Joe Biden Fears for the Democratic World Order!
By Phil Butler – New Eastern Outlook – 04.03.2017
“The progressive democratic world order is at risk of collapse”, former Vice President Joe Biden spoke these words in his last speech to a waiting public. This is the same man whose son took up an executive role in Ukraine before the embers of revolution had stopped smoldering. In this same speech Biden also named Russia as the prime antagonist of this new global order. Here’s a look at one of the world’s top public enemies.
Joe Biden loves Bill and Hillary Clinton, he loves them so much he wants to be just like them. Why he’s already started his own money machine, The Biden Foundation, which looks like the spitting image of the Clinton Foundation. Like the Clinton Foundation, Biden’s new NGO is into all those things that people are most concerned about. It’s also into all those things people donate money for, like lobbying. The sparkling new Biden endeavor professes care for women’s issues, health, protecting little kids and equality too, just like Bill’s and Hillary’s altruism. The ex-Vice President’s new site drips with lovingkindness. It’s amazing, hopeful, and chock full of smiling faces to take your heart, breath, and money away. It’s even got “Pillars” like one of those ancient Greek temples of wisdom! And knowing what Joe Biden is really about, it makes my stomach churn.
Domestic Hypocrisy
The first thing Joe and Dr. Jill Biden did on launching their new foundation was to make a statement. It went something like this, with Joe quoting his father:
“My dad used to have an expression: “It’s a lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.” Jill and I have been very lucky these past decades.”
Indeed. But for the lowest income people in America the Obama-Biden White House brought nothing but more misery. Despite the juggled numbers this Administration and the “new order” cooked up, poverty in America is far worse. In the richest country on Earth there are 36% more people on food stamps than when these “saviors” took office. The Federal debt in America has more than doubled too, as pork barrel and military spending that helped only the banks prevailed. Corporate profits under Obama and Biden rose to 144% over previous wins, while home ownership and other key metrics for most Americans fell dramatically. The America Donald Trump inherited is a socio-economic piñata with deadly candies tucked away inside now, and he has said as much.
A look at the division in attitudes shows one divide, but the deeper scars of this nation may soon be weighed in catastrophe. Biden, the poster boy of hypocrites in the swamp of Washington, represents a more clear and present danger to Americans now, than he did as VP. Biden and his wife are lucky, when many Americans feel blessed to have a bed to get up out of, or even a roof over their heads. As is the case with any set of statistics, how one slices the numbers determines the reality. For Biden and the elites, this new Democratic order has been a boom. But for those who are not elites, the distribution of wealth shows a different truth. Put in a nutshell, Biden and his ilk feathered the beds of the upper-middle class and the ultimate elites, with the proceeds of a lower class fleeced once again. Don’t take my word, do you own research starting here. The “have nots” paid for Joe and Jill’s beautiful American Dream, and for Joe’s Dad’s deep, deep vision too. And as to copy-cat NGOs, Biden Foundation is already on the pharma scene for an upcoming medical conference. I am reminded of Bill and Hillary and how they started the speaking bonanza we heard so much about. This from MedCity:
“Now that Biden has decided to set up shop — at least part-time — at the University of Pennsylvania as head of the new Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the Philadelphia health tech community sees him as a unique asset. Several health IT and digital health interests in Southeast Pennsylvania are trying to get the former VP down to HIMSS17 in Orlando, Florida.”
Foreign Policy Fun
It is interesting for me that the first category listed on the Biden Foundation website under “Our Pillars” is Foreign Policy. Cancer nor kids are not first in these people’s minds, the Freudian slip has hit them between their beady little eyes too. The ideas and endeavors of the Bidens is not thought out alphabetically even. If this were the case, then “Community Colleges and Military Families” would be first, even though I cannot figure out why those two are lumped together. So, it is foreign policy issues this spanking new NGO intends to address first! The dogma for Biden Foundation foreign policy is tough talking too! It goes something like this:
“The Biden Foundation will find new ways to build upon Joe Biden’s longstanding commitment to preserve the liberal international order.”
How does Joe Biden intend to accomplish his stated mission? One way will be through the longstanding strategy of integrating a man and a mission inside institutions worldwide. The first such institution the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, where Biden will lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. This new center in Washington D.C. will focus on “diplomacy, foreign policy, and national security.” Like the malignancy that former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski has been, Biden follows the entrenchment path to foreign policy fame. Unfortunately for Biden, he has nowhere near the evil genius of Carter’s policy adviser.
However feeble his strategic mind might be, Biden has tentacles in other academic halls like the University of Delaware, and connections with a vast network of hyper-liberals from California to Florida. The Bidens have even secured a famous talent agency to get their show on the road. The scary thing about Biden and his feet in foreign policy is the fact he handled the Ukraine portfolio for the same White House that made a war zone where none existed. Who can forget when Biden’s son joined the biggest natural gas company in Ukraine only weeks after the Euromaidan set the country alight? The fact Ukraine’s ruler/oligarch Petro Poroshenko and Joe Biden are personal friends only adds further dismay alongside any idea the Biden Foundation will do more than make matters worse. Only if the price (or donation) were right, could any kind of sane détente come from such an NGO.
No Shame In the NWO
Finally, news Joe and Jill Biden have officially given their blessing to a controversial relationship (affair) between the widow of their deceased son Beau, and their son Hunter, it punctuates the hypocrisy and circus lunacy of the Biden circle. Even the announcement of this “blessing” oozes Biden drama, as it frames Joe Biden as the “president who never was”, owing continually to his love and devotion to family. Watching these people and Washington the last 8 years has been a continual soap opera. Joe Biden appears to those with open eyes, as the laughing hyena among jackals with no shame. This is Trump’s “Washington Swamp” at the utter bottom.
An article entitled, “Behind the Putin Fantasies” makes the rest of my argument for keeping away from anything Joe Biden is involved in. As we know, several Trump campaign advisers had business ties to Russia, and there’s been no end to the upheaval over this in Washington. However, the visits of Joe Biden and his boss Barack Obama to Russia have gotten zero press these last few weeks. But Biden continuing to side with Poroshenko and Kiev muddles the mind. “The Donald Trump administration should be a strong supporter and partner of Ukraine”, Biden told Trump last month after a visit to see his pal Poroshenko. Strangely, the New York Times and CNN failed to accuse the former administration of regime change and under the table business deals on the suggested innuendo? This is the fantasy land that the Obama administration created! Or was it created by Bill and Hillary Clinton? I cannot say truthfully, for this New Democratic Order is an enigmatic and powerful beast – one we should all hope is in dire danger of collapsing!
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe.
The NYT War on Truth
By Stephen Lendman | March 4, 2017
On issues mattering most, The Times features fake news, not the real thing.
On March 1, its editors lied headlining “Russia Sides With Chemical Weapons,” saying:
“Russia proved again on Tuesday that there is no crime heinous enough to make it turn against Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It vetoed a resolution before the United Nations Security Council that would have punished Syria for using chemical weapons.”
Fact: Throughout six years of Obama’s war, now Trump’s, using terrorists as imperial foot soldiers against a sovereign independent state threatening no one, claims about Assad using chemical weapons were fabricated – bogus accusations without evidence.
Fact: Plenty of clear evidence proves ISIS, al-Nusra and other US-supported terrorists used CWs numerous times – their elements trained in their use by Pentagon contractors in Turkey and Jordan, Saudi Arabia at times supplying toxins.
Times editors: “The Kremlin’s decision was in keeping with President Vladimir Putin’s vigorous support of the Syrian military in a six-year-long war that has killed half a million people.”
Fact: No mention by Times editors about Washington’s full responsibility for mass slaughter and destruction – NATO, Israel, and other rogue allies sharing blame.
Fact: Syria was invaded by US-supported terrorists, recruited from scores of countries, trained in Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere, responsible for horrific atrocities, mostly against defenseless civilians.
Times editors: “Although Moscow had made clear in advance that it would veto the resolution, (Washington), Britain and France were right to insist on a vote and to expose Russia’s moral bankruptcy.”
Fact: As usual, Times editors turned truth on its head, ignoring US-orchestrated aggression, vilifying Russia’s righteous mission.
Times editors: Mr. Putin’s argument that the resolution interfered with cease-fire negotiations between the Syrian government and the rebels was… not credible.”
Fact: The resolution was introduced to undermine peace talks, apparently wanting endless war continued.
Separately, Times editors claimed White House signals give “autocrats… a green light” to do what they please. What rubbish!
Most of America’s allies are rogue states, alliances formed long before Trump’s ascension to power – notably key NATO ones, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states, partners in US high crimes.
Maybe Times editors forgot.
Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.
FBI Rigged Investigation of Black Panthers, Newly Released Docs Reveal
Sputnik – 03.03.2017
Newly-released FBI files reveal that authorities tampered with an investigation into a police officer’s death in the 1970s, resulting in a Black Panther leader dying in prison for a crime he did not commit.
In 1970, Mondo Even we Langa (formerly David Rice) was one of 17 people arrested in connection with a bombing that killed Omaha police officer Larry Minard, eventually serving a life sentence for the murder.
At the time, Mondo was deputy of information for Omaha’s National Committee to Combat Fascism, an affiliate group of the Black Panther Party, and unbeknownst to him, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had placed him on a secret detention list and ordered agents to neutralize him.
Nearly 50 years after his conviction, heavily-redacted documents show that the agency called off a search for Minard’s killer just days before his funeral, and canceled the testing of the call that lured the officer to his death, which indicated 15-year-old Duane Peak as a lead suspect.
The San Francisco Bayview quotes one of the documents saying, “Special Agents of the FBI in conjunction with members of the Omaha Police Department arrested [Duane Peak].” and “Captain [Hartford] advised that the Police Department was in the process of obtaining a search warrant … and that he would advise the FBI as to the results.” Another section read,”Captain [Hartford] requested our assistance in interviewing [REDACTED] for any information he may have regarding the bomb slaying.”
Although the documents indicate deep cooperation between the FBI and Omaha police, officials testified that the agency had no involvement in the investigation.
In 1982, New Jersey Congressman Richard Roe requested an FBI report on the investigation. Two weeks later Roger Young, assistant director in charge at the Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, replied to Roe claiming, “The investigation of these two individuals was conducted by the Omaha Police Department and the trial was held in state District Court, not in a federal court. … I am, therefore, not in a position to furnish you a report.”
Some documents are missing from the files, and Mondo’s co-defendant and former NCCF chair, Edward Poindexter, remains imprisoned in a maximum-security facility.
The “Omaha Two,” as Poindexter and Mondo have been referred to, appear to be the targets of Hoover’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a wide-ranging effort to infiltrate, disrupt, and neutralize many activist groups of the period. Many Black Panthers and other radical activists were monitored, set up for crimes they did not commit, railroaded into prison and assassinated, as a result of the program.
In 1969, the ‘Panther 21’ were indicted on conspiracy charges in New York for allegedly plotting to bomb police stations and assassinate police officers. The hotly-contested eight-month trial resulted in all 21 Panthers being acquitted, thanks, in no small part, to the work of one the defendants, Afeni Shakur, mother of late rapper Tupac Shakur.
That same year, informant William O’Neal provided Chicago police with the floor plan to Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton’s house. Police raided Hampton’s house in the wee hours of the early morning, killing him in his sleep. They later claimed that Panthers opened fire on them.
Mondo died in prison in March 2016.
Antarctic Record Temperature Con
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | March 2, 2017
https://twitter.com/greenpeace/status/837005520313679872
Today’s fake news story comes from Greenpeace.
The supposed record comes from Esperanza. As Jim Steele at WUWT points out, Esperanza is at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, at a latitude of 63.4S, just about as far outside the Antarctic Circle as you could get.
And as WUWT also points out, the temperature was purely the product of a fohn wind.
The temperature of 63.5F was actually set in March 2015, but has only just been officially confirmed by the WMO. As the Capital Weather Gang at the Washington Post noted at the time, the previous record of 62.8F was also set at Esperanza as far back as 1961.
The implication now is that “balmy” temperatures of 63F are unheard of Antarctica, which is clearly nonsense.
And as we can see, monthly average temperatures in March 2015 were not in the least unusual. Indeed, the hottest March was in 1965.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=301889630008&dt=1&ds=14
None of this information is mentioned by either Greenpeace, or media outlets such as MSN, who also carry the story.
But the really dishonest part is that photo of two poor penguins stranded at the top of a melting lump of snow.
As Joe has discovered, exactly the same photo appeared in December 2013, in an article by the International Science Times, which was about record cold temperatures in Antarctica. The picture is actually on Cape Denison, as the report makes clear:
When it’s late February and you’re complaining about the winter dragging endlessly on, take comfort in the fact that you’re not on the East Antarctic Plateau, where scientists have measured the coldest temperature on earth. At negative 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the August 10, 2010, temperature was “tens of degrees colder than anything ever seen in Alaska, Siberia or Greenland,” said Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the group that made the discovery.
NATO’s scaremongering about ‘Russia threat’ to Baltic States ‘is all about money’
RT | March 2, 2017
The US security establishment is trying to justify its existence, says Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Peace Institute, commenting on a new report which lists how NATO can help the Baltic States counter Russian ‘hybrid warfare.’
The American global policy think-tank, the RAND Corporation, published a report that claims NATO should do more to counter the potential Russian threat and strengthen the Baltic countries’ forces. The US government-funded body issued a report titled “Hybrid Warfare in the Baltics: Threats and Potential Responses.”
The document raises concern over “Russian use of “hybrid warfare” best understood as covert or deniable activities, supported by conventional or nuclear forces, to influence the domestic politics of target countries.”
The author of the report, Andrew Radin claims “these tactics are of particular concern in the Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia, which have significant Russian-speaking minorities.” He warns that there is concern Russia will seek to use these minorities to gain influence in the region, “use covert action to seize territory, use subversion to justify a conventional attack, or otherwise use deniable or covert means to gain influence in the Baltics and undermine the EU and NATO.”
RT discussed the report with McAdams and asked him why potential “Russian aggression” is in the spotlight again. Is there a real threat?
In his view, what we are seeing is just another example of the national security establishment in the US “having to justify its existence.”
“The report itself outlines many things that NATO has to do to help the Baltics. The Baltics are absolutely irrelevant to the security of NATO. Their only relevance is geographic. They are close to Russia. Therefore, NATO can hold exercises on Russia’s border to provoke Russia. As far as the Baltics, look at Latvia, for example, if it is so concerned about Russian warfare or hybrid warfare, why do they spend 0.9 percent of their GDP on defense? They are clearly not worried. It really is just a ploy to get more free things from NATO. And for NATO to keep itself alive after it should have been shut down,” McAdams said.
In his opinion, “hybrid warfare” – the report refers to – is a term used when there’s no evidence that Russia has done anything wrong.
It was hybrid warfare when Russia “invaded Ukraine.” And that is just because we didn’t see any Russian military in Ukraine. It was hybrid warfare with “the little green men” in Crimea. Well, those little green men in Crimea were already there legally as part of the leased base in Sevastopol. All of these things are made up, it’s part of NATO’s ongoing aggression toward Russia, provocation of Russia and it is desperate to keep itself alive, to keep its budgets rising,” the analyst said. “And sadly, unfortunately, we are seeing that the US president who was rightly critical of NATO, calling it outdated, said in his recent speech to Congress that he loves NATO and thinks it’s great. So, unfortunately, it looks like it is going to be propped up for a while longer. And yes, it is about money,” he added.
Women’s Protection in Syria: Disinformation Is No Help
By Tim Hayward | March 1, 2017
A ‘new report by the London School of Economics’ (LSE), so announced the British press – The Times, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror – describes sexual crimes against women in Syrian prisons. It alleges these to be a matter of state policy. Published just ahead of Geneva talks about a political settlement in Syria, the press interpreted it as supporting renewed calls for regime change.
The paper provides no new grounds for that conclusion, however. In fact, its sweeping allegations obscure good reasons why, under present circumstances, a responsible approach to the problem of sexual violence in Syria would involve supporting the government against the terrorist insurgents.
Syrian Christians
Some reasons can be gleaned from United Nations research into the problem. The UN found (in 2015 and again in 2016) that while some conflict-related sexual violence was perpetrated by state personnel, ‘non-State actors account for the vast majority of incidents’.[1] The UN made clear that efforts to defeat groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, as the Syrian government is committed to, ‘are an essential part of the fight against conflict-related sexual violence.’ Such groups use sexual violence as part of their strategy to spread terror among those that oppose their ideology. They engage in trafficking of women and slavery. They drive the displacement of women who, then, ‘remain at high risk, even when they reach the supposed refuge of neighbouring countries.’
Marie Forestier, the LSE paper’s author, complains that the UN paid ‘disproportionate attention’ to the terrorist groups as perpetrators of sexual violence in Syria. She wants to highlight crimes on the government side, and she relays some horrific allegations about some individual cases. This illustrates specific experiences of a problem that the UN had signaled. However, while harrowing in themselves, these testimonies cannot speak to the comparative scale of the problem.[2] Forestier therefore does not show the UN’s concerns about the egregious sexual violence of the terrorist insurgents to be disproportionate. Furthermore, her interviews relate to experiences from a period – 2012 and 2013 – that is earlier than covered by the UN reports of 2015 and 2016. Forestier herself admits that accusations of sexual violence on the government’s side were ‘most frequent from late 2011 to 2013, in disputed areas such as the Damascus suburbs, and in central and coastal governorates … with a peak in 2012, and comparatively fewer cases in 2014.’ She thereby shows the situation was worse in places where the government had to fight insurgents and improved when the government regained control. In light of her own admissions, it seems perverse to cite limited older evidence in criticizing considered conclusions of fuller and more up-to-date reports.
The perversity is heightened with unwarranted generalizations in the present continuous tense. Press coverage has, unsurprisingly, transmitted the message that the most shocking details of individual allegations from up to five years ago capture what is occurring on a general and continuing basis today. Forestier herself even makes demonstrably false general claims in the present tense. For instance, she says: ‘According to an estimate by United Nations investigators, Syrian security forces detain tens of thousands of people at any one time.’ However, the source she cites for this claim says no such thing.[3]
Some of her most damaging claims are simply inexplicable, as when she says: ‘According to testimony, the overwhelming majority of men committing rapes have been State forces.’ This extraordinary claim flies in the face of the palpable evidence and reports of the UN. Bizarrely, the source Forestier cites for it is an article on ‘general data on sexual violence by state forces’ attained for 129 other conflicts, not including Syria, and during a period (1989-2009) prior to the outbreak of war in Syria.[4]
The LSE paper’s headline message thus misrepresents what is actually shown regarding the extent of the government’s responsibility for sexual violence. Buried within its text are admissions that the paper should only ‘be considered as a starting point for further research’ and that ‘it is impossible to conclude that sexual violence by regime forces is a mass phenomenon.’ Yet this did not stop Forestier making such damaging accusations as that ‘rape can be considered as part of a general policy from the authorities’ (p.12).[5]
Regardless of lack of evidence, she seems determined to convey a message of rape and sexual violence being state policy approved at the highest levels.[6] Yet she admits: ‘The decision to resort to sexual violence (or tolerate it) seems to have fallen under the regional level or even the branch and military unit level’. ‘No information indicates that high-level officials in Damascus ordered rapes’ and ‘the President or high level security officials probably didn’t give explicit orders’.
She rightly notes that ‘commanders may be prosecuted where they know or should have known of the abuses and failed to take action to stop them.’ She also correctly observes that ‘ending impunity is central in preventing sexual violence.’ I would add that ending impunity, like bringing the problem itself under control, requires well functioning institutions. The Syrian government is evidently aware of this, and, under difficult conditions, has sought to improve its systems for the protection of women and children, as welcomed by the UN OHCHR. But the good functioning of institutions is favoured by peaceful conditions rather than by war.
One does not have to be an enthusiast for the present government to recognize its legitimacy and the simple fact that it is uniquely well-placed as things stand now, and foreseeably, to protect ordinary men, women and children against violent threats.
Freed from ISIS
A realistic general presumption has to be that rape and sexual violence tends be more common in war than in peacetime.[7] That is a reason – on top of so many others – why war should be avoided. A country that finds its territory turned into a battleground has to reckon with sexual violence being more prevalent than in peacetime, while its resources to tackle the problem are diverted and diminished. A government that has to defend its people against armed insurgents, particularly when these routinely engage in sexual violence, faces extraordinary challenges. That does not absolve it of responsibility for ensuring good conduct by its own forces. The practical ability of a government to maintain discipline, however, is not enhanced by having to engage on many fronts with ruthless opposition.
Realistically, and morally, the best way to avoid rape in war is to avoid war itself. I cannot believe that Marie Forestier would disagree on this general point, but I am less sure what she thinks with regard to the specific case of Syria, or even whether she has fully thought it through.[8] The thrust of her argument would support continued efforts by foreign powers, exercised through terrorist proxies on the ground, to depose the government of Syria, something that could only worsen further still the problem of sexual violence.
By contrast, it may be instructive to consider the approach taken by the Kurds in the north of Syria. In 2011, Kurds were among the groups fighting against the Syrian government. Since then, however, they have become pragmatic allies of the government in a common drive to eliminate ISIS from Syrian territory. The Kurds also have a particularly enlightened appreciation of women’s central place in society.[9] Consistent with their political philosophy, about a third of their fighting force is women. The Women’s Protection Unit or YPJ, is an all-female Kurdish military organization of about 8,000 volunteers, and growing.[10] Meanwhile the Syrian Arab Army has emulated the Kurds by creating all women battalions along similar lines.[11] Already, though, the Syrian army prominently featured all female units, including the famed Lionesses for National Defence unit of the elite Republican Guard.[12] Western commentators who note the propaganda value of this also grant that its success reflects the wider social solidarity that has made the Syrian Arab Army so resilient. As a French commentator observes, ‘The war in Syria is a face-off between two societal structures and Assad is showing that, in his system, women have an important role, even in the defence forces’.[13] If the Syrian government sees the propaganda value of promoting women’s equality, we might reasonably suppose it would see the irrationality of undoing such reputational gains by pursuing a delinquent policy of the kind Forestier alleges.
The fact is that what people widely believe throughout Syria – in Arab areas as in Kurdish – is that the overwhelming problem of sexual violence, like that of extremist violence more generally, comes from ISIS and other terrorists that violate, torture, enslave, traffic and oppress women. This is consistent with the UN findings. Forestier’s allegations are consistent only with the foreign drive for ‘regime change’.
For anyone genuinely concerned to deal with sexual violence occurring in – and occasioned by – conflict situations, a central preventive strategy is not starting a war in the first place, and not prolonging a war needlessly once started. It certainly means not intervening in a war on the side of those inflicting by far and away the most extensive and egregious sexual crimes.
In short, if the government had been supported in its efforts to defeat the insurgents, a great deal of sexual violence would have been avoided. Forestier’s claims, seen in this light, in being unfounded, are counterproductive and irresponsible. The view she opposes has a coherence hers lacks. It also has basic morality on its side. The problem with Forestier’s paper is not simply that it is poor research and writing.[14] The real concern is that, in being publicly promoted, it has been fed into the narrative beyond academia that would continue seeking to destabilise Syria (and the wider Middle East) and to prolong conflict against the Syrian government. One effect of this would be to prolong the circumstances in which sexual violence continues unabated on that territory.
Civilians freed by Syrian Army
[1] United Nations Security Council, Conflict-related sexual violence Report of the Secretary-General 23 March 2015: https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2015/203. United Nations Security Council Report of the Secretary-General on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, 20 April 2016, S/2016/361 http://www.peacewomen.org/node/94106.
[2] I do not take propose to take issue with any of Forestier’s reporting of testimonies, even though her methodology is unclear. (For instance, she mentions that three interviews with survivors ‘were excluded because they seemed exaggerated or false’ yet she does not explain how she decided whose word to give how much credence to, particularly in cases where she was speaking through a translator via phone to someone she hadn’t met.)
[3] The source she cites is UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, A/ HRC/31/68, 11 February 2016, http://www. ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/ CoISyria/A-HRC-31-68.pdf. (Having checked that source I find the only mention of thousands of people refers to ISIS crimes. I could not find any statement remotely resembling her claim, and I would readily correct the record here if she can direct me to it with a page reference.)
[4] Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordas, “Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: Introducing the SVAC dataset, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: Introducing the SVAC dataset, 1989−2009”, Journal of Peace Research 51(3) (2014), 418-428.
[5] This assumption is manifest, too, in her claim – made much of in the press reporting of her paper – that sexual assault in detention was so routine that contraception was supplied. Damning as this may be, assuming it is true, it does not self-evidently suggest that those assaults were part of a policy as distinct from an atrocious practice. It could in fact be taken to suggest a desire of perpetrators to prevent evidence of violations coming to light. A related claim involves the testimony of a victim that her attacker used Vaseline. Forestier takes this, along with the contraception, to ‘indicate that rapes followed a regular pattern that involved some degree of organisation and were part of a broader state policy of widespread repression against the civil population.’ Since the organization required is that of a visit to a pharmacy, and we can have no idea how widespread the practice was, we cannot simply infer what Forestier claims about a ‘broader state policy’.
[6] At one point she asserts that ‘when soldiers or militiamen raped women during military operations, this was part of the attack against their adversaries and their relatives. Thus, rape can be considered as part of a general policy from the authorities.’ But the inference stated after her ‘thus’ is a non sequitur: she provides no reason to think such attacks follow from a policy rather than opportunism or vindictiveness.
[7] The presumption has to be defeasible, but it seems clear that simply to presume the contrary would be imprudent. For a discussion see e.g. Doris E. Buss, ‘Rethinking “Rape as a Weapon of War, Feminist Legal Studies (2009) 17.2: 145-163.
[8] Her puzzling take on the situation is illustrated by a claim like this: ‘the Syrian government has sought to increase antagonism between communities’ and ‘to frame the conflict as a fight between Alawites and Sunnis instead of a struggle for democracy.’ Yet the government owes its resilience precisely to a longstanding and conscious strategy of defusing sectarian tendencies. (The government has consistently framed the conflict as an attack on the secular multi-faith state by primarily Islamist jihadists.) Furthermore, however much a desire for greater democracy may originally have motivated the political opposition, the conflict that has ensued was taken over by jihadists committed to imposing the most anti-democratic regime imaginable.
[9] A fundamental tenet of Kurdish nationalism, as articulated by PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) founding leader Abdullah Öcalan, is that ‘a country can’t be free unless the women are free’. This political philosophy – given the name ‘jineology’– is embraced by the movement and its fighters, about a third of whom in the Kurdish region of Syria are women.
[12] Daily Mail 26 March 2015 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3011838/Syria-s-female-tank-drivers-Battalion-800-women-commandos-fierce-clashes-rebels-line-Damascus.html#ixzz4ZnIjB3tT
[13] Fabrice Balanche, quoted by France 24, 2 April 2015: http://www.france24.com/en/20150402-syria-women-soldiers-assad-army-propaganda
[14] Given its status as a Working Paper, the academic community is aware that Forestier’s claims have not been peer-reviewed. The wider world does not observe such niceties. The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail and The Times did not. Most tweeters do not. They all present it as coming from the prestigious LSE. Which is fair enough, given that it features conspicuously on the LSE website. Since LSE has promoted this paper, there is a case for saying they should own it and answer for it. If my argument in this post is correct, there is a case for suggesting they should retract it.
The Clinton system to discredit Donald Trump
By Thierry Meyssan | Voltairenet | February 28, 2017
This article is a warning – in November 2016, a vast system of agitation and propaganda was set up in order to destroy the reputation and the authority of President Donald Trump as soon as he arrived in the White House. It is the first time that such a campaign has been scientifically organised against a President of the United States, and with such resources. Yes, we are indeed entering a post-Truth age, but the distribution of roles is not what you may think it is.
David Brock is considered to be one of the masters of agit-prop (agitation & propaganda) in the 21st century. A personality devoid of scruples, he is able to defend a cause as well as destroy it, according to the needs of his employer. He is at the head of an empire of mass manipulation.
The campaign waged against the new President of the United States by the sponsors of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the destruction of the Greater Middle East is on-going. After the Womens’ March on 22 January, a March for Science is scheduled to be held not only in the USA, but also throughout the Western world on 22 April. It’s goal is to show that Donald Trump is not only a misogynist, but also an obscurantist.
The fact that he is the ex-organiser of the Miss Universe pageant, and that his third wedding was to a model, is apparently enough to prove that he holds women in contempt. The fact that the President contests the role played by Barack Obama in the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange (a long time before his Presidency) and rejects the idea that climatic disturbances are caused by the expulsion of carbon into the atmosphere attest to the fact that he understands nothing about science.
In order to convince US public opinion of the President’s insanity – a man who says that he hopes for peace with his enemies, and wants to collaborate with them in universal economic prosperity – one of the greatest specialists of agit-prop (agitation & propaganda), David Brock, set up an impressive system even before Trump’s investiture.
At the time when he was working for the Republicans, Brock launched a campaign against President Bill Clinton which would eventually become Troopergate, the Whitewater affair, and the Lewinsky affair. Having changed his colours, he is today in the service of Hillary Clinton, for whom he has already organised not only the demolition of Mitt Romney’s candidacy but also her riposte in the affair of the assassination of the US ambassador in Benghazi. During the first round of primaries, it was Brock who directed the attacks against Bernie Sanders. The National Review qualified Brock as «a right-wing assassin who has become a left-wing assassin».
It is important to remember that the two procedures of destitution of a serving President initiated since the Second World War were set in motion for the benefit of the deep state, and not at all for the benefit of democracy. So Watergate was entirely managed by a certgain «Deep Throat» who, 33 years later, was revealed to be Mark Felt, the assistant of J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. As for the Lewinsky affair, it was simply a way of forcing Bill Clinton to accept the war against Yugoslavia.
The current campaign is organised in secret by four associations:
Media Matters is tasked with picking up on Donald Trump’s mistakes. You read his bulletin every day in your newspapers – the President can’t be trusted, he got this or that point wrong.
American Bridge 21st Century has collected more than 2,000 hours of videos showing Donald Trump over the years, and more than 18,000 hours of other videos of the members of his cabinet. It has at its disposition sophisticated technological equipment designed for the Department of Defense – allegedly not in working order – which enables it to look for contradictions between their older declarations and their current positions. It should be extending its work to 1,200 of the new President’s collaborators.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — CREW is a firm of high level lawyers tasked with tracking anything that could create a scandal in the Trump administration. Most of the lawyers in this association work pro bono, for the cause. These are the people who prepared the case for Bob Ferguson, the Chief Prosecutor of the state of Washington, against the immigration decree (Executive Order 13769).
Shareblue is an electronic army which has already connected with 162 million internauts in the USA. It’s job is to spread pre-ordained themes, for example:
• Trump is authoritarian and a thief.
• Trump is under the influence of Vladimir Putin.
• Trump is a weak and quick-tempered personality, he’s a manic-depressive.
• Trump was not elected by the majority of US citizens, and is therefore illegitimate.
• His Vice-President, Mike Pence, is a fascist.
• Trump is a billionaire who will constantly be faced with conflicts of interest between his personal affairs and those of state.
• Trump is a puppet of the Koch brothers, who are famous for sponsoring the extreme right.
• Trump is a white supremacist and a threat to minorities.
• Anti-Trump opposition just keeps growing outside Washington.
• To save democracy, let’s support the democrataic parliamentarians who are attacking Trump, and let’s demolish those who are co-operating with him.
• Overthrowing Trump will take time, so don’t let’s weaken in our resolve.
This association will produce the newsletters and 30-second videos. It will base itself on two other groups – a company which makes documentary videos, The American Independent, and a statistical unit, Benchmark Politics.
The whole of this system – which was set up during the transitional period, that is to say before Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House – already employed more than 300 specialists to which should be added numerous voluteer workers. Its annual budget, initially calculated at 35 million dollars, was increased to the level of about 100 million dollars.
Destroying the image – and thus the authority – of the President of the United States, before he has had the time to do anything at all, can have serious consequences. By eliminating Saddam Hussein and Mouamar Kadhafi, the CIA plunged their two countries into a long period of chaos, and the «land of Liberty» itself may suffer severe damage from such an operation. This type of mass manipulation technique has never before been levelled at a head of state in the Western world.
For the moment, the plan is working – no political leader in the world has dared to celebrate the election of Donald Trump, with the exception of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Translation
Pete Kimberley
Is this the muddy reality behind the “97.4% of climate scientists” meme?
By Sapere Aude | OffGuardian | February 27, 2017
On 4 February, 2017 the Daily Mail published an article entitled: “World Leaders Duped by Manipulated Global Warming Data”.
“… The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’.”
Eight years ago, the “Climategate” scandal enjoyed some brief exposure. A large cache of emails had been discovered (possibly hacked into) at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.
The mails revealed that in 1997, in the run-up to the Kyoto Climate Change Conference, a similar manipulation of data had taken place relating to the 1995 global climate report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). The original report contained statements from scientists to the effect that there was no risk of a CO2-caused climate catastrophe.
On the Jesse Ventura talk-show of 19.12.2009, Dr. Ben Santer, lead author of the IPCC reports, admitted that he had deleted from Chapter 8 of the 1995 report those sections which had explicitly denied the claim of human-caused climate change. On the show he was confronted by Lord Monckton (a leading so-called ‘climate denier’) about the changes he had made.
Monckton: “After scientists had submitted their finished draft, Santer came and rewrote parts of it – specifically where, in five different places, it had been explicitly stated that there is no provable human effect on global temperature. I have seen a copy – Santer went through the draft, deleted the relevant parts and wrote a new summary … which remained as the official conclusion”.
Santer: “Lord Monckton has pointed to cuts in this chapter … and there were cuts. In order to preserve harmony with the other chapters, we dropped the final summary”.
Because the original 1995 report had already been signed by more than 100 scientists, Santer had to quickly find new signatories for the amended (falsified) report. Santer was just then in a conference in Kassel, Germany and he had no chance of quickly finding another 100 scientists to sign the amended report. However, at that time Kassel University was the home of the Center for Environmental Systems Research. Its head, Professor Joseph Alcamo was responsible for looking after climate affairs in Germany on behalf of the UN, UNEP and the IPCC. On 9 October 1997, Prof. Alcamo sent an email to his assistants, who were waiting in Kyoto, telling him to secure the required new signatures for the falsified report. The email was discovered in November 2009 among thousands of other emails at the CRU Institute at the University of East Anglia. The key parts of the email are reproduced below:
“I am very strongly in favor of as wide and rapid a distribution as possible for endorsements. I think the only thing that counts is numbers. The media is going to say “1000 scientists signed” or “1500 signed”. No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000 without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a different story.
If the report comes out only a few days before Kyoto I’m afraid that the delegates we want to influence won’t have any time to consider it. We should give them a couple of weeks to take note of it.”
Simultaneously, Greenpeace activists were also working to get signatures on a document of their own to influence the media, using a tried-and-tested technique for signature gathering: Don’t read the fine print — just sign! To showcase their campaign, Greenpeace was organizing a media event ahead of the Kyoto meeting to display the document signed by concerned “scientists.”
Alcamo continued:
“If Greenpeace is having an event the week before, we should have it a week before them so that they and other NGOs can further spread the word about the Statement. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be so bad to release the Statement in the same week, but on a different day. The media might enjoy hearing the message from two very different directions”.
These two high-profile cases should surely raise some doubts about the truth of what has frequently been hyped as the ‘greatest threat humanity faces’ – the threat of runaway global warming. Are we dealing merely with a few minor ‘touch-ups’ to official reports and the views of a small minority of dissenting scientists – or is the whole story of global warming/climate change an enormous scam?
We are told ad nauseam that global warming is “settled science”; that there is an overwhelming consensus among scientists as to the reality of human-caused global warming. Figures such as “98% of scientists”, even 99.5% according to ex-president Obama, are routinely trotted out. Anyone who questions this “truth” is immediately vilified as a dangerous “climate denier” – one of the many derogatory accusations hurled at Donald Trump.
But President Trump was not always a ‘climate denier’. In December 2009, Trump and three of his children signed a letter to President Barack Obama (the letter was also signed by dozens of business leaders and was published as an ad in the New York Times), calling for a global climate deal:
“We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today. If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet”. [Emphasis added].
The day after announcing his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show (17 June, 2015), where he said that he is “not a believer in man-made” warming, adding:
When I hear Obama saying that climate change is the No. 1 problem, it is just madness”.
And in early December of that year he criticised the Paris climate summit, saying:
While the world is in turmoil and falling apart in so many different ways … our president is worried about global warming. What a ridiculous situation”.
(At the conference, President Obama urged world leaders to agree to an ambitious deal to combat global warming).
During a campaign speech at the end of December Trump said:
So Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and the – a lot of it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, ok?”
In January 2016, after Bernie Sanders had criticised Trump for his earlier suggestion that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese, Trump expands on the idea that ‘climate change’ is a “money-making industry”:
I think that climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax. A lot of people are making a lot of money …”.
And in September, some six or so weeks before the presidential election, but at a time when the contenders are already choosing their “transition teams”, word is leaked that Trump has chosen Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute to head the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Ebell had previously accused climate scientists of “manipulating and falsifying the data”.
On the same day, Trump’s campaign manager tells The Huffington Post that Trump “believes [climate change] is naturally occurring and is not all man-made”.
What is the truth?
One of the most quoted percentages of scientists who support the IPCC’s claims is 97.4% – a remarkably precise figure.
We have to ask: 97.4% of what?
It cannot be 97.4% of all the scientists in the world – how could all of them have been canvassed? Perhaps 97.4% of ‘climate scientists’? But there are relatively few of these. Today’s “climate scientists” are primarily biologists and geologists and mathematicians and physicists who happen to have brought their varied scientific training to bear on the issues of weather and climate.
A figure that is not so often quoted (almost never, in fact – suggesting a deliberate suppression of unwelcome data) is that of the 31,487 scientists (more than 9,000 of them with a Ph.D.) who have signed the following petition letter to the US Congress:
“We urge the US government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals.
The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gases, is causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause, catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and/or the disruption of earth’s climate.
Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric CO2 produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth”. [Emphasis added]
The signatories support the Global Warming Petition Project. The website explains that:
The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists.”
It should be evident that 31,487 Americans with university degrees in science – including 9,029 PhDs – are not “a few.” These scientists are convinced that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth.
To the 31,487 signatories of the Global Warming Petition Project we must add the 4000+ scientists (including 72 Nobel Prize winners) who have signed the “Heidelberg Appeal”: an appeal (issued to coincide with the opening of the UN-sponsored Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992) against “an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress, and impedes economic and social development” and “against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data”. [1]
Another document urging caution was circulated among reputable scientists in the wake of the Kyoto Climate Conference. This document is known as the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change. The document expressly states the following:
“As the debate unfolds, it has become increasingly clear that — contrary to the conventional wisdom — there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. In fact, most climate specialists now agree that actual observations from both weather satellites and balloon-borne radiosondes (i.e. weather balloons) show no current warming whatsoever — in direct contradiction to computer model results.” [emphasis added].
Among the signatories of this declaration are scientists from NASA, the Max Planck Institute, one of the former Presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, and many members of the American Meteorological Society. These people are not lightweights in the field of science.
Clearly the so-called “consensus of scientists” so often referred to is not a consensus at all. But the many voices of dissenting scientists have been drowned out – at least until recently – by the constant repetition by politicians and the media of the ‘human-caused global warming’ myth, and by biased sources such as Wikipedia, which uses the “climate denier” slur to attack anyone who challenges the official myth.
If the 97.4% figure were correct, one could reasonably assume that the 31,487 scientists who have signed the petition must represent a large part of the 2.6% of scientists who, according to the 97.4% claim, oppose the consensus view. However, that immediately reveals a problem with the calculation. If 31,487 is 2.6% of the grand total of scientists who must be assumed to have expressed an opinion on the matter … then that grand total is in the order of 1,180,000 scientists.
Did someone really canvass nearly 1.2 million scientists worldwide? There is no evidence of that. It is, however, known that in 2009 a paper by Professor Peter Doran and graduate student Maggie Kendall Zimmermann of the University of Illinois in Chicago was published based on a survey Zimmermann had sent to 10,257 earth scientists, with two questions. Answering the questions was expected to take no more than two minutes:
- “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”
- “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
[Note that the second question already presumes what was left open in the first question i.e. change. Note also that the second question is too vague to be scientific …. what does “a significant contributing factor” mean? Is a 1% or 2% contribution “significant”?].
3,146 of the scientists replied (a 30.7% response rate). Of those, 82% answered “yes” to question 2.
Only 77 of the scientists polled identified themselves as “climate scientists”. The student singled out the 75 of them who agreed that human activity was “a significant contributing factor” in changing global temperatures.
Coincidentally, 75 is precisely 97.4% of 77. But 75 out of the original 10,257 is a risible 0.73%!
As might be expected (for example, from its track record of routinely describing any challenge to suspect modern dogmas as “conspiracy theories”), Wikipedia reveals its bias in favour of the establishment’s “global warming” myth by claiming that the Doran and Zimmermann paper shows that “active climate researchers almost unanimously agree that humans have had a significant impact on the Earth’s climate” – when the original wording, as noted above, was that human activity was merely “a significant contributing factor”. Predictably, the article fails to mention the selection process involved – or the vastly higher number of dissenting scientists who signed the petition.
In a 2013 paper published by the Institute of Physic’s IOPScience and cited by NASA, University of Queensland climate communication fellow John Cook also stated that 97 percent of scientists who took a position on global warming agreed that humans were the primary cause. According to Cook and his co-authors:
Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW [anthropogenic global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global warming”.
However, a peer review of Cook’s paper by David Legates (a former state climatologist and professor at the University of Delaware), published in the April 2015 issue of Science and Education, debunked the 97 percent consensus figure. Legates pointed out that only 41 of the 11,944 academic papers Cook examined in his meta-analysis (0.3%) explicitly stated that most of the global warming since 1950 was caused by human activity:
It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when in the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%”.
Cook’s paper was also criticized by other scientists for what they said was a number of methodological errors. In a book published by the Heartland Institute and entitled Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, its three authors stated:
Probably the most widely repeated claim in the debate over global warming is that “97% of scientists agree” that climate change is man-made and dangerous. This claim is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science.”
Despite the general media support for the IPCC’s claims, there have been notable exceptions – as shown by the Mail on Sunday quote with which I began. More than six years ago, on 13 October, 2012, the same paper published another surprising article with the headline: “Global warming stopped 16 years ago [i.e. around 1996] reveals Met Office report quietly released
“… The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 … there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures … This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years. […] The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.”
The article included a graph (see below) which charts the fluctuations in average global temperature between 1997 and 2012. There are peaks and troughs, but the significant finding is that the average global temperature in 2012 (just half a degree above the world average of 14C) was exactly the same as in 1997. That pattern has continued to the present, with warmer and colder years, but no average increase.
Graph provided by the Daily Mail in 2012
Even more surprisingly, on 11 December, 2016, another British newspaper – the Sunday Express – published another remarkable article with the startling headline: “World on BRINK of MINI ICE AGE: Fears sparked as solar activity reaches new low. SOLAR ACTIVITY has reached its lowest point since 2011, prompting fears the Sun has reached its solar minimum early.”
The writer explains:
“If the Sun has reached its solar minimum early, it could mean we could be in for a prolonged cold period. Images captured by NASA between November 14 and 18 shows that there are barely any sunspots. NASA says that solar activity has dwindled at a much faster rate than expected following a peak in 2014. The Sun follows cycles of roughly 11 years where it reaches the solar maximum and then the solar minimum.”
2014 was a year with record high temperatures. It was touted by the ‘climate change’ lobby as proof of man-made global warming. The Express article may well have puzzled many of its readers since it would have been the first time for many or most of them that global temperature had being linked to sunspot activity and sun cycles. But this was not a new suggestion. In 2002, an issue of the magazine Science included the editors’ “prognostications for next year’s hot research topics. Such as:
What is happening to the world’s store of ice?
What exactly is the sun-climate connection, now that “researchers are grudgingly taking the sun seriously as a factor in climate change” and in “triggering droughts and cold snaps.”
They could have added a whole bunch more, such as: Why is the atmosphere not warming appreciably in contrast to all model predictions? Why the disparity between temperature trends of the atmosphere and surface? What’s happening to CO2?”
Piers Corbyn is the older brother of Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party. He runs a very successful long-range weather forecasting business which has consistently proven to be more accurate than the ‘official’ meteorological offices such as the UK’s Met Office. Corbyn based his predictions on solar cycles and sunspot activity. He has been challenging the ‘global warming’ swindle since at least 2008. In September of that year he posted an “initial response” to the BBC’s “Climate Wars” programme, in which he stated:
“… This ‘Climate Wars’ production is a shameful and desperate effort from the BBC’s ‘green religion department’ to shore up the failing theory of CO2-driven Global Warming and Climate Change….”
“… The piece – and the Global Warmers camp in general – while pretending to be objective, skilfully avoid applying sound science and provide no answers to the mounting evidence which refutes the crumbling Global Warming theory. It puts lipstick on scientific fraud – but it remains fraud”.
The website’s ‘mission statement’ includes the following:
“WeatherAction supports True-Green-Policies to defend biodiversity and wildlife and reduce chemical and particulate pollution, and points out that CO2 is not a pollutant, but the ‘Gas of Life’ (plant food).
WeatherAction defends evidence-based science and policy-making. WeatherAction completely supports campaigns for geo-ethical accountability and CLEXIT (Exit from UN Climate Change Deals) and is against data fraud and the political manipulation of data and the so-called ‘scientific’ claims now dominating climate and environmental sciences. Evidence shows that man-made climate change does not exist and the arguments for it are not based on science, but on data fraud and a conspiracy theory of nature.”
If Corbyn and the many thousands of scientists now speaking out about the ‘climate change’ fraud are correct, how and why did a situation come about in which the world was told that it faced an imminent catastrophe if CO2 emissions were not drastically cut?
How many trillions of dollars, pounds, euros etc. have been spent promoting the urgent need to “reduce our carbon footprint”. And why would scientists and politicians lie on such a scale?
The origins of “the great climate fraud” will be examined in a further installment.
The soft coup against Jeremy Corbyn is under way
By John McDonnell | Labour Briefing | February 26, 2017
WE HAVE TO ALERT PARTY MEMBERS and supporters that the soft coup is underway. It’s planned, co-ordinated and fully resourced. It is being perpetrated by an alliance between elements in the Labour Party and the Murdoch media empire, both intent on destroying Jeremy Corbyn and all that he stands for.
The coup is not being waged up front in public but strictly behind the scenes. Having learned the lesson of the last coup attempt – that a direct attack on Jeremy and his policies will provoke a backlash from many party members – the coup perpetrators are this time round pursuing a covert strategy.
The aim of these covert coup plotters is to undermine the support Jeremy has secured among Labour Party members, and also importantly to undermine support from Labour voters.
Undermining support for Jeremy from Labour voters is important to the plotters because their objective is to ensure Jeremy trails in the polls and can’t win elections. In this way they can destroy morale among party members and their confidence in him.
The tactics include daily and constant behind-the-scenes non-attributable briefings against Jeremy and his Shadow Cabinet every time he or his shadow ministers make a statement, intervene in Parliament or launch a policy. The plotters use every opportunity to chip away at Jeremy’s standing to seek to demean him and undermine support for him in the Labour Party and among Labour supporters. This constant barrage of negative briefings also crowds out any positive initiatives or narrative from Jeremy and his team. It also feeds and confirms in the public’s mind that the Labour Party is split.
The plotters are effective in distorting the media coverage because they have extensive contacts and allies in the media, many inherited from Mandelson’s days. The professional planning of interventions in which attacks to undermine Jeremy are framed evidences an exceptionally well resourced ‘dark arts’ operation of the old spin school. The coup plotters are willing to sacrifice the Party at elections just to topple Jeremy and prevent a socialist leading the Party. It is more important to them that they regain control of the Party than it is to win elections.
The irony is that they are willing to go so far in denigrating Jeremy that they endanger their own parliamentary seats and endanger the very existence of the party they want to use to get into power. We saw the methods they use with the leaking of the Party’s internal polling. This was a carefully planned and executed operation. Let’s use it as a case example.
Both quantitative and qualitative polling is undertaken by the Party regularly under the direction of Jon Trickett, the Party’s National Campaign Co-ordinator. Jon arranged for one focus group to be carried out by the Party’s polling agency in Manchester to assess how our frontbench members appearing on television programmes at the time were being perceived in the north west. This polling took place back in November and its results were only accessible to a small number of party officials, Jon Trickett and the polling agency. To this day I have still not seen the results. The polling was leaked by someone to James Lyons, a Times journalist who has regularly received leaks from within the Labour Party – usually used to attack Jeremy and his team.
The Murdoch media had already run earlier in the week fake news stories in The Times and Sun alleging that Jeremy was planning to stand down as leader of the Party. No matter how many times it was explained that this story was completely untrue and absolute fiction, the The Times and Sun continued to run it – and the BBC and other broadcast media took it up and reported it extensively. The media then invented the story that the polling on the perception of Shadow Cabinet members in the north west was the Party testing the perceptions of potential successors to Jeremy.
This was a classic negative story framing and transmission exercise. It is just one example of what we confront on a weekly and at times almost daily basis. It is vitally important that our supporters understand and appreciate what we are facing. What we are experiencing is completely predictable and expected. Spreading that understanding of what we are up against enables us all to organise how we can fight back and overcome the soft coup strategy.
We all have an important role to play in explaining what we are facing and how, by standing together, we can defeat the plotters again. This is the testing time for the Corbyn transformation. The challenges are great and the times are tough – but we all know that this is the socialist opportunity of a lifetime.
John McDonnell is Shadow Chancellor, MP for Hayes and Harlington, Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and Chair of the Labour Representation Committee.
contact – office@labourbriefing.org
© Labour Briefing 2017
Five reasons Turkish forces must leave Syria
By Adam Garrie | The Duran | February 27, 2017
Turkey’s presence in Syria is not welcome, not legal and not moral.
Ali Haidar, Syria’s Minister for National Reconciliation, recently talked to Sputnik where he condemned Turkey’s continued illegal presence in Syria.
With some many world-powers complicit in looking the other way at Turkey’s illegal war on Syria.
Here are five reasons that Turkey must leave.
- International Law
The first and foremost reason that Turkey should not be in Syria is that legally, Turkey cannot be in Syria. The Syrian Arab Republic is a sovereign state and Turkish presence is not welcomed by the Syrian government nor does Turkey have any sanction for their invasion by the United Nations.
Ali Haidar said quite clearly,
“Our stance on the presence of Turkish military forces has not changed. This is the violation of the sovereignty and occupation of Syria”.
As allies, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah forces have been welcomed to coordinate their war on terror with Damascus. This is not true of Turkey and their fellow NATO member states.
- Bad Intentions
Where Syria’s actual allies are helping to bring stability to a country besieged by a plethora of terrorist groups, whose names and local allegiances constant shift, Turkey has had two goals in Syria, neither of which are productive, let alone moral.
Turkey first of all wanted to push for illegal regime change in Damascus, something which the Turks now quietly concede is an impossibility.
The second reason Turkey is involved is to weaken the position of Kurdish YPG forces in Syria. Turkey wants to create an effective buffer zone in both Iraq and Syria between Kurdish positions in the two Arab states and Kurdish regions of Turkey. This is why both the Syrian government and Syrian Kurds are uniquely united in condemning Turkey’s presence in the country.
- Working With Jihadists
Because there isn’t political will among ordinary Turkish citizens for a mass invasion, Turkey is in great part relying on rag-tag jihadists who when fighting for Turkey call themselves the Free Syrian Army, a name first assigned to a group of mainly US funded marauders in 2011. The original group disappeared shortly after its creation.
But the current FSA is more or less a byword for jihadists loyal to and funded by Turkey. Whether standing under an Al-Sura, ISIS or FSA flag, there is little difference in the intention, ideology or methods of these vile groups.
- Undermining Arab Independence
President Erdogan is well known to have Ottoman ambitions. This has led him to threaten not only Greece and Cyprus but also the Arab world which the Ottoman Sultan once ruled. Arabs fought long and hard to establishment their independence in the 20th century. The long fight was more recently against European powers, but prior to that it was a struggle against Ottoman rule.
To add insult to injury, Turkey is now accusing Iran of what Turkey is doing, namely trying to gain a foothold in the Arab world. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accused Iran of trying to spread Shi’a Islam to Syria and Iraq, echoing the lie about a ‘Shi’a Crescent’.
Meanwhile President Erdogan accused Iran of trying to spread Persian Nationalism in the Arab world.
Although I have been critical of Iran’s role in Iraq, a role made possible only through the illegal US-UK invasion, in Syria, Iran has exercised restraint. Iran respects for Syria’s government and Syria’s secular way of life. The same cannot be said of Ankara.
By contrast, it is Turkey who is arming radical Sunni groups who put the lives of Shi’a Muslims, moderate Sunni Muslims and Christians in peril. It is Turkey’s President who shouts about restoring Ottoman provinces. No such words nor indications of direct actions come out of Tehran.
- Turkey’s Domestic Problems
With Erdogan facing problems on the home front, he really cannot afford his foreign adventures in Syria, not least because ISIS has been doing a strangely good job at keeping Turkish forces and their unreliable terrorist FSA at bay, although Turkey’s current (if not temporary) victory in Al-Bab may give Erdogan some buoyancy.
Between Gulenists, ISIS and Al-Qaeda sympathisers in Turkey, resurgent Kurdish PKK forces and Kemalists distraught by Erdogan’s increasing disregard for the traditions of modern Turkey, he simply cannot afford the giant distraction that his Syrian adventure has become. He ought to quit. Better late than never.
‘White Helmets helping rebrand terror groups to create Syrian no-fly zones’ – Vanessa Beeley
RT | February 27, 2017
Increased terrorist attacks during the peace talks put pressure on the US to divide the militant factions inside Syria to determine who are terrorists and who are not. A terrorist rebranding process comes into play at that point, says researcher Vanessa Beeley.
A spokesman for the terror group which claimed responsibility for Saturday’s deadly attack on military facilities in the Syrian city of Homs has appeared on the Al Jazeera TV channel.
The attacks happened at the same time as Syria peace talks were underway in Geneva. During the broadcast, the terrorist claimed the attack was planned well in advance and wasn’t aimed at disrupting the talks.
Tahrir al-Sham is an Al-Qaeda-linked terror group, formed in January. The majority of its members were part of a group widely known as al-Nusra.
RT: What do you think about Al Jazeera giving a platform to a terrorist?
Vanessa Beeley: This is not that unusual for Al Jazeera in the sense that although they have not overtly given a platform to terrorists throughout their reporting on the NATO and Gulf State war that is being waged against a sovereign nation, Syria, we’ve seen them consistently produce reports from terrorist affiliates, particularly during the time of the Al-Nusra Front-led occupation of East Aleppo.
We saw them allegedly broadcast from East Aleppo via citizen journalists and activists that we’ve later discovered have clear affiliations to extremist groups, like Nour al-Din al-Zenki, like Nusra Front themselves, for example, Lina al-Shami and other such affiliates who were embedded inside East Aleppo and were producing the NATO-aligned narrative and propaganda to ensure the continued incarceration of the civilians in East Aleppo.
So, this is not unusual for Al Jazeera to be giving a platform so to speak to terrorist organizations, to terrorist operatives. And again, this renaming of Tahrir al-Sham is another rebranding process that is becoming very familiar now.
RT: The militants are rebranding themselves quite often. What’s the purpose of this?
VB: I think they have two aspects to this. I think you have the aspect that we have now gangs and counter-gangs throughout Syria – we see splinter groups upon splinter groups particularly in Idlib, we are seeing them fighting among themselves, the various extremist and militant factions. But as regards Nusra Front – we had it already – the last name was Fateh al-Sham, it is a little hard to keep up with it and in fact, I think, the US administration, both under Obama and under Trump, is struggling to keep up with their own rebranding process of Al-Qaeda in Syria.
And what I think we are really seeing is an intensification of that during peace talks when, of course, there is going to be pressure upon the US administration to basically segregate the militant factions inside Syria and to determine those that are terrorists and those that are not. And we always see this rebranding process coming into play at that point.
RT: The group denies the attack on the Syrian military facilities in Homs was designed to disrupt the Geneva peace talks. Do you believe the timing is just a coincidence?
VB: I think the timing is far from a coincidence. I don’t think any of these attacks are ever coincidental, particularly when they come in parallel with the various peace talks that have been held over the last few years. But this one in particular, what is very important to know that for the last four days to a week there has been an intensification of the Syrian Arab Army campaigns against the terrorist factions in Homs and in the surrounding countryside.
What I did notice, which was very interesting, is in the corporate media reporting of this incident, we saw the appearance of actually the White Helmets and their video footage was used by the majority of corporate media. This is interesting because it is one of the few times that I have seen them actually inside Homs and filming a terrorist operation, so to me this demonstrates the fact that the White Helmets will be used alongside with the rebranding of this terrorist group to basically protect the terrorist group by calling in for the ‘no-fly zone’ and in an attempt to derail the Syrian Arab Army activity that is effectively to cleanse the area of the terrorist factions.
RT: What are your thoughts about the documentary on the White Helmets having been nominated for an Oscar?
VB: I think it will be a victory for propaganda, basically. They should be congratulated maybe on their acting skills rather than their humanitarian skills. Myself, and actually Lizzie Phelan of RT were actually in East Aleppo at pretty much the same time during its liberation from Nusra Front-led occupation. And afterward for the many celebrations of liberation leading up to Christmas. And both of us independently in different districts of East Aleppo, as they were being liberated, were speaking to civilians as they were emerging from four and a half years of imprisonment, we were both asking these civilians what they knew of the White Helmets. Now the first point to make was, when I used the term the White Helmets, which is the label that is given to them by their marketing campaign managers and by the corporate media in the West, most of the civilians didn’t have a clue who we were talking about. When we then expanded on the theme, we mentioned that they were civil defense, then almost immediately, the response was: “Oh, you mean Nusra Front civil defense.” And that was entirely unprompted by these Syrian civilians, literally as they were leaving the liberated districts. We also accrued a number of testimonies that basically attested to the fact that they worked alongside the terrorist organizations inside East Aleppo, they worked in facilitating and sometimes even participating in the various terrorist atrocities that were carried out both at East Aleppo and in the Aleppo countryside and then in Idlib…
Read more:
Human Rights Watch Cites Al Qaeda and Collaborators in Latest Syria Report
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 26.02.2017
On the heels of Amnesty International’s admittedly and entirely fabricated report regarding Syria’s Saydnaya prison, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has published its own baseless report on Syria – this one regarding alleged chlorine bomb attacks in Aleppo during the city’s liberation late last year.
In a post on HRW’s website titled, “Syria: Coordinated Chemical Attacks on Aleppo,” it claims:
Syrian government forces conducted coordinated chemical attacks in opposition-controlled parts of Aleppo during the final month of the battle for the city, Human Rights Watch said today.
However, when qualifying HRW’s accusations, it admits:
Through phone and in-person interviews with witnesses and analysis of video footage, photographs, and posts on social media, Human Rights Watch documented government helicopters dropping chlorine in residential areas on at least eight occasions between November 17 and December 13, 2016. The attacks, some of which included multiple munitions, killed at least nine civilians, including four children, and injured around 200.
Watching the videos and viewing the photographs reveals that none of them actually link any of the alleged “chlorine attacks” to Syrian forces, or even to chlorine itself.
The body of evidence presented by HRW also reveals that the interviews they conducted with alleged “witnesses” included almost exclusively opposition forces. Among them were the US-UK funded White Helmets – referred to disingenuously as “Syria Civil Defense” in HRW’s report – who served as designated terrorist organization Jabhat Al Nusra auxiliaries, often found on the battlefield shoulder-to-shoulder with armed militants.
Not only are these clearly compromised sources of information based on their admitted political alignments, but also because of their respective, systematic fabrications throughout the Syrian conflict. It is telling of HRW’s systematic bias that it would base an entire report on compromised sources drawn from the opposition, but not even a single report based on government claims. United Arab Emirate-based Al Nusra propaganda platform Orient News was also cited, as were other notorious anti-government propaganda networks including the Aleppo Media Center. In reality, a true rights advocacy organization would only report what is physical evidence verified. Human Rights Watch has deliberately avoided doing so not only in Syria, but amid virtually every conflict it involves itself in.
From conflating the number of civilians “trapped” in eastern Aleppo, to attempts to downplay or dismiss the role designated terrorist organizations played in the occupation of Aleppo, the groups and individuals cited by Human Rights Watch have practiced deliberate deceit throughout the battle for Aleppo, and the Syrian conflict at large.
For Human Rights Watch – an allegedly world-renowned rights advocacy organization – to cite such sources indicates that this latest report, like Amnesty International’s recently fabricated report, constitutes a politically-motivated attack hiding behind rights advocacy, not upholding it.
Considering the timing of Amnesty International, Human Rights, and also the Atlantic Council’s reports, rolled out in a multi-organizational campaign attacking the Syrian government, the individual deceit of each organization transforms into collective and coordinated impropriety.
A final consideration in the wake of Human Rights Watch’s latest, politically-motivated report is the fact that all actual evidence points to the opposition itself for being behind both the production and deployment of chlorine-based weapons.
TIME Magazine in an article titled, “Syria’s Civil War: The Mystery Behind a Deadly Chemical Attack,” would admit:
In August rebel forces took Sabbagh’s factory by force, as part of a sweep that also netted them an electricity station and a military airport about 30 km from Aleppo. Sabbagh, who has since fled Aleppo for Beirut, says his factory is now occupied by Jabhat al-Nusra, a militant group with strong ties to al-Qaeda that has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. He knows this because his site manager has struck a deal with the rebels — they supply 200 L of fuel a day to keep the generator running so that the valves of his $25 million factory don’t freeze up. The factory isn’t operational anymore, but this way at least, says Sabbagh, it might be one day in the future. In the meantime, he has no idea what has happened, if anything, to the 400 or so steel barrels of chlorine gas he had stored in the compound. The yellow tanks, which hold one ton of gas each, are used for purifying municipal water supplies. “No one can know for certain, but if it turns out chlorine gas was used in the attack, then the first possibility is that it was mine. There is no other factory in Syria that can make this gas, and now it is under opposition control,” he says.
Military experts since the advent of modern chemical warfare have noted its limited utility during combat. It has very temporary tactical advantages when used on a very large scale – a scale much larger than any of the alleged attacks cited by Human Rights Watch. Strategically, a military force with superior conventional means would have no logical use for chemical weapons.
Likewise, chemical weapons would not turn the tide in the battle of Aleppo for the occupying terrorists. However, the use of chemical weapons in Aleppo and the use of the West’s powerful propaganda arms to assign blame to the Syrian government did promise a very significant political and possibly strategic advantage. It was accusations of “weapons of mass destruction” that served as a pretext for war with Iraq in 2003 – a pretext the US attempted to recreate versus Syria in 2013.
With these latest, weak, and baseless accusations presented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Atlantic Council, we are witnessing a redux of 2013 propaganda aimed at undermining the Syrian government and expanding the West’s pretext for more direct involvement in the Syrian conflict.
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From the Archives
The 9/11 “Double-Cross” Conspiracy Theory
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 6, 2022
Is it true that “9/11 was an inside job”? Yes, insofar as Israel is “inside” the U.S. But for the 9/11 truthers who have identified Israel as the main perpetrators, “9/11 was an inside job” is at best a half-truth, and at worst an integral part of the Zionist operation, like a secondary flag sewn as a lining under the false flag of Islamism. Victor Thorn (1963-2017) wrote in his book 9/11 made in Israel: The Plot Against America (2011): “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. . . . The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised.” In milder terms, it is “controlled opposition”.
A genuine truth movement would have pointed to Israel as the prime suspect from the start. From day one, it was obvious who would benefit. … continue
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