Media Promote War On Syria

Syria’s a battle zone. Western generated violence is to blame, not Assad. America’s media scoundrels claim otherwise. They want him ousted by any means, including war.

An April 9 Wall Street Journal commentary said “Syrian government forces (keep) bombing and killing….” Assad “reneged on (his) promises to end the bloodshed.”

Washington “and its allies (are) doing little or nothing to depose (his) regime. (The) illusion of diplomatic progress serves as cover for the Assads of the world to do more killing. Your move, President Obama.”

Like all scoundrel media commentators, Journal contributors blame victims, not villains. Their readers are betrayed, not informed.

Wall Street Journal contributor Fouad Ajami long ago sold out to imperial interests for whatever he gets in return. He showed it in an op-ed headlined, “A Kosovo Model for Syria,” saying:

“In the Obama world, the tendency to wait has become official policy: It is either boots on the ground or head in the sand.”

He’d “be wise to consider the way Bill Clinton dealt with the crisis of Kosovo in 1999. He authorized a NATO air campaign against Serbia that began on March 23, 1999, the very same day a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress voted to support it.”

Fact check

Bombing Yugoslavia for 78 days violated international law, as well as US constitutional and statute laws. It was also humanitarian hypocrisy.

Congress didn’t declare war. The Security Council didn’t authorize it. Yugoslavia didn’t threaten America, other NATO members or neighboring states. Nonetheless, Clinton got the war he wanted.

It was lawless, premeditated aggression. Ajami thinks it’s a good thing. So do other scoundrel media contributors like him. Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman said America “suffered one casualty in the (Serbia/Kosovo) war. (The) rule of law (was) blown to pieces.”

While Congress appropriated funds for the war, it never authorized it. Presidents can’t do it on their own. It hasn’t stopped them since WW II. Roosevelt’s war was the last one Congress declared. Failure to do so made others following it illegal, Obama’s wars included.

Ajami claimed Clinton acted responsibly. Obama “has a similar opportunity” to oust Assad “without a massive American commitment.” Failure leaves “only the shame of averting our eyes from Syrian massacres.”

Shamefully, many others agree with him.

On April 21, a Washington Post editorial said it’s time for “Plan B.”

“THE ONLY good news about Syria since the Obama administration’s embrace of an unworkable United Nations peace plan is the hints that it is beginning to consider alternatives.”

Assad “will never be induced by diplomacy to end his assaults on Syrian cities, allow peaceful demonstrations or release political prisoners….”

Obama has “to recognize these realities and embrace options that actually can advance its stated goal of ending Mr. Assad’s rule.”

“Mr. Assad will fall only when his attacks are blocked and countered; it follows that U.S. policy should aim at that.”

The Post urges “feckless diplomacy” ended in favor of immediate military action. Hawkish throughout the conflict, its position heads toward boiling over. Can war be far behind?

Hillary Clinton’s notoriously hawkish. So is UN envoy Susan Rice. Critics call her “Rice-a-phony.” She’s an over-ambitious zealot angling for Clinton’s job. Her rhetoric makes some observers gasp. It gives diplomacy a bad name and then some.

After Security Council Resolution 2043 passed, authorizing up to 300 unarmed military Syrian monitors, she couldn’t hold back.

She said “300 or even 3,000 (won’t halt Assad) from waging (his) barbaric campaign of violence against the Syrian people.” Only “intensified external pressure (can halt his) murderous rampage.”

She suggested tough measures are coming, saying “let there be no doubt: we, our allies and others in this body are planning and preparing for those actions….if the Assad regime persists in the slaughter of the Syrian people.”

The Post also wants tough talk followed by tougher action. Minimally it supports “modest military force.” Perhaps it considers Serbia/Kosovo a template. Perhaps it needs brushing up on US and international law, as well as who initiated lawless conflict and who confronted it responsibly.

Syria was calm and peaceful until Washington unleashed its dogs. US Special Forces direct them on the ground. So do UK ones. They attack hard and soft targets alike. They have Turkish safe haven sanctuaries. Post and other media scoundrels omit what’s most important.

Ignoring Obama administration lies and its own, a New York Times editorial headlined “Assad’s Lies,” saying:

Assad “reneged on nearly every promise made. (So-called) “activists reported that Syrian troops fired tear gas and bullets on thousands of protesters….Ban Ki-moon (claims he’s) failing to provide needed food and medicine to 230,000 displaced people, and refusing to allow outside agencies to help.”

Fact check

“Activists” cited are stooges for power. Throughout the conflict, Times articles, op-eds, and editorials shamelessly blamed Assad for Western generated crimes. Ban Ki-moon does the same thing. Kofi Annan did it before him.

Both have shameless records of failure and betrayal. Assurance it would turn out that way got them their jobs. Only imperial loyalists qualify. Only media scoundrels claim otherwise or say nothing about their support for lawless wars and inaction to stop them.

Although Western generated violence displaced thousands of Syrians, no one has precise counts how many. ICRC officials report Assad cooperates delivering aid. Only areas plagued by insurgent violence makes it hard. When security forces quell it, residents thank Assad. They’d be helpless without him.

The Times said his “cruelty and blindness were predictable. What is unfathomable is why Russia and China continue to support him….Even now, Russian officials put much of the blame for the bloodshed on the fractured, mostly peaceful opposition forces, not the Syrian Army with its heavy weapons.”

“Russia sells arms to Syria….China seems determined to deny the West another ‘win….’ “

Fact check

Times opinion writers mock truth and full disclosure. Anyone trying better find another line of work. Only imperial loyalty matters. Facts are sacrificed to support it.

In response to insurgent violence, Assad confronts it responsibly. Syrians count on him. He’s their only means of defense. Russia and China are the only permanent Security Council members preventing Washington from getting another war trophy – so far.

Why Putin Is Driving Washington Nuts

Forget the past (Saddam, Osama, Gaddafi) and the present (Assad, Ahmadinejad). A bet can be made over a bottle of Petrus 1989 (the problem is waiting the next six years to collect); for the foreseeable future, Washington’s top bogeyman – and also for its rogue North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners and assorted media shills – will be none other than back-to-the-future Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And make no mistake; Vlad the Putinator will relish it. He’s back exactly where he wants to be; as Russia’s commander-in-chief, in charge of the military, foreign policy and all national security matters.

Anglo-American elites still squirm at the mention of his now legendary Munich 2007 speech, when he blasted the then George W Bush administration for its obsessively unipolar imperial agenda “through a system which has nothing to do with democracy” and non-stop overstepping of its “national borders in almost all spheres”.”

So Washington and its minions have been warned. Before last Sunday’s election, Putin even advertised his road map The essentials; no war on Syria; no war on Iran; no “humanitarian bombing” or fomenting “color revolutions” – all bundled into a new concept, “illegal instruments of soft power”. For Putin, a Washington-engineered New World Order is a no-go. What rules is “the time-honored principle of state sovereignty”.

No wonder. When Putin looks at Libya, he sees the graphic, regressive consequences of NATO’s “liberation” through “humanitarian bombing”; a fragmented country controlled by al-Qaeda-linked militias; backward Cyrenaica splitting from more developed Tripolitania; and a relative of the last king brought in to rule the new “emirate” – to the delight of those model democrats of the House of Saud.

More key essentials; no US bases encircling Russia; no US missile defense without strict admission, in writing, that the system will never target Russia; and increasingly close cooperation among the BRICS group of emerging powers.

Most of this was already implied in Putin’s previous road map – his paper A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making. That was Putin’s ippon – he loves judo – against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the International Monetary Fund and hardcore neo-liberalism. He sees a Eurasian Union as a “modern economic and currency union” stretching all across Central Asia.

For Putin, Syria is an important detail (not least because of Russia’s naval base in the Mediterranean port of Tartus, which NATO would love to abolish). But the meat of the matter is Eurasia integration. Atlanticists will freak out en masse as he puts all his efforts into coordinating “a powerful supranational union that can become one of the poles of today’s world while being an efficient connecting link between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific Region”.

The opposite roadmap will be Obama and Hillary’s Pacific doctrine. Now how exciting is that?

Putin plays Pipelineistan
It was Putin who almost single-handedly spearheaded the resurgence of Russia as a mega energy superpower (oil and gas accounts for two-thirds of Russia’s exports, half of the federal budget and 20% of gross domestic product). So expect Pipelineistan to remain key.

And it will be mostly centered on gas; although Russia holds no less than 30% of global gas supplies, its liquid natural gas (LNG) production is less than 5% of the global market share. It’s not even among the top ten producers.

Putin knows that Russia will need buckets of foreign investment in the Arctic – from the West and especially Asia – to keep its oil production above 10 million barrels a day. And it needs to strike a complex, comprehensive, trillion-dollar deal with China centered on Eastern Siberia gas fields; the oil angle has been already taken care of via the East Siberian Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline. Putin knows that for China – in terms of securing energy – this deal is a vital counterpunch against Washington’s shady “pivoting” towards Asia.

Putin will also do everything to consolidate the South Stream pipeline – which may end up costing a staggering $22 billion (the shareholder agreement is already signed between Russia, Germany, France and Italy. South Stream is Russian gas delivered under the Black Sea to the southern part of the EU, through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Slovakia). If South Stream is a go, rival pipeline Nabucco is checkmated; a major Russian victory against Washington pressure and Brussels bureaucrats.

Everything is still up for grabs at the crucial intersection of hardcore geopolitics and Pipelineistan. Once again Putin will be facing yet another Washington road map – the not exactly successful New Silk Road (See US’s post-2014 Afghan agenda falters, Asia Times Online, Nov 4, 2011.)

Ant then there’s the joker in the pack – the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Putin will want Pakistan to become a full member as much as China is interested in incorporating Iran. The repercussions would be ground-breaking – as in Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran coordinating not only their economic integration but their mutual security inside a strengthened SCO, whose motto is “non-alignment, non-confrontation and non-interference in the affairs of other countries”.

Putin sees that with Russia, Central Asia and Iran controlling no less than 50% of world’s gas reserves, and with Iran and Pakistan as virtual SCO members, the name of the game becomes Asia integration – if not Eurasia’s. The SCO develops as an economic/security powerhouse, while, in parallel, Pipelineistan accelerates the full integration of the SCO as a counterpunch to NATO. The regional players themselves will decide what makes more sense – this or a New Silk Road invented in Washington.

Make no mistake. Behind the relentless demonization of Putin and the myriad attempts to delegitimize Russia’s presidential elections, lie some very angry and powerful sections of Washington and Anglo-American elites.

They know Putin will be an ultra tough negotiator on all fronts. They know Moscow will apply increasingly closer coordination with China; on thwarting permanent NATO bases in Afghanistan; on facilitating Pakistan’s strategic autonomy; on opposing missile defense; on ensuring Iran is not attacked.

He will be the devil of choice because there could not be a more formidable opponent in the world stage to Washington’s plans – be they coded as Greater Middle East, New Silk Road, Full Spectrum Dominance or America’s Pacific Century. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to rumble.

Source: Asia Times

The 10 Inventions of Nikola Tesla That Changed The World

‘Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. Throughout space there is energy.  — Nikola Tesla, 1892 

Nikola Tesla is finally beginning to attract real attention and encourage serious debate nearly 70 years after his death.  Was he for real? A crackpot? Part of an early experiment in corporate-government control?

We know that he was undoubtedly persecuted by the energy power brokers of his day — namely Thomas Edison, whom we are taught in school to revere as a genius.  He was also attacked by J.P. Morgan and other “captains of industry.” Upon Tesla’s death on January 7th, 1943, the U.S. government moved into his lab and apartment confiscating all of his scientific research, and to this day none of this research has been made public.

Besides his persecution by corporate-government interests (which is practically a certification of authenticity), there is at least one solid indication of Nikola Tesla’s integrity — he tore up a contract with Westinghouse that was worth billions in order to save the company from paying him his huge royalty payments.

But, let’s take a look at what Nikola Tesla — a man who died broke and alone — has actually given to the world.  For better or worse, with credit or without, he changed the face of the planet in ways that perhaps no man ever has.

1. Alternating Current — This is where it all began, and what ultimately caused such a stir at the 1893 World’s Expo in Chicago.  A war was leveled ever-after between the vision of Edison and the vision of Tesla for how electricity would be produced and distributed.  The division can be summarized as one of cost and safety: The DC current that Edison (backed by General Electric) had been working on was costly over long distances, and produced dangerous sparking from the required converter (called a commutator).  Regardless, Edison and his backers utilized the general “dangers” of electric current to instill fear in Tesla’s alternative: Alternating Current.  As proof, Edison sometimes electrocuted animals at demonstrations.  Consequently, Edison gave the world the electric chair, while simultaneously maligning Tesla’s attempt to offer safety at a lower cost.  Tesla responded by demonstrating that AC was perfectly safe by famously shooting current through his own body to produce light.  This Edison-Tesla (GE-Westinghouse) feud in 1893 was the culmination of over a decade of shady business deals, stolen ideas, and patent suppression that Edison and his moneyed interests wielded over Tesla’s inventions. Yet, despite it all, it is Tesla’s system that provides power generation and distribution to North America in our modern era.

2. Light – Of course he didn’t invent light itself, but he did invent how light can be harnessed and distributed.  Tesla developed and used florescent bulbs in his lab some 40 years before industry “invented” them. At the World’s Fair, Tesla took glass tubes and bent them into famous scientists’ names, in effect creating the first neon signs.  However, it is his Tesla Coil that might be the most impressive, and controversial.  The Tesla Coil is certainly something that big industry would have liked to suppress: the concept that the Earth itself is a magnet that can generate electricity (electromagnetism) utilizing frequencies as a transmitter.  All that is needed on the other end is the receiver — much like a radio.

3. X-rays — Electromagnetic and ionizing radiation was heavily researched in the late 1800s, but Tesla researched the entire gamut. Everything from a precursor to Kirlian photography, which has the ability to document life force, to what we now use in medical diagnostics, this was a transformative invention of which Tesla played a central role.  X-rays, like so many of Tesla’s contributions, stemmed from his belief that everything we need to understand the universe is virtually around us at all times, but we need to use our minds to develop real-world devices to augment our innate perception of existence.

4. Radio — Guglielmo Marconi was initially credited, and most believe him to be the inventor of radio to this day.  However, the Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s patent in 1943, when it was proven that Tesla invented the radio years previous to Marconi.  Radio signals are just another frequency that needs a transmitter and receiver, which Tesla also demonstrated in 1893 during a presentation before The National Electric Light Association.  In 1897 Tesla applied for two patents  US 645576, and US 649621. In 1904, however, The U.S. Patent Office reversed its decision, awarding Marconi a patent for the invention of radio, possibly influenced by Marconi’s financial backers in the States, who included Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie. This also allowed the U.S. government (among others) to avoid having to pay the royalties that were being claimed by Tesla.

5. Remote Control — This invention was a natural outcropping of radio. Patent No.613809 was the first remote controlled model boat, demonstrated in 1898.  Utilizing several large batteries; radio signals controlled switches, which then energized the boat’s propeller, rudder, and scaled-down running lights. While this exact technology was not widely used for some time, we now can see the power that was appropriated by the military in its pursuit of remote controlled war. Radio controlled tanks were introduced by the Germans in WWII, and developments in this realm have since slid quickly away from the direction of human freedom.

6. Electric Motor — Tesla’s invention of the electric motor has finally been popularized by a car brandishing his name.  While the technical specifications are beyond the scope of this summary, suffice to say that Tesla’s invention of a motor with rotating magnetic fields could have freed mankind much sooner from the stranglehold of Big Oil.  However, his invention in 1930 succumbed to the economic crisis and the world war that followed. Nevertheless, this invention has fundamentally changed the landscape of what we now take for granted: industrial fans, household applicances, water pumps, machine tools, power tools, disk drives, electric wristwatches and compressors.

7. Robotics — Tesla’s overly enhanced scientific mind led him to the idea that all living beings are merely driven by external impulses.  He stated: “I have by every thought and act of mine, demonstrated, and does so daily, to my absolute satisfaction that I am an automaton endowed with power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli.”  Thus, the concept of the robot was born.  However, an element of the human remained present, as Tesla asserted that these human replicas should have limitations — namely growth and propagation. Nevertheless, Tesla unabashedly embraced all of what intelligence could produce.  His visions for a future filled with intelligent cars, robotic human companions, and the use of sensors, and autonomous systems are detailed in a must-read entry in the Serbian Journal of Electrical Engineering, 2006 (PDF).

8. Laser — Tesla’s invention of the laser may be one of the best examples of the good and evil bound up together within the mind of man.  Lasers have transformed surgical applications in an undeniably beneficial way, and they have given rise to much of our current digital media. However, with this leap in innovation we have also crossed into the land of science fiction.  From Reagan’s “Star Wars” laser defense system to today’s Orwellian “non-lethal” weapons’ arsenal, which includes laser rifles and directed energy “death rays,” there is great potential for development in both directions.

9 and 10. Wireless Communications and Limitless Free Energy — These two are inextricably linked, as they were the last straw for the power elite — what good is energy if it can’t be metered and controlled?  Free?  Never.  J.P. Morgan backed Tesla with $150,000 to build a tower that would use the natural frequencies of our universe to transmit data, including a wide range of information communicated through images, voice messages, and text.  This represented the world’s first wireless communications, but it also meant that aside from the cost of the tower itself, the universe was filled with free energy that could be utilized to form a world wide web connecting all people in all places, as well as allow people to harness the free energy around them.  Essentially, the 0’s and 1’s of the universe are embedded in the fabric of existence for each of us to access as needed.  Nikola Tesla was dedicated to empowering the individual to receive and transmit this data virtually free of charge.  But we know the ending to that story . . . until now?

Tesla had perhaps thousands of other ideas and inventions that remain unreleased.  A look at his hundreds of patents shows a glimpse of the scope he intended to offer.  If you feel that the additional technical and scientific research of Nikola Tesla should be revealed for public scrutiny and discussion, instead of suppressed by big industry and even our supposed institutions of higher education, please  to demand that power brokers everywhere learn that we are ready to Occupy Energy and learn about what our universe really has to offer.

The release of Nikola Tesla’s technical and scientific research — specifically his research into harnessing electricity from the ionosphere at a facility called Wardenclyffe — is a necessary step toward true freedom of information.  The petition has a goal of 25,000 signatures and needs your support, but whether or not it is reached please continue to add your voice by sharing this information with as many people as possible.

A Facebook event page for the official call on January 7th, the anniversary of Tesla’s death, can be found here:  

For additional information about the demand for release, please visit:http://releaseteslasresearch.weebly.com/

As they state:

Tell your friends, bring it up and discuss it at your next general assembly, do whatever you can to get the word out, organize locally to make a stand for the release of Nikola Tesla’s research…. America is tired of corrupt corporate greed, supported by The American government, holding us back in a stagnant society in the name of profit . . . The Energy Crisis is a lie.

As an aside: there are some who have pointed out that Tesla’s experimentation with the ionosphere very well could have caused the massive explosion over Tunguska, Siberia in 1908, which leveled an estimated 60 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers, and may even have led to the much maligned HAARP technology.  I submit that we would do well to remember that technology is never the true enemy; it is the misuse of technology that can enslave rather than free mankind from its animal-level survivalism.

Please view the video below, which does an excellent job at personalizing this largely forgotten human being, as well as show the reasons why to this day he is not a household name.

And here is a video that offers an essential alternative view of ancient Egypt and other cultures that employed pyramidal structures, which suggests the staggering outer limits of what Tesla was attempting to harness and offer to humanity:

Additional Sources:
http://www.electroherbalism.com/Bioelectronics/Tesla/TeslaversusEdison.htm

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nikola-tesla1.htm
http://teslapress.com/blackout.html
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/History_of_radio
http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~drestinblack/didyouknow.htm

http://www.world-mysteries.com/dougy.htm
http://radiographics.rsna.org/content/28/4/1189.full

Source: Nicholas West | Activist Post

NATO After Libya: A Threat to European Stability

Address given on Monday, August 29, at the international conference Central Europe, the EU and the new Russia at the Czech Parliament in Prague.

More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, NATO is an obsolete and harmful anachronism. It has morphed into a vehicle for the attainment of misguided American strategic objectives on a global scale. Its mutation from a defensive alliance into a supranational force based on the nebulous doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” started with the air war against Serbia in 1999 and was completed with the Libyan intervention in the spring and summer of 2011. NATO in its mature form is beyond redemption or reform. It should be disbanded.

The Soviet Union came into being as a revolutionary state that challenged any given status quo in principle. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, Russia has been trying to articulate her goals and define her policies in terms of traditional national interests. By contrast, the early 1990’s witnessed the beginning of America’s attempt to assert her status as the only global hyperpower. Instead of declaring victory and disbanding NATO in the early 1990’s, the Clinton administration successfully redesigned it as a mechanism for open-ended out-of-area interventions at a time when every rationale for its existence had disappeared.

Following the air war against Serbia, NATO’s area of operations became unlimited and its “mandate” self-generated. Another round of NATO expansion came under George W. Bush. In April 2007, he signed the Orwellian-sounding NATO Freedom Consolidation Act, which extended U.S. military assistance to aspiring NATO members, specifically Georgia and Ukraine. Further expansion, according to former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was “historically mandatory, geopolitically desirable.” A decade earlier, Brzezinski readily admitted that NATO’s enlargement was not about U.S. security in any conventional sense, but “about America’s role in Europe—whether America will remain a European power and whether a larger democratic Europe will remain organically linked to America.” Such attitude is the source of endless problems for America and Europe alike.

President Obama and his foreign policy team have failed to grasp that a problem exists, let alone to act to rectify it. There has been a change of officials, but the regime is still the same—and America is still in need of a new grand strategy. The threat to Europe’s security does not come from Russia or from a fresh bout of instability in the Balkans. The threat to Europe’s security and to her survival comes from the deluge of inassimilable aliens within the gates and from collapsing birthrates. These problems are due to the moral and cultural decay, not to any shortage of soldiers and weaponry.

More than three decades after the occupation of Prague in 1968 the USSR was gone and the Warsaw Pact dismantled, but the principles of the Brezhnev Doctrine are not defunct. They survive in the neoliberal guise. No “interests of world socialism” could beat “universal human rights” when it came to determining where and when to intervene. The key difference is only in the limited scope of the Soviets’ self-awarded outreach. It applied only to the “socialist community,” as opposed to the unlimited, potentially world-wide scope of “responsibility to defend.” The “socialist community” led by Moscow stopped on the Elbe, after all. It was replaced by the “International Community” led by Washington, which stops nowhere and constructs as it goes along a self-referential framework for the policy of permanent global interventionism. It precludes any meaningful debate about the correlation between ends and means of American power: we are not only wise but virtuous; our policies are shaped by “core values” which are axiomatic, and not by prejudices. The foreign policy community in Washington remains oblivious to the fact that, after a brief period of American mono-polar dominance (1991-2008), the world’s distribution of power is now characterized by asymmetric multipolarity. It is the an inherently unstable model of international relations.

The doctrine of global interventionism has been given an updated form in NATO’s much-heralded “Strategic Concept” (SC), adopted at the summit in Lisbon almost a year ago. Last week liberal interventionists and their neoconservative twins on both sides of the Atlantic were jubilant as Libyan rebels took over Tripoli. From now on, “[t]he right question for the United States and its allies isn’t whether to help oppressed people fight for freedom, it’s when,” declared The Washington Post on August 24. Yet again NATO has intervened militarily in pursuit of formally stated goals which had little to do with its hidden agenda and which produced results “objectively” detrimental to Western interests. As the country braces itself for the second half of the double-dip recession, the Balkan Syndrome of the 1990’s has been transferred to a grander, strategically more significant scene.

In the meantime the key strategic issue, NATO’s attitude toward Russia, remains unresolved. The Strategic Concept asserts that “NATO poses no threat to Russia,” with which it seeks “a true strategic partnership.” President Barack Obama greeted President Dmitri Medvedev in Lisbon as “my friend and partner.” It was left to Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, to articulate Moscow’s misgivings: “The NATO gamekeepers invite the Russian bear to go hunting rabbits together. The bear doesn’t understand: why do they have bear-hunting rifles?” We’ve heard statements like Obama’s before: In 1997 Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which was soon violated by the Kosovo war in 1999 and NATO’s eastward expansion.

In Lisbon Russia was invited to cooperate with NATO in missile-defense development, but only after the plan was completed in Washington and Brussels. Russia is expected to provide transit of NATO supplies to and from Afghanistan, but she has no say in shaping the mission itself. Moscow is asked “to increase transparency on its nuclear weapons in Europe and relocate these weapons away from the territory of NATO members,” but no corresponding commitment is made to the relocation of NATO’s missile-defense system away from Russia’s own borders. Russia’s involvement is indispensable to the European missile defense which lacks feasibility without integrating Russia’s radar stations. Furthermore, Russia as a permanent Security Council member still retains an important role when NATO launches operations requiring the UN approval. At the same time, NATO is not offering Russia anything practical in return. A strategic or any other serious partnership between Russia and NATO stands no chance. Russia and NATO have inherently divergent interests that cannot be resolved merely by bombastic press releases. NATO remains at the top of the list of external threats Russia faces today.

On the plus side, Ukraine and Georgia are no longer serious candidates for membership. The financial crisis makes the further reduction of European military budgets inevitable. Whatever new NATO missions are conjured in Washington, the lack of political will in “Old Europe” to sign on will be coupled with the material inability to do so in a meaningful way.

Also on the plus side, it is in the interest of European stability that Vladimir Putin will declare his candidacy, and next year will get elected President of Russia yet again. Western Russophobes on both sides of the Atlantic are hoping that this will not happen, and a new round of Putin’s demonization is already under way in the U.S. media. In fact, any scenario other than a new Putin presidency is not only unrealistic; it is also harmful to European stability because it would create the impression that Russia is divided and that it can be manipulated and reduced to the impotence of the Yeltsin era. False impressions and false hopes, but as we know political misconceptions based on erroneous assumptions may have serious consequences.

NATO is devoid of a coherent mission and strategic purpose. Between 1949 and 1991 it was successful in providing security against the threat of a hostile totalitarian power. Today, it is detrimental to the security in Europe and irrelevant to the security of its members. It should not be reformed; it should be abolished.

The Libyan Endgame

Regardless of whether Muammar Qaddafy is killed, brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, or exiled, his regime has collapsed beyond recovery. After a five-month air war against his forces NATO has succeeded in decisively tipping the balance on the ground in favor of the rebels. This does not mean that the war in Libya is over, however. It is only entering a new, more complicated stage.

The new chapter is heralded by a flamboyant half-Irish rebel commander,, announcing that the first thing his forces will do “is set up checkpoints to disarm everyone, including other rebel groups.” Otherwise it will be a bloodbath, he said, since “all the rebel groups will want to control Tripoli.” Najjair’s Tripoli Brigade is only one among several “rebel groups,” however, and it is unimaginable that others will willingly surrender their weapons and thus accept his authority. Najjair’s statement merely reflects a mindset likely shared by his erstwhile allies who now view each other as rivals.

The United States, Britain and France have encouraged, financed, armed, and—crucially—provided 150 days of air support to the rebels in the name of protecting civilians. They have finally succeeded in bringing down Qaddafy. This had been their objective all along, regardless of the UNSC resolution authorizing limited action for supposedly humanitarian goals. They are therefore responsible for what happens on the ground in the days and weeks to come—and they will do nothing about it.

After the U.S. Army deposed Saddam, Iraq was the scene of a protracted vendetta and simultaneous bloody struggle for power which the occupying “Coalition” forces were unable and unwilling to prevent. The absence of such forces on the ground in Libya means that the rebels will be even freer to settle their political, personal and tribal scores with Qaddafy’s supporters as they deem fit—which will be a nasty business—and to try to “disarm” each other, which will exacerbate rather than prevent a bloodbath. Many ordinary Libyans with no commitment to either side will become as nostalgic for Qaddafy’s days as their Iraqi counterparts turned wistful for the predictable stability of Saddam’s rule only months after his fall.

It is an even bet that eventual winners will be Cyrenaica’s Jihadists of different hues—the best armed and organized rebel faction by far—who are different in style but not in substance from the Shia clerics who are now in charge in Baghdad. It is also possible that there will be no clear winner for a long time. The disintegration of the Libyan state, the revival of tribal core loyalties and the ineffectiveness of the Transitional National Council (TNC) have the potential to turn Libya into a more sophisticated version of Somalia. The tribes are already arming themselves and moving away from the central state. A Hobbesian free-for-all would turn Libya into a hotbed of regional instability and a safe haven for the assorted Fourth Generation Warriors, such as Al-Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb.

Yet again NATO has intervened militarily in pursuit of formally stated goals which had little to do with its hidden agenda and which produced results “objectively” detrimental to Western interests. Just as the Kosovo intervention was not about “preventing genocide” but about handing over the southern Serbian province to Washington’s KLA clients, the Libyan intervention was not about “protecting civilians” but about bringing down Qaddafy. The Balkan Syndrome of the 1990’s has been transferred to a grander, strategically more significant scene. If it is the purpose of the United States and its European NATO partners to replace Arab dictators with hard-line Islamists, they have done equally well in Mesopotamia and in north Africa. Watch out for the neocon-neolib chorus demanding the replay of the Libyan success in Syria.

Arguing Libya

On July 9 I took part in a demonstration in front of the White House, the theme of which was “Stop Bombing Libya”. The last time I had taken part in a protest against US bombing of a foreign country, which the White House was selling as “humanitarian intervention”, as they are now, was in 1999 during the 78-day bombing of Serbia. At that time I went to a couple of such demonstrations and both times I was virtually the only American there. The rest, maybe two dozen, were almost all Serbs. “Humanitarian intervention” is a great selling device for imperialism, particularly in the American market. Americans are desperate to renew their precious faith that the United States means well, that we are still “the good guys”.

This time there were about 100 taking part in the protest. I don’t know if any were Libyans, but there was a new element — almost half of the protesters were black, marching with signs saying: “Stop Bombing Africa”.

There was another new element — people supporting the bombing of Libya, facing us from their side of Pennsylvania Avenue about 40 feet away. They were made up largely of Libyans, probably living in the area, who had only praise and love for the United States and NATO. Their theme was that Gaddafi was so bad that they would support anything to get rid of him, even daily bombing of their homeland, which now exceeds Serbia’s 78 days. I of course crossed the road and got into arguments with some of them. I kept asking: “I hate that man there [pointing to the White House] just as much as you hate Gaddafi. Do you think I should therefore support the bombing of Washington? Destroying the beautiful monuments and buildings of this city, as well as killing people?”

None of the Libyans even tried to answer my question. They only repeated their anti-Gaddafi vitriol. “You don’t understand. We have to get rid of Gaddafi. He’s very brutal.” (See the CNN video of the July 1 mammoth rally in Tripoli for an indication that these Libyans’ views are far from universal at home.)

“But you at least get free education and medical care,” I pointed out. “That’s a lot more than we get here. And Libya has the highest standard of living in the entire region, at least it did before the NATO and US bombing. If Gaddafi is brutal, what do you call all the other leaders of the region, whom Washington has long supported?”

One retorted that there had been free education under the king, whom Gaddafi had overthrown. I was skeptical of this but I didn’t know for sure that it was incorrect, so I replied: “So what? Gaddafi at least didn’t get rid of the free education like the leaders in England did in recent years.”

A police officer suddenly appeared and forced me to return to my side of the road. I’m sure if pressed for an explanation, the officer would justify this as a means of preventing violence from breaking out. But there was never any danger of that at all; another example of the American police-state mentality — order and control come before civil liberties, before anything.

Most Americans overhearing my argument with the Libyans would probably have interjected something like: “Well, no matter how much you hate the president you can still get rid of him with an election. The Libyans can’t do that.”

And I would have come back with: “Right. I have the freedom to replace George W. Bush with Barack H. Obama. Oh joy. As long as our elections are overwhelmingly determined by money, nothing of any significance will change.”

Postscript: Amidst all the sadness and horror surrounding the massacre in Norway, we should not lose sight of the fact that “peaceful little Norway” participated in the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; has deployed troops in Iraq; has troops in Afghanistan; and has supplied warplanes for NATO’s bombing of Libya. The teenagers of those countries who lost their lives to the US/NATO killing machine wanted to live to adulthood and old age as much as the teenagers in Norway. With all the condemnation of “extremism” we now hear in Norway and around the world we must ask if this behavior of the Norwegian government, as well as that of the United States and NATO, is not “extremist”.

The Berlin Wall — Another Cold War Myth

The Western media will soon be revving up their propaganda motors to solemnize the 50th anniversary of the erecting of the Berlin Wall, August 13, 1961. All the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returning to the East in the evening; many others went back and forth for shopping or other reasons. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. Why then was the wall built? There were two major reasons:

1) The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.” ¹

In 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled [1989], East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.” ² Earlier polls would likely have shown even more than 51% expressing such a sentiment, for in the ten years many of those who remembered life in East Germany with some fondness had passed away; although even 10 years later, in 2009, the Washington Post could report: “Westerners say they are fed up with the tendency of their eastern counterparts to wax nostalgic about communist times.” ³

It was in the post-unification period that a new Russian and eastern Europe proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.” It should also be noted that the division of Germany into two states in 1949 — setting the stage for 40 years of Cold War hostility — was an American decision, not a Soviet one. ⁴

2) During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more. ⁵

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of Washington, DC, conservative coldwarriors, in one of their Cold War International History Project Working Papers (#58, p.9) states: “The open border in Berlin exposed the GDR [East Germany] to massive espionage and subversion and, as the two documents in the appendices show, its closure gave the Communist state greater security.”

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West, leading eventually to the infamous Wall. However, even after the wall was built there was regular, albeit limited, legal emigration from east to west. In 1984, for example, East Germany allowed 40,000 people to leave. In 1985, East German newspapers claimed that more than 20,000 former citizens who had settled in the West wanted to return home after becoming disillusioned with the capitalist system. The West German government said that 14,300 East Germans had gone back over the previous 10 years. ⁶

Let’s also not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union to wipe out Bolshevism forever, and that the Russians in World War I and II, lost about 40 million people because the West had used this highway to invade Russia. It should not be surprising that after World War II the Soviet Union was determined to close down the highway.

We came, we saw, we destroyed, we forgot

An updated summary of the charming record of US foreign policy. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States of America has …

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected. ⁷
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. ⁸
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. ⁹
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries. ¹⁰
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. ¹¹

In total: Since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above actions, on one or more occasions, in the following 69 countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world):

Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Australia Bolivia Bosnia Brazil British Guiana (now Guyana) Bulgaria Cambodia Chad Chile China Colombia Congo (also as Zaire) Costa Rica Cuba Dominican Republic East Timor Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Fiji France Germany (plus East Germany) Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Honduras India Indonesia Iran

Iraq Italy Jamaica Japan Kuwait Laos Lebanon Libya Mongolia Morocco Nepal Nicaragua North Korea Pakistan Palestine Panama Peru Philippines Portugal Russia Seychelles Slovakia Somalia South Africa Soviet Union Sudan Suriname Syria Thailand Uruguay Venezuela Vietnam (plus North Vietnam) Yemen (plus South Yemen) Yugoslavia

(See a world map of US interventions.)

The occult world of economics

When you read about economic issues in the news, like the crisis in Greece or the Wall Street/banking mortgage shambles are you sometimes left befuddled by the seeming complexity, which no one appears able to untangle or explain to your satisfaction in simple English? Well, I certainly can’t explain it all myself, but I do know that the problem is not necessarily that you and I are economic illiterates. The problem is often that the “experts” discuss these issues as if we’re dealing with hard and fast rules or laws, not to be violated, scientifically based, mathematically sound and rational; when, in fact, a great deal of what takes place in the real world of economics and in the arena of “expert” analysis of that world, is based significantly on partisan party politics, ideology, news headlines, speculation, manipulation, psychology (see the utter meaninglessness and absurdity of the daily rise or fall of stock prices), backroom deals of the powerful, and the excessive power given to and reliance upon thoroughly corrupt credit-rating agencies and insurers of various kinds. The agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s are protection rackets — pay our exorbitant fees or we give you a bad rating, which investors and governments then bow down to as if it’s the result of completely objective and impressive analytical study.

Then there’s the exceptions made for powerful countries to get away with things that lesser countries, like Greece, are not allowed to get away with, but all still explained in terms of the unforgiving laws of economics.

And when all other explanations fail to sound plausible, the experts fall back on “the law of supply and demand”. But that law was repealed years ago; just try and explain the cost of gasoline based on it, as but one example.

So there’s a lot to cover up, many reasons why the financial-world players can’t be as open as they should be, as forthright as the public and investors may assume they are.

Consider the US budget deficit, about which we hear a great deal of scare talk. What we don’t hear is that the most prosperous period in American history occurred in the decades following the Second World War — from 1946 to 1973. And guess what? We had a budget deficit in the large majority of those years. Clearly such a deficit was not an impediment to growth and increasing prosperity in the United States — a prosperity much more widely shared than it is now. Yet we’re often fed the idea of the sanctity of a balanced budget. This and other “crises” are typically overblown for political reasons; the current “crisis” about the debt ceiling for example. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, now an independent columnist, points out that “regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised the US government is not going to go out of business. … If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, certainly, the US government is.”

In economic issues that occupy the media greatly, such as the debt ceiling, one of the hidden keys to understanding what’s going on is often the conservatives’ perennial hunger to privatize Social Security and Medicare. If you understand that, certain things become much clearer. Naomi Klein points out that “the pseudo debate about the debt ceiling … is naked class war, waged by the ultra rich against everyone else, and it’s well past time for Americans to draw the line.”

Consider, too, the relative value of international currencies. Logically, reasonably, if the British pound is exchangeable for two dollars, one should be able to purchase in Washington goods and services for two dollars which would cost one pound in London. In real life, this of course is the very infrequent exception to the rule. Instead, at places called “exchanges” in New York and Chicago and London and Zurich and Frankfurt a bunch of guys who don’t do anything socially useful get together each day in a large room, and amidst lots of raised voices, busy computers, and numerous pieces of paper, they arrive at a value for the pound, as well as for a barrel of oil, for a pound of porkbellies, and for various other commodities that affect our daily lives. Why should these speculators and parasites have so much influence over the real world, the real economy, and our real lives?

As a general rule of thumb, comrades, as an all-purpose solution to our economic ills, remember this: We’ll keep going around in crisis circles forever until the large financial institutions are nationalized or otherwise placed under democratic control. We hear a lot about “austerity”. Well, austerity has to, finally, visit the super-rich. There are millions (sic) of millionaires and billionaires in the United States and Europe. As governments go bust, the trillions of dollars of these people must be heavily taxed or confiscated to end the unending suffering of the other 95% of humanity. My god, do I sound like a (choke, gasp) socialist?

Notes

1. New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12 ^↩
2. USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1 ^↩
3. Washington Post, May 12, 2009; see a similar story November 5, 2009 ^↩
4. Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949 (1996); or see a concise review of this book by Kai Bird inThe Nation, December 16, 1996^↩
5. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion. ^↩
6. The Guardian (London), March 7, 1985 ^↩
7. http://killinghope.org/essays6/othrow.htm ^↩
8. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/suppress.html ^↩
9. See chapter 18 of Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower – add Palestine, 2006 to the list ^↩
10. http://killinghope.org/superogue/bomb.htm ^↩
11. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm ^↩

Why Palestine is Important

Palestine is important not because it is as beautiful as Tuscany, nor because the Palestinians are suffering, and not even because it is occupied by a Jewish state. What we need to understand is that the Jews have been handed Palestine not because they were so smart or so strong or so devoted, but by Imperial design.

Palestine is important because it is believed to be a linchpin of Empire, one of the key points necessary to control the world. Such was the conviction of the 19^th century British Empire-builders of the Rhodes variety, and this conviction has been recently and continuously reformulated into the terms of modern geopolitics. Once an arcane theory developed by HJ Mackinder, it has grown up to become a driving force behind globalism. We shall not go into its rational interpretation of mythological imagery; we must simply accept that this is the way the world’s powerful elite think.

Mackinder planned the subjugation of the whole planet to the Empire. He noted that the Arab world (apassage-land, in his terms) is central for this enterprise, and declared that “the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategic position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategic position between ancient Babylon and Egypt.” He believed that the “ideal position” of Jerusalem as the centre of the world of the medieval Crusader maps is no religious quirk, but an inspired understanding of the inherent quality of the place. In his exact words, “In a monkish map, contemporary with the Crusades, which still hangs in Hereford Cathedral, Jerusalem is marked as at the geometrical centre, the navel, of the world, and on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem they will show you to this day the precise spot which is the centre… The medieval ecclesiasts were not far wrong”.

 A strategist-mystic, Mackinder was a great supporter of Balfour declaration: “The Jewish national seat in Palestine will be one of the most important outcomes of the war. That is a subject on which we can now afford to speak the truth … a national home at the physical and historical centre of the world”.

In his fresh-from-the-presses book, The Great Games (rush out and buy it while stocks last, dear reader!), our friend and fellow Counterpuncher Eric Walberg says it best: “Mackinder’s inspiration was not Zionist but rather imperial, and by putting Jews in a Palestinian homeland he was assembling the pieces in today’s imperial order”.

Clearly, his imperialism, and his geography have had religious antecedents. Geopolitics is a secularised sacred geography, and its drive towards “the hill citadel of Jerusalem” and “Shambala” is not a coincidence. But then, every ideology is a crypto-religious doctrine; or in words of Carl Schmitt, «all of the most pregnant concepts of modern doctrine are secularized theological concepts».

People argue that geopolitics has more than a touch of mumbo-jumbo, but this doctrine is being applied by the elites. One can rationalise the fateful Imperial attachment to Afghanistan by a vague possibility to build there a pipeline; it is easier to see in the US drive to Afghanistan a new version of the search of Shambala.   Mackinder rationalised his feelings, he referred to Jerusalem’s army being able to defend the Suez, but the old maps influenced him – and other Empire-builders – more than he was ready to admit.

For this reason it is difficult to imagine that the Empire will ever voluntarily release Palestine; it is far too important ideologically, religiously, geopolitically, and strategically in the eyes of the Imperial elites. But why has the Empire chosen the Jews to be the shock troops in Palestine? Indiana University’s Professor of Geography, Mohameden Ould-Mey provides some explanation in a scholarly paper, a paper that was never successfully published. The paper had been duly reviewed and accepted by Political Geography’schief editor David Slater, but two years later a new chief editor came along who knew better on which side lies the butter, and he quickly spiked the paper. He used his position to instead commission some celebratory articles about Israel’s Independence Day.

In the never-published paper, Professor Ould-Mey revealed that the Zionist movement was not created by Jews in the 19^th century: they were busy looking closer to home. These starry-eyed Jews once dreamt of forming a homeland inside Ukraine or Poland, to build there an independent state “just like Serbia”. It was the British who had a different idea, namely, to turn the Jews into English colonists in the Middle East. They needed manpower to man the Hill Citadel, and “they wanted the Jews to fill in the blank for the non-existing native Protestants in the Holy Land”.  The idea was tried earlier and failed: Napoleon toyed with the idea of planting Jews in Palestine as France’s foot soldiers, but there were no takers among Jews. The Brits achieved what the French could not.

Enter William Henry Hechler (1845- 1931), “the British agent who actually fathered Zionism in Eastern Europe and Russia”. Hechler is the man who turned Leo Pinsker into a Zionist; Pinsker later became author of the first and most influential pre-Zionist pamphlet, Auto-Emancipation. “This is when and how the British began to inject their Zionism into an otherwise local and normal emancipation movement of Eastern European Jewry in their own ancestral homeland” in Eastern Europe, writes Ould-Mey.

After winning over Pinsker and establishing the first Jewish movement for settlement in Palestine (Hibath Zion), Hechler went to Vienna to entice Theodor Herzl. At that time, Hechler was already “described as an agent working for German and English interests and particularly as a ‘secret agent’ working for the Intelligence Service”.

“Hechler actively participated in the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in August 1897…Hechler-Herzl relations (like the Hechler-Pinsker ones before them and the Balfour- Weizmann ones after them) would seem to resemble the tutor-tutored relations rather than prophet-prince relations as suggested by Zionist historiography. Beyond tutoring Herzl on what Zionism is all about, Hechler introduced both Herzl and Zionism to the German Emperor, the Russian Czar, the Ottoman Sultan, the Pope (Pie X)” and other luminaries.

“Herzl was essentially a British envoy to the Germans, the Russians, the Ottomans, and the Jews. It was said that Herzl was fitted to lead Zionism precisely because he knew neither the Jews nor Palestine or Turkey…”

Ould-Mey concludes: “The British wanted Palestine for imperial and religious motives and used the Zionist Jews as willing surrogates and proxies who down the road became more active agents.”

This makes sense, for it solves the mystery: why was the Jewish Zionist movement such a Johnny-come-lately? Jewish Zionism was still in its infancy when Russians, French and Germans had been buying up lands and building houses all over the Holy Land for 40 years. Ould-Mey’s theory answers all the pertinent questions nicely. It was an English coup de grace.

This discovery is very exciting, but a trifle short of sensational: the British Intelligence Service is known to have rocked the cradle of The Muslim Brotherhood, the CIA fostered the Taliban, Shabak fathered Hamas. There is no doubt that all these bodies became wildly independent, unleashed themselves from their masters and ended up causing them a lot of trouble. Ould-Mey’s discovery that the Zionist movement was established by the British Secret service does not necessarily imply that it remained under their control – or anybody’s external control.

Since then, Jews have become doubly integrated into the fabric of the Empire: as the holders of the geopolitical “hill citadel of Jerusalem”, and as the bearers of neo-liberal post-modern ideology, the ideology of the “islanders” in Mackinder’s terminology — which is surprisingly close to “the traditional Jewish ideology” in the view of Milton Friedman as expounded by Gilad Atzmon. The first group is located mainly in Israel; the second group is mainly in the US.

The Zionist conception that the Jews are natural placeholders of the “hill citadel of Jerusalem” is now under review. The Middle East has sprung forth new forces with which the Empire is already actively collaborating. Foremost are the aggressive Saudi Wahhabis whom Thierry-Meyssan has identified as theSudairi. Qatar’s Al-Jazeera is a powerful weapon that is in their hands. They  with Israel but they are not Zionist stooges. They are quite a nasty lot and are friends of the Empire by their own right.

Obama’s May speech has made this clear. Israel is no longer the only outpost in the wilderness of the Middle East, no longer a bastion of the West in the East. Obama’s proposal was similar to that made by Jimmy Carter to China and Taiwan in 1979, when the United States transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing while carrying on commercial, cultural, and other unofficial contacts with Taiwan. Over 30 years have passed since then, and Taiwan has not suffered from being downgraded. Likewise, Obama offered Israel a similar deal: shrink a bit, and you will live a long and happy life. Contraction should be not only territorial, but strategic and ideological as well. You are welcome to stay a favorite son of the US in the Middle East, but as a son among other sons, not as a pampered baby among slaves. In short, be a Taiwan – don’t try to be a China.

As we know, Israel quickly neutralized this proposal by mobilising pro-Jewish American politicians. This has effectively humiliated Obama – and energized the new pro-Imperial Arab forces to action. Their new confidence was expressed in Prince Turki’s opinion piece and has been widely commented upon. This is one reason why Israel has been acting hysterically recently, as is evident from the attacks on the Flotilla, the detention of the fly-in tourists, and the massacre of the unarmed Palestinians upon the anniversary days of the Nakba and Naksa.

Israelis have a feeling that their position is being re-evaluated, and they are freshening up their connections with the Jews abroad and flexing the power of their lobbies, playing up anti-semitism hysteria. The most recent orchestrated surges of pro-Jewish sentiments have surfaced in the harsh treatment of film director Lars von Trier and designer John Galliano, but are by no means over.

Now an important debate of the last decade can be addressed. Noam Chomsky explained America’s obsession with Israel by hard-nosed Imperial interests, while John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt inter alia have explained it by activity of the Israel Lobby. Now we can try to square this circular argument.

Indeed, the imperial plans for conquest of the world as they were laid upon in the end of 19^th century included creation of the “hill citadel of Zion” manned by “ranging” (Mackinder’s term) Jews. New data proves that these plans were not inspired by Jews, but given to Jews by imperial planners. These plans passed from generation to generation, and presumably they are now accepted by the imperial elites as given.

During the Cold War this idea figured less prominently, but “since the end of the Cold War, as regional strategic concerns have replaced those of the global bipolar confrontation of the twin superpowers, the relevance of Mackinder’s study [and of his concepts] is once again apparent”, in words of Leut.-Gen Ervin Rokke.

 So apparently, Chomsky was right? Not so fast. We can reword the old argument in new terms: M&W argument can be read as “the old ideas of Mackinder are so much of old bunkum, and in reality the citadel became rather a hindrance than a useful defence, like Belfort”.  This coincides with the Arab pro-Imperialist view of the Saudis. Perhaps it is a convincing opinion, but the Lobby is still instrumental in blocking it.

The last and final answer to the “Jews and Empire” question was proposed by the modern Russian author, Viktor Pelevin:

- Everything is in the hands of Allah, – said the girl.

- I beg your pardon, – a young man turned to her rather unexpectedly, – How can it be? What about Buddha’s mind? Hands of Allah exist only in the mind of Buddha, you would not deny that, would you?

The girl smiled politely.

- Surely I wouldn’t. The hands of Allah exist only in Buddha’s mind. But the whole point is that the mind of Buddha is in the hands of Allah.

The ICC Orders Qaddafy’s Arrest

The Libyan affair became a choreographed farce on June 27, with the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Muammar Qaddafy, one of his sons, and his chief of military intelligence. This move is a carbon copy of The Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicting Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at the height of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. In both cases a transnational court of dubious legitimacy, controlled and financed by the intervening powers, acted on cue to provide retroactive justification for an illegal and unprovoked act of military aggression.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno-Ocampo called on Qaddafy’s closest aides to become “part of the solution in Libya” by deposing him. “Justice will be done,” he declared at the court’s headquarters at The Hague. ICC judge Sanji Mmasenono Monageng had already explained that “evidence submitted to Ocampo”—she did not disclose the identity of the submitter(s)—was enough to establish “reasonable grounds to believe” the three were guilty of murder, the persecution of civilians, and “crimes against humanity.”

The statements by Their Honors emanating from their virtual world would be as irrelevant as the fatuities of Bertrand Russel’s Vietnam “tribunal” 45 years ago, were it not for the fact that their “warrants” will be used in the manner that has destructive political and military consequences. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland promptly announced “the U.S. believes that the decision to refer the case to the ICC was the right decision” and that “Qaddafy’s got to take the message that it’s time to go.” White House spokesman Jay Carney called the decision “another step in this process of holding him accountable.” Over in Brussels the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton declared that the “the European Union fully supports the International Criminal Court, which plays a key role in the promotion of international justice.” This means that Qaddafy’s removal—decided upon in London, Paris and Washington long before the limited UN Security Council authorization for “protecting civilians” was adopted in March—now has ex post facto international legitimacy. This is on par with the Nazi government decreeing on July 2, 1934, the Staatsnotwehrgesetz (the Law on State Self-Defense) which retroactively “legalized” the Night of the Long Knives two days after the bloodbath.

Back in 1999 Louise Arbour’s ICTY indictment convinced Milosevic of the need to stiffen resistance to NATO and encouraged the Albanians to escalate the KLA campaign of terror. In Libya Qaddafy will be more determined than ever not to end up like Milosevic and the insurgents will be equally determined not to seek a compromise solution, now that their Western mentors have upped the ante to the point where third-party mediation efforts are meaningless.

That the Obama Administration is enthusiastically supporting the actions of the ICC reflects not only the immediate political utility of the latter’s decisions but also the fact that the liberal-hawk sisterhood in Obama’s inner circle (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power), and their allies in the academia and the State Department bureaucracy, are intent on the United States signing on to The Rome Statute establishing the ICC. They do not worry about having a court that could theoretically prosecute American officials for pursuing American policies: who pays the piper calls the tune.

The liberal hawks’ preferences are unsurprising. Just as their “humanitarian interventionism” is the antithesis of traditional American foreign policy principles, the “evolving” system of transnational criminal justice—of which the ICC is the flagship—is the antithesis of fundamental American precepts and constitutional principles of sovereignty, checks and balances, and national independence. The ICC is outside any “constitutional” design that delineates how laws are made, adjudicated, enforced, or made accountable. As the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton summed it up in 2002, in the ICC’s central structures such political checks are either greatly attenuated or entirely absent: “They are effectively accountable to no one. The Prosecutor will answer to no superior executive power, elected or unelected. Requiring the United States to be bound by this treaty, with its unaccountable Prosecutor and its unchecked judicial power, is clearly inconsistent with American standards of constitutionalism.” Yet the Bush Administration weakened this principled position by supporting the development of ad-hoc hybrid institutions that incrementally legitimized the transnational judicial machinery.

The power of the ICC prosecutor to act without third-party restraint and to claim universal jurisdiction offers the scope for considerable legal creativity, depending on the will of the prosecutor’s political masters. The foundation of the edifice is the ideology of universal human values, of a common political and legal culture for the whole world. It is the enemy of liberty as understood and practiced in the West for centuries, a menace on par with the shadow of Jihad. Its proponents are invariably also the upholders of multicultural diversity, anti-discriminationism, open immigration &c. The moral absolutism at the core of the ICC world view is immoral. The ICC enthusiasts’ disdain of the principle of sovereignty may be motivated by their genuine conviction that the war against the Westphalian order is just, but their sincerity is as relevant as that of the suicide bombers in Peshawar.

Qaddafy’s “arrest warrant” confirms that the more arrogant the doctrine behind the ICC, the greater the willingness of its creators and puppeteers to lie for the truth. The transparent predictability of the process is comical in a dark way, but derisive laughter is out of place. The progression of an uncured malignancy is equally predictable, equally unfunny, and equally fatal in its final consequences.

General Mladić: The Facts

The circumstances surrounding the arrest of the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, General Ratko Mladić, seem puzzling. On May 26 he was captured in the house of a close relative with the same surname in a village north of Belgrade. Prima facie this means either that Mladić was entirely left to his own devices and had to seek shelter with people certain to be under police surveillance, or else that the Serbian authorities had been conniving in his hiding. The former is unlikely in view of the effectiveness of Mladić’s concealment after he finally went underground in 2002. The latter is even less likely in view of President Boris Tadić’s constant desire to please his mentors in Brussels and Washington and get Serbia a step closer to the ever-elusive EU membership.

According to our reliable sources in Belgrade, Mladić would not have been discovered had he not decided to give himself up in return for a substantial financial reward for his family. He is a very sick man and unlikely to live much longer. In addition to a chronic kidney ailment and high blood pressure, he has suffered several minor strokes over the past decade. Two years ago he was treated—under an assumed name—for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at a clinic in Belgrade. Aware that his wife Bosiljka and son Darko had been living in penury since the authorities stopped paying his pension in 2005, Mladić decided to offer the government a deal. The final settlement is well below the $10m previously offered for Mladić’s capture, but sufficient to enable his wife and son to live in comfort for many years to come.

The price Mladić will have to pay is to endure, in the closing months of his life, a show trial at The Hague, where his guilt for genocide, crimes against humanity etc. is treated as a long-established fact. That he will not be granted even pro forma assumption of innocence was evident in the statement by the viceroy of Bosnia (“International High Representative”), Valentin Inzko of Austria, who described Mladić as a “war criminal” even though the trial is unlikely to start until some time next year.

Ratko Mladić is neither a monster nor a saint. He is a soldier, groomed in the Titoist tradition of the JNA (YPA) trans-national Yugoslavism, who rediscovered his Serb roots in late middle age. He was a skilled tactician but he was not a master strategist: he knew how to win battles, but ending the war was beyond him. His masterly conquest of the fortified Muslim positions on Mts. Igman and Bjelašnica in the summer of 1993 was a neat case of deep penetration by platoon-sized shock units in the center, immediately followed by panic-inducing flanking pincers.

Mladić’s freedom of action was partly curtailed by the latent tensions between the military and the political leadership of the Bosnian Serb republic. He and his staff were former YPA officers mistrusted by the ruling Serbian Democratic Party. On the other hand, Mladić’s view was that the Serbian Democratic Party establishment was both corrupt and inept. Dr. Karadžić retaliated by referring to the Army top brass as “commie bastards,” komunjare. The underlying animosity was based on the politicians’ claim that the officers had divided loyalties, since many of them (including Mladić) were still on the payroll of the Yugoslav Army, which at that time was controlled by Slobodan Milošević.

Needless to say, Ratko Mladić is not guilty as charged. The heart of the indictment against him, “Srebrenica,” is a myth—a genocide-that-never was, a postmodernist exercise in pseudoreality. It is a matter of record that thousands of Muslim men were killed in the vicinity of that small town during the Bosnian war, and that most of them lost their lives during an attempted breakthrough after the pocket fell to the Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995. At least a fifth reached safety of the Muslim-held town of Tuzla; a few hundred crossed to Serbia, across the Drina River to the east. An unknown were killed while fighting their way through; and many others—numbers remain disputed—were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb soldiers. The numbers remain unknown and misrepresented. The War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) never came up with a conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place is undeniable, but the number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unproven. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, “from the outset the numbers were used and abused” for political purposes.” The most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure, he says, is that it has always been represented as synonymous with the number of people executed.  This was never a possibility. (Check out my Srebrenica and the Power of Reason, April 15.)

Far from bringing the Srebrenica myth to some long-overdue critical scrutiny, Mladić’s transfer to The Hague will be used to reconfirm old prejudices and old myths. In reality, the crimes and violations of human rights between 1992 and 1995 were not the direct result of anyone’s nationalist project. These crimes, as Susan Woodward of Brookings notes, “were the results of the wars and their particular characteristics, not the causes.” Yet the effect of the legal intervention of the “international community” with its act of recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina was that a Yugoslav loyalty was made to look like a conspiratorial disloyalty to “Bosnia.” In 1943-4 Tito was able to force the Anglo-Americans to pretend that his struggle was not communist revolution. In 1992-5 Alija Izetbegović forced the West to pretend that his jihad was the defense of “multi-ethnicity.” Both pretenses were absurd.

Ratko Mladić will be duly convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. He will not come out of jail alive. The verdict is already written, but it reflects a fundamental imbalance. It ignores the essence of the Bosnian war—the Serbs’ striving not to be forced into secession—while remaining mute about the culpability of the other two sides for a series of unconstitutional, illegitimate and illegal political decisions that caused the war. The judgment against Mladić at the U.S.-sponsored and largely U.S.-funded tribunal at The Hague will be built on this flawed foundation. It will be neither fair nor just. It will also give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle that used to be known as “war on terrorism,” and now no longer has a name, or a purpose, or a strategy.

The long-term agenda of the Tribunal’s architects is obvious when we read Geoffrey Robertson’s “Mistakes the Mladic trial needs to avoid” (The Independent, May 28, 2011): “The Mladic indictment … should be replaced by just one charge, the crime against humanity constituted by his command responsibility for ordering the worst war crime since the Japanese death marches of POWs at the end of the Second World War, namely the slaughter of more than 7,000 prisoners of war—the Muslim men and boys killed at Srebrenica.” It remains the Serbian government’s duty, Robertson says,

to clean out the Serb orthodox church, whose priests blessed the death squads at Srebrenica. Without their blessing, I believe that some soldiers would have disobeyed their orders to shoot defenceless, hog-tied, men and boys. It is widely known that the church has harboured Hague fugitives in its monasteries and has been deeply implicit with the murderous aspects of Serb nationalism… They should remember … the fact that the wheels of international justice grind slowly but they grind exceedingly small.

This is a statement worthy of a senior jurist in Moscow, cca 1937. It is unimaginable that Mr. Robinson would suggest a similar clean-up of the Prophet’s Religion of Peace and Tolerance, of course. His call is based on the construct of primary Serb culpability that is supposedly unique among the warring factions. In Robertson’s scenario The Hague is not a vehicle of judicial reconciliation but an instrument of quasi-legal retaliation.

The forthcoming verdict against Ratko Mladić, signed and sealed as it is, will be based on a lie and on an arbitrary apportioning of guilt by the self-appointed guardians of the “international community.” It paves the way for a new, even worse conflict a decade or two from now. It guarantees that the absurdity known as “Bosnia-Herzegovina” will become even less tenable than it is already.

Cross and Double Cross of Gitmo

Unredacted Guantanamo files show clearly that the trail to Abbottabad was known to the US intelligence services at least since 2005, when al-Libi, another Abbottabad dweller, was captured.

Timing is everything. The US President announced killing of Osama bin Laden just as Wikileaks completed its publication of Guantanamo files. Was it coincidence? If not, what was the connection?

An answer to this question is directly connected with the cross and double cross accusations exchanged in the murky world where the intelligence services meet mainstream media.

Publication of the US secret papers, the Guantanamo Files, was done almost simultaneously by two competing media groups, namely:

•  One was the Wikileaks of Julian Assange and their partners The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, the French Le Monde.
• Another one was The New York Times, The Guardian, the Israeli Haaretz.

The Guardian said of the files: “They were obtained by the New York Times, who shared them with theGuardian, which is publishing extracts today, having redacted information which might identify informants. The New York Times says the files were made available to it not by Wikileaks, but “by another source on the condition of anonymity”.

Haaretz made more of it: “A few media outlets, including The New York Times, the Guardian and Haaretz, obtained the documents from an independent source without the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is under house arrest in Britain awaiting his appeal not to be extradited to Sweden, where he faces charges of rape and sexual assault.” The Guardian’s David Leigh twitted “double-crossing Assange!”

Now we’ll give you the story behind the story: who crossed and double crossed whom, which information was redacted and how did it lead to OBL?

In the beginning, the source was one; allegedly Private First Class Manning or whoever it was who got it and transferred to the Wikileaks of Julian Assange. The entire file is still far from being published – a big part of it was encrypted and uploaded as Julian Assange’s Insurance file. Assange published two tranches of that: the War Diary: Afghanistan War Logs and War Diary: Iraq War Logs. He prepared publication of the third tranche: a huge collection of the State Department cables (Cablegate: 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables) in the Guardian.

At that time, the data river forked. The treasure trove was copied by a Wikileaks German employee Daniel Dumshit-Berg who got AWOL after this profitable appropriation. Dumshit made a deal with David Leigh of the Guardian; Leigh used it to cross Assange. He cold-shouldered Assange, declared the deal ‘void’, and used the data to promote his career and to make friends with Bill Keller of the NY Times. They published the cables after redacting them, or should we say “censoring” – they removed everything the secret services demanded to remove. We wrote about it at length here in CounterPunch.

Julian Assange succeeded to regain some lost ground: he established new partnerships, with the Daily Telegraph and others. The cables were being published all the time. And then Assange learned that theGuardian and the New York Times plan to publish the Guantanamo files. There was no time to lose: in a few days, the Wikileaks team prepared the files and began to upload. So did the competitors, possessing the Dumshit-appropriated copy. This was the double-cross per Leigh.

The Guardian and the New York Times had a big and skilful staff, a lot of research, rich archives. But they decided to play ball with the secret services of their countries, redacting “information which might identify informants.” What a hutzpah! Sometimes, the identity of “informants” is more important than the information.

For instance in the file of Adil Hadi al Jaz’iri Leigh and Keller removed the name of the informant.

To their misfortune and to our advantage, at this time the Wikileaks and the Guardian/NY Times were not a loving couple but two competing enterprises. And the Wikileaks published this file in full, warts and all.

Here is the name in full:

Abu Zubaydah the informer was the subject of intensive research, available here that makes clear: this unfortunate man was tortured by the CIA, with permission of the US medics and Bush administration, to the point of the total collapse of his personality. He was one of the High Value Detainees; all of them suffered tortures beyond our ability to comprehend. Information they provided was not only unacceptable in court, it was of nil value because they said everything their tormentors wanted in order to gain a moment of peace.

Andy Worthington wrote: Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental health problems, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did”… “The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered,” further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

Removal of his name by Leigh-Keller gang was not “caring about informers”, it was caring about the torturers.

However the most important redactions by Leigh and Keller were directly dictated by the US intelligence services. The name of Nashwan Abd Al Razzaq Abd Al Baqi, or by another name, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi or by his number IZ-10026 was edited away from the file of Abu al-Libi (US9LY-010017DP) and elsewhere. This file is available in a redacted version of the Guardian and in the uncut version of Wikileaks. Comparison shows to what extent all the traces of al Iraqi were removed. It was not connected to “caring about informers”, for al Libi was dead, allegedly committed suicide in a Libyan jail just before the arrival of the US Ambassador in Tripoli. The file of al Iraqi is missing in all databases; he was captured in 2005 and kept in various secret prisons, until transferred to Guantanamo where he is detained now.

Careful reading of the file shows that al-Libi was connected with al Iraqi since October 2002. In 2003, OBL stated al Libi would be the official messenger between OBL and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, al Libi moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar. He maintained contact with al Iraqi.

And we know that OBL was found and killed in Abbottabad – just as this publication hit the pages of the newspapers. So the trail to Abbottabad was known to the American services at least since 2005, when al-Libi, another Abbottabad dweller, was captured.

What we do not know is the nature of the contacts between the US authorities and  OBL. Were they kissing friends? Was OBL run by the CIA? Did the US fake his killing and moved him to even safer destination after the Wikileaks publication made his trail hot? Or did the heads of the US Secret services decided that there is no destination as safe as netherworld, and killed OBL in order to hide all the traces? They treated him kindly and honorably: they did not show him with purple-painted gums, he was not dressed in the demeaning orange jumpsuit, he was not waterboarded to oblivion, he was not humiliated.

What we do know is that David Leigh and Bill Keller tried to hid it from their readers. Their redacting of the Guantanamo files, like their redacting of the Cablegate, had nothing to do with “saving informers”.Instead of admitting that they redacted the files and the cables for perfectly valid reason of being in cahoots with big business and with intelligence services, the editors say they cared for informers and removed sex charge claims. Somehow, when they wrote about Julian Assange, they did not remove sex charge claims, they rather attenuated them.

David Leigh claimed that Assange  “double-crossed” the paper by distributing the Gitmo files to various “right-wing” news organisations, meaning the conservative Daily Telegraph. This is rich. “Left” and “right” has very little meaning nowadays, after Blair and Clinton. What is important is the position on wars and overseas interventions, susceptibility to the Secret Service meddling, subservience to the priority of the state.

In France, right-wing Marine Le Pen stands against foreign interventions in Libya and Cote d’Ivoire, against payments to bankers, against the President, while left-wing Bernard Henri Levy supports wars and interventions, loves bankers, is a friend of the President “right-wing” Sarkozy.

In England, the Guardian is the leading newspaper for calls to war. Libya, Syria – the Guardian wants them bombed. Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq, – the Guardian wanted them to be invaded. It is just the package is different: instead of right-wing jingoism, the Guardian served the neo-colonialist adventurism under delicate sauce of humanitarian intervention. The Guardian leads on hypocrisy.

The Guardian is not the newspaper of the left; it is the problem of the left. The case of Guantanamo files proves that the Guardian redacted the most vital information as told by the CIA.

And Osama? What about Osama bin Laden? Now we know that the US knew of his whereabouts; they knew of the trail, they asked Leigh and Keller to remove relevant references. Why didn’t they capture him or kill him earlier?

OBL’s organisation did what the US authorities wanted to be done. They fought the Russians and ruined Afghanistan. They conspired and fought against Hezbollah, slaughtered Shias in Iraq, undermined Qaddafi, hated Hamas and Iran. They supported ethnic cleansing of ‘infidels’ in Chechnya and in the Balkans. They never ever attacked Israel: they preserved their vigour for Sayyed Nasrallah. Like a dreadful beast nurtured in the CIA secret labs, only once they reportedly rebelled against their merciless creator – on 9/11. Osama was greater than, but similar to such American friends as Jonas Savimbi of Angola or Shamil Basayev of Chechnya, and hopefully after his death his organisation will vanish like Unita and Basayev bands did.

The Guantanamo files reveal utter wretchedness of Osama’s unlucky followers. With exception of a few dozen close associates, the rest of the prisoners made a wrong choice ever listening to him. They (especially foreigners) were idealists, who wanted to establish Kingdom of God upon the earth; they were encouraged by the US to flock to Afghanistan to fight the Commies.  Majority of them never even had a chance to hold the gun. They, the foreigners in Afghanistan and Pakistan were sold for bounty to the Americans as fast as possible. They paid for this by years of torture. And now they are about to learn that their supreme chief was safeguarded by the same Americans who tortured them!

But in the mind of the Muslim masses OBL will be remembered (justly or not) as the architect of the only successful response of the oppressed to the Empire on its own soil. And that ensured him greatness of his own and a place in history.

What “Humanitarian Intervention” Looks Like

Iraq: Let us not forget what “humanitarian intervention” looks like.

Libya: Let us not be confused as to why Libya alone has been singled out for “humanitarian intervention”.

On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of “war criminal” and “torturer”. (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can’t Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: “Aren’t you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?” She also threw in another line that’s become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that’s used when all other arguments fail: “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.” ¹

My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that “you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God.” … The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.

Unfortunately, they’ve lost just about everything else as well. Twenty years of American bombing, invasion, occupation and torture have led to the people of that unhappy land losing their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … more than half the population either dead, disabled, in prison, or in foreign exile … the air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

In 2006, the UN special investigator on torture declared that reports from Iraq indicated that torture “is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein.” Another UN report of the same time disclosed a rise in “honor killings” of women. ²

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

“I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college,” Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi told American peace activist Medea Benjamin in 2010. “I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything — electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein.” ³

And this from two months ago:

“Protesters, human rights workers and security officials say the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has responded to Iraq’s demonstrations in much the same way as many of its more authoritarian neighbors: with force. Witnesses in Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk described watching last week as security forces in black uniforms, tracksuits and T-shirts roared up in trucks and Humvees, attacked protesters, rounded up others from cafes and homes and hauled them off, blindfolded, to army detention centers. Entire neighborhoods … were blockaded to prevent residents from joining the demonstrations. Journalists were beaten.” ⁴

So … can we expect the United States and its fellow thugs in NATO to intervene militarily in Iraq as they’re doing in Libya? To protect the protesters in Iraq as they tell us they’re doing in Libya? To effect regime change in Iraq as they’re conspiring, but not admitting, in Libya?

Similarly Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria … all have been bursting with protest and vicious government crackdown in recent months, even to a degree in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive societies in the world. Not one of these governments has been assaulted by the United States, the UK, or France as Libya has been assaulted; not one of these countries’ opposition is receiving military, financial, legal and moral support from the Western powers as the Libyan rebels are — despite the Libyan rebels’ brutal behavior, racist murders, and the clear jihadist ties of some of them. ⁵ The Libyan rebels are reminiscent of the Kosovo rebels — mafiosos famous for their trafficking in body parts and women, also unquestioningly supported by the Western powers against an Officially Designated Enemy, Serbia.

So why is only Libya the target for US/NATO missiles? Is there some principled or moral reason? Are the Libyans the worst abusers of their people in the region? In actuality, Libya offers its citizens a higher standard of living. (The 2010 UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income ranked Libya first in Africa.) None of the other countries has a more secular government than Libya. (In contrast some of the Libyan rebels are in the habit of chanting that phrase we all know only too well: “Allah Akbar”.) None of the others has a human-rights record better than that of Libya, however imperfect that may be — in Egypt a government fact-finding mission has announced that during the recent uprising at least 846 protesters were killed as police forces shot them in the head and chest with live ammunition. ⁶ Similar horror stories have been reported in Syria, Yemen and other countries of the region during this period.

It should be noted that the ultra-conservative Fox News reported on February 28: “As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body’s Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya’s human rights record. The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a “priority” and for bettering its “constitutional” framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens — who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.”

Of all the accusations made against Gaddafi perhaps the most meaningless is the oft-repeated “He’s killing his own people.” It’s true, but that’s what happens in civil wars. Abraham Lincoln also killed his own people.

Muammar Gaddafi has been an Officially Designated Enemy of the US longer than any living world leader except Fidel Castro. The animosity began in 1970, one year after Gaddafi took power in a coup, when he closed down a US air force base. He then embarked on a career of supporting what he regarded as revolutionary groups. During the 1970s and ’80s, Gaddafi was accused of using his large oil revenues to support — with funds, arms, training, havens, diplomacy, etc — a wide array of radical/insurgent/terrorist organizations, particularly certain Palestinian factions and Muslim dissident and minority movements in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; the IRA and Basque and Corsican separatists in Europe; several groups engaged in struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa; various opposition groups and politicians in Latin America; the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang.

It was claimed as well that Libya was behind, or at least somehow linked to, an attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Cairo, various plane hijackings, a bomb explosion on an American airliner over Greece, the blowing up of a French airliner over Africa, blowing up a synagogue in Istanbul, and blowing up a disco in Berlin which killed some American soldiers. ⁷

In 1990, when the United States needed a country to (falsely) blame for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libya was the easy choice.

Gaddafi’s principal crime in the eyes of US President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) was not that he supported terrorist groups, but that he supported thewrong terrorist groups; i.e., Gaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Washington was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the US military in Grenada. The one band of terrorists the two men supported in common was the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

And if all this wasn’t enough to make Gaddafi Public Enemy Number One in Washington (Reagan referred to him as the “mad dog of the Middle East”), Gaddafi has been a frequent critic of US foreign policy, a serious anti-Zionist, pan-Africanist, and pan-Arabist (until the hypocrisy and conservatism of Arab governments proved a barrier). He also calls his government socialist. How much tolerance and patience can The Empire be expected to have? When widespread protests broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, could Washington have resisted instigating the same in the country sandwiched between those two? The CIA has been very busy supplying the rebels with arms, bombing support, money, and personnel.

It may well happen that the Western allies will succeed in forcing Gaddafi out of power. Then the world will look on innocently as the new Libyan government gives Washington what it has long sought: a host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: “We’ve got a big image problem down there. … Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don’t trust the US.” ⁸ Another thing scarcely any African country would tolerate is an American military base. There’s only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It’ll be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.

And remember — in the context of recent history concerning Iraq, North Korea, and Iran — if Libya had nuclear weapons the United States would not be attacking it.

Or the United States could realize that Gaddafi is no radical threat simply because of his love for Condoleezza Rice. Here is the Libyan leader in a March 27, 2007 interview on al-Jazeera TV: “Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much. I admire her, and I’m proud of her, because she’s a black woman of African origin.”

Over the years, the American government and media have fed us all a constant diet of scandalous Gaddafi stories: He took various drugs, was an extreme womanizer, was bisexual, dressed in women’s clothing, wore makeup, carried a teddy bear, had epileptic fits, and much more; some part of it may have been true. And now we have the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, telling us that Gaddafi’s forces are increasingly engaging in sexual violence and that they have been issued the impotency drug Viagra, presumably to enhance their ability to rape. ⁹ Remarkable. Who would have believed that the Libyan Army had so many men in their 60s and 70s?

As I write this, US/NATO missiles have slammed into a Libyan home killing a son and three young grandchildren of Gaddafi, this after repeated rejections of Gaddafi’s call for negotiations — another heartwarming milestone in the glorious history of humanitarian intervention, as well as a reminder of the US bombing of Libya in 1986 which killed a young daughter of Gaddafi.

Two more examples, if needed, of why capitalism can not be reformed

Transocean, the owner of the drilling rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago, killing 11 workers and sending two hundred (200) million gallons of oil cascading over the shoreline of six American states, has announced that (through using some kind of arcane statistical method) it had “recorded the best year in safety performance in our Company’s history.” Accordingly, the company awarded obscene bonuses on top of obscene salaries to its top executives. ¹⁰

In Japan, even as it struggles to contain one of history’s worst nuclear disasters, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has proposed building two new nuclear reactors at its radiation-spewing power plant. The plan had taken shape before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and TEPCO officials see no reason to change it. The Japanese government agency in charge of approving such a project has reacted in shocked horror. “It was just unbelievable,” said the director of the agency. ¹¹

Which leads us to A.W. Clausen, president of Bank of America, speaking to the Greater Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, in 1970:

“It may sound heretical to some in this room to say that business enterprise is not an absolute necessity to human culture … Ancient Egypt functioned more than 3000 years without anything resembling what we today understand by the term ‘corporate enterprise’ or even ‘money’. Within our span of years, we have witnessed the rise of the Soviet Socialist empire. It survives without anything you or I would call a private corporation and little that approaches our own monetary mechanism. It survives and is far stronger than anyone might have expected from watching its turbulent beginnings in 1917 … It is easy to mislead ourselves into thinking that there is something preordained about our profit-motivated, free-market, private-enterprise system — that is, as they used to say of gold, universal and immutable.”

Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years, part III

• Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, pages 349-350: April 6, 2004. Sanchez was in Iraq in video teleconference with President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One major American offensive was in operation, another about to be launched. According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly, “Powell said. “There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” Then Bush spoke: “At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone. At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out. Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. … There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”
• Noam Chomsky: “If there is really authentic popular participation in the decision-making and the free association of communities, yeah, that could be tremendously important. In fact that’s essentially the traditional anarchist ideal. That’s what was realized the only time for about a year in Spain in 1936 before it was crushed by outside forces, in fact all outside forces, Stalinist Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini’s fascism and the Western democracies cooperated in crushing it. They were all afraid of it.”
• To Hitler, America was both the enemy and a role model, inspiring in its imperial seizure of great territories by force, its use of slave labor, its eradication of native populations.
• NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, made clear in a speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington in 2008 that western interests in Afghanistan went well beyond good governance to the strategic interest in having a permanent military presence in a state that borders central Asia, China, Iran and Pakistan.
• CIA Special Collections of documents; “Instances Of the Use of US Armed Forces Abroad, 1798 – 2010“
• Michael Collon: “Let’s replace the word ‘democratic’ by ‘with us’, and the word ‘terrorist’ by ‘against us’.”
• Ron Paul: “Those who caution that leaving Iraq would be a disaster are the same ones who promised the conflict would be a ‘cake-walk’.”
• Spc. Alex Horton, 22, writing in a blog while a marine in Iraq in 2007: “In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.”
• Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Nixon: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on –– and even precedent value for –– other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.”
• Paul Craig Roberts: “International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else.”
• Chris Hedges: “If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist ‘madrassa,’ or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.”
• “The US has never had a ‘foreign policy’ but a fanatical domestic policy which, once it had bled through to the Pacific, sought new hosts on which to feed.” Patrick Wilkinson
• C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956): “The only seriously accepted plan for ‘peace’ is a fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.”
• The United States goes around the world sprinkling democracy dust.
• Iran, the latest threat to life as we know it.
• “Iran hit back at US allegations that it has failed to crack down on fugitive al-Qaeda members, calling on Washington to apologize to the world for its own past support of the network. ‘The Americans should present a full apology to the international community for the support they gave to al-Qaeda,’ said the foreign ministry, referring to a period in the 1980s when millions of dollars of covert US aid was channeled — through the Pakistani secret service — to Islamist groups battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” (Agence France Presse, June 2, 2003)
• Tom Hayden: They believe that the exposure of the generals to a civilian academic atmosphere may humanize the process of war-making, not worrying that the actual danger may be the militarizing of the university.
• Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his 2007 book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World”: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

  After an avalanche of commentary, Greenspan backpedaled and obfuscated in his comments. He insisted he was talking about “oil security” and “the global economy”. But this was just proving his own point that mentioning oil as a motivation for war is “politically inconvenient”. It’s no way to get young men to kill other young men who’ve never done them any harm.

• The American people have no more authentic control over their government than do people in countries that we call dictatorships, particularly on issues of foreign policy.

Notes

1. ^↩
2. Associated Press, September 21, 2006 ^↩
3. Common Dreams, August 20, 2010 ^↩
4. Washington Post, March 4, 2011^↩
5. Washington Times, February 24, 2011; The Telegraph (London), March 25, 2011; Alexander Cockburn, “Libya, Oh What a Stupid War; Fukushima, Cover-Up Amid Catastrophe”; “Al Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” (PDF), Combating Terrorism Center, US Military Academy, West Point, NY, December 2007 ^↩
6. Associated Press, April 20, 2011 ^↩
7. Gaddafi’s history of supporting terrorism, real and alleged: William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 48 ^↩
8. The Guardian (London), June 25, 2007  ^↩
9. Reuters news agency, April 29, 2011 ^↩
10. Washington Post, April 1, 2011 ^↩
11. Washington Post, April 6, 2011

Croatian Generals Sentenced at The Hague

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Zagreb and other Croatian cities over the past week to protest the conviction of two Croatian generals by the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. The ICTY sentenced Ante Gotovina to 24 years in jail and Mladen Markač to 18 years for their role in the August 1995 Operation Storm, which resulted in the exodus of up to a quarter of a million Krajina Serbs. The tribunal found that the generals were part of an elaborate conspiracy headed by Croatia’s then president, Franjo Tudjman.

It would have been preferable for the Croatian domestic courts to deal with the legacy of the Storm. The reaction to the verdict indicates that a trial of men so widely considered national heroes was literally unimaginable, however, which is unfortunate. (The Croatian Army chief chaplain, Bishop Juraj Jezerinac, of Gotovina and Markač to the suffering of Jesus Christ.) The Tribunal’s proponents will use the reaction in Croatia as evidence that the ICTY remains relevant and necessary. Additionally problematic is the Tribunal’s use of the concept of Joint Criminal Enterprise—thus far used only against the Serbs—which is a blunt legal tool with Kafkaesque implications.

The political objectives of the Croatian state leadership in launching the attack are evident from a transcript of Tudjman’s meeting with his top military commanders and civilian aides at the Adriatic island of Brioni on July 31, 1995, five days before the attack. “We have to inflict such blows,” Tudjman announced, “that the Serbs will to all practical purposes disappear.” “It is important that those [Serbian] civilians set out, and then the army will follow them, and when the columns set out they will have a psychological impact on each other,” Tudjman went on. “This means giving them a way out, while pretending to guarantee their civil rights etcetera.”

The verdict at The Hague is a potential embarrassment for Bill Clinton’s national security team, including a number of “Balkan experts” who remain influential in his wife’s State Department.  According to a prominent Croatian investigative journalist, the late Ivo Pukanic, the United States was actively involved in the preparation, monitoring and initiation of Operation Storm: the green light from President Clinton was passed on by the US military attaché in Zagreb and the operations were transmitted in real time to the Pentagon:

The US was thrilled with the how fast and clean the operation was conducted, and with its outcome, which permitted the lightning fast entry of HV [the Croatian Army] into Bosnia-Herzegovina and … Belgrade’s consent to sign the Dayton Accords. [This] was later confirmed in the statements that the operation was carried out properly, and tthe US-Croatian cooperation in intelligence and military matters intensified. General Patrick Hughes, Clapper’s successor as director of DIA, visited Croatia, intensified cooperation in the sector of electronic monitoring of Serbia and Montenegro, other intelligence was swapped, MPRI began its intensive training of the Croatian military…

As Croatian troops launched their assault on August 4, U.S. aircraft operating under NATO command destroyed Serbian radar and anti-aircraft defenses. Croatian planes then carried out attacks on Serbian towns and positions and strafed refugee columns. Thousands of Serbs lost their lives during the exodus; hundreds of those too old or infirm to move were killed by the Croatian forces. It was the biggest act of ethnic cleansing in post-1945 Europe.

Most of the refugees ended up in Serbia and the Serbian part of Bosnia (Republika Srpska). Massacres continued for several weeks after the fall of Krajina. UN patrols discovered numerous fresh unmarked graves and bodies of murdered civilians well after the ‘Storm’ was over. A suppressed EU report stated, “The corpses, some fresh, some decomposed, are mainly of old men. Many have been shot in the back of the head or had throats slit, others have been mutilated… Serb lands continue to be torched and looted.” Following a visit to the region the Zagreb Helsinki Committee reported that virtually all Serb villages had been destroyed: “In a village near Knin, eleven bodies were found, some of them were massacred in such a way that it was not easy to see whether the body was male or female.”

As the reaction to Gotovina’s and Markač’s sentences indicate, the war in remains controversial, many years after its end in 1995. To the Croats, it was a war of Serbian aggression and Croatian Defence of the Motherland, plain and simple. To the Serbs the war was a reaction to what they perceived as intolerable provocation, an existential response to the revamping of Ustašism in rhetoric, symbols, and substance. They were reacting to Tudjman’s escalating political ploys in Zagreb and his minions’ terrorist acts on the ground. The establishment of autonomous regions, and the subsequent proclamation of the Republic of the Serbian Krajina, was seen as an act of rebellion by most Croats and as necessary response by most Serbs.

Tudjman’s strategic objective behind Operation Storm was a Serb-free Croatia. That much is no longer in doubt. While circumstantial evidence had always been there, the Brioni transcript of July 31, 1995, provides the smoking gun. A week later, at a rally in Knin, Tudjman announced, “There can be no return to the past, to the times when [Serbs] were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, a cancer that was destroying the Croatian national being.” He then went on to speak of the “disappearance” of the Krajina Serbs, “so it is as if they have never lived here!”

Former U.S. Ambassador in Zagreb Peter Galbraith, testifying at The Hague, dismissed claims that Croatia had engaged in ethnic cleansing, “because most of the population had already fled when the Croatian army and police arrived.” But Galbraith was being disingenuous: Tudjman’s objectives had included ethnic cleansing all along. His objectives were stated with perfect clarity at a meeting with his closest aides on 23 August 1995, in the aftermath of Operation Storm:

[M]ilitary force can be a most effective means for solving the internal needs of the state. Considering the situation we face with the liberation of occupied territories, the demographic situation, it is necessary for military command precisely to become one of the most efficient components of our state policies in solving the demographic situation of Croatia. […] We have the fortunate situation that the liberation demands a distribution of military units that would simultaneously solve the demographical [problem].”

Croatia still celebrates August 5 as Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day. Almost sixteen years later, as Gotovina and Markač prepare their appeals, it seems likely that they will spend many years in jail, but they were the operation’s executors rather than masterminds. The key political leaders—starting with Franjo Tudjman, who died in bed in 1999—are immune or out of reach. The Hague verdict notwithstanding, the crimes of 1995—not unlike the Ustaša horrors that had preceded them in 1941-45—remain unacknowledged and unatoned for.

“Srebrenica” and the Power of Reason

“Truth and reason are eternal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Rev. Samuel Knox in 1810. “They have prevailed.  And they will eternally prevail . . . ” Jefferson was wrong. His belief that “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it” was naive. As Patrick J. Buchanan proves in a passing reference in his otherwise sound latest column, even men of generally sound understanding and good intentions end up the victims of the disinformation campaigns that pass for media reporting.

“In none of the Libyan towns affected by fighting in recent weeks,” Buchanan writes, “has anything like the massacre in the Ivory Coast taken place, let alone Srebrenica.”

It is noteworthy that “Srebrenica” is used here not as a geographic location that needs to be preceded by a noun (“the massacre in…”) but as a stand-alone term that denotes horror, on par with “Auschwitz,” or “Katyn,” or “Hiroshima.”

“Srebrenica” used in this sense has established itself as a myth based on a lie.  As the introduction to an enlightening recent article points out, we need to transcend the routine banalities of the Srebrenica debate which turns mostly on numbers; but the very term “debate” is rejected by those who should be on one of the two sides in that debate:

They deny as a matter of principle that there is anything to debate. So many thousand prisoners were executed and a distinguished international judicial forum of unquestioned authority has found it to constitute genocide. (These are the “routine banalities” that define the parameters of Srebrenica as an issue at least, if not as a debate.) According to our hypothetical debating partners there is nothing to debate because everything is settled and clear.

Reasonable people with no ethno-religious axe to grind in the Balkan quagmire have long fought such “routine banalities,” including the claim that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed in cold blood and  the systematicmisuse of the term “genocide.”

BACK TO THE NUMBERS—The fact beyond dispute is that during the Bosnian war thousands of Muslim men were killed in the region of Srebrenica. Most of them died in July of 1995 when the enclave fell almost without a fight to the Bosnian Serb Army and the Muslim garrison—the 28^th division of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Army—attempted a breakthrough. A significant number reached safety at the Muslim-held town of Tuzla, 60 km to the north; a few found shelter in Serbia, across the Drina River to the east. An unknown were killed while fighting their way through; and many others—numbers remain disputed—were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb army.

The numbers remain unknown and misrepresented. With “8,000 executed” and—inevitably—thousands more killed in the fighting or reaching the Muslim lines, the column attempting to break out should have counted 12 to 15,000 men—an impossibly large number. There should have been huge gravesites and satellite evidence of  executions, burials, and body removals. The UN searches in the Srebrenica vicinity, breathlessly frantic at times, still falls far short of the sanctified figure of 8,000. The Islamic shrine at Potocari, where the supposed victims are buried, includes those of soldiers killed in action, Muslim and Serb, between May 1992 and July 1995.

The Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) never came up with a conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place is undeniable. The number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unproven. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, “from the outset the numbers were used and abused” for political purposes. The number of likely casualties corresponds closely to the ‘missing’ list of 7,300 compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Rooper says.  But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported ‘to have left the enclave before it fell’:

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure is that it has always been represented as synonymous with the number of people executed.  This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with significant casualties on both sides. It was also known that others had fled to Muslim-held territory around Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westwards and northwards, and that some had fled into Serbia.  It is therefore certain that nowhere near all the missing could have been executed.

The Red Cross reported at the time that some 3,000 Bosnian Army soldiers managed to reach Muslim lines near Tuzla and were redeployed by the Bosnian Army “without their families being informed.” The number of military survivors was also confirmed by Muslim General Enver Hadzihasanovic in his testimony at The Hague.

The last census results, from 1991, counted 37,211 inhabitants in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). Displaced persons from Srebrenica registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995 totaled 35,632. With 3,000 Muslim men who reached Tuzla “without their families being informed” we come to the figure of over 38,000 survivors. The Hague Tribunal’s own estimates of the total population of the Srebrenica enclave before July 1995—notably that made by Judge Patricia Wald—give 40,000 as the maximum figure. It does not add up.

Having spent five days interviewing over 20,000 Srebrenica survivors at Tuzla a week after the fall of the enclave, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Henry Wieland declared, “we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place.” A decade later a Dutch field investigator, Dr Dick Schoonoord, confirmed Wieland’s verdict: “It has been impossible during our investigations in Bosnia to find any people who witnessed the mass murder or would talk about the fate of the missing men.”

A “PROTECTED ZONE”?—It is often pointed out that Srebrenica was an UN “protected zone,” but it is seldom noted that the enclave was simultaneously an armed camp used for attacks against Serb villages in the surrounding areas. Muslim General Sefer Halilovic confirmed in his testimony at the Hague Tribunal that there were at least 5,500 Bosnian Muslim Army soldiers in Srebrenica after it had obtained the “safe haven” status, and that he had personally arranged numerous deliveries of sophisticated weapons by helicopter.

French General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR commander who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, is adamant that the crimes committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable. He testified at The Hague Tribunal on February 12, 2004, that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region.” Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that “Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself… he didn’t even look for an excuse… One can’t be bothered with prisoners.”

Cees Wiebes, who wrote the intelligence section of the Dutch Government report on Srebrenica, notes that despite signing the demilitarization agreement, Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica were heavily armed and engaged in provocations (“sabotage operations”) against Serbian forces. Professor Wiebes caused a storm with his bookIntelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, detailing the role of the Clinton administration in allowing Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims.

On 11 July, 1995, the Muslim garrison was ordered to evacuate the town which the Serbs entered unopposed. Local Deputy Director of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, wrote in 2004 (“Was Srebrenica a Hoax?”) that Muslim forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery because “military resistance would jeopardize the image of ‘victim,’ which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.”

POLITICAL BACKGROUND—Two prominent supporters (at the time) of the late Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, his Srebrenica SDA party chairman Ibran Mustafic and police commander Hakija Meholjic, have subsequently accused Izetbegovic of deliberately sacrificing the enclave in order to trigger NATO intervention. Meholjic is explicit: in his presence, Izetbegovic quoted Bill Clinton as saying that 5,000 dead Muslims would be sufficient to provide the political basis for an American-led intervention on the side of the Muslims.

Testifying at The Hague Tribunal, Muslim Generals Halilovic and Hadzihasanovic confirmed this theory by describing how 18 top officers of the Srebrenica garrison were abruptly removed in May 1995.  Ibran Mustafic, the former head of the Muslim SDA party in Srebrenica, is adamant that the scenario for the sacrifice of Srebrenica was carefully prepared:

Unfortunately, the Bosnian presidency and the Army command were involved in this business … Had I received orders to attack the Serb army from the demilitarized zone, I would have rejected to carry out that order. I would have asked the person who had issued that order to bring his family to Srebrenica, so that I can give him a gun let him stage attacks from the demilitarized zone. I knew that such shameful, calculated moves were leading my people to catastrophe. The order came from Sarajevo.

Military analyst Tim Ripley agrees that Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by the Muslim political leaders. He noted that Dutch UN soldiers “saw Bosnian troops escaping from Srebrenica past their observation points, carrying brand new anti-tank weapons [which] made many UN officers and international journalists suspicious.”

The term “genocide” is even more contentious than the exact circumstances of Srebrenica’s fall. Local chief of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, noted that if there had been a premeditated plan of genocide, instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north—which left open escape routes to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped:

The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN. The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there.

The fact that The Hague Tribunal called the massacre in Srebrenica “genocide” does not make it so. What plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about hundreds of thousands of Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Srebrenica and other parts of Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Žepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an “expert” opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. Such psychobabble turns the term “genocide” into a gruesome joke.

Yet it was on the basis of this definition that in August 2001, the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of “complicity in genocide.” Even if the unproven figure of “8,000” is assumed, it affected less than one-half of one percent of Bosnia’s Muslim population in a locality covering one percent of its territory. On such form, the term “genocide” loses all meaning and becomes a propaganda tool rather than a legal and historical concept. On that form, America’s NATO ally Turkey—a major regional player in today’s Balkans—committed genocide in northern Cyprus in 1974. On that form, no military conflict can be genocide-free.

As Diana Johnstone explained in a seminal “Counterpunch” article, the ‘Srebrenica massacre’ is part of a dominant culture discourse that is highly relevant, some years later, to the ongoing intervention in Libya:

We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our ‘values’ when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit ‘genocide.’ … The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because ‘we’ let that happen, ‘we’ mustn’t let ‘it’ happen again, ergo, the U.S. should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of ‘genocide’.

The accepted Srebrenica story, influenced by war propaganda and uncritical media reports, is neither historically correct nor morally satisfying. The relentless Western campaign against the Serbs and in favor of their Muslim foes—which is what “Srebrenica” is really all about—is detrimental to the survival of our culture and civilization. It seeks to give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as “war on terrorism.” The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake.

In more ways than one “Srebrenica is, indeed, a totem for the new world order.  And I hope that Pat Buchanan reads this.

The Libyan Stalemate

The Libyan operation is being quietly aborted, barely three weeks after its ill-conceived onset. There will be no mission creep, no American boots on the ground, and no arming and training of the rebel forces.

The impending stalemate is the least of all evils. It is preferable to an open-ended escalation or to an outright victory by either side. Libya will be effectively divided in two, with the boundary passing somewhere east of Brega and west of Benghazi. The Interim Transitional National Council (ITNC) will be dominated by hard-core Islamists. They already form the fighting core in eastern Libya, which is composed of former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG. Oh, yes, they have “renounced violence.” It is just as well the ITNC’s claim to represent the country as a whole will get nowhere, France’s hasty act of recognition notwithstanding. Gaddafi will continue to control a half of the oil wells, and he will be able to evade the sanctions—current and future—thanks to the sympathetic generals ruling Algeria to the west. On the other hand, three-quarters of Libya’s oil reserves are believed to be in the Sirte Basin currently controlled by rebels. Since oil accounts for more than two-thirds of of Libya’s GDP, a rebel-controlled statelet in the east may offer all kinds of rich pickings to the British and French oil companies which were the driving forces behind this intervention.

President Obama has never had his heart in this operation. The ambivalence was obvious in his bizarre description of “Odyssey Dawn” as a “time-limited, scope-limited kinetic military action” for which “our military … is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally.” The operation will now die a quiet death, which is just as well. Only weeks ago Libya had the potential to combine the worst elements of several Western military interventions over the past decade and a half. To gain the United Nations Security Council approval on March 17, it was presented as a 1997 Iraq no-fly zone lookalike. France and Britain had always intended to escalate the operation once this limited mandate was granted, however, and proceeded to do so within days of the Resolution’s adoption. The bombing raids soon became reminiscent of NATO’s 1999 air war against Serbia, civilian targets and victims included. The parallel demand for Gaddafi’s ouster soon opened the possibility of a further escalation—specifically prohibited by the UNSC Resolution 1,973—which would have entailed outright occupation of Libya by ground troops.

The only serious combatants among the insurgents are hard-core Islamic fundamentalists from Cyrenaica, including veterans of various Jihads in Central Asia and the Balkans. This means that the “success” in this war would be hugely detrimental to the American interest. Instead of an eccentric dictator, Libya would be ruled by the likes of Hizb-ut-Tahrir Party, North Africa’s response to the Taliban. These people are most unlikely to be described by U.S. officials as “strong parters in the war on terrorism,” as Gaddafi was designated only five years ago. According to a 2008 West Point analysis of a cache of al-Qaeda records, nearly a fifth of foreign jihadists in Iraq were Libyans; on a per-capita basis, Libya provided twice as many of them as Saudi Arabia. NATO commander Adm. James Stavridis admitted that much when he told a Senate hearing that there were intelligence reports about the presence of Qaeda and Hezbollah members among the insurgents.

What next? Gaddafi needs to be given some discrete assurances that, when the dust settles, he would be left in peace if he behaves and stays below the radar screen. “Negotiating with Gaddafi” is bound to be called a defeat by those who had always intended to use the limited mandate under the UNSC Resolution 1,973 but for once they should be ignored: the fruits of their clamoring have proven too costly in American lives and treasure over the past decade. A viable exit strategy requires giving up the rhetoric of regime change.

Four lessons of Libya may be drawn by now. The first has been known for years: “humanitarian intervention” is a pernicious concept which provides the equivalent of the “Polish army attack” on the Gleiwitz radio station to a would-be aggressor. It undermines the concept of collective security and it undermines international law as a system of commonly respected norms that are binding upon all states. Its arbitrary nature is evident in the failure of its most vocal practitioners to invoke it when the violator is too powerful (e.g. North Korea subjecting its people to famine and terror), or too insignificant (various African despots, in Sudan, Congo, etc.), or considered a partner (NATO ally Turkey’s war against the Kurds in the 1980s and 90s took the lives of at least 30,000 civilians). Far from being “moral,” humanitarian intervention is inherently a tool of situational morality.

The second is that foreign interventions are easy to start and very difficult to end. They create a dynamic of their own which makes long-term planning and management impossible. Ends and means get confused. Enormous costs make “failure” unacceptable, but the definition of “success” becomes elusive. Both Iraq and Afghanistan provide telling current examples.

The third is that wars should be fought not for “ideals” but against threats to national security. All too often when no threat is present—such as Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”—reductio ad Hitlerum is deployed. Muammar Gaddafi—eccentric, unpleasant, brutal and probably mad as he is—was not a threat to the United States. He has been no worse a dictator than several of our Third World clients. He is more reliable on Islamic extremism than our kleptocratic “allies” in Saudi Arabia. Libya’s per capita gdp and other indicators show that he has shared more of his country’s oil wealth with his people than the rulers of the Emirates, or Bahrein, or (again) Saudi Arabia. Who rules Libya may matter to delusional one-worlders like Samantha Power, to neoconservative ideologues who have never seen a war they did not like, or to oil executives, but their interests are not national interests. Their interests can be reliably assumed to be the exact opposite of the American interest.

The fourth is that with each new war started without congressional approval—let alone a formal declaration—the United States loses further vestiges of its republican identity and enhances its imperial character. His previous antiwar rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama has effectively embraced the previous Administration’s September 2001 dictum that “no statute can place any limits on the President’s determinations” because “these decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.” They are nothing of the sort “under the Constitution,” but that did not prevent Hillary Clinton from telling the House of Representatives that “the White House would forge ahead with military action in Libya even if Congress passed a resolution constraining the mission.” Successive administrations—most notably those of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—have inured us to illegality to such an extent that its explicit flaunting is seen as normal. That is, on balance, the worst consequence of this unnecessary adventure.

The new definition of crazy: Our wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq & Drugs

Recently I’ve become a fan of ABC’s new television show “Off the Map,” and last week’s plot featured a schizophrenic woman who kept imagining things that didn’t really exist in the real world.  Inside of her own mind, however, it was a different story — and, as far as she was concerned, the scary phantoms who peopled her own mental world really did exist.  “What I see IS real,” she kept sobbing.

And, apparently, all the scary phantoms and bogeymen who seem to people the minds of diagnosed schizophrenics have also been living inside of the minds of America’s current leaders as well.  Everywhere from the Pentagon to Wall Street, it appears that a whole bunch of crazy and false images are also running through our leaders’ brains.  “All our wars are humanitarian wars,” they keep telling us. “All our wars are necessary and good.  And we are also winning all of these wars.”  Sounds crazy to me.

In the last several decades, Americans have been sold a whole laundry-list of military, financial and/or moral disasters, such as our wars on far-off God-forsaken places like Afghanistan, Vietnam, Libya, Serbia, Grenada, Somalia, Guatemala, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, El Salvador, Africa, Latin America and Iraq; and we’ve also been sold a bunch of wars on various miscellaneous things such as Terror and Drugs.  And don’t forget all those other miscellaneous undeclared wars that are also being sold to us daily — such as corporatists’ undeclared wars on unions, sick people, infrastructure, women, school children and what’s left of our American middle class.

Just look at this list.  It’s basically loony-tunes.  To a sane person, it would appear that our leaders have declared war on practically every single person in the world but themselves.  That’s craziness.  Just what the freak is going ON inside of these people’s minds?

And while all these horrendous and insane disasters keep on draining America’s treasury — approximately seven trillion dollars has gone down the drain so far, a nest egg that we’ll never see again — still our leaders keep on trying to sell us even more of these loser wars, telling us over and over again that they are not only moral, necessary and affordable, but that they are actually keeping us safe and that we are actually WINNING these wars.  How schizophrenic is that?

“What we see IS real,” our leaders keep sobbing — just like that crazy woman on TV.

Is it really normal human behavior to spend trillions of dollars on bombing, torturing and murdering untold numbers of strangers?  Women and children and babies who we don’t even know?

Is it really normal human behavior to elevate weapons of mass destruction to the position of becoming America’s top national product?  Especially in these modern times of recession and need?

Sounds more like schizophrenia than sanity to me.

For instance, let’s take a look at that ever-popular War on Drugs.  America is losing the War on Drugs.  So far, we have spent untold billions on this craziness and yet the results are obviously certifiably abnormal — to say the least.  Mexico and Columbia have become armed fortresses, while here at home Americans by the millions are losing their brain functions — and/or their lives — because of unregulated street drugs that are being cut with everything from corn starch to shoe polish.

We are twenty or more long years into this “war” and nothing has changed — except that the rich are getting richer. According to the Guardian newspaper, “[T]he drug industry has two products: money and suffering.  On one hand, you have massive profits and enrichment.  On the other, you have massive suffering, misery and death.  You cannot separate one from the other.”http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

What kind of alternative reality do our leaders live in if they actually think that this kind of behavior is okay?

And let’s look at the war on Iraq next.  In “Off the Map,” the schizophrenic woman runs into the village marketplace and starts trying to kill people.  On the TV show, this sort of behavior is presumed to be clinically insane and the good guys rush in to stop her.  Yet when this same behavior gets repeated again and again on a massive scale in Iraq, no one seems to be calling it crazy.  Why not?

Next, let’s attempt to get inside the distorted minds of those American leaders who actually think that we are winning the war on Af-Pak.  Yeah right.  If you think that spending billions per month on a ten-year-old “war” that kills thousands of women and children living on the other side of the world and still keeps slogging on and on and on with no end-game in mind or in sight is called “winning,” then you are way out of touch with reality here as well.

If anyone were to start exhibiting this type of behavior on the streets of any small town in America, they would immediately have several large men in white coats running after them with straight jackets.

How crazy can it be to spend trillions of dollars on slaughtering human beings on the other side of the planet — while huge numbers of our own children here in America cry themselves to sleep at night because they are homeless and hungry due to the huge deficit caused by these “wars”?  And we are calling Muammar Gaddafi crazy?

Isn’t Einstein’s definition of insanity, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?  Yet our leaders, both Democrat and Republican, keep plunging us into loser war after loser war even after every one of their wars so far have been unnecessary, avoidable and psychopathic disasters.

Perhaps it’s time to do something different for a change, something that actually works.

Perhaps it’s time for Americans to switch paradigms here and start looking at our leaders from this new “Off the Map” perspective — and to finally begin to realize that if America’s leaders are incapable of keeping us out of all these useless, inhuman and unnecessary loser wars, then they are the ones who are acting crazy.  Nuts.  Bonkers.  Bananas.  Looney-tunes.  Fruitcakes.  Certifiable.  Off the map.

And also, I just gotta ask, why is the rest of America putting up with all this craziness from our leadership time after time — and continuing to keep electing these obvious lunatics to office.  Am I the only one who can see the insanity of this?  I’d hate to think that I was the only sane person left in America.

PS:  Speaking of crazy murderers, I just filmed an audition tape to send off to an up-coming reality show called “Get a Clue”.  The show will be similar to some popular murder-mystery board game — and I’m trying out for the part of the innocent-looking little old lady who nobody would ever suspect of being the killer.  Here’s my audition tape:  

PPS:  Speaking of financial craziness and war, for the last three or four years I’ve been waging a losing battle against the Department of Labor in order to receive federal workers compensation benefits regarding injuries to my right foot and knees received while on the job.  And why is my battle with the D.O.L. proving to be so hard to win?  I suspect that it is because our leaders have been squandering far too much of America’s money on murdering women and children in Juarez, Kabul, Tripoli and Baghdad, and are now cutting corners here at home so they can still keep their war-profiteers friends happy.  And that’s totally crazy too.  Guys, it’s time to get your priorities straight.  America first!

Anyway, here are the latest details with regard to my struggles with the D.O.L and workers’ comp:

After I went to see two excellent independent podiatry and orthopedic specialists who both agreed that my injuries were job-related, I then went off to see the U.S. Department of Labor’s own doctor and he also told me that I was injured on the job.  All sides agreed.  Clearly a cut-and-dried case, right?  Not exactly.

A few months later, this very same D.O.L. doctor then submits another report telling me the exact opposite — that I was NOT injured on the job.  Then this very same D.O.L. doctor gets his certificate to practice medicine in the State of California revoked, allegedly because he is a bad doctor.  And then the D.O.L. itself has the chutzpah to turn down my case once again, apparently because this same crumby former D.O.L. doctor now suddenly knows what he was talking about — but my own two excellent independent specialists don’t.  Huh?

And now I gotta go out and file yet another appeal with the D.O.L. Dudes!  Wouldn’t it have been cheaper all around to just have given me my earned-the-hard-way workers comp benefits in the first place?  We’re only talking about the price of some orthopedic shoes here, one arthroscopy and seven months of back pay.  Geez Louise.

For the price of making the quality of my life 100% better, it would only cost the same as approximately one leather bucket-seat in just one of some war-profiteer’s fleet of BMWs, or perhaps just a case of French champagne for some corporatist CEO who recently got bailed out by Congress.  Chump-change money to them, direly important to me.

PPPS:  Here’s even another example of craziness. Corporatists are so much more of a danger to America and have done so much more damage to our country than terrorists have ever done — including the nightmare of 9-11 — and yet no one seems to be getting on their case about that damage or screening for them at airports or even torturing them to confess or sending them off to Guantanamo.  In fact, America seems to be even in LOVE with these creeps.

In addition, more damage has been done to America by corporatists in terms of job losses than any illegal immigrants could ever possibly have done.  Just think of all the tens of millions of jobs that corporatists have stolen and outsourced from America, including probably yours.  And yet you never see any corporatists shunned or jailed or deported.  Why not?

Not only that, but all-too-many corporatists don’t even pay any freaking taxes here at all because the corporations that they own — even though they have been happily granted all the same kinds of rights of personhood that real Americans have — aren’t even American citizens at all, having fled abroad in order to avoid paying taxes.

These corporations/persons are now officially living abroad and have chosen some foreign country over us?  Well, fine.  However.  If these same corporations/persons ever try to sneak back across our borders to get work in America again, that will make them wetbacks!  So let’s sic the Migra on them and send them all back to the Caymans where they belong.

Obama’s Serbia-Solution for Libya

“Split the country and steal the oil”

The Obama administration never would have launched a war on Libya if they didn’t have a puppet-in-waiting ready to take power as soon as the fighting ended. That puppet appears to be Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi’s former justice minister. Jalil is presently the opposition leader of the Libyan National Transitional Council which oversees the insurgents from Al Bayda. This is not a grassroots movement that embraces the fundamental precepts of democratic government. It’s a clatter of rebels armed by the Egyptian military (with US approval) to topple the Gaddafi regime. Jalil has garnered the military support of the so-called “international community” despite the fact that peaceful protesters in Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have been kicked to the curb. It’s just another example of the UN’s selective support for pro-democracy movements.

Here’s a clip from an interview with Mr. Jalil that appeared in The Daily Beast:

Question–Should you prevail, what’s your vision of the new Libya?

Mustafa Abdul Jalil—“We are striving for a new democratic, civil Libya, led by democratic and civil government that focuses on economic development, building civil society and civil institutions and a multi-party system. A Libya that respects all international agreements, is good to its neighbors, stands against terrorism, with respect for all religions and ethnicities….We will be seeking a smooth peaceful transition, with a drafting of a new constitution that will lead the country to a free and fair legislative and parliamentarian elections as well as presidential election…..There will be peaceful conference of governance according to elections, under the observation of the international organizations.” (The Daily Beast)

There you have it, another committed “democrat” like Karzai, Abbas, Calderon, Uribe, Siniora etc. Jalil predictably parrots all the familiar public relations buzzwords: Civil society, constitution, peaceful transition, parliamentarian elections, democracy, democracy, democracy and, oh, did I mention democracy. The idea that this US-sponsored farce is some type of spontaneous eruption of the freedom-seeking masses is laughable. Here’s an excerpt from an article in Reuters that reveals the truth behind the propaganda:

“Egypt’s military has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washington’s knowledge, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Quoting U.S. and Libyan rebel officials, the newspaper said the shipments were mostly of small arms such as assault rifles and ammunition. It appeared to be the first case of an outside government arming the rebel fighters, the newspaper said….

The United States is a major ally and supplier of military aid to Egypt….

“Americans have given the green light to the Egyptians to help. The Americans don’t want to be involved in a direct level, but the Egyptians wouldn’t do it if they didn’t get the green light.” (“Egypt arming Libya rebels, Wall Street Journal reports”, Reuters)

This may explain why Hillary chose to meet with Egypt’s new junta leaders just last week. She probably wanted to make sure that US operations were running smoothly next door in Libya. In any event, it’s clear that the Obama administration is using its influence in Cairo to smuggle weapons to rebels in Benghazi.

So, what’s the endgame here? Does Obama really think he can depose Gaddafi with this armed rabble of malcontents or does he have something else up his sleeve?

The answer to these questions can be found in an article in Businessweek titled “Libya’s Eastern Rebels, Long-Time Qaddafi Foes, Driving Revolt.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Decades of poor treatment and economic discrimination against Libyans in the country’s eastern province of Cyrenaica provided the kindling for the revolt against leader Muammar Qaddafi…. The rebellion began in Cyrenaica, a region endowed with oil….

With hundreds of miles of desert separating the main towns of Libya’s three regions, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan, in the Sahara at the southwest of the country, the regions had little binding them together…

“Libya as a country is a relatively new concept,” said Elliott Abrams, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush. “The period of Libya as a modern nation really starts after World War II.”

Most of Libya’s proven oil and gas reserves lie in Cyrenaica, one of three provinces that the 20th century colonial power, Italy, melded into the precursor of modern Libya. Oil and gas account for 97 percent of Libya’s export earnings, one-fourth of the country’s economic output, and 90 percent of government revenue, according to the International Monetary Fund.

“Substantial revenues from the energy sector coupled with a small population give Libya one of the highest per capita GDPs in Africa, but little of this income flows down to the lower orders of society,” the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency wrote in a public document analyzing Libya’s economy.

With $105 billion of reserves in the national treasury and a population of about 6.5 million, Libya has ample funds to support a transition from Qaddafi’s regime and ease any regional tensions that may come from four decades of investment favoring the Tripoli region, Abrams said in an interview.

“If you had a new government, it could actually adopt a development plan that could buy years of stability,” Abrams said. (“Libya’s Eastern Rebels, Long-Time Qaddafi Foes, Driving Revolt,” Bloomberg Businessweek)

Repeat: “Oil and gas account for 97 percent of Libya’s export earnings, one-fourth of the country’s economic output, and 90 percent of government revenue.”

So, what does it mean?

It means that all of Libya’s resources lie in the eastern province which can be easily split-off Serbia-style with the support of foreign imperialists using their proxy armies and their “democracy promoting” puppets. This is what’s really at the heart of Obama’s “humanitarian intervention”, further Balkenization of the Middle East. It’s just more plunder disguised as magnanimity.

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