Another Massacre and Can Calls for a Police State Be Far Behind?

After Orlando, Democrats and Republicans Clamor for Expanded Police State

by Eric Draitser - CounterPunch

June 20, 2016

The horrific massacre in Orlando has once again thrust the specter of domestic terrorism into the limelight, and into the media space. Pundits and politicians alike have taken the incident as yet another opportunity to thump their chests about the need for even more counter-terrorism legislation, a further increase in surveillance state activity and, of course, more war abroad.

And while such opportunists posture as defenders of the American people, none care to face the inescapable reality that since 9-11, and the introduction of numerous pieces of draconian legislation ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism, the agencies charged with surveillance and law enforcement have not managed to prevent attacks.

Obviously, this raises the question of what exactly legislation such as the PATRIOT Act is really intended for if not to ‘keep Americans safe.’

But even more critical than retrospective criticism of the erosion of civil liberties after nearly a decade and a half of propaganda and fearmongering, is the need to oppose the further expansion of such legislation and domestic spying programs. Indeed, while what were once considered rights are now seen as passé, the US is staring down the barrel of a presidential election where the leading candidates are calling for even more surveillance, expanded government databases, and more billions of dollars to be poured into the NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, and the rest of the alphabet soup that comprises Police State USA.

Clinton, Trump, and Death as Political Currency

In the immediate aftermath of the heinous slaughter in Orlando, the neoconservative-neoliberal chimera known as Hillary Clinton predictably called for an expansion of surveillance and the police state. Less than 48 hours after the attack, in a speech in Cleveland, Clinton proclaimed:

We already know we need more resources for this fight. The professionals who keep us safe would be the first to say we need better intelligence to discover and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be carried out. That’s why I’ve proposed an ‘intelligence surge’ to bolster our capabilities across the board, with appropriate safeguards here at home.

As with all things Hillary, one must carefully deconstruct the statement to unravel the distortions and empty rhetoric, and distill her actual proposal. The first part of her statement is instantly suspect as the US has already grossly inflated its intelligence budget. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the 2017 intelligence budget will reach nearly $70 billion, with $50 billion being spent on the National Intelligence Program (NIP). One would have to seriously question the logic in Clinton’s statement, namely the implied consensus about the need for more resources. How much more exactly will prevent incidents like the one in Orlando? Perhaps another $50 billion would do the trick?

The second fallacy embedded in the torrent of misinformation that is a Hillary Clinton speech excerpt is the specious argument that “better intelligence” would “discover and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be carried out.” This vacuous statement must be dismissed out of hand after one considers the fact that the alleged Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, was investigated, followed, and interviewed by the FBI multiple times (he was also introduced to FBI informants whose responsibility was likely to keep tabs on him).

So, according to Clinton the US should spend tens of billions more dollars to fund the agencies and programs that already have the ability to single out a potential terrorist, do all the leg work to establish contact with him, invest human resources into his case, and yet still be unable to stop his alleged actions. To put it in terms Hillary’s Wall Street patrons would understand: sounds like a bad investment strategy.

The third unmistakably wrongheaded statement (I only selected three sentences, so she’s 3 for 3) is the absolutely odious suggestion of an “intelligence surge” to improve the capabilities of the intelligence community. In fact, what Clinton is actually suggesting is a massive increase in contracts awarded to private intelligence firms and military contractors, though veiling it as a boost to the intelligence community. This fact is made clear by the renowned investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in his 2008 book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing where he notes that:

In 2006… the cost of America’s spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on foreign and domestic intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot know the true extent of outsourcing, for two reasons. First, in 2007, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) refused to release an internal report on contracting out of fear that its disclosure would harm U.S. national security interests. Second, most intelligence contracts are classified, allowing companies like CACI to hide their activities behind a veil of secrecy.

Think about that figure for a second: 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to outsourcing. In other words, government expenditure on surveillance and intelligence is an indirect subsidy to private corporations. This should come as no surprise considering similar indirect subsidies to energy companies, private mercenaries, and even big retail corporations.

Of course, Clinton knows all this perfectly well. So when she calls for an intelligence surge what she’s actually doing is making clear to her military-industrial-surveillance complex cronies that she will make sure to feed the goose that continues to lay the golden eggs. Just like her speeches to Goldman Sachs served to reassure Wall Street that she was their lady, so too does Clinton use the tragic events in Orlando to give a wink and a nod to Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, and the rest.

As with all things Clinton, her words drip with cynicism like her hands drip with the blood of Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, Serbians, and countless others.

It should be mentioned too that aside from just funding, Clinton undoubtedly represents a further rightward shift in terms of “anti-terror” legislation – the kinds of bills that she’d promote and sign into law as president would be, to put it bluntly, no different than the Bush era bills that she supported such as the PATRIOT Act. As Conor Friedersdorf noted in The Atlantic in 2015:

[Clinton] served in the United States Senate from 2001 to 2009. She cast votes that enabled the very NSA spying that many now regard as a betrayal. And she knew all about what the NSA wasn’t telling the public. To say now that the NSA should’ve been more transparent raises this question: Why wasn’t Clinton among the Democrats working for more transparency?

Friedersdorf is being much too kind with his concluding rhetorical question. Clinton is perhaps one of the most hawkish surveillance state proponents in the US. Her total disregard for even the basic tenets of the US Constitution, let alone domestic or international law, make her not only unfit for office, but a dangerous criminal.

And then of course there’s the trainwreck made flesh, Donald Trump, who with his typically bombastic and utterly vacuous public statements has once again managed to make the criminal Hillary into the “sensible one.” In a speech on Monday June 13, Trump reverted to his usual racist demagogy that is light on actual policy prescriptions and heavy on xenophobia, racism, and outright lies. But in the midst of the Trump madness, there are indeed kernels of policy that should be worrying.

During the speech Trump called, once again, for a ban on Muslim immigration to the US, warning of “major consequences” for the Muslim community in the country. But Trump went further saying, “We have a dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly.” Again, Trump provides no specific policy prescription, but the implication from his statement is an increase in surveillance of citizens domestically, as well as presumably the codification of a deeply racist immigration system which would discriminate based on religion and/or ethnicity.

Trump continued, saying “With these people, folks, it’s coming. We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president.” Here again Trump aligns with Clinton. While supposedly the two are opposed to one another, the fact is that both accept the false assumption that our problems would be solved if only we could just stop “holding back” the intelligence community. Clinton calls for a surge while Trump calls for taking off the training wheels. Sort of like an argument about which is better Pepsi or orange juice.

The Police State Is Not the Answer

While the Demopublican-Republicrat Party continues its political posturing, the assumptions that both have internalized are what need to be excised from the body politic. It is patently absurd to call for more surveillance in a country where, thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know the following:

* The PRISM program allows “The National Security Agency and the FBI [to tap] directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs.” According to cybersecurity experts PRISM uses obviously illegal tactics to “circumvent formal legal processes…to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos.”

* The BLARNEY system is utilized extensively. According to former AT&T technician Mark Klein and former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology at the FCC Scott Marcus, “Using a device called a ‘splitter’ a complete copy of the internet traffic that AT&T receives…is diverted onto a separate fiber-optic cable which is connected to a room which is controlled by the NSA.” Therefore, unlike PRISM, which the government and its apologists attempt to justify as being used to target key individuals, BLARNEY has no such capacity. Rather, it is designed solely to collect data, all internet data, to be used and likely stored.

* The NSA has constructed enormous data storage facilities such as the Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah.As one top security official told Wired, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Naturally, there is not nearly enough space here to detail all of the myriad surveillance programs. But, taking them together with what we know of government funding to private intelligence firms, how could anyone rightly argue that surveillance should be increased? If anything, the enormous expenditure has proven utterly useless.

Indeed, the legal framework developed in the post-9/11 era including draconian legislation such as the PATRIOT Act, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and many others, laid the foundation for the systemic and systematic stripping away of civil liberties and human rights. The technical infrastructure has been steadily evolving since 9/11 as technology continues to improve, providing the intelligence agencies with ever more tools for surveillance and intelligence gathering. The continued, unrestrained neoliberal policy of privatization has created a complex network of companies, contractors, and subcontractors, usually working independently of each other, all in the service of the security state. Finally, the political landscape in the United States has so thoroughly devolved that elected officials are more concerned about stopping the whistleblowers and leakers, than about addressing America’s continued descent into a fascist police state.

Such is the state of the union in 2016. And while the aspiring Mass Murderer-in-Chief Clinton continues to attack the political snake-charmer Trump, and The Donald does what The Donald does, the bodies of 50 innocent people are being laid to rest. Must the values and freedoms that the US allegedly once stood for also be buried?

Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.

More articles by:Eric Draitser

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Dave Lindorff, Ken Stone, Janine Bandcroft June 22, 2016

This Week on GR

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

June 22, 2016

Another mass shooting in the United States, and a lot more of the now too well practiced responses from government, media, interest groups, and the way-out-there factions that see conspiracy behind this event, (if it really even happened!) and most others.

Most predictable of all is the sensible idea, again put forward, to limit public access to military-grade weaponry.

But, what about police access to the same kinds of over-the-top armaments that has made your local constabulary come more to resemble an outpost of the 3rd Army? Isn't it time to consider de-escalating the other side of the civilian arms race?

Listen. Hear.

Dave Lindorff is an award-winning print journalist, broadcaster, and founder of the web news site, This Can’t Be Happening.net, that has since 2004 filled some of the vast investigative journalism vacuum in American media. He's also the author of: ‘This Can’t Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy,’ ‘Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains,’ and ‘Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.’

Dave Lindorff in the first half.

And; word from Fallujah, Iraq is not good. Tens of thousands, some estimates say as many as 90,000 citizens of the most battle-blighted of all of that war-benighted country's cities, are under the stars tonight, made homeless again by another Western interventionist-supported military assault; of course, meant to root out "the terrorists." Nearly thirteen and a half years after America's initial 'Shock and Awe' not only does the fighting and killing carry on in Iraq, but the war then begun there is now spread throughout the region. Nowhere perhaps is its contagion more virulently felt than in neighbouring Syria, now more than five years into its own nightmare of others' making.

Ken Stone is an executive member of the Syria Solidarity Movement, (syriasolidaritymovement.org) serving treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, and longtime antiwar activist. This past April, he was a member of the Second International Tour of Peace to Syria, from where he sent his 'Dispatch from Syria' column. Ken is also an occasional contributor to the web news site, GlobalResearch. and commentator on Press TV.

Ken Stone and reaching for peace in Syria in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of some of the good things going on in and around our city in the coming week. But first, Dave Lindorff and, Why not a general ban on America's assault weapons arsenal?

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.

Bear-Baiting: Missile Necklace Around Russia Risks Nuclear Catastrophe Putin Warns

Putin: People Do Not Understand How Potentially Dangerous The Situation Really Is

by - RT

June 20, 2016

‘We know when US will get new missile threatening Russia’s nuclear capability’ 

The US anti-missile defense systems being installed near Russia’s borders can be “inconspicuously” transformed into offensive weapons, Vladimir Putin has said, adding that he knows “year by year” how Washington will develop its missile program.

Talking about NATO’s ballistic missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, Russia’s president said that the Americans are now deploying their missiles at these military complexes.

“The missiles are put into a capsule used for launches of sea-based Tomahawk missiles. Now they are placing their antimissiles there, which are capable of engaging a target at a distance of up to 500 kilometers [310 miles]. But technologies are developing, and we know around what year the Americans will get a new missile, which will have a range not of 500 kilometers, but 1,000, and then even more – and from that moment they will start threatening our nuclear capability,” Putin said at a meeting with the heads of international news agencies at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday.

“We know year by year what will happen, and they know that we know,” he said, adding that Western officials “pull the wool over [their news outlets] eyes,” who in turn misinform their audiences.

The main problem, according to the Russian president, is that people do not understand how potentially dangerous the situation really is. “The world is being pulled into a completely new dimension, while [Washington] pretends that nothing’s happening,” Putin said, adding that he has been trying to reach out to his counterparts, but in vain.

“They say [the missile systems] are part of their defense capability, and are not offensive, that these systems are aimed at protecting them from aggression. It’s not true,” Putin told the journalists, adding that “strategic ballistic missile defense is part of an offensive strategic capability, [and] functions in conjunction with an aggressive missile strike system.”

The “great danger” is that the same launchers that are used for defense missiles can be used to fire Tomahawks that can be installed “in a matter of hours,” Putin noted.

“How do we know what’s inside those launchers? All one needs to do is reprogram [the system], which is an absolutely inconspicuous task,” he said, adding that the governments of the nations on whose territories these NATO complexes are based would have no way of knowing if this had happened.

Washington engaged in deception from the very start when it claimed that it was moving its ballistic missile defense east to counter “Iran’s nuclear threat,” Putin said, pointing out that Tehran’s alleged offensive nuclear capability now doesn’t exist – largely thanks to President Obama’s involvement. “So why have they now built a missile defense system in Romania?” he asked.

While pointing out that NATO keeps rejecting “concrete” proposals from Russia on cooperation, Putin said that US policy is now jeopardizing “the so-called strategic balance... thanks to which the world has been safe from large-scale wars and military conflicts.”

By unilaterally withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Washington “struck the first colossal blow at international stability,” the president said. To maintain the balance, Moscow has had to develop its own missile program in turn, to which the US agreed in the beginning of the 2000s, when Russia was in a difficult financial situation.

“I guess they hoped that the armament from the Soviet times would initially become degraded,” he said.

“Today Russia has reached significant achievements in this field. We have modernized our missile systems and successfully developed new generations. Not to mention missile defense systems,” Putin told the international news agencies, stressing that these moves are counter-measures and not “aggression,” as Moscow is so often accused of.

“We must provide security not only for ourselves. It’s important to provide strategic balance in the world, which guarantees peace on the planet... It’s the mutual threat that has provided [mankind] with global security for decades,” Putin concluded.

Sanders' Pretences: A Campaign Finished But for the Lying

Sanders in Burlington

by Stephen Lendman

Friday, June 17, 2016

Clinton is the presumptive Democrat party nominee. She’ll face Trump in November.

On Thursday night from his Burlington, VT home base, Sanders addressed supporters via livestream, maintaining the myth of his “political revolution,” pretending his campaign continues.

His address was warmed-over stump mumbo jumbo previously delivered numerous times before - empty rhetoric, belying his business as usual voting record, the true measure of the man, the only thing that counts.

All politicians lie. Ignore what they say. Follow only what they do. Sanders’ political history isn’t pretty. It speaks for itself.

Due diligence checking exposes him as just another dirty politician, a self-serving opportunist like all the rest with rare exceptions - none since Jack Kennedy becoming presidential material.

Sanders is no JFK, no anti-war activist, no peace, equity and justice champion, no social democrat as he claims - for sure no transformational revolutionary advocate.

Saying “the political revolution must continue” ignored its nonexistence. Dirty business as usual continues unchanged no matter who succeeds Obama.

Sanders saying he’s “very optimistic about the future of our country” belies its deplorable state - a neocon infested rogue state at war with humanity, risking WW III.

Throughout his campaign, he never once explained its danger, imperial madness, the risk of US-initiated nuclear war, targeting Russia and/or China, wrongfully blaming them for America’s high crimes against peace.

He lied, saying his “campaign has never been about any single candidate…always about transforming America.”

He did nothing to achieve it throughout 30 years in public office, failing to follow through when his vote mattered most, virtually always yielding to powerful entrenched interests - suppressing his deplorable record in addressing followers on the stump, again on Thursday night.

He ignored US imperial wars, not a word said about them, naked aggression against nonbelligerent countries, raping one after another, responsible for millions of deaths, chaos and human misery on an unimaginable scale.

He “look(s) forward to working with secretary Clinton,” he said, his endorsement certain, an unindicted war criminal/racketeer belonging in prison, not high office.

Claiming his intention “to transform the Democratic (sic) party” ignored its hardwired ruthlessness too debauched to fix - exclusively serving wealth, power and privilege.

Republicans operate the same way, both parties in lockstep on major issues mattering most, notably supporting endless imperial wars, corporate empowerment and harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers.

Sanders is part of the problem, not the solution. He’ll never admit it. I just did! 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Ban Assault Weapons, De-escalate Police Militarization

What about cops? Ban Assault Weapons, But for Police Too, Not Just Civilians

by Dave Lindorff  - This Can't Be Happening 

June 18, 2016

A few years ago, I contacted my local police department asking them to send an officer over to put down a doe that had been hit by a car on the street in front of my house. She had suffered a left front and right rear leg break but had somehow flopped herself well into the yard and was on the ground suffering.

When a cop arrived, and began to approach her with his pistol I warned him off, saying the deer would hurt herself more trying to get away.


Get assault rifles out of the hands of
the public...and of the police

"Oh," he replied. "Okay, I'll get a rifle." He returned to his SUV, and pulled out, to my astonishment, an AR-4, a military-style assault rifle, which he then used to shoot the deer with a clean shot between the eyes.

When I asked him about having that weapon available in his patrol vehicle, he replied matter-of-factly that all police in almost all departments in the country have them readily available.

Now for the record, I live in a suburban community where the only crimes we have are fights in or outside of bars, and the occasional breaking-and-entering burglary. Yet when a friend of mine whose late brother, a Vietnam veteran with serious PTSD mental issues and drug problems, while visiting his home here, called 911 and said he was going to kill himself with a pistol, my friend came home to find his house blocked off by a swarm of police vehicles, and surrounded by cops armed with assault rifles, and with snipers in position in four spots around the home. Informing the police that he had already removed the bullets and magazine from his brother's licensed pistol, and that as well his disabled, wheelchair-bound wife was inside that home, he convinced them to allow him to enter the home and bring out his brother out with him, and the incident ended peacefully.

But it demonstrates to me that this country's police have completely lost any sense that they are supposed to be "peace officers," as we once called them (when's the last time you've heard that old-fashioned term?).

After the latest bloody slaughter of dozens of people by a whacko with an assault rifle in Orlando, there are the usual calls to ban assault weapons in the US. That makes perfect sense to me. Assault rifles are not appropriate to hunting, unless you are trying to eliminate some species the way we nearly exterminated the Plains Bison in the late 19th century.

I've heard hunters claim that an assault rifle is "more humane" because it's rapid fire capability allows the hunter who has wounded some poor animal to finish it off before it runs off to die some miserable death elsewhere in the woods. But that's absurd logic. If the hunter cares that much about the welfare of his target, he should wait for a cleaner shot. In fact, thinking that way probably encourages more hunters to take wild shots earlier, knowing that they can get off more as needed.

The other argument made by gun advocates is that assault weapons are needed by fearful homeowners who want to protect themselves, their families and their property from would be home invaders. But assault weapons are a very poor choice for that job, as they are far more likely to cause what the military calls "collateral damage," injuring family members while trying to hit any of the invaders.

In any case, it's clear from the evidence in countries like Australia that have had the sense to ban assault weapons, that when they're not available the incidence of their use in mass killings drops dramatically -- in Australia's case to zero.

So let's ban assault weapons in the US.

But what about the cops? It's worth noting that the Orlando Police admit that some of the dead in the recent Pulse nightclub mass shooting may have been shot by police who fired at Omar Mateen and some of his hostages through the hole that police busted into the outer wall of a lavatory in the building where he had been holed up. I don't know the details of that shooting spree, but knowing how police tend to all fire at a suspect when given the chance, and that the responding SWAT teams were armed with assault rifles themselves, that they did so with guns that were on at least semi-automatic settings.

Police argue that they need assault rifles as standard issue weapons because the "bad guys" have them and they are thus "outgunned." But that of course is circular logic. If we allow ready access to assault weapons, of course the "bad guys" or crazies will want to have them too, and so then the police will need them. But if we ban assault weapons, and require any such currently licensed weapons held in private hands to be turned in and destroyed, there won't be that need.

In most modern civilized nations, even including police states like China, police don't have assault rifles as standard-issue weapons. They don't drive around with them racked in their patrol cars. If there is an incident in which criminals are known to have such arms, officers who are trained to use them are issued assault weapons themselves at headquarters, but there is careful management regarding when and how they are used. As a result, you don't see hundreds of civilians being killed by police in places like Europe, Japan, Hong Kong or Taiwan. As far as that goes, in some countries like the UK, police on patrol are not even armed with guns, which they only turn to when they know they are pursuing or seeking to apprehend someone who is armed with a gun.

Such police are in the business of "talking down" a suspect, not liquidating him or her, and so the whole approach to policing changes because there is not generally the option of just shooting the suspect to end an interaction. As one Scottish police chief explained to visiting US police leaders in an exchange program that was reported last year in the New York Times, "If we have an incident that ends in the arrest of an offender, we consider it a success. If an incident ends with a suspect being shot or killed, we consider it a failure."

Try to imagine an American police chief saying that. I've never heard such a thing. And a lot of the people who are killed by US police officers turn out to have been unarmed, or were armed with something as relatively harmless as a pocket knife.

So let's ban assault weapons, but not just for the citizenry, but also for our police. The terms "peace officer" and "assault weapon" simply do not go together. We must, as a society, acknowledge that reality.

Roads to Moscow: Why Walk in Russia

Why go to Russia?

by Kathy Kelly - vcnv.org

June 17, 2016
 

Since 1983, Sharon Tennison has worked to develop ordinary citizens’ capacities to avert international crises, focusing on relations between the U.S. and Russia. Now, amid a rising crisis in relations between the U.S. and Russia, she has organized a delegation which assembled in Moscow yesterday for a two week visit.

 I joined the group yesterday, and happened to finish reading Sharon Tennison’s book, The Power of Impossible Ideas, when I landed in Moscow.

An entry in her book, dated November 9, 1989, describes the excitement over the Berlin Wall coming down and notes that “Prior to the Wall’s removal, President Reagan assured Secretary General Gorbachev that if he would support bringing down the Wall separating East and West Berlin, NATO would not move ‘a finger’s width’ closer to Russia than East Germany’s border. With this assurance Gorbachev gladly signed on.

Little could he or the world have guessed that this promise would soon be broken during the next administration – and that the redeveloping distrust between the countries would threaten to become a second cold War, due to NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders.”

Today, NATO and U.S. troops will conclude 10 days of military exercises, Anakonda, on Russia’s western border, involving 31,000 troops. The operation was named after a snake that kills by crushing its prey. Ongoing deployment of 4,000 additional NATO troops has been announced. U.S. and South Korean military exercises just completed at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea were dubbed “Decapitation” and mobilized 320,000 troops.

Conn Hallinan, in “Bear Baiting Russia,” notes that

“Russia has two bases in the Middle East and a handful in Central Asia. The U.S. has 662 bases in foreign countries around the world and Special Forces (SOF) deployed in between 70 and 90 countries at any moment. Last year SOFs were active in 147 countries. The U.S. is actively engaged in five wars and is considering a sixth in Libya. Russian military spending will fall next year, and the U.S. will out-spend Moscow by a factor of 10. Who in this comparison looks threatening?” 

It’s important for U.S. people to learn more, from ordinary Russian people, about their responses to troop build-up and new bases on their borders, threatening military exercises, and antagonistic arsenals of nuclear weapons on high alert. As President Vladimir Putin begins summoning a new Russian National Guard that could include 400,000 troops, it’s important to hear how Russian people feel about this development.

Rather than foster cartoonized versions of foreign policy, the media should help people recognize complexity in Russian society and include awareness of desires to live in peace on the part of people in both countries.
U.S. people committed to peace making might help ordinary Russians sense the complexity of U.S. society and better understand how U.S. military spending and build up toward war adversely affects civil society in the U.S.

Suppose someone in Russia were to ask me what I was doing before coming to Russia. In honesty, I'd explain that the previous week companions and I finished a 150 mile walk to a supermax prison in my home state of Illinois which could eventually subject 1900 people to tortuous years of solitary confinement, doubling the number of such cells in the U.S. Like the military-industrial complex in the U.S., the prison-industrial complex is now rooted in government salaries and corporate profits, and it's hard to uproot it.
Before joining the walk, I lived for several weeks in late May and early June with young volunteers in Kabul who long to "live without war." 15 years into the U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. has “succeeded” in creating conditions for ongoing war.

NATO and U.S. officials claim that their military exercises in countries around the world will enhance international security, but those of us who are members of the delegation here in Russia believe that it’s essential to swiftly reverse the present trend toward Cold Wars with Russia and China. The fantasy of world domination endangers people throughout the world and within the U.S. as people again shudder over the possibility of war between nuclear armed powers.

This morning, Dmitri Babich, an active journalist for over 25 years focusing on Russian politics, said it’s important to name the problem we face, and he believes the fundamental problem is the U.S. insistence on being institutional supremacists, - exceptionalists.

In other words, the policy fantasy that stands in the way of addressing major world problems cooperatively is the idea that the United States can retain and expand the boundaries of “sole superpower” domination. United States policy should stop poking and provoking Russia and China along their frontiers, and instead seek negotiated peaceful coexistence.

Missiles fitted with thermonuclear warheads and on battle-ready status are unstable, and, at any time, can result in the catastrophic destruction of cities on both sides, and even the ending of civilized life on earth.
With active cooperation among the great powers and large reductions in wasteful competitive military spending, all countries could cooperatively address the threats from climate change, water shortages, regional underdevelopment, and economic pressures caused by population growth.

Ordinary people everywhere should do all that we can to demand that all international disputes be resolved by non-military means, avoiding all wars and achieving the deactivation of all nuclear weapons.

Sharon Tennison’s work to develop citizen-to-citizen diplomacy, since 1983, suggests that people could work together to tackle such problems.

But, informed public opinion in the U.S. and in Russia will be crucially needed.

My friend Brad Lyttle, a lead organizer of and participant in the “San Francisco to Moscow Walk” (1960 -1961) recently wrote to President Obama that there is no reason why the U.S. and Russia should continue to jeopardize the very existence of the human species with their huge nuclear arsenals.

“Work with President Putin to reduce and eliminate these,” wrote Brad. 

 “Emphasize a trustful and positive approach. Don't assume that the future needs always to be as bad as much of the past.”

Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org)co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence www.vcnv.org

Western Capitalism Reaches Its Barbaric Zenith

Predatory Capitalism and the Hidden Drivers Beneath Western Barbarism

by Mark Taliano - Global Research

June 16, 2016

Syria is on the front lines against the dictatorship of a globalizing economic ideology that favours the dominance of capital/markets over people and nation-states.

Wahhabi Saudi Arabia., the Gulf Monarchies, Israel, and NATO are trying to impose the hidden driver of imperialism, “International Capital”, on Syria.

Robin Mathews describes our own capture by international capital in “The Trans Pacific Partnership: Canada and Imperial Globalization”:

A characteristic of Imperial Globalization is criminal manipulation of people and events for the profit of a few. It includes massive ‘disinformation’ about equality, benefits, social development, law, improved standards of living, etc. The disinformation is spread by ‘authoritative’ news sources. In the hands of gigantic, wealthy, private corporations, globalization is a process which works to erase sovereign democracies and replaces them with ‘treatied’ sub-states, economic colonies ruled by faceless, offshore, often secret, unaccountable powers.

Whereas Canadians are led to believe that we live in a free and democratic society, we are increasingly engineered to accept the dictatorship of transnational capital as expressed through international banking institutions (as opposed to publicly-owned banking) and “free trade” agreements, all of which subordinate elected polties and serve the interests of an international oligarch class, to the detriment of Canadians. Both domestically and internationally, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few.

So how did Syria, free from terrorists prior to the pre-planned, criminal, imperialist “interventions”, earn the distinction of being on the front lines against the West?

Syria insists on choosing its own path, as per international law, and refuses to be a vassal of US led forces of predatory capitalism that siphons the world’s resources for the benefit of a transnational oligarch class.

Supremacists, on the other hand, view international law as a disposable commodity.

Countries are opened up for the extraction of human and natural resources. Transnational banksters pry open previously sovereign countries with usurious loans bundled Structural Adjustment Plans that privatize and loot public assets for the benefit of the publicly bailed-out “private” Market.

When all else fails, when sanctions haven’t killed and demoralized enough innocent civilians – the “other” — non-compliant civilized nations — face Empire’s foot soldiers — the likes of which include ISIS, and al Qaeda/al Nursra Front in Syria.

Zafar Bangath, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), and president of the Islamic Society of York Region, Toronto, ON., explains that Empire is seeking to install a compliant puppet government in Syria; that it is seeking to destroy Syria; and that it seeks to protect Israeli supremacy. Already, he notes, the aggressors have inflicted about $100 billion worth of damage on the battered country.

His assessment errs on the side of caution. A study by The Lancet, “Syria: end sanctions and find a political solution to peace” indicates that by the end of 2014, the cost of illegal sanctions imposed on Syria stood at US $143.8 billion, and that 80% of the population was living in poverty.

Meanwhile, President Assad is well aware of the imperial forces behind the mercenaries invading his country. In a speech to the newly elected members of the People’s Assembly, he elaborated upon the modus operandi of the invaders.

• They seek to attack the constitution by means of a so-called “transition” stage
• They seek to destroy the two pillars of the government: the army, and the diverse national, pan-Arab and religious identity of Syrians
• They seek to rebrand the savage terrorists as “moderates” and then to eternally provide them with a cover of legitimacy
• They seek to create chaos, sectarianism, ethnic enclaves that turns the people’s commitment from the homeland to conflicting groups that seek help from foreigners against their own people
• They seek to be branded as “humanitarian” and “protectors” to save the people from (externally engineered) conflict and misery.

By imposing economic and armed terrorism on the people, by waging a phony war against their own proxies, and by destroying a countries infrastructure, the imperialists seek to be seen as saviours, humanitarians, protectors, who can then introduce the “free market” of international capital, which will be the coup de grace to effect the final destruction of the host country.

We’ve seen the same script play out most recently in Libya and Iraq.

Stephen Gowans explains in “Aspiring to Rule the World: US Capital and the Battle for Syria”:

Significantly, every country in which the United States has intervened militarily either directly or through proxies, or threatened militarily, since WWII has had a largely publicly owned economy in which the state has played a decisive role, or has had a at democratized economy where productive assets have been redistributed from private (usually foreign) investors to workers and farmers, and in which room for US banks, US corporations and US investors to exploit the countries’ land, labor, markets and resources has been limited, if not altogether prohibited. These include the Soviet Union and its allied socialist countries; China; North Korea; Nicaragua; Yugoslavia; Iraq; Libya; Iran; and now Syria. We might expect that a foreign policy dominated by a wealthy investor class would have this character.

Syria, then, is opposing international forces of Capital that threaten its very existence. These imperial forces are trying to impose a globalized dictatorship of Capital that expresses itself externally in the economic sanctions and the invading terrorists ravaging Syria, even as expresses itself through “internal imperialism” in Western countries such as Canada, where public resources are increasingly looted for the benefit of international investors, and oligarch classes, foreign and domestic.

Instead of worshipping at the altar of transnational predatory capitalism, which is spreading war and poverty throughout the world, we should be embracing “Life Capital”, and the forces of economic and political democracy that accompany it.


The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Mark Taliano, Global Research, 2016

Winning the Budget War: Pentagon's Primary Strategy Keeps Money Coming

The Pentagon’s Real $trategy: Keeping the Money Flowing

by Andrew Cockburn - TomDispatch

June 16, 2016   

These days, lamenting the apparently aimless character of Washington’s military operations in the Greater Middle East has become conventional wisdom among administration critics of every sort. Senator John McCain thunders that “this president has no strategy to successfully reverse the tide of slaughter and mayhem” in that region. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies bemoans the “lack of a viable and public strategy.”

Andrew Bacevich suggests that “there is no strategy. None. Zilch.”

After 15 years of grinding war with no obvious end in sight, U.S. military operations certainly deserve such obloquy. But the pundit outrage may be misplaced.

Focusing on Washington rather than on distant war zones, it becomes clear that the military establishment does indeed have a strategy, a highly successful one, which is to protect and enhance its own prosperity.

Tomgram: Andrew Cockburn, Victory Assured on the Military's Main Battlefield -- Washington

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Because I'll be on the road for a few days, the next TD post will be on Tuesday, June 21st. Tom]

When it comes to Pentagon weapons systems, have you ever heard of cost “underruns”? I think not. Cost overruns? They turn out to be the unbreachable norm, as they seem to have been from time immemorial. In 1982, for example, the Pentagon announced that the cumulative cost of its 44 major weapons programs had experienced a “record” increase of $114.5 billion. Three decades later, in the spring of 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the military’s major programs to develop new weapons systems -- by then 80 of them -- were a cumulative half-trillion dollars over their initial estimated price tags and on average more than two years delayed. A year after, the GAO found that 47 of those programs had again increased in cost (to the cumulative tune of $27 billion) while the average time for delivering them had suffered another month’s delay (although the Pentagon itself swore otherwise).

And little seems to have changed since then -- not exactly a surprise given that this has long been standard operating procedure for a Pentagon that has proven adamantly incapable not just of passing an audit but even of doing one. What we’re talking about here is, in fact, more like a way of life. As TomDispatch regular William Hartung has written, the Pentagon regularly takes “active measures to disguise how it is spending the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars it receives every year -- from using the separate ‘war budget’ as a slush fund to pay for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting wars to keeping the cost of its new nuclear bomber a secret.”

When it comes to those cost overruns, Exhibit A is incontestably the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a plane whose total acquisition costs were pegged at $233 billion back in 2001. That price now: an estimated $1.4 trillion for far fewer planes. (Even the F-35 pilot’s helmet costs $400,000 apiece.) In other words, though in test flights it has failed to outperform the F-16, a plane it is supposed to replace, it will be, hands down (or flaps up), the most expensive weapons system in history -- at least until the next Pentagon doozy comes along.

Today, Andrew Cockburn, whose recent book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (just out in paperback), is a devastating account of how U.S. drone warfare really works, suggests that this is anything but a matter of Pentagon bungling. Quite the opposite, it’s strategy of the first order. Tom 

The Pentagon’s Real $trategy: Keeping the Money Flowing

by Andrew Cockburn

Given this focus, creating and maintaining an effective fighting force becomes a secondary consideration, reflecting a relative disinterest -- remarkable to outsiders -- in the actual business of war, as opposed to the business of raking in dollars for the Pentagon and its industrial and political partners. A key element of the strategy involves seeding the military budget with “development” projects that require little initial outlay but which, down the line, grow irreversibly into massive, immensely profitable production contracts for our weapons-making cartels. 

If this seems like a startling proposition, consider, for instance, the Air Force’s determined and unyielding efforts to jettison the A-10 Thunderbolt, widely viewed as the most effective means for supporting troops on the ground, while ardently championing the sluggish, vastly overpriced F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that, among myriad other deficiencies, cannot fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm. No less telling is the Navy’s ongoing affection for budget-busting programs such as aircraft carriers, while maintaining its traditional disdain for the unglamorous and money-poor mission of minesweeping, though the mere threat of enemy mines in the 1991 Gulf War (as in the Korean War decades earlier) stymied plans for major amphibious operations. Examples abound across all the services.

Meanwhile, ongoing and dramatic programs to invest vast sums in meaningless, useless, or superfluous weapons systems are the norm. There is no more striking example of this than current plans to rebuild the entire American arsenal of nuclear weapons in the coming decades, Obama's staggering bequest to the budgets of his successors.

Taking Nuclear Weapons to the Bank

These nuclear initiatives have received far less attention than they deserve, perhaps because observers are generally loath to acknowledge that the Cold War and its attendant nuclear terrors, supposedly consigned to the ashcan of history a quarter-century ago, are being revived on a significant scale. The U.S. is currently in the process of planning for the construction of a new fleet of nuclear submarines loaded with new intercontinental nuclear missiles, while simultaneously creating a new land-based intercontinental missile, a new strategic nuclear bomber, a new land-and-sea-based tactical nuclear fighter plane, a new long-range nuclear cruise missile (which, as recently as 2010, the Obama administration explicitly promised not to develop), at least three nuclear warheads that are essentially new designs, and new fuses for existing warheads. In addition, new nuclear command-and-control systems are under development for a fleet of satellites (costing up to $1 billion each) designed to make the business of fighting a nuclear war more practical and manageable.

This massive nuclear buildup, routinely promoted under the comforting rubric of “modernization,” stands in contrast to the president’s lofty public ruminations on the topic of nuclear weapons. The most recent of these was delivered during his visit -- the first by an American president -- to Hiroshima last month. There, he urged “nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles” to “have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them.”

In reality, that “logic of fear” suggests that there is no way to “fight” a nuclear war, given the unforeseeable but horrific effects of these immensely destructive weapons. They serve no useful purpose beyond deterring putative opponents from using them, for which an extremely limited number would suffice. During the Berlin crisis of 1961, for example, when the Soviets possessed precisely four intercontinental nuclear missiles, White House planners seriously contemplated launching an overwhelming nuclear strike on the USSR. It was, they claimed, guaranteed to achieve “victory.” As Fred Kaplan recounts in his book Wizards of Armageddon, the plan’s advocates conceded that the Soviets might, in fact, be capable of managing a limited form of retaliation with their few missiles and bombers in which as many as three million Americans could be killed, whereupon the plan was summarily rejected.

In other words, in the Cold War as today, the idea of “nuclear war-fighting” could not survive scrutiny in a real-world context. Despite this self-evident truth, the U.S. military has long been the pioneer in devising rationales for fighting such a war via ever more “modernized” weapons systems. Thus, when first introduced in the early 1960s, the Navy’s invulnerable Polaris-submarine-launched intercontinental missiles -- entirely sufficient in themselves as a deterrent force against any potential nuclear enemy -- were seen within the military as an attack on Air Force operations and budgets. The Air Force responded by conceiving and successfully selling the need for a full-scale, land-based missile force as well, one that could more precisely target enemy missiles in what was termed a “counterforce” strategy.

The drive to develop and build such systems on the irrational pretense that nuclear war fighting is a practical proposition persists today. One component of the current “modernization” plan is the proposed development of a new “dial-a-yield” version of the venerable B-61 nuclear bomb. Supposedly capable of delivering explosions of varying strength according to demand, this device will, at least theoretically, be guidable to its target with high degrees of accuracy and will also be able to burrow deep into the earth to destroy buried bunkers. The estimated bill -- $11 billion -- is a welcome boost for the fortunes of the Sandia and Los Alamos weapons laboratories that are developing it.

The ultimate cost of this new nuclear arsenal in its entirety is essentially un-knowable. The only official estimate we have so far came from the Congressional Budget Office, which last year projected a total of $350 billion. That figure, however, takes the “modernization” program only to 2024 -- before, that is, most of the new systems move from development to actual production and the real bills for all of this start thudding onto taxpayers’ doormats. This year, for instance, the Navy is spending a billion and a half dollars in research and development funds on its new missile submarine, known only as the SSBN(X). Between 2025 and 2035, however, annual costs for that program are projected to run at $10 billion a year. Similar escalations are in store for the other items on the military’s impressive nuclear shopping list.

Assiduously tabulating these projections, experts at the Monterey Center for Nonproliferation Studies peg the price of the total program at a trillion dollars. In reality, though, the true bill that will come due over the next few decades will almost certainly be multiples of that. For example, the Air Force has claimed that its new B-21 strategic bombers will each cost more than $564 million (in 2010 dollars), yet resolutely refuses to release its secret internal estimates for the ultimate cost of the program.

To offer a point of comparison, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the tactical nuclear bomber previously mentioned, was originally touted as costing no more than $35 million per plane. In fact, it will actually enter service with a sticker price well in excess of $200 million.

Nor does that trillion-dollar figure take into account the inevitable growth of America’s nuclear “shield.” Nowadays, the excitement and debate once generated by President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” scheme to build a defense system of anti-missile missiles and other devices against a nuclear attack is long gone. (The idea for such a defense, in fact, dates back to the 1950s, but Reagan boosted it to prominence.) Nevertheless, missile defense still routinely soaks up some $10 billion of our money annually, even though it is known to have no utility whatsoever.

“We have nothing to show for it,” Tom Christie, the former director of the Pentagon’s testing office, told me recently. “None of the interceptors we currently have in silos waiting to shoot down enemy missiles have ever worked in tests.” Even so, the U.S. is busy constructing more anti-missile bases across Eastern Europe. As our offensive nuclear programs are built up in the years to come, almost certainly eliciting a response from Russia and China, the pressure for a costly expansion of our nuclear “defenses” will surely follow.

The Bow-Wave Strategy

It’s easy enough to find hypocrisy in President Obama’s mellifluous orations on abolishing nuclear weapons given the trillion-dollar-plus nuclear legacy he will leave in his wake. The record suggests, however, that faced with the undeviating strategic thinking of the military establishment and its power to turn desires into policy, he has simply proven as incapable of altering the Washington system as his predecessors in the Oval Office were or as his successors are likely to be.

Inside the Pentagon, budget planners and weapons-buyers talk of the “bow wave,” referring to the process by which current research and development initiatives, initially relatively modest in cost, invariably lock in commitments to massive spending down the road. Traditionally, such waves start to form at times when the military is threatened with possible spending cutbacks due to the end of a war or some other budgetary crisis.

Former Pentagon analyst Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, who spent years observing and chronicling the phenomenon from the inside, recalls an early 1970s bow wave at a time when withdrawal from Vietnam appeared to promise a future of reduced defense spending. The military duly put in place an ambitious “modernization” program for new planes, ships, tanks, satellites, and missiles. Inevitably, when it came time to actually buy all those fancy new systems, there was insufficient money in the defense budget.

Accordingly, the high command cut back on spending for “readiness”; that is, for maintaining existing weapons in working order, training troops, and similar mundane activities. This had the desired effect -- at least from the point of view of Pentagon -- of generating a raft of media and congressional horror stories about the shocking lack of preparedness of our fighting forces and the urgent need to boost its budget. In this way, the hapless Jimmy Carter, elected to the presidency on a promise to rein in defense spending, found himself, in Spinney’s phrase, "mousetrapped," and eventually unable to resist calls for bigger military budgets.

This pattern would recur at the beginning of the 1990s when the Soviet Union imploded and the Cold War superpower military confrontation seemed at an end. The result was the germination of ultimately budget-busting weapons systems like the Air Force’s F-35 and F-22 fighters. It happened again when pullbacks from Iraq and Afghanistan in Obama’s first term led to mild military spending cuts. As Spinney points out, each successive bow wave crests at a higher level, while military budget cuts due to wars ending and the like become progressively more modest.

The latest nuclear buildup is only the most glaring and egregious example of the present bow wave that is guaranteed to grow to monumental proportions long after Obama has retired to full-time speechmaking. The cost of the first of the Navy’s new Ford Class aircraft carriers, for example, has already grown by 20% to $13 billion with more undoubtedly to come. The “Third Offset Strategy,” a fantasy-laden shopping list of robot drones and “centaur” (half-man, half-machine) weapons systems, assiduously touted by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, is similarly guaranteed to expand stunningly beyond the $3.6 billion allotted to its development next year.

Faced with such boundlessly ambitious raids on the public purse, no one should claim a “lack of strategy” as a failing among our real policymakers, even if all that planning has little or nothing to do with distant war zones where Washington’s conflicts smolder relentlessly on.

Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years. In addition to numerous books, he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and the 2009 documentary on the financial crisis, American Casino. His latest book is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (just out in paperback).

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

Copyright 2016 Andrew Cockburn

Samantha's Power of Delusion

Samantha Power, Henry Kissinger & Imperial Delusions

by Daniel Kovalik - CounterPunch

June 16, 2016

Quite revealingly, the self-proclaimed crusader against genocide, Samantha Power, was awarded the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize in Berlin.

That Power would be awarded a prize named after one of the world’s great génocidaires, and that she would happily accept it, proves what many of us have believed all along – that she is more the clever apologist for U.S. crimes than a bona fide human rights advocate.

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet shaking hands
with Kissinger in 1976, Archivo General Histórico del 
Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, licensed under CC BY 2.0 

The problem with Power all along has been that her refusal to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that the U.S., as exemplified by such figures as Henry Kissinger himself, is in reality the world leader in war crimes commission, and an active facilitator of genocide. The U.S. is not, as Power has claimed throughout her career, a force for halting such evils. However, Power has done an impressive job in advancing this myth, and in the process in perpetuating the false belief that the world would be better off if only the U.S. were more active militarily throughout the world. In so doing, Power, who is lauded as some great human rights advocate, probably does more than any other public figure to harm the cause of global human rights.

Power’s acceptance speech, entitled, “Remarks on ‘Twenty-First Century Realism’ at the Awarding of the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize,” is very illustrative of the delusions Power promotes in the interest of U.S. power projection and the grave harms done by this projection. [1]

First of all, Power, in full agreement with Kissinger, condemns what she refers to as “the rise of extremist and isolationist voices in the U.S.” who dare challenge “the internationalist assumptions that have undergirded U.S. foreign policy across party lines since the Second World War.” This statement is pregnant with meaning and deserves some dissecting.

As an initial matter, it is stunning that Power would characterize those who call for the U.S. to stop, or even slow, its aggressive, interventionist policy around the globe as “extremist” when it so clear to any rational observer that it is this interventionist policy itself which is so extremist as to be insane.

Indeed, it is hard to point to any great successes, especially in terms of human rights, that the U.S.’s post-WWII “internationalism” (I would prefer to call it imperialist aggression) achieved, and Power in her speech tellingly does not point to even one such success. And, how could she with a straight face? The innumerable U.S. interventionist adventures since WWII have done nothing to advance human rights or even national security, at least if national security means the protection of U.S. citizens like you and me.

Rather, the U.S.’s “internationalism” has consisted of overthrowing constitutional democracies in countries like Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), Haiti (2004), Honduras (2009), just to name a few. It has consisted of carrying out mass slaughter in an attempt to put down national liberation struggles, for example in Vietnam and in Southern Africa, costing the lives of millions. And, it has involved sewing instability throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East, in such countries as Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

Power’s complete blindness to such realities – though she ironically entitles her speech, “Twenty-first Century Realism” – is hard to fathom. For example, she explains the current rise of ISIL in Iraq as the product of “the deeply sectarian, corrupt, and abusive rule of Prime Minister Maliki . . . . “ There is no mention, however, of the 1991 and 2003 military interventions in Iraq by the U.S., nor of the intervening sanctions regime, which destroyed the social fabric of that country and left hundreds of thousands of civilians, including at least half a million children, dead. No, those acts of “internationalism” apparently do not deserve even a mention in Power’s distorted view.

In addition, Power does not mention the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, though that was an intervention which she and her soulmates Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice played a key role in bringing about. Again, the undisputed result of this intervention has been instability in Libya and surrounding countries, such Mali and Tunisia, and the accompanying rise of armed extremist groups in those countries. But again, this deserves no mention. Instead, Power attempts to explain the “instability roiling the Middle East” as the product of almost mystical forces beyond the purview of the U.S., thus criticizing those who would “presume that the United States had within our control to put the Arab Spring genie back in the bottle . . . .”

Power, repeating her long-time refrain which has given her the reputation as a human rights advocate, ends her speech by stating that “we no longer live in an era in which foreign policymakers can claim to serve their nations’ interests treating what happens to people in other countries as an afterthought. . . . What happens to people in other countries matters. It matters to the welfare of our own nations and our own citizens.” Of course, there is nothing particularly profound about this statement, and it would be hard to find many who would admit to disagreeing with it.

However, as with all Power says, what is absent is any discussion about how the actions of the U.S., and of even of Power herself, has undermined the welfare of people in other countries. For example, in addition to her role in pushing for the disastrous intervention in Libya, Power has also been active in giving diplomatic cover to the U.S.-backed Saudi slaughter in Yemen which continues to this day. Thus, in an episode quite reminiscent of those she criticizes in her Pulitzer-prize winning book, A Problem From Hell, Power helped the Saudis scuttle a resolution at the United Nations that called for an investigation into the civilian toll of the Saudi coalition war against Yemen [2], in which at least 6,000 civilians have been killed and 14 million civilians find themselves on the brink of starvation. In the end, even for Power, whether “people in other countries matter” inevitably depends upon who the people are, and whether the state impacting their interests is a friend of the U.S. or not.

In short, Power is really the perfect exemplar of U.S. foreign policy. She is a hypocrite and a phony idealist who believes her own lies about the role of the U.S., and even herself, in the world, and who does a great job of convincing the public that these lies are truth. But sadly — like Kissinger himself who will never be able to wash the blood of the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Chileans, Argentines and East Timorese off his hands, but who nonetheless is treated as an elder statesman — Power will most likely never be brought to account. She will continue to live out her days watching Boston Red Sox games and hanging out with the rich and powerful, while other, lesser criminals are sent to The Hague. Regrettably, this is what passes for human rights these days . . . .

Notes

[1] See, Power speech at http://usun.state.gov/remarks/7320

[2] https://news.vice.com/article/as-saudis-block-a-human-rights-inquiry-in-yemen-the-us-stays-quiet

 

Daniel Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

More articles by:Daniel Kovalik

Marching to Thomson Prison

Activists Complete 150 mile March to Thomson Prison

by Buddy Bell - Creative Voices for Non-Violence

In late May and early June, Chicago group Voices for Creative Nonviolence held a 150-mile walk against indefinite detention, solitary confinement, and the racist U.S. prison system. For two weeks, a group of 20 justice seekers walked across the state of Illinois from east to west, interacting with hundreds of passers-by, carrying placards to give a momentary reminder to thousands of motorists, and holding public face-to-face discussions at churches and libraries. They began on May 28 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago and then walked through Chicago’s west side, the western suburbs, on to DeKalb and the rural northwest part of the state.

The march swelled to 35 by the last day, June 11. When the walkers arrived in the small town center of rural Thomson, IL, they noticed that 18 police cars were staged in this town of 600 residents. Carrying placards saying "Education Not Incarceration" and "Hospitals Not Prisons", the activists continued walking the final mile up to the Administrative U.S. Penitentiary, Thomson, which is expected to open in 2017.

The word “administrative” is a euphemism for a facility which consists entirely of isolation cells, in this case 1,900 of them, according to the watchdog organization Solitary Watch. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons would try to fill these cells by taking prisoners from other prisons to bring them to Illinois, a state where activists have spent decades furthering a general awareness of solitary confinement. The general disgust with solitary confinement in Illinois recently forced the state assembly to consider a House Bill 5417, legislation that requires a documented reason for putting any prisoner in isolation confinement and which limits the duration of such confinement to not more than 5 days.

The walkers admonished the U.S. government for not releasing the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, who for 14 years have not been charged with any crime. It is thought that Thomson prison may still be part of a murky and politically expeditious plan to avoid releasing these detainees by simply moving them around. Similar to having people wait years and years without a speedy trial in Cook County jail, indefinite detention without charge or trial is a government crime, the brunt of which falls on poor people and on people of color, especially Black people, who on the national level in 2008 were 6 times more likely to go to prison than white people, according to the NAACP.

The walk to Thomson prison is a recently woven row in the vast tapestry of work being done to challenge the prison system. The more work that can be done to engage people on the issue of mass imprisonment, the better. Facilitating dialogue and sparking people’s imaginations can eventually lead to a diversion of public resources away from building prisons and into alternatives that help to build a healthier society.

Kabul, Afghanistan

In the Absence of Peace

by Sabia Rigby

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”

-Warsan Shire


Do you believe that there are children as young as ten who think and learn about nonviolence and desire to shelter you from the grief and suffering of war…in Afghanistan?

Come hear the stories of the Afghan Peace Volunteers. They understand that they may never see the end of war; they tell me that they do not believe that there can be peace or that they believe in peace, since they have never lived without war.

Then why do this great and arduous work? Their answer, “We have not lost hope.” Later that afternoon, I was relating these conversations to Hakim, who has had countless conversations about this, he shared the question he asked the group, “…then what should we do, how should we conduct our lives in the absence of peace?”

The Borderfree Center is their answer of hope in action. A safe haven of twenty teams involved in permaculture, trainings on leadership, volunteerism, Dari, math, classes about green spaces, sustainability and how to care for the earth, equity and equality between people and nations, and nonviolence concepts, practices and influential people of nonviolent movements. The facilitators are as young as 13 years old, and yes, she is a girl, Muqadisa.

I sit here in Kabul at the Borderfree Center reminding myself to breathe and blink. I am in awe.

Zuhal shows a PowerPoint of photo after photo: famine, mutated humans, drone attacks and nuclear bombs and the shape they leave on human bodies, lives and the earth. She stops, stutters and cries in front of the group. Zuhal was affected by the Kunduz Hospital attack. There is not a human in the room outside of me that has not been affected by war.

The APVs know that the past is not easily brushed away like the naan (bread) crumbs after every meal. It is the ingredient that connects us to each other and to the planet. The more we try to separate ourselves from the past the more the past conspires to bring us back to each other. They are using the past as a teacher and a guide to lead lives that cultivate and benefit the earth and all living beings.

(https://www.facebook.com/Voices-for-Creative-Nonviolence-186632774722147/)

Copyright © 2016 Voices for Creative Nonviolence, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:
Voices for Creative Nonviolence
1249 W Argyle St
Chicago, IL 60640
USA

Through Lies and Deception: Canadian Home Governance and Foreign Policy

Governing Through Lies And Deception

by Mark Taliano - Global Research

June 12, 2016

On September 16, 2005, Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister, Paul Martin, addressed “The High Level Meeting of the Sixtieth Session of the United Nations General Assembly”:

“Clearly, we need expanded guidelines for Security Council action to make clear our responsibility to act decisively to prevent humanity’s attack on humanity. The “Responsibility to Protect” is one such guideline. It seeks rules to protect the innocent against appalling assaults on their life and dignity. It does not bless unilateral action. To the contrary, it stands for clear, multilaterally-agreed criteria on what the international community should do when civilians are at risk.”

These “expanded guidelines” as expressed by Martin, were later exploited to launch the criminal invasion of Libya, in which Canada played an important role.

Instead of “protecting the Libyan people”, the guidelines were used to attack the wealthiest nation in Africa, to support proxy ground forces (al-Qaeda), and to destroy the country.

The notion that Libyans needed “protection” was engineered through a campaign to demonize Libya’s leader, Mohammar Gaddafi. The West used an arsenal of evidence-free allegations, largely unchallenged by corporate media, to press its case.

Maximilian C. Forte lists the lies in “The Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya” :

• Genocide
• Gadaffi is “bombing his own people”.
• “Save Benghazi”
• African mercenaries
• Viagara-fueled mass rape
• Gaddafi – the Demon
• Freedom Fighters – the Angels

The lies also masked Libya’s socially-oriented governance that boasted remarkable achievements:

• Human Development Index (HDI), a measure of health, education, and income, ranked above the regional average
• the highest standard of living in Africa
• Free public health care, and free public education
• 89% adult literacy rate (with girls outnumbering boys by 10% in secondary and tertiary education)
• Subsidized, affordable food
• Homelessness all but wiped out

In reality, then, the R2P legislation served as a cover to enable the inversion of its professed goal. Instead of protecting Libya and Libyans, it destroyed both.

Abayomi Azikiwe reports in “Libya War Continues Three Years After Gaddafi Assassination” that the demise of the Jamahiriya-Gaddafi rule has resulted in “on-going destabilization, with warring factions battling for control.”

Martin also explained that,

“[T]he status quo and too often empty rhetoric must make way here for a new and pragmatic multilateralism measured by concrete results, not simply by promises. Our citizens want security, based on international law. They want opportunity, based on more effective aid. They want empowerment, based on respect for human rights.”

This statement, too, has proven prophetic, in the sense that Canada is still practicing the opposite to what it proclaims to do.

Canada’s disregard for international law and order Canadian was also in full view when it supported the Canada-Honduras Free Trade deal not long after the democratically-elected Zelaya government was deposed by an illegal, Washington-orchestrated coup.

The author wrote in “Why Canada and the U.S. are on the ‘Wrong Side of Democracy’ “:

Living conditions in Honduras have gone from bad to worse since the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was ousted by a military coup in 2009. The rupture of democratic governance has set Honduras back decades,

and that

Hondurans have experienced increased levels of violence since the coup and unprecedented levels of murder and criminalization of politicians, human rights advocates, labor activists, journalists and indigenous leaders.

In fact, assassins recently murdered Honduran indigenous leader Berta Caceres, one of numerous murders that in all likelihood would not have occurred had it not been for the illegal coup, orchestrated by Washington.

Canada’s complicity in the “destabilisation” of Honduras is best illustrated through its ratification of the “Canada-Honduras Economic Growth and Prosperity Act”.

On March 31, 2014, Member of Parliament (MP) Alex Atamanenko, of British Columbia Southern Interior, BC, explained the duplicity of ratifying the agreement:

Mr. Speaker, let me be clear. There are three fundamentally important criteria for assessing the merits of trade agreements.

First, does the proposed partner respect democracy, human rights, adequate labour and environmental standards, and Canadian values? If there are challenges in these regards, is the partner on a positive trajectory toward these goals?

Second, is the proposed partner’s economy of significant or strategic value to Canada?

Third, are the terms of the proposed agreement satisfactory?

The proposed free trade agreement with Honduras clearly fails this test.

Canada’s foreign policy duplicity is also inherent in its support another illegal government: that of the neo-Nazi infested regime, offspring of the Western-orchestrated coup that deposed the elected government of President Yanuyovch. George Freidman, founder and CEO of Stratfor intelligence described the coup as “the most overt coup in history.”

More recently, our duplicity was in full view when Defence Minister, Harjit Sajjan, stated publicly that “Assad must go”. This, despite the fact that engineering regime change in a sovereign, foreign country, contradicts international law; despite the fact that Canada’s previous bombing campaign against Syria (now more of a support role), was a clear violation of international law; and despite the fact that the current sanctions levied against Syria are illegal as well.

Clearly, Canada’s humanitarian proclamations are hollow facades engineered to fool Canadians into thinking that we have a benevolent foreign policy, even as evidence demonstrates the opposite.

Instead of supporting democracy and the rule of international law, our government practices public deception and subterfuge to conceal its criminal international policies which deny and negate both democracy and international law.

Increasingly, our elected governments are ruling through lies and deceptions; the consent that they are engineering is not informed consent. “Democracy” and Canada’s current political economy flow in opposite directions.


The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Mark Taliano, Global Research, 2016