In the first half of this article, published on JFK’s centenary, I discussed the general degradation of the intellectual and moral character of figurehead politicians, the concomitant societal decay, and whether or not this is a deliberate policy or a by-product of promoting sociopaths above their ability to function.
In this half we will re-examine the death of JFK, not just as a simple assassination, but as an act of psychic-warfare on the general populace, and explore the long-lasting effect on the American psyche.
A Nation of Hamlets
We’ve all become Hamlets in our country, children of a slain father-leader whose killers still possess the throne. The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American Dream.”Jim Garrison – JFK
The death of Kennedy is a story that won’t go away, a splinter at the back of the American mind. Driving them mad. If a country can be compared to an individual, then a fallen king can be a dead parent. A father lost before his time. An adolescent trauma, rotting and unconfronted and repressed. Informing every moment, every decision.
The JFK obsession has been dismissed by some as nothing more than a cult of personality, a trite fetishising of the too-soon-departed, equivalent to the worship of Jim Morrison or Marilyn Monroe. But I see it as going deeper than that, somewhere behind the glitz and glamour of “Camelot” there was something more substantial. An idea. “And ideas are bullet proof”.
That, perhaps, explains the cultural push back against both investigation of the Kennedy assassination, and praise of his presidency. The man was killed over five decades ago, but the political establishment still feel the need to assassinate him. Over and over again.
He is portrayed as naive and arrogant for ignoring “experts” and getting involved in Vietnam. A spoilt rich kid whose father bought the election. A womanizing drug addict.
In this Guardian article, for example, published earlier this year to mark the centenary, the author makes reference to Kennedy’s extra-marital affairs, and criticises him for his “secret medical conditions” as if they are somehow relevant to his politics. The final two paragraphs are then given over to Kissinger’s biographer who proceeds to compare Kennedy, unfavourably, to Donald Trump:
The realities of the Kennedy White House are so extraordinarily scuzzy that Trump is a kind of saintly figure by contrast.”
For years now, from both sides of the right-left paradigm, there has been a steady effort to “fight back” against the “sanctified” picture of JFK. That particular charge has been led by Noam Chomsky, who is keen to paint JFK as just another politician. “Worse than Obama”, he says in this interview.
It’s obviously true that the election of Kennedy didn’t instantly and completely halt any and all military and covert operations, the world didn’t become a Coca Cola advert on January 20th 1961. But to lay that at the feet of the new President, when he was in the process of taking control of a highly secretive framework of machinery designed to promote war and chaos, and compartmentalise information, is disingenuous at best.
Yes, the Bay of Pigs invasion was a disaster – one that Kennedy is routinely blamed for – but that was planned under Eisenhower (even Chomsky admits that). Kennedy’s reticence to turn it into a full-scale war – which the military repeatedly pressured him to do – led to him being labeled “soft on communism”. He beheaded the CIA afterwards, forcing the resignation of Allen Dulles and several others.
And yes, the irresponsible and provocative placing of Jupiter missiles in Turkey led to the Cuban Missile Crisis – but it was Kennedy’s readiness to make a deal that prevented a near-miss from blooming into a mushroom cloud. One wonders how many modern presidents would have resolved that situation peacefully.
And, finally, yes, his administration carried on the Eisenhower era policies of arming the south Vietnamese – but Kennedy was committed to ending that support and to pulling out of Vietnam. This is an established fact. But for his assassination, there would have been no Vietnam war.
As an argument, the idea that Kennedy was nothing more than a proto-Obama, a smiling salesman in an expensive suit, would perhaps carry more weight if he hadn’t been murdered in public. Generally speaking, you don’t need to execute mascots and frontmen.
We are being asked to live in an insane world – one where we are expected to believe that the most influential act of political murder of the last 100 years happened for no reason at all. Kennedy wasn’t important. Kennedy didn’t stand for anything. Kennedy died for no reason.
The massive divergence between the established, allowable consensus and genuine weight of public opinion has driven a wedge into the American psyche. The Jungian collective mind is schizophrenic in America, driven insane by mass-cognitive dissonance. Every poll of the American people ever done on this topic, dating back to November 29th 1963, only a week after the shooting, has shown a clear majority believe in a conspiracy to kill their president. Public support for the “Lone Gunmen” theory has never surveyed at better than 30%.
Less than one in three people have ever believed the official narrative, but is that reality reflected in the media? Never. Films and documentaries and TV productions (with one noteworthy exception) routinely portray the assassination in the absurd terms laid down by the Warren commission. Attempting to undermine, straw-man or completely ignore any other interpretations.
Whether you view the President as the father of the nation, or the concept of democracy as the father of America, the US citizenry are reduced to a nation of Hamlets. Forced to watch their father die and his killer usurp the power that should, by right, be passed to them.
Cursed with the certain knowledge that their country is poisoned, their society sick. They try to pursue the truth, but are told by every voice they consider authority… that they are mad. To let it go.
Our heroes are stamped out before our eyes, and their ghosts cry out for justice we cannot provide. We want to act, but are deprived of the kind leadership that can coalesce angry people into a movement with direction and purpose. The media muddy the water and sow discord, whilst any voice that tries to rise above the din of distraction, to make us whole and just, is shut out. Locked up. Gunned down.
Of All Sad Words…
Here we are. Lyndon Johnson, more of the same. Nobody voted for him… It felt for a second like everything was about to change. Pete Campbell – Mad Men
The public execution of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is a watershed moment in the history, not just of America, but the world. Possibly the key moment of the entire 20th century. From that violent wellspring flowed Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
America, the ideal America described in the constitution, died on November 22nd 1963. It’s important to remember: Thing’s could have been so different.
At its heart, the American system of government is one of the fairest ever devised by man, the US Constitution one of most fair-minded and important pieces of legislation ever drafted. But from its founding as a nation America has been in a near-constant state of internal struggle. In the early days it was Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Democratic-Republicans vs Federalists. The push of central government against the rights of individual states. The idea of a stable cooperative vs the push to nationhood and, inevitably, empire. That same struggle exists in Europe today.
Slowly but surely, over the first two-hundred years of American existence, the ideals of the constitution were knocked-back, limited, qualified, in the push for more centralised power and the building of an Empire. States were forced through military might to stay in the Union against their will. It became America’s “manifest destiny” to commit genocide against Native Americans and steal their land.
Over time the American Imperialists fermented into what we call the Deep State. Interconnected families of enormous wealth and immeasurable economic influence, given complete monetary control after the founding of the Federal Reserve, and handed the reins of military and political power when Harry Truman signed the order that established the CIA. Truman declared, later in life:
I think [the creation of the CIA] was a mistake. And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it… Why, they’ve got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I’ve told you, one Pentagon is one too many.
In the decade following that order the CIA backed anti-democratic coups in Guatemala, Iran, and the Congo. Resulting in decades of oppression and millions of deaths. It set a pattern that would repeat right up to the present day.
This gluttonous pursuit of wealth and power was only ever held in check by constitutional safe-guards against out-right tyranny. A rivalry personified in the clash between Kennedy’s administration and the giants of the American intelligence community, Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. Kennedy’s assassination ended that rivalry, and ever since that day the barely controlled Imperialist drive has run rampant.
Consider everything that might have been different if the Kennedy side had won that struggle, if he had made good his alleged threat to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces”.
Firstly, and most obviously, there is Vietnam. The war that drove America mad. The prototype for all American “interventions” since, a war started on an absurd lie, fought brutally and inefficiently by a system more interested in selling helicopters than saving lives. From Vietnam flows Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Grenada, Iraq, the Balkans, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya and Syria. Five decades of Orwellian, perpetual warfare. Millions of lives destroyed. All started by that first domino, Vietnam.
Outside of overt warfare, there are covert actions. A tamed intelligence service could never have launched military coups in Ecuador, Brazil, Greece, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Chile and Haiti. Without illegal and punitive sanctions, who knows how countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Libya would have fared.
Who knows what men like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have achieved, if an emboldened and all-powerful intelligence community hadn’t gunned them down before our eyes.
We’ll never know exactly what kind of world was taken from us all the day American democracy was destroyed and a coup government installed. It may have been not much better than this one, but how much worse could it be?
An Assault on the Public Mind
Power resides where men believe it resides; it’s a trick, a shadow on the wall, and a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” Varys – Game of Thrones
You will have realised by now that, when I discuss the JFK assassination, I talk about it as a deep-state operation. A conspiracy. To me that is the only rational reading of the evidence, and I have thought so ever since, aged 12, I first watched Oliver Stone’s fantastic film JFK. The evidence all points in one direction, a CIA-sponsored operation using an intelligence operative as a fall guy, who is then “liquidated” before his trial. To cling to the official story has been insane ever since Arlen Specter proposed the insulting “magic bullet theory”.
Far more interesting, and perhaps important, than the who and how of the case, is the why.
Let’s revisit JFK through the lens of a declining Empire, run entirely by psychopaths. Psychopaths, not just on an individual, but an institutional level. Battling alphabet agencies competing over influence, all placed under threat by Kennedy’s alleged desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds”, can become united in a need to remove said threat, and re-assert their authority.
In that light, the assassination of JFK can be seen as more than the political removal of an inconvenient man. If JFK represented, as he certainly has come to represent since his death, hope for a better society, then what does it say to society at large to blow his brains out in a public square?
There are much easier ways to remove a “difficult” politician than killing him. It’s far better to bring him to heel through pressure, or to buy him with bribes and favours. You can blackmail him with dirt or release the dirt and impeach him, as was done with Clinton. If he doesn’t respond to bribes, and has no dirt to dish, then you can bring pressure on his party to keep him from being nominated, as was done with Henry Wallace in the 1940s. You can fix primaries, as was done with Bernie Sanders only last year.
You can perform “soft coups”, hamstringing an administration with bureaucratic resistance whilst leaking sensitive material to a cooperative media – undermining the authority and credibility of the executive branch until it has no choice but to resign. As they did with Nixon and are attempting to do with Trump. The Falklands War and the Iran hostage situation were both used to secure public support for the “approved” candidates just before and after important elections. The 2000 and 2004 elections were outright fixed.
The deep state has evolved a long list of tactics for controlling who wears the public face of power. Assassinations are at the very bottom of this list. They are hard to do, difficult to cover up, and so damn final. That there is a general institutional reluctance to utilise assassination as a tool, not on moral but pragmatic grounds, is a logical conclusion based on the rarity of political assassinations in general.
Do not forget that JFK was killed in November ’63, he lad less a year of his first term left. Unseating him in 1964 would have been difficult, but doubtless easier than covering up a CIA-backed assassination for the next 54 years (and counting).
So why was he killed?
You can reason that his removal was a strong reaction, an almost reflexive autonomic rejection, of what the system deemed a strong, and immediate, threat. That he was, through whatever circumstances, immune to threats, unresponsive to pressure and impossible to bribe. That being the case, death becomes the only recourse.
This reasoning might explain the act, but not the method.
Generally speaking, murders aren’t committed in public. If murder becomes a practical solution to a political problem, there are far simpler means to that end than guns. Kennedy could fall down the stairs of the White House. His car could explode. His plane could crash. He was on pain meds for his back, an accidental overdose or “complication” would be easy enough to arrange. There would be dozens of times a week when the president was alone but for his security detail… anything can happen.
You could do whatever you wanted to the man in private, behind closed doors, then make up any story you wanted and beam it out on every channel. A horrible accident. A national tragedy. Now let’s invade Vietnam.
If your goal is simply his death, there’s a massive spectrum of possibilities available to you. Most of them offering a higher degree of secrecy than a rifle, all them requiring a smaller number of personnel.
There’s only one interpretation that fully explains all of this. One that lays open the thought process of the deep-state:
The man must be killed for questioning your authority, but he must also be SEEN to be killed, to reinforce that authority. It can be argued that the assassination was as much a message to the world as anything else. A public execution displays contempt for the victim, and conveys raw power to the witnesses.
Jesus, before his post-mortem PR team ret-conned him into a literal God, was an anti-Imperial rabble-rouser. A political revolutionary nailed to a tree to quieten talk of rebellion.
Power is an ephemeral concept, bestowed by the vast majority on to a tiny minority entirely through the process of belief. The only way to win power is to convince people you already have it. That is most easily done through displays of brutality and the nurturing of public fear. As medieval monarchs would mount heads on spikes, so do our new rulers terrorise us with the public execution of our chosen leaders.
Behold the head of a traitor, flying back and to the left.
Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has published two exclusives whose import is far greater than may be immediately apparent. They concern Israel’s bombing in 2007 of a supposed nuclear plant secretly built, according to a self-serving US and Israeli narrative, by Syrian leader Bashar Assad.
Although the attack on the “nuclear reactor” occurred a decade ago, there are pressing lessons to be learnt for those analysing current events in Syria.
Porter’s research indicates very strongly that the building that was bombed could not have been a nuclear reactor – and that was clear to experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) even as the story was being promoted uncritically across the western media.
But – and this is the critical information Porter conveys – the IAEA failed to disclose the fact that it was certain the building was not a nuclear plant, allowing the fabricated narrative to be spread unchallenged. It abandoned science to bow instead to political expediency.
The promotion of the bogus story of a nuclear reactor by Israel and key figures in the Bush administration was designed to provide the pretext for an attack on Assad. That, it was hoped, would bring an end to his presidency and drag into the fray the main target – Iran. The Syrian “nuclear reactor” was supposed to be a re-run of the WMD deception, used in 2003 to oust another enemy of the US and Israel’s – Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
It is noteworthy that the fabricated evidence for a nuclear reactor occurred in 2007, a year after Israel’s failure to defeat Hizbullah in Lebanon. The 2006 Lebanon war was itself intended to spread to Syria and lead to Assad’s overthrow, as I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.
It is important to remember that this Israeli-neocon plot against Syria long predated – in fact, in many ways prefigured – the civil war in 2011 that quickly morphed into a proxy war in which the US became a key, if mostly covert, actor.
The left’s Witchfinder General
The relevance of the nuclear reactor deception can be understood in relation to the latest efforts by Guardian columnist George Monbiot (and many others) to discredit prominent figures on the left, including Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, for their caution in making assessments of much more recent events in Syria. Monbiot has attacked them for not joining him in simply assuming that Assad was responsible for a sarin gas attack last April on Khan Sheikhoun, an al-Qaeda stronghold in Idlib province.
Understandably, many on the left have been instinctively wary of rushing to judgment about individual incidents in the Syrian war, and the narratives presented in the western media. The claim that Assad’s government used chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun, and earlier in Ghouta, was an obvious boon to those who have spent more than a decade trying to achieve regime change in Syria.
In what has become an ugly habit with Monbiot, and one I have noted before, he has enthusiastically adopted the role of Witchfinder General. Any questioning of evidence, scepticism or simply signs of open-mindedness are enough apparently to justify accusations that one is an Assadist or conspiracy theorist. Giving house room to the doubts of a ballistics expert like Ted Postol of MIT, or an experienced international arms expert like Scott Ritter, or a famous investigative journalist like Seymour Hersh, or a former CIA analyst like Ray McGovern, is apparently proof that one is an atrocity denier or worse.
Inconvenient facts buried
Monbiot’s latest attack was launched at a moment when he obviously felt he was on solid ground. A UN agency, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), issued a report last month concluding that the 100 people killed and 200 injured in Khan Sheikhoun last April were exposed to sarin. Monbiot argues that the proof is now incontrovertible that Assad was responsible – a position that he, of course, adopted at the outset – and that all other theories have now been decisively discounted by the OPCW.
There are reasons to think that Monbiot is seriously misrepresenting the strength of the OPCW’s findings, as several commentators have observed. Most notably, Robert Parry, another leading investigative journalist, points out that evidence in the report’s annex – the place where inconvenient facts are often buried – appears to blow a large hole in the official story.
Parry notes that the time recorded by the UN of the photo of the chemical weapons attack is more than half an hour *after* some 100 victims had already been admitted to five different hospitals, some of them lengthy drives from the alleged impact site.
But potentially more significant than such troubling inconsistencies are the conclusions of Gareth Porter’s separate investigation into Israel’s bombing of the non-existent Syrian nuclear reactor. That gets to the heart of where Monbiot and many others have gone badly wrong in their certainty about events in Syria.
Extreme naivety
Monbiot has been only too willing to promote as indisputable fact claims made both by highly compromised and unreliable western sources and by supposedly reputable and independent organisations, such as international human rights groups and UN agencies. He, like many others, assumes that the latter can always be relied upon to stand apart from western interests and can therefore be implicitly trusted.
That indicates an extreme naivety or possibly the lack of any experience covering on the ground highly charged conflicts in which western interests are paramount.
I have been based in Israel for nearly two decades and have on several occasions taken to task Human Rights Watch (HRW), one of the world’s most esteemed human rights organisations. I have shown that assessments it has made were patently not rooted in evidence or even credible interpretations of international law but in geopolitical considerations. That was especially true in the case of the month-long fighting between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006. (See here and here.) My concerns about HRW’s work, I later learnt from insiders, were shared in its New York head office, but were silenced by the organisation’s most senior staff.
Nuclear plant deception
But Porter helps shine a light on how even the most reputable international agencies can end up similarly following a script written in Washington and one that rides roughshod over evidence, especially when the interests of the world’s only superpower are at stake. In this case, the deceptions were perpetuated by one of the world’s leading scientific organisations: the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors states’ nuclear activities.
Porter reveals that Yousry Abushady, the IAEA’s foremost expert on North Korean nuclear reactors, was able immediately to discount the aerial photographic evidence that the building Israel bombed in 2007 was a nuclear reactor. (Most likely it was a disused missile storage depot.)
The Syrian “nuclear plant”, he noted, could not have been built using North Korean know-how, as was claimed by the US. It lacked all the main features of a North Korean gas-cooled reactor. The photos produced by the Israelis showed a building that, among other things, covered too small an area and was not anywhere near high enough, it had none of the necessary supporting structures, and there was no cooling tower.
Abushady’s assessment was buried by the IAEA, which preferred to let the CIA and the Israelis promote their narrative unchallenged.
Atomic agency’s silence
This was not a one-off failure. In summer 2008, the IAEA visited the area to collect samples. Had the site been a nuclear plant, they could have expected to find nuclear-grade graphite particles everywhere. They found none.
Nonetheless, the IAEA again perpetrated a deception to try to prop up the fictitious US-Israeli narrative.
As was routine, they sent the samples to a variety of laboratories for analysis. None found evidence of any nuclear contamination – apart from one. It identified particles of man-made uranium. The IAEA issued a report giving prominence to this anomalous sample, even though in doing so it violated its own protocols, reports Parry. It could draw such a conclusion only if the results of all the samples matched.
In fact, as one of the three IAEA inspectors who had been present at the site later reported, the sample of uranium did not come from the plant itself, which was clean, but from a changing room nearby. A former IAEA senior inspector, Robert Kelley, told Parry that a “very likely explanation” was that the uranium particles derived from “cross contamination” from clothing worn by the inspectors. This is a problem that had been previously noted by the IAEA in other contexts.
Meanwhile, the IAEA remained silent about its failure to find nuclear-grade graphite in a further nine reports over two years. It referred to this critical issue for the first time in 2011.
Chance for war with Iran
In other words, the IAEA knowingly conspired in a fictitious, entirely non-scientific assessment of the Syrian “nuclear reactor” story, one that neatly served US-Israeli geopolitical interests.
Porter notes that vice-president Dick Cheney “hoped to use the alleged reactor to get President George W Bush to initiate US airstrikes in Syria in the hope of shaking the Syrian-Iranian alliance”.
In fact, Cheney wanted far more sites in Syria hit than the bogus nuclear plant. In his memoirs, the then-secretary of defence, Robert Gates, observed that Cheney was “looking for an opportunity to provoke a war with Iran”.
The Bush administration wanted to find a way to unseat Assad, crush Hizbullah in Lebanon, and isolate and weaken Iran as a way to destroy the so-called “Shia crescent”.
That goal is being actively pursued again by the US today, with Israel and Saudi Arabia leading the way. A former US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, recently warned that, after their failure to bring down Assad, the Saudis have been trying to switch battlefields to Lebanon, hoping to foment a confrontation between Israel and Hizbullah that would drag in Iran.
Abandoning science
Back in 2007, the IAEA, an agency of scientists, did its bit to assist – or at least not obstruct – US efforts to foster a political case, an entirely unjustified one, for military action against Syria and, very possibly by extension, Iran.
If the IAEA could so abandon its remit and the cause of science to help play politics on behalf of the US, what leads Monbiot to assume that the OPCW, an even more politicised body, is doing any better today?
That is not to say Assad, or at least sections of the Syrian government, could not have carried out the attack on Khan Sheikhoun. But it is to argue that in a matter like this one, where so much is at stake, the evidence must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny, and that critics, especially experts who offer counter-evidence, must be given a fair hearing by the left. It is to argue that, when the case against Assad fits so neatly a long-standing and self-serving western narrative, a default position of scepticism is fully justified. It is to argue that facts, strong as they may seem, can be manipulated even by expert bodies, and therefore due weight needs also to be given to context – including an assessment of motives.
This is not “denialism”, as Monbiot claims. It is a rational strategy adopted by those who object to being railroaded once again – as they were in Iraq and Libya – into catastrophic regime change operations.
Meanwhile, the decision by Monbiot and others to bury their heads in the sands of an official narrative, all the while denouncing anyone who seeks to lift theirs out for a better view, should be understood for what it is: an abnegation of intellectual and moral responsibility for those around the globe who continue to be the victims of western military supremacism.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced that his company will ‘de-rank’ RT’s articles online, calling them propaganda. Is he concerned for the integrity of news, or are his motives more partisan?
The 62-year-old, with an estimated wealth of $11.1 billion, has never hidden his political leanings, jumping straight into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign long before she officially announced her candidacy. In one of John Podesta’s leaked emails, the long-time Clinton confidant and chairman of her presidential campaign told her soon-to-be campaign manager Robby Mook that he had met with Schmidt in April 2014, more than a year before Clinton told the American public that she was hoping to become their next president.
“I met with Eric Schmidt tonight… He’s ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn’t seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going. He’s still in DC tomorrow and would like to meet with you if you are in DC in the afternoon. I think it’s worth doing…” Podesta wrote in the email, which was published by WikiLeaks last October.
Another email, written two weeks later, showed Schmidt sharing his campaign ideas with Clinton aide Cheryl Mills. “Let’s assume a total budget of about $1.5 billion, with more than 5,000 paid employees and million(s) of volunteers,” he said.
He went on to brainstorm ideas on how to utilize technology in the campaign. It wasn’t long before The Groundwork, founded by analysts and engineers who worked on Barack Obama’s campaign and funded by Schmidt, became Clinton’s top technology provider. The Groundwork was housed in an office just a few blocks away from Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, New York.
Schmidt continued to advise Clinton on digital matters throughout the campaign.
“Eric recognizes how the technology he’s been building his whole career can be applied to different spaces. The idea of tech as a force multiplier is something he deeply understands,” The Groundwork’s Michael Slaby told Quartz in 2015.
Then there was campaign night, when a photo forwarded to Politico showed a smiling Schmidt at Clinton’s election headquarters, complete with a “staff” badge.
Schmidt’s efforts to get Clinton elected, along with Google’s overall efforts to do the same, were addressed in a November 2016 report by the Campaign for Accountability ‒ a non-partisan, non-profit organization that aims to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life ‒ and its Google Transparency Project. The document concluded that “Google executives and employees bet heavily on a Clinton victory, hoping to extend the company’s influence on the White House.” It added that “had she won the election, Clinton would have been significantly indebted to Google and Schmidt, whom she referred to as her ‘longtime friend.'”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange also brought up the relationship between Schmidt and the US establishment in his 2014 book, ‘When Google Met WikiLeaks.’ He describes a 2011 encounter with Schmidt in Norfolk, UK, where Assange was under house arrest at the time.
“I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers ‘fireside chats’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos,” Assange wrote. “Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s ‘foreign minister’ – making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines – had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.”
Same thing, different candidate
Schmidt’s political leanings became clear in the early days of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. He publicly endorsed Obama, tellingThe Wall Street Journal in October 2008 that he was “doing this personally,” as Google was “officially neutral” in the election. He also served as an informal adviser to Obama’s campaign.
Schmidt also donated $5,000, the maximum allowed by law, to Obama’s 2008 campaign, according to US media reports that cited a now-deleted official list of donors. Schmidt’s close relationship with Obama didn’t end when the Democratic candidate was elected. Schmidt chaired the board of public policy think tank New America Foundation, working closely with Obama as a member of his Transition Economic Advisory Board. Later, Schmidt claimed a seat on Obama’s new Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The two became so close that the Consumer Watchdog sent a letter to the White House demanding that Obama distance himself from Google, and stop inviting Schmidt to fancy galas in Washington, DC. The group pointed out that Schmidt, and then-Google Vice President Marissa Mayer, were invited to a state dinner despite the company being under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice over allegations that it profited from selling online ads to illegal pharmacies.
“Executives of companies under federal criminal investigation should not be invited while a major case is pending. Allowing such executives to hobnob at a gala White House event inevitably sends a message that the Administration supports them and undercuts the ability of federal investigators to proceed with their case in a fair and unbiased way,” reads the letter, dated June 23, 2011.
Schmidt also supported Obama’s 2012 campaign, helping to recruit talent, deciding on technology, as well as mentoring campaign manager, Jim Messina. He was present in the Chicago, Illinois boiler room on election night. The Google executive was apparently so impressed by Obama’s campaign staff that he invested in several start-ups founded by the analysts and engineers who worked on it, one of those being The Groundwork.
Schmidt’s announcement to ‘de-rank’ RT’s articles comes despite Google’s own investigation saying it found no manipulation of its platform or policy violations by RT. There may be more ground to question Schmidt’s integrity than that of RT – but that’s highly unlikely to happen in today’s climate, because Google is not a Russian company.
Just a few days ago RTAmerica was forced to register as a foreign agent in the United States. Using this designation as justification, Twitter and Facebook have now banned RT and Sputnik from advertising on their services. This is all over alleged Russian “interference” in the 2016 Presidential Election, for which there is still not a single piece of clear evidence.
This is the United States of America, where freedom of the press is literally one of the founding principles of the nation. They celebrate their freedom every time they’re forced to stand through their national anthem.
What would the press reaction have been if Russia had forced the BBC, for example, to register as a foreign agent?
In fact, how many American or European media outlets have ever been forced to register as foreign agents in “autocratic” Russia where Putin has allegedly “shut down the free press”?
Zero.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has operated in Russia and Eastern Europe for nearly 70 years. It’s an American destabilization programme. That’s not a “conspiracy theory”. It is acknowledged in the public record that RFE/RL was established by the State Dept. and the CIA in order to spread American propaganda behind the Iron Curtain. They have never been barred from operating in Russia.
Now, imagine it was on the public record that the FSB had founded RT. Imagine it was written into Sputnik’s mission statement that their job was to undermine the American government. Would they have been allowed to broadcast in the US? Would they have come anywhere NEAR 68 years of operation?
Look at the Moscow Times, a notionally Russian paper that is owned by a Finnish conglomerate and prints exclusively in English. It is routinely, even pathologically, critical of the Russian government. Would this situation ever be allowed to stand in reverse? If there were a newspaper calling itself The London Times, which was owned by a Venezuelan and printed nothing but anti-government stories, exclusively in Russian…would it be allowed to operate? Would people cite it as a decent source of information?
Look at CNN, where Anderson Cooper – ex-CIA “intern” – solemnly nods his way through autocues full of baseless propaganda. Repeating, verbatim, the statements of nameless “intelligence sources”, without analysis or question. Can you imagine if RT’s headline reporter had worked for the KGB? Luke Harding would have written a (very bad) book about it by now. Can you imagine if RT’s news crews had been caught, numerous times, literally faking news footage (severaltimes)?
These double standards are never addressed or acknowledged in the “free press” of NATO aligned nations.
Radio Free Europe has a story covering Russia’s “tit-for-tat” sanctions on US media outlets. It is hilariously without irony.
They interview the American ambassador to Russia – Jon Huntsman – who says, with a straight face:
We just think the principles of free media in any free society and democracy are absolutely critical for strength and well-being…Freedom of speech is a part of that. That’s why we in the embassy care about the issue. That’s why we’re going to follow the work that is going on in the Duma and the legislation that is being drafted very, very carefully. Because we’re concerned about it.”
He defends America’s stance on RT, whilst attacking Russia’s counter moves, claiming America is sanctioning RT in the name of “transparency” and that:
That’s far different from designating somebody a foreign agent
The US Ambassador to Russia, apparently, needs some help keeping up with current events because “designating somebody a foreign agent” is exactly what the US government has done. For some reason the (funded by the CIA) editorial staff of RFE/RL don’t feel the need to correct him. Even though their headline from three days earlier completely contradicts him.
Apparently journalistic standards are only for other people. And state censorship of the media, like all other crimes against humanity, is OK when America does it.
The long wait appears to be coming to an end on Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal”, one supposedly capable of unlocking the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.
The United States peace initiative may be unveiled as soon as January, marking the first anniversary of Mr Trump’s arrival in office. Other reports suggest it may be delayed until March. But all seem sure it will be upon us soon.
Neither Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, appear keen to enter another round of fruitless dialogue.
But for good reason, Mr Abbas is far more reticent.
This month, in statements presumably directed at Washington, he insisted he would not agree to a Palestinian state without Gaza, or one restricted to Gaza. He also warned again that, in the absence of a two-state solution, Israel would face demands from Palestinians for equal rights in one state.
That was presumably the context for Mr Abbas being called to Riyadh earlier this month, doubtless after the White House urged Saudi Arabia use its leverage with the Palestinian leader to bring him onside. According to Palestinian sources cited by Israeli reporter Ben Caspit, Mr Abbas was told in no uncertain terms that he had to respond positively to the coming peace initiative.
Strong-arming Mr Abbas was doubtless also the motive behind US threats at the weekend to shut down what is effectively the Palestinians’ embassy in Washington – unless the Palestinian leader agrees to peace talks.
Outrage from Palestinian officials, who referred to the White House move as “extortion”, was an indication of their mounting exasperation.
Given that Mr Abbas is invested exclusively in diplomacy, his resistance to this round of US-led peacemaking should serve as warning enough of how bad a Trump peace is likely to prove.
At the weekend Israeli media offered the first substantive clues of what might be on offer.
The headline news is not entirely bad – so long as one ignores the small print. Most significantly, if reports are accurate – and Washington and Israel claim they are not – the US is said to be ready to recognise a Palestinian state.
It is a move characterised by the kind of bullishness that is Mr Trump’s trademark and has left Mr Netanyahu anxious. But everything else should reassure him.
The US will apparently agree that no one will be forcibly moved from their home. That may prove the answer to Israel’s prayers. It will finally have US blessing for all its illegal settlements, which have eaten into the bulk of the West Bank, turning it into a patchwork of Palestinian enclaves.
After five decades of Israel clearing most of the Palestinian population from the same area, penning them up in cities, the reported Trump deal will offer no restitution.
The most intractable issue, Jerusalem, will supposedly be kept off the table for now. But reports say Israel will be allowed to continue its military chokehold on the large agricultural spine of the West Bank, the Jordan Valley.
Everything else will be up for grabs – or as a US official noted, its role would be “not to impose anything” on the two parties. In practice, that means the strongest side, Israel, can impose its will by force.
All of this indicates that the “state” the US recognises will be a demilitarised archipelago of mini-Palestines. This Trumpian version of statehood could be the weirdest one ever conceived.
That should not surprise us. At a meeting in London this month to mark 100 years since the signing of the Balfour Declaration, Mr Netanyahu suggested that the Palestinians were an example of a people unsuited to “sovereignty”.
It is striking how little the prospect of a Trump peace process has ruffled the feathers of Israel’s far-right government.
That is in part because they have put in place measures to tie Mr Netanyahu’s hand. He is precluded from negotiating with a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, and he would have to refer any peace proposal to a referendum. And if he tests his colleagues’ loyalty too far, they can always bring down the coalition.
But their best hope is that the Trump deal will be so outrageously divorced from reality that Mr Abbas could never sign up to it, even if Washington secures Arab money to pay for its implementation.
The biggest danger may turn out to be the US president himself. Previous efforts at peacemaking, however skewed to Israeli interests, were at least premised on reaching a consensual agreement.
It is in Mr Trump’s nature to bargain ruthlessly and then cut a quick deal. In this environment, something has to give.
In one scenario, that could be the US president’s interest in solving the Israel-Palestine issue. But it could also be Mr Abbas and his increasingly authoritarian Palestinian Authority.
Forced into the corner by a bull-headed Trump administration, Mr Abbas may be faced with a hard choice: either he agrees to a series of non-viable statelets under Israel’s thumb, or he steps down and dismantles the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting.
In these circumstances, bringing down the house of cards that is the Palestinian Authority may be the best option, even if it delights many in Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet. It will leave a void, and one to be filled by a new generation of Palestinians no longer distracted by empty promises of statehood.
Yesterday, media reported that the Indian Ministry of Defense scrapped the $500M deal with Israeli arms manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for its missile systems. Years in the making, the deal had been celebrated in international media and was finalized after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel in July. In August, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and its Indian partner Kalyani Strategic Systems opened a facility in Hyderabad to manufacture the missile systems.
The deal was cancelled after India’s state-run Defense Research Development Organisation asserted that India should not import this Israeli technology.
Jamal Juma’, coordinator of the Palestinian Stop the Wall Campaign and BNC secretariat member said:
India’s decision to scrap this massive arms deal with Israel is a huge blow to the Israeli weapons industry. This $500 million deal would have fueled Israel’s military industry, which is deeply implicated in war crimes against the Palestinian people.
It is also a major setback for Israel’s propaganda hubris that its technology is indispensable for India’s development and modernization. As many Indians are recognizing, Israel is marketing military and agricultural technologies in India and trying to cement Indian dependence on Israel.
Israel seeks a flow of Indian cash for it’s own profit and to help finance its criminal wars and apartheid regime.
India is by far the globe’s biggest importer of Israeli weapons, and Israel is enjoying almost unparalleled influence in the Indian military system. Israel is equipping the Indian army with Israeli guns, the Indian airforce and navy with Israeli airplanes and missiles, and is also providing communication systems and technology in all levels of the Indian military.
Over the last two decades, Indo-Israeli military relations have continuously increased despite various corruption scandals and technical failures.
Similar patterns have started to surface in other sectors as well. India’s 16 million-strong farmer’s union AIKS has endorsed the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) “in order to stand for the rights of the Palestinian people and to resist the corporate takeover of Indian agriculture sector by Israeli companies.”
Members of Telengana’s state assembly last week denounced state-sponsored trips of Indian farmers to Israel as “a wastage of money.”
Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BNC said:
We hope this is the beginning of the end of Indian complicity in Israel’s egregious violation of international law and Palestinian human rights. As Palestinians we ask the Indian people to maintain their proud legacy of commitment to independence, to growing local knowledge and to respecting other people’s struggles for self-determination.
Israel’s regime of oppression can never be a model for the great Indian nation that once led the non-aligned movement and upheld the right of all nations to self determination and freedom. Israel exports to India what it knows best — technology that represses, militarizes and dispossesses people of their land and water rights. India is better off without that.
Last week it was announced that Indian Oil and Natural Gas Corporations are bidding for drilling rights in gas fields claimed by Israel, despite the many controversies linked to territorial disputes in such fields. In August, India’s Adventz group signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop Israel’s Jerusalem Light Rail, which serves Israel’s settlements in and around occupied East Jerusalem in violation of international law.
Omar Barghouti said:
As large multinationals increasingly abandon their illegal projects in Israel due to effective BDS pressure, Israel has started dragging India into deals fraught with legal and political problems. Indian companies would be well advised to avoid getting sucked into Israel’s human rights violations as more and more international corporations refuse to get involved in such complicity.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.
Seeking recognition of Palestine has been one of the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic strategies which lose significance when juxtaposed against Mahmoud Abbas’s collaboration with the Israeli occupation. Behind statements of recognition lies silence and the tacit acceptance of Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land and forced displacement of the indigenous people. Other than the obsolete two-state paradigm, there has been little discussion of what such recognition actually means in practice, or whether it could generate a tangible outcome for Palestinians.
On Monday, during an official visit to Spain, Abbas urged the Spanish parliament to recognise Palestine, “so that Palestine and Israel can live side-by-side in security, stability and good neighbourly relations, which will bring hope in a better future for Palestine and its people who have suffered from historical injustice when they were uprooted from their homeland in the 1948 Nakba and the occupation of the rest of our land in 1967.”
According to Wafa news agency, Abbas also reiterated his support for international impositions, including “efforts by [US] President [Donald] Trump’s administration to achieve a historic peace deal.” Presumably Abbas is referring to the latest wheeze from Washington; according to Haaretz, the US State Department has threatened to shut down the Palestinian diplomatic mission in the country if it does not embark upon negotiations with Israel and instead seeks recourse through the International Criminal Court for Israel’s war crimes. PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat stated that all communication with the US would be halted if such a threat materialises.
However, with an entity that is bolstered by both the US and Israel, continuing or halting diplomatic communication will ultimately continue to reveal the degree of collaboration that is ongoing, with the PA on the bottom rung and through which decisions detrimental to Palestinians continue to be imposed. Whether countries recognise Palestine or not, Israel and the US continue a seamless plan to strip away Palestinians from their land. Clearly, symbolic recognition is neither helping nor hindering Palestine’s diplomatic efforts. It is merely a symbol of the PA purportedly attempting to take a stand for Palestinian rights.
Palestine has become many things, depending upon the interests of the actors involved. Colonialism constituted the first laceration between land and people. For the international community, it has been simplified into a “question” to be debated at regular intervals but never answered. Abbas, on the other hand, has followed the trajectory of exploiting Palestine after allowing Israel to continue its expansion. The ensuing question is, therefore, what recognition is Abbas demanding from governments? If there was no two-state imposition, what would constitute recognition of Palestine?
As things stand, recognition of Palestine upon Abbas’s demand also implies recognition of the PA’s concessions to Israel which have resulted in divesting Palestinians of their land. This is in line with Israel’s colonial ambitions. If Palestine and Palestinians become two separate, isolated entities, there will be no obstacle to expansion, since the international community is in agreement regarding its refusal to take a stand in favour of decolonisation. Perhaps, to complete the PA’s quest for symbolic recognition, some fragments of Palestinian territory will remain for the purpose of creating a symbolic rump Palestinian state that makes a mockery of historic Palestine, all of which rightfully belongs to all Palestinians.
By Rasem Obidat | Al-Quds News | November 20, 2017
Israel’s Channel 2 has revealed the features of the American plan to resolve the Palestinian issue. The essence of the solution is based on Netanyahu’s economic project, a state without a state.
The Palestinian issue and the rights of the Palestinian people are also being addressed by Netanyahu and the American Zionist team in the US administration who are tasked with formulating this plan (Kushner, Greenblatt, Nikki Haley and David Friedman) who have worked in the US President’s office in real estate. Therefore, they look at our cause as a real estate issue that can be resolved with a package of huge economic aid, presented by the Arabs and Gulf sheikhs in order to make the plan a success.
The proposed plan abandons the notion of an independent Palestinian state on the 4 June 1967 borders. Instead, it states that the presence of settlers in the West Bank is legal and any evacuation of these invading settlers who have taken over Palestinian territories is a form of ethnic cleansing, according to Netanyahu. Hence, the plan legitimises the presence of the occupation and permits the confiscation of others’ land by force.
At the same time Netanyahu is stating that evacuating settlers from their settlements built on occupied Palestinian territories is considered ethnic cleansing, he is exercising all forms of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. He plans to expel, evacuate and displace Arab Jahalin Bedouins from the Jabal Al-Baba area, near Al-Eizariya, because these Bedouin communities on the outskirts of Jerusalem prevent the Ma’ale Adumim settlements, which include Mishor Adumim, Kedar and Mitzpe Yeriho, from being linked and annexed to the city of Jerusalem.
Construction in the area known as E1, 12 kilometres northwest of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, would completely isolate the city of Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings and permanently bury the two-state solution. This would separate the northern part of the West Bank from the south and separate its northern and southern parts from its central area. It is a plan to separate and fragment the West Bank.
Netanyahu is well aware of the details and clauses of the American plan expected to be put forward, as the American team preparing the plan is more Zionist than Netanyahu himself. He is the most hostile and denies the rights of the Palestinian people, and therefore, it is not surprising that Netanyahu has described the evacuation of settlers from the occupied territories as a form of ethnic cleansing.
The Zionist American Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, said that Israel has the right to establish settlements anywhere in Jerusalem and the West Bank, on public or private Palestinian land. He even described Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as false claims and alleged occupation.
Therefore, Netanyahu’s proposals align with Friedman, Kushner and Greenblatt’s vision, as well as his expulsion of the Jahalin Bedouins from the areas surrounding Jerusalem. Furthermore, pushing back the Al-Walaja barrier by 2.5 kilometres in order to control the Ain Haniya area, and creating a connection in order to annex settlements south of Jerusalem, the Gush Etzion settlement blocs, and the settlements located east of it to the city, making them under its sovereignty and authority are all part of the American plan. This would make the area of Jerusalem 10 per cent of the West Bank.
This also means pumping 150,000 settlers into Jerusalem and removing 100,000 Jerusalemites from the city, as well as the villages and towns behind the wall, including Kafr Aqab, Shuafat Camp and parts of the village of Sawahra. This plan is proposed by the so-called minister of Ze’ev Elkin in order to ensure a Jewish majority in the city and shifting its demographic reality in favour of the settlers.
Twenty-four years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, we still have not reached a state, as believed by those who signed it. Unfortunately, it has led us to the disastrous situation where the PA is nothing more than a civil administration and local police that has no security or civil control, even in the areas that are supposed to be under complete Palestinian authority, i.e. Area A. The occupation violates and breaches the PA’s areas however and whenever it wants, without referring back to the Oslo Accords, and even considers its actions part of the agreement. In short, our situation is exactly how President Abbas put it at the UN General Assembly 72nd session, “an authority without authority”.
The new “creative” American plan to resolve the Palestinian issue according to the so-called regional framework preserves and legitimises the presence of setters in the West Bank. The plan also has the support, blessing and participation of Arab backers and funders of this plan.
We are well aware, whether or not President Abbas and the Saudi officials denied this, that the purpose of his summons to Riyadh was not to fill him in on the details of the American plan and what is required of the Palestinians according to the plan, but to present the American plan and reveal its temptations and threats.
Saudi Arabia is part of the financing of this plan, and one of its enthusiasts, as it is strongly seeking to normalise and legitimise Arab relations with Israel and integrate it into the region as a natural component. It sees Israel as a “friendly” state and that Iran and its advanced arm in the region, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which Saudi Arabia has classified as a terrorist organisation, is the real threat to the security and stability of the region.
Therefore, Abbas’ approval of the American plan means pumping millions of dollars, perhaps billions, to the PA treasury. Rejecting the plan would mean a financial blockade and the creation of alternatives, and perhaps even America’s failure to renew the permit for the Palestinian representation office in Washington. This is all a part of America and its allies’ policy to pressure the PA to accept the plan.
Just as the disastrous Oslo Accords led us to an authority without authority, the so-called deal of the century will lead us to a state without a state. It will lead us to economic peace, which is Netanyahu’s project, entailing of the exchange of the Palestinian’s legitimate right to freedom and independence for economic projects and bribes that improve the Palestinians’ living situation under occupation. This will be achieved through Arab and international funding, with the occupation’s support and legitimisation.
Therefore, what awaits the Palestinian people is far more dangerous than the Oslo Accords. The “deal of the century” carries with it the complete liquidation of the Palestinian cause, unfortunately with Arab participation and blessing. Therefore, our people and leadership are facing true challenges and risks, requiring those meeting in Cairo today to be highly responsible. They arrange the internal home and our internal front in accordance with unified visions and strategies and a national project based on a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders and guaranteeing the refugees’ right of return, in accordance with UN resolution 194.
Failure and the continued division is not an option for our factions in Cairo, as it would mean disaster, destruction and loss for everyone. What we need is unity and an end to the division, as we are facing enormous dangers and challenges. Are our leaders aware of this?
In a recent talk before Chatham House think-tank in London, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, approached the issue of a Palestinian state from an intellectual perspective.
Before we think of establishing a Palestinian state, he mused, “it is time we reassessed whether the modern model we have of sovereignty, and unfettered sovereignty, is applicable everywhere in the world.”
It is not the first time that Netanyahu discredits the idea of a Palestinian state. Despite clear Israeli intentions of jeopardizing any chances for the creation of such a state, the US Administration of Donald Trump is, reportedly, finalizing plans for an ‘ultimate peace deal’. TheNew York Times suggests that “the anticipated plan will have to be built around the so-called two-state solution.”
But why the wasted effort, while all parties, Americans included know that Israel has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state and the US has no political capital, or desire, to enforce one?
The answer may not lie in the present, but in the past.
A Palestinian Arab state had initially been proposed as a political tactic by the British, to provide a legal cover for the establishment of a Jewish state. It continues to be used as a political tactic, though never with the aim of finding a ‘just solution’ to the conflict, as is often propagated.
When British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, made his promise, in November 1917, to the Zionist movement to grant them a Jewish state in Palestine, the once distant and implausible idea began taking shape. It would have been effortlessly achievable, had the Palestinians not rebelled.
The 1936-1939 Palestinian rebellion revealed an impressive degree of collective political awareness and ability to mobilize, despite British violence.
The British government then dispatched the Peel Commission to Palestine to examine the roots of the violence, hoping to quell the Palestinian revolt.
In July 1937, the commission published its report, which immediately ignited the fury of the native population, who were already aware of the British-Zionist collusion.
The Peel Commission concluded that “underlying causes of the disturbances” were the desire of the Palestinians for independence, and their “hatred and fear of the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Based on that view, it recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, the latter to be incorporated into Transjordan, which was itself under the control of the British.
Palestine, like other Arab countries, was supposedly being primed for independence, under the terms of the British Mandate, as granted by the League of Nations in 1922. Moreover, the Peel Commission was recommending partial independence for Palestine, unlike the full sovereignty granted to the Jewish state.
More alarming was the arbitrary nature of that division. The total Jewish land ownership then did not exceed 5.6 percent of the total size of the country. The Jewish state was to include the most strategic and fertile regions of Palestine, including the Fertile Galilee and much of the water access to the Mediterranean.
Thousands of Palestinians were killed in the rebellion as they continued to reject the prejudicial partition and the British ploy aimed at honoring the Balfour Declaration and rendering Palestinians stateless.
To strengthen its position, the Zionist leadership changed course. In May 1942, David Ben-Gurion, then the representative of the Jewish Agency, attended a New York conference which brought together leading American Zionists. In his speech, he demanded that all of Palestine become a “Jewish Commonwealth.”
A new powerful ally, President Harry Truman, began filling the gap left open, as the British were keen on ending their mandate in Palestine. In ‘Before Their Diaspora,’ Walid Khalidi writes:
“(US President Harry Truman) went a step further in his support of Zionism by endorsing a Jewish Agency plan for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The plan envisaged the incorporation into the Jewish state about 60 percent of Palestine at a time when the Jewish landownership in the country did not exceed 7 percent.”
On November 29, 1947 the UN 33-member state General Assembly, under intense pressure from the US administration of Truman, voted in favor of Resolution 181 (II) calling for the partition of Palestine into three entities: a Jewish state, a Palestinian state and an international regime to govern Jerusalem.
If the British partition proposal of 1937 was bad enough, the UN resolution was a reason for total dismay, as it allocated 5500 square miles to the proposed Jewish state, and only 4500 square miles to Palestinians – who owned 94.2 of the land and represented over two-thirds of the population.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in earnest after the Partition Plan was adopted. In December 1947, organized Zionist attacks on Palestinian areas resulted in the exodus of 75,000 people. In fact, the Palestinian Nakba – Catastrophe – did not begin in 1948, but 1947.
That exodus of the Palestinians was engineered through Plan Dalet, which was implemented in stages and altered to accommodate political necessities. The final stage of that plan, launched in April of 1948, included six major operations. Two of them, Operation Nachshon and Harel, aimed at destroying the Palestinian villages in and around the Jaffa-Jerusalem border. By cutting off the two-main central mass that composed the proposed Palestinian Arab state, the Zionist leadership wanted to break up any possibility of Palestinian geographical cohesion. This continues to be the aim to this day.
The Israeli achievement after the war was hardly guided by the Partition Plan. The disjointed Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem made up 22 percent of the historic size of Palestine.
The rest is painful history. The carrot of the Palestinian state is dangled from time to time, by the very forces that partitioned Palestine 70 years ago, yet worked diligently with Israel to ensure the demise of the political aspirations of the Palestinian people.
Eventually, the partitioned discourse was remolded into that of ‘two-state solution’, championed in recent decades by various US administrations, who exhibited little sincerity of ever making such a state a reality.
And now, 70 years after the partition of Palestine, there is only one state, although governed by two different sets laws, one that privileges Jews and discriminates against Palestinians.
“A single state has already existed for a long time,” wrote Israeli columnist Gideon Levy in a recent Haaretz column. “The time has come to launch a battle over the nature of its regime.”
History shows us that when empires over-extend themselves, military commanders become semi-independent warlords who usher into place systems of graft and corruption. Such was the case in the Roman Empire in 193 A.D., when Emperor Pertinax’s Praetorian Guard – a combination personal security force for the emperor and elite special forces unit that distinguished itself on distant battlefields – sold out the emperor in exchange for a bribe from an aspirant emperor, Didius Julianus. The Praetorian Guard assassinated Pertinax and swore their allegiance to the new emperor, Julianus.
The rot of corruption would help ensure the downfall of other global empires. The fraudulent British East India Company and its corporate nabobs, backed by British military and naval power, helped to ignite colonial rebellions in America in the 1770s and India in 1857.
As the United States has over-extended its military realm into the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, Europe, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, corruption within so-called “Areas of Responsibility” assigned to regional US military commands has run rampant.
Within the US Pacific Command (PACOM) region, a major bribery and fraud scandal centered on a US Navy contractor, Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), headed by Leonard Glenn Francis, a 350-pound Malaysian citizen nicknamed “Fat Leonard.” In return for cash, vacations at five-star hotels, first- and business-class flights, expensive concert tickets, Rolex watches, Mont Blanc pens, Dom Perignon champagne, vintage wine, Cuban cigars, spa treatments, foie gras, $2000 bottles of cognac, and prostitutes, US Navy officers provided Leonard with virtual unfettered access to Navy intelligence and sensitive contract information that was used by GDMA to secure lucrative Navy logistics contracts. The “Fat Leonard” scandal grew to include senior officers, including admirals, attached to the US Seventh Fleet in Japan. The Navy’s investigation is continuing, and more than 60 additional admirals are reportedly under investigation by law enforcement authorities. For years, the Navy scandal extended from Japan to the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sabah, South Korea, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Australia, Sri Lanka, Hawaii, and Washington, DC and involved, in addition to Navy officer and enlisted personnel, Marine Corps officers and US government civilians, including investigators of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).
One of the worst frauds to have arisen from the neo-conservative bowels of the George W. Bush administration was the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). The June 4, 2017, strangling death in Bamako, Mali of US Army Green Beret Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar by two US Navy SEALs is now linked to his discovery that the two Navy personnel were pocketing official funds used by AFRICOM to pay off informants in the West African country. This type of fraud points to a culture of malfeasance present in US area of responsibility commands, including AFRICOM, Central Command (CENTCOM), and Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).
According to reports in The New York Times and The Daily Beast, the death of Melgar at the hands of the two SEAL thieves occurred within a barracks unit within the heavily-fortified US embassy compound in Mali. The SEALS, Petty Officer Anthony DeDolph and Adam C. Matthews, allegedly killed Melgar after he refused an offer to share their ill-gotten loot and shared, via email, his concerns with his wife back in the United States. The SEALS claimed Melgar died after becoming unconscious during a hand-to-hand combat training session. The SEALS also told military investigators that Melgar was drunk when he became unconscious as the result of a chokehold placed on him during the roughhousing. However, the US Special Operations Command and Army Criminal Investigative Command (USACIC) decided the SEALS had changed their stories so many times that they became subjects, rather than witnesses, in the investigation. An autopsy revealed that there were no traces of alcohol or drugs in Melgar’s body at the time of his death. Furthermore, Melgar was reported by friends and family to have been a teetotaler.
AFRICOM and USACIC tried to cover up the details of Melgar’s death until The New York Times originally broke the story about the death last month. USACIC handed off investigation of the case to the NCIS, which is worse than its Army counterpart in covering up sensitive military criminal cases. Neither of the two SEALS, both of whom were transferred back to the United States and were placed on administrative leave, have been charged in the murder of Melgar. It was apparently officers of the US Special Operations Command, which is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, who tipped off the press about the cover-up involving Melgar’s death.
AFRICOM has also been hesitant to provide full details about an ambush of a joint US-Nigerien unit operating near the Niger village of Tongo-Tongo in October of this year. Four US Army personnel were killed by an armed force that remains unidentified by AFRICOM. Tongo-Tongo sits astride a major African smuggling route for humans, drugs, ivory, and weapons between West Africa and the failed state of Libya. It was later reported that the four US soldiers died at the hands of the attackers after their unit’s Nigerien army personnel fled the scene during the attack. The body of one of the American troops, Sgt. La David Johnson, showed signs of being tortured and executed by the unidentified captors.
The case of Melgar is similar to the murder of West Point ethics professor, Army Col. Ted Westhusing in Baghdad in 2005. Like AFRICOM in Mali and other African countries, CENTCOM was entrusted with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash used to pay-off informants and make local purchases on the Iraqi economy.
Westhusing’s family and friends rejected the Army’s determination that Westhusing took his own life. The Army based its decision on a “suicide” note said to be written in Westhusing’s handwriting. At the time of his death, Westhusing was investigating contract violations and human rights abuses by US Investigations Services (USIS), a privatized former entity of the US Office of Personnel Management later purchased by The Carlyle Group, a firm with close links to George H. W. Bush. While he was in Iraq training Iraqi police and overseeing the USIS contract to train police as part of the Pentagon’s Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, Westhusing received an anonymous letter that reported USIS’s Private Services Division (PSD) was engaged in fraudulent activities in Iraq, including over-billing the government. In addition, the letter reported that USIS security personnel had murdered innocent Iraqis. After demanding answers from USIS, Westhusing reported the problems up the chain of command. After an “investigation,” the Army found no evidence of wrongdoing by USIS.
Days before his supposed suicide by a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound in a Camp Dublin, Iraq, trailer located at Baghdad International Airport, West Point Honor Board member Westhusing reported in e-mail to the United States that “terrible things were going on in Iraq.” He also said he hoped he would make it back to the United States alive. Westhusing had three weeks left in his tour of duty in Iraq when he allegedly shot himself in June 2005.
The cover-up of Westhusing’s death involved the same Army Criminal Investigative Command that covered up Melgar’s death in Mali. The murders of Melgar and Westhusing are not stand-alone events regarding US military forays around the world. Army Corporal Pat Tillman, the star National Football League player who enlisted in the Army after 9/11, became disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan. After Tillman’s private feelings about the Afghan war were discovered by senior commanders in his chain-of-command, Tillman was “fragged” by members of his own unit in Khost province on April 22, 2004. Tillman’s diary, uniforms, and other possessions were burned by his unit to cover up his execution by his own colleagues.
On September 4, 2006, Army Lt. Col. Marshall Gutierrez, the chief logistics officer at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, who was investigating over-payments for goods and services and other fraud, supposedly committed suicide in his base quarters after ingesting prescription sleeping pills and anti-freeze. In December 2006, Army Major Gloria Davis, a contracting officer at Camp Arifjan, allegedly committed suicide in Kuwait after she admitted to receiving $225,000 in bribes from Lee Dynamics, an Army logistics contractor. Davis had reportedly agreed to cooperate with government investigators in their overall investigation of contract fraud in Iraq and Kuwait.
In 2007, a senior Blackwater manager threatened to kill Jean C. Richter, the chief US State Department investigator of Blackwater’s dubious operations in Iraq, unless the State Department called off the investigation. The incident occurred as Richter focused on problems with Blackwater’s $1 billion State Department contract. The CEO of Blackwater was Erik Prince, whose sister, Betsy DeVos, now serves as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary. Prince later sold Blackwater, which is now known as Academi. Prince has reportedly been involved in AFRICOM operations in Libya and Somalia via his Reflex Responses (R2) firm, which is based in Abu Dhabi.
The July 2, 2007, “suicide” of Army Lt. Col. Thomas Mooney, the US Defense Attaché in Nicosia, Cyprus, was said to be the result of a “self-inflicted cut to the throat.” Mooney’s body was found next to an embassy vehicle parked in a secluded location, some 30 miles west of Nicosia. He was said to have left the embassy in the embassy’s black Impala Chevrolet to pick up an arriving passenger at Larnaca International Airport. Although the US embassy and State Department ruled Mooney’s death a suicide, the Cypriot police did not agree with those findings but merely pointed out that suicide was illegal in Cyprus. Mooney was, according to our sources, investigating Iraq-related contract fraud involving companies headquartered in Cyprus, some of which were linked to the Israeli Mafia.
AFRICOM and PACOM – just as is the case with CENTCOM, which complements the culture of baksheesh bribery in the Middle East and South Asia – now find themselves mired in the same depths of kleptocratic fraud as is practiced in countries like Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso, where AFRICOM is active. The Fat Leonard scandal and the recent murder of Melgar in Mali are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the malfeasance involved in global US military operations.
When it comes to the US military operating in its overseas locations, the Latin phrase popularized by the Roman poet Juvenal, perhaps wise to the corruption of the Praetorian Guard of his time, comes to mind. “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who watches the watchmen?”
Google is “deciding what people see,” which is “very dangerous” since they are legally a tech company and do not adhere to any type of editorial standards our guidelines, research psychologist Robert Epstein told Sputnik following Google’s announcement that it was working to make Sputnik and RT articles less visible on its search engine.
“It’s not clear Google should be able to exercise editorial control” by deranking Sputnik articles since Google “isn’t accountable to editorial standards,” he said.
“Companies like Google and Facebook play both sides: they pretend to be objective but exercise enormous editorial control” and “censorship” over what mass audiences see, Epstein told Sputnik News.
Epstein, a research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in Vista, California, pioneered research in the “search engine manipulation effect.” The research showed that biased search results presented by Google could influence how undecided voters choose presidential candidates.
“What we’re talking about here is a means of mind control on a massive scale that there is no precedent for in human history,” he said at the time. Research participants spent a much larger percentage of web browsing time visiting search results that were higher up. According to Epstein, biased Google results could have provided an extra 2.6 million votes in support of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race.
His research found that Google’s “autocomplete” function would frequently suggest “little marco” and “lying ted,” two of US President Donald Trump’s preferred pet names during the election, but rarely, if ever, prompted users to search for “crooked hillary” or “corrupt kaine.”
Speaking with Science Magazine last October, Epstein explained, “Google pretends to be the public library, but it isn’t. Public libraries don’t… track people [and] they don’t sell the history of your book borrowing to other companies. They simply help you find stuff. That’s what we need. We need to take Google’s search engine and make it public.”
On Saturday, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told a session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada “We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites — it’s basically RT and Sputnik. We are we trying to engineer the systems to prevent [the content from being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites — that’s not how we operate.”
”Good to have Google on record as defying all logic and reason: facts aren’t allowed if they come from RT, ‘because Russia’ — even if we have Google on Congressional record saying they’ve found no manipulation of their platform or policy violations by RT,” Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Sputnik and RT, said in response to the news.
Google’s announcement that it is working to reduce the presence of Russian media in its news feeds has been slammed by lawmakers and political commentators as an act of aggression which will have a global impact on the freedom of speech and thought.
“This is an open form of information warfare waged right now – a bombardment, a direct aggression” against the Russian news outlets, Andrey Svintsov, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee for Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, told RT. The lawmaker explained that tweaking search results for the news category would cut off the global readership that remains interested in the Russian position on global events, calling it a “powerful blow” to the freedom of speech.
“We as MPs should think about… limiting [the use of] the Google search engine, as well as certain social networks belonging to this holding in Russia,” Svintsov said. Meanwhile, the head of the Russian Upper House Commission for Information Policy, Senator Aleksey Pushkov, also wondered whether Google should be “de-ranked” in Russia in a tit-for-tat response.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said earlier that the company is “trying to engineer the systems” to prevent RT and Sputnik content from reaching wider audiences. RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan criticized the initiative as an arbitrary form of censorship that defies “all logic and reason.”
Google’s initiative will have a direct impact on “freedom of speech and thought” in the US, believes Prof. Dan Kovalik, from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
“It is a form of censorship, and the idea is to lead readers away from RT content. And it will have an impact on the discourse in this country,” Kovalik told RT. “When [you start] censoring anyone, they are going to censor everyone, and I think everyone in the US should be appalled by this and very concerned.”
The human rights lawyer remains certain that US companies initiated an anti-RT campaign to woo the American government at the expense of free speech.
“I think what you see has happened is that Google, Twitter and Facebook have been pressured by the US government to try to essentially [put] blame on Russia where there is none, and to appear somehow that they are working with the US government against Russia. And they have bowed to this pressure,” Kovalik said.
Kovalik also argued that RT presents an alternative point of view that is simply incompatible with US policies.
“I do believe that there is a concern in the US government and the mainstream media of this alternative narrative about what is happening in Syria, for example, about whether the US is truly fighting terrorism in Syria as it claims. Well, Russia has a different view of that. RT has a different view of that. The same thing in Ukraine. The US has been backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine. That is something that the powers that be don’t want Americans to know. And so, I think the attack on RT, which has a very different view of those things, is an attack on those alternative narratives of issues that are very important to the American people,” he said.
Google is dancing to the tune of the US government as part of the broader campaign to demonize Russia, political commentator and TV host Steve Malzberg told RT.
“This is all about the fact that Russia is right now the enemy. Russia has been made the enemy by the left, the Democrats and, by definition, the media. The media has been nonstop for a year now about ‘evil Russia.’ Anything associated with the ‘evil Russia’ will incur the wrath of the government,” Malzberg said. “It is because they have been called in before Congress and because of this witch hunt that is going on… They don’t want to risk the wrath of Congress, and that is the problem.”
“There has been nothing found in the whole Russian collusion investigation so far. And there really no meat here when it comes to RT and nefarious doings and dealings, but that does not stop them. They are just going with the flow,” the political commentator added.
Malzberg noted that if Google really wanted to address the so-called ‘fake news’ phenomenon, they should look in their own backyard and check the information flow that comes out of the US mainstream media.
“If they wanted to concentrate on the real program, they certainly have all the opportunity to look at what I call propaganda from the leftist mainstream news media… But they do not have interest in that, because Congress isn’t calling them to say, ‘Oh, big bad CNN or big, bad, evil MSNBC’,” Malzberg said. “Russia is ‘boogeyman’ right now, and this is all part of that deal.”
Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.
Newby’s book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll’s, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island. Newby reaches this conclusion on page 224 after mentioning Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47 and otherwise avoiding it throughout the book. This is bizarre, because Newby’s book otherwise goes into great depth, and even chronicles extensive research efforts that lead largely to dead ends, and because there is information available about Plum Island, and because Carroll’s best-selling book seems to demand comment, supportive or dismissive or otherwise.
In fact, I think that, despite the avoidance of any discussion of Plum Island, Newby’s research complements Carroll’s quite well, strengthens the same general conclusion, and then adds significant new understanding. So, let’s look at what Carroll told us, and then at what Newby adds. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
Aletho News 