Fourth and Long: Desperate Blairite Claque Conscripts Paris Massacre

Bleaters and Tweeters: On Briefly Being a Political Football

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

For the past few days, I’ve had the curious experience of being — peripherally, indirectly — a political football.

The original piece I wrote on the Paris bombing got picked up by StopTheWar UK, an organization associated with Jeremy Corbyn, and was then used by Labour Blairites and Tory twits to bash Corbyn for the “sickening” article, which showed what an ungodly radical he really was. He was later asked about it by the BBC.

Of course, I was not and am not associated with STW in any way.

Graphic: LabourPartySupporters

Without my knowledge or permission, someone at the organization put my piece on their website. (Not that I would have minded if I’d known, or refused permission if asked.) Then at some point later, someone removed it from the website. This too became cause for controversy, as it was “proof” of a radical conspiracy to hide what Corbyn and STW really believed, etc. etc.

Needless to say, I knew nothing of any of this as I sat at home reading the torrent of news about the attacks.

(UPDATED BELOW) (UPDATED AGAIN) 

The first I heard of it was when someone came onto my Twitter timeline demanding that I confirm that my article had been the original “official position” of STW before it was later, dastardly pulled. This tweet was hooked to others — a whole gaggle of Blairites raging at the “despicable” article and how it showed the urgent need to purge Holy Tony’s party of Corbynite filth. A couple of MPs were apparently on the case as well, busily tweeting away about this all-important issue in the midst of the crisis. I must say, this petty, point-scoring exploitation of the attacks for political game-playing seems more “sickening” than anything I wrote.

As for the article itself — written as the opinion of a private citizen, not on behalf of any organization or institution — I honestly didn’t see what was so controversial about it. Is it really controversial to say that without the US invasion of Iraq, there would be no ISIS? I don’t think even the supporters of that war dispute this fact. Is it controversial to say that the NATO intervention in Libya has turned that country into a chaotic spawning ground for violent extremism? Is that a disputed fact in any way? Is it disputable that the United States and Britain overthrew a secular democracy in Iran in 1953 with the help of religious fundamentalists that US/UK spies helped organize and promote? I mean, I read it in the New York Times, so it must be true.

Is it disputable that the United States and Saudi Arabia helped organize a worldwide network of violent jihadis in order to provoke the Soviet Union into intervening in Afghanistan, then trying them down there for years, in order to “give them their own Vietnam?” This is the proud and open claim of one of the chief architects of that policy, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Did not Ronald Reagan sit down in the White House with the forerunners of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and praise them as “freedom fighters” and moral paragons, even as his administration supplied them with textbooks extolling violence and terrorism, thus indoctrinating a whole new generation? (The Taliban continuned to use the US textbook after taking over the country.) Has the West not plied the Saudis with money, weapons and kowtowing respect, even as they exported their retrograde Wahhabi sectarianism all over the world?

Finally, is it disputable in any way that these historical facts — and many others like them — have played a decisive role in forming the unstable and violent world we live in today? Is this controversial? I grant that it might be “sickening” — but it is still the truth.

Later, a couple of people wrote to say that although they agreed with the piece and “thought it needed to be said,” they objected to the phrase “reaping the whirlwind” in the headline. Somehow, a phrase encapsulating a process which — as I clearly wrote — has been taking place over many decades was somehow read as “blaming the victims.” Well, what can I say? I was raised a Southern Baptist by a Southern Baptist deacon; the Bible's tropes and cadences are in my head. “Reaping the whirlwind” is a good biblical phrase, well-known in the wider culture. It means just what it says — and just what I was trying to say: you sow violence, you reap violence. You spend decades destroying secular political movements in Middle Eastern countries, spend decades deliberately and openly fostering sectarian extremists as your proxies, spend decades in an open military alliance with the world’s chief peddler of retrograde Islamic extremism, spend years invading and destroying whole nations, leaving sinkholes of violence and ruin behind — and guess what? You’ll have a world crawling with violent sectarian groups that have the means to strike back at you when you strike them. Again, I made the specific point that what we were seeing was the result of decades of policies and actions. It was in no way “blaming the victims” on the Paris streets; it was saying — very clearly — that there would have been no victims on the Paris streets if not for these actions and policies.

But I’m sure very few of the Blairite bleaters and Tory twit-tweeters actually read the article. Certainly none of them took issue with its substance. They saw a headline that set their hive-mind going, in a setting — the STW website — that could be exploited to make partisan hay, and off they went. Of course, except for that first Tweeter, no one ever contacted me to find out if I actually was a STW “activist” or member, as they happily and witlessly repeated around the country.

Anyway, the dogs have barked and the caravan, as they say, has already moved on, to other witless and inaccurate game-playing and partisan hackery. And our leaders continue down the same path — more bombing, more repression, more fearmongering and hate-fomenting — which they well know will only lead to more death and destruction across the world. Unfortunately for the rest of us, their murderous folly is not a game.

UPDATE: Now (Tuesday) it seems that the article is being brought up in Parliament, as David Cameron -- and several blood-eyed Labour MPs -- rail at Corbyn for "the "Stop the War" tweet" about “reaping [the] whirlwind of western support for extremist violence in Middle East”. Again, it is patently obvious that no one involved in this entirely manufactured moral apoplexy has actually read the article in question. The fake outrage is being used both as a stick to stir up the poisonous brew of political gaming, and as a diversion from any serious, measured -- and above all, informed -- discussed of the situation, and the best ways to deal with it. A very instructive episode all around.

UPDATE 2: After a long day of seeing the article egregiously mischaracterized not only by the giants of statesmanship in Parliament but also by the founts of savvy wisdom throughout the UK press, I sent the brief statement below to a couple of reporters in the national media. Needless to say, naught came of it. But I append the statement below just for, as they say, the hell of it.

Just for the record: I wrote the original blog post behind the controversy over the "Stop the War tweet" mentioned in Parliament today. I wrote it for my own political blog, Empire Burlesque. I have nothing to do with Stop the War UK. Someone there picked it up from my blog, altered the headline, then later removed the post, all without my knowledge. I knew nothing of it until someone tweeted me about it. My original article did not say the attack was "the fault of the French" nor did my headline mention "Paris". Given the broad historical context of the piece, the reference was clearly that we, the whole world, are all reaping the whirlwind of the policies and actions described in the article — going back several decades, not just to the interventions and approaches of the recent past.

There is very little that is controversial or disputable about the historical facts I noted in the post; for example, even Tony Blair admits that the Iraq War was instrumental in the rise of ISIS. But I doubt very seriously that any of the people now pouncing on the article to make great shows of moral outrage have actually read the piece. I'm sorry to see that they would rather indulge in petty political game-playing than engage in a serious, measured discussion about the best response to the Paris atrocities.

Again, I am not a member of Stop the War. I am not a member of the Labour Party. I was speaking as a private citizen -- an American citizen with a British family. The article dealt almost wholly with US, and to a lesser degree, UK policy. It did not "blame the French." It did not "blame the victims." Nothing absolves the perpetrators of the Paris massacres; this is so self-evident that it seems insulting or condescending to have to spell it out. They chose to do evil, and the responsibility is their own. But neither can we keep pretending that these horrific eruptions spring out of nowhere, or that the proper response to them is to continue the policies of violent intervention and supporting extremism for geopolitical purposes that have brought us to this hell in the first place.

The Pains of Knowledge: Six Truths About the Global War on Terror

6 Painful Truths About the War on Terrorism

by Dylan Charles, Editor - Waking Times 

If you were 4 years old when 9/11 occurred in 2001, then you’re now old enough to enlist and fight in the war on terror.

Recent geo-political events suggest that this conflict may endure for some generations to come, so, regretfully, your children may also get to participate.

The war on terrorism is apparently part of our culture and part of our lives now.

“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are at war now — with somebody — and we will stay at war with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.” – Hunter S. Thompson

By no means a prophet, Hunter S. Thompson was just an eccentric observer with a knack for connecting the dots between political events and the ongoing mainstream media narrative that supports and manufactures consent for the oligarchy. When taken at face value, the terror script is indeed a rather convincing and motivating story, but when you dismantle the official fiction and bring the hidden pieces into the picture, the truth about the war on terror is just too heavy for conscious people to ignore any longer.

As it persists, international terrorism is guaranteed to increase, and as time goes by, we learn more and more about the real reasons why we’ve been forced into this apocalyptic conflict. After nearly 15 years of kicking down doors, drone bombing villagers, shattering societies, and mourning our own senselessly dead, here are 6 things we now know for sure about the war on terrorism.

“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” – Hiram W. Johnson

1.) The war on terror was never about ensuring the security of Americans at home or abroad, nor was the current situation the result of foreign policy blunders.

The conflict was engineered from the onset to break up, destroy and destabilize most of the oil-producing countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

The war on terrorism is about control of oil, about conquering national economies and turning them over to ‘foreign investors,’ about demonizing Muslim nations, about creating a lawless territory in which to develop Western controlled mercenary armies like ISIS, about protecting Israel’s interests in the region, about destabilizing Europe, about opening access to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, and about punishing those nations which dared to defy the international banking cartel by moving to avert the petro-dollar.

The war on terrorism is also about radically altering the legal framework of Western governments to allow for greater surveillance, control and the militarization of once free societies.

The aim is to continually broaden the definition of terrorism so that any act of defiance against the state or the corporate oligarchy, whether advocating for human rights, the environment, or any other issue of popular concern, can be persecuted without due process.

The war on terror will be used to target American citizens who support the idea of limited government and strive to maintain the protections afforded by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America.

Additionally, the war on terror is about creating new markets for the security industry and opening steady income streams for war profiteers and arms manufacturers, so that a relative minority can profit heavily from the continuance of the war and the waste, swindling and destruction involved.

2.) The war on terror doesn’t stop terror, because it is terror.

The Western nations most heavily invested in the war on terror are also the nations most heavily involved in global arms trading, which gives advanced weaponry to any despotic tin pot dictator with an oilfield. And France just happens to be the world’s number one exporter of arms per capita. The Western ‘coalition’ regularly kills civilians in other nations directly and indirectly, which is in and of itself a very real type of terrorism.

“You cannot have freedom or peace in a country whose government is engaged in the global wholesale of advanced military arms and weaponry to national governments.” –Stefan Molyneux

 

Regional arms sales by the UK.

3.) Our worst terrorist enemies are the products of government, the military industrial complex and Western intelligence agencies.

The Mujahideen was originally organized, funded, trained and supplied by the CIA to oppose the Soviet Union. The Mujahideen became Al Qaeda with the assistance of Saudi Arabia and American training, arms and financial aid. Al Qaeda has morphed into, or been replaced with ISIS, who is the creation of the military industrial complex, the US, Israel, the UK and France, and is supported by some 40 other nations who knowingly trade and deal with ISIS.

“They tax you in order to create weapons to sell to foreigners to attack you.” –Stefan Molyneux

ISIS, the new Islamic Caliphate as they call it, is the most barbaric, cruel and inhumane social movement to come about in some number of centuries, perhaps even a millenia or more. ISIS was given birth and nurtured into being by the West, and now, primarily Muslim people are suffering horribly in their own homelands while the war intensifies and extends into Europe in acts of urban terrorism.

Video from November 2015 of an ISIS fighter in Syria using an American TOW missile to waste an American Humvee.

4.) The mainstream media plays a crucial in perpetuating the war on terrorism.

The primary role of the corporate-owned and government-controlled mainstream media is to transform selected acts of terror into enduring symbols that can be used again and again to reinforce the war on terror narrative. Their secondary role is to keep the level of tension and stress as high as possible by ceaselessly over-reacting to non-events and over-reporting on non-issues, thereby keeping the public captivated and hypnotized by an ongoing drama so that when a major event does occur it has the greatest possible psychological impact.

Reporting on global terrorism is duplicitous and hypocritical because certain events have more franchise than others in influencing public support for government policy changes and military actions. In the practical world of marketing, French flags pictured draped over national monuments at night-time will go much further in promoting the war on terror than Kenyan flags draped over African monuments.

The media uses shock and awe in a war of psychological attrition against the public. The objective is to incapacitate and sideline people from participating in dissent, while scaring people into acquiescence to any imposed government authority or security measures.

5.) State-sponsored False flag attacks still work to achieve political objectives.

There is a tremendous continual international effort underway to expose the true facts behind each new terror attack, terror plot, and major government lie. The alternative media is growing in reach and effectiveness, however, the reality is that the Hegelian dialectic of problem, reaction, solution still works on a shell-shocked public.

6.) Suicide is more deadly to our soldiers than any terrorist organization.

The war on terrorism represents the first time in US history that suicide has been the leading cause of death of US soldiers. The psychological impact of this type of conflict is unique and the suicide rate of returning soldiers may be our best evidence that the war is unwinnable.
Final Thoughts

The goal of the war on terror is transform people into willing participants in chaos, mayhem and murder, or to turn them into collateral damage. Nobody is born a terrorist, and we are all being set up as dispensable pawns in an orchestrated clash of civilizations.

The truth is out there. When you cut through the propaganda, emotional triggers, and the divisive nature of discourse today, what’s left is the truth that the war on terror is something that we must end. The rise in global consciousness and our willingness to speak out may be our only hope. 

Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com, the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com, a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at wakingtimes@gmail.com.

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This article (6 Painful Truths About the War on Terrorism) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

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National Security/Islamic State's Incestuous Relationship

A Post-Paris “Clash of Civilizations”? It’s the Islamic State’s Dream and Marco Rubio Agrees

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch 

 

Honestly, I don’t know whether to rant or weep, neither of which are usual impulses for me. In the wake of the slaughter in Paris, I have the urge to write one of two sentences here: Paris changed everything; Paris changes nothing.

Each is, in its own way, undoubtedly true. And here’s a third sentence I know to be true: This can’t end well.

Other than my hometown, New York, Paris is perhaps the city where I’ve felt most at ease.

I’ve never been to Baghdad (where Paris-style Islamic State terror events are relatively commonplace); or Beirut, where they just began; or Syria’s ravaged Aleppo (thank you, Bashar al-Assad of barrel-bomb terror fame); or Mumbai (which experienced an early version of such a terror attack); or Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, now partly destroyed by the U.S.-backed Saudi air force; or Kabul, where Taliban attacks on restaurants have become the norm; or Turkey’s capital, Ankara, where Islamic State suicide bombers recently killed 97 demonstrators at a peace rally. But I have spent time in Paris. And so, as with my own burning, acrid city on September 11, 2001, I find myself particularly repulsed by the barbaric acts of civilian slaughter carried out by three well-trained, well-organized, well-armed suicide teams evidently organized as a first strike force from the hell of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.

The Paris attacks should not, however, be seen primarily as acts of revenge from a distinctly twisted crew, even though one of the murderers reportedly shouted, “You killed our brothers in Syria and now we are here.” Instead, they were clearly acts of calculated provocation meant to reshape our world in grim ways. Worse yet, their effectiveness was pre-guaranteed because, as has been true since 9/11, the leaders of such terror groups, starting with Osama bin Laden, have grasped the dynamics of our world, of what makes us tick and especially what provokes us into our own barbarous acts, so much better than our leaders, our militaries, or our national security states have understood them (or, for that matter, themselves).

Here in a nutshell is what bin Laden grasped before 9/11: with modest millions of dollars and a relatively small number of followers, he and his movement couldn’t hope to create the world of their fervid dreams. If, however, he could lure the planet’s “sole superpower” into stepping into his universe, military first, it would change everything and so do his work for him. And indeed (see: invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq), an operation mounted for an estimated $400,000 to $500,000, using 19 dedicated (mostly Saudi) followers armed only with paper cutters, did just that.

And it’s never stopped since because, just as bin Laden dreamed, Washington helped loose al-Qaeda and its successor outfits from the constraints of a more organized, controlled world. In these last 14 years of failed wars and conflicts of every sort, American military power, aided and abetted by the Saudis, the British, the French, and other countries on a case-by-case basis, essentially fractured the Greater Middle East. It helped create five failed states (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen), worlds in which terror groups could thrive and in the chaos of which they could attract ever more recruits.

Wiping Out the Gray Zones

Think of the Islamic State and various al-Qaeda crews as having developed (to steal a term from commentator John Feffer) "splinterlands" strategies. To continue to grow, they need the U.S. and its allies to lend them an eternally destructive hand to further smash the worlds around them. So in response to the Paris attacks, French President Francois Hollande’s statement that “we will lead a war which will be pitiless” was just what the terror doctor ordered, as was the growing pressure in Washington for a “big military response” to Paris. The first French reprisal air strikes against IS’s Syrian “capital,” Raqqa, were indeed launched within two days.

All of this is like manna from heaven for the Islamic State, the more “pitiless” the better. After all, that group’s goal, as they write in their magazine and online, is “the extinction of the gray zone” in our world. In other words, they seek the sharpening of distinctions everywhere, which means the opening of abysses where complexity and interaction once existed. Their dream is to live in a black-and-white world of utter religious and political clarity (and calamity), while engaging in what American pundits like to term a “clash of civilizations.” And -- what a joy for the Islamic State! -- Republican presidential candidates are already responding to the Paris attacks, as Marco Rubio did, by calling for just such “a civilizational conflict with radical Islam.” As he put it, “This is not a grievance-based conflict. This is a clash of civilizations... And either they win, or we win.” Jeb Bush similarly responded: “This is an organized effort to destroy Western civilization and we need to lead in this regard.” The answer, of course, is “war.” Various Republican candidates are also now calling for only accepting Syrian Christians as refugees here. You can't be more black and white than that.

In the European context and with the destruction of those “gray zones” in mind, the Paris attacks should also be considered the Islamic State’s first foray into the politics of the 2017 French presidential campaign. Think of those mass killings as a wholehearted endorsement of the extremist candidate Marine le Pen, whose poll numbers were already on the rise even before the attacks, and her anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant National Front Party. She is now, in effect, IS's chosen candidate, the one most likely to go after gray zones. In the process, of course, pressure on France’s large, increasingly isolated Muslim population will only increase.

Such attacks are guaranteed to put wind in the already billowing sails of far right-wing parties all across Europe. It should, for instance, have come as no surprise that, in the wake of the Paris attacks, Konrad Szymanski, the European affairs minister for Poland’s new far-right government, almost instantly declared his country unlikely to abide by recently negotiated European Union (EU) quotas on accepting refugees from the Greater Middle East. And we’re only going to see more of this in the post-Paris world. With the assistance of IS and other jihadist groups, the elimination of such gray areas in Europe could, in the end, help crack the EU open, while pushing France’s Muslims into an even worse situation, which would, of course, mean more potential recruits for groups like the Islamic State.

In other words, from IS's point of view, the Paris attacks and other acts like them represent a potential horn of plenty. Sadly, it’s not the only organization that will reap such benefits -- and I’m not just referring to other jihadist outfits either. Such acts are, after a fashion, similarly useful in the Western world. Think of it as a kind of unspoken bargain between two “civilizations” from hell.

Take the United States, a place where, in the years since 9/11, the danger of being attacked by an Islamic terrorist could be slotted in somewhere between being “shot” by your dog and being shot by a toddler who has found a loaded, unlocked gun in your house, purse, or car. Among the many perils of American life from car crashes to suicide, E. coli illnesses to floods, injuries from crumbling infrastructure to mass killings by non-Islamic lone wolves, Islamic terrorism remains at the bottom of the barrel in the company of other frightening but rare events like shark attacks. Yet the American national security state has essentially been built and funded to protect you from that danger alone.

Put another way, the officials of that security state have bet the farm on the preeminence of the terrorist “threat,” which has, not so surprisingly, left them eerily reliant on the Islamic State and other such organizations for the perpetuation of their way of life, their career opportunities, their growing powers, and their relative freedom to infringe on basic rights, as well as for that comfortably all-embracing blanket of secrecy that envelops their activities. Note that, as with so many developments in our world which have caught them by surprise, the officials who run our vast surveillance network and its staggering ranks of intelligence operatives and analysts seemingly hadn’t a clue about the IS plot against Paris (even though intelligence officials in at least one other country evidently did). Nonetheless, whether they see actual threats coming or not, they need Paris-style alarms and nightmares, just as they need local “plots,” even ones semi-engineered by FBI informers or created online by lone idiots, not lone wolves. Otherwise, why would the media keep prattling on about terrorism or presidential candidates keep humming the terror tune, and how, then, would public panic levels remain reasonably high on the subject when so many other dangers are more pressing in American life?

The relationship between that ever-more powerful shadow government in Washington and the Islamic terrorists of our planet is both mutually reinforcing and unnervingly incestuous. Both, of course, emerge as winners when the gray zones begin to disappear. When Paris is hit, after all, law enforcement agencies in the U.S. instantly increase their “alert levels”; the CIA director pushes back hard against "hand-wringing over intrusive government spying" and the minimalist restrictions on electronic surveillance put in place in recent years; the FBI heightens “its surveillance of Americans under investigation for apparent ties to the Islamic State”; and, among other things, more police patrols are sent out in major cities, while local law enforcement “vigilance” rises even in places like Niagara Falls, New York. In Los Angeles, post-Paris, extra patrols were typically sent “to ‘critical sites’ and [the city’s police department was] monitoring the ongoing situation, even though it said there were no known threats.”

The lack of obvious threats is, of course, beside the point when American “safety” is at stake! In the meantime, the road toward a more locked-down, secretive, governmentally intrusive, less democratic world is being well paved.

A Dance of Death

Think of this as a kind of global danse macabre in which ISIS attacks -- eight committed guys, some possibly trained in combat in Syria or Iraq, with AK-47s, suicide vests, and rental cars -- spread death, chaos, panic, and alarm in our world at next to no cost at all. In response, Washington and its allies engage in a big-budget version of the same, including intensified air campaigns which will, of course, end up taking out civilian targets and infrastructure.

Think of what the U.S. military does when it heads out to destroy those gray zones as the Kobane or Sinjar Strategy. Kobane was a largely Kurdish town on the Turkish border that IS militants besieged and partially took in 2014. They were driven back early this year by the same combination of forces that recently retook the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq: Kurdish fighters and American warplanes. By the time both were retaken, American bombs and Islamic State IEDs and booby-trapped houses had insured that those towns would be largely uninhabitable wrecks, littered with corpses and the skeletons of buildings.

Similarly, plans by the U.S. to intensify the bombing of those Syrian oilfields under the control of the Islamic state (to cut into its supply of funds) reflect a strategy that, whatever its immediate successes, is guaranteed to further wreck the infrastructure of the region. This will help ensure that, no matter what happens to the Islamic State, “Syria” or any state structure like it will be no more. Such acts of destruction, largely from the air, have been taking place across the Greater Middle East since 2001. From Libya to Syria, Iraq to Yemen, the Sinjar Strategy has demonstrably done little to bring success to the U.S. and its allies in their various wars. It has, however, helped create a zone of failed and increasingly fragile states. It has left uprooted populations leading skeletal lives in haunted lands that are also hunting grounds for extremists of every sort. Consider this the dream world of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the perfect breeding ground for yet more extreme nightmares of our age. A dance of death indeed.

As it happens, I’ve barely ranted and not yet wept. If anything, on reaching the end of this piece, I find myself depressed. The future shouldn’t be so easy to see or so repetitively predictable. And it’s a terrible thing to know that, as the gray zones of our planet continue to disappear and wrecked worlds spread, the tempo of that dance of mutual death and destruction stands every chance of speeding up as the "music" only grows louder.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt

Putting an Inscrutable Face on Myanmar's "Democracy"

Rohingya and the Burmese Generals How to Forge a Democracy and Get Away with It

by Ramzy Baroud  - Dissident Voice

November 18th, 2015

Writing in the New York Times in an article entitled “Myanmar Generals Set the Stage for Their Own Exit”, Thomas Fuller expressed his and the media’s failure to recognize the total fraud that is Burmese democracy.

“The official results are still being tabulated,” he wrote, “but all signs, so far, point to that rarest of things: an authoritarian government peacefully giving up power after what outside election monitors have deemed a credible vote.”

Fuller, who said nothing about the persecuted Rohingya minority and little about the other millions of Burmese who were denied the chance to vote, only managed to contribute to the seemingly baffling media euphoria about the country’s alleged democracy.

Reporting from Burma – also known as Myanmar – Timothy McLaughlin dealt with the Rohingya subject directly; however, he offered a misleading sentiment that the oppressed minority, which was excluded from the vote, can see a ‘glimmer of hope’ in the outcome of the elections.

According to results, the National League for Democracy (NLD), under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, has won a stunning victory over its rivals in the ruling party, by garnering 348 seats, in contrast with only 40 seats obtained by the military-controlled party that has ruled Burma since 1962.

There is no real basis for that supposed ‘glimmer of hope’, aside from a non-binding statement made by an NLD official, Win Htein, that the Citizenship Act of 1982 “must be reviewed” – an Act which served as the basis for discrimination against the Rohingya.

Win Htein’s comments are disingenuous, let alone non-committal, at best. The Citizenship Act “must be reviewed because it is too extreme… review that law and make necessary amendments so that we consider those people who are already in our country, maybe second generation, so they will be considered as citizens,” he told Reuters. His comments promote the myth that the well over one million Rohingya are ‘Bengalis”, who came to his Burma only recently as hapless immigrants.

While Burma, like any other ASEAN country has its fair share of immigrants, the fact is that most Rohingya Muslims are native to the state of “Rohang” (originally a kingdom in itself), officially known as Rakhine or Arakan. Over the years, especially in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the original inhabitants of Arakan were joined by cheap or forced labor from Bengal and India, who permanently settled there.

For decades, tension has brewed between Buddhists and Muslims in the region. Eventually, the majority, backed by a military junta, prevailed over the minority which had no serious regional or international backers. A rising tide of Buddhist nationalism has reached genocidal levels in recent years and is targeting not only Rohingya Muslims, but also Christian and other minority groups in the country.

The Rohingya population of Arakan, estimated at nearly 800,000, subsist between the nightmare of having no legal status (as they are still denied citizenship), little or no rights and the occasional ethnic purges carried out by their neighbors. While Buddhists also paid a price for the clashes, the stateless Rohingya, being isolated and defenseless, were the ones to carry the heaviest death toll and destruction.

Writing in the Ecologist,Nafeez Ahmed cited alarming new findings conducted last October by the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary University in London, which “found that the Rohingya ..face ‘the final stages of a genocidal process’.” “Leaked government documents show that plans to inflict ‘mass annihilation’ have been prepared at the highest levels,” he wrote.

Not only did the elections disempower and further alienate the Rohingya, but it also empowered political groups that have openly sought the ‘mass annihilation’ of the defenseless minority, most of whom are living in abject poverty within closed refugee camps, while thousands have perished at sea in a bid to escape the violence.

One of these nationalist groups is the Arakan National Party (ANP), which has incited and enacted violent pogroms against the Rohingya for years. In fact, ethnically cleansing the Rohingya is a main rally cry for a group which now has a democratically elected 29 national level representatives in Rakhine, and is also in “decisive control of the state’s regional assembly,” according to Reuters.

The sad fact is that much of the reporting on the Burmese elections stoked false hope that a democracy has finally prevailed in that country, and either brushed over or completely ignored the plight of the Rohingya altogether.

But how could anyone with a reasonable degree of knowledge in the political, constitutional and historical context of the November elections ignore the major discrepancies of the army-championed style of “Discipline Flourishing Democracy” program announced in August 2003 by General Khin Nyunt?

Burma’s generals have organized every facet of their sham democratic campaign since the early 1990s so that they give an illusion of democracy, while retaining power.

When the outcome of the 1990 elections did not work in their favor, they crushed their opponents and placed the leaders of the NLD under house-arrests or prison. This action, however, cost them international isolation outside the domain of China and a few ASEAN countries.

For years, the generals learned how to craft a system that would allow them to rule the country, while making symbolic gestures to meet the west’s half-hearted condition of democratization and pluralism.

The most recent elections have been, by far, the most successful of the generals’ democracy schemes in recent years. This clever scheme is rooted partly in the 2008 Constitution, “which elevates core interests of the military (such as the military budget, appointments, business conglomerates and security matters) above the law and parliamentary oversight,” wrote Maung Zarni in the Guardian.

According to the controversial constitution, “the military serves as the ultimate custodian with the power to discipline any elected government or MP who dares to stray from the military’s chosen path and its definition of parliamentary democracy,” Zarni wrote.

In fact, just last June, the military, defeated an attempt by parliamentarians to rescind its veto power. This is why the military remains the upper hand in the country, regardless of who wins or loses the elections. By reserving for itself a quarter of the seats in parliament, the military will continue to enjoy a veto power.

Then, why is there all this excitement about Burmese democracy? Simple – the rivalry between China and the United States, and their respective allies have reached a point where the massive amount of untapped wealth of oil and natural gas in Burma can no longer be ignored.

The US, UK and other countries are salivating at the limitless potential of economic opportunities in that country, estimated at “3.2 billion barrels of oil and 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves.” According to a UK government report, under the theme, a ‘hotspot for exploration,” Burma’s “unproven resources may be vastly greater.”

With Burma climbing to the world top five countries in terms of proven oil and gas reserves, terms such as genocides, military juntas and human rights are abruptly and largely omitted from the new discourse.

Indeed, a whole new narrative is being conveniently drafted, written jointly by the Burmese army, nationalist parties, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, western investors and anyone else who stands to benefit from the treasures of one of the world’s worst human rights violators.

Ramzy Baroud is an author and a journalist. His latest volume is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London). He can be reached at ramzybaroud@hotmail.com. Read other articles by Ramzy.

Predicted Draconian State Actions Lightning Quick in Paris

Orwell’s Razor: All of 21WIRE’s predictions come true days after ‘Paris Attacks’

by Patrick Henningsen -  21wire 

 November 18, 2015

21st Century Wire says… How predictable is the globalist imperial agenda? We are now witnessing the final stages of a long-term plan to induce another economic recession and erect a new high-tech police state throughout Europe and beyond. All they needed was a pretext.

While the mainstream media performed its normal routine of emotive reporting, stoking general fear and spreading mass hysteria, some smaller independent media outlets were busy plotting the establishment’s latest crisis agenda.

When the Paris Attack news broke last week, 21WIRE’s Patrick Henningsen went on television late Friday evening to comment on the unfolding drama, and also to analyze what was was likely to happen in the coming days and weeks in the wake of this event.

As it turns out, his quick predictions were incredibly accurate…

1. Declaration of a State of Emergency

France declared its first nationwide state of emergency since 1961 (when it attempted a coup d’état during the Algerian colonial war). Initially, this week’s snap passage of the emergency powers law only provides for a 12 day period, but on Monday French ministers confirmed this would be extended to 3 months because they believed that French citizens “had a right to a safe Christmas.” It gets even worse. After closing French borders, President François Hollande then proceeded to accelerate new police state measures after declaring publicly that, “We are a nation at war”, and then called for suspending normal due process by canceling search warrants, imposing curfews, traffic bans, and even authorizing local governments to impose a ban on public demonstrations. It seems the President has traded in his nation’s liberty for security theatre. In addition, over 100,000 police and soldiers have been deployed throughout the country. France is now under Martial Law.

2. Airstrikes by Monday

In predictable knee-jerk fashion, the French government seized upon this opportunity in order to insert more of its their military assets into the Syria conflict by launching airstrikes on Sunday night in the area surrounding Raqqa, Syria, allegedly striking a multitude of “ISIS targets”, including command centers, weapons depots, and ISIS ‘Oil Assets’ – all thanks to supposed intelligence provided by the US. However, reports suggest that the impressive display of French air power didn’t actually net any real ISIS casualties. One can only wonder how so many ‘high value targets’, especially ISIS oil assets (we’re told this is so crucial to ISIS funding), could suddenly be made available to the French by a US military that claims to have been conducting round-the-clock airstrikes over this same region… for the last 14 months. This only reinforces many people’s suspicions that the US-led Coalition “Anti-ISIS(ISIL) Campaign” has been nothing more window dressing for a covert agenda, where the US and its allies have actually been working in concert with both ISIS and al Qaeda in Syria in order to achieve a long-held policy of toppling the Syria’s government, ala regime change in Damascus.

3. Invoking the Article 5 ‘Mutual Defense’ Clause

To date, Washington’s multi-lateral proxy, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), has not been able to legally wiggle its way into Syria to help the thousands of foreign fighters and terrorists (like NATO did in Libya in 2010-2011) who have been allowed to flood into that country since 2011. Currently, the US and its allies are engaged in a illegal, undeclared war in Syria, and the US are desperate to find some legitimate avenue to pursue their military ambitions after having failed to cheat their way into Syria via a staged false flag ‘chemical weapons’ event in Aug 2013.

According to NATO article 5, an attack on one member state is deemed an ‘attack on all’, and thus automatically triggers a joint military action (war) by the NATO collective against their declared enemy. Already, a number of political figures have cried out for ‘Article 5’ war powers, including former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen who claimed that, “I do believe that the attacks on Paris qualify for an invocation of Article 5.” He added, “It was an attack on an ally and we know who the attacker is.” (certainly, they know the attacker much more than they are letting on).

Eager to see a wider military deployment from Washington, US Senator Marco Rubio has called for ‘an Article 5’ too. Absent of any official NATO route, however, France has simply gone ahead and invoked an obscure ‘Mutual Defense’ pact hidden within the EU charter. The clause is called Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union which states that, “If a member state is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other member states shall have toward it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power.” Job done. Bombs away.

4. Calls for No Fly Zone

As 21WIRE first reported last year, the ‘No Fly Zone’ meme has been coming out of every available orifice in Washington since 2013, and this popular US tool for military intervention still draws the affectionate gaze of Democratic Party war hawks like Hillary Clinton, as well as the endless column of Republican war hawks who are in the pocket of the military industrial lobby. Whether its Jeb Bush, John McCain, or Lindsey Graham, they never get tired of the No Fly Zone.

5. US Republicans pushing for ‘boots on the ground’

Just like the No Fly Zone, ‘Conservative’ Republican war hawks have been desperate to implement another old chestnut – by throw thousands of young US men and women at a problem which the US has actually created. War hawks in Washington DC have predictably seized on the Paris Attacks as an opportunity to reignite calls for “boots on the ground” in Syria. Amazingly, they are now claiming that massive deployment of troops “worked really well” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

6. Call for closing freedom of movement across European borders

Early Saturday morning, Hollande’s first move was to ‘seal’ France’s borders, supposedly to catch the terrorists. This ’emergency’ move also comes at the height of Europe’s co-called ‘Migrant Crisis’ (a crisis that’s actually been engineered by the US and Europe).

Rather conveniently, one of Friday the 13th’s said ‘suicide bombers’ was allegedly carrying a fake Syrian passport, which somehow led the French government and the western media to conclude that the Paris Attacks were a result of the ‘Migrant Crisis’, claiming the terrorists has sneaked into the country as refugees. To date, this only an official conspiracy theory, but that hasn’t stopped politicians and ‘security experts’ from using this crack-pot theory as justification for a European lock-down, prompting some European leaders to call for an end to freedom of movement across Europe.

7. Debate on Govt Spying and Privacy Rights, now off the table

As expected, politicians looking to appear ‘tough on terror’ and the growing gaggle of security lobbyists, and other assorted corporate fascists, have called for something akin to a ‘European Patriot Act’ – an end to the ‘Post-Snowden’ debate over bulk data collection and privacy – covering issues like NSA and GCHQ blanket spying on all citizens, and imposing more regulations and government monitoring of mandatory manufacturer ‘back doors’ for computers, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and also calls to make encryption illegal (except for government of course).

8. Calls for mandatory ID’s, biometric IDs

This hasn’t hit the headlines yet, but you can be sure that the usual gang of security contractors are putting the final touches on their proposals from a new regime of biometric ‘real IDs’. Expect announcements before the week’s end.

The last one is wasn’t very difficult to predict, but it has now been proven accurate nonetheless…

9. Cameron using Paris to Push for Syria War Vote

Back in August 2013, British MPs rejected Cameron’s call for bombing Syrian government forces in a close vote. It turns out that MP’s made the right choice as that war would have been waged on false pretenses. As predicted on Friday last week, David Cameron has now promised a new “comprehensive strategy” to win MP’s Parliamentary votes for an open-ended UK bombing campaign ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

Cameron claims he wants to, “do the right thing for our country” (fancy that), and hit the “head of the snake” of ISIS in Raqqa, Syria. Aside from mounting a a giant marketing exercise for British military hardware, is debatable what actual military impact the UK would make in a multi-nation war in scrum that includes the US, Russia, France and Turkey (and everyone else), with a British air force that totals about a dozen Typhoon fighters and a handful of operational naval vessels. Make no mistake about it – the British defense industry would like nothing more than to see this happen tomorrow – along with increased defense spending and procurement. Job done. Bombs away.

We’d rather none of these had come true, especially this quickly, but it only goes to show just how transparent the new world order agenda really has become.

Watch 21WIRE’s Patrick Henningsen and his original analysis from Friday evening, Nov. 13, 2015 on RT International…

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Bonny Glambeck, Jennifer Moore, Janine Bandcroft November 18, 2015

This Week on GR

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

This past summer, the retreat of a salmon farming operation from Clayoquot Sound marked a first for the long fight to protect wild salmon.

For those whose epic migration cycle begins and ends in the rivers and creeks of the Sound, they must first and last traverse a gauntlet of more than twenty such operations.

Opposition to the fish farms, referred to by opponents as the sea-based equivalents to land-based feedlot, or "factory farms," has grown throughout British Columbia due to environmental impacts and concern for the genetic survival of the five distinct Pacific salmon species.

Listen. Hear.

While the success at home, in Clayoquot, is heartening for all engaged in the effort to preserve wild salmon, sometime the fight must be taken to the source; and it is with that in mind a delegation of First Nations and local enviros are heading to Norway, the very heart of the salmon farming industry, to attend a transcontinental Wild Salmon Conference and meet up with their European counterparts.

Bonny Glambeck is with Clayoquot Action, the Tofino-based conservation society committed to the Sound's biocultural diversity. Their goal is simple, they say; "keep Clayoquot Sound clean and green for future generations, to preserve the diversity and integrity of the ecosystems, and to maintain and develop community and cultural richness."

Bonny Glambeck in the first segment.

And; it's not only on the streets of Europe's capitals, militarization is taking hold in the most varied of venues. For example, a newly released report reveals the so-called security strategy of the Canadian/US mining giant Tahoe Resources, and to the people of southeastern Guatemala, the Escobal Project looks a little like the Third-World War. Investigative Journalist, Luis Solano's 'Under Siege: Peaceful Resistance to Tahoe Resources and Militarization in Guatemala' untangles, says MiningWatch Canada, a web of relationships and tactics leading to the militarization of local farming communities.

"From the outset," writes Solano, "Tahoe Resources hired a US security and defence contractor that boasts experience with corporations working in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan to develop a security plan that treated peaceful protest and community leaders as if they were armed insurgents."

Jennifer Moore is the Latin America Program Coordinator for MiningWatch Canada. From her Ecuador-base, Jen spent years in Latin America as a freelance print and broadcast journalist, specializing in communities affected by Canadian-financed mining companies and exposing, among others, Blackfire Explorations' and its notorious Payback Mine in Chiapas, Mexico. MiningWatch Canada helped sponsor Luis Solano's recent 'Under Siege' tour through Canada.

Jennifer Moore and resisting Tahoe in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz of happenings on and around our streets, and beyond, in the coming week. But first, Bonnie Glambeck and On to Norway! with Clayoquot Action.

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

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

BC Supreme Court Quashes Guatemala Tahoe Resources Suit

B.C. Supreme Court Stays Lawsuit against Tahoe Resources, Denies Justice in Canada for Guatemalan Victims

by MiningWatch Canada 

November 17, 2015

Ottawa/Oakland/Tatamagouche - Canadian and US organizations are calling a British Columbia judge’s refusal to hear a lawsuit against Tahoe Resources over violence at its Guatemala mine site wilfully blind to the gravity of the case and the obstacles faced by the victims in bringing a transnational corporation to justice.

Photo: Giles Clarke 

On Monday, November 9th, the BC Supreme Court declined jurisdiction over a civil lawsuit that seven Guatemalan men filed in June 2014 against BC-registered mining company Tahoe Resources for negligence and battery.

Six Guatemalan farmers and one student brought the suit against the company after being shot and injured by the company’s private security during a peaceful demonstration outside the Escobal silver mine in southeastern Guatemala on April 27, 2013.

Daily protests were taking place in response to the Guatemalan government’s approval of the company’s final mine permit and dismissal, without consideration, of over 250 complaints based on local concerns over water contamination and health harms.

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Laura Gerow ruled the case should be heard in Guatemala, focusing heavily on the procedural costs and inconvenience of bringing the suit in Canada. Justice Gerow’s ruling ignored evidence presented to the court about Tahoe Resources’ quasi-military security strategy at its mine site, which was developed well before April 2013 and involved contracts with groups specialized in counterinsurgency techniques.

“Documentation submitted to the B.C. court provides evidence that Tahoe Resources contracted security companies ready for war, not communities peacefully protesting threats to their water and farms. Justice Gerow gave far too much attention in her ruling to the violence that took place in Guatemala in April 2013 and not enough to how Tahoe Resources’ decisions contributed to or failed to prevent this from occurring,” states Jen Moore for MiningWatch Canada.

In her ruling, Justice Gerow chose to ignore the power imbalances between a transnational mining company and Guatemalan farmers that are almost certain to hinder justice in the Central American country. Notably, she shrugged off the fact that senior Tahoe Resources executives ignored subpoenas earlier this year and in 2014 to appear in a Guatemala court where their mine manager had brought trumped up charges against a community leader.

Those charges were eventually dismissed.

“It is unclear what persuaded the judge to think that the victims could get a fair trial in Guatemala, where mining abuses are so prevalent and so poorly addressed. Guatemala’s impunity rate hovers above 90% for every sort of crime, and an international commission recently unearthed a series of massive corruption scandals that implicated high-level government officials, including a number of judges. Justice has never been served in Guatemala in terms of holding a foreign company to account and it is unclear why Justice Gerow thinks this case would be special,” comments Ellen Moore of the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala.

“Perhaps it is a novel idea in the eyes of the B.C. judiciary to contemplate the connections between a Canadian company and its subsidiaries elsewhere. However, we urgently need B.C. courts to step up given that there are hundreds of mining companies that call Vancouver home, including many that are embroiled in conflicts abroad,” remarks Lisa Rankin from the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network.

“Justice is supposed to be blind to wealth and power, not turn a blind eye to abuse and impunity,” she concluded.


Source: Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network - MiningWatch Canada - Network in Solidarity with the Peoples of Guatemala

Contacts:
Jen Moore, MiningWatch Canada, jen(at)miningwatch.ca
Megan Whelan, Network in Solidarity with the Peoples of Guatemala (NISGUA), megan(at)nisgua.org
Lisa Rankin, Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network, btscoordinator(at)gmail.com,

Of Friends and Foes: Will Obama Level?

Can Obama Level with the People?

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

November 14, 2015

The atrocities in Paris, killing more than 120 people, have brought forth the usual condemnations against terrorism and expressions of sympathy for the victims, but the larger question is whether this latest shock will finally force Western leaders to address the true root causes of the problem.


President Obama and King Salman Arabia stand 
at attention during the U.S. national anthem as 
the First Lady stands in the background 
with other officials on Jan. 27, 2015, at the 
start of Obama’s State Visit to Saudi Arabia. 
(White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Will President Barack Obama and other leaders finally level with the American people and the world about what the underlying reasons for this madness are? Will Obama explain how U.S. “allies” in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, have been fueling this Sunni extremism for years? Will he dare recognize that Israeli repression of the Palestinians is a major contributing factor, too?

On a practical level, will Obama finally release those 28 pages from the congressional 9/11 report that addressed evidence of Saudi support for the hijackers who attacked New York and Washington in 2001?

Does he have the courage to explain how this scourge of Sunni terrorism can be traced back even further to the late 1970s when President Jimmy Carter started a small-scale covert operation in Afghanistan to destabilize a Moscow-backed secular regime in Kabul and that President Ronald Reagan then vastly expanded the program with the help of the Saudis, pouring in a total of $1 billion a year and giving rise to Saudi militant Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda?

Can Obama be convinced that telling hard truths to the American people is not only vital to a democratic Republic in a philosophical way but can have the practical effect of creating crucial public support for rational policies? Will he realize that propaganda schemes or “strategic communications” may be clever short-term tricks to manipulate the American people but they are ultimately counterproductive and dangerous?

Will Obama finally take on Official Washington’s well-entrenched neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” junior varsity by challenging their innumerable false narratives? Will he pointedly blame the neocons and the liberal hawks, including those who run the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, for the disastrous Iraq War? Will he take on the “deep state” dug in at the big-name think tanks, not just at neocon havens like the American Enterprise Institute but at the center-left Brookings Institution?

Can the President muster the courage to ally himself with the American people, arming them with real information, so they can act like true citizens in a Republic rather than cattle being herded toward the slaughterhouse? Can he shake his own elitism or his fear of social ostracism to somehow become a true leader in his last year in office, rather than a timid follower of the prevailing “group think”?

Just because the “important people” have fancy credentials and went to the “right” schools, doesn’t mean that they have any monopoly on wisdom. Indeed, in my nearly four decades covering Official Washington, these “smart” folks have been wrong a lot more than they have been right. A leader of historic dimensions recognizes that reality and takes on the know-it-alls. In this case, a leader who enlists the American public by giving them reliable information could change this depressing dynamic.

If Obama could muster such courage and show trust in the people, he could bend the prevailing false narratives in the direction of truth and reality. On a practical level, he could help make the current Syrian peace talks succeed by stopping his endless repeating of the neocon/liberal-hawk mantra blaming President Bashar al-Assad for the entire mess and insisting that “Assad must go.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.”]

Twist Some Arms

Instead, Obama could twist the arms of his Saudi, Qatari and Turkish “friends” to get them to halt their financing and military support for Sunni jihadists associated with Al Qaeda and its various spin-offs, like the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front. And he could work cooperatively with Russian President Vladimir Putin to squeeze concessions out of both the Assad regime and the U.S.-financed “moderate” opposition so a unity government can begin to restore order in Syria and isolate the extremists.

Once some security is achieved, the Syrian people could hold elections to decide their own future and pick their own leaders. That should not be the business of either Obama or Putin.

As part of this effort, Obama could finally release the U.S. intelligence analyses on both jihadist funding and the circumstances surrounding the lethal sarin attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, which the Obama administration hastily blamed on Assad’s regime although later evidence pointed toward a likely a provocation by Sunni extremists. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria Sarin Case.”]

To create crucial space for cooperating with Putin, Obama also could let the American people in on the reality about the Ukraine crisis in 2014, which was used by the neocons and liberal hawks to drive a wedge between Obama and Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]

U.S. intelligence analysts know a lot about key turning points in that conflict, including the Feb. 20, 2014 sniper attacks, which set the stage for ousting elected President Viktor Yanukovych two days later, and the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was used to build an anti-Putin hysteria. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “MH-17: The Dog Still Not Barking.”]

I’m told that these tragedies became propaganda weapons to deploy against Assad, Yanukovych and Putin rather than horrific crimes that deserved serious investigation and accountability. But whatever the ultimate conclusion about who is to blame for these crimes, why has Obama withheld from the American people what U.S. intelligence analysts know about those three incidents?

It was Obama, after all, who talked so much about “transparency” and trusting the American people as a candidate and during his first days in office. But since then, he has conformed to the elitist Orwellian approach of managing our perceptions rather than giving us the facts.

Yet, if Obama could get his cooperation with Putin back on track – recognizing how useful it was in 2013 when Putin helped Obama get Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons and assisted in wresting important concessions from Iran about its nuclear program – then the two powers could also weigh in on securing a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, another major irritant to peace in the region.

Indeed, it appears that the possibility of Obama and Putin working together to force the Israelis to make meaningful concessions for peace was a factor in the neocon determination to turn an eminently manageable political dispute in Ukraine – over the pace of its integration into Europe without rending its ties to Russia – into the dangerous frontlines of a new Cold War.

The neocons and liberal hawks outmaneuvered Obama who fell in line with the Putin-bashing, all the better to fit within Official Washington’s in-crowd.

Thus, the Syrian crisis was left to fester with Obama acquiescing to neocon/liberal-hawk demands for arming and training “moderate” rebels although the President recognized that the idea was a “fantasy.” He also resisted some of the more extreme ideas, like an outright U.S. military invasion of Syria framed as a humanitarian “safe zone.”

But the Paris tragedy is another reminder that it is well past time for Obama to resurrect his helpful relationship with Putin and restore the teamwork that held such promise toward settling conflicts through negotiations, along the lines of the Iran nuclear deal.

If Obama were to choose that route – which could be implemented through a combination of truth-telling to the American people and pragmatic big-power diplomacy with Russia – he could at least start addressing the underlying causes of the violence tearing apart the Middle East and now spreading into Europe.

Or will Obama’s reaction to the Paris attacks be just more of the same – more tough-guy talk about “resolve,” more “targeted” killings that slaughter many innocents as “collateral damage,” more tolerance of Saudi-Turkish-Qatari support for Sunni militants in Syria and elsewhere, more acceptance of hard-line Israeli repression of the Palestinians, more giving in to neocon/liberal-hawk demands for “regime change” in the neocons’ preferred list of countries?

If the history of the past seven years is any guide, there’s little doubt which direction President Obama will choose. He will go with Official Washington’s flow; he’ll worry about what the editorialists at the Post and Times might think of him; he’ll accommodate the neocons and liberal hawks who remain influential inside his own administration. In short, he’ll continue down the road toward destruction.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

BCDNP's Fail on Fracking: Still Not Getting It After All These Years!

BCNDP Convention Shows They Still Don't Get It on LNG

by Rafe Mair - Common Sense Canadian

Political pundits are busy analyzing the recent NDP convention and I can tell you it’s easier to interpret the entrails of a rooster. Conventions organized to look like sunny expressions of the party’s solidarity and readiness for an election usually disguise more than they reveal.

What this NDP clambake tells me is that the party is sick to death of leadership fights and “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” – a highly dubious substitute for skill and character.

The good news first

Starting with the good news, the party caucus has done a decent job of exposing government malfeasance, in the health and the email scandals in particular, and demonstrating the general incompetence of the Premier and her cabinet. (Not too tough considering how willingly they do that on their own.)

Unfortunately for the NDP, history tells us that these sorts of issues don’t have “legs”. When it comes to election time, the public has different considerations; from experience they expect government misbehaviour and only want to know what will happen to their pocketbook in the next four years. Election after election has proved that.

It’s also true that parties tend to lose elections rather than win them and the Clark/Coleman government, now old and corrupt, is ready for a rest – a long one. A permanent one, in my view.

Why back LNG?

To take advantage, the Opposition must look like a government in waiting. If, however, as we have just seen in the recent federal election, voters want rid of a government badly enough, they’ll say, “they can hardly be worse than this bunch” and overlook opposition inexperience.

It’s foolish in the extreme for an Opposition to rely on this happening, yet Mr. Horgan, in his keynote speech, said nothing about the environment and showed no inclination to back off the party’s idiotic, wholehearted support for LNG. If this remains NDP policy, it will offer the atrocious Clark/Coleman bunch a lifeline because voters do care about these issues and before you write Premier Photo-op off, remember Mair’s Axiom I: “You don’t have to be a 10 in politics, you can be 3 if your opponent is a 2.”

Whether or not Mr. Horgan realizes it, LNG will be an issue in 2017, much including the proposed Woodfibre LNG plant. The Horgan-led NDP has badly let down those who expect that an Official Opposition will ask some basic questions about controversial and dangerous mega-projects like this one. WLNG is not a NIMBY issue at all but a real and substantial danger to life and limb, not to mention to the environment of this beautiful fjord.

Howe Sound belongs not to those who live near it but to all British Columbia – it’s a jewel in the provincial diadem. Thanks to a lot of volunteers particularly, Howe Sound has nearly recovered from decades of dirty industry; the herring and salmon runs are returning to what they once were, sea mammals, including several types of whales, are back, as are seals, sea lions, and even porpoise. It is incredibly beautiful and unspoiled even though next to a metropolis. I would have thought that not even the most cynical politician would place all this in jeopardy without at least asking a few simple questions of the government. I was obviously wrong.
Woodfibre gets a free ride

There’s the appalling environmental assessment pantomime which the government relied upon to approve WLNG with very significant aspects of the proposal not properly canvassed.

Before getting to the basic environmental questions, I must ask Mr.Horgan why he has never questioned the Clark/Coleman government about the integrity of Woodfibre LNG?

It’s owned, as most now know, by a crook from Indonesia best known for paying a $200+ million fine for evading taxes; for burning down jungles; and brutally evicting people who may be uncomfortably in the way of his plans. He’s not hard to investigate, Mr. Horgan, so why don’t you want to know why the Clark government is involved with this sort of man in an operation of this magnitude?

There’s the question of the plant itself, the pipelines involved, the safety of converting natural gas into LNG, the disposal of waste – especially warm water – the impact on marine life around Squamish, which is becoming increasingly important. All the normal environmental concerns and questions the citizens of Squamish and surrounding areas want answered were sloughed of or ignored by the ersatz environmenal assessment “process”.

Mr. Horgan, why won’t you, as Leader of the Official Opposition, on behalf of all British Columbians but Squamish people especially, carefully examine the Clark/Coleman bunch on these critical issues? Isn’t that your job?

Tanker danger

Then there’s the question of transportation of the LNG by tankers down Howe Sound itself. Here, in a nutshell, is the explosive (sick pun intended) issue.

The Society of International Gas Tankers and Terminal Operators (SIGTTO)* – the acknowledged world authority on LNG issues – has set standards for the LNG tanker trade. SIGTTO’s #1 and overriding criterion is that there is no acceptable probability of a catastrophic LNG release, i.e. the only acceptable probability is ZERO.

On the critical issue of separation, Sandia International Laboratories has defined for the US Department of Energy three hazard zones of 500m, 1600m, 3500m surrounding LNG tankers. The largest, a circle of 3500m radius, centred on the moving ship, represents the minimum safe separation between tanker and people. Other LNG hazard experts say at least 4800m is a more realistic minimum safe separation.

Plainly – and you need only look at the chart – Howe Sound is far too narrow. Surely that in itself must be fatal to the project!

Isn’t the safety of Howe Sound, extending to western West Vancouver, even worth a question to the Premier, Mr. Horgan?

Let’s just sum up what you evidently see as unwarranted whining, Mr. Horgan.

1. The owner of the company we must depend upon for taxes and royalties, plus caring of our delicate environment, is a big-time tax evader with an utterly appalling environmental record.

2. The people of Squamish and surroundings, facing the immediate consequences of any environmental “accidents”, are asked, and arrogantly expected, to accept a phoney environmental process, where the “fix” was in from the start, and which gave Woodfibre LNG the patented Christy Clark corporate whitewash. They would have been more honestly dealt with by a denial of process than by a process reminiscent of a Soviet Show Trial.

3. The most disastrous consequences to be feared are from a tanker mishap, which, mathematically, is not a possibility or even a probability but a certainty – merely a matter of time. This time will clearly be abridged by an utter lack of concern about internationally-recognized rules re: hazard and separation zones yet, Mr. Horgan, you haven’t uttered a peep to the government about this critical issue!
NDP ignores call for help

We’ve asked for NDP help, yet on these issues, of so much concern to so many of your fellow citizens, the Official Opposition, including you and your MLAs – because of your blanket approval of LNG – has been as scarce as a tumbler of Glenfiddich at a temperance meeting.

Is this the care you will show for British Columbians if you become premier?

Yes, the sunny simpleton and her trained seals now running the province must be replaced, but with the likes of you, sir? A man lacking the political or moral courage to help citizens threatened by crooks, environmental rapists, and tanker disasters, as our Premier? A Leader of the Official Opposition who doesn’t understand his duty? A man who imposed a catastrophic LNG policy on his party because he’s afraid of losing a couple of seats where highly destructive and dangerous fracking is prevalent?

God forbid!

BC deserves the Green Party or a new party representing the people of the province, not just cheerleaders led by a political sissy. But time is short, with just a year and a half left for serious contenders to get their asses in gear.

*WLNG claims that because they are members of SIGTTO that their plan is safe. This is corporate bullshit. Membership does not imply let alone confirm compliance and, indeed, anyone reading this can join SIGGTO as an associate member – which is all WLNG is!