pickford.)

Hotline: 250-813-3569
Email: Zoe@WildCoast.ca
Web: www.WildCoast.ca

Ridin' the Carbon Corridor: Connecting the Dots Across Northern BC

 

'Canada's Carbon Corridor' Part 1: Connecting the Dots Across Northern BC

by Damian Gillis - The Canadian.ca

I recently returned from a whirlwind tour across northern BC, one of many legs of filming for a documentary and multi-media project I've been co-directing for the past year and a half, called Fractured Land. The people we spoke to along the way, the sights we witnessed and documented finally brought into focus the real story about energy development in BC.

It is clear to me that the proposed Enbridge Pipeline, which has been the target of so much activism and media attention of late, is merely one piece of a much bigger puzzle that promises to transform this province like nothing since the days of colonial, railroad-driven "nation building."

Our film and the multi-media series that will accompany it through our website, FracturedLand.com, and various social media tools, is the story the industrialization of northern BC - told through the eyes of a talented, eloquent young First Nations law student named Caleb Behn.

The two sides of Caleb's family are rooted in the epicentres of both major natural gas hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") plays in northeast BC - West Moberly Territory near Hudson's Hope, under which the Montney shale gas field extends; and Echo Dene Territory around Fort Nelson, home of the Horn River shale gas field. Taken together - along with the recently discovered neighbouring Liard Basin play - form one of the world's meccas for "unconventional" gas (read: highly experimental and dangerous).

We began our film by focusing on fracking - a relatively new method of natural gas extraction that involves burrowing deep into shale formations and blasting them with a toxic mixture of high-pressure water, chemicals and sand to crack open the shale and release the gas. But throughout our adventure, we've come to see that fracking doesn't exist in isolation. Neither does the proposed Site C Dam on the Peace River in the same region, nor gas and bitumen pipelines proposed to cut across BC's wilderness en route to Kitimat and Prince Rupert, nor myriad, massive proposed Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) plants on BC's coast, nor the dozen or more serious coal and metals mines proposed throughout the north, nor the Alberta Tar Sands.

It is a serious mistake to put any of these projects in a silo. They are all, in fact, systemically interconnected in what my colleagues and I have come to think of - at least until a more apt description emerges - as "Canada's Carbon Corridor". Before this article and its second part conclude, I will briefly illustrate this interconnected web of energy projects that extend from BC's coast to the Alberta Tar Sands - covering virtually the entire top half of the two provinces. However, the real work of fleshing out the components of this carbon corridor and how each piece relates to the next will be accomplished through a subsequent series of stories over the next two months - each exploding a different piece of the big puzzle - all cross-published through The Common Sense Canadian and the blog for Fractured Land.

Both this film project and my colleagues at The Common Sense Canadian - which has made its mission to inform the public about the energy, environmental and public policies reshaping BC and Canada - will seek to lodge this big picture view, with all its socioeconomic and cultural implications, on the agenda of the public and media in the lead-up to a pivotal provincial election next May. This is a sorely needed conversation that so far has been lost in the simplistic rhetoric championing the project of opening Western Canadian oil and gas resources to new markets in Asia and the one-track chorus of opposition to the Enbridge proposal.

If that seems unfair, allow me to state my case herewith.

We began our recent two and a half week journey in northeast BC, before traveling along the Alaska Highway through Fort Nelson, Liard Hot Springs, Watson Lake just over the Yukon Border, then down Highway 37 through the Sacred Headwaters and Tahltan First Nations country, southwest to Kitimat, east to the Morice River near Houston, and finally to Prince George to deliver a presentation to faculty and students at UNBC, before heading home to Vancouver (an approximately 5,000 km journey, all told).





Map of the recent journey around BC of the film crew of "Fractured Land"


Over the past several years, I've made seven trips to northeast BC (I'm currently here again for the "Keepers of the Water" conference in Fort Nelson) and more than that to northwest BC and its coast, but this trip - as it tied together both sides and centres of development in the province - felt like the quintessential journey through BC's proposed economic future. Through it, we traced the interconnections of this carbon corridor and met people on both sides of the arguments around these individual projects.

If there's one thing that has become abundantly clear to our production team, it's that this is a conversation which defies easy polarities. The fracturing we reference in our title, taken literally from the process of fracking, serves as a metaphor for the conflict within individuals, families and communities torn between developing economic opportunities and protecting their core values and ancestral practices on the land.

Far from shying away from this tension, we are drilling deep into it.

After driving 15 hours north from Vancouver, we began our experience at Carbon Lake, near Hudson's Hope - at a camp once owned by my great uncle, Penn Powell, who operated it as a fly-in fishing lodge for years. Today, it is owned and operated by the Saulteau First Nation - the people of our central character Caleb's grandmother.

Caleb comes here in the summer to hunt moose and reconnect with his land. Unfortunately, the moose are slim pickings these days - likely partly related to all the roads for logging that bisect the onetime wilderness surrounding the lake. Now, a large open pit coal mine threatens to finish the job. Carbon Lake gets its name for a reason. One can pick up large blocks of metallurgical-grade coal from the bed of nearby Carbon Creek, the site of one of a number of proposed new coal mines throughout the Peace River Coalfield.

To get to the lake, we had to drive over Williston Reservoir and WAC Bennett Dam - the first major dam in the region, which helped set the stage for the resource boom that followed. Caleb and my families have much in common beyond this camp at Carbon Lake, as we've learned throughout the making of our film. Another thing we share is that both our families lost our land in the flooding of Williston Reservoir in 1968. My family's land, upon which it settled in 1914, was known as Goldbar Ranch at 20 Mile. Today, many of my uncles who remain in the region work in the gas patch. As do many of Caleb's relatives. Such are the complexities inherent in the sort of large-scale resource decisions being made today - mostly without the broad-based knowledge and will of the public.

That said, Bennett Dam was built to provide affordable, "clean" (or so we thought at the time) electricity and new economic opportunities for all British Columbians. I believe my family understood that, even as we watched our barns and hand-crafted cabins and grand old log home burned to the ground and drowned forevermore.

Today, two fracking companies - Talisman Energy and Canbriam Energy - have a 20-year license to suck 10 million litres a day of water from that same reservoir (before it's converted to power for British Columbians!) for their nearby fracking operations.

Moreover, Site C - which would be the third dam in the Peace Valley, stretching 80 km east from Hudson's Hope to Fort St. John and flooding some 13,000 acres of agricultural land and a comparable amount of Boreal Forest wildlife habitat - is not being proposed to power BC's homes and businesses. We have access to plenty of electricity for those purposes. Rather, this power will go to the myriad proposed mining operations across the north and, according to Premier Christy Clark, compressing natural gas into liquid to sell to Asia. All of these industrial operations are enormously energy dependent - to the point we would need multiple Site C Dams to even begin powering them.

From Carbon Lake, our team traveled north to Fort Nelson, where we visited with the other side of Caleb's family. Fort Nelson is the jumping off point for the Horn River shale gas operations, which have been slowing down of late, due to the cratering price of natural gas, but contain enormous development potential and have been wildly active in recent years. The Cabin Gas Plant, North America's largest, is just nearing completion after several years of furious construction. The adjacent Liard Basin formation was recently touted by Apache Canada as "the best reservoir in North America" for gas fracking.

Yet little of this development will occur unless a higher price can be obtained for the resource. This relatively new method of fracking has flooded the North Americ





Bison grazing between Liard Hot springs and Watson Lake

an market with supply, driving down the price for gas, which is why new markets are being sought in Asia, where gas prices are currently much higher.

Unlike the gas plays around Fort Nelson, the Montney play - in Caleb's mother's territory, where we began our journey - often produces what is considered as "wet gas", meaning it contains other products, such as sulfur and condensate, both of which have considerable value on their own. Condensate is used to dilute bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands, which is too viscous to pump through a pipeline on its own.

This is another way in which Canada's Carbon Corridor is interconnected - both natural gas and condensate go from BC to Alberta to melt and extract bitumen and to dilute it for transport.

But the big idea, for now, is to open up new markets for northeast BC gas. If these LNG plants and the pipelines connecting northeast BC gas to northwest BC refineries proceed, you can bet Horn River activity will ramp up to new heights and the Liard Basin will be cracked wide open.

We drove near these proposed Liard operations en route to the northwest corner of the province and it is some of the most exquisite country any of us has seen. We passed through pristine valleys coursing with crystal-clear water from the Northern Rockies and by herds of majestic wild bison and various ungulate species. Our soak in the Liard Hot Springs was one the trip's big highlights - I would highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in that neck of the woods.

Watch for Part 2 of this introduction to Damien Gillis' "Canada's Carbon Corridor" series Saturday - completing the journey across northern BC to the northwest, examining everything from mining and unconventional gas proposals in the Sacred Headwaters to the construction of the Northwest Transmission Line, the Pacific Trails gas pipeline to Kitimat and proposed LNG facilities there.

Choosing Your Poison: When Evil is Absolute

Nothing More Evil

by David Swanson

 A writer at the Atlantic named Conor Friedersdorf recently noted the level of evil many have been brought to support:

"Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can't bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, and they'll nod along. Say that you'd never vote for a politician caught using the 'n'-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can discern Mitt Romney's flaws, which I've chronicled in the course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama. Don't they see that Obama's transgressions are worse than any I've mentioned? I don't see how anyone who confronts Obama's record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I'd have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers."

Not long ago, I attended a speech by Obama, along with thousands of his adoring cheerleaders formerly known as citizens. I asked him to stop killing people in Afghanistan, and the Secret Service asked me to leave. But, just now, I got a phone call from the local Obama office. They had my name because I'd picked up a ticket to attend the speech. The young woman wanted to know if I would come help phone other people. I asked if she was familiar with the president's kill list and his policy of killing men, women, and children with drones. She said she knew nothing about that but "respected my opinion." She hung up. Objecting to presidential murder is now an opinion, and willingness to be aware of its existence is an appendage to the opinion. If you don't object to presidential murder by Democrat, then you simply arrange not to know about it. Thus, in your opinion, it doesn't exist.

Some of my friends at this moment are in Pakistan apologizing to its government and its people for the endless murderous drone war fought there by our country. They're meeting with victims' families. They're speaking publicly in opposition to the crimes of our government. And my neighbors, living in some other universe, believe most fundamentally, not that one candidate will save us, not that the two parties are fundamentally opposed, not that a citizen's job is to vote, not that war is all right if it's meant well -- although they clearly believe all of those things -- but, most fundamentally, they believe that unpleasant facts should simply be avoided. So, in a spirit of afflicting the comfortable to comfort the afflicted, here are a few from recent days:

WAR IS A LIE

We know that in the past "defensive" wars have been intentionally launched by fraud or provocation. We know that many in our government want a war with Iran. We know that several years ago then-Vice President Dick Cheney proposed disguising U.S. ships as Iranian and attacking other U.S. ships with them. We know that then-President George W. Bush proposed disguising a plane as belonging to the United Nations, flying it low, and trying to get Iraq to shoot at it. We know that there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, no evidence that Spain attacked the Maine, no doubt that the weapons and troops on board the Lusitania were public knowledge, no question that FDR worked hard to provoke an attack by Japan, and so on. And we know that Iran has not attacked another nation in centuries. So, it almost goes without saying that Washington warmongers are contemplating ways to get Iran to make the "first move." Assassinating scientists hasn't worked, blowing up buildings doesn't seem to do it, cyber-war isn't blossoming into real war, sanctions are not sanctioning armed resistance, and dubious accusations of Iranian terrorism aren't sticking. Exactly what do we have to do to get ourselves innocently attacked by the forces of evil?

The Israel Lobby to the rescue! Patrick Clawson, Director of Research at the Washington Institute Of Near East Policy, blurted out the following on video this week:

"Crisis initiation is really tough. And it's very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran. . . . The traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests. Some people might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into World War II . . . . You may recall, we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War I. You may recall that he had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam. You may recall he had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn't go to war with Spain until the Maine exploded. And Mr. Lincoln did not feel he could call out the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians had said would cause an attack. So, if in fact the Iranians aren't going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war. . . . I mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean, look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down. Someday one of them might not come up. Who would know why? [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE] . . . . We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier."

This is serious advocacy for manufacturing a "defensive" and "humanitarian" war. This is not a war critic or a Yes Men prankster. The position of most elected officials in Washington, including the President, fits well with this. That position includes the ultimatum that Iran must cease doing what U.S. National Intelligence Estimates say it is not doing, namely building nuclear weapons. The goal at the bottom of all of this is war. The purpose of the war is not related to any of the excuses for it. The purpose is something else entirely. But it's ugly, so it's easier not to look.

HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

We often forget that war is the worst thing there is. Hence our government's shift in policy back to outsourcing a lot of the torture and insourcing the "cleaner" approach of assassination without torture. Hence, also, our common fantasy that war can be used to solve a problem that is somehow worse than war.

We also forget that torturing people can be crueler than experimenting on them. Torture has been given an acceptance in the United States during the past decade that "human experimentation" has not. So, we are still capable of a bit of shock when a story comes out like this one: During the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide, apparently including radioactive particles, in poor neighborhoods in St. Louis and other cities, to test the results on the people who unknowingly breathed it.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. military's Operation Paperclip brought nearly 500 Nazi scientists to the United States to work on U.S. weaponry. Many view their influence on the nascent military industrial complex as critical to its sadistic and sociopathic tendencies ever since. In fairness to the Nazis, it's possible that they simply fit in well, serving the military of a nation with a long history of genocide, slavery, torture, and public deception.

I came across a member of Veterans For Peace this week who's been struggling many years as a result of experimental vaccines and drugs given to hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers during the Gulf War. We also learned this week that every prisoner in the Guantanamo death camp has been given experimental drugs without their knowledge or at least without their consent.

And then there's this: "Congressional Probe Reveals Cover-Up of 'Auschwitz-Like' Conditions at US-Funded Afghan Hospital":

"A congressional investigation has revealed a top U.S. general in Afghanistan sought to stall an investigation into abuse at a U.S.-funded hospital in Kabul that kept patients in, quote, 'Auschwitz-like' conditions. Army whistleblowers revealed photographs taken in 2010 which show severely neglected, starving patients at Dawood Hospital, considered the crown jewel of the Afghan medical system, where the country's military personnel are treated. The photos show severely emaciated patients, some suffering from gangrene and maggot-infested wounds. For TV viewers of Democracy Now!, please be warned: these images are extremely graphic and may be disturbing."

NOTHING MORE EVIL

Here's what I'm trying to get at. If you try to think of something more evil than what we are now doing, you'll fail. Name your evil: destroying the earth's climate? President Barack Obama flew to Copenhagen to single-handedly derail any process for protecting the earth's atmosphere. The only way in which to fantasize about greater evil is quantitative, not qualitative. We could drop more bombs. We could starve more children. We could experiment on more prisoners. In fact, this is what Lesser Evilism amounts to. A Lesser Evilist today is not choosing less evil policies, but the same policies in what he or she hopes will be lesser amounts.

That might be a rational calculation within a polling place. But living it prior to and after an election, apologizing and cheering for one of two teams, as if self-governance were a spectator sport, is nothing other than complicity in the most hideous forms of cruelty and murder. That complicity is insidious. Evil begins to look like something else, because the Lesser Evilist, within his or her own mind, comes to view the Lesser Evil forces as good, if not glorious, if not saintly.



David L. Swanson is an American activist, blogger and author. warisacrime.org

AIPAC Fortunes Fading in DC?

AIPAC: Israel’s Agent Feeling Squeezed?

by Franklin Lamb, Beirut- Al Manar

The American Israel public affairs committee (AIPAC) has seen headier days according to US congressional staffers forced to work regularly with the pro-Zionist agent of Israel. The grip of fear and the lock on Congress that the Israel first organization has long touted in its service to Israel may be weakening against a backdrop of American Jews rejecting the increasing rants of Prime Minister Netanyahu that are driving many Jews to distance themselves from him, from AIPAC, from other Arabphobic US Zionist organizations, and from Israel.

AIPAC tells some Congressional aids that their fund raising is hurting and it can’t keep promises it made to certain candidates that it would arrange “indirect” funding for their current election campaigns. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is increasingly becoming the butt of jokes across the Israeli and American political spectrum. Several in his cabinet and members of the US Congress reportedly consider him an embarrassment. A perception likely added to by his recent General Assembly cartoon gimmick and his repeated Nazi style arm and hand gestures that were widely distributed by the main stream American media outlets especially Reuters, AP and even the Zionist Drudge Report.

In addition, there are signs that some members of congress and their staffs, who are regularly heavily lobbied by AIPAC to donate, are beginning to chaff under heavy handed AIPAC fundraising tactics.

Perhaps reflecting financial pressures on its free spending policies including astronomical administration costs in the 70% range, on 9/24/12, Jonathan Missner, AIPAC’s Director of National Affairs and Development sent out more 500,000 emails in a desperate and thinly veiled bid to raise cash to defeat Obama.

Wrote Missner:

Dear Friend of Israel:

I am writing because we have not yet heard from you, and your support is greatly needed by September 30th.

As I’m sure you know, Israel and America are now facing serious threats throughout the Middle East. In recent months alone we have seen:
• Protestors in multiple Arab countries storm U.S. embassies, burn American and Israeli flags, and chant "death to America, death to Israel," amidst false reports that a video was created by an Israeli Jew and backed by 100 Jewish financiers.
• Iran sent military personnel and large quantities of weapons across to Syria to aid the Assad regime's violent crackdown.
• A deadly terror attack along the Egypt-Israel border that killed 16 Egyptians and enabled terrorists to penetrate into Israel.
• Leaders in Iran and its regional proxies increased their vitriol against Israel. The frequency and intensity of these recent statements has been troubling: “Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (August 17th).
• If you’re like most pro-Israel Americans, these events have made you more scared for Israel’s existence than you’ve likely felt in many years.
• But as you watch these dangers continue to unfold, it is important to remember there is something you can do to help keep Israel safe.
• You can join AIPAC, and help ensure that our leaders in Washington speak out clearly and unequivocally in support of Israel and that the aggressions shown toward our greatest ally Israel must immediately cease.
• At this dangerous time, the number one strategic answer to the threats facing Israel is for America to express – in every possible way- an unwavering, unshakable commitment to Israel.
• We must ensure that President Obama speaks out for Israel.
• We must ensure that America stands by its full commitment to Israel’s security assistance for fiscal year 2013, which is vital for Israel to be able to defend herself.
• And we must ensure that America continues to pledge 100% of its diplomatic support to Israel.
• We must do all of this, so that we can send a strong and loud message that America stands by Israel and that any attacks on Israel’s security is an attack on America’s security.”

AIPAC appears to be failing in carrying out its orders from the Israeli Embassy in Washington “to defeat Obama, whatever is required.” The latest polls, including two commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and one from the Anti-Defamation League show Obama likely avoiding the defeat on November 6th that Tel Aviv hoped his perceived combative attitude toward Israel would produce. Obama currently leads Mitt Romney by a 69-20 percent margin among likely Jewish voters. If these polls hold, while they represent a marked decline from the 78 percent of the Jewish vote Obama got in 2008, they show Romney’s promise to put Israel “first no matter what “ is not resonating with American Jews. Romney even garnering 25% of the Jewish vote shows there is plenty of resistance to taking his candidacy seriously on a variety of domestic social issues that increasingly among the American public matter more than Israel’s zany schemes. The poll projections may have been reflected at the UN last week when Netanyahu appeared to back off a bit from his pillorying of the Obama administration as being weak on terrorism.

Meanwhile, according to an Arab American Institute (AAI) poll, 52 percent of all Arab-Americans say they plan to vote for Obama, compared to 28 percent who have declared their support for Romney. Broken down by religion, Arab American Muslims support Obama overwhelmingly (75% to 8%), while Orthodox/Protestants support Romney by a 16% margin. According to the poll, Arab American Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 margin (46% to 22%), continuing a steady migration away from the GOP toward the Democratic Party since 2002.

Congressional staffers report that the Obama White House is rejecting the tactics being employed behind its back to assert pressure for the “red lines” that Netanyahu’s has been pushing and is aware that AIPAC is actively working to defeat President Obama on November 6th.
What is confusing many in the American Jewish community appears to be the same as what perplexes a growing segment of the non-Jewish American public. And that is Netanyahu’s nonsense over Iranian progress in having nuclear weapons and the history of the Israeli promoted “the sky is falling-we must cry wolf!” canard.

It was back in April of 1984, that the British defense magazine Jane’s Defense Weekly got things started with its false claim that Iran was “engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years.”

Jane’s became embarrassed since it could offer no probative evidence to back its sensationalist claim and soon admitted that its speculation was based on a single West German intelligence source which turned out to be an assistant engineer who visited the unfinished Bushehr nuclear reactor that year and became curious. Soon, a pillar of the US Zionist lobby, US Senator Alan Cranston picked up on the report and declared that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 1991.

The next year, Benjamin Netanyahu, a onetime campaign volunteer for Cranston, and by now an Israeli parliamentarian, began a campaign to inform the World that Iran could develop nuclear weapons within “three to five years” and therefore must be stopped through “an international front headed by the US.”
The current President of Israel Shimon Peres announced in 1992 that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 1999. As noted by Robert Fisk in the UK Independent, current Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in 1996 that Iran would have a nuclear arsenal by 2004.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joined the project and reported to Congress in 1998 that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear or a biological payload that could hit the US within five years. Secretary of State Colin Powell soon claimed in 2004 that if fact, Iran had been working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. These allegations boldly came from Powell’s less than one year after his Iraqi weapons of mass destruction assertions were being proven to be false.
For his part, Netanyahu reportedly got into an ugly argument with the American ambassador to Israel last month over the Obama administration’s unwillingness to take matters regarding Iran to a more aggressive level. The Israeli prime minister was, according to the New York Times, “at his wit’s end” because, he claimed, Iran was “only four to six weeks away from a nuclear bomb”. A few weeks later, Netanyahu backtracked and pushed the deadline “to six or seven months away.”

And round and round it goes.

Congressional sources insist that White House staff will not forget Netanyahu’s blatant attempts to humiliate and defeat their boss.

The American public, as well as the international community are exhibiting exhaustion over this incessant hysteria which was summed up recently by Professor Stephen M. Walt, writing in Foreign Policy. “Those prophesying war with Iran are starting to sound like those wacky cult leaders who keep predicting the End of the World, and then keep moving the date when the world doesn't end on schedule. At what point are we going to stop paying attention?”

One Congressional source emailed: “Time will tell if next year’s AIPAC conference finds President Obama or any of his top aides on its program.”


Franklin Lamb, former Assistant Counsel, US House Judiciary Committee and Professor of International Law at Northwestern College of Law in Oregon, earned his Law Degree at Boston University and his LLM, M.Phil., and PhD degrees at the London School of Economics. Following three years at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Lamb was visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies Center.

He is currently doing research in Lebanon and volunteers with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign and the Sabra-Shatila Foundation. Lamb is the author of: Israel’s 1982 War in Lebanon: Eyewitness Chronicles of the Invasion and Occupation, South End Press, First Printing, 1983, International Legal Responsibility for the Sabra-Shatila Massacre, Imp. TIPE: 42, Rue Lebour 93100 Montreuil, Paris, France 1984, The Price We Pay: A Quarter Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons in Lebanon (Lamont Press) 2007, His latest book, The Case for Palestinian Civil Rights in Lebanon, is due out shortly.

Doctoring Assange: G&M Has Questions to Answer

2012-09-30 The Globe & Mail doctored the video of Julian Assange's address to the United Nations, changing his message.

by Sandra Finley

Anybody who listened to the video of Julian Assange’s address to the United Nations would know that it’s about failing democracy in the U.S.

The Globe & Mail edited the video to create: Assange accuses Obama of exploiting Arab Spring.

I placed markers in the Transcript; you can see what was said, and what they reported, without ANY acknowledgement that they substantially changed the video before posting it on their website.

COMPARE:
The G&M posting of Julian Assange’s address to the U.N., with no indication that it has been “doctored” to reflect the message they assigned to it, Video: Assange accuses Obama of exploiting Arab Spring.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accused U.S. President Barack Obama of exploiting the Arab uprisings for political purposes. Assange, who is hiding in an embassy in London, addressed a sideline meeting of the UN General Assembly via video conference.

It’s short, listen to the G&M doctored video: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/video/video-assange-accuses-obama-of-exploiting-arab-spring/article4571316/

2. NOW LOOK AT THE REAL THING: The video, seen by people in other countries: Julian Assange addresses UN (Full Version with Q&A)



I placed markers in the 2012-09-26 Transcript to show what the Globe & Mail deleted – - - all mention of Sgt Bradley Manning, for example.

Frankly speaking, it makes me nauseous to see the dishonesty and distortion done by the G&M.

The Assange coverage clearly shows that the G&M are propagandists for the American administration.

John Stackhouse became editor-in-chief of the G&M in 2009 after a stint as editor of The Globe’s Report on Business. He needs to be fired. There’s the 2012-09-30 The Globe & Mail’s handling of Margaret Wente’s plagiarism , and now this coverage of Julian Assange’s address to the United Nations, a clear statement.

Maya Naser: Dying for Truth in Syria

Killed for Exposing Truth

by Finian Cunningham

He knew what was at stake. “My people are dying and I am waiting my turn,” he wrote. Maya knew that powerful forces were at work maligning his country.

The 33-year-old journalist placed his own life in danger on several occasions because he wanted the world to know the truth about the real cause of suffering afflicting the Syrian people.

Despite receiving death threats for his critical reporting, he courageously returned to the line of duty time and again. Maya, from Syria, was said by colleagues to be painfully concerned by the suffering of ordinary people. He wanted their truth, their voices to be heard.

The day he was killed was typical of his spirit. When two powerful bombs rocked the centre of the capital, Damascus, on Wednesday morning, Maya and his Press TV colleagues were first on the scene, as Syrian army forces fought gun battles with the perpetrators. He was fatally wounded while doing his job of “getting the story” and factually reporting for the Syrian public and the wider world.

While the Western media would misreport, often from remote offices in the region, on how the Syrian army was bombarding civilian districts and shooting on innocent protesters, Maya would take great personal risk to report on the ground from places like Aleppo. His reports were real, not second-hand versions from un-named “activists” based in Britain and other countries. Crucially, his brave journalism provided a corrective view of what was really happening in Syria.

He knew what was at stake. “My people are dying and I am waiting my turn,” he wrote. Maya knew that powerful forces were at work maligning his country. He knew that Western governments, the US, Britain and France, were fuelling a covert war of aggression in his country by arming foreign mercenaries, who for the past 18 months have unleashed atrocities and carnage on the Syrian people. Yet all the while, these Western governments and their powerful media organizations have turned reality on its head by insisting that the violations are being committed by the Syrian government against its people and the “rebels”.

Maya knew that regional powers like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel are also colluding in the foreign conspiracy to destroy his country and to replace the government of President Bashar al-Assad with an entity that would serve the interests of foreign powers, not the interests of his people. A professed Christian, Maya knew that the sabotage of his country was based on the tactic of whipping up sectarian fears between Muslims and Christians, to wreck centuries of peaceful coexistence and tolerance, to replace that with factionalism and tribalism that would best serve the interests of foreign powers.

The conspiracy against Syria is real. It is not just rhetoric plied by the Assad government. The people of Syria have been living under a foreign-backed reign of terror since March 2011. Yet, the Western media, as well as those backed by the Saudi and Qatari monarchs, Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, have indulged in the most fantastic fabrications and illusions.

Some 20 journalists have been killed so far in Syria’s violence, most of them Syrian nationals. Many others have been kidnapped or wounded. Most of the attacks have been carried out by Western-backed mercenaries against Syrian journalists who are deemed to telling the truth about the Western-backed terrorism in their country. Saudi and Qatari-backed satellite platforms have even blocked Syrian news channels in a bid to choke the truth and prevent the world from understanding what is really going on in Syria.

Month after month, the barrage of lies and distortions from the New York Times, CNN, Financial Times, BBC, the Independent, Guardian, the Irish Times, to name a few, has served the political agenda of “regime change” by the Western governments in Syria.

Massacres have been blamed on government forces whenever they were perpetrated by Western and Arab-backed mercenaries; car bombs in cities causing the deaths of hundreds have been misattributed to Machiavellian psy-ops by Assad’s military intelligence; CNN and Al Jazeera have even engaged in fabricating atrocities and falsely claiming they were carried out by the Syrian army; the BBC has removed footage that clearly shows violations by the so-called rebels.

Maya Naser was well aware of the disservice to the truth and to his country that foreign powers and their supposed independent news media are engaging in. He knew that the bigger picture was one of twisting world public opinion to perversely blame the victims of violence and to champion the perpetrators. He knew that this veil of lies and demonization was setting the scene for illegal foreign military intervention in his country, to “liberate” the Syrian people from the very violence that these foreign powers have unleashed, criminally, on his country.

Even reporting his death this week, the Western media could not find the integrity to tell the truth. The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Reuters and Irish Times, for example, all reported that Maya was killed by “a sniper”. Invariably, they attributed the source “according to Press TV”. Using innuendo, these media went on to remind the reader that Press TV is an Iranian channel, and that Iran is a supporter of the Assad government in Syria. None of these media would prominently report that Maya had received death threats, that these death threats were issued by Western-backed mercenaries, nor that his death was finally caused by foreign militants that have been infiltrated into Syria to commit acts of terrorism. No, these media would only report that he was killed “by a sniper” - thus once again shrouding the nature of conflict in Syria in mystery.

The day before Maya was killed, US President Barack Obama regaled the United Nations General Assembly in New York with his usual act of sanctimony and pious words. The man who secretly draws up weekly assassination lists for drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, lectured the assembly on the rights and virtues of free speech and freedom of information. “True democracy… depends on the freedom of citizens to speak their minds and assemble without fear,” Obama intoned with high-minded gravitas.

Well less than 24 hours later when a fearless young Syrian journalist went out to practice Obama’s principles, he was cut down by American-backed terrorists on the streets of Damascus.

Thanks to the courage of Maya Naser, the world is given a far more accurate view of the violence bearing down on Syria. While the supposed august Western media organizations have displayed the most pathetic servile dependency on Western governments, Maya actually lived, fulfilled and died for the principles of truthful, independent journalism. His journalism empowers people to make accurate judgments and to determine the truth of violence and who the perpetrators are. May he now rest in peace.



Finian Cunningham is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He specialises in Middle East and East Africa issues.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Byron Christopher, Dave Lindorff, Janine Bandcroft Oct. 1, 2012

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

 We are indeed, on October 1st, 2012,  living in "interesting times." Even as wars and rumours of war nightly compete for space on the news with super typhoons, earthquakes, drought, floods, famine, and environmental degradation, the pitiful beast that is 'the modern world' daily labours still to enlarge its crapulence.

The purportedly ancient Chinese "May you" aphorism is the first in a series of curses that include: "May you come to the attention of Authority" and, "May your wishes be granted." Famed Canadian "eco-warrior" Wiebo Ludwig lived through the first two curses, and got the last laugh on the third when he died in April, content with his life, and at peace with his wish to die in God's grace.

But, death was not the end of Wiebo's fight with the authorities that plagued him - he had one more interesting battle to win.

Listen. Hear.

Byron Christopher is an award-winning, Edmonton, Alberta-based print and radio journalist who has spent the better part of his career chronicling the hard-boiled crime beat. Before settling in Western Canada, Christopher filed stories from four continents, working for the CBC, and CHED 630 among others. His investigations into the criminal activities of Calgary-based Talisman Energy led to that company's ignominious retreat from Sudan.

He freelances now, his reports available at, ByronChristopher.org - No News Release Journalism, and at The Dominion paper.ca among other places online. Byron was the last reporter to talk to Wiebo Ludwig before he succumbed to esophogeal cancer last Spring, and the first one contacted by Ludwig's closest friend, Richard Boonstra when the RCMP decided it wanted one more fight with the patriarch of the Christian community "living off the land" in Alberta's remote Peace River country.

Byron Christopher in the first half.

And; from "interesting" to times of Biblical proportions: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a turn through the United States last week. The ostensible reason for the trip was the annual United Nations confab, but Netanyahu's ulterior purpose was to bang the drum again for an American intervention in Iran.

Israel has had its Hasbara, or propaganda program, on high heat beneath the Islamic Republic for more than a half-dozen years, and had hoped to use the upcoming U.S. election as a pressure point to spur Obama to further action. It now seems, Netanyahu and his far-right Likud Party colleagues miscalculated both the president and Jewish-American sentiment.

Dave Lindorff is an award-winning muck raking journalist, founder of the news website, This Can't Be Happening.org, and author of the books: 'This Can't Be Happening: Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy,' 'Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains,' and 'Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.' He is also co-author, with Barbara Olshansky of, 'The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office.' Dave is too recipient of a 2011 Project Censored award for his expose, 'Toxic Intervention,' an uncovering of the use of Depleted Uranium by NATO forces during the "liberation" of Libya.

Dave Lindorff and the decline of the Jewish Lobby's influence in Washington in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz from our city's streets and beyond.

But first, Byron Christopher and Wiebo Ludwig's posthumous battle with the RCMP.