Why Does the United States Beat Up On Capitalist Russia?
By W. T. Whitney | CounterPunch | May 30, 2017
The Cold War we are familiar with ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his new book “The Plot to Scapegoat Russia,” lawyer and human rights activist Dan Kovalik writes about a new Cold War against Russia – and about the peace that never came. He discusses the role of the Democratic Party and the CIA, but his book centers on explaining why hostilities resumed.
The real motivations of a revived confrontation are hardly the stuff of day-to-day news, and so the author relies upon the historical record for discovering the origins of a new Cold War. And he tells why the old Cold War was waged.
The common explanation was a pretext, he thinks. In Kovalik’s words: “the Cold War, at least from the vantage point of the US, had little to do with fighting ‘Communism,’ and more to do with making the world safe for corporate plunder.” This proposition, implied more than dwelled upon, enables the author to account for other U. S. wars and interventions.
CIA involvement is mentioned but not detailed. For Kovalik, “the CIA is a nefarious, criminal organization which often misleads the American public and government into wars and misadventures.” These two themes – the real reason for why the United States fights wars and the CIA’s role in such wars – are unobtrusively present throughout the history recounted in the book.
Readers hungry to know about the “plot” advertised in the book’s title will need patience. The author conducts a tour over time and across the world that takes in examples of U. S. military interventions and foreign meddling. At the point Kovalik is discussing the current U. S. – Russia confrontation, he has already described patterns of U. S. aggression and thereby has already traced out a scenario where motivations for harassing Russia are clear.
This highly – recommended book offers material so encompassing as to belie its small size. Kovalik’s writing is clear, evocative, and readable. Along the way, he recalls those causes and the outrage that fired up activists who were his contemporaries. That’s a side benefit.
In college Kovalik learned about CIA machinations in Central America. Revelations from former agents Philip Agee, Ray McGovern, and John Stockman astonished him. His first trip to Nicaragua exposed him to a harvest of killings and terror. He learned first-hand about the role of Contra paramilitaries, recruited and paid for by the CIA. At one point he was comforting a father burying his son, killed by the Contras, along with 50,000 other Nicaraguans.
The author recalls the four churchwomen and six Jesuit priests murdered by U. S. – trained soldiers in El Salvador, U. S. support for soldiers and paramilitaries who killed and displaced populations in Colombia, and the CIA’s Operation Condor by which South American client states murdered political enemies. He recounts U. S – instigated coups in Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; and Chile, 1973. Along the way he mentions U.S. war in Vietnam, occupation and war in Korea, nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, nuclear testing and dying in the Marshall Islands, and the CIA’s recruitment of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
This was the justification: keeping “the world safe from the threat of Soviet totalitarianism.” Then the Soviet Union was no more and the search was on for a new pretext. Having turned to “humanitarian intervention,” the Clinton administration soon was assisting the Paul Kagame regime in Ruanda and other African nations as they assaulted the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “US mining interests” were satisfied, Kovalik says, but “nearly six million people” people died.
Clinton’s government intervened in Haiti and participated in the destruction of Yugoslavia, Europe’s last socialist state. Supposed humanitarian motivations were behind the United States role in delivering Libya into chaos. For the author, U. S. pretensions and brutality stand in contrast to the relatively benign nature of Russian misdeeds.
More recently, in Kovalik’s telling, the U. S. government settled upon the rationalization of “American exceptionalism.” This is “the belief that the US is a uniquely benign actor in the world, spreading peace and democracy.” Thus terror was exported to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen, where Saudi Arabia acted as a U. S. proxy. The list includes the 2009 military coup in Honduras facilitated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
For the author, “The US’s outsized military exists not only to ensure the US’s quite unjust share of the world’s riches, but also to ensure that those riches are not shared with the poor huddled masses in this country.” Good relations with Russia would be “simply bad for business, in particular the business of war which so profoundly undergirds the US economy … As of 2015, the US had at least 800 military bases in over 70 nations, while Britain, France and Russia had only 30 military bases combined.” And, “under Obama alone, the US had Special Forces deployed in about 138 countries.”
Having surveyed decades worth of U.S. interventions abroad, military and otherwise, Kovalik turns to Russia. In the early 1990s that fledgling capitalist state was in crisis, he reports. Life expectancy had plummeted, the poverty rate was 75 percent, and investments in the economy were down 80 percent. National pride was in the cellar, the more so after the United States backed away from Secretary of State Baker’s 1991 promise that NATO would never move east, after the United States attacked Russia’s ally Serbia, and after the United States attacked Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 without consulting Russia.
He regards Russia’s approach to Ukraine as defensible while reminding readers that Russia offered to cooperate with the United States in ending war in Syria. And U. S. claims about lack of democracy in Russia seem strained, especially when, as Kovalik insists, the United States abuses peoples the world over and itself suffers from a “severe democracy deficit.”
He argues that the Obama administration, particularly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was obsessed with Russia and that Democrats currently are fueling hostilities, backed by a compliant media. He discusses WikiLeaks revelations about the Democratic Party and hacking attributed to the Russians. He also suggests, without offering specifics, that the CIA is involved. Kovalik doesn’t comment on possible interaction between Trump campaign personnel and Russian officials.
But prior to his discussion of confrontation with Russia, Kovalik had devoted considerable attention to why and how the United States harasses other countries. The reader, therefore, already knows never to expect U.S. imperialism to give Russia a break and knows why that is so.
Kovalik’s treatment of the Soviet Union is an essential part of his narrative. For one thing, many of the U. S. military interventions he reports on wouldn’t have occurred if the Soviet Union still existed. But basically, “the Soviet Union, did wield sizable political and ideological influence in the world for some time, due to the appeal of its socialist message as well as its critical role in winning [World War] II.”
Kovalik acknowledges “periods of great repression.” He adds, however, that “the Russian Revolution and the USSR … delivered on many of their promises, and against great odds. …. In any case, the goals of the Russian Revolution—equality, worker control of the economy, universal health care and social security— were laudable ones.” And, “One of the reasons that the West continues to dance on the grave of the Soviet Union, and to emphasize the worst parts of that society and downplay its achievements, is to make sure that, as the world-wide economy worsens, and as the suffering of working people around the world deepens, they don’t get any notions in their head to organize some new socialist revolution with such ideals.”
Ultimately, Kovalik sides with Martin Luther King, who remarked that, ‘The US is on the wrong side of the world-wide revolution’ – and with Daniel Ellsberg’s clarification: ‘The US is not on the wrong side; it is the wrong side.’”
W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.
Britain’s next Prime Minister could likely be Jeremy Corbyn
By Adam Garrie | The Duran | May 30, 2017
Brexit which in many ways put British politics on the international map for the first time since the 1960s, was not supposed to happen. The establishment of all the major parties, the business sector, academia, the mainstream media, the arts and science community (which still hold some influence in Britain) were all opposed to it.
Likewise, the polling data was so set against Brexit that on the night of the vote, a sober Nigel Farage all but conceded defeat. Several hours and several drinks later he emerged to give a victory speech.
The people who voted for Brexit voted for a number of reasons and even more crucially in a key number of geographical places.
Many people voted for Brexit because they were seething with anger over those who opposed it. The elite were unpopular and the elite did not want Brexit, this meant that ordinary people in middle and northern England as well as most of Wales voted for Brexit. Other issues ranging from European border policy, to trade and nostalgia for empire played far less of a factor than many pundits think. Brexit was a visceral vote, not a calculated vote.
The EU is an elitist institution and Britain’s own local elite loved it. For most people that was enough to make them support it.
While the dishonest and discredited elites ran the pro-EU campaign Brexit was spearheaded from the right by Nigel Farage while its most prominent left wing advocate was George Galloway. Both Farage and Galloway are figures one either loves or hates, but few people can legitimately question their sincerity. After all, neither have embraced causes that were guaranteed to get them invited to Buckingham Palace.
Many thought that if two straight-forward men who are on different sides of the political divide both embraced Brexit, it can’t be all that bad for honest, ordinary people and furthermore, contrary to what the neo-liberal mainstream media says, Farage’s supporters are not all racist obscurantists and Galloways’ supporters are not ‘only Muslims’. Such remarks slander both men and their supporters who on the whole are ordinary, decent, normal people of all backgrounds who for various reasons are tired of a broken status-quo.
Jeremy Corbyn may well be on the verge of achieving something similar to Brexit, only more. Corbyn, like Brexit is anti-establishment and like Brexit the entire establishment are against him…with this notable exception: small, medium and even some big businesses.
Jeremy Corbyn will certainly appeal to working class Brexit voters in England’s north and midlands as well as Wales (aka Brexit country) who have longed for a Labour leader that puts bread and butter issues first. Corbyn is all about jobs, funding essential services and putting hospitals before banks, schools before hedge funds, wages for real people over tax-loop holes for foreign companies. This is music to the ears of a Labour base who became alienated from Labour after years of neo-liberal policies first instigated by the war criminal Tony Blair.
But what about business, will they vote for a socialist Labour leader? Many interestingly will. Most businesses of all sizes have generally benefited from some aspects of EU membership, most crucially from the Single Market which non-EU countries Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are a happy part of.
Corbyn has said he is committed to getting Britain a deal that involves retaining the benefits of the Single Market and this has made many in the business community silently sympathetic to a Labour leader who has taken a stand on the Single Market whereas Conservative leader Theresa May has a policy which amounts to little more than ‘frankly I don’t give a damn’.
So this means Corbyn has the working class and wider Midlands, Northern England and Welsh Brexit vote, the anti-establishment Brexit vote and ironically also the business minded pro-Single Market Vote.
And then there is Scotland. Scotland voted in favour of retaining EU membership and what’s more is that when Scotland held a referendum on independence from the UK in 2014, one of the biggest selling points on the ‘remain part of the UK’ side was that membership of the UK guaranteed membership of the EU. My how times have changed!
Because of this, Scottish Nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Parliament want a new independence referendum. Theresa May has responded to this call with disdain and contempt. Her refusal to engage in a dialogue with Scotland smacks of a colonial attitude when Scotland is a democratic part of the United Kingdom. It’s unreal that someone like May can think this way in the year 2017.
By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn said that he will listen to Scotland, engage positively with the Scottish people and will in any case respect their exercise of democratic self-determination if that is what they ultimately seek. This means that if the vote in England is a dead-heat, the Scottish Nationalists who will almost certainly win every major seat in Scotland will have the ability to form a coalition with Corbyn and make him the British Prime Minister.
Under this scenario one sees that Corbyn has retained much of the ‘Brexit coalition’ with the added bonus of almost all of Scotland’s backing if he eventually needs it, plus more members of the business community than many think. Even those in the business community who might not like Corbyn’s tax policies, realise that leaving the Single Market is a far bigger problem and one that could take much longer to reverse.
In the wealthy parts of Southern England, the Conservatives might be in for another unexpected shock. Most people in England’s wealthiest areas voted to remain in the EU and many are privately shocked that the once pro-EU Conservative party is taking such an undiplomatic and frankly unknowing approach to Brexit.
Many such affluent voters may end up voting for the unambiguously pro-EU Liberal Democratic party who in most other policy areas are little different than mainstream moderate Conservatives.
The polls which got Brexit and Trump totally wrong are still saying that the Conservatives will win, but only by a small margin. The reality could be very different. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour might capture most of middle and northern England, all of Wales and find allies in Scotland. Theresa May’s Conservatives may end up losing some seats in their own affluent backyard, among those who still cherish the EU as much as they did when they voted against Brexit alongside former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.
We could be looking at the most unlikely political revolution in British history…. since last year, anyway.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of a would be Corbyn victory is that he managed to quietly build an unlikely coalition without sacrificing his principles. Perhaps this is the real lesson of the campaign.
MSM’s right-wing bias costs Corbyn ‘fair’ coverage, says BBC veteran Dimbleby
RT | May 30, 2017
Veteran BBC broadcaster David Dimbleby has hit out at the British media for failing to give Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn “fair” coverage in the run-up to the June 8 general election.
Dimbleby, who will be reporting the election results for a 10th time in his distinguished broadcasting career, echoed the long-standing complaint among Corbyn’s supporters that coverage of the Labour chief tends to suffer from a right-wing bias and from “lazy pessimism.”
“I don’t think anyone could say that Corbyn has had a fair deal at the hands of the press, in a way that the Labour Party did when it was more to the center, but then we generally have a right-wing press,” he said in an interview with the Radio Times.
Speaking ahead of a BBC Question Time special on Thursday, in which he will question both Prime Minister Theresa May and the Labour leader, Dimbleby said nothing in this election should be taken for granted despite the Tory lead in the polls.
“My own prediction is that, contrary to the skepticism and lazy pessimism of the newspapers and the British media, it’s going to be a really fascinating night, and it will drive home some messages about our political system and the political appeal of different parties that no amount of polling or reading the papers will tell us,” Dimbleby said.
“Polls? You can have them until the cows come home. For me, the exit poll is the starting gun for a political roller coaster ride, and a night of thrills and spills.”
Although Corbyn has suffered rebellions among his own MPs in Parliament, Dimbleby pointed out the Labour leader enjoys overwhelming grassroots support.
“It’s a very odd election,” Dimbleby said.
“If the Conservative story is how Theresa May is the ‘brand leader,’ the interesting thing is that a lot of Labour supporters really like and believe in the messages that Jeremy Corbyn is bringing across.
“It’s not his MPs in the House of Commons necessarily, but there is a lot of support in the country.”
Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell recently said the media’s “appalling” coverage of Corbyn’s leadership is the “worst” any politician has ever had to face.
He called it an example of the “establishment using its power in the media to try and destroy an individual and what he stands for.”
Just last month, analysis revealed that the majority of reports on Corbyn are critical of his leadership, and that he is more likely to be attacked by the media than Tory leader May.
Loughborough University found a “considerable majority” of reports attack Corbyn, while coverage of the Conservatives appears to be much more balanced, with negative reports offset by an equal number of positive news stories.
A separate study by the London School of Economics last year found up to 75 percent of press coverage misrepresented the Labour leader.
Such “antagonism” hinders freedom of speech, represses opposition and thus falls short of “serving democracy,” the study claimed.
Macron accuses RT and Sputnik of ‘behaving like deceitful propaganda’
RT | May 29, 2017
Newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron explained his team’s decision to deny RT and Sputnik, both Moscow-based news outlets, accreditation during his campaign, by labeling the media outlets as “propaganda.”
“They didn’t act like the media, like journalists. They behaved like deceitful propaganda,” Macron told RT France head Xenia Fedorova during a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Versailles.
“I have always had an exemplary relationship with foreign journalists, but they have to be real journalists,” explained Macron, who defeated Marine Le Pen in the second round of the election, earlier this month. “All foreign journalists, including Russian journalists, had access to my campaign.”
Macron described RT and Sputnik as “organs of influence and propaganda,” adding that both “produced infamous counter-truths about him.”
Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow “does not agree” with Macron’s statements about the two news organizations.
RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said that Macron’s attack on a news outlet he disagrees with is a threat to freedom of speech.
“Despite the numerous accusations made throughout the duration of the French presidential campaign, to this day not a single example, not a single piece of evidence, has been presented to support the claims that RT spread any slander or ‘fake news’ about Mr. Macron,” Simonyan said in a statement. “By labeling any news reporting he disagrees with ‘fake news,’ President Macron sets a dangerous precedent that threatens both freedom of speech and journalism at large.”
Last month’s accreditation delay for RT and Sputnik, which ended up becoming an outright refusal, provoked a heated reaction from Moscow.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova called it “deliberate and bare-faced discrimination against Russian media by the presidential candidate of a state that has historically been vigilant when it comes to free speech.”
Simonyan accused Macron’s team back then of “building electoral campaign on lies about RT and Sputnik.”
Macron’s campaign repeatedly accused Russia of interference in the election, claiming that Russian hackers attempted to gain access to its data, and impede the work of its website. A trove of communication purportedly from Macron’s staff was leaked on the internet a day before the run-off election. Moscow has staunchly denied any interference.
Despite an anticipated coolness in relations, the Russian president is one of the first world leaders to travel to Paris since Macron’s convincing election win.
On Monday, the pair spent three hours in what the French leader called a “frank exchange of views,” which Putin said would lead to a “qualitative” improvement in relations between the two countries.
US Policymakers Openly Plot Against Venezuela
By Tony Cartalucci | Land Destroyer | May 24, 2017
The US media has been paying increasing attention to the unfolding crisis in the South American nation of Venezuela. As the US media has done elsewhere, it is attempting to portray the unfolding crisis as a result of a corrupt dictatorship fighting against a “pro-democracy” opposition.
In reality, it is simply a repeat of US-driven regime change aimed at toppling Venezuela’s independent state institutions and replacing them with institutions created by and for US special interests.
The “opposition” is comprised of US-backed political parties and US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) many of which are listed on the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) website.
The UK Independent in a 2016 article titled, “Venezuela accuses US of plotting coup as Washington warns of ‘imminent collapse’,” would even admit:
… observers of the region point out that the US has a long history of seeking to interfere in the politics of Venezuela, as well as elsewhere in Latin America.
In addition to supporting those who ousted Mr Chavez in 2002, the US poured hundreds of thousands of dollars to his opponents via the so-called National Endowment for Democracy.
To understand America’s actual role amid Venezuela’s unfolding crisis, one must read policy papers produced by organizations called “think tanks” which devise and promote US policy.
The Brookings Institution is a Fortune 500-funded policy think tank. It is populated by policymakers who represent the collective ambitions of some of the world’s most powerful corporate-financier interests including big-oil, defense, agricultural monopolies, pharmaceutical corporations, media interests, and more.
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| Some of the Brookings Institution’s corporate-financier sponsors |
Brookings and think tanks similar to it, have regularly produced policy and media guidelines later disseminated across the Western media and Western legislatures through public relations firms and lobbyists. Think tanks are where the real agenda of the West is agreed upon and promoted from.
A recent piece featured upon the Brookings Institution’s website titled, “Venezuela: A path out of crisis,” lays out a 5-point plan toward escalating Venezuela’s already precarious situation (emphasis added):
1. The United States could expand its assistance to countries that until now have been dependent on Venezuelan oil, as a means to decrease regional support for and dependence on the Maduro government.
2. The United States could increase monetary assistance to credible civil society organizations and nongovernmental organizations able to deliver food and medicines to Venezuelans. By doing so, the United States should make clear that international pressure aims to support democracy, not punish the Venezuelan people.
3. The United States could support efforts by the opposition in Venezuela to build an “off-ramp” that would split moderate elements of the government away from hardliners, encouraging the former to acquiesce to a transition to democracy by lowering their costs of exiting government.
4. The United States could coordinate with international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to offer financial incentives for holding free and fair elections in 2018, and for the opposition to unify and compete in those elections. Such coordination would also involve developing and publicizing a credible plan to restart Venezuela’s economy.
5. As a last resort, the United States could consider raising economic costs to the government through an expanded sanctions regime that aims to limit Venezuelan earnings from oil exports and block further financing. This policy is risky, given that the Maduro government would be able to more credibly shift blame for the economic crisis onto the United States, and should be accompanied by well-publicized efforts to deliver humanitarian aid through credible civil society and nongovernmental organizations.
It is a prescription for further economic isolation, US-funded political subversion, and with its reference to “a transition to democracy,” an oblique call for regime change.
The US media – particularly organizations operating from under right cover – have portrayed Venezuela’s economic crisis as primarily related to “socialism” and corruption. In reality, factors that would have only impeded the full realization of Venezuela’s economic progress have been intentionally compounded through US sanctions, economic sabotage, and political subversion to precipitate the currently unfolding socioeconomic and humanitarian crisis.
Venezuela would not be the first nation the US targeted for economic implosion in South America.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its own online archives available to the public under a section titled, “CIA Activities in Chile,” would admit (emphasis added):
According to the Church Committee report, in their meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell on 15 September 1970 President Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, directed the CIA to prevent Allende from taking power. They were “not concerned [about the] risks involved,” according to Helms’ notes. In addition to political action, Nixon and Kissinger, according to Helms’s notes, ordered steps to “make the economy scream.”
These Cold War attitudes persisted into the Pinochet era. After Pinochet came to power, senior policymakers appeared reluctant to criticize human rights violations, taking to task US diplomats urging greater attention to the problem. US military assistance and sales grew significantly during the years of greatest human rights abuses. According to a previously released Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger in June 1976 indicated to Pinochet that the US Government was sympathetic to his regime, although Kissinger advised some progress on human rights in order to improve Chile’s image in the US Congress.
With violence increasing in the streets of Venezuela and many of the rhetorical tactics used to set the stage for violent regime change and humanitarian catastrophe in Libya and Syria are now being used to topple the government in Caracas – the world must get ahead of the propaganda and begin exposing this open conspiracy against yet another sovereign nation.
Venezuela’s political system is for the Venezuelan people themselves to decide – without US interference. A government dominated by US-backed opposition members will leave Venezuela as an extension of US corporate-financier special interests, not an alternative or check against them. This only serves in inviting further abuse by these interests not only in South America, but all around the world – Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Ukraine for example – where America’s unwarranted wealth and influence is sowing instability, conflict, and catastrophe.
Who Controls the Information Space and Why
By Jean Perier – New Eastern Outlook – 28.05.2017
Recently behind-the-scenes rules and restrictions being used by Facebook have fallen into the hands of Guardian reporters. According to their report, moderators employed by the tech giant are entitled to decide what exactly the 2 billion users of this social network can or cannot publish on their pages. This report has provoked a massive discussion on the absence of any ethical norms that could prevent the tech giant from exercising censorship, along with disputes about the determination of US intelligence agencies to spy on their citizens in violation of the USA Freedom Act.
The fact that the US created the Internet as a tool of exercising control over information space, as a convenient environment for espionage, collecting dirty facts and spreading lies has been established long ago. For those naive few who refuse to believe the facts, one can only be reminded of the old saying: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. But who owns the allegedly free Internet? Who created it and why?
According to Reuters, last year alone the US National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted 151 million phone calls of American citizens, in spite of the fact that Congress has allegedly limited the ability to exercise surveillance for intelligence agencies by adopting the USA Freedom Act, according to which courts must decide when to allow intelligence agencies to collect information about a person suspected of criminal activity.
However, the all-encompassing control of US intelligence services over the world’s information space has been uncovered by an unending stream of publications in American and foreign media sources, showing that the United States is grossly violating even the most basic human rights, by creating a system of electronic interception and processing of all sorts of data about users on the Internet.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to state that every aspect of our day-to-day lives is being controlled: phone conversations, short text messages, everything we write on social media networks or send via email. Thus, the British Guardian confirmed the existing exchange of information about intercepted electronic messages of both US citizens and British citizens established by US intelligence agencies and the British Government Communications Headquarters. Even British courts recognized that such cooperation that existed for at least seven years is unlawful, since they were carried out in violation of international conventions on human rights.
In addition, the Guardian has also revealed that phone tapping that Mi-5 and Mi-6 authorized in order to intercept private consultations between UK citizens and their lawyers in a bid to guarantee the authorities an upper hand during trials, constitutes a violation of both national laws and international norms.
The Intercept has also revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British partners from the Government Communications Headquarters stole the encryption keys of the world’s largest SIM card manufacturer – Gemalto, situated in the Netherlands. This allowed intelligence agencies from both nations ever since to tap all sorts of phone conversations and intercept any data sent via a mobile device carrying a SIM card produced by Gemalto.
In late 2014, the Wall Street Journal has also revealed the practices that allowed US intelligence agencies to record information stored on millions of cell phones across the US through the use of special spyware. Additionally, Wikileaks released CIA documents that show this agency is capable of intercepting messages sent via encrypted message apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.
It should be noted that US intelligence agencies have been pretty methodical in the collection of information that in one way or another could be used not just against ordinary citizens, but even against leading political figures. When in October 2013 a scandal erupted with the National Security Agency’s wiretapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, it turned out that the NSA had been carrying out such intrusions for more than ten years by that time. Back then, the scandal was downplayed and no actual changes in those malicious practices were pursued.
So how many more revelations about the total control that US intelligence agencies exercise over information space should be published before Washington’s open mockery of human rights and freedom of speech is finally challenged and stopped?
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East.
Manchester Bombing: The Libyan Connection
By David Macilwain | American Herald Tribune | May 28, 2017
Following the Manchester suicide bombing, one wonders just what is necessary before Western media commentators and journalists join the dots – to make a true picture of the terrorist monster unleashed on the world by their own governments.
It is a question many people were asking only a day earlier, as those media blandly reported the demented ravings of the US, Saudi and Israeli leaders about the global terrorist threat posed by Iran. Surely there must have been some misunderstanding! Even though some commentators noticed a few of the Emperor’s clothes were missing, or a little inappropriate (black-flag underwear?) none challenged the ludicrous ideas that Iran was a global sponsor of terrorism, and “still” sought to develop nuclear weapons.
For Iranians however, and their friends and allies, events of the last weeks have stripped bare both the “Emperor” and his terrorist partners, and revealed the depths of deceit in the West’s fight against the “Islamic State”. The Libyan link in this chain of covert war – the LIFG connections of the Manchester bomber – has finally and unexpectedly rounded out the picture.
Silence over the collapsed Libyan state is just another of the Western media’s failings, though silence might be preferable to further repetition of the old lies about a “Revolution against the dictator Qadhafi”, followed by tribal warfare, and now compounded by the supposed presence of “Islamic State”. What has actually been happening in Libya, both since 2011 and dating back to the ‘90s has been cleverly or unwittingly concealed from Western audiences by their media and leaders in what looks like a complex game of diversions and distractions, white lies and black lies.
As revealed recently by Tony Cartalucci, and further dissected by Thierry Meyssan, the network of alliances and collaboration between Libyan Salafist groups and US and UK intelligence services has played a central role in NATO’s campaign against the “resistance” states, including Libya, Syria, Iran and Shia Lebanon. The failure of Western commentators and analysts to notice this “conspiracy” and consequently adjust their viewpoint has enabled grossly criminal behaviour to continue without public opposition. The exposing of the “Libyan connection” – by US intelligence agencies – threatens to change this, and the extreme reaction from the UK to the US leaking of the Manchester bomber’s identity – cutting communications between their intelligence services for 24 hours – indicates just who is threatened by it.
It was former MI5 agent David Shayler and his partner Annie Machon who first made public the co-operation between MI6 and anti-Qadhafi Salafists in Libya in the 1990s. MI6 helped in the formation of the “Libyan Islamic Fighting Group” from Afghanistan mujahideen/Al Qaeda veterans, with the express aim of assassinating the Libyan leader. Following the plot’s failure, and changing attitudes to Qadhafi in the UK, marked later by Tony Blair’s much publicised rapprochement with him, the tables were turned on several key leaders. Most notable, and now notorious, was Abdulhakim Belhaj, who was delivered back to Tripoli by the CIA/MI6 and imprisoned for six years.
During this period, up until the “Arab Spring”, other members of the LIFG who were resettled in the UK around 1998 – in the Manchester suburb where they were rediscovered last week – became rather persona non grata and some were placed on control orders as the LIFG was classified as a terrorist group.
However… a big however – when US, UK and French leaders decided in 2011 that they could no longer live with Moammar Qadhafi – who now supported his traditional secular Arab Nationalist allies in Syria – the UK leaders again found a use for their Libyan friends in Manchester, as leaders of the ‘Revolutionary forces’ against the Libyan government.
But of course it didn’t end there – in Libya – and hasn’t ended yet, either in Libya or in Syria, which is where many Libyan militants soon went.
The story of the ‘rat line’, from Eastern Libya to Turkey and onto Syria, was first prominently exposed by Seymour Hersh in early 2014, but observers in Turkey had noticed the presence of many Libyans in Turkey back in 2012, as they waited to join the violent insurgency against the Assad government in Syria. Amongst these fighters – or terrorists if you prefer – was Belhaj, who the CIA found was someone they could work with in their operation to “smuggle” militant jihadists and weapons from Libya to Syria. The US “consulate” in Benghazi seems to have been the centre of operations for the rat line, and disputes between different terrorist groups including the LIFG, and the CIA were likely the cause of the well-publicised attack and killing of the US ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Abdulhakim Belhaj meanwhile had returned to Libya, and somehow became the head of military forces in the Libyan transitional government. Rather contradictorily he had also launched legal action against the UK government for their years of action against him, including rendition and alleged torture by Libyan Intelligence on behalf of MI5. Compounding the picture of this terrorist-in-a-tie were claims last year that Belhaj was now the leader of Islamic State in Libya…
Before getting to the crucial questions on the identity of the Manchester bomber and his relatives, there is one other little thing to mention – Clinton’s emails. As is the habit with Western mainstream media, their focus has been almost entirely on aspects of this story which are relatively unimportant – such as Clinton’s use of a private server, and a witch-hunt over how the emails were leaked. It is of course the content of those emails that is the real story, and what they tell us about Clinton’s direct role in supporting the terrorist groups in Syria. Along with David Petraeus, who just happened to be in Tripoli when the Benghazi consulate was attacked, Clinton could hardly have been ignorant of the whole rat-line operation, even as her President Obama publicly debated whether to arm the “moderate opposition” in Syria.
But then Belhaj and his Libyan terrorist mates were not exactly moderate. Once Al Qaeda and now “Islamic State”.
It is against this background that we discover some shocking truths about the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi – this young man who “appears to have become radicalised in Syria”.
In 2011, when MI5 facilitated the passage to Libya of LIFG members from Manchester, Salman’s father Ramadan Abedi evidently took his sons back to Tripoli to join the armed insurgents and learn how to kill people. Ramadan already had experience doing this in the ‘90s alongside Belhaj, as despite failing to kill Qadhafi there were many other innocent victims of the MI6 enabled LIFG “contras”.
In the six years since, Salman Abedi evidently went to fight in Syria, with Al Qaeda or “IS”. Perhaps he even went there with the CIA’s “rats”. So it could be said that joining the dots on the Manchester bombing gives us quite a good picture of a Western mercenary rat, whether it’s a white rat or a black rat…
Alleged suicide bomber’s father arrested as he expresses doubts over son’s involvement
Ramadan Abedi
OffGuardian | May 28, 2017
According to various outlets including an article in Reuters, Ramadan Abedi the father of Salman Abedi, expressed astonishment his son could be responsible for the alleged bomb attack in Manchester on May 21. And while he was voicing his doubts to a reporter, western-backed Libyan security forces arrived to take him away.
Many mainstream sources have claimed Ramadan Abedi was a member of an anti-Gaddafi terrorist group. Alternative analysis site Voltaire.net goes further and suggests a link between Ramadan and MI6 operations in Libya.
Given that anti-Gaddafi Libyans have long been nurtured by the UK and other western nations, even if we don’t accept direct connections with the UK security apparatus, this seems an odd background for a putative suicide bomber, as even the Guardian noted. And indeed Ramadan Abedi, currently living in Libya, but having been resident in the UK for many years, expressed considerable surprise and consternation that his son would have committed such an act. He denied the suggestion Salman was a member of ISIS, and is quoted by Reuters as saying:
Salman doesn’t belong to any organization… The family is a bit confused because Salman doesn’t have this ideology, he doesn’t hold these beliefs…. I didn’t expect that to happen, never…”
Ramamdan also allegedly added the claim that there were “hidden hands” behind the attack.
In a truly bizarre development members of the Libyan Rada arrived while this interview was being conducted and escorted Ramadan away, for reasons that were not specified.
Earlier Salman’s brother, Hashem, was also detained by Rada “on suspicion of links to Islamic State.”
The speedy arrests leave open the question – is this a legitimate round up of terror suspects, or, as some have suggested, a means of silencing those who might reveal too much about the Abedi family’s connections with western security agencies?
The West Spreading New Wave of Feel-Good Movies and False Hopes
By Andre Vltchek | New Eastern Outlook | 27.05.2017
Watch blockbuster movies from the “south” and chances are you will start to believe that the world is not really such a desperate place. Perhaps you might even get convinced that under the present imperialist and turbo-capitalist global arrangement things can always get better. If you live in a gutter somewhere in Sub-Continent or Africa, you could simply try hard, you could “believe in yourself and love yourself”, you could “listen to your instincts”, and everything may eventually fall into the right places. You could get acknowledged, rewarded and even catapulted from your misery into some plush pastures that are covering the tall green hills of success.
Think twice! Or… don’t think at all – just bury your head in the sand.
There were always books written and films produced just in order to please the Western funding agencies and propaganda machine. I described the process, colorfully, in my recent political/revolutionary novel “Aurora”.
Just think about Kite Runner written by an Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, or about all those bestsellers by Salman Rushdie or Elif Shafak, books about India or Turkey, but intended almost exclusively for a Western audience, and often despised in their native countries.
The works of Rushdie and Shafak can at least qualify as “literature”. But now both the Western markets and mainstream media are demanding more and more of ‘feel good’ rubbish books and movies from poor countries, more and more of those simple, picturesque and ‘positive’ stories that are actually confusing and give false hopes to the local population of many poor countries.
Do you still remember Slumdog Millionaire? How realistic a scenario was that? First of all, it was not even an Indian film; it was a 2008 British movie, directed by Danny Boyle, who also had directed Trainspotting. It took place in the Juhu slum of Mumbai.
In 2011, I filmed in the same Mumbai slum where the movie was produced. I asked many, how likely was such a ‘success scenario’ in that filthy and hopeless neighborhood? The dwellers of the Juhu slum just dismissed the entire charade with derogatory gestures; why even waste precious words?
Now more films are coming – more and more… and more! Feel good; feel very good about the world! Drop a few tears as you are departing from the cinema. Utter under your breath: “Everything is possible.” Collaborate with the establishment. Forget about the revolution, think ‘positively’ (the way the system wants you to think) and above all, think about yourself!
A film about a real Ugandan chess player Phiona Mutesi, created by the Indian director Mira Nair (Fire, Water among her other work), Queen of Katwe, is a tour-de-force of true individualism. And again, if you think you are actually watching a Ugandan or even Indian film, you are squarely wrong: it is supposed to feel like an African one, but it is a US movie, produced by Walt Disney Pictures. And it is actually intended and even proudly promoted as a “feel good movie”.
The plot is simple and predictable: a little girl grows up in total misery, in one of the toughest slums of Africa – Katwe, at the outskirts of Kampala. Her father has already died of AIDS, her mother is unable to pay the rent, and her older sister is barely surviving as a prostitute. Phiona, just 10-years old, is forced to drop from school.
Her life is approaching total collapse. But then, suddenly, a miracle! Hallelujah!
Phiona enrolls in a state-sponsored chess program. She is talented. She climbs and climbs, soon travelling to Sudan by a plane, and a few months later, even to Russia.
It is supposed to be a ‘true story’. And yes, there was a poor girl, growing up in a Ugandan slum. She was talented although she never reached the zenith, and never won any gold medal. In the film, she wins tournaments, makes loads of cash, and buys a villa (looking like a palace), for her family.
Is this what young poor girls watching the film in the Katwe slum should be aiming at? Would such a dream be realistic, or is this an absolute mirage?
I also filmed in Katwe, for my damning documentary Rwanda Gambit. And when I was a young kid, I could pass for a talented chess player, taking part in several tournaments and competitions. Somehow, the film – Queen of Katwe – did not make any sense. To become chess champion takes much more than some luck and zeal. Like a concert pianist, a chess player has to spend years and years of hard training, literally killing himself or herself, to play at a certain level.
When I was a kid, my father, a scientist, was obsessed with turning me into a champ. Frankly, I was not too interested, although I worked hard, for years. I won a few medals, but never went further. Could Phiona, hungry, almost without a roof over her head, become a grand master, just after a few months of unhurried coaching?
I wish she could. But I doubt it, knowing Uganda, knowing its slums, fully realizing how merciless their reality really is, and of course, knowing chess.
Who benefits from such films? Definitely not the poorest of the poor, and definitely not Indians or Africans!
It appears that the only beneficiaries are those people who are trying to uphold the status quo, in the West and in the colonies. They don’t want people to realize: that there is almost no hope left, and only some radical change, a revolution, can reverse and improve things in their plundered countries.
A revolution is a ‘communal’ event. It is never about one person suddenly advancing, or getting ‘rescued’ or ‘saved’. It is not about one person or one family ‘making it’. It is about an entire nation fighting for its rights, for progress, and it is about social justice for all.
Little ‘success stories’ actually divide communities, offering false hopes.
Phiona’s story coming from pro-Western, turbo-capitalist Uganda, has nothing in common with the great communal projects in Venezuelan slums: like the classical Youth Orchestras, or cable cars, childcare centers, public libraries, community learning centers, and free medical posts.
No matter how ‘lovely’ is Mira Nair’s cinematography, winning the lottery, or getting lucky here and there, is not going to change the entire country. That is exactly why those small individualist acts and triumphs are being celebrated and glorified in the centers of Western imperialism. There, no real change is ever welcomed, whether it takes place at home or in the colonies. On the other hand, all selfish little victories are treated as sacred. One should live for himself or herself, disregarding the context.
How many other deeply ‘positive-thinking’/ unrealistic/ ‘feel-good’/ ‘false-hope’ films have I seen, lately? Many. For instance Lion, a 2016 Australian/UK co-production, about a poor Indian boy who jumps on a train, loses his hometown, and eventually gets adopted by a loving and dedicated Australian family.
It looks like a downpour, an avalanche of similar films and books and news stories. It looks like some kind of new wave of ‘positive thinking’, or ‘there is nothing really too wrong with our world that couldn’t be fixed by some personal luck and individualism’ dogma. Most of the stuff is somehow connected to the epicenter of Western ideological indoctrination – the United Kingdom (a country, which is successfully nullifying all revolutionary zeal of its own citizens, of the immigrants arriving from desperate and colonized countries, and even those people who live in despair in various far away places).
The West is busy manufacturing ‘pseudo reality’. And in this grotesque pseudo-reality, several deprived individuals like starving chess players, street vendors and slum dwellers are suddenly becoming rich, successful and fulfilled. Millions of others, all around them, continue to suffer. But somehow, they don’t seem to matter much.
There is a new celebrity group in making – let’s call them the ‘glamorous poor’. Those ‘exceptional individuals’, the glamorous poor, are easy to digest, and even to celebrate in the West. They are swiftly and cheerfully integrating into the ‘mainstream’ club of the global ‘go getters’ and narcissist rich.
Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, a writer of revolutionary novel Aurora and several other books.
Russia fumes as OPCW investigators fail to inspect Khan Sheikhoun or Al-Shayrat air base
By Alexander Mercouris | The Duran | May 26, 2017
Two months after the alleged chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Syria and the US cruise missile strike on Al-Shayrat air base from where the alleged chemical attack was allegedly launched, the OPCW investigators charged with investigating the alleged chemical attack have failed to inspect either location.
This has provoked an angry and exasperated statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry yesterday, highlighting especially the failure of the OPCW inspectors to inspect Al-Shayrat air base, the location from which the chemical attempt was allegedly launched
All the conditions have been created there in terms of security and compliance with obligations under the Convention. The Syrian government demanded an urgent visit, thus reaffirming the preparedness to fulfil its obligations that arise from Clause 12 of the OPCW mission mandate and from the provisions specified in Clause 15 of Part IX of the Chemical Weapons Convention appendix on inspections. These documents state in clear terms that an (OPCW) inspection group has the right of access to any and all areas that might have been affected by the employment of chemical weapons. This means all the conditions have been created there (at Shayrat) in terms of security and compliance with obligations under the Convention. Standing in a sharp contrast to it is the inaction of the (OPCW/UN) Joint Mechanism and the detached position of the OPCW leadership that believes a trip to Shayrat is outside of the sphere of competence of the OPCW Mission.
I discussed the obvious lack of enthusiasm of the OPCW inspectors to inspect either location in an article I wrote for The Duran on 21st April 2017. I pointed out in that article that though there might be safety concerns preventing the OPCW inspectors from inspecting the location of the alleged attack at Khan Sheikhoun – which is under Jihadi control – the same was certainly not true of Al-Shayrat air base, which was from where the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun was allegedly launched.
I said that the failure of the OPCW inspectors to inspect either location meant that the investigation of the Khan Sheikhoun attack had effectively collapsed even before it started.
Needless to say it is a basic principle of any criminal investigation – which is what this investigation essentially is – that the investigators inspect the crime scene and any other locations related to it. The fact that the inspectors in this case have not even attempted to discharge this basic task shows that they are not really interested in carrying out an investigation at all.
This is the inevitable consequence of the President of the United States and of Western governments making a pronouncement of the Syrian government’s guilt before any investigation of the Khan Sheikhoun incident had taken place. That inevitably was going to prejudice the conduct of the investigation, with the result that we now see.
What that means is that when the investigation eventually reports its findings they will carry no authority, and will be rejected with good cause by those who dispute its conclusions.
American Jewish Committee ad implies BDS endangers children
If Americans Knew | May 26, 2017
The New England chapter of the American Jewish Committee ran a full page ad in the Boston Globe last Friday demonizing the Boycott, Divesment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian human rights.
The ad turned reality on its head by suggesting that BDS could be endangering children–when in fact BDS is opposing an occupation and apartheid structure under which indigenous children are being shot, imprisoned, tortured, traumatized, deprived of basic necessities of life and denied desperately needed medical care.
The ad’s headline reads “Could an academic boycott put a child’s life at risk?” and appears under an image of a young child hooked up to a breathing tube. Part of the text of the ad says:
Academic boycotts inspired by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement undermine the free exchange of ideas—the beating heart of medical progress and research. They are dangerous, anti-democratic, and deceptive… [BDS is an] ill-conceived and cynical maneuver.
The ad highlights an anti-BDS statement signed by over 100 professors in the medical field (see the names here)–even though hundreds of other academics, institutions and others support BDS.
Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions are nonviolent economic actions that can pressure states to end human rights abuses. The same tactics played a part in ending South Africa’s racist apartheid system.
The BDS movement aims to pressure Israel to end its confiscation and occupation of Palestinian territory, stop its invasions of Gaza and the West Bank, and uphold the rights of Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Four-year-old Palestinian girl Shayma Al-Masri. Hospital officials said she was wounded in an Israeli air strike that killed her mother and two of her siblings. – Gaza City (July 2014)
Scare ads like this are part of a concerted effort among powerful pro-Israel organizations and individuals desperate to maintain the status quo, or worse, in Israel-Palestine. Due to lobbying from these organizations, 17 states in the U.S. have passed laws that punish people participating in the movement.
While the ad portrays a nonviolent movement for equal rights as “dangerous” and harmful to children, it ignores the fact that the Israeli government kills, injures, or abducts more Palestinian children every day. (Watch IMEMC for a week or so.)
There is no indication that the AJC or the professors who endorsed this ad have spoken out against Israeli violence against Palestinian children, supported by their tax money.
Alison Weir, executive director of If Americans Knew, sent this letter to the editor of the Boston Globe:
The AJC Should Care about ALL Children
To the Editor:
Regarding the recent full page ad placed by the American Jewish Committee: “Could an academic boycott put a child’s life at risk?”
If this group truly cared about children, they would be concerned that in the past 17 years alone, Israeli forces have killed 2,150 Palestinian children, injured tens of thousands of children, imprisoned over 8,000 children, made hundreds of thousands homeless, and made tens of thousands orphans.
They would be troubled that Israel has at times prevented children in Gaza suffering from excruciating and sometimes fatal health problems from traveling to outside hospitals for treatment, according to Physicians for Human Rights – Israel.
They would be disturbed that according to UNICEF, children in Gaza are suffering malnutrition, stunting, and depression due to Israel’s blockade, in addition to severe psychological trauma.
It is time for the AJC and the other Israel partisans who signed their advertisement to leave their chauvinism behind and care equally for all children, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity, and to demand that Israel stop its violence against children of the “wrong” religion/ethnicity.
– Alison Weir
Injured Palestinian children receive medical treatment at al-Najar hospital in Rafah in the Gaza strip, following an Israeli military strike on August 1, 2014.
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“Is free-speech really worth all this hassle?” – Gaby Hinsliff
By Kit | OffGuardian | May 26, 2017
I’ve never written a response to a Gaby Hinsliff column before. I’ve never felt the need. In much the same way that I’ve never written an online review of sliced bread or an essay about cardboard. It’s… there, I suppose, and it does a job, but it’s hardly worth getting excited about.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. – Mahatma Gandhi
The Manchester bombing was “let happen” by MI5 because of the Conservative party’s disastrous dip in the polls. That was the theory tweeted by Rufus Hound, a comedian. As theories go, and it is still just a theory at this early stage, it’s not at all outlandish. History is full of precedents of power structures making people believe they are under threat in order to secure their position. As Hound succinctly put it, #Reichstagfire.
The bombing, whether real or staged or allowed to happen or planned by MI5, will allow May to talk about strength and stability some more, allow the Tory’s to attack Corbyn on the grounds of being “soft on terrorism”, and distract everyone from the conservative plans to sell everything in the country that isn’t nailed down, arrest anyone that isn’t a member of a golf club, and levy hefty taxes on bedsits, old-age and despair.
If you find yourself reading this and thinking, “Well, I guess that’s possible,” I have some bad news for you: You are a dangerous, delusional moron.
At least, according to Gaby Hinsliff.
Mr Hound posited a theory, one with which Ms Hinsliff disagrees. In a rational world what would follow is a balanced exchange of ideas. Rhetoric, debate, discourse. These are the tools that make a society great, right?
Instead we get roughly 2000 words of insults, innuendo and fallacy. Her defence of Theresa May’s morality is a wondrous example of double-think:
This isn’t just silliness crowned with ill-judged Nazi references. It’s using a public platform to baselessly suggest that loved ones could be alive today had the Tories not been desperate to win an election. Before eventually apologising and deleting the exchange, Hound explained that “I struggle believing our establishment is incapable of great evil” – as if one comedian’s struggle with his own addled beliefs was reason enough to allege complicity in mass murder.
Clearly facts are too burdensome to carry when storming uphill to capture moral high ground, because Hinsliff seems to forget: May’s “complicity” in mass murder does not need to be “alleged”. It is an historical fact.
As an MP, May supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq.The final count on the number of dead Iraqi children as a result of that war is still unclear, however most reasonable estimates put it somewhere north of 22. Likewise Libyan children. And Afghan children. And Syrian children. In fact, Theresa May has actually never once voted AGAINST military intervention of any kind.
Theresa May is absolutely FINE with blowing up children, and has never given us any reason think she sees our children as more precious than their children. That Hinsliff can so easily, comfortably, make that distinction says more about her own mind than anything else.
Even if you buy into the (vaguely racist) assumed distinction between children born in Baghdad and children born in Manchester, any defence of May’s morality – or the morality of the conservative party as a whole – begins and ends with their domestic policies. People have died after being deemed “fit for work”. Old, sick, disabled, injured people are denied care and security, while £350 billion pounds is spent on a machine for setting the world on fire.
Any argument based on the assumed morality of power structures is illogical, an example of what they call the Divine Fallacy or the argument to incredulity. An argument based on the morality of this Tory government? That is nothing short of absurd.
Her vaguely directed bile would carry more weight (maybe) if she could at least demonstrate she had even the slightest idea what she was talking about:
Social media is littered with amateur “truthers” who once watched a YouTube video about Noam Chomsky’s theory of false flags, and now see conspiracies lurking under every bed.
I’m not sure what a “professional” truther would be, aren’t all people naturally inclined to want to know the truth? That said, even the most cursory of google searches would have taught her that Noam Chomsky’s “theory of false flags” is that “they don’t really happen and even if they do who cares”.
I realise that, as a journalist, Ms Hinsliff is imbued with a natural contempt for the truth, and I understand that writing a column without researching your ideas is much, much easier, but it’s hardly right she should flaunt it. At least a passing veneer of competence would make the Guardian’s (increasingly desperate) pleas for money so much more effective.
Bizarrely, she is so incredibly bad at making her argument, she accidentally makes the opposite case:
It’s not unreasonable to think an election fought in the shadow of a terrorist threat could help the traditional party of law and order, and the state did collude with paramilitaries in Northern Ireland; besides, the government’s emergency Cobra committee meets in secret, so can anyone outside the room really know what happened?
This paragraph is just delightfully odd, it seems to be heading towards a “BUT” that never arrives. Hinsliff lays out all the (perfectly reasonable) logic behind suspecting government involvement, and then just leaves an ellipsis on the end, hoping we can come to the “right” conclusions all on our own.
The equivalent of a defense attorney, at a murder trial, beginning his final statement to the jury with:
“Yes, obviously, my client had every reason in the world to want the victim dead, and yes, he has undeniably killed people before. And, true, he can’t account for his whereabouts on the night in question.”
… and then just sitting down without another word.
Apparently, when Hinsliff writes about “reversing the burden of proof”, she means she’s going to start proving herself wrong and saving everybody else the trouble. Very considerate of her.
“But where is all this going?”, you might ask. What, indeed, is her point?
Like mushrooms, conspiracy theories grow in the dark. But mushrooms also need manure, which is where social media comes in.
There it is. Beneath all the rambling about Diana, and the Moon Landings, and Noah Pozner, what we have here is yet another attack on the internet, and the ability of people who lack the “journalistic and regulatory processes” of the mainstream media to say things with which Ms Hinsliff (and her colleagues) are paid to disagree.
The internet’s magical power – that by expanding social circles to millions worldwide it allows the like-minded to find each other, however esoteric their interests – is also its sickness. There is no belief so repellent that it cannot find an echo somewhere online, and feel normalised…. Paedophiles are emboldened to learn just how many others secretly fantasise about sex with children, leading one another on to ever more violent obscenities.
This not-so-subtle concomitance of paedohilia and anti-establishment political ideals aside, this is at last an honest expression of a justly held fear. The internet is a threat – as an open network of person-to-person communication, it really sticks in the media’s collective craw. As such, it is blamed and bad mouthed at every corner.
That’s not to say that Rufus Hound was right or wrong. I’m not writing in defence of conspiracy theories per se. Maybe every conspiracy theory is wrong. Maybe Oswald was guilty as hell and physics stopped working on 9/11. Or maybe John Lennon is still alive and Stanley Kubrick directed the moon landings. It’s immaterial. This goes beyond that. This is about free speech, and the right to be wrong.
Unless we stand up for each other’s right to hold, and express opinions – even wrong opinions – then no opinions will ever be safe. Because when they clamp-down on the internet, it won’t be truth that decides what stays and what goes, but political convenience, and unless we defend all of it, none of it is safe.
In the past few months the internet’s lack of regulation has been blamed for Clinton’s loss of the election, for Russia’s “spreading influence” and for the proliferation of “fake news”.
In the past week alone, the Guardian has been running articles on Facebook’s lack of moderation. How they promote child abuse, misogyny and holocaust denial. Already Theresa May has called on tech companies to “do more” to combat online extremism.
They blame it for paedophilia, terrorism, sexism, racism. Drugs are dealt, threats are issued, abuse hurled. The internet is a playground, as David Thorne said, but apparently it’s one of those rusty, graffiti-ridden playgrounds where nice kids shouldn’t go. Tear it down. Pave it over.
Cure society’s ills by making it smaller, more isolated and much, much easier to control.
Maybe I’m just getting middle-aged. But there are weeks when [arguing with conspiracy theorists] seems an inordinately high price to pay for a convenient means of swapping gossip and cat videos.
Isn’t free speech difficult? Isn’t it all just so much hassle? Wouldn’t it be SO much easier if we could just stomp it all out? Yes, obviously, fewer cat videos would be a shame, but think of the benefits – a nice safe world, full of nice safe pre-approved thoughts. That sounds nice, doesn’t it?
This sentence does more than give us a fleeting glimpse at the author’s complete lack of imagination, it shows… again… where the establishment’s crosshairs are trained. And it’s on us. At OffGuardian and the hundreds of sites like us. At the minor celebrities tweeting reasonable (but forbidden) thoughts to groups of followers “more than double the circulation of a national broadsheet newspaper”. We’re all talking to each to other now, bypassing the established and approved lines of communication.
And it’s causing no end of trouble.
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The toxic legacy of nuclear weapons testing serves as a stark warning of the danger these weapons pose
By Scott Ritter | RT | March 11, 2021
Millions of people suffer and die from the effects of radiation exposure from decades of nuclear weapons testing. Their experience should give serious pause to those who continue to embrace the viability of a nuclear deterrent.
A dust storm originating in the Sahara Desert swept across parts of Spain, France, the UK, and Ireland last month. In addition to bringing a red tinge to the sky, the dust caused a slight, yet noticeable, spike in radiation in the areas it reached. This radiation spike was caused by the presence of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope produced through the nuclear fission of uranium-235 in nuclear weapons. A legacy of French nuclear weapons testing that occurred in Algeria during the 1960s, the cesium-137 contamination is a reminder that while the testing of nuclear weapons may have been halted for the time being, the consequences of these tests live on through the poisoning of the planet mankind calls home.
The Saharan radioactive dust cloud is but the most recent visible phenomenon of a plague that has infected much of the world. … continue
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