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Prior to the U.S. intelligence community’s 2007 assessment that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapons program, there was a scramble among U.S. and Israeli officials to show that it was.
The CIA’s Operation Merlin also revealed that U.S. officials were not above planting false evidence, writes Norman Solomon.
Iranian women attending a speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Iranian gov't photo)
A month after former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was convicted on nine felony counts with circumstantial metadata, the zealous prosecution is now having potentially major consequences — casting doubt on the credibility of claims by the U.S. government that Iran has work on a nuclear weapons program.
With negotiations between Iran and the United States at a pivotal stage, fallout from the trial’s revelations about the CIA’s Operation Merlin is likely to cause the International Atomic Energy Agency to re-examine U.S. assertions that Iran has pursued nuclear weapons.
In its zeal to prosecute Sterling for allegedly leaking classified information about Operation Merlin — which provided flawed nuclear weapon design information to Iran in 2000 — the U.S. government has damaged its own standing with the IAEA. The trial made public a treasure trove of information about the Merlin operation.
Last week Bloomberg News reported from Vienna, where IAEA is headquartered, that the agency “will probably review intelligence they received about Iran as a result of the revelations, said the two diplomats who are familiar with the IAEA’s Iran file and asked not to be named because the details are confidential.”
The Bloomberg dispatch, which matter-of-factly referred to Merlin as a “sting” operation, quoted a former British envoy to the IAEA, Peter Jenkins, saying: “This story suggests a possibility that hostile intelligence agencies could decide to plant a ‘smoking gun’ in Iran for the IAEA to find. That looks like a big problem.”
After sitting through the seven-day Sterling trial, I don’t recall that the government or any of its witnesses — including 23 from the CIA as well as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — ever referred to Operation Merlin as a “sting.” Instead, it was consistently portrayed as an effort to send Iran down the wrong technical path. In fact, over the years, Operation Merlin may have been both.
Near the end of the Clinton administration, CIA documents released at the trial show, Merlin was a botched effort to screw up Iran’s nuclear program. (There is no evidence that Iran’s government took the bait.) But documents also show that Merlin continued for years, with the CIA considering plans to widen the operation beyond Iran.
As a matter of fact, one CIA document was not redacted sufficiently to hide evident interest in also trying a similar tactic against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. History certainly tells us that the Bush-Cheney administration would be capable of seeking to cite fabricated evidence in a push to justify military action against a targeted country.
Investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler, my colleague at ExposeFacts, has written an extensive analysis of the latest developments. The article on her EmptyWheel blog raises key questions beginning with the headline “What Was the CIA Really Doing with Merlin by 2003?”
An emerging big irony of United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is that the government has harmed itself in the process of gunning for the defendant. While the prosecution used innuendos and weak circumstantial evidence to obtain guilty verdicts on multiple felonies, the trial produced no actual evidence that Sterling leaked classified information. But the trial did provide abundant evidence that the U.S. government’s nuclear-related claims about Iran should not be trusted.
In the courtroom, one CIA witness after another described Operation Merlin as a vitally important program requiring strict secrecy. Yet the government revealed a great deal of information about Operation Merlin during the trial — including CIA documents that showed the U.S. government to be committed to deception about the Iranian nuclear program.
If, as a result, the International Atomic Energy Agency concludes that U.S. assertions about an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program lack credibility, top officials in Washington will have themselves to blame.
Norman Solomon is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He is a co-founder of RootsAction.org.
An explosive new report in The Guardian claims the Chicago police are operating a secret compound for detentions and interrogations, often with abusive methods. According to The Guardian, detainees as young as 15 years old have been taken to a nondescript warehouse known as Homan Square. Some are calling it the domestic equivalent of a CIA "black site" overseas.
Prisoners were denied access to their attorneys, beaten and held for up to 24 hours without any official record of their detention. Two former senior officials in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice are calling on their colleagues to launch a probe into allegations of excessive use of force, denial of right to counsel and coercive interrogations. We speak to Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian. We are also joined by Victoria Suter, who was held at Homan Square after being arrested at the NATO protests in Chicago in 2012.
Spencer Ackerman,
national security editor at The Guardian, where he has published a two-part series on police abuse in Chicago.
Victoria Suter,
traveled to Chicago on May 12th, 2012 to attend the NATO
protest. On May 16th, she and 11 others were taken to Homan Square in
Chicago after police raided the apartment where they were staying. Sutor
spent 18 hours in solitary confinement before being allowed to speak to
a lawyer.
The three conglomerates that dominate print media in Canada—Torstar, which publishes the Toronto Star, the country’s largest daily newspaper; Woodbridge, which publishes The Globe and Mail, the largest national daily; and Postmedia, which controls the daily newspapers of most cities in English Canada–speak on Ukraine as though they all attended the same indoctrination sessions.
Insignia of Army SOS, one of the far right projects promoted by Toronto Star writers
Viewed through their prism, Ukraine is topsy-turvy and bears little resemblance to reality. Human rights, moral standards and the concerns of the people of the east of the country are given no standing, no voice and no sympathy.
Among the three, the Star has distinguished itself in that three of its writers have used their column and article space to vaunt the fundraising projects of Ukraine’s extreme-right parties and militias and the Ukraine army. These are the forces which have been shelling towns and cities in eastern Ukraine and otherwise committing countless war crimes for the better part of the past year.
I raised a hue about the fundraising in an article dated January 30. It was published in CounterPunch and Rabble.ca, drawing attention to two articles in the preceding six weeks, including one by seasoned Star Foreign Affairs Reporter Olivia Ward, which promoted pro-war fundraising. I accused the Star of “running with the extreme right in Ukraine”.
Earlier, on December 29, I published a letter responding to a December 23 article by Star writer Tanya Talaga which first introduced Star readers to ‘Patriot Defense. Its campaign, I explained, funds ‘first aid’ kits and training “being provided to members of the special Battalions, the National Guard, the Army and the Border Service and other security agencies. We are working together with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence”. Note the “working together” language indicating this is a straight-up effort of the rightist battalions (which tolerate Ukraine’s elected institutions at the best of times and are known to threaten to overthrow them if the extreme right is not given its political way). I complained to the writer and to the Star editors, to no avail.
Counterpunch and Rabble.ca are widely read, so I thought it safe to assume that my January 30 article came to the attention of the Star‘s editors, if not its writers. In point of fact, for the past year, I have sent many e-mails and copies of articles to Star editors and columnists, pointing out the newspaper’s one-sided and simplistic ‘blame Russia’ interpretations of events in Ukraine.
So how did the Star respond to my January 30 article? Why, it came back with two more fundraising appeals!
On January 31, it published an article promoting a stage play in Toronto which is raising funds for the ‘Patriot Defense’ fundraising campaign of extremist battalions. Star writer Leslie Ferenc provided a description of the play and the seemingly noble and heroic aims of ‘Patriot Defense’. She cited the playwright’s description of the origin of the political conflict and war in Ukraine as “an atrocity against humanity which became a full-blown Russian invasion”.
On Saturday, February 7, the Star published a front-page article by Olivia Ward which advocates fundraising for ‘SOS Army’ in Ukraine. This outfit has been providing arms and equipment to the Ukraine army, to the Ukrainian National Guard (which is largely composed of volunteers from the extremist parties in Ukraine), and to the battalions that are the militias of the extreme right.
The most shocking part of the Olivia Ward riposte is that among the items funded by ‘SOS Army‘ is technology for improved artillery sighting.
The Ukraine army and militias have been conducting war crimes against the civilians of eastern Ukraine during the past nine months through indiscriminate artillery and rocket attacks against towns and cities. These are the war crimes of which the mainstream media dares not speak or write. The crimes have included the use of cluster weapons, as documented by the New York Times, by Human Rights Watch and, most recently, by the observer mission in Ukraine of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Human Rights Watch has been obliged to speak out a second time against the use of cluster weapons because it was ignored by Kyiv the first time. That was in October, when the rights agency and the Times published separate investigations, each concluding that Kyiv is using cluster weapons. Human Rights Watch returned to the subject on February 4, 2015 because, it says, the Ukraine government failed to explain itself back in October and, worse, continues to use the weapons. Cluster weapons are banned in an international treaty, but Ukraine and the United States are among the countries that have refused to sign it. (Canada has signed the treaty but has failed to adopt an implementation process. Treaty statuses by country here.)
A Ukrainian language blog report encourages financial donations to ‘SOS Army’ by describing the benefits of more accurate artillery shelling. “For the price of a few sleepless nights, a computer technology team created an artillery sighting calculator that allows to quickly calculate and fire. Ballistic tables for all types of weapons help our gunners immediately calculate and adjust their shooting, dramatically improving their accuracy and avoiding mistakes.
“Fighters in the front are very pleased to no longer lug around bulky books, heavy iron plates and old topographic maps.”
It’s hard to know what “mistakes” this promotion material is citing. There have been way too many—tens of thousands—of artillery strikes in eastern Ukraine in the past nine months on houses, apartment buildings, workplaces, buses, hospitals, schools and kindergartens, among other locations, to believe for a nanosecond that any of these are cases of “mistakes”.
Another improvement for artillery against enemy fighters, not to speak of civilians and infrastructure, is provided by drone technology. Here too, SOS Army fundraising helps to equip the Ukraine army, not to speak of fascist paramilitary battalions. Here is a YouTube video promoting that effort.
And for a donation to ‘SOS Army’, you, too, can have your very own t-shirt carrying the stirring message, ‘Putin is a fucker’.
The blog report claims that SOS Army is a registered charitable foundation in the United States, United Kingdom and Spain.
So let’s pause here to see if we have this right. Canada’s largest newspaper, the only one still known to employ many writers and columnists with liberal and socially progressive views, is somehow caught up in fundraising for the armed forces of a neo-conservative government in Ukraine and its allied fascist extremists, who are bombing and shelling civilians in the east of the country. How could this be?
Sadly, the direction comes from the top. The Toronto Star has vigorously editorialized in favour of the war–oops, pardon me, I should say the ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’, as Kyiv calls it—in eastern Ukraine since it was launched last April. No dissenting voice from that course is permitted in the newspaper’s pages. Its fundraising pitches on behalf of the war date back to at least September 11 of last year when the right-wing Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) staged a gala fundraising event featuring Prime Minister Stephen Harper and professional hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. The Star wrote a glowing review of that event (timed on the anniversary of the world’s most publicized terrorist attack, and I don’t mean Hiroshima or Nagasaki). It took place only a few weeks after the Star ignored the news, reported on the CBC and some other mainstream outlets, of the UCC-organized Ukraine Independence Day event in Toronto that was attended by a federal cabinet minister and the premier of the province. It prominently featured a fundraising booth of the Right Sector fascist paramilitaries of Ukraine.
The latest Star editorial gives voice to the continued war course, saying, “Russian President Vladimir Putin has been the aggressor all along and, if this latest effort at peace fails, it’s important that he pay an escalating price for his deadly bellicosity.” But it goes further than sanctions by holding out the option of military escalation:
In the run-up to the latest round of peace talks, both U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper held open the possibility of supplying Ukraine with high-tech defensive weapons. That option requires further analysis given that key allies, including Merkel and France’s President François Hollande, remain opposed.
But it may soon prove necessary if Putin remains immune to arguments based on reason, economic pressure, and simple decency.
It is shocking to think that the ideological heirs in today’s Ukraine of the dark forces of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes of that era are today’s heroes in the pages of the likes of the Toronto Star.[1] All the more shocking when one considers that NATO’s threats and escalations in eastern Europe raise the nightmare specter of a horror some may mistakenly believe no longer haunts humanity—nuclear war.
There is an urgency in Canada as well as in other NATO countries of seizing the occasion of the ceasefire in Ukraine to promote more discussion and debate about the high stakes in the Ukraine war. Antiwar protest is needed. Indeed, a wholesale rejuvenation of an antiwar movement is in order, including to oppose the economic sanctions against Russia. Sanctions serve to set the stage for escalating military threats.
Following the encouraging victory of the Syriza Party in the recent Greek election, and with the climate emergency becoming ever more urgent, this is not the time to be leaving the destiny of the Earth in the hands of crazed warmongers.
Roger Annis is a frequent writer on the war in Ukraine. He is an editor of the website New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond. The website publishes daily news and analysis by its editors and contributors and it reprints articles from other sources. This article first appeared in Counterpunch on Feb. 20, 2015.
Notes:
To be fair to the Star, it is not alone in covering up the role of the extreme right in Ukraine and otherwise disseminating confusion and disarray. The Globe and Mail editors are just about as bellicose (stopping short of calling for arms shipments to Kyiv in their Feb. 13 editorial). And last December, the Globe and Mail‘s European correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, wrote a substantial article summing up the situation in Ukraine. He expressed befuddlement over Ukraine’s painful experience during World War Two, specifically the collaboration of large numbers of right-wing Ukrainians with Nazi Germany. I wrote a rejoinder to his article at the time. MacKinnon described the deeply divisive historical debate in Ukraine over the war as “an angry argument about whose grandfathers were on the right side of the Second World War, when Hitler fought Stalin in Ukraine”. Aha, it seems that in light of more recent events, World War Two was not a war against fascism after all, as I was taught in my school years in Canada and as my family members who served in the war believed. It was a war where, in Ukraine at least, “Hitler fought against Stalin”. And Germany did not invade the Soviet Union and kill upwards of 20 million people; no, “Hitler fought Stalin”. (By the way, this reads like a version of the rising, revisionist “double genocide” school of World War two history which posits that Hitler’s crimes may be explained, at least in part, by equal, or perhaps worse, crimes attributed to the leaders of the Soviet Union.)
In the years since 9/11, American police alone have killed at least twice as many Americans as died in that single large event, the annual toll of police killings being somewhere between 500 and 1,000, the variation owing to many such events going inaccurately reported by police.
Each year, somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand Americans are killed in automobiles, the level having declined in recent years. Each year about 15,000 Americans are murdered, down from about 25,000 not too many years ago. Each year about 100,000 Americans are killed by medical malpractice. About 40,000 Americans commit suicide annually. These are just a few causes of death in America, not the largest ones but some of the more interesting.
Let’s get a rough total estimate of what has happened to Americans from these causes in the time since 9/11. Just using the low number in each case for fourteen years, 7,000 Americans were killed by their own police, 420,000 were killed by something parked in their garage, 210,000 were murdered by fellow citizens, 1,400,000 were killed by friendly family doctors, and there were 560,000 who just decided to pack it in for one reason or another. The total of these various causes of death rounds to 2, 600,000 deaths, nearly 867 times the number of Americans killed in 9/11, 867 collapsed sets of twin towers, nearly 62 collapsed sets of towers per year.
So why are we spending countless billions of dollars fighting terror, an almost insignificant threat to our well-being? We spend a total by various estimates of between 1 and 5 trillion dollars (yes, that’s trillion with a “t”), although such totals can never accurately be given owing to secrecy, false accounting, and the immense waste that is an inherent part of all military and intelligence operations. Even in the crudest military terms of “bang for the buck,” ignoring all the death and destruction and ethical issues, just as the military routinely does in its grim work, the War on Terror has to be the greatest misdirection of resources in all of human history.
Or is it? Perhaps there are other reasons for the War on Terror, reasons never discussed in newspapers or on news broadcasts, reasons which make the expenditure of such colossal amounts against such an insignificant risk acceptable to those doing the spending? Unless American leaders are all lunatics, I think there must be.
Most people are aware that the War on Drugs has been a stupendous flop, with a great deal of resources having bought nothing except a general diminishment of personal freedoms, construction of new prisons, and make-work employment for many unnecessary police and prison guards. But each year the War on Terror spends many, many times the amount spent on the War on Drugs, and what has it bought us? A far greater debasement of freedoms, almost wiping clean parts of the Bill of Rights, raising to a high status in our society such dark and anti-democratic forces as security agents of every kind and the military, increasing exponentially the secrecy of government and thus giving voters no hope for an informed ballot, making countless future enemies in the world, and causing Americans willy-nilly to support filthy acts identical to the hateful work of military juntas who made tens of thousands of civilians disappear.
I think there are only a couple of explanations for this waste of resources which otherwise employed could have made the world an immeasurably better place. They are assisted greatly by what I’ll call the “crime in the news” effect, although I might just as well call it the “advertising effect,” because advertising works on people’s minds through its seeming omnipresence and repetition planting suggestions, suggestions not entirely different to those planted by the stage-performer hypnotist in the minds of his volunteers from the audience.
It has been demonstrated many times that daily reports of violent crime, even when the crimes occur outside a listening community, cause people to become apprehensive about many ordinary activities such as letting kids walk to school or go to the park to play. And no advertising campaign in history could begin to compare to the complete audience saturation of “terror this or that” in our newspapers, magazines, and on-air. Surely, no totalitarian government ever more completely blanketed its people with fearful suggestions than does America’s “free press” today. You literally cannot hear a news broadcast or read a newspaper with the word terror missing, a fact which keeps most people in an unquestioning frame of mind about what properly should be regarded as sinfully immense expenditures to no useful purpose, at the same time conditioning them to surrender precious freedoms. For most people, the fact is that fear overcomes both logic and courage.
Americans, along with people in other lands heavily under American influence, have voluntarily given up claims to what we believed were well-established rights. Yes, there is some controversy over the high-tech equivalent of Big Brother’s telescreens, over the construction of immense new or expanded agencies such as the TSA and NSA, and even some over a seemingly-endless set or wars, but much less than you might have expected. There has been relatively little controversy over America’s smashing its adherence to everything from the Geneva Conventions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the complete disregard for established basic principles of common law in America’s international behavior goes largely unremarked, at least in America.
In a very real sense, America’s establishment, its government within the government consisting of leaders in security and the military and of its great corporations, has been given licence to create a kind of Frankenstein monster which now stands ready with terrible powers to do its bidding. It certainly isn’t just terrorists who need fear, it is every person with the impulse in his or her breast for justice, fairness, and human decency, and it is every country which has an impulse for independence from America’s imperious declarations of how they should carry on their affairs. I don’t like the expression New World Order, but it does in fact communicate something of what has been pursued relentlessly by America’s establishment since 9/11 with an unbounded sense of its entitlement and privilege. The awesome creature it has brought to life - which already runs secret prisons, tortures, conducts non-judicial killings, and supports horrible governments in many places - is no respecter of principles or human rights or even basic decency. We all know from history and common experience that over time any well-funded, established, and privileged institution grows, altering the terms of its charter and spreading its influence always farther, just as today American intelligence, bound by charter not to spy on Americans, spies on them all the time through various technical arrangements effectively going around its charter.
This monster serves ambitions abroad – crush democracy anywhere it proves inconvenient or a barrier to the interests of America’s establishment, as in Ukraine and in Egypt and as attempted in Venezuela, but also crush old arrangements which have produced advancing societies in other lands, even though they are not yet democratic, as in Syria, Iraq, or Libya.
In a relatively short time the monster has made a chaotic wasteland of such previously prosperous lands as Iraq and Libya, and it is now hard at work doing the same to the lovely, ancient land of Syria where it is allied in its efforts with some of the ugliest violent fanatics you could hope to find anywhere. Its acts have resulted in many hundreds of thousands of deaths in these places, countless refugees and injuries, the destruction of much precious infrastructure, and left people to wallow in chaos for years to come.
It created a coup, and thereby a civil war, in Ukraine, reducing that impoverished land still further, and it allied itself for the effort with the kind of stormfront militia trash that even the pathetic FBI surely would infiltrate and investigate were they active in the United States. It did all this just to gain temporary psychological advantages over Russia, a country whose leadership today far better represents principles of international peace and good order – not without some distant echo of irony for those of us raised on a steady diet of Cold War propaganda - than those in Washington who never stop mouthing slogans about rights and democracy which they routinely ignore. We all have an immense investment in America’s reckless game of “playing chicken” with Russia, the only country on the planet capable of obliterating most of Western civilization. I’ve never liked frat-boy pranks and humor, but in this case the overgrown frat-boys at the CIA are guffawing over stupidities which risk most of what we hold precious.
But the monster serves also to intimidate America’s own population. Don’t hold big or noisy demonstrations against injustice, don’t complain too much about authorities and truly abusive police, don’t communicate with others who may be viewed as undesirables for whatever reasons by the government, and don’t describe any group which has been arbitrarily-declared terrorist as being merely freedom fighters – any of these acts or many others risks arbitrary powers that never formally existed before.
Homeland Security has stocked huge amounts of crowd-control equipment and weapons, and it was a military general who quietly announced a few years back that the Pentagon was prepared should martial law became necessary in America. America’s local police forces, long ago having earned an international reputation for violent, militaristic behavior, have been given surplus military-grade crowd-control equipment. The FBI seeks new authorities and capabilities regularly, the same FBI with such a sorry record, going back to its origins, of abusing authority.
In my mind, and I think in the minds of many, America’s posture towards the world resembles a pug-ugly bully confronting you on the street, someone who just will not let you pass until you give him what he demands. The bully is the country’s immensely wealthy and influential privileged establishment, having the country’s general population now completely in tow, fearful and intimidated, quite apart from being in large part underemployed or unemployed. The bully naturally pays no attention to international organizations and agreements, believing himself above the rules and constraints to which others hold. The organizations are either simply ignored or, as in the case of the UN, coerced into behaving along acceptable lines, America having spent some years recently refusing to pay its legally-required dues just to prove a point as well as having been involved in more than one cabal to unseat a disliked Secretary General.
And I fear this gives us just a hint of what is likely to come because, as we should never stop reminding ourselves, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The world’s hope for relief from a form of international tyranny comes from the growth of countries like Russia, China, India, and Brazil. I wish I could add the EU to the list, but it seems almost as supine and voiceless as America’s own general population or Canada’s present government. Only forces capable of saying “no” to America’s establishment and building interest blocs to oppose its excesses offer redress and relief in future, and it is only through political contention that new international organizations are likely to emerge, ones with some power and effect. Americans all give lip service to competition in economics, but the concept applies no less to the spheres of politics and world affairs. And Americans all give lip service to democracy, not realizing that its governing elites represent the tiniest fraction of the world’s population and resemble in their acts abroad about as aristocratic a government as ever existed.
John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. http://chuckman.blog.ca/
Next week marks another
of Haiti's too many "days that live in infamy." Before the February 29th, 2004
sun rose on Port-au-Prince, soldiers sat in the shadow waiting for the signal to
overthrow a president.
As the sun set, Jean Bertrand Aristide, the most
popular of all popularly elected presidents in the Americas, would be a prisoner
on a plane high above the Atlantic Ocean; destination unknown.
Ives is too a filmmaker who has collaborated on many films
documenting human rights abuses, trade struggles, and conflicts between the
island's peasant farmers and corrupt State enterprise. He's contributed to the
books: 'Dangerous Crossroads,' 'The Haiti Files,' and Haiti: A Slave
Revolution,' and appeared on many international news programs promoting the
cause of Haiti's disenfranchised, travelling Canada and the U.S to deliver
lectures on the persistently dire situation there.
Kim Ives in the first half.
And; Valentine's Day has for the last 25 years marked a more sombre
remembrance than romance; it's the day Canadian women and their supporters march
in memory of those afflicted by physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual
violence. These women are the killed and disappeared and the march is an effort
to bring to them "courage and committment to end the violence."
Sounds from the 25th Annual Women’s Memorial March in the second
half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with
some of what's going on in and around our city in the coming week. But first,
Haiti eleven years after Aristide.
In Britain, 700 artists, including many household names, pledged a cultural boycott of Israel, and a leader of the Board of Deputies, the representative body of UK Jews, quit, saying he could no longer abide by its ban on criticising Israel.
Across the Atlantic, the student body of one of the most prestigious US universities, Stanford, voted to withdraw investments from companies implicated in Israel’s occupation, giving a significant boost to the growing international boycott (BDS) movement.
Meanwhile, a CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans, and three-quarters of those under 50, believed the US foreign policy should be neutral between Israel and Palestine.
This drip-drip of bad news, as American and European popular opinion shifts against Israel, is gradually changing the west’s political culture and forcing Israel to rethink its historic alliances.
The deterioration in relations between Israel and the White House is now impossible to dismiss, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama lock horns, this time over negotiations with Iran.
The US was reported last week to be refusing to share with Israel sensitive information on the talks, fearful it will be misused. A senior Israeli official described it as like being evicted from the “deluxe guest suite” in Washington. “Astonishing doesn’t begin to describe it,” he said.
The fall-out is spreading to the US Congress, where for the first time Israel is becoming a partisan issue. A growing number of Democrats have declared they will boycott Netanyahu’s address to the Congress next month, when he is expected to try to undermine the Iran talks.
Things are more precarious still in Europe. Several leading parliaments have called on their governments to recognise Palestinian statehood, and France rocked Israel by backing just such a resolution recently in the UN Security Council.
Europe has also begun punishing Israel for its intransigence towards the Palestinians. It is labelling settlement products and is expected to start demanding compensation for its projects in the occupied territories the Israeli army destroys.
This month 63 members of the European Parliament went further, urging the European Union to suspend its “association agreement”, which allows Israel unrestricted trade and access to special funding.
None of this has gone unnoticed in Israel. A classified report by the foreign ministry leaked last month paints a dark future. It concludes that western support for the Palestinians will increase, the threat of European sanctions will grow, and the US might even refuse to “protect Israel with its veto” at the UN.
Israel is particularly concerned about the economic impact, given that Europe is its largest trading partner. Serious sanctions could ravage the economy.
One might assume that, faced with these drastic calculations, Israel would reconsider its obstructive approach to peace negotiations and Palestinian statehood. Not a bit of it.
Netanyahu’s officials blame the crisis with Washington on Obama, implying that they will wait out his presidency for better times to return.
As for Europe, Netanyahu blames the shift there on what he calls “Islamisation”, suggesting that Europe’s growing Muslim population is holding the region’s politicians to ransom. On this view, the price paid for the recent terror attacks in Paris and Copenhagen is Europe’s support for Israel.
Instead, Netanyahu has begun looking elsewhere for economic – and ultimately political – patrons.
In doing so, he is returning to an early Israeli tradition. The state’s founders were inspired by the collectivist ideals of the Soviet Union, not US individualism. And in return for attacking Egypt in 1956, Israel was secretly helped by Britain and France to build nuclear weapons over stiff US opposition.
In response to recent developments, Netanyahu announced last month that he was courting trade with China, India and Japan – comprising nearly 40 per cent of the planet’s population.
Last year, for the first time, Israel did more trade with these Asian giants than with the US. Much of it focused on the burgeoning arms market, with Israel supplying nearly $4 billion worth of weapons in 2013. A region once implacably hostile to Israel is throwing open its doors.
India, plagued by border tensions with Pakistan and China, is now Israel’s largest arms purchaser – and such trade is expected to expand further following the election last year of Narendra Modi, known for his anti-Muslim views.
He has lifted the veil off India’s growing defence cooperation with Israel, one reason why Moshe Yaalon last week became the first Israeli defence minister to make an official visit.
Ties between Israel and China are deepening rapidly too. Beijing has become Israel’s third largest trading partner, while Israel is China’s second biggest supplier of military technology after Russia.
Last month the two signed a three-year cooperation plan, with China keen to exploit – in addition to Israel’s military hardware – its innovations on solar energy, irrigation and desalination.
Emmanuel Navon, an international relations expert at Tel Aviv University, claims that, despite its poor public image, Israel now enjoys a “global clout” unprecedented in its history.
Israel’s immediate goal is to future-proof itself economically against mounting popular pressure in Europe and the US to act in favour of the Palestinian cause.
But longer term Israel hopes to convert Chinese and Indian dependency on Israeli armaments – based on technology it tests and refines on a captive Palestinian population – into diplomatic cover. One day Israel may be relying on a Chinese veto at the UN, not a US one.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
More than 100 pilot whales have died following a series of tragic mass strandings on New Zealand’s coast. And for weeks, oil companies have been firing deafening shocks to the seafloor in the same area -- potentially interfering with the whales' ability to navigate.
Tell the New Zealand government to put all seismic testing on hold and launch an independent study.
More than 100 distressed pilot whales have stranded and died on New Zealand's beaches in recent weeks.
And nearby, oil exploration companies have been ceaselessly firing sonic booms to map the seafloor.Local conservationists are calling for urgent research into the impact of the exploration on the whales -- something the government should have done before granting licenses to the oil companies in the first place.
The New Zealand government is sticking by its oily friends for now. But we know the government monitors New Zealand's green image closely, and relies heavily on it for tourism and exports. That’s why an international outcry could tip the government in favor of the whales.
Tell the New Zealand government to halt all seismic testing and launch an independent study on its effects.
Whales and dolphins rely on sound for navigating. But the seismic surveying methods used during oil and gas exploration generate loud sounds which can travel large distances through water.
The New Zealand government has allowed an unprecedented amount of seismic testing for deep sea oil to take place in its waters this year, particularly by Norwegian company Statoil. It has happily granted permits to test in marine mammal reserves -- including off the West Coast of the North Island, inside a sanctuary intended to protect the highly-endangered Maui's dolphin.
Seismic testing is the first step of oil exploration. It is done from a ship firing off repeated sound blasts every few seconds, day and night, and sometimes over weeks or months.
The blasts, created by large underwater air guns, generate a pressure wave that penetrates the seafloor and the reflected sound waves are then recorded by an array of sensors dragged on long cables after the ship. The seismic explosions can be heard over 100kms away.
This must stop. We know we need to leave 80% of known fossil fuels in the ground if we are to prevent dangerous runaway climate change. There is absolutely no justification for exploring for new sources of oil -- especially when they could contribute to putting at risk the health of whales and dolphins who are already struggling to survive in our changing climate.
We only have one planet, so we need to look after it together. That’s why we’re supporting local resistance against corporate destruction from the tar sands of Canada to the shores of New Zealand.
Sign the petition to halt seismic testing for deep sea oil off the New Zealand coast.
Thanks for all you do,
Paul, Angus, Cami, and the team at SumOfUs
**********
More information:
Calls for more seismic testing research after whale strandings, TVNZ, January 24 2015
Did seismic testing for oil contribute to the mass whale stranding on Farewell Spit?, Greenpeace New Zealand, February 14 2015
Terrifying and Destructive to Whales and Dolphins: A Glimpse Into the Reality of Seismic Exploration, Huffington Post, December 11 2013
SumOfUs is a worldwide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy. Please help keep SumOfUs strong by chipping in $3.
Truly, US President Barack Obama’s recent call to address the root causes of violence, including that of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) and al-Qaeda was a step in the right direction, but it is still miles away from taking the least responsibility possible for the mayhem that has afflicted the Middle East since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“The link is undeniable,” Obama said in a speech at the State Department on 19 February “When people are oppressed and human rights are denied - particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines - when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism. It creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit.”
Of course, he is right. Every word. However, the underlying message is also clear: it’s everyone else’s fault but ours. Now, that’s hardly true, and Obama, once a strong critic of his predecessor’s war, knows it well.
Writing at MSNBC.com, Sarah Leah Whitson went a step further. In “Why the fight against ISIS is failing,” Whitson, criticised the anti-IS alliance for predicating its strategy on militarily defeating the group, without any redress of the grievances of oppressed Iraqi Sunnis, who, last year welcomed IS fighters as “liberators”.
“But let’s not forget how Iraq got to that point,” she wrote, “with the US-led Iraq war that displaced a dictator but resulted in an abusive occupation and destructive civil war, leaving more than a million dead.”
Spot on, well, almost. Whitson considered “displacing of a dictator,” as a plus for the US war, as if the whole military venture had anything to do with overcoming dictatorship. In fact, the “abusive occupation and destructive civil war” was very much part of the US strategy of divide and conquer. Many wrote about this to the extent that that the argument itself is in fact, history.
At least, however, both arguments are a significant departure from the pseudo-intellectualism that has occupied the larger share of mainstream media thinking about terrorism and violence. Not only does the conventional wisdom in US media blame the bloody exploits of IS on the region itself, as if the US and western interventionism are not, in any way, factors, at least worth pondering. (In fact, for them US intervention is a force of good, rarely self-seeking and exploitative.) Even worse, no matter how they unravel the argument, Islam somehow ends up being the root of all evil - a reductionist, silly and irresponsible argument, to say the least.
It is also a dangerous one, for it infers the kind of conclusions that will constantly point the arrow to the direction of a self-destructive foreign policy, the kind that has set the Middle East ablaze in the first place.
But that is not your everyday diatribe. The constant injection of all sorts of bizarre arguments, like that of Graeme Wood’s recent piece in the Atlantic, is aimed at creating distractions, blaming religion and its zealots for their “apocalyptic” view of the world. Wood’s argument, designed to be a methodical and detached academic examination of the roots of IS is misconstrued at best, disingenuous at worst.
“That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfilment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succour if it stays true to the Prophetic model,” Wood concluded with the type of liberal positivism that has become as galling as religious zeal.
Mohamed Ghilan, an Islamic law scholar, dissected Wood’s argument with integrity based on real, authentic knowledge of both Islam and the Middle East region. “An analysis of what ISIS is about and what it wants that looks to Islam as a causal source of their behaviour is not only misguided, but also harmful,” he wrote.
“It obscures the root causes for why we have an ISIS, an al-Qaeda, an Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, and any of the other groups that have risen and continue to arise. It creates further confusion and contributes to a rising Islamophobic sentiment in the West. And when given the guise of academic rigour, it accomplishes all of this rather perniciously.”
Indeed, the age-old ailment of shallow, lacking writing about the complex and involved reality in the Middle East persists, even after 25 years of full American military engrossment in the region.
Since the first Iraq war (1990-91) until this day, America’s mainstream intellectuals and journalists refuse to accept the most prevalent truth about the roots of the current crisis; that military intervention is not a virtue, that war begets chaos and violence, that military invasion is not a harbinger of a stable democracy, but invites desperately violent polices predicated on winning, regardless of the cost.
Nonetheless, that very admission came from former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who, by virtue of his previous position should indeed be able to assess the link between the US war on Iraq and the current upheaval. Although he rightly blamed regional powers for exasperating the conflict, he laid the blame where it surly belongs: the Iraq war, invasion and the way the occupation was handled afterwards. “I was against this invasion and my fears have been founded. The break-up of the Iraqi forces poured hundreds if not thousands of disgruntled soldiers and police officers onto the streets,” he said.
That was indeed the backbone of the initial home-grown resistance in Iraq, which forced the US to shift strategy by igniting the powder keg of sectarianism. The hope then was that the “disgruntled soldiers” of Iraqi resistance would be consumed in a civil war inferno involving Sunni-based resistance against Shiite-based militias, themselves working for or allied with the US and US-imposed Shiite government in Baghdad.
“The aim of creating democracy without the existing institutions ushered in corrupt sectarian governments,” Annan said. For Annan, the war and invasion come first, followed by the sectarian-mismanagement of Iraq, also by the Americans, an admission that is rarely echoed by US officials and media as demonstrated by the obstinately deficient media coverage.
One is rarely proposing to ignore existing fault lines in Middle Eastern societies, standing sectarianism, fundamentalism, brewing, unresolved conflicts, and of course the monster of authoritarianism and corruption. None of this should be unheeded, if indeed a peaceful future is to be made possible. On the other hand, the argument that desperately seeks every possible pretence - from blaming Islam and believers of some strange apocalypse to everyone else but the US and its allies - is a poor attempt at escaping a heavy moral, but also political responsibility.
The danger of that argument lies in the fact that its promoters don’t mind seeing yet another war, like the one that was visited upon the Middle East a decade or so ago, the one that wrought al-Qaeda to the region, and orchestrated the rise of IS, and the bloodbath that followed.
Ramzy Baroud – www.ramzybaroud.net - is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. He is currently completing his PhD studies at the University of Exeter. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).
Views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
American historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”
The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left.
The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).
In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.
George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.
Andreas Papandreou was arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:
I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.
Another charming chapter in US-Greek relations occurred in 2001, when Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Goliath Lowlife, secretly helped Greece keep billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheet through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps. This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also helped create a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that’s drowning the entire continent. Goldman Sachs, however, using its insider knowledge of its Greek client, protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail.
Will the United States, Germany, the rest of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – collectively constituting the International Mafia – allow the new Greek leaders of the Syriza party to dictate the conditions of Greece’s rescue and salvation? The answer at the moment is a decided “No”. The fact that Syriza leaders, for some time, have made no secret of their affinity for Russia is reason enough to seal their fate. They should have known how the Cold War works.
I believe Syriza is sincere, and I’m rooting for them, but they may have overestimated their own strength, while forgetting how the Mafia came to occupy its position; it didn’t derive from a lot of compromise with left-wing upstarts. Greece may have no choice, eventually, but to default on its debts and leave the Eurozone. The hunger and unemployment of the Greek people may leave them no alternative.
The Twilight Zone of the US State Department
“You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop … the Twilight Zone.” (American Television series, 1959-1965)
State Department Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015. Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, questioned by Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.
Lee: President Maduro [of Venezuela] last night went on the air and said that they had arrested multiple people who were allegedly behind a coup that was backed by the United States. What is your response?
Psaki: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of longstanding policy, the United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful, and legal. We have seen many times that the Venezuelan Government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan Government to deal with the grave situation it faces.
Lee: Sorry. The US has – whoa, whoa, whoa – the US has a longstanding practice of not promoting – What did you say? How longstanding is that? I would – in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a longstanding practice.
Psaki: Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history –
Lee: Not in this case.
Psaki: – is that we do not support, we have no involvement with, and these are ludicrous accusations.
Lee: In this specific case.
Psaki: Correct.
Lee: But if you go back not that long ago, during your lifetime, even – (laughter)
Psaki: Matt, my intention was to speak to the specific reports.
Lee: I understand, but you said it’s a longstanding US practice, and I’m not so sure – it depends on what your definition of “longstanding” is.
Psaki: We will – okay.
Lee: Recently in Kyiv, whatever we say about Ukraine, whatever, the change of government at the beginning of last year was unconstitutional, and you supported it. The constitution was –
Psaki: That is also ludicrous, I would say.
Lee: – not observed.
Psaki: That is not accurate, nor is it with the history of the facts that happened at the time.
Lee: The history of the facts. How was it constitutional?
Psaki: Well, I don’t think I need to go through the history here, but since you gave me the opportunity –- as you know, the former leader of Ukraine left of his own accord.
………………..
Leaving the Twilight Zone … The former Ukrainian leader ran for his life from those who had staged the coup, including a mob of vicious US-supported neo-Nazis.
If you know how to contact Ms. Psaki, tell her to have a look at my list of more than 50 governments the United States has attempted to overthrow since the end of the Second World War. None of the attempts were democratic, constitutional, peaceful, or legal; well, a few were non-violent. The ideology of the American media is that it believes that it doesn’t have any ideology
So NBC’s evening news anchor, Brian Williams, has been caught telling untruths about various events in recent years. What could be worse for a reporter? How about not knowing what’s going on in the world? In your own country? At your own employer? As a case in point I give you Williams’ rival, Scott Pelley, evening news anchor at CBS.
In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”
In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself told CBS’s Rather in February 2003:
“These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”
Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world, before the 2003 American invasion, that the WMD were non-existent.
Enter Scott Pelley. In January 2008, as a CBS reporter, Pelley interviewed FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:
PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?
PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.
PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?
PIRO: Yes.
PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?
For a journalist there might actually be something as bad as not knowing what’s going on in his area of news coverage, even on his own station. After Brian Williams’ fall from grace, his former boss at NBC, Bob Wright, defended Williams by pointing to his favorable coverage of the military, saying: “He has been the strongest supporter of the military of any of the news players. He never comes back with negative stories, he wouldn’t question if we’re spending too much.”
I think it’s safe to say that members of the American mainstream media are not embarrassed by such a “compliment”.
In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter made the following observation:
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
Cuba made simple
“The trade embargo can be fully lifted only through legislation – unless Cuba forms a democracy, in which case the president can lift it.”
Aha! So that’s the problem, according to a Washington Post columnist – Cuba is not a democracy! That would explain why the United States does not maintain an embargo against Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt and other distinguished pillars of freedom. The mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship. Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for blindly following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship?
No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control almost all the media worth owning or controlling?
Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. (They do not have direct election of the president, but neither do Germany or the United Kingdom and many other countries). Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals. Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Is it that they don’t have the Koch Brothers to pour in a billion dollars? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; which is why it’s not the case.
Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?
Is Cuba not a democracy because it arrests dissidents? Many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During the Occupy Movement two years ago more than 7,000 people were arrested, many beaten by police and mistreated while in custody. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer; virtually without exception, Cuban dissidents have been financed by and aided in other ways by the United States.
Would Washington ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.
The Ministry of Propaganda has a new Commissar
Last month Andrew Lack became chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees US government-supported international news media such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia. In a New York Times interview, Mr. Lack was moved to allow the following to escape his mouth: “We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.”
So … this former president of NBC News conflates Russia Today (RT) with the two most despicable groups of “human beings” on the planet. Do mainstream media executives sometimes wonder why so many of their audience has drifted to alternative media, like, for example, RT?
Those of you who have not yet discovered RT, I suggest you go to RT.com to see whether it’s available in your city. And there are no commercials.
It should be noted that the Times interviewer, Ron Nixon, expressed no surprise at Lack’s remark.
Notes
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, chapters 3 and 35
Evidence Shows More Than 17 People Died: A Rose Crucifixion?- Remèt Kadav yo!
At 2:48 a.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, during the second day of Haiti’s annual Mardi Gras carnival, while on his float, Daniel Darinus, known as “Fantom” who is a member of the Barikad Crew band hit an overhead, high-voltage wire and set off a mass electrocution and stampede tragedy.
Slow motion footage showing electrocution of carnival
goers on left-side and back of the Barikad Crew float
See also Fantom hitting the high-voltage wire with the top of his head in X8 slow motion.
*** Repòtaj Altagracia Jean Joseph nan Repiblik Dominikèn | Konpatriyòt Jean Robert Elie sou kanaval la.
Fantom was hospitalized and is recovering. No one on the Barakad Crew float died. Champ de Mars is the main public park of Port au Prince where carnival stands lined both sides of the street for the three day event. Overloaded carnival floats move through the tightly packed, narrow route on the Champ de Mars in front of the grounds of the razed presidential palace. The accident happened at Champ de Mars, right in front of the all-pink, palace-like presidential carnival stand and across from a Mayor of Port au Prince-sponsored cemetery stand.
There is much controversy about the number of people who were electrocuted, and how many were crushed in the stampede. Some say they heard shooting. The government authorities announced that 17 people died and 76 were injured, all, from electrocution and the stampede.
Available video evidence suggests the electrical current arced from the power line to the micro-phone of the lead singer Fantom of Barikad Crew. Then traveled through the conductive framework of the float, earthing and electrocuting carnival revelers at ground level, who were in direct contact with live sections of the float and others in physical contact with them at the time. Carnival goers were crowded, like tightly packed-sardines, on all four sides of the vehicle. It’s a visual nightmare to watch. We believe if the entire charge had passed only through Fantom, he would not be alive today. Most of the charge must have traveled through his micro-phone lead. (See, Answering Questions About the Tragedy.)
Clustered electrocuted victims at side of float. Feb 17, 2015
Eyewitnesses insist that upwards to 100 people died on February 17, 2015. If true, where are all the bodies? Only 17 of the dead were acknowledged at the empty casket state funeral on February 21, 2015. But there seems to be more than 17 dead just in the first photo of clustered deaths, posted above.
THERE ARE LEGITIMATE FEARS OF ORGAN TRAFFICKING IN HAITI
The carnival deaths and the missing bodies bring up the spectacle of organ trafficking that plagues Haiti and African countries, more so with the advent of each new killing catastrophe. During the Haiti earthquake, then Prime Minister of Haiti, Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN about the organ trafficking and sale of Haiti children in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. UNICEF said 15 Haiti children were snatched from hospitals in Haiti and there was a group of US charity workers who we jailed for kidnapping 33 Haiti children. At that time, the head of the MINUSTAH/UN forces was Edmond Mulet. Mulet was once arrested for child trafficking in Guatemala and recently his children trafficking past is catching up with him. The Haiti government and security forces are still under the rule of the Charitable Industrial Complex and the UN-MINUSHAH forces.
The authorities released these names, but not the autopsies they claim were conducted before the public funeral.
Ceremony without substance? 17 empty caskets.
Feb. 21, 2015 government
funeral of 17 dead.
Haiti groups claim up to 100 carnival goers died.
The visually well organized, quick government funeral hasn’t closed the need for those who can’t find their family members to understand and find closure about their loved ones. There are reports of people being shot that night. We do not see any evidence of this in the videos. These matters require an independent judicial investigation.
Carnival Electrocution, 2015 | Front view of Barikad Crew truck slowly moving through the crowd. Side view beneath the singer at the arcing moment where crowd gets electrocuted and back view of running, scattering and trampling. (See it in slow motion at the moment of ground impact.)
*** Electrical surge through some micro-phone leads as Fantom contacts the power line. Source for illustration: Mike Perrett. Thanks to Mike Perrett for the video uploads and slow motion footages. Good job Mike! Mesi anpil.
***
The negligence that allows carnival floats to be set so high as to touch live wires should be accounted for and not allowed to happen, ever again. Government entities in charge of public security are accused of putting carnival revelers in danger. If the narrow area had not been so congested with people and the people were not touching the float, the deaths would probably not have occurred. The regime is also heatedly criticized for not putting the concerns of the victims’ families at the center of the grief vigil and funeral. It’s fine for the State to pay for the funerals. But insensitive to go on with the carnival the day of the tragedy. Unacceptable for it to refuse the families access to the remains of their loved ones – remèt kadav yo (return the corpses).
The tragedy began with a terrible accident. But there are so many tragedies in this situation. First of all, just last week Henry Jean Claude, a Haitian in the Dominican Republic was beaten, strangled, publicly lynched and left to hang in a Santiago public park. Haitians in the Dominican Republic are facing state terror, daily slaughters, the theft of their belongings and arbitrary deportation even if they’ve legally resided in the DR for 80 years. Instead of showing national concern, the Martelly-Paul regime holds a massive national carnival to dance, revel and waste monies.
After the Henry Jean Claude’s hanging, the Haiti government reportedly gifted 1,000 pesos or approximately $223 dollars to Henry Jean Claude’s young widow. Erzuline Celuma, the grieving widow has two small girls to raise. She was offered no protection by the Haiti government. Contrast this with the monies the Martelly regime spends on national carnival and the luxurious $450,000 palace-like stand, complete with waiting rooms, bathrooms and air-conditioning, built just to be used for an event that will last only three days.
With all the problems the country is facing, the people who lost their lives shouldn’t even have been there if Haiti had a responsible government.
Secondly, for months, the people have been daily protesting the high gas prices, high costs of living, the dissolution of Parliament, the unconstitutional reign of the Martelly regime. So, how does it make sense to waste so much monies on carnival to begin with?
Haiti needs infrastructure, clean water, sanitation, sewer systems, good roads, food sovereignty and local jobs. But the Martelly regime prioritizes carnival drinking, dancing and singing. It abandons the Haitians being terrorized in the Dominican Republic; abandons justice for the 10,000 dead UN-cholera victims, the 850,000 infected ones; ignores the homeless quake victims from the January 2010 earthquake that are still getting evicted from tarp and tent villages and living in pure squalor. Deception and dictatorship are not democracy. It’s unspeakably cruel and terrorizing.
Lastly, the carnival was scheduled for three days, February 15, 16, and 17th. After the accident, Martelly and his crew announced that the last day of carnival was cancelled. But just as Bill Clinton did not build Haiti back better, Martelly did not cancel the carnival. The show went on to ceremonially show Martelly, like Bill Clinton, can handle an emergency with competency. It was smoke and mirrors. A mourning narrative repeated by the irresponsible media. The hideous truth is that the Martelly regime used the carnival tragedy the way their handlers at USAID, the UN, the NGOs and the Clinton Foundation used the earthquake tragedy. Afterwards, the nation was left bleeding, filled with questions, more traumatized and in more grief. (See, Answering Questions About the Tragedy ; The Carnival Was Not Cancelled and A Rose Crucifixion But Not Vodun.)
***
ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CARNIVAL TRAGEDY Questions About Electrocuted Victims With No Outward Trauma
Since the carnival tragedy, Haiti activists have been called upon to advocate for the carnival goers’ right to get answers to questions the US-puppets seem too busy posturing for carnival photo-ops to publicly provide.
At first, when folks came to HLLN to say that the dead folks clustered on the electrocuted side of the Barikad Crew float or seen in photos looked more asleep than dead and had no electricity entry and exit wounds, we wondered if toxic gasses could account for the clustered deaths that showed no visible outward trauma? We’re not experts on how an electrocuted body looks like. It took some research and time to speak with doctors and understand enough to try to explain what we were told, which is that AC current causes instantaneous cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation. It’s not uncommon to have no visible outward trauma in electrocution cases.
Other questions the family’s raised were about why the people on the float were not killed. How did the people on the ground get electrocuted if the power-line did not fall to the ground and no one on the float died? In an effort to answer credibly, we publicly discussed the questions on-line, invited assistance and scoured tons of on-line video footages to locate the best ones from all angles.
Knowledgeable folks who we sent the videos to and consulted with maintained that it’s not at all surprising that the people on top of the float weren’t shocked, since they were not between the singer and the ground. In a power line electrocution, the current is divided equally among everyone who is in contact directly or indirectly with the victim who touched the line. Fantom who was victim #1 had surface burns, but most of the others would not have visible trauma.
Watch the three videos (posted on the side panel and also here, here, and here) which show Fantom getting electrocuted and best explains how the people on the ground were electrocuted.
The first video video shows the front view of the Barikad Crew truck slowly moving through the crowd. The camera pans for a side view beneath the singer. Shows the moment the crowd gets the electric shock or electrocuted. There’s a flashing spark, people drop instantaneously. There’s a back view of running, scattering and trampling. We’ve cropped and slowed down the first video video by 8 times to make it easier to follow what happened. The slow motion footage shows the moment of impact. How the people touching the float on the left (Fantom side) and only side the electricity traveled were electrocuted and the aftermath back view.
The second video shows the actual front top view of the electrocution of the shirtless Fantom, but there’s no float panic. One sees the rush starting at the back/side view of the float on the ground level. You hear someone say, “gen moun ki mouri anba cha.” – some people are died under the float. See the second video cropped and in X8 slow motion showing Fantom hitting the high-voltage wire with the top of his head.
The third video (13:47) shows a better angled ground view and the longer aftermath footage of the accident. It shows that at the instant of the power-line accident, the crowd of people on the left side, walking next to the float with their hands against the float and everyone within about 5 feet of the rear dropped instantly to the ground, while people right next to them seemed unaffected by the electrocution. There was then a brief panic. Some of the people on the left-side got up and ran after they were shocked. Others from the back began jumping off the float to run. It looks like at least two victims were trampled perhaps 15 ft behind the float. They were later attended to by medics, and didn’t seem to get up. No gun shots are heard on the videos we’ve watched. From what is seen in the third video (13:47 minute) time span, carnival goers, the light green cap-wearing folks from the National Carnival Committee (NCC) and some emergency medical units were there picking up the injured and rushing them out of the area.
In terms of organization during a national emergency, the actually Saturday, February 21, 2015 funeral was visually well executed with 17 empty caskets. But if you look at the videos of the tragedy, some police authorities wandered into the accident area, but didn’t seem to be very effective or have any unified plan or actions.
If more updates come in, we will share it at this post or perhaps in a later essay. There was a power outage at some point, which lasted for 6 or so minutes. Questions remain as to how many died from electrocution, from the float running over them, from being crushed by the crowd, from the little bit of running that’s observable. The victims’ families have the right to examine the remains, see the autopsies, be told the truth so they may get better closure. (For more on the carnival tragedy, go to A Rose Crucifixion but not Vodun ; The Carnival Was Not Cancelled, and More Than 17 People Died In Haiti Carnival Tragedy.)
Jolly Roger flag
with a skull and bones is a symbol for piracy.
It is the traditional
English name for the flags flown to identify
a pirate ship about to
attack during the early 18th century.
WHAT THE QUESTION OF SORCERY AND SACRIFICE REALLY MEANS IS: WAS THIS TRAGEDY PLANNED?
A Rose-crucifixion but not Vodun. Madigra m pa pè w, se moun ou ye.
The carnival tragedy is a product of poor infrastructure and governmental failures. Mysticism cannot be a scapegoat for this catastrophe. The Martelly regime’s cemetery stand, where the accident occurred is filled with the old European pirate’s skull and bones pirate flag symbol. This indeed is a fitting depiction for the plundering US-puppet dictatorship and US occupation of Haiti behind UN mercenary guns. Skull and bones are not Vodun symbols.
In Haiti whenever something bad happens, inevitably someone will blame it on Vodun. Vodun is African. God is the white Jesus according to Western ethos. So, it’s not surprising that many are negatively connecting Vodun to the carnival tragedy. This is irresponsible and lazy. Foreigners and clueless Haitians need to stop feeding that colonial narrative. But what gives this more legs is that the electrocution took place across from the unpopular government’s cemetery stand.
Martelly government-sponsored carnival stand where the electrocution
occurred complete with Martelly pink death motif and messages.
The taunting cemetery billboard stand is sponsored by the mayor of Port-au-Prince, supposedly for the cemetery. Which needs advertising? Yes, you can see the credulity at the outset. It gets worse.
Next to the cemetery stand is where the Barikad Crew float had the accident. The Government’s cemetery is also located not too far away from Martelly’s $450,000 palace-like presidential float. Of course, this only aggravated and provoked morbid rumors, especially with the coded, dual meanings depicted on the cemetery stand like “Frap La” – “Nap Manyen Yo” and “Frap la Revelasyon 2015.“
The coded meanings are readily understandable to the pro-democracy masses in Haiti. Why would the major of Port-au-Prince would sponsor such a stand? Probably because he was appointed by Martelly and in his younger days, Martelly participated in FRAPH, a paramilitary group that helped take down the first democratically elected Aristide government and kept it out of power from 1991 through to 1994.
There’s a sort of Bill Clinton plausible deniability for Haiti officials when they’re charged with taunting the anti-dictatorship protestors and opposition by using carnival and carnival funds for political purposes. There’s a carnival group called Frap La, which literally means “Frap (better known as FRAPH) is still here.” So, it could be argued that it’s the words from that band’s name and music that are part of what’s etched on the government’s cemetery stand. There is no political message directed at the anti-Martelly demonstrators. But then why would such a personal artist’s message be sponsored at the cemetery by the offices of the Mayor of Port-au-Prince?
While the Martelly regime basks in its sudden good fortune in free and heightened publicity from the carnival tragedy, elsewhere in the nation, tensions are running high. People are scared, looking for answers. It seems to Haitians that their lives are being sacrificed left and right with poor infrastructure that causes deaths while the rich live well, drink clean water, have year-round electricity and want to bring in tourists on lands taken from Haitians. The harsh reality is no one with access to any world power seems to care about what happens to Haitians. Certainly not the Martelly dictatorship or its Pamela White/Samatha Powers “Core Group” handlers.
It’s in this context we find certain Haiti journalists, commentators and plain ordinary folks saying, out-loud that Vodun was used to cause the accident or, on the other hand, blaming the carnival victims for their fate for participating in Martelly’s carnival in the first place. Both are untenable. Black life matters, is most precious. None of the carnival goers deserve the bad fortune that unfurled. And certainly the Ancient Ones would not be our warrior ancestors, would not be our winning ancetors of the Haiti revolution if their way (Vodun) would sanction Haiti blood to fuel Empire’s vampires.
Martelly’s pink palace-like carnival stand reportedly cost a whopping
$450,000 to build. For the State funeral for the carnival victims, the
government re-painted the stand white. A waste of monies?
The strange pink stand has an eye of Horus under one of the skull and bones and it’s painted in green. I’d guess this, combined with the implication that FRAPH is still alive in Haiti – “Frap La” is written on the float – could be some dictatorship/US intelligence operatives making fun of the Haiti struggle to end the outsourced occupation and the Martelly dictatorship by telling pro-democracy militants the CIA-created FRAPH death squads are still around. Frap la!
Deceive, divide, dominate is a tried and true colonial blueprint. But this attempt to show Martelly’s invincibility with a pink cemetery stand or to create chaos and a sort of Papa-Doc psychological terror with the cemetery stand was executed in such a manner that shows the artists and sponsors of the stand have no knowledge of the Egyptian mystery system nor Vodun. The brainless clown faces and their symbolism on this cemetery carnival float are NOT connected to traditional Haitian symbols, much less Vodouist. My point is both evil or good deeds are not mysterious. They’re the work of human beings: Madigra m pa pè w, se moun ou ye. Deliberately or inadvertent that’s the question some Haitians are asking about the carnival tragedy. It’s natural for the families of the victims to want more information and an investigation. They want access to the corpse of their loved ones to examine their deaths.
Haiti carnival should not be an instrument of propaganda for the presidential palace. The Martelly regime routinely excludes carnival artists for lyrics bashing Martelly – their artistic and cultural expressions. But he uses public funds to promote more amenable artists or to fund a huge $450,000 pink, National Palace-sized presidential stand. Or, a Mayor of Port-au-Prince carnival stand with veiled death-threat messages aimed at his detractors and the anti-dictatorship demonstrators. (See, More Than 17 People Died In Haiti Carnival Tragedy ; Answering Questions About the Tragedy; and The Carnival Was Not Cancelled.)
THE CARNIVAL WAS NOT CANCELLED
The Martelly dictatorships’ political use of the tragedy is unseemly. The carnival was not cancelled. It went forward, but pitched to media cameras and the nation, as an all-white vigil and a state funeral.
Something cannot be both planned and an accident. The carnival tragedy was set off when Fantom’s head hit the overhead power line. But, there is truth to the observation that something was planned. That something is the aftermath. That perception is not a figment of the people’s fertile imagination. The band played on. Martelly, the self-styled carnival king was center stage. Outrageously, there was no breathing room between the tragedy and the resumption of the carnival.
The deaths occurred on Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 2:48 p.m. The government announced on that same day that the carnival was cancelled and a three day period of national mourning would began. But in reality, on the day of the deaths, by 5:00 p.m., the carnival had resumed.
Martelly couldn’t be bothered to really change or delay his big carnival finale plans just because untold numbers of carnival revelers were electrocuted and killed on the second day of his carnival. You see, he’d already paid an unprecedented $450,000 on his own palatial spot at the public square to view the festivities with special friends and entourage. So, blithely, the Martelly presidential band marched on, even better with Martelly marching along, for the cameras and international media, while grieving families and the victims’ friends were scouring hospitals, demanding answers and searching everywhere for their missing relatives. Ceremony and pageantry was valued more than substance.
Martelly just took the opportunity of the tragedy to put on a more effective political show for the cameras. His regime faces constant and widespread demands that he steps down. This was his well-scripted, manna from heaven, big Hollywood comeback. An all-white-outfitted carnival event, etched from the massive, pre-planned street celebrations that normally closes out the carnival festivities. The usual finale was re-formatted and pitched as a mourning vigil for the carnival victims and grieving families. Different sectors participated. The image projected was of an inclusive and popular Martelly government. The reality is the Martelly regime is most known in Haiti, these last three years for its unpopularity, exclusion, elitism, and ruling by decree. People go to carnival not because they approve of Martelly, but because it’s free and distracting. Which is exactly why Martelly holds so many of them. It’s a cheap way, like the old time Roman gladiator games, to keep the people busily distracted from the country’s real issues. It’s a handy way to stop, at least for three days, the widespread demonstrations against his illegitimate rule.
The Band Played On: A Carnival Parade Pitched to The Public as a Vigil
The handling of the vigil without family participation, the sudden great organization skills of Martelly’s emergency response, and the fact that the incident happened across from the weird government-sponsored cemetery death stand, which doesn’t fit into a happy carnival theme, understandably upsets and perplexes many Haitians. The government could dispel this confusion if it put the people’s needs for answers ahead of its media publicity stunts.
The authorities in charge of public security, including the police, the Mayor of Port au Prince, the Director General of Electricity of Haiti (EDH), the National Carnival Committee (NCC), the Minister of Interior, the Minister of Culture and the President, all should be held accountable for the overcrowding and patently unsafe public conditions that led to the Champ De Mars tragedy. The Commissaire de Gouvernment (prosecutors office) must open up an investigation to assure impunity does not reign, due reparations are accorded to the victims and measures to improve public security at future carnivals are put in place. (See also, More Than 17 People Died In Haiti Carnival Tragedy ; Answering Questions About the Tragedy; and A Rose Crucifixion but not Vodun.)
