Eva Bartlett Debates Syria with Misinformed US University Prof
By Richard Edmondson | Fig Trees and Vineyards | September 16, 2016
Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett attempts to clarify issues about the Syrian conflict in a debate with two Americans, one of whom, is Stephen Zunes, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco. From his perch in California, Zunes, who seems to have a peculiar facial tic, pompously suggests he knows more about the situation in Syria that does Bartlett, who has filed numerous reports from on the ground inside Syria.
Zunes apparently relies a lot on the mainstream media for his information. For one thing, he believes there are “moderate” rebels. He also asserts that protests held in 2011 at the outset of the conflict were “brutally suppressed by the Assad regime,” and he refers to the democratically elected president of Syria as a “war criminal.” If Zunes is typical of university professors in America, it’s no wonder the country is in such a sad state.
When Bartlett attempts to set the record straight–for instance on the early protests–Zunes basically dismisses everything she has to say.
The other guest on the show, Gareth Porter, is not one of my favorite writers either, but at least he has the grace and good form to concede at one point that Bartlett “knows much more about this than I do.” No such concession is made by the presumptuous and overbearing Mr. Zunes. … More
IMF: Mideast conflicts have erased development gains for whole generation
Press TV – September 16, 2016
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says conflicts in the Middle East are not only devastating economies in countries such as Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, but they have also erased “development gains for a whole generation.”
The fund issued a report titled the Economic Impact of Conflicts and the Refugee Crisis in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) on Friday, where it said conflicts were killing economies in the countries gripped by war and sapping growth in neighboring countries and those hosting millions of refugees.
Middle Eastern and North African countries battered by fighting have suffered average losses of 6-15 percentage points in the gross domestic product (GDP) in three years, compared to a 4-9 percentage-point average worldwide, according to the report.
The IMF report showed that the drops in economic output in Syria, Libya and Yemen in recent years have far exceeded the worldwide average.
Syria’s gross domestic product level is currently less than half the level it was five years ago before the start of the conflict, the IMF stated.
The report showed Yemen lost 25-35 percent of its GDP in 2015 alone, in the wake of the deadly Saudi campaign.
Oil-dependent Libya saw its GDP fall 24 percent in 2014, the IMF said.
Physical infrastructure damage, now estimated at $137.8 billion in Syria and more than $20 billion in Yemen, has reduced trade and output in neighboring countries, according to the report.
Countries bordering high-intensity conflict zone showed an average annual GDP decline of 1.4 percentage points worldwide, with a bigger drop of 1.9 percentage points in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Refugees’ plight
The fleeing of more than half of Syria’s 22 million population, 6.6 million internally and more than five million to other countries, has magnified economic losses, dramatically escalating poverty, unemployment and school dropouts in countries that were already struggling, the IMF said.
Many of the refugees seeking asylum in other countries are skilled workers and professionals forced by war and persecution to leave the conflict zones in hope of better lives.
However, according to the IMF, because refugees often have fewer rights than local populations, those landing in developing countries are often absorbed into already disadvantaged local communities forming a new underclass comprising refugees and the existing poor in the host country, which in turn leads to a detrimental effect on the host countries.
For those refugees that land in Europe, where the influx of refugees has only had a small impact on economy, there have been some positive effects on the host countries, according to the report.
More funds needed
The IMF report has revealed the huge scale of the refugee crisis and the pressure it put on several United Nations institutions, especially the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme.
The two UN organizations have been playing a leading role in the provision of humanitarian assistance, both to internally displaced people and refugees.
However, the IMF report says funding has not kept up with the sharp increase in needs.
For instance, the World Food Programme and the UNHCR have had to cut their services to refugees in Jordan due to funding constraints, which may have contributed to the acceleration of refugee flows to Europe from late 2014, according to the report.
The IMF report urged policymakers to scale up humanitarian aid in conflict zones and neighboring countries hosting refugees and prioritize fiscal spending to protect human life and serve basic public needs.
The report comes as the UN General Assembly is preparing to host a summit on refugees in New York next week.
The UN plans to use the summit as a platform to urge governments, private donors, and humanitarian agencies to support the organization in its efforts to ease suffering of the victims of world conflicts.
Analysts believe the MENA conflicts and the following refugee crisis are the outcome of the West’s policies in the Middle East and North Africa.
Egyptian state media claims 9/11 was carried out by West to justify war on terror
Orrazz | September 16, 2016
A columnist for a state-run newspaper in Egypt has suggested the US invented Isis and set up the 9/11 attacks to justify its military interventions in the Middle East.
“Is it possible to believe the official version, from the US government, of the events of 11 September 2001?” wrote journalist Noha Al-Sharnoubi in Al-Ahram, a major national Egyptian newspaper owned by the government.
Ms Al-Sharnoubi said the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks could have been premeditated to “justify the war on terror” in her column, published on 23 August.
She also cast doubt over the veracity of the actions of the so-called Islamic State, alleging the extremist group could have been made up to “trick” the world and validate US foreign policy.
Ms Al-Sharnoubi does not appear to shy away from controversial subjects. Her weekly column has recently discussed issues such as burkini bans, French military involvement in Libya and whether it is acceptable to sacrifice chickens, duck and geese.
According to an English translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri) [admittedly unreliable – Aletho News ], Ms Al-Sharnoubi wrote: “Is it a coincidence that the commanders of the September 11 attack trained at American flight schools?”
“Is it conceivable that four hijacked planes flew around so freely, penetrated US airspace and hit the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon one by one, with an interval of 15 minutes and 30 minutes between the attacks,” she added.
“All this took place without the Americans targeting the planes and downing them, despite all their intelligence, satellites and radars?
“Or was the whole thing planned [in advance] in order to justify the war on terror, the [first] episode of which [later] began in Iraq?”
Ms Al-Sharnoubi also questioned the contents of ISIS propaganda videos, suggesting the militant group could be “another story that was prepared in advance [by the West] to justify the devastation, partitioning and occupation” of Middle Eastern countries.
“Does it make sense that most ISIS members are foreigners [i.e., Western nationals], unless ISIS is another story that was prepared in advance [by the West] to justify the devastation, partitioning and occupation [of countries] that is taking place and will continue to take place in the Middle East?” she wrote, according to Memri.
“Those who are murdered and [then] accused of perpetrating terror attacks in the West – are they the real culprits?
“[Perhaps Western] intelligence elements are behind the attacks and the bombings, and later Muslim citizens are arrested and killed and simply accused of perpetrating [the attacks] in order to justify what is happening in the Arab countries in the name of the war on terror, and in order to justify the plan to persecute the Muslims in the U.S. and Europe and expel them? Have we really been deceived, and continue to be deceived, to such an extent?!”
Egypt is listed as number 159 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
According to the report, “journalists are obliged on national security grounds to report only the official version of ‘terrorist’ attacks” under an anti-terrorism law passed in 2015.
Cost of US post-9/11 wars approaching $5trn – report
RT | September 16, 2016
The US spent $4.79 trillion on wars in the Middle East and on the ‘War on Terror’ after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, a new report estimated.
The report by the Cost of War Project, which is run by Brown University’s Watson Institute, counted the total budgetary cost of the wars America waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria as well as on counter-terrorism.
The $4.79 trillion figure includes future obligations to spend budgetary money through 2053, estimated future spending on veterans, interest already paid for money borrowed for the war effort and other relevant expenditures. This is $300 billion higher than what the project reported in 2015.
The estimate does not include interest the US is expected to pay on war loans, but says the current operational cost may pale in comparison.
“Interest costs for overseas contingency operations spending alone are projected to add more than $1 trillion to the national debt by 2023. By 2053, interest costs will be at least $7.9 trillion unless the US changes the way it pays for the wars,” wrote report author Neta Crawford, professor of political science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War Project.
The figure also excludes costs that are difficult to estimate such as the spending on veterans by local and state budgets. Neither does it put a dollar cost on loss of human life or the toll the wars take on the US economy. The former was detailed in an earlier report published in August. The macroeconomic impact is addressed briefly and is said to have “cost tens of thousands of jobs, affected the ability of the US to invest in infrastructure and probably led to increased interest costs on borrowing, not to mention greater overall federal indebtedness.”
The paper details other estimates of the cost of war by US officials and scholars, saying that they were more conservative.
“This paper’s estimate of current and future costs of war greatly exceeds pre-war and early estimates. Indeed, optimistic assumptions and a tendency to underestimate and undercount war costs have, from the beginning, been characteristic of the estimates of the budgetary costs and the fiscal consequences of these wars,” the report said.
European companies export highly-polluted fuel to West Africa: Report
Press TV – September 16, 2016
European companies are accused of taking advantage of weak fuel standards in African countries to export highly-polluted fuel to West Africa, a new report says.
The report, from the Swiss watchdog group of Public Eye, said major European oil companies and commodity traders take crude oil from African countries, blend it with highly-polluted additives, and then sell it back to them.
“Many West African countries that export high grade crude oil to Europe receive toxic low quality fuel in return,” it wrote.
Toxic products that the companies add to make the so-called “African Quality” fuels are far higher than those allowed in Europe, according to Public Eye.
“Their business model relies on an illegitimate strategy of deliberately lowering the quality of fuels in order to increase their profits,” the report read.
It said companies, among them the Swiss commodity traders Trafigura and Vito, increased their profits at the expense of Africans’ health.
While the European Union (EU) has allowed ten parts per millions (ppm) of sulfur in diesel in the continent, the legal limit on sulfur petrol in some African countries like Nigeria is 3,000 ppm.
After burning, the sulfur is released into the atmosphere as sulfur dioxide and other particulates that provide a major contributor to respiratory symptoms such as bronchitis and asthma.
According to the report, 20 million people in the Nigerian state of Lagos breathe 13 times more particulate matter than people in London, with dirty fuel being the main reason.
This is while Nigeria and some other West African countries produce petroleum with the world’s lowest sulfur levels. They do not have refining capabilities, however, and have to import fuel from Europe.
“Africa could prevent 25,000 premature deaths in 2030 and almost 100,000 premature deaths in 2050” if the export of low-quality fuel is stopped, Public Eye said.
It called on African governments “to protect the health of their urban population, reduce car maintenance costs, and spend their health budgets on other pressing health issues.”
“If left unchanged, their practices will kill more and more people across the continent,” the report warned.
In response to the allegations, the report said, three of the companies denied any wrongdoing, arguing that they meet the regulatory requirements of the market.
Public Eye, however, said that the companies adjusted their blends with no increased costs when Ghana lowered its sulfur content level in 2014.