Tag Archives: war on terror

How Iran’s Missile Strategy has Rewritten the Rules of Middle Eastern Wars

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Iran has built an extraordinary military alliance stretching from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen that missile by missile has changed the rules of war in the Middle East

 

by Kevin Barrett

On Nov. 12, 2011, an explosion was heard across Tehran.

Within hours, the Iranian press reported that 14 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, popularly known as “the father of the Iranian missile,” had died in an accident at the Shahid Modarres base, 30 miles outside the city.

At the funeral, attended by the religious, civilian and military leaders of the Islamic Republic, the bereaved wept.

An IRGC general attributed Iran’s military deterrence and its “self-sufficiency” to Moghaddam, while Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, credited him with “filling Palestinian hands with missiles instead of stones to strike these arrogant terrorists.”

The mourners doubted Moghaddam and the other IRGC officers had died accidentally but had instead been killed in an Israeli attack, one of a string of recent political assassinations aimed at the heart of Iran’s security state.

Days before his death, Moghaddam, who headed the IRGC’s missile division, had ordered missile test results duplicated and stored in secret locations owing to a fivefold increase in explosions at key security sites in the previous year.

While the epitaph on his gravestone in Tehran reads “Here Lies a Man Who Wanted to Destroy Israel,” it is safe to assume Moghaddam knew his enemies would likely get to him first.

Although Tehran still struggles to deter so-called gray zone attacks by Israel such as assassinations and sabotage, its missile program, built from scratch by Moghaddam, has successfully deterred the airstrikes regularly threatened by Israel.

It has also deterred the United States from carrying out airstrikes, particularly during the first term of then-President George W. Bush, with U.S. forces occupying neighboring Iraq.

In the decade before his death, Moghaddam was involved as much in strengthening Iran’s missile defense and counterstrike system as he was in integrating Hezbollah’s defense into Iran’s own program, training a cadre of Lebanese engineers.

“Knowledge cannot be bombed,” he said, giving voice to Iran’s policy not only of supplying missiles but also, crucially, sharing know-how to sustain the deterrence.

Today, the balance of power is broadly equal; for the U.S. or Israel to launch a war against Iran or Lebanon is almost politically unthinkable.

“The Iranians and Lebanese Hezbollah now have a really deadly reconnaissance strike complex,” explained Michael Knights of the Washington Institute.

“They can absolutely wreck the infrastructure, lifestyle and economic functioning of their close enemies.”

Of course, the reverse is also true, but Iran’s strategy is not suicide, despite Moghaddam’s epitaph, but to stabilize the Resistance, an alliance of nations opposed to the U.S. security constellation of the Middle East: Iran, most of Shia Iraq, the Syrian state and Hezbollah.

This Resistance sees Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as part of an increasingly unstable American empire, whose power needs to be checked.

Yet Tehran’s goal goes further than merely maintaining a balance of power with its enemies or ending their influence in the region.

Instead, Iran believes it is offering an alternative to the crumbling U.S. version of modernity, sustained, at least in theory, by multibillion-dollar defense industries. Iran’s military-industrial complex is the tip of the iceberg of a wider political project.

The Tehran-Beirut alliance has brought Hamas in Gaza and Yemen’s al-Houthi fighters into the Resistance, training their engineers and smuggling components to produce Moghaddam’s designs.

Over the past decade, the Tehran-Beirut alliance has brought Hamas in Gaza and Yemen’s al-Houthi fighters into the Resistance, training their engineers and smuggling components to produce Moghaddam’s designs.

This military cooperation supports allies but also bolsters Tehran’s own deterrence against Israel and Saudi Arabia by having missiles placed on their more vulnerable southern borders.

“With blood, sand and love, they are sent, built and launched,” is how the rank-and-file IRGC refer to the emerging military-industrial complex of the Resistance…

US divided over Israel

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Five Congress representatives, members of the Democratic Party, have ramped up criticism in Congress against Democratic President Joe Biden.

They accuse him of complicity with Israel in its crimes against the Palestinians.

These women, close to the Defense Department, are already known for their commitment against “systemic racism”.

The US State Department has issued a notice asking US citizens who wish to visit Israel to cancel their trip if possible.

The US Department of Defense has withdrawn at least a hundred of its men stationed in Israel and moved them to Germany.

Judaism And Zionism Are Not The Same Thing

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The Palestinian Rabbi’s 1947: “We wish to express our definite opposition to a Jewish State in any part of Palestine.” These Palestinian Jews were kicked out of office by the invading Zionist army.

nkusa.org

We would like to take a few minutes of your time to prevent you from making a terrible mistake that may have disastrous results for many.

You have always without a doubt heard and read much about the political crises in the Middle East in which the State of Israel plays a central role.

This is, in fact, an ongoing series of crises with potential to bring the greatest misfortune on the entire world.

Tragically many believe that Zionism and Judaism are identical.

Thus they conclude that the entire Jewish people is responsible for the actions of the Zionist government and the world crises which emanates from it. This is a Grave Error!

The truth is that the Jewish faith and Zionism are two very different philosophies.

They are as opposite as day and night. The Jewish people have existed for thousands of years.

In their two thousand years of Divinely decreed exile no Jew ever sought to end this exile and establish independent political sovereignty anywhere.

The people’s sole purpose was the study and fulfillment of the Divine commandments of the Torah.

The Zionist movement created the Israeli state.

The latter is a persuasion less than one hundred years old.

Its essential goal was and is to change the nature of the Jewish people from that of a religious entity to a political movement.

From Zionism’s inception the spiritual leaders of the Jewish people stood in staunch opposition to it.

To this day Torah Jewry remains forever loyal to its faith. Zionists want the world to believe that they are the representatives of the entire Jewish people. This is false!

The Jewish people never chose them as their leaders.

Semites are generally swarthy people. The European Ashkenazim Jews are not from the Hebrew stock!

The Zionists have deceived many well meaning Jewish people via terror, trickery and false propaganda.

They have at their disposal the use of a nearly universally subservient media.

Whoever attempts to criticize them puts his livelihood and, at times, his very life in danger.

However, despite the media blackout and easy resort to terror the simple truth remains unrefuted and irrefutable: ACCORDING TO THE JEWISH FAITH AND TORAH LAW THE JEWISH PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO HAVE THEIR OWN STATE WHILE AWAITING THE MESSIANIC ERA!

The Creator gave us the Holy Land thousands of years ago. Yet, when we sinned, He took it away and sent us into exile.

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Since that time our task is to wait for Him to send the Messiah.

At that time, the Creator alone, without any human being lifting a hand or saying a word, will bring us together and take us out of exile.

He will likewise establish universal peace among all mankind and all will serve Him in good will.

Some religious Jews, confused by Zionist propaganda quote Biblical verses that state that G-d gave the children of Israel the Holy Land.

They overlook, unfortunately, those verses which say that He took it away due to our sins.

They further ignore those prophecies which explicitly describe the last exile’s conclusion as a Divine, not a human process.

The Creator has commanded every Jew to follow the ways of peace and to be loyal to the country where he lives.

Torah true Jewry waits patiently for the Messianic redemption. They have nothing to do with any kind of pseudo “Jewish State” and its aggressions against other peoples.

They have a deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians who have suffered the most from Zionism’s false teachings and barbaric actions.

The Zionist state is not a Jewish state.

The Zionists alone are the only ones responsible for their actions.

Authentic Jewry has and will continue to oppose the very existence of this blasphemous state.

May all mankind witness the true redemption.

Lydda Air Port. Palestine Airways plane close-up

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1948: The British commander of Transjordan’s Arab Legion, had toured Palestinian Arab towns, including Lydda and Ramle, urging them to prepare to defend themselves against the Zionist horde.

The PLUNDER and LOOTING of Palestinian homes, farms, plantations, banks, cars, ports, railroads, schools, hospitals, trucks, tractors, etc. in the course of the 1948 war were a crime on a massive scale. For example, the looting of Lydda City was described by the Israeli Ministerial Committee for Abandoned Property in mid-July, 1948:

“From Lydda alone, the army took out 1,800 truck-loads of property.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 69)

It should be noted that the great majority of the Palestinian people have been dispossessed for the past five decades, meanwhile, their properties are being used by mostly European Jews (who were victims of similar war crimes committed by anti-Semitic Europeans). Prior to being ethnically cleansed in 1948, the Palestinian people owned and operated 93% of Palestine’s lands, and contributed up to 55-60% of its national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Zionists capture Lydda: Palestine’s main railway junction and its airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport) were in Lydda, and the main source of Jerusalem’s water supply was 15 kilometers away.

American President Bill Clinton and wife Hillary are welcomed at the Gaza airport by President of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat and wife Soha. (Photo by Ira Wyman/Sygma via Getty Images)

“The airport used to be packed with thousands of travelers and we received presidents and world leaders,” he said, pointing to parts of the site in various stages of decay.
“Now it’s turned into a ruin, a waste dump. It’s a tragedy.”

Daifallah Al-Akhras, the chief engineer of the airport, admitted he wept on a recent visit to the terminal.

“We built the airport to be the first symbol of sovereignty,” he said. “Now you don’t see anything but destruction and ruin.”

When the airport opened in late 1998 it was one of the most tangible symbols of the Oslo accords.

Many saw the deals as paving the way to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, but their five-year transitional period expired without a resolution to the conflict.

The airport was opened despite the assassination of the most senior Israeli signatory to Oslo, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, by a Jewish ‘radical’ opposed to the agreements.

By 1998 the accords were fraying, but Clinton, along with his wife Hillary, still attended the ceremony to inaugurate the Yasser Arafat International Airport.

Built with funding from countries across the globe, it hosted the newly formed Palestinian Airlines and was able to handle hundreds of thousands of passengers a year, with many airlines opening up routes there.

Once a commercial airport was established, the Palestinian Authority moved forward with a plan to establish a flag carrier for the embattled country.

The airline was officially announced in 1995 with financial backing coming from the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, who donated two Fokker 50s and a Boeing 727 to help start operations.

The newly-formed Palestinian Airlines would also join the Arab Air Carriers Organization, with its introduction to the alliance coming in 1999.

While the airline officially started operations in 1997, limits were quickly established on where it could fly.

The Yasser Arafat International Airport was still under construction in Gaza, leaving the airline to commence service in the Egyptian towns of Port Said and Arish to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Amman, Jordan.

Once the airline’s home in the Gaza Strip was completed, all operations were transferred to the new airport.

Palestinian Airlines quickly expanded to include service to additional countries including Turkey, Bahrain, Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

The airline would also come to take hold of an Ilyushin Il-62 to help with their expansion plans.

While the airline was expanding, it was not completely free of Israeli restrictions.

Under the Oslo II Accord, Israel had the right to restrict the airport’s schedule, which frequently saw the airport shuttered during the nighttime hours.

The airport’s security was also administered by the Israeli government due to fears that the Palestinians would lapse on security due to the economic instability of Gaza.

Unfortunately, the Oslo II Accord soured over time and increased tensions between the Israelis and Palestinians led to the breakout of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.

Palestinian Airlines was forced to suspend operations while Israel and Palestine escalated their conflict.

Fearing that the Palestinians would use Yasser Arafat Airport for weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip, Israel made the airport a primary target, destroying both the radar and control towers in 2001 before carving up the runway using bulldozers in 2002.

In addition to its smuggling fears, Israel also claimed that the dismantling was in response to a Palestinian raid that killed four Israeli soldiers.

The destruction of Yasser Arafat International Airport did not sit well with Palestinians or the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

For Palestinians, the ruins of the airport were a symbol of a potential nation now reeling from the Second Intifada and a sign that Israel and Palestine may never trust each other.

Meanwhile, the ICAO saw Israel’s destruction of the airport as a violation of Palestine’s right to operate a commercial airport and strongly condemned the Israelis for their actions.

The ICAO called for Israel to pay for any repairs from the damages caused to the airfield, which Israel ignored.

With no home airport inside Palestine, the flag carrier fled back across the border and restarted operations at El Arish International Airport in Egypt.

However, getting Palestinians to Arish was a struggle, as Egyptian security could take up to a day processing those traveling into and out of the country.

To attempt to ease the issue, the airline still manned the ticket counters at Yasser Arafat Airport, hoping to sell tickets to passengers inside Gaza and simplify their flying experience.

With this restriction, and the flag carrier operating 30 miles from its home opposite a major international border, the consumer base for Palestinian Airlines slowly dried up. The airline removed the Boeing 727 and Ilyushin Il-62 from its fleet before suspending operations outright in 2005.

The Palestinian Authority would hold on to the two Fokker 50s and lease them to other airlines while they waited for a chance to restart operations.

That chance would finally come in 2012, when the airline announced it would restart service using its Fokker 50s and a route map that would, yet again, be based in Arish, Egypt with flights to Cairo, Amman and Jeddah.

But much like their previous experience at Arish, Palestine was at too much of a disadvantage to make use of their airline.

The airline would last less than two years before re-suspending operations.

The Palestinian Authority returned to leasing their Fokker 50s, with Niger Airlines currently being the home for the two aircraft.

Despite having no current operations, the airline is still an active member in the ICAO, IATA and Arab Air Carriers Organization.

While Palestine hopes to have the airline flying again, the prospect of coming home to Gaza grows bleaker and bleaker.

The airport sustained more damage in recent years, with the terminal and ramps areas taking heavy bombings by Israeli forces in 2014.

Given that the Egyptian rehabilitation attempts have proven too costly for the airline, Palestinian Airlines is currently a flag carrier with no home, no service and no clear future.

Barack Obama’s Legacy

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It is estimated that Barack Obama, as the US president, authorized an estimated 353 targeted killing operations, mainly in the form of drone strikes.
His predecessor George W Bush authorized an estimated 48 targeted killing operations.

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.”

In more than 90 percent of the cases, the agencies quietly accepted that they were wrong, yet these are the kind of people who Obama would have executed by drone.
That is an extraordinary error rate.

He opposes the death penalty in the US, after lengthy trials, but issued kill orders for Muslims overseas with no trial at all.

A Promised Land

What could we possible learn from these frauds and liars?

The first volume of former President Barack Obama’s memoirs, A Promised Land, has recently been published.

Most of the commentary about these memoirs has contrasted the former constitutional law professor’s polite and consensual approach to government to the mayhem that has taken place under his successor, President Donald J Trump.

Reviews of the book have carried little criticism, except for some rather fatuous commentary in the British press about Michelle Obama’s breach of royal protocol when she put her arm around Queen Elizabeth II on the couple’s first state visit to London.

Very little has been said about Obama’s immoral and counterproductive approach to the so-called “war on terror” – which has set human rights back a long way, and only encouraged his successor to behave even more reprehensibly.

On his very first day in office, as Obama proudly writes, he made two commitments: “One … was closing Gitmo, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay – and thus halting the continuing stream of prisoners placed in indefinite detention there.

Another was my executive order ending torture.” Both were indeed important announcements although, instead of being closed in 12 months, Guantanamo remains open 12 years later, and my clients continue to be abused there.

Obama writes that his “highest priority was creating strong systems of transparency, accountability, and oversight – ones that included Congress and the judiciary and would provide a credible legal framework”.

All the sadder, then, that Obama sided with Republicans to suppress Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Senate torture report, so that much of the truth remained behind the sealed doors of the CIA.

Unprecedented authority the CIA was granted by the Bush administration to detain terrorist suspects

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Perhaps even more important, in a little-noted but extraordinary development, Obama ramped up the use of “kill lists” where he acted as judge and jury in the White House and imposed a secret death sentence on people who had hitherto been taken to prison, albeit Guantanamo.

This policy was proudly leaked to the media, dubbed “Terror Tuesday”: Obama himself would watch a slide presentation of bearded Muslims and then, like a latter-day Emperor Caligula in the Colosseum, turn his thumb down to authorise their assassination by Hellfire Missile.

One problem facing all presidents is that they must make decisions on topics where they have no experience, often based on advice from people whose biases go unchallenged.

Terror Tuesday smacked of someone with little understanding of “extremism” who – refusing to countenance torture and indefinite detention – felt he had to do something else to remain “tough on terrorism”.

He turned to his advisors, and between them, they made matters exponentially worse.

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Trump claims that the Obama administration, including Joe Biden, had members of the U.S. military murdered and that the official story of Osama bin Laden’s killing was a hoax.

Obama provoked many more to join the ranks of his enemies, inflamed by evidence that this man who purported to promote human rights was a hypocrite, ignoring 200 years of history – assassination was first declared illegal by Emer de Vattel in 1797.

His book sadly confirms this in stark terms, and without repentance. “Each month, I chaired a meeting in the Situation Room,” he writes.

“The Bush administration had developed a ranking of terrorist targets, a kind of ‘Top 20’ list complete with photos, alias information, and vital statistics reminiscent of those on baseball cards; generally, whenever someone on the list was killed, a new target was added, leading Rahm [Emanuel] to observe that ‘al-Qaeda’s HR department must have trouble filling that number 21 slot.’

One of the more bizarre Obama episodes. They declare they killed Bin Laden and this is the proof “they got him”.

In fact, my hyperactive chief of staff – who’d spent enough time in Washington to know that his new, liberal president couldn’t afford to look soft on terrorism – was obsessed with the list, cornering those responsible for our targeting operations to find out what was taking so long when it came to locating number 10 or 14.”

In other words, the law professor who opposed the racist imposition of the death penalty by state courts jettisoned all his principles in the interests of domestic poll numbers and applied the death penalty without trial exclusively to Muslims.

Obama was perhaps blinded by the technology being used. “The National Security Agency, or NSA, already the most sophisticated electronic-intelligence-gathering organization in the world,” he glows, “employed new supercomputers and decryption technology worth billions of dollars to comb cyberspace in search of terrorist communications and potential threats.”

On his watch, the US was targeting people using the metadata on their phones, so if you made calls that seemed suspicious, you could end up on the wrong end of a missile.

This is how Al Jazeera Pakistan station chief Ahmed Zaidan ended up on one of those CIA slide presentations, labelled a member of al-Qaeda because he had interviewed all kinds of people from Osama bin Laden on down.

We did not learn of this dangerous defamation from Obama’s vaunted transparency, but from a leak by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Rather than applauding, or at least acknowledging, the exposure of a criminal conspiracy to murder Zaidan, Obama’s attorney general focused on bringing Snowden to the US, bargaining with Russia that if they forced him to “come home”, he would not be tortured or executed.

The same intelligence agencies targeting Muslims for death under Obama were responsible for the intelligence that harvested the detainees to be taken to Guantanamo.

This should have proven a useful petri dish in which to study the reliability of the information that informs those White House slide shows.

Overall, there have been 780 Guantanamo prisoners, said to be the “worst of the worst terrorists” in the world. Today, just 40 remain – 740 have been released after retrospective findings – by the six top US intelligence agencies – in almost all cases that they are “no threat to the US or their coalition allies”.

In other words, in more than 90 percent of the cases, the agencies quietly accepted that they were wrong, yet these are the kind of people who Obama would have executed by drone.

That is an extraordinary error rate.

What evidence is there that the “sophisticated” intelligence behind the “kill list” is any better? Very little.

Indeed, one of my own passions over several years has been to assemble data – facts, not woolly words – evaluating how the Drone Age has been impacting the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama authorized hundreds of attacks, supposed to eliminate our enemies. In targeting Ayman al-Zawahiri, for example, the CIA has thus far killed 76 children and 29 innocent adults, yet the leader of al-Qaeda is reportedly still alive.

Seventy-six children: each was a much-loved child in a family, and in a local community, all of whom we turned into enemies.

W Bush legacy: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

In other words – just like Guantanamo, but more so – the Obama Doctrine created exponentially more enemies for America.

In his book, Obama dwells on some of the speeches he gave. One, he writes, “intended mainly for domestic consumption, would insist that America’s long-term national security depended on fidelity to our Constitution and the rule of law, acknowledging that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we’d sometimes fallen short of those standards and laying out how my administration would approach counterterrorism going forward”.

Nice words, just not what he did.

There are consequences for American democracy when a president blunders over the line.

In 2012, John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, wrote that the “revelation that President Obama, operating off a government ‘kill list,’ has been personally directing who should be targeted for death by military drones … merely pushes us that much closer to that precipitous drop-off to authoritarianism”.

Four years later, we elected Donald Trump.

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

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“I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel, and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements” said Colombian paramilitary leader and indicted drug trafficker Carlos Castao in his ghostwritten autobiography, Mi Confesin.
Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

The book’s argument that “[t]he war on drugs and terror in Colombia is in fact a war for the control of the cocaine trade — in a system of imperial domination — by means of state-sponsored terror” is summarized in the conclusion as follows: “This war as decreed by successive Washington administrations was, is, and remains its opposites: a war for drugs and a war of terror.”

Of course, such assessments are not easily grafted onto the consciousness of a populace conditioned to impute noble — or at least sincere and non-paradoxical — motives to US projects abroad.

If the US is to attain the minimum amount of self-awareness necessary for any society that considers itself free, the proliferation of studies like Villar and Cottle’s is a prerequisite.

The scholars explain that, starting in the late 1980s, “the Colombian state commenced efforts to manufacture its image as a defender of democracy at war with narco-terrorists,” enlisting the talents of US public relations firm the Sawyer/Miller Group.

The firm earned nearly a million dollars in the first six months of 1991 for its efforts, which included “us[ing] the American press to disseminate Colombian government propaganda, with the routine production of pamphlets, letters to editors signed by Colombian officials, and advertisements placed in the New York Times and Washington Post.”

As tends to happen with even the most diligently manufactured threats, however, the traitorous truth has consistently failed to rise to the occasion, and “in 2001 Colombian intelligence estimated that [the] FARC controlled less than 2.5 percent of Colombia’s cocaine exports, while the AUC controlled 40 percent, not counting the narco-bourgeoisie [the updated incarnation of the Colombian oligarchy] as a whole.”

The exclusive assignment of the “terrorist” label to the FARC is meanwhile not entirely congruent with the fact that it was the Colombian military and not the guerrillas that resuscitated the Vietnam-era collective punishment method of “draining the sea to kill the fish.”

According to Villar and Cottle, “[h]uman rights groups contend that the AUC and Colombian armed forces have been responsible for approximately 90–95 percent of all politically-motivated killings, which have included massacres by chainsaw and other methods designed to terrorize the campesinos in rural areas under FARC control.”

As for the US request in the 1980s for the extradition of Medellín cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar for “conspiring to introduce cocaine into the United States via Nicaragua,” this allegation might have just as aptly been levied against other characters such as US Marine Lt Col. Oliver North, whose activity did not result in a collaborative assassination effort by the CIA, AUC, Cali Cartel, and Colombian police.

You Cannot Mention Monsanto!

When Amelia and I met Milber in 2009, his parents had just acquired a coca plot after failing to make ends meet with less lucrative crops.

Other farming families in the area described additional obstacles to diversifying away from coca, such as repeated US-sponsored aerial fumigation of sugar cane, banana, and corn crops.

Fumigated children, livestock, and water supplies were also reported.

Journalist Jeremy Bigwood has investigated the toxic effects of fumigation for CorpWatch, drawing attention to a revealing episode in 2001 in which a recalcitrant US senator — who had criticized military aid to Colombia and the dangerous inaccuracy of fumigation — was hauled down to the South American nation for an honorary cropduster flyover that was intended to negate his concerns.

Bigwood quotes the senator’s spokesman on the resulting spectacle: “On the very first flyover by the cropduster, the US Senator, the US Ambassador to Colombia, the Lieutenant Colonel of the Colombian National Police, and other Embassy and congressional staffers were fully doused — drenched, in fact” — with the herbicide Roundup, a product of the US-based biotech giant Monsanto, former manufacturer of the infamous defoliant Agent Orange.

Remarking on the relevance of the Agent Orange legacy given the deforestation of large sections of Vietnam, the “over 50,000 birth defects and hundreds of thousands of cancers both in Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, as well as in former US troops serving in South East Asia”, and the similarity in post-contact symptoms between victims of Agent Orange and Roundup, Bigwood notes that the lack of transparency with regard to Monsanto’s machinations in Colombia is entirely logical: “[D]uring a meeting with US Embassy staff in Bogotá, the top officer at the State Department’s Narcotics Affairs Section was emphatic and his tone threatening: ‘You cannot mention Monsanto!’ he boomed, spit flying from his mouth.”

Villar and Cottle meanwhile allude to the helpfulness of fumigation policies in “draining the sea”, and emphasize — with regard to fusarium oxysporum, a fungus whose appeal to proponents of Washington’s multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia presumably had something to do with its success in wiping out a coca plantation in Hawaii in the 1970s — that “the mono-crop drug fincas of the narco-bourgeoisie in Colombia were not sprayed. The fungal spraying was proposed only for the rebel-held areas.”

Addicted to Narco-Imperialism

As Peter Dale Scott asserts in his excellent foreword to Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror, the book “shows how in the last half-century the United States has helped to centralize and militarize the class conflict [in Colombia], and above all how cocaine has come to play a central role in financing this oppression.”

Villar and Cottle write:

The cocaine decade saw the consolidation of the Colombian drug trade as a source of profit for U.S. capital via banks that were established to launder and invest drug money in legitimate U.S. corporations.

The United States contended it was at war with drugs and terrorists in Colombia, but, in reality, the economic relations between U.S. imperialism and the Colombian narco-bourgeoisie permitted cocaine production to flourish in Colombia, and the cocaine market to expand within the United States and Western Europe.

The authors stress that, though Colombian paramilitary death squads may not constitute a “proxy army for the United States,” they do “function… as a vanguard force of the counterinsurgency strategy” in eliminating obstacles to foreign investment, corporate exploitation of resources, and the continuing economic preponderance of the Colombian elite.

These obstacles come in a variety of forms, among them campesinos, human rights workers, journalists, trade unionists, and indigenous citizens maliciously inhabiting resource-rich land.

Colombian paramilitaries were
trained by Tel Aviv

The Colombian AUC paramilitaries are always in need of arms, and it should come as no surprise that some of their major suppliers are Israeli. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala.

The AUC, for its part, happens to inhabit the same list of US State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations as Al Qaeda, but one suspects that a more substantive uproar would have been made over the discovery that Chiquita Brands International was funneling millions of dollars to the latter group.

The need for a paramilitary proxy army in the first place is meanwhile called into question by the behavior of the Colombian army itself, recipient of large quantities of US military aid and renowned for its expertise in slaughtering civilians and dressing the corpses up like FARC guerrillas.

As for even more direct US contributions to violence and oppression in Colombia, Villar and Cottle note that, when the administration of former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez “stepped up its civil war preparations in 2002, the US government demanded cooperation in shielding US forces stationed in-country from prosecution for war crimes.”

Prior to being hailed in the US as a democratic hero and role model for Latin America on account of his neoliberal enthusiasm for societal repression, Uribe’s claims to fame included appearing on a 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency list of the More Important Colombian Narco-Traffickers and Narco-Terrorists.

Blood and Capital Accumulation

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror is a vital antidote to the fatuous propaganda that functions as mainstream news on Colombia.

In tracing the history of the relationship between imperial America and “its most important client state on the continent,” Villar and Cottle demonstrate that the emergence of the FARC was a direct result of social inequality and CIA-backed class repression.

Prospects for conflict resolution thus appear dim given the authors’ note that “Colombia is the only major country in Latin America where the gap between the rich and poor has markedly widened in recent years, according to the UN Commission on Latin America.”

Colombian President Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958–1962) may have put it best himself when he commented — in reference to the devastating US-assisted counterinsurgency campaign that followed the assassination of Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who had “promised to end the rule of the landed oligarchy and eliminate mass poverty” — that “blood and capital accumulation went together.”

In conclusion, it is worthwhile to recall the following passage from Glenn Greenwald’s piece “The Wars on Drugs and Terror: mirror images,” which underscores the rhetoric of Villar and Cottle:

It’s the perfect deceit. These wars, in an endless loop, sustain and strengthen the very menaces which, in turn, justify their continuous escalation. These wars manufacture the very dangers they are ostensibly designed to combat. Meanwhile, the industries which fight them become richer and richer.

The political officials those industries own become more and more powerful. Brutal drug cartels monopolize an unimaginably profitable, no-competition industry, while Terrorists are continuously supplied the perfect rationale for persuading huge numbers of otherwise unsympathetic people to join them or support them. Everyone wins — except for ordinary citizens, who become poorer and poorer, more and more imprisoned, meeker and meeker, and less and less free.

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Peace Groups Blockade Creech AFB to Protest ‘Illegal and Inhumane Remote Killing’ by US Drones

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Former Air Force airmen are speaking out against America’s drone war, calling the military drone program “morally outrageous” and “one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.”

According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the U.S. has carried out at least 14,000 drone strikes during the so-called War on Terror, killing at least 8,800 people—including between 900 and 2,200 civilians—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen alone since 2004.

One CodePink protester said she hopes the week-long protest “will teach the soldiers that they must take control of and understand the consequences of their actions.”

A group of 15 peace activists on Saturday wrapped up a week-long nonviolent, socially-distanced protest at a Nevada Air Force base housing a command and control center for unmanned aerial drones. 

For the 11th straight year, CodePink and Veterans for Peace led their twice-annual Shut Down Creech demonstration against killer drones at Creech Air Force Base  to “oppose the remote-control killing” orchestrated from the military facility located 45 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

CodePink organizer Toby Blomé said the activists, who hail from California, Arizona, and Nevada, “were compelled to participate and take a strong and determined stance against the illegal and inhumane remote killing by U.S. drones that occurs daily” at Creech.

Indeed, hundreds of pilots sit in air-conditioned bunkers at the base—known as the “Home of the Hunters”—staring at screens and toggling joysticks to control the more than 100 heavily armed Predator and Reaper drones that launch airstrikes in around half a dozen countries, sometimes killing civilians along with targeted Islamist militants.

According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the U.S. has carried out at least 14,000 drone strikes during the so-called War on Terror, killing at least 8,800 people—including between 900 and 2,200 civilians—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen alone since 2004.

This year, the activists participated in a “soft blockade” to impede entry of the Air Force personnel who drive to work  from their homes in metro Las Vegas.

On Friday, two activists—Maggie Huntington of Flagstaff, Arizona, and Blomé, from El Cerrito, California—unfurled a banner reading, “Stop Droning Afghanistan, 19 Years ENOUGH!”

Huntington said she was “motivated to participate in this resistance, with the hope that we will teach the soldiers that they must take control of and understand the consequences of their actions.”

The activists caused a traffic jam on U.S. Route 95, the main road leading to the base, and delayed vehicles from entering for about half an hour.

They left the roadway after being threatened with arrest by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police. 

Arrests were common in past years. Last year’s protest—which occurred shortly after a U.S. drone strike killed dozens of Afghan farmers—resulted in the arrest of 10 peace activists.

However, as many of the activists are elders, they did not want to risk being jailed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The activists also placed mock coffins in the road marked with the names of countries bombed by the U.S., and read the names of some of the thousands of drone strike victims—who include hundreds of children.

Other Shut Down Creech demonstrations during the week included a solemn mock funeral procession along the highway with black clothing, white masks, and small coffins, and LED light board letters in the pre-dawn hours declaring: “NO DRONES.”

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War on Terror: Israel Profiteers

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According to J.P. London’s company, CACI International, the visit of London — sponsored by an Israeli lobby group and including U.S. congressmen and other defense contractors — was “to promote opportunities for strategic partnerships and joint ventures between U.S. and Israeli defense and homeland security agencies.”

The Arlington, Virginia based CACI International has reincarnated itself under various names since it was founded in 1962 by Harry Markowitz, the 1990 Nobel laureate for Economics.[1]

Presently, it employs 9500 individuals working in its more than 100 offices in North America and Europe. According to its website, it provides ‘IT and network solutions’ in an era of ‘defense, intelligence and e-government’.[2]

Between August and December 2003, CACI was awarded 11 contracts, worth about $66 million for work in Iraq alone.[3]. In 2004 CACI was the subject of five different government investigations.[4]

CACI has strong Israeli ties and according to Robert Fisk one of Staphanovic’s co-workers, Joe Ryan – who was not named in the Taguba report – now says he underwent an ‘Israeli interrogation course’ before going to Iraq.’ [Google will deter you from the  Caci International site but just keep going]. Apparently there are those who don’t want us to read it.

J.P. London, the CEO of the company, visited Israel on a trip sponsored by an Israeli lobby group along with U.S. congressmen and other defense contractors.

In early 2004 he also attended an ‘anti-terror” training camp in Israel where he ‘was presented with an award by Shaul Mofaz, the right-wing Israeli defense minister’. [6]

This clip is from the 2006 film, “Iraq For Sale”

Arms Sales

The nature of today’s U.S. arms exports is different from those in the 1990s, as the U.S. is not supplying these weapons to allies like Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies for defensive purposes.

Just as the U.S. has used its own war machine to commit aggression around the world since the 1980s, and more systematically since 2001, it now sells offensive weapons to its allies with the clear, if unspoken, understanding that they will use them to attack and threaten their neighbors, thereby expanding the U.S.’s aggressive war policy by proxy.

War crimes by U.S. allies rarely lead to any loss of U.S. logistical or diplomatic support, as we have seen after Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Palestine and in the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

In fact, the U.S. government has rallied to support its allies by quickly and quietly replenishing their weapons stocks and vetoing UN Security Council resolutions to investigate orrespond to their crimes.

The U.S. State Department has an appalling record of failing to enforce U.S. laws that require the suspension of arms sales to countries that use U.S. weapons to kill civilians or otherwise violate international humanitarian law.

The current regime of U.S. arms exports is part of a deliberate strategy to outsource U.S. war-making, projecting military power through alliances with U.S.-armed client states as a substitute for direct U.S. military action.

This minimizes both domestic opposition from a war-weary U.S. public and growing international resistance to the catastrophic results of U.S. wars, while U.S. military-industrial interests are well served by ever-growing arms sales to allied governments.

Hitching U.S. interests and foreign policy to repressive regimes around the world is nothing new.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. built the Shah of Iran’s military forces into the fifth largest army in the world, even as Amnesty International reportedthat Iranhad 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners and “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief.” The predictable result of the U.S.’s

Former traitor Afghan soldiers turn their guns on allied American Invaders

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Image result for us kill team in afghanistan

The Taliban relentlessly pressure Afghan soldiers and police to turn and fight the Americans as invaders (and rightly so)

As U.S. forces have shrunk their presence and interaction with regular Afghan soldiers, American airstrikes have reached record numbers, often pounding areas close to where the soldiers come from and sometimes killing civilians. In an age of social media and Taliban news, the news of those attacks spread quickly, and outrage against the American presence rises.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

“All I gotta do now is take Dick Cain and work deals for the CIA and the Outfit … all over the world. … Overseas is where it’s all headin’, Chuck,” Mooney continued. I’ve got Trafficante on board for Asia. The Vietnam War is gonna make a lot of guys rich.”                                          – Mob boss Sam Giancana, speaking in 1966, “Double Cross”, 1992 (111)

Israel
You can’t understand what’s been going on around the world with American covert operations and the Israeli covert operations until you understand that the two countries have this secret arrangement.~ Andrew Cockburn

Just as the U.S. uses its economic and military power, its sophisticated propaganda system and its position as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council to violate international law with impunity, it also uses the same tools to shield its ally Israel from accountability for international crimes. Since 1966, the U.S. has used its Security Council veto 83 times, more than the other four Permanent Members combined, and 42 of those vetoes have been on resolutions related to Israel and/or Palestine. Just last week, Amnesty International published a report that, “Israeli forces have displayed a callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank over the past three years with near total impunity.” Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories condemned the 2008 assault on Gaza as a “massive violation of international law,” adding that nations like the U.S. “that have supplied weapons and supported the siege are complicit in the crimes.” The Leahy Lawrequires the U.S. to cut off military aid to forces that violate human rights, but it has never been enforced against Israel. Israel continues to build settlements in occupied territory in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention, making it harder to comply with Security Council resolutions that require it to withdraw from occupied territory. But Israel remains beyond the rule of law, shielded from accountability by its powerful patron, the United States.

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

Afghan opium soaring since US invasion, 90 % of world’s illegal opium is now from Afghanistan

The Afghanistan Papers

See the documents More than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos reveal a secret history of the war.

Part 2: Stranded without a strategy Conflicting objectives dogged the war from the start.

Responses to The Post from people named in The Afghanistan Papers

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

Whose Side Is the CIA On?

“Following its ignoble defeat in Vietnam, America was driven by a reactionary impulse to reassert its global dominance. The justifications used to rationalize Phoenix were institutionalized as policy, as became evident after 9/11 and the initiation of the War on Terror.”

Large picture: the CIA’s Paul Helliwell with the CIA’s Michael Hand (mid) and Frank Nugan (right) of the Nugan Hand Bank, a laundromat for CIA heroin profits. Small picture, left: Former CIA director, vice president, and chief U.S. drug trafficking “fighter” George H. W. Bush with Panama’s Noriega, a decades-long CIA asset and Medellin Cartel-allied cocaine exporter to the U.S. – until he became too much of a liability in 1989. Small picture, right: Seizure in Mexico of cartel weapons and drugs.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

In 2014, at Sopko’s direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture.

Titled “Lessons Learned,” the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and development programs.

Drawing partly on the interviews, as well as other government records and statistics, SIGAR has published seven Lessons Learned reports since 2016 that highlight problems in Afghanistan and recommend changes to stabilize the country.

But the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

“We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians,” read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.

The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to compel it to release the documents.

9/11: Those who can make you believe absurdities…

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Breaking from non-partisan tone of the ceremony, bereaved son called on lawmaker to ‘show respect’ and said al-Qaida attacked the U.S.’s ‘Judeo-Christian’ values

Nicholas Haros wears a shirt critical of Ilhan Omar's comments while reading names at 9/11 commemorations, New York City, September 11, 2019

“Madam, objectively speaking we know who and what was done,” Haros said, addressing Omar, who was not present at the ceremony. “There’s no uncertainty about that. Why your confusion? On that day 19 Islamic terrorists, members of al-Qaida, killed over 3,000 people and caused billions of dollars of damage. Is that clear?”

His criticism lasted for nearly a minute and a half, and drew a smattering of applause.

“Got that now?” he continued, saying al-Qaida had attacked the country’s “Judeo-Christian” values. “Show respect in honoring them. Please: American patriotism and your position demand it.”

It is not, as the American people were led to believe, that the terrorism of 9/11 simply fell out of the clear blue sky and that the War on Terror and radical changes in U.S. domestic and foreign policy followed as a result. Rather, the evidence proves that the 9/11 attacks were carried out in order to kick-start the Israeli war agenda known as the War on Terror.

The Rothschilds, the founding family of the Zionist state of Israel, are closely linked to various aspects of the 9-11 terror atrocity. The Solving 9-11 books present some of these connections, which are usually one step removed and not easily seen. The Lauder/Rothschild connection, on the other hand, is one that is both obvious and central to the 9-11 operation.

Lord Jacob Rothschild with Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, after receiving the WJC Theodor Herzl Award on behalf of his family, on November 7, 2018 (Photo credit: Shahar Azran/WJC)

The 9-11 terror crime required a great deal of setting up, preparation which included the privatization of the World Trade Center, state-owned property of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.  

For the culprits, obtaining control of the Twin Towers was necessary so that demolition teams could access the buildings in order to place explosive materials. This would have been impossible had the towers remained in the hands of the Port Authority.

The privatization of the World Trade Center involved Ronald Lauder, a high-level Zionist with close ties to the Rothschild family, one of whom served at the highest level of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate.

Ronald Lauder headed the two commissions under Governor George Pataki that pushed for the privatization of the World Trade Center:  the New York State Commission of Privatization and the New York State Research Council on Privatization.

 Lauder was the driving force behind the effort to privatize the World Trade Center, which resulted in Larry Silverstein, a fellow Zionist, getting the 99-year lease of the Twin Towers in July 2001.

Ronald S. Lauder is the President of the World Jewish Congress.

David de Rothschild is chairman of the governing board of the World Jewish Congress. He is also the Executive Chairman of the Rothschild Group.

David de Rothschild (left) is chairman of the board of the WJC; Ronald Lauder (third from left) is president of the WJC. Jacob Rothschild (second from left) received an award from the WJC, November 2018. (Source: WJC)

Ronald Lauder established the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, in 1999.

Major General Daniel Rothschild, (IDF ret.), is head of the Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC). He is also the chairman of the annual Herzliya Conference series and a member of the advisory board of the Central Bank of Israel.

Danny Rothschild, head of the Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Mossad school, the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC).

In 1984, Rothschild was appointed assistant to the IDF Chief of Staff. He was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General in 1985 and appointed commander of the IDF Units in Southern Lebanon.

Rothschild later served as deputy director of the Military Intelligence Directorate, the central, overarching military intelligence body of the Israel Defense Forces. Rothschild was director of the Research Department, where he was responsible for national strategic (political and military) research and analysis, including before and during the first Gulf War.

In 1991 Rothschild was promoted to the rank of Major General (Aluf) and was appointed Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a position he held until his retirement in 1995.

THE ISRAELI WAR ON TERROR

The War on Terror is basically an Israeli stratagem developed in the 1970s to deceive the American public into thinking that Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies. The purpose of this deception is to bring the U.S. military into the Middle East on a long-term basis to defend the Zionist state by waging war against its foes.

The terrorist masterminds behind the War on Terror stratagem knew that a massive and spectacular act of terrorism would be required to trick the U.S. into fighting their enemies, so they began – evidently in the 1970s – planning the attack which befell the United States on September 11, 2001.

A timeline of some key events is helpful to understand the common origin and development of the 9/11 and War on Terror plot.

1977 – In a major turning point in Israel’s political history, the Likud, a right-wing political coalition founded by the Zionist terrorist Menachem Begin (former head of the Irgun) comes to power in Israel ending three decades of Labor Party dominance.

Begin is a notorious terrorist leader known for having ordered the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946, in which 91 people were killed, and the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948.


1977 – Likud, the terrorist faction headed by Menachem Begin, comes to power in Israel.

1978 – Arnon Milchan, a top-level Israeli intelligence agent, produces his first movie, The Medusa Touch.  The film’s climactic scene depicts a Boeing 747 crashing into the Pan Am Building in New York City. Milchan was responsible for illegally sending 800 krytrons – triggers for nuclear weapons – from the U.S. to Israel’s Ministry of Defense between 1979 and 1983. Although his company, Milco International, was behind the illegal smuggling, Milchan himself was not indicted.

1979, July – The War on Terror doctrine is rolled out onto the world stage in a well-planned propaganda offensive at the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism. The conference is headed by the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin of the Likud. 

Begin’s propaganda blitz is hosted by the Netanyahu Institute, an organization set up by Benjamin Netanyahu and his father for the purpose of promoting the War on Terror ideology.

“The conference organizers expect the event to initiate a major anti-terrorist offensive,” Ian Black writes in the Jerusalem Post after the first day of the conference.

“The use of the military term ‘offensive’ is accurate,” Philip Paull wrote in “International Terrorism”:  The Propaganda War.  “Four former chiefs of Israeli military intelligence participated in the conference:  Gen. Chaim Herzog, Maj. Gen. Meir Amit, Lt. Gen. Aharon Yariv, and Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit.”

The fact that four former chiefs of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence attended the three-day conference indicates that Israeli military intelligence was involved in the planning and preparation of this “propaganda offensive.”

1979, September – Isser Harel, the former chief of Israeli intelligence, predicts with uncanny accuracy the events of 9/11 to Michael D. Evans, an American Zionist, saying Arab terrorists will attack the tallest building in New York City:

I sat with former Mossad chief Isser Harel for a conversation about Arab terrorism. As he handed me a cup of hot tea and a plate of cookies, I asked him, “Do you think terrorism will come to America, and if so, where and why?”

Harel looked at his American visitor and replied, “I fear it will come to you in America. America has the power, but not the will, to fight terrorism.

The terrorists have the will, but not the power, to fight America – but all that could change with time. Arab oil money buys more than tents.”

As to the where, Harel continued, “New York City is the symbol of freedom and capitalism. It’s likely they will strike the Empire State Building, your tallest building [he mistakenly thought] and a symbol of your power.”
– “America the Target,” Jerusalem Post, September 30, 2001

1982, February – The Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” written by Oded Yinon, is published by the World Zionist Organization (in Hebrew).  Thanks to Professor Israel Shahak, the essay is translated and published in English under the title “The Zionist Plan for the Middle East.”

The Yinon Plan calls for “Balkanizing” the Arab states, i.e. breaking them up into ethnic enclaves, as was done to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

“There is one thing that we do know,” Middle East expert Linda S. Heard wrote in 2006, “Oded Yinon’s 1982 ‘Zionist Plan for the Middle East’ is in large part taking shape. Is this pure coincidence? Was Yinon a gifted psychic? Perhaps!  Alternatively, we in the West are victims of a long-held agenda not of our making and without doubt not in our interests.”

The Yinon Plan specifically calls for breaking up Syria and Iraq, which is exactly what has happened to these nations after the U.S. military intervened.

As Oded Yinon wrote: 

Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target.

Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druze who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.

1982, June – Under the leadership of Menachem Begin, Israel invades Lebanon with the intention of occupying the southern part of the country up to the Litani River, as per the Yinon Plan. The Israeli aggression results in the deaths of more than 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.  

1983 – Israeli military intelligence (AMAN), headed by Ehud Barak, begins arming and training the virulently anti-Western Hezb-i-Islami mujahedeen of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Pakistan. This operation is supported by U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson and funded by the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia.

Israel provides the mujahedeen with weapons it has taken off the battlefield in Lebanon.  Israeli military intelligence is creating the cadre of a radical “Islamist” terrorist foe to prepare the stage for U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

Hekmatyar and Osama Bin Laden begin working together in 1984 when Bin Laden’s “Afghan Arabs” join forces with Hezb-i-Islami. Ali Mohamed, Bin Laden’s first trainer, is a Hebrew-speaking Egyptian working for Israeli military intelligence. In 1994, these Israeli-armed and trained terrorist forces merge into Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

1986 – Benjamin Netanyahu publishes Terrorism: How the West Can Win, a collection of papers from a second Netanyahu Institute conference (Washington, D.C., 1984). The book is part of his continuous effort since 1979 to promote the doctrine of a global War on Terror with books, articles, and speeches.

1987 – Eight years after Israeli intelligence chief Isser Harel predicted that Arab terrorists would attack the tallest building in New York City, two of his veteran Mossad agents obtain the security contract for the World Trade Center and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority tears up the contract when it discovers that Avraham Shalom (Bendor), the head of Atwell Security of Tel Aviv, is using a fake name and has a conviction in Israel – as the former chief of the Shin Bet – for the murder of two Palestinians.

1993 – The World Trade Center is hit by a truck bomb in the North Tower, killing six people. Emad Salem, an FBI informant and critical witness is paid more than one million dollars for his testimony. Since the alleged conspiracy took place in New Jersey, the Israeli dual-national Michael Chertoff, serving as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, plays a key role in the prosecution. Chertoff’s Israeli mother was one of the first Mossad agents. The media interpretation of the bombing leads Americans to believe that Muslims want to destroy the Twin Towers.

1998 – Philip Zelikow heads the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group with Ashton Carter and John Deutch. Their report is published in Foreign Affairs (CFR) at the end of the year.  The Zelikow report begins by “imagining the transforming event” of catastrophic terrorism “that could happen next month.” Ashton Carter and John Deutch are senior partners of Global Technology Partners, “an exclusive affiliate of Rothschild N.A., formed to make acquisitions of and investments in technology, defense, and aerospace-related companies.” Zelikow, the head of the group, will go on to head the 9/11 Commission and write most of the commission’s report. Carter goes on to be Secretary of Defense under President Obama.

2000 – Arnon Milchan and his business partner Rupert Murdoch produce a TV series called “The Lone Gunmen.” The first episode of the series, “Pilot”, is about a passenger airliner being remotely hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center. The footage for the climactic sequence when the plane is approaching the Twin Towers is actually filmed flying a helicopter over Manhattan. The program airs on Murdoch’s Fox Television on March 4, 2001, six months before 9/11, and is viewed by 13 million U.S. viewers.

2000, September – A Neo-Con think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997, publishes a paper entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which specifically calls for the U.S. to occupy Iraq and other radical changes in U.S. military policy.  The “process of transformation” the paper says, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

2001, 9/11 – In a spectacular act of terrorism the tallest buildings in New York City are destroyed, just as Mossad chief Isser Harel predicted 22 years earlier.  The terror attacks of 9/11 bear the hallmarks of an Israeli false-flag operation designed to start their long-planned war agenda. Ehud Barak immediately calls for an operational “war against terror” on BBC World and Sky News television. Barak is Israel’s most senior military officer as the former commander of the Israel’s covert commando force (Sayeret Matkal), head of military intelligence (AMAN), chief of staff, and both prime minister and defense minister until March 2001.

While tens of thousands are feared dead in the rubble, the New York Times asks Benjamin Netanyahu on 9/11 about the effect the terror attacks will have on U.S.-Israeli relations. Netanyahu says:   “It’s very good… it will generate immediate sympathy.”

2001, October 7 – The War on Terror begins with a U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan. In December, the Taliban is ousted and Hamid Karzai is installed to head a transitional government. The war in Afghanistan goes on to become the longest war in U.S. history.

2001, October – General Wesley Clark visits the Pentagon and is informed of the planned war agenda:  “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off, Iran.”

2003, March 20 – The Bush administration invades Iraq claiming that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that the Iraqi government poses an immediate threat to the United States and its coalition allies. No evidence, however, of WMDs is found to verify the claims used to start the war.

2003, March 31 – The 9/11 Commission headed by Executive Director Philip Zelikow holds its first hearing in New York City. Zelikow has a complete outline of the commission’s final report before the commission even begins its work.

His outline is detailed with chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings.  Zelikow shows his report to Commission Chairman Tom Kean and Vice-chairman Lee Hamilton and they like it, but think it could be seen as evidence of having a pre-determined outcome. They decide to keep it secret from the commission’s staff.

2008, April 16 – “Netanyahu Says 9/11 Terror Attacks Good for Israel” the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports, quoting Benjamin Netanyahu:  “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”

Although this timeline is by no means complete, it is sufficient to show the common origin of the 9/11 terror atrocity and the War on Terror. Both originated from the same source at the same time – Israeli military intelligence under the political leadership of the notorious terrorist Menachem Begin of the Likud (formerly Irgun) in the late 1970s.

A closer examination of the evidence is found in Solving 9/11: The Deception that Changed the World and Solving 9/11: The Original Articles, a set of books containing my 9/11 research that shows exactly who had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime – and carry out the cover-up upon which the War on Terror depended. 

It is not, as the American people were led to believe, that the terrorism of 9/11 simply fell out of the clear blue sky and that the War on Terror and radical changes in U.S. domestic and foreign policy followed as a result. Rather, the evidence proves that the 9/11 attacks were carried out in order to kick-start the Israeli war agenda known as the War on Terror.

The American Tragedy: Veteran Rams Hindu Family, thinking they were Muslims

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According to the FBI, anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US surged 67% last year, to levels not seen since 2001.

“I believe that’s his military instinct,” Stewart’s brother told NBC News. “You know: Leave no soldier behind, leave no civilian behind, just leave no one behind.”*

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”*

The American Tragedy: Veteran Rams Hindu Family, thinking they were Muslims, in Sunnyvale: [I live here and the area is heavily populated with Hindus, most being high techi’s in Silicone Valley.]

An Iraq War veteran, who had spent 5 years in that country, was arraigned Friday. On Tuesday, he had plowed into 8 people in an intersection in Sunnyvale, California, particularly aiming at a South Asian family who he assumed to be Muslims.

They weren’t. The names indicate that they are Americans of Indian Hindu heritage (a minority in the US of about 1 million people). The veteran has been charged with a hate crime and with 8 counts of attempted murder.

Witnesses say that after his crime he acted strangely, saying “Thank God for giving me this opportunity!” and “I love you, Jesus, I love you, Jesus.”

 

The victims included a 13-year-old girl, Dhriti and her father; her young brother Prakhar, 9, was hurt, but not by the car. Dhriti experienced swelling of the brain and bleeding, so that physicians had to take off the side of her skull, and she is fighting for her life in critical condition.

Others hurt by the car ramming were Marina Reimler, 32; Soeren Reimler, 33; Ping Lu, 51; Rajesh Narayan, 45; Eric Nava, 24; and Miguel, 15.

Ramming non-combatant pedestrians with an automobile is an ISIL tactic, showing the way in which America’s forever wars are turning its best and brightest into mirror images of their enemy. It is also a sign that the enemy is winning.

Colonel U.S. Marine Kenneth O’Keefe publicly states that ISIL is “a creation, a monster, a Frankenstein created by U.S., the same U.S. State Department. The truth is that it is a strategy military and geopolitical, well thought out by the U.S. military elite, our great Military Industrial Complex by the Israeli military elite and Banking. “

 

Trump, who has previously warned that immigration from Muslim-majority nations threatens European and US security, frequently retweets other messages whose political views he finds favorable.

The enraged vet managed to wound Americans of German, Indian, Chinese and Latino heritage in his fruitless search for other Americans to kill, of Muslim heritage.

Ayaan Hirsi has been lauded in the West as a courageous feminist standing up to Islam in defense of women. A closer look at her work shows that her advocacy for women’s safety and equality is hardly principled or consistent, while her “critique” of Islam built on a foundation of distortions and fabrications.

This heartless crime did not come out of nowhere but is a testimony to nearly two decades of constant warfare and demonization of ordinary Muslims by some in the US elite (including Trump).

That the intended crime so badly misfired is a good metaphor for the way hatred directed by any Americans at any other group of Americans inevitably harms us all.

Nowadays it is Trump who is associated with rapacious white nationalism that is contemptuous of the lives and rights of those not coded as “white” or rich (and whiteness has always been constructed around the propertied classes).

The George W. Bush administration, despite some cynical tokenism, however, was also all about white privilege.

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The 2003 Bush-Cheney war on Iraq (it was a war on Iraq, not in Iraq) was fought on false pretenses– that dictator Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11 or that he had advanced and sophisticated nuclear and biological weapons programs and was within 2 years of having a nuclear bomb.

It militarized America’s civilian society, sending hundreds of thousands of Americans over time to a major Arab Muslim country where they lorded it over the brown locals as the new district commissioners of a new colonial empire.

The Iraq War brutalized Iraqis, leaving hundreds of thousands dead, millions wounded or orphaned, and 4 million displaced from their homes.

The tsunami that hit the society swept away old authority structures and led to the proliferation of anti-imperial militias and ultimately to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, members of which the US military imprisoned with 25,000 others in Camp Bucca, introducing them to one another.

It morphed into the so-called Islamic State group (ISIL or Daesh) and tore Iraq and Syria apart in 2014 and after.

Does Islam teach Muslims to hate non-Muslims?

The Qurʾān highlights the special place of Christians and Jews by constantly referring to them as “people of the book.” There are many verses in the Qurʾān that highlight the close relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims. And you will certainly find those who say, ‘We are Christians,’ to be the nearest of them in love to the believers. That is because amongst them are savants and monks and because they are not arrogant (Qurʾān 5:83). Additionally, the Qurʾān even prohibits Muslims from insulting the god’s or idols that are worshipped by other religions, Although Muslims obviously disagree with non-Muslims who worship other than God, they are prohibited from insulting or speaking ill of other religious deities. And do not insult those whom they call upon besides Allah (Qurʾān 6:108).

“Why did you kill me” Former Israeli soldier was traumatized because of a child who comes to haunt him every night. He can’t sleep, he wets the bed. “I killed for you, with these hands! You say, ‘Terrorists with blood on their hands?’ I killed more than 40 people for you! I murdered!” Razon wasn’t expressing remorse for the killings, but complaining that he has not been offered treatment for the severe psychiatric impact the butchery he committed in service of Israel has had on him.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Americans cycled through Iraq. Some 80,000 were at least slightly injured, and 12,000 were so seriously wounded they will need special medical care the rest of their lives.

The reality is more than bullets and bomb blasts. For our service members, the fight transcends the battlefield. It continues when they come home. It’s replayed and relived, consciously and subconsciously, in real time. After reviewing Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense studies, we found an estimated 420,000 post-9/11 service members experience PTSD, TBI or both.

More tens of thousands were harmed by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, with some driven to drink and homelessness. Suicide rates are high because of the things these young persons were ordered to do or found themselves in a situation where they felt constrained to do them.

Some of them were grouped in with sadists and serial killers who had themselves a grand old time on the killing fields of Iraq. As the 8 and a half-year-long nightmare rolled on, Bush-Cheney started letting white supremacists with gang tats into the US army, something that would have been unthinkable in previous decades.

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Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin’s bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy’s head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. Morlock made sure to get a similar memento.

Eventually they all  come home to live among us.

Hatred of Muslims was bound to grow up if the enemy was year after dreary year drawn from their ranks. Given that Americans had gone to a Muslim country and occupied it, resistance to occupation was inevitable.

Just imagine that a foreign country occupied Alabama or Kentucky– what do you think their citizens would do to those troops from abroad who didn’t even speak English but now ran the lives of the locals.

Bush-Cheney turned our police into commandos in full battle gear and provided them with armored vehicles, helping provoke the Black Lives Matter movement. They turned our young men into PTSD basket cases or professional sadists or even war criminals (some of them have gone into politics and risen high).

What if I’m not the hero

What if I’m the bad guy

And they turned many in the general population into bigots with an irrational hatred of Muslims, weirdly conflating white Sufi converts, Bangladeshis, Iranian secularists in LA, and Bosnians from eastern Europe fleeing Christian genocide with Iraqis and Afghans who objected to having foreign troops in their country.

The ISIL-style ramming of innocent civilians in Sunnyvale is a metaphor for what the United States has become.

But we do not have to be this person. We could be real Americans if we wanted, and bring the troops home, and stop finding the latest ethnic group to hate so that our diverse society can be divided and ruled by the likes of Trump and Mercer and Murdoch and other pond scum.

According to US Department of Defense data, since 2001 about 2.5 million Americans went to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq, with more than 800,000 deploying more than once. Nearly 700,000 of those veterans have already been awarded disability status, with another 100,000 pending, according to the VA.

Empire Wars: “Illegal but Legitimate”

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Just because these individuals have not been formally charged with war crimes does not mean they will  escape justice, either in this world or the next. Lest we forget, powerful dictators and warmongers look untouchable only for a while. Before they fall into the dustbin of history…

In bypassing the United Nations, engaging in disingenuous negotiations that precluded diplomatic solutions and manipulating the public case for war, Nato’s intervention over Kosovo in 1999 was an important precursor to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As the region struggles to contend with the environmental and health legacies of cluster bombs and the use of depleted uranium, the 10th anniversary of Nato’s bombing of Serbia must not pass in vain, but instead serve as a timely reminder of the need for dispassionate and neutral analysis of unfolding conflicts and their potential solutions; analysis that endeavors to explore the often tragic complexities of civil wars and the nuanced understandings that their transformation requires.*

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The bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that began on March 24 1999 was the first time NATO went to war. The 78-day campaign, known as Operation Allied Force, was officially conducted to protect civilians.

Wars for Israel

They had been caught in the middle of the conflict between the secessionist insurgents of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Yugoslavian security forces.

The conflict had dramatically escalated in 1998, when the KLA began an armed campaign to end the Yugoslavian (or, more specifically, Serbian) rule over Kosovo.

Even now, 20 years after the intervention, and despite the military, diplomatic and financial investments of Western powers in Kosovo, a political agreement on the status of Kosovo is nowhere to be seen.

War on Terror the Board Game

Quite to the contrary, tensions between the unilaterally declared Republic of Kosovo and Serbia – the state it seceded from back in February 2008 – are running high.

The interests of both parties appear to be diametrically opposed. Kosovo aims to be recognised as a state by Serbia and, in turn, Serbia’s main national interest is to sabotage the international recognition of its former province.

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‘An excuse to start bombing’

NATO’s air superiority encountered few obstacles in 1999. The transatlantic military intervention began after negotiations between the members of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the KLA, aimed at giving Kosovo greater self governance, collapsed.

Henry Kissinger described the failure of these so-called “Rambouillet talks” as an “excuse to start bombing”.

The uninterrupted bombing of Yugoslavia lasted 78 days and involved 38,400 sorties, including 10,484 strike sorties. By the end, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević had capitulated.

Men walk near destroyed buildings in Sabri, a central Benghazi district, Libya, August 12, 2017
Red Cross Expresses Concern Over Deteriorating Humanitarian Crisis in Libya AFTER liberation

In military terms, Operation Allied Force was a clear success. It achieved its major objectives. Perhaps the most important aim was, through the Kumanovo agreement, the withdrawal of the Yugoslav/Serbian security forces from Kosovo.

NATO troops were subsequently deployed on the ground and remain there to this day.

It should be noted, however, that the bombing was illegal. It was done without the authorisation of the UN Security Council.

An international commission convened to investigate the intervention later came up with a fascinating semantic formula to explain this away – the bombing had been “illegal but legitimate”.

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Soviet poster: NATO

 The operation has been romanticised by its supporters. Former Czech President Václav Havel, for example, described it as the first time that states waged war “in the name of principles and values” rather than their national interest.

This idealist perspective, however, neglects the fact that the intervention had significant geopolitical motivations.

The operation was fervently supported, and indeed implemented, by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair – leaders who were very much a product of their time.

This generation transformed post-Cold War euphoria into military adventurism.

Both leaders developed their own “humanitarian” doctrines which advocated intervention – which, in practice, meant war – to protect threatened civilians. They went on to present themselves as humanitarian heroes at home. Others saw their actions as imperialism.

The Serbian Interior Ministry in Belgrade is set ablaze by a NATO cruise missile attack in 1999. EPA

The campaign also resulted in massive collateral damage. There were hundreds of civilian victims. I’ve found that between 80% and 87.5% of the victims of the Kosovo conflict died during or in the aftermath of Operation Allied Force.

The KLA took advantage of the power vacuum created by the NATO intervention to carry out revenge killings and abductions against Serbs, Bosniaks, Roma and other minorities.

The elusive political settlement

The bombing dramatically shaped the political future of Kosovo. It paved the way towards its (unilaterally declared) independence on February 17 2008 – a move which was encouraged by Washington and some European allies.

At first glance, it would seem that this development would solve the crisis in Kosovo.

But Kosovo is far from achieving full international recognition. It is, for one thing, still unable to join the UN, the gold standard when it comes to statehood.

Even if enough states did support its bid for membership, Kosovo could face a veto – certainly from Russia and probably from China.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was eventually tried for war crimes in the Hague but died before a verdict was delivered. EPA

An EU-led agreement signed in 2013 aimed at “normalising relations” between Kosovo and Serbia is in deadlock, sabotaged by the mutual distrust of all parties involved. The term “normalise” is, of course, deliberately vague.

For all Kosovo officials I have talked to, nevertheless, the meaning of the term is crystal clear – full mutual recognition.

The problem is that if a solution is not found, further border alterations could be on the cards. That might mean, for example, a potential exchange of territories between Serbia and Kosovo or the unification of the latter with Albania.

The aspiration of uniting all Albanians in a single polity continues to attract support among Albanians in Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia.

Western policymakers, however, categorically reject any further border alterations – perhaps because it would illustrate their own failure to “settle” the Kosovo case.

Further border transformations may even plant the seeds for future sovereignty-driven conflicts.

Decades on, it’s clear that reaching a political settlement after a military intervention can be a nightmare. Certainly much more difficult than launching a bombing campaign.

MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic U.S.-Backed War in Yemen

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Maddow goes on a ten-minute rant about a Pepe! Meme Magic

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The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.

More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network’s obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.

FAIR’s study, “MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic U.S.-Backed War in Yemen,” documented a picture of extreme journalistic malfeasance at MSNBC:

● “An analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017. And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen.”

● “Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.”

● “All of this is despite the fact that the U.S. government has played a leading role in the 33-month war that has devastated Yemen, selling many billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, refueling Saudi warplanes as they relentlessly bomb civilian areas and providing intelligence and military assistance to the Saudi air force.”

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MEDIA BLACK-OUT: US Proxy War in Yemen Underway, Saudi Stooges Do Initial Dirty Work

Why put your name on another unpopular war, when your proxy can do it for you? Instead of initially intervening itself, the Pentagon has dispatched its own Arab proxy army in the region to the highly unpopular dirty deeds that Washington normally does. What’s the difference, after all, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are two of the Anglo-American Military Industrial Complex’s best customers – flying all US jets and using all US satellite intel to help select defenseless targets inside Yemen.

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s incessant “Russiagate” coverage has put the network at the media forefront of overheated hyperbole about the Kremlin. And continually piling up the dry tinder of hostility toward Russia boosts the odds of a cataclysmic blowup between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

In effect, the programming on MSNBC follows a thin blue party line, breathlessly conforming to Democratic leaders’ refrains about Russia as a mortal threat to American democracy and freedom across the globe. But hey—MSNBC’s ratings have climbed upward during its monochrome reporting, so why worry about whether coverage is neglecting dozens of other crucial stories? Or why worry if the anti-Russia drumbeat is worsening the risks of a global conflagration?

FAIR’s report, written by journalist Ben Norton and published on Jan. 8, certainly merited a serious response from MSNBC and the anchors most identified by the study, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes. Yet no response has come from them or network executives. (Full disclosure: I’m a longtime associate of FAIR.)

In the aftermath of the FAIR study, a petition gathered 22,784 signers and 4,474 individual comments—asking MSNBC to remedy its extreme imbalance of news coverage. But the network and its prime-time luminaries Maddow and Hayes refused to respond despite repeated requests for a reply.

The petition was submitted in late January to Maddow and Hayes via their producers, as well as to MSNBC senior vice president Errol Cockfield and to the network’s senior manager in charge of media relations for “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Signers responded to outreach from three organizations—Just Foreign Policy, RootsAction.org (which I coordinate), and World Beyond War—calling for concerned individuals to “urge Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and MSNBC to correct their failure to report on the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the direct U.S. military role in causing the catastrophe by signing our petition.” (The petition is still gathering signers.)

As the cable news network most trusted by Democrats as a liberal beacon, MSNBC plays a special role in fueling rage among progressive-minded viewers toward Russia’s “attack on our democracy” that is somehow deemed more sinister and newsworthy than corporate dominance of American politicians (including Democrats), racist voter suppression, gerrymandering and many other U.S. electoral defects all put together.

At the same time, the anti-Russia mania also services the engines of the current militaristic machinery.

It’s what happens when nationalism and partisan zeal overcome something that could be called journalism.

“The U.S. media’s approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda,” the independent journalist Robert Parry wrote at the end of 2017, in the last article published before his death. “Does any sentient human being read the New York Times’ or the Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts?”

Parry added that “to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a ‘Putin apologist’ or ‘Kremlin stooge.’ Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many ‘liberals’ who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the assertions on faith.”

Fake news about Venezuela: a simple recipe

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“Journalists” who want to write fake news about Venezuela, or about any other country or group that dares to stand up to US imperialism, only need to follow this simple recipe:

Choose one or more countries/groups opposed to US imperialism
If available, have a former official, now being paid by the US government, make the accusations
Season well with doses of “war on terror” and/or “war on drugs”
Sprinkle with opinions of “experts” who work in DC think tanks or US-funded NGOs

While this looks like a very unsavory mix, the results last very long and can be reheated with no problems.

This recipe has been used and re-used plenty of times, either by US officials to justify policies or by media outlets. But given how the media critically accepts everything when it comes to foreign policy, there is hardly a distinction to be made here.

A classical example were the fabricated connections between Chávez/Venezuela and al-Qaeda . Other variants involve dealings with the FARC (1), Mexican cartels, and the favourite dance partner is Hezbollah. On one hand, the US’ relation with al-Qaeda is now a bit more complicated, as extremists may get bombed if they are in Iraq but supported if they cross into Syria. On the other, Hezbollah is the biggest obstacle to Israeli hegemony and the colonisation of Palestine. This kind of propaganda is reminiscent of the effort to fabricate connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. Some outlets would even have us believe North Korea was supplying arms to Hamas!

The most recent story involves the newly-appointed vice-president, Tareck El Aissami, who is a perfect ingredient because of his Middle Eastern ancestry. Even though he was born and lived all his life in Venezuela, his parents are Druze immigrants from Lebanon. The storm started with a CNN “story” about the Venezuelan embassy in Iraq selling passports to dangerous people, including members of Hezbollah, who would then use them to attack the US or its allies. This operation was claimed to be directed by El Aissami. This story was directly quoted by Marco Rubio during a renewed push by US lawmakers for more sanctions against Venezuela. These came later from the Department of the Treasury, this time linking El Aissami to Mexican cartels. With a little more effort even the North Koreans might have been added to the party.

Tareck El Aissami with an incriminating Palestinian scarf

All in all, there are many things that do not add up. First of all there is the issue of Hezbollah plotting terror attacks the US, but we will not go into detail here. It suffices to say that the evidence of Hezbollah involvement in terror attacks abroad is, at best, very thin. Then there is the sectarian issue. Western media, at the behest of western allies in the Middle East, keep stirring up this supposedly grave Shia threat, with Iran and Hezbollah even conspiring to reshape demographics and create an all-Shia corridor in the Middle East. And yet their man in Venezuela is a Druze. Equally ludicrous are claims that there are Venezuelan training camps in Lebanon and vice-versa. Hezbollah’s main foe is right next door, but somehow it would need training camps halfway around the world! The links to the drug trade presented by the Treasury are equally flimsy, and were picked apart masterfully by Larissa Costas.

The “star witness” of CNN’s expose, Misael López, has since been revealed to be a close associate of Ana Argotti, who is in turn very close to Lilian Tintori and Leopoldo López, the hard-right politician jailed for his role in the violent activities during the 2014 guarimbas that resulted in over 40 deaths. Argotti has defended several members of the opposition charged with violent crimes during this period. As for Misael López, he is also under investigation for alleged sexual harassment and attempting to withdraw funds from the Venezuelan embassy in Baghdad.

Elusive cartels and double standards

Another high-profile fake story, followed by sanctions, involved Diosdado Cabello, an important figure in the ruling PSUV and head of the National Assembly at the time. Based on the account of a former bodyguard turned star-witness, now living comfortably in the US, Cabello was accused of being the boss of the elusive Cartel de los Soles. This is supposedly a very important Latin American drug cartel run by the Venezuelan military. The problem is that, unlike the stories we hear of cartels violently making themselves known and marking territory, here we have a drug cartel run from the highest levels of the Venezuelan state operating without anyone really noticing it. It is like the Illuminati version of drug cartels.

Diosdado Cabello next to President Nicolás Maduro

Venezuela is often presented as an obstacle in the war on drugs, but the truth is that the main actor in the cocaine trade is neighbouring Colombia, the empire’s best friend and largest recipient of aid in the hemisphere. Any list of officials connected to the drug trade has to start with (former Colombian president) Álvaro Uribe if it is to be taken seriously. We are talking about the country where the para-politics scandal broke, revealing that dozens of elected officials had links to paramilitary groups, the heart and soul of the drug trade. And yet we never hear stories of Colombian politicians or military officials, who cooperate closely with the US military, being involved in illegal activities, nor have sanctions ever been imposed on them.

This double standard is only outrageous if we believe that the war on drugs is actually designed to eradicate the drug trade. Rather, it is supposed to manage it. In fact, drugs have been very useful for US agencies, for instance to pacify black communities and derail the black liberation movement in the 1970s. Coupled with draconian legislation and harsh sentences, today they serve to feed the very lucrative prison industry. In any case, large amounts of cocaine are consumed in the very place where the drug money is laundered – Wall Street. Even when a massive drug money laundering scheme is uncovered at a major US bank, a mild slap on the wrist and a fine worth a few days’ profit is all that can be expected.

Fake news as background

None of this is intended as an endorsement or an exoneration of El Aissami, Cabello, or anyone else. But these news and unproven accusations, as well as others targeting lower-profile officials such as Néstor Reverol, are not meant to prove anything or to lead to any judicial prosecution. They are simply thrown out there and blindly echoed by an uncritical media, they are meant to create background. From now on, whenever Tareck El Aissami appears in the news we will read that he has links to terrorism and the drug trade, and thus whatever he says or does will build on this background.

For the past two decades, Venezuela has been the biggest thorn in the US’ side, a real nuisance in Washington’s “backyard”, striving for an independent course (a “second independence”) and leading the efforts for a regional integration which is not subjected to the interests of the Northern empire. The US responded with its traditional regime-change operation, destabilising at every turn, funding opposition groups, imposing a de-facto financial blockade on Venezuela, even working to lower oil prices. Their natural allies, the Venezuelan elites, have also been outraged that the country they used to own has been taken away from them, and coup-plotting has become their way of life.

And therefore these fake news are pre-emptive justification for a future coup or foreign intervention. Should one of these take place, the media will be ready with plenty of hyperlinks to these fake stories that present Venezuela as a failed, rogue state, connected to terrorism and the drug trade. The coup/foreign intervention would then look like the benign empire saving the world from this threat.

What the empire, the local elites and the media keep underestimating is the power of the masses that were awakened by this project, chavismo, that for the first time sees them placed front and centre. There is now a political conscience, a firm belief that the people should write their own history, and it will take a lot more than fake stories from propaganda outlets to restore Venezuela’s former neo-colonial status. In the words of Chávez:

“Aquí nadie se rinde, carajo!”

Note:

(1) While the FARC have been involved in the drug trade, it has mostly been at the lowest levels of the chain, levying a tax on sales of coca crops. Associating them, and only them, to the Colombian drug trade, is incredibly dishonest and exonerates those who profit the most out of it.

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