Some presidents grow in office and some presidents grow once out of office (Jimmy Carter comes to mind). But some presidents seem to learn very little during their four or eight year term. Unfortunately, especially when it comes to foreign policy, it seems President Obama falls into that latter category.
The president gave a press conference at the Pentagon today to update us on how the fight against ISIS is going. Remember: it is two years since Obama expanded what he promised would be a very limited military operation to save a religious minority — the Yazidis — from a hilltop in Iraq, into a full-fledged war in Iraq, Syria, and as of last week, Libya.
Two years ago this very week, in fact, President Obama informed the American people that he was launching “targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel, and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water…”
There was no chance of this very limited rescue operation expanding, he assured us:
As Commander-in-Chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq. And so even as we support Iraqis as they take the fight to these terrorists, American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.
Two years later, the lies are laid bare. US troops are indeed fighting another war in Iraq, with the addition of wars in Syria and Libya to boot.
Today the president wanted to give us good news about his anti-ISIS efforts in Iraq and Syria. His efforts have made us more safe, he claimed: “I do think that because of our extraordinary efforts, a homeland is significantly safer than it otherwise would be.”
But the president wanted us to know that things are not perfect. There are some bad actors who are hindering our efforts.
Singled out for condemnation in the president’s address was not ISIS, or al-Qaeda, or even the US-backed Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which recently filmed itself beheading a young child. No, the real villain for President Obama is the Syrian government, which has been engaged in a five year battle with ISIS, al-Qaeda, and US-backed “moderates” who do things like cut off young boys’ heads.
To Obama, the disaster in Syria is not the fault of the outside powers, who imported jihadis and even weapons from Libya (Hillary!) to overthow Syrian president Assad. It is all the fault of Assad for resisting the foreign-backed overthrow of his government! Indeed, even the act of fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda in his country earns Assad the condemnation of Obama:
In Syria, defeating ISIL and al-Qaeda requires an end to the civil war and brutality against the people, pushing them to extremes. The regime and its allies continue to violate the cessation of hostilities.
So the Syrian government is guilty of violating the “cessation of hostilities” by fighting al-Qaeda and US-backed groups that fight alongside al-Qaeda.
Indeed, to Obama the whole Syria disaster is the fault of Assad, who apparently woke up one morning and decided that the best way to keep power in Syria was to destroy his own country.
Said Obama:
We are very clear that Russia has been willing to support a murderous regime and an individual who has destroyed his country just to cling to power.
Whatever one thinks of Assad, what world leader would not resist a foreign-backed insurgency aimed at overthrowing the constitutional order? Would Obama? The mere rumor that the Russians might have had a peep at the DNC’s “cheat Bernie Sanders” grand strategy and the entire Democratic Party is ready to launch World War III against Russia!
But, finally, Obama assures us that try as he constantly does, he just sees no option other than our current hyper-interventionism in the Middle East:
I am pretty confident that a big chunk of my gray hair comes out of my Syrian meetings. There is not a meeting that I don’t end by saying is there something else we could be doing that we haven’t done? Is there a plan F, G, H that we think would lead to a resolution of the issue so that the Syrian people can put their lives back together and we can bring peace and leave the refugee crisis that has taken place?
Well, Mr. President, you must not be trying all that hard, because the answer is as obvious as the gray that has overtaken your hair: just go home. Leave Syria alone. Stop trying to change regimes.
The sensational headlines following the arrests of Brandon-Lee and Tony-Lee Thulsie, as well as Ebrahim and Fatima Patel, in Johannesburg and the West Rand, have dominated the South African media over the past few weeks. The #TerrorArrests, as they have been dubbed on social media, came a month after the US embassy issued its umpteenth terror alert warning of imminent Daesh attacks in the country. Even though there are still questions around the legality of the Thulsie arrests, the word “terror” has been used freely. The South African Jewish Report claims that it dubbed the Thulsies the “Terror Twins” and the “name has stuck like glue in all media reports on the case,” gloated journalist Ant Katz.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the court of public opinion has already found the accused – all of whom are Muslims – guilty of being Daesh recruits. They were, it is claimed widely, planning attacks on American sites and Jewish cultural institutions.
There has been much speculation about Daesh recruitment in South Africa — indeed, around the world — but I would argue that the extremist group has no need to make any real effort to recruit anyone; the West does a good enough job in that respect. It is the West’s support for tyrannical Arab and Israeli regimes that draws people to extremism. Daesh’s use of terminology such as “Caliphate” and “jihad”, and its Hollywood-style video clips purportedly confronting the imperial invaders, also attract marginal support from the naive.
In 2003, the South African government introduced US-inspired anti-terrorism legislation, despite warnings from civil society on the impact that this would have on the Muslim community. Since then, there has been a slew of clandestine arrests and detentions of South African Muslims, in collaboration with foreign intelligence agencies like the FBI.
Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute reports that the FBI treats Muslims like “terrorists-in-waiting”, encouraging, pressurising and sometimes paying them to commit crimes that they would not ordinarily have committed. Informants trawl through Muslim communities, mosques and community centres, monitor and engage social media, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideas. If suitable suspects are identified, FBI agents then run a sting, often creating a fake terror plot in which it helps supply weapons and targets. Then, dramatic arrests are made, press conferences held, terror “experts” paraded and lengthy convictions secured.
Are the authorities in South Africa headed in the same direction? It seems that we might well be seeing such a scenario. The investigating officer for the Thulsie case, Wynand Olivier, admitted in court that foreign intelligence agents prompted the Hawks — SA’s elite anti-terror police squad — to arrest the Thulsie and Patel siblings. So desperate were the authorities to effect an arrest that even paintball guns have been presented as “evidence” of an arms cache. More disturbing still is Olivier’s understanding of the word “jihad”, a term that has become central to the case against the Thulsies. The legal official has admitted that no Islamic or Arabic language experts were consulted to guide the authorities on the use of the word.
The word “jihad” is actually used widely by all Muslims, and refers to both individual and social struggles. In fact, if the Hawks were to monitor the use of “jihad” thoroughly, then every South African Muslim would qualify as a “terror” suspect. That is a day we must ensure never comes. The Muslim community is woven firmly within the fabric of South African society, a fact recognised by the government.
However, if we are to retain this social harmony, then the authorities must revisit the anti-terror laws we were coerced into adopting. Furthermore, an independent, enlightened and prudent foreign policy must be followed; it would be the best way to protect us all by ensuring that we do not give Daesh the metaphoric ammunition to entice gullible people to join the movement. Such a policy will be infinitely more effective at countering extremist ideology than a witch-hunt based on myths, stereotypes and misinformation.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Fourth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” Read the third part here.
Back in 2006 all but a prescient few, such as Christopher Bollyn, perceived it as premature to try to identify and bring to justice the actual perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes. There was still some residue of confidence that responsible officials in government, law enforcement, media and the universities could and would respond in good faith to multiple revelations that great frauds had occurred in interpreting 9/11 for the public.
Accordingly, the main methodology of public intellectuals like Dr. Kevin Barrett or, for instance, Professors David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Peter Dale Scott, Graeme MacQueen, John McMurtry, Michael Keefer, Richard B. Lee, A.K. Dewdney, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, and Michel Chossudovsky, was to marshal evidence demonstrating that the official narrative of 9/11 could not be true.
The marshaling of evidence was spurred on by observations coming from government insiders like Eckehardt Wertherbach, a former head of Germany’s intelligence service. In a meeting in Germany with Christopher Bollyn and Dr. Andreas von Bülow, Wertherbach pointed out that, “an attack of this magnitude and precision would have required years of planning. Such a sophisticated operation would require the fixed frame of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a loose group like the one led by the student Mohammed Atta in Hamburg.”
Andreas von Bülow was a German parliamentarian and Defense Ministry official. He confirmed this assessment in his book on the CIA and 9/11. In the text von Bülow remarked that the execution of the 9/11 plan “would have been unthinkable without backing from secret apparatuses of state and industry.” The author spoke of the “invented story of 19 Muslims working with Osama bin Laden in order the hide the truth” of the real perpetrators’ identity.
In the early years the pioneer researchers and organizers of the 9/11 Truth Movement began the process of marshaling evidence that demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt that the original narrative of the 9/11 crimes could not be true. From this it followed that the public was entitled to a credible and true explanation, from the responsible authorities, about what really transpired on 9/11. To arrive at this outcome the Bush administration’s now-thoroughly-discredited 9/11 Commission Report, sometimes also known as the Kean-Hamilton report, would have to be put aside.
Released in 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report was drafted primarily by the Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow. Zelikow is a history professor who was a well-known political operative active in the Bush White House. Zelikow was a prominent member of the Israeli First network in and around the war cabinet and staff of US President George W. Bush. Zelikow is recognized for his professional expertise in studying, creating and deploying public mythology as a tool for the shaping of public attitudes and behavior.
The chairs of the 9/11 Commission failed to stop Zelikow from drawing on counterfeit evidence obtained illegally through torture. Zelikow deployed this tainted testimony to embed, in the conscious and subconscious minds of the trusting public, the religious fable of 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report entrenched in public mythology the imagery of demonic Islamic extremists motivated exclusively by their theocratic zealotry.
The new investigation called for by many prominent members of the 9/11 Truth Movement would have to transcend the realm of partisan politics; it would have had to be staffed by neutral parties of high esteem capable of rendering genuine third-party adjudication that goes to the very roots and origins of the 9/11 crime. To this day no such honest investigation has taken place. Meanwhile the citizens’ investigation of 9/11 has continued to bring forward more and more evidence that proves conclusively that from September 11, 2001 until this day, authorities are lying to the public about 9/11 and many related topics. Thus the lies of 9/11 continue to form the basis of public policy, the basis of decisions made everyday about who lives and who dies.
The scope and depth of the citizens’ investigation on 9/11 is hard to fathom in terms of the number of researchers involved, the diversity of specific topics covered, and the array of various types of expert knowledge brought to the project of separating fact from fiction. As one observer has noted, “In the annals of history, no event has ever been so thoroughly dissected by as many disparate humans as the 9/11/01 Massacre.”
Of course the quality of the work being developed in the field of 9/11 studies spans the spectrum from excellent to poor. This variation has resulted in the evolution of improvised versions of peer review that developed among experts both inside and outside the halls of academia. Some, like Noam Chomsky, choose to mock and demean these people’s process of distinguishing empirically demonstrable truth from the lies of corrupt officialdom. Why would Chomsky show such contempt and to what end?
What must always be born in mind is that the citizens’ investigation into 9/11 is first and foremost a public service done because the responsible authorities have failed to do their jobs. The authorities have acted criminally at worst, contrary to the public interest at best. Our compromised and discredited officials have failed almost uniformly to provide citizens with a credible explanation for a major event that has significantly transformed all our lives decidedly for the worse. So far the negative fallout has rained down with particular severity on Muslims. Millions of them have been killed, maimed, poisoned, displaced, and tortured in a series of wars all originating in a specious interpretation of what transpired on 9/11.
There is still no end in sight to the murder and mayhem. The failure to address the crimes of 9/11 with truth rather than with the constant resort to the 9/11 fable has become a major factor in the delegitimization of government. Never has public confidence been lower in our most basic institutions of governance, finance, policing, education, and media of mass communications.
In the decade since 2006 the realization has grown that there is little chance that those in charge of our core institutions would dare press for a genuine investigation to identify the real nature and perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes. The elaborate 9/11 operation itself and the subsequent cover up implicate too many powerful agencies, groups and individuals.
Understanding the deep corruption permeating the system over which the 9/11 culprits still rule, is changing the attitudes of many of those who have taken the time to study 9/11 for themselves. Given the unwillingness of officialdom to protect the public interest, those leading the citizens’ investigation into 9/11 are increasingly inclined to name and shame the most credibly accused suspects who so far have been able to evade accountability by framing, blaming, manipulating and smearing Muslims.
A recent illustration of the depth of this scam is exposed in the machinations of the kangaroo court at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Along with four supporting actors, the supposed “mastermind of 9/11,” the oft tortured Khalid Sheik Mohammed, is subject to the travesty of a psychological operation going forward under the guise of a legal proceeding.
The Guantanamo Military Commission has been ordered to direct ultimate blame for the 9/11 debacle on a manipulated cast of patsies performing parodies of Islamic extremism. This farce of litigation, this betrayal of due process, forms a telling illustration of the degradation of our criminal justice systems. Like many other institutions essential to the survival of free and democratic societies, our criminal justice systems are being trashed to protect the real culprits responsible for the lies and crimes of 9/11.
Prominent among those that should be put on trial, including for the 9/11 cover up, are Michael Chertoff, Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, Richard Perle, Benjamin Netanyahu, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Shalom Yoran, Arnon Milchan, Jules Kroll, Philip Zelikow, Ash Carter, Robert Gates, Ronald Lauder, William Kristol, Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Judge Michael Mukasey, Jonathan Kay, Michael Shermer, David Frum, Karl Rove, General Richard Myers, David Aaronovitch, Rupert Murdoch, Rita Katz, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, Paul Godfrey, and, as we shall see, Noam Chomsky.
As years pass, the 9/11 cover up is becoming the central element of the 9/11 crime. The logistics of the cover up involve the manipulation of the mainstream media and other strategic institutions including our courts, schools and universities. As Howard Baker observed when reflecting on the abbreviated presidency of Richard Nixon, “it is almost always the cover up rather than the event that causes trouble.” It is difficult to fathom the enormity of the enterprise of keeping alive the absurd Islamophobia-inducing fable of 9/11, let alone the smaller scale sequels of false flag terror events required to keep large portions of the public in constant states of fear, confusion, uncertainty, disorientation and angst.
An astonishing piece appeared in the New York Times (NYT) recently. It reported a fierce bias in the Times’s coverage of politics and current affairs, most notably when it comes to Donald Trump. The bias turns up not just in the opinion pages but in the News, reports Liz Spayd, the new “public editor,” a position once called the ombudsman.
But the surprise does not end there. Spayd’s report is based on letters from liberal readers, which are filling her inbox to overflowing. Here are some examples that she cites:
“You’ve lost a subscriber because of your relentless bias against Trump — and I’m not even a Republican,” writes an Arizonan.
“I never thought I’d see the day when I, as a liberal, would start getting so frustrated with the one-sided reporting that I would start hopping over to the Fox News webpage to read an article and get the rest of the story that the NYT refused to publish,” writes a woman from California.
“The NY Times is alienating its independent and open-minded readers, and in doing so, limiting the reach of their message and its possible influence,” writes a Manhattanite.
Since these examples are all letters from liberals, the public editor comments:
“You can imagine what the letters from actual conservatives sound like….
“Emails like these stream into this office every day. A perception that The Times is biased prompts some of the most frequent complaints from readers. Only they arrive so frequently, and have for so long, that the objections no longer land with much heft.”
Of course, this is nothing new for the Times. The bias in favor of the latest project of the American Imperium has been true for my entire lifetime. But it used to be subtler, and it used to include some real information, albeit buried away somewhere deep within an article. Noam Chomsky was once fond of reminding us that it was better to read the Times articles backwards, because some truth was buried in the last couple paragraphs.
But in the last few decades since the end of the Cold War and the rise of NATO Expansion and American Exceptionalism in the Clinton “co-presidency,” the situation has grown much worse. The age of American Triumphalism has caused more rot in the mainstream media. Not only with the Times but with other major outlets like the Washington Post, the Wall St. Journal and National Public Radio.
A striking example occurred when the Times lent its front page to a fabricated and now thoroughly discredited story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon in September, 2002 claiming that Iraq had WMD.
That was just weeks before Congress took a vote to “authorize” George W. Bush to launch an invasion of Iraq. I still recall the day I looked at that article and thought it was fact free and source free and that any decent editor would turn it back. It was clear at that moment that the fix was in and that we were on our way to a war which our Elite had decided upon. (Judith Miller eventually was the sacrificial lamb when that story and its origins in Dick Cheney’s office became known. But the co-author, Michael R. Gordon, continues as the “chief military correspondent” for the Times, and the editors in charge have never been punished.)
It seems that the situation has got worse with the rise of Trump who endangers the Imperium’s quest for world domination by seeking to “get along” with Russia and China. Once Trump took that stance, the vitriol and vituperation became a daily feature in the Times. Indeed their columnist Timothy Egan seems to write about little else these days. Only Maureen Dowd provides occasional timid relief, daring to point out that Trump “talks to the press,” a dig at Hillary who does not. (Clinton has not had so much as a single press conference in almost a year.)
I know that many Times readers now seek out Fox, just like the letter writer quoted above. And many also turn to Breitbart and the Drudge Report as well as RT and China Daily. Even when the Times reports some actual facts, it reports only selected ones (A half truth is a full lie.) or buries them in a narrative that neutralizes them.
More Times readers should recognize that they are being taken for a ride. And they should stop being so damned cocksure and snooty about their “knowledge.” They often look more foolish than they might think.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Third part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Over decades Chomsky has moved towards the center of formidable networks of academic associations, publishing enterprises, activist groups, speakers forums and New Media operations. The fact that the senior professor is so well wired into such an effective communication grid of activist interaction has hugely amplified his voice and his influence.
Chomsky’s ideas have been broadcast to the far corners of the world in every conceivable format. His work is translated into many languages as the MIT professor goes from honor to honor, distinction to distinction, all the while seeming to combat the expansionary impulses emanating from some of the world’s leading centers of power including those in Israel. The phenomenal success of Chomsky’s career would seem to prove and illustrate that there is still some substance in the conception of America as the land of the free, home of the brave.
Dr. Barrett’s career path presents a very different picture of the role of the academy in US society. Barrett is the child of a strong Wisconsin family that also embodied many classic elements in the American Dream. Kevin Barrett’s father, Peter, was a lawyer, engineer, finance professor and successful businessman. He also became an Olympic Gold Medalist in sailing in 1968.
In 1964 Barrett’s father would have won a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics if he had not disqualified himself at the end of a sailing competition by confessing that (not noticed by anyone else) he had lightly brushed against another boat early in the race.
In 2006 Kevin Barrett is reported to have referred to this episode during the ordeal of his trial by media. This public inquisition came about as a result of Kevin Barrett’s incorporation of views skeptical of the dominant 9/11 narrative into his pedagogy at the University of Wisconsin. Drawing implicit connections between his father’s decision in Tokyo and his own insistence on integrating the quest for 9/11 truth into the broader panorama of his academic work, the young academic commented, “Cheating for strategic advantage is never right. It’s important to follow the truth no matter what.”
Much is revealed by the contrasting treatment delivered on the dissident academic Kevin Barrett and on Leftist superstar Noam Chomsky. Dr. Barrett’s career so far runs against the Hollywood version of how the heroic deeds and revelations of whistle blowers are received. In the Hollywood version of redemption through unrelenting truth telling, the solitary hero often ends up overcoming the deceit of corrupt and ruthless opponents. The honesty of the solitary hero is made to triumph, thereby saving civilization along with innocent civilians from horrific cataclysms.
In real life America, however, this scenario of redemption through truth telling is more the aberration than the rule. Most whistle blowers are met with silence, avoidance and denigration of the type that Noam Chomsky has heaped on Kevin Barrett. The more common scenario of whistle blowing in America is for the truth teller to be sidelined and crushed in a harsh system of institutionalized cover-up hugely biased towards the rule of money and political expediency.
From Operation Gladio to the False Flag Terror Events
Animating the “Global War on Terror”
Dr. Barrett’s talk at the Left Forum in May of 2016 helped break an ideological prohibition at a venue that had previously blocked presentations by investigators that share some of his views. For fourteen years, any and all thinkers that rejected the official narrative of 9/11 were excluded, including those situated intellectually along the left-oriented spectrum of political identification.
The Left Form is an outgrowth of the annual Socialist Scholars’ Conference at City University of New York. In Barrett’s view Chomsky became the virtual Pope of the Left Forum Vatican, a venue peopled by admirers prone to revere their secular Pontiff as sacrosanct and infallible. In helping to break the hold of such an unseemly intellectual exclusion of 9/11 skeptics, Barrett brought to the proceedings his own unique style of Truth jihad. With his struggle to bring truth into the light of public awareness, the Muslim American scholar helped liberate free speech in a forum that during the Cold War was itself infested with the depredations of anti-communist witch hunts.
A convert to Islam since 1992, Dr. Barrett learned Arabic on the way to his writing his Ph.D. thesis on Sufi literature. In 2006 he was ousted from his position as a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin where he had taught since 1996. Barrett’s alleged crime was to have assigned skeptical as well as orthodox readings on 9/11 in one of his seventeen weeks of classes in an introductory course entitled Islam: Religion and Culture.
In retrospect, Dr. Barrett was adapting his curriculum to a subject with huge ramifications for Muslims in all walks of life the world over. The real academic crime in this situation would have been for an instructor of a survey course on Muslim thought, devotion and experience to have ignored this reality; to have evaded some sort of reckoning with the immense implications of 9/11 for the Islamic world.
Dr. Barrett’s reasonable pedagogical response to major changes in global geopolitics became fraught with controversy of great strategic significance for the future of our academic institutions. The Rupert Murdoch media in the United States, but especially Fox News, became an especially forceful engine of the bandwagon on which many ambitious publicity-seeking politicians jumped. For a time the University of Wisconsin held the sacred ground of academic freedom. Its academic leaders found in an internal investigation that Dr. Kevin Barrett had been conscientious presenting a wide array of competing perspectives on 9/11.
The fact that Dr. Barrett is a Muslim himself formed a significant part of the circumstances that caused him to be singled out. His inquisitors in the media chose to transform him into a symbol of those said to be attacking the American way through the subversion of American youth.
Much evidence supports the view that the most important motivating factor in the planning, implementation and cover up of the ongoing 9/11 operation has been to inject fear of Islamic religion and Muslim people into the minds of non-Muslim populations. The aim of this purposeful contamination of the mental environment is to transform Israel’s regional enemies, but especially the Palestinians, into one part of a larger transnational Muslim enemy said to be hostile to all Western freedoms. As Barrett asserted at the Left Forum in New York, the 9/11 Black Op was to create the basis for a “100 year war on Muslims for Israel.”
The 9/11 culprits delivered the fabricated imagery of global Islamic terror to the proprietors and beneficiaries of America’s permanent war economy. Especially since 9/11, the strategy has been to create patsies and to sponsor covertly the recruiting, organizing, arming, and violent incursions of mercenary soldiers. Whether pictured under the flags of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra or the so-called “Islamic State”, these mercenary forces are paid handsomely to perform the role of vicious Muslim terrorists acting out of no other motivation than their own blood-thirsty religious extremism.
In this fashion the new enemy has been shaped, inflated and deployed as needed in order to justify all sorts of interventions, including aggressive warfare anywhere in the world. Under Israeli direction the core of the US political economy was thus revivified in the name of anti-terrorism. After the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s the military-industrial complex needed a new enemy. Neoconservative activists supplied “the West” with a concocted enemy. They also helped ramp up the activities of the war machine with the necessary political bribes, media propaganda and military directives aimed at transforming the US Armed Forces into an edified instrument for the expansion and further empowerment of Greater Israel.
The alignment of opposing forces in Syria well illustrates the way the core countries and satellites of the Israeli-American juggernaut have integrated mercenary forces fighting under Islamic flags into the machinery of aggressive and psychological warfare. NATO’s program of false flag terrorism in Europe was one of the models for this new round of false flag terrorism aimed at demonizing Muslims. Where the operatives of Operation Gladio engineered violent acts in the 1970s and 80s to blame and thereby demonize both communists and left-leaning progressives, the current round of serial false flag terror events is aimed at inciting Islamophobia. The manufacturing of hatred towards Muslims is a necessary psychological pillar of Likudnik Israel’s agenda of violent expansion.
A key facet of this strategy of tension is the increasingly transnationalized and privatized police state that has become deeply intertwined with a massively augmented surveillance state. Since 9/11 the apparatus of law enforcement has been thoroughly politicized and turned against the human rights, civil liberties and public interests of citizens. Without a doubt the quality of life has declined significantly, as the instruments of Cold War anti-communism have been transformed into agencies supposedly devoted to anti-terrorism. This concocted series of post-9/11 conflicts, starting with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are presented in ways calculated to confuse, deceive, disorient and mislead an anxiety-ridden public. Police and military coercion to hold and expand empire are misrepresented as simple fights for and against “terror.”
This phony war on terror originates in the 9/11 deceptions. This phony war draws on a long heritage of duplicity in international banking, where the same financiers loan money to both sides in conflicts. In many core episodes in the so-called Global War on Terror, both sides are subject to the control of the same paymasters, the same high-finance power brokers. In this heavily engineered series of manufactured conflicts, citizens expected to pay the enormous cost of these military operations are plunged into a fog of war. Whole populations are deceived, distracted and mercilessly exploited. We are presented with a barrage of alarming media images constantly signaling to us that our most menacing enemy on earth is the scourge of Islamic terrorism.
One of many intended consequences is to divert our attention away from our growing subjugation to the bondage of compounded debt enslavement. This theft is imposed through the machinations of the world’s centralized private banks. These kleptocratic institutions exploit the indebtedness of nations to privatize the ownership of commonly-held infrastructures and resources, all the while forcing governments to cut back resources for public services like health care, education and social security.
The recent downing of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter and the death of all 5 on board over Al Qaeda-held Idlib province in Syria, represents the unenviable full circle US rhetoric has made surrounding both the Syrian conflict, and the wider “War on Terror.”
It was the United States who first created and used Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s to down Russian aircraft and to fight Russian troops. After successfully pushing Russia out of Afghanistan and plunging it into a sociopolitical dark age, the US went on to claiming to be victimized by the monster they themselves created, perhaps most spectacularly on September 11, 2001. Today, the US finds itself back to now fully using Al Qaeda to fight a proxy war against Russia, this time in Syria.
Russian Helicopter Was on Humanitarian Mission Over Al Qaeda Territory
The Russian Mi-8 helicopter was conducting humanitarian operations. This is not according to only Russian or Syrian sources, but even opposition sources including UK-based anti-Syrian government proponent Rami Abdulrahman who refers to himself as the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” (SOHR).
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes the Syrian government and tracks the conflict from Britain through contacts in Syria, said the helicopter had crashed near the village of Saraqib in Idlib Province.
The aircraft had recently delivered aid to two Shiite villages nearby that have long been surrounded by Sunni rebels, the group said.
Qatari-state media Al Jazeera, also an admittedly pro-militant voice amid the conflict, would admit that Idlib province, Syria, is held by Al Qaeda.
Idlib is held almost entirely by a powerful coalition of hardline rebel groups, including the former al-Nusra Front, now known as the Fateh al-Sham group after renouncing its status as al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
Despite Al Jazeera’s attempts to qualify Nusra Front as having “renounced” its Al Qaeda affiliations, it is still recognized by the US, Russia and Syria as a terrorist organization.
Justifying & Celebrating Al Qaeda’s Atrocity
In the immediate aftermath of the helicopter’s downing and now ongoing since, pro-militant pundits from both the public and Western policy centers, celebrated the incident.
Former director of the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center, Salman Shaikh, repeatedly retweeted accusations that Russia’s Mi-8 was not in fact on a humanitarian mission, simply because empty rocket pods were found among the wreckage.
With SOHR insisting indeed the Russian helicopter was on a humanitarian mission, the empty rocket pods were most likely empty upon take off. So far, “experts,” including Atlantic Council’s “Digital Forensic Research Lab Senior Non-Resident Fellow” Eliot Higgins, previously an unemployed British social worker and blogger, have insinuated the Mi-8 was on a military mission, but have yet to provide any evidence.
This attempt to leverage supposed “experts” to justify the downing of a helicopter (and subsequent celebrations) engaged in humanitarian operations even in contradiction to media reports coming from both sides of the conflict, indicates just how far departed Western rhetoric has become from the principles it claims to uphold, particularly in regards to its involvement in the Syrian conflict and its backing of militant groups operating in Al Qaeda-held Idlib province.
US Aspired to Down Russian Aircraft in Syria
The downing of Russia’s Mi-8 over Idlib is not the first. Another Russian helicopter was shot down near Palmyra in early July.
Two Russian airmen killed in Syria on Friday were shot down with American weaponry, the Interfax news agency said Sunday, quoting a Russian military source.
It said insurgents from the Islamic State group hit the airmen’s Mi-25 assault helicopter with a U.S.-made TOW heavy anti-tank missile, a weapon that uses guidance from a ground station.
The possibility of terrorist organizations like the Islamic State (IS) ending up with US missiles should be no surprise. It is a “coincidence” it appears many US policymakers wanted to unfold in Syria, if a no-fly zone implemented over Syria by the US directly was not a possibility.
I might do what we did in Afghanistan many years ago, to give those guys the ability to shoot down those planes. That equipment is available.
He would elaborate further by stating:
The Free Syrian Army, just like the Afghans shot down the Russian…
It should be noted that the “guys” Senator McCain is referring to in Afghanistan were Al Qaeda. With the downing of 2 Russian helicopters at the hands of IS and Al Qaeda respectively, it appears very much like Senator McCain has (one way or another) gotten his wish, with Al Qaeda once again serving as the armed intermediary between the US and Russia.
The end result is US foreign policy coming full circle, having created Al Qaeda to fight Russia in the 1980s, then using the terrorist organization as a pretext to extend military interventionism globally, to now once again cheering them on in Syria as they down Russian aircraft amid a struggle to restore peace and stability to both Syria and the wider region.
One wonders if this irony is lost on the American people, who have been asked to sacrifice so much in the name of fighting “terrorism,” only to have those who have done the asking to ally themselves with the very terrorists in a destructive proxy war in the distant lands of the Levant.
According to legend, Otto Frank recovered his daughter’s diary from Miep Gies, the woman who hid the Frank family during World War II. Frank published the diary under Anne’s name in 1947. In response to skeptics, Otto Frank angrily insisted that he had not authored the diary. He claimed that while he may have edited out a few embarrassing details, the diary was ‘penned’ entirely by his daughter.
In 1980, Otto Frank sued Hamburg resident Ernst Roemer for spreading the accusation that Otto Frank had written his dead daughter’s diary. Relying on the testimony of handwriting experts that all of the diary’s pages had been written by one person, the court upheld the authenticity of the diary. An appeal by Roemer was unsuccessful.
Roemer appealed again, and this time the court asked for the technical services of the official German forensic bureau, the Bundes Kriminal Amt (BKA) that performed a careful analysis of the original manuscript of the diary with microscope and ultraviolet illumination in order to confirm its authenticity — in particular, to determine when it was written.
The BKA found that large portions of the alleged “diary” were written in ballpoint pen — of a type that was not manufactured prior to 1951. The German magazine, Der Spiegel, summarized the report as follows: some editing postdated 1951; Experts had held that all the writing in the journal was by the same hand; and thus – the entire diary was a postwar fake.
In April 2000, a Dutch court held that while the authenticity of “The Diary of Anne Frank” may be questioned, any such questions must properly respect victims of the Holocaust. In doing so, the court affirmed Siegfried Verbeke’s conviction for publishing Robert Faurisson’s 1978 work questioning the authenticity of the Diary. The court stated that, “By raising doubts as to the authenticity of the diary within the context of REVISIONISM … the brochure far exceeds the limits of what is acceptable within the framework of freedom of expression.”
So, despite proof from Germany that the Diary was written after the war, the state of the law in Holland is that one may not improperly question the veracity of Anne Frank’s Diary, the iconic tome of an innocent victim of World War II.
And then, in November 2015, the Anne Frank Foundation almost lost the European portion of its copyright of the Diary. Most European copyright protections extend for 70 years after the author’s death. Anne Frank famously died in 1945. Otto Frank lived until 1980, and the copyright for his work could continue until 2050.
On its website the foundation claims that Anne had originally written two diaries, one personal and one intended for publication. According to the Foundation, Otto combined the diaries and had done so much work on the most widely published version that he had “earned his own copyright.” The foundation claimed to be protecting “Anne Frank’s original writings, as well as the original in-print versions [that] will remain protected for many decades”.
In the New York Times, French attorney Agnes Tricoire disputes their claim on rationale if not on facts stating: “If you follow their arguments, it means that they have lied for years about the fact that it was only written by Anne Frank.”
Also ignoring the authenticity of the diary, Isabelle Attard, a French MP worries that the foundation’s claim will dilute the impact of the diaries. “Many revisionists, people who want to deny the extermination camps existed, have tried to attack the diary for years. Saying now the book wasn’t written by Anne alone is weakening the weight it has had for decades.”
The Foundation won its copyright claim, but it lost the war and the diary is now widely available online.
My question is, why, after the book has been shown to be a likely forgery is ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ still relevant? In a survey conducted in 1996 at the University of Michigan, The Diary was named as the predominant source of Holocaust education: the text was required reading in high school for over half the students surveyed.
In an interesting piece on The Atlantic, Eleanor Barkhorn argues that the Diary is one of several widely assigned books that are not difficult enough to meet the new common core requirements. There is no shortage of alternative books relating the plight of civilians in World War II. I hope that we can allow Anne Frank to rest in peace and provide our schoolchildren with the best history as we now understand it.
Official documents on Britain’s relationship with Israel, including papers on “military and nuclear collaboration” in the 1970s, have disappeared from the National Archives in the last four years.
More than 400 records have gone missing from the repository in Kew, southwest London, including a 1947 letter from Winston Churchill and a Home Office document on the 1910 Suffragettes “disturbances.”
The Archives reassured the public it is following a “robust” plan to find the lost files.
The loss of the documents was uncovered following a BBC freedom of information (FoI) request, which found the last recorded knowledge of the 402 historical dossiers was January 2012.
Among them is a Foreign Office file titled ‘Military and nuclear collaboration with Israel: Israeli nuclear armament,’ in which the British government notes Israel’s intention to purchase nuclear weapons.
The document is thought to be linked to a United Nations resolution from 1978 listing the “increasing evidence” of the Middle Eastern country’s attempts at acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
This is not the only National Archives paper to report on Anglo-Israeli nuclear agreements. A 1958 document, made public by the BBC a decade ago, showed how Britain sold 20 tons of heavy water – one of the ingredients needed to generate plutonium – to Israel, to be used in the country’s top secret Dimona nuclear reactor.
The lost file is believed to have been part of a portfolio of official 1970s documents on arms control and nuclear disarmament.
Israel neither admits nor denies its possession of nuclear weapons and has never publicly tested one. It is universally believed to have them, however, but its official secrecy means it is unclear exactly how many.
It is thought that the files may have simply been misplaced and will soon be found. National Archives officials highlighted that less than 0.01 percent of the library’s 11 million public records disappear, accounting for around 100 files each year.
“We are a working archive with a robust, ongoing program dedicated to locating misplaced documents and many are subsequently found again after a thorough search,” a spokesperson for the Archives said.
Around 1,600 documents were reported missing between 2005 and 2011.
“The challenge is to ensure that you’ve got the systems to prevent that, because with every loss of a potential piece of archive you’re losing some history and understanding,” said Labour MP and All-Party Parliamentary Group on Archives and History vice-chair Tristram Hunt.
“You’re losing a sense of connection and you’re losing the fabric of the past.”
A couple of newspaper articles caught my attention this weekend. The first was in The Times, and claimed the following:
President Putin has launched a secret propaganda assault on Britain from within its own borders, The Times can reveal. The Kremlin is spreading disinformation through a newly opened British bureau for its Sputnik international news service, and is infiltrating elite universities by placing language and cultural centres on campuses. Analysts said that the push was part of Russia’s military doctrine, which specifies the use of ‘informational and other non-military measures’ in conflicts.
The Times is particularly alarmed by the fact that, ‘the University of Edinburgh accepted £221,000 from the Russkiy Mir (Russian World) Foundation to host Britain’s first Moscow-sponsored language and cultural centre. The foundation has also opened centres at Durham University, which accepted £85,000, and St Antony’s College, Oxford.’ According to The Times, ‘A NATO source accused Russia of “operationalising information” from within Britain. “The Russian information effort is to muddy the waters, to create uncertainty,” he said.’
The second article was published in Sunday’s New York Times. In this, the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul claims that ‘Everywhere, autocrats are pushing back against democrats, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is the de facto leader of this global movement.’ America must resist this movement, McFaul says. Otherwise, ‘The threats will grow and eventually endanger our peace, as we saw in Europe and Japan in the 1930s, and Afghanistan in the 1990s.’
What exactly should America do? McFaul suggests:
Just as the Kremlin has become more sophisticated at exporting its ideas and supporting its friends, so must we. We should think of advancing democratic ideas abroad primarily as an educational project, almost never as a military campaign. Universities, books and websites are the best tools, not the 82nd Airborne.
But it’s best not to do this openly, McFaul admits. He says, ‘Direct financial assistance to democrats is problematic: A check from an American embassy can taint its recipients. America’s next president should privatize such aid and help seed new independent foundations.’
So, let me get this straight. Russkii Mir openly provides money to the University of Edinburgh for the study of Russian language and culture. That constitutes a ‘secret propaganda assault on Britain’. Ambassador McFaul proposes giving money to Russian universities through disguised channels and for decidedly political purposes, and that is ‘advancing democratic ideas’. ‘Nuff said!
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Second part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”.
In his recent presentation at the “Left Forum” in New York, Kevin Barrett didn’t mince words. He rarely does. Barrett accused the 87-year old Noam Chomsky of contributing to the fast deterioration of the human condition by purposely diverting skeptical attention away from the true culprits responsible for the lies and crimes of September 11, 2001. In his essay, “Why Chomsky is Wrong on 9/11,” Barrett extended a growing trajectory of suspicion questioning the real agenda motivating America’s most highly publicized professor. What is behind Dr. Chomsky’s zeal to obstruct fair and balanced professional debate about contested interpretations of 9/11?
The contradictions are conspicuous between Chomsky’s oft’ proclaimed ideals as an academic investigator and the personalized vitriol of his attacks on those exposing the litany of lies permeating the most transformative event of the twenty-first century. The stakes in this matter are high indeed given the hagiographic extremes associated with Prof. Chomsky’s worldwide reputation. In the eyes of millions, Chomsky is the primary academic embodiment of anti-establishment dissidence within the US system of higher education.
Barrett’s critique of Chomsky adds to the observations of an already sizeable list of public intellectuals that have come to the conclusion that the celebrity Prof is not what he seems to be. The increasingly insistent accusation is that the crude diversionary tactics deployed by Prof. Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within. Among the commentators that have strongly criticized Chomsky’s work as a limited hangout are Ken Adachi, Barrie Zwicker, Daniel L. Abrahamson, James Corbett, Jeff Blankfort, Douglas Herman, Alfred Schaefer, and Benjamin Marhav.
Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within.
Internet broadcaster James Corbett has encapsulated the consternation concerning the obvious contradictions internal to Chomsky’s academic work. Depending on his subject, Chomsky develops themes that contrapuntally expose and promote the workings of empire. Corbett has argued, “Whatever Chomsky is doing, he is functioning as if he’s working hand in hand with the very elite he proclaims to be fighting against.”
“Intellectuals Are In a Position to Expose the Lies of Government”
Chomsky’s academic work began in the 1950s in the field of linguistics. Chomsky’s analysis of speech, the primary medium of communicative interaction among humans, highlights his theories about the universality of mental structures governing the convergence of perception, abstraction, and articulation. Chomsky famously imagined a “black box” of language formulation as part of a universal feature of human brains. Chomsky’s metaphors on human mental hardware naturally attracted the attention of deep state operatives in the CIA and related agencies with a professional interest in influencing human attitudes and behaviors.
The scholar’s original academic discipline, therefore, provided him with an excellent platform from which to launch his applied study of the connections linking propaganda to contemporary imperialism and warfare. Since the late 1960s Chomsky has entered the outer stratosphere of intellectual notoriety, both pro and con, based on his very public interventions into the big contemporary issues of life and death, war and peace. From his very secure base of academic tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prof. Chomsky would emerge in the final decades of the twentieth century to become probably the most recognized and oft quoted professor in the entire history of American higher education.
Beginning with his opposition to US military intervention in Indochina, Chomsky applied his expertise in linguistic manipulation to the study of the media’s role in manufacturing consent for many nefarious operations. In a 1967 article entitled “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky explained his intervention in what was then the most contentious issue in domestic and international politics. In hard-hitting prose that created markers against which Chomsky’s position on 9/11 would later be measured, the MIT professor wrote, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
While all citizens have the responsibility to oppose deceptions and crimes committed on our behalf, intellectuals have an added weight of responsibility to act in the public interest against state terror and injustice. “Intellectuals,” he wrote, “are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”
A Jewish Sage and Lawgiver Preaching from
New England’s Most Prestigious Academic Pulpit
The contrasting treatment of Kevin Barrett and of Noam Chomsky by the custodians of US higher education forms a revealing backdrop against which to appreciate the deeper implications of the former’s assessment of the latter at the Left Forum. In recent decades Chomsky’s dramatic career has come to be invested with a kind of Hollywoodized aura. For his adept and incredibly prolific jabs directed at corporate giants, war hawks and the like, Chomsky was embraced as the Left’s most tireless warrior of the pen. He is a wordsmith of the first order who, in his spoken language, articulates frequently with such precise effect that transcripts of his speeches, interviews and panel discussions are often quickly transcribed to become popular publications.
Many have come to think of Chomsky as a kind of secular prophet seeking to inspire his followers to save America from its own worst attributes. The intensity of Chomsky’s mission to redeem America invokes Old Testament ideals of the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem. The theocratic ideals associated with the creation of a New Jerusalem in the New World have churned through the dynamic matrix of US history ever since the Calvinist Puritans founded New England. New England’s founding Protestant patriarchs conceived of themselves as Israelites, as God’s Chosen People chartered by the Lord to realize a special evangelical mission.
The perception that there was a divine charter underlying the Puritans’ creation of Massachusetts extended to the sense of “Manifest Destiny” invoked to explain and justify the transcontinental expansion of the US republic in the nineteenth century. American exceptionalism is the term currently used to identify the secular outgrowth of the old religious justifications for imperial expansion. The psychology of God-given exceptionalism has animated US expansionism throughout its transition from transcontinental to hemispheric to trans-Pacific to global proportions.
In seeming to lead the Left’s quest for the Promised Land of liberation from corporatist tyranny, Chomsky has come to embody key elements of the American Dream. A strong statement is seemingly announced by the fact that Chomsky has been able to perform his dissenting role from a place of tenured academic security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With Harvard and about twenty other prestigious universities nearby, MIT is one of the most well established, stable, and safe platforms of intellectual power in the United States.
Chomsky’s academic home is well known for its old, deep and elaborate ties with the research arms of the military-industrial complex and its attending agencies of so-called national security. In spite of the military attachments and connotations of his academic home, however, Prof. Chomsky was permitted to thrive as a leading critic of the very interests that contributed significantly to his reputation and primary livelihood. One apparent implication of Chomsky’s career path is that a key institution at the very strategic core of the American superpower was made to appear accepting of radical criticism from within. This accommodation of Chomsky’s scholarly political activism conveyed the implicit message that the USA continues to be alive to constant adaptive change in response to a never-ending need for intellectual and logistical renewal.
Shakespearian chords resonate through the drama that has culminated in Professor Chomsky becoming the most high profile academic elder of Cambridge Massachusetts. The scholar grew into the role of a Jewish sage and lawgiver revered as a modern-day prophet preaching from the most prestigious secular pulpit in the American capital of higher education. From this important site of power in the Promised Land where New England’s Calvinist founders once found refuge from their persecutors in Europe, the Left’s favorite scholarly jurist handed down many judgments and dictums.
Chomsky’s decision to side with power and against skeptical analysis of the lies and crimes of 9/11 would prove to be the most consequential judgment of his entire career. In a book first published in November of 2001 and in many judgments delivered extemporaneously from his academic pulpit, Prof. Chomsky condemned as heretics those engaged in skeptical investigation of 9/11. The effect of Chomsky’s fatwa on systematic research into the deep state origins and character of the 9/11 crime was the professional equivalent to an intellectual burning of heretics on the cross of professional infamy.
Chomsky’s academic oversight of the professional assault on 9/11 skeptics amounts to a twenty-first century equivalent in a professional context to the Salem Witch Trials. Indeed, New England’s heritage of Puritan witch trial proceedings is made to weave through many features of the psychological operation attached to the aggressive warfare mounted by the real protagonists of the 9/11 crimes.
By misrepresenting the scholarly and pedagogical work of Muslim academic Kevin Barrett, Prof. Chomsky has led the academic facet of the twenty-first century’s most severe and unrelenting witch hunt. The University of Wisconsin’s professional martyrdom of Dr. Kevin Barrett, whom Dr. Chomsky smears with careless disregard for even the rudimentary niceties of academic protocol, well illustrates the nature of the post-9/11 assault on reason, due process, human rights, civil liberties, evidence-based reportage and decency itself. The episode constitutes a telling illustration of the elaborate psychological operation aimed at diverting Left-leaning activists from paying close attention to the true nature of the 9/11 crime.
At the Left Forum in New York, Dr. Barrett was outspoken in holding Noam Chomsky accountable for his directing role in the Left’s failure to deal cogently with the core realities of who did what to whom in the originating event of the ongoing 9/11 Wars.
Did perennial Clinton rainmaker and current Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe let the cat out of the bag? The “cat” is the widely-held suspicion that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton isn’t really opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The “bag” is the campaign narrative that frames her election year reversal on the controversial trade accord as the outcome of an honest re-examination of a deal that she once hailed as “the gold standard in trade agreements.”
Just to add to the confusion, Hillary Clinton failed to declare her opposition to the TPP in her historic acceptance speech. Instead, she asked assembled Democrats to join her if they “believe that we should say ‘no’ to unfair trade deals” and “stand up to China.”
It was an understandable omission given the grievances of Bernie loyalists poised to pounce on her every misstep. By avoiding the minefield completely she disappointed union leaders and deferred the issue until she debates Donald Trump.
Until then, she — and notable surrogates like economist Joseph Stiglitz — will try to convince a trade-weary public that she’s truly committed to renegotiating the increasingly unpopular deal. She’ll also be beating-back the ghost of trade deals past.
United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams claims Hillary assured him during the primary that she’s also committed to reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Like the TPP, she was for it before she was against it. And like Hillary’s campaign promise to tweak NAFTA, McAuliffe suggested in an interview with Politico that – if she wins the White House – Clinton would make a few tweaks in the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal and then support it.
These caveats fit into a long pattern of trade policy triangulation that raises the question: Is this policy reversal truly a switch or just another bait and switch? There is good reason for the buyer to beware.
“Once the election’s over, and we sit down on trade, people understand a couple things we want to fix on it but going forward we got to build a global economy,” McAuliffe said.
Trading Places
NAFTA is America’s most notorious trade deal. Although It was negotiated by the first Bush Administration, it was Bill Clinton who closed the deal. At the end of his first year in office he guided NAFTA through the House and Senate by offsetting Democratic resistance with significant Republican majorities. Its ratification fit perfectly with the “centrist” mission of the Clinton-led “New Democrat” movement incubated by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) during the preceding decade.
From its inception in 1985, the DLC triangulated against the Democratic Party’s “liberal” moniker that the GOP so effectively turned into an epithet after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. The historic loss of “liberal” former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988 set the table for the DLC’s corporately-minded “New” Democrats. The election of DLC star Bill Clinton in 1992 was the turning point.
With the DLC’s best salesman and former chairman in the Oval Office, the Democratic Party was open for business. His wheeling-dealing economic team opened a whole new avenue for Wall Street to influence U.S. government policies. The Democrats were no longer a political roadblock.
Even if these New Democrats weren’t completely trading places with the GOP, Team Clinton was certainly willing to triangulate against Democrats’ traditional constituencies … particularly on trade.
The biggest signal of Clinton’s brand new deal was Al Gore’s smug dismissal of Ross Perot’s NAFTA warning on Larry King’s CNN show about the trade deal causing a “giant sucking sound” of American jobs going to Mexico. In dismissing Perot’s worries, Gore fired the starting gun for the go-go globalization of the 1990s.
The Morning NAFTA
For the first decade of NAFTA, Perot’s “sucking sound” seemed to go in reverse. As Sonali Kolhatkar detailed on TruthDig, big U.S. agribusinesses flooded Mexico with cheap, subsidized corn and seven other market-crushing products. That tidal wave put small Mexican farmers out of work. Ironically, they flooded back across the border to work in — surprise! — Big Ag’s burgeoning factory farming operations in states like Iowa, North Carolina, Alabama and Arkansas. Go figure.
According to a 2014 assessment by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Mexico is still waiting for the promise of NAFTA’s economic leveling effect to be fulfilled. It’s actually lost ground on economic growth and GDP per person. And the poverty rate remains essentially unchanged.
But NAFTA did offer another low wage alternative to manufacturing in the United States. That helps keep retail prices low enough to match the eroding purchasing power of American consumers, which suffers because their wages are, like Mexican workers, flat or declining. The one thing that hasn’t suffered? Corporate profits and the executive compensation it is predicated upon. Again, go figure.
Where Credit Is Due
Although NAFTA is the usual target of anti-trade fervor, it simply doesn’t compare with the transformative impact of Bill Clinton’s biggest “trade deal” — securing Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status for China. Repeated approval of Chinese access to U.S. markets set off a wave of job losses in America’s industrial heartland. It stoked corporate profits and consumer debt. And it ushered in the often-lamented era of the big box store.
Rising retail titans like Arkansas-based Walmart rushed into China’s incredibly favorable labor market. The cheap products they made turned the 1990s into a decade of plenty. Big box stores were stocked with cheap plastic stuff and consumers gobbled up the bargains with one or more of the credit cards they’d been given during an unprecedented era of ubiquitous consumer credit.
A study by Demos published in 2003 found that during Bill Clinton’s tenure the “average American family experienced a 53 percent increase in credit card debt, from $2,697 to $4,126.” Low-income families experienced a “184 percent rise in their debt.” And, despite the rise in income inequality during his presidency, even “high-income families had 28 percent more credit card debt in 2001 than they did in 1989.”
Demos also found a sharp rise in credit card direct mail solicitations from 1.52 billion in 1993 to a staggering 5 billion in 2001. Monthly minimums where lowered from 5 percent to 2 percent, thus making it easier to carry debt. And the consumer credit industry “tripled the amount of credit it offered customers from $777 billion to almost $3 trillion” by the time Clinton left office. It was a bill of sale first written by Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in 1992.
Promises, Promises
When Bill Clinton ran for president, the Cold War was over; the Savings and Loan scandal had exploded; the economy was mired in a sharp recession; and incumbent President George H.W. Bush couldn’t do a damn thing right. He seemed bored by people’s “pain.” He looked woefully out of touch in a grocery check-out line. And he’d broken the infamous “no new taxes” pledge that helped him defeat “Taxachusetts” Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988.
With Reaganomics on the ropes, Team Clinton scored repeatedly with their “It’s the Economy, Stupid” campaign. But Clinton also exploited another weakness — the Bush Administration’s quick embrace of the Chinese Government after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. That embrace was sealed with a discomfiting handshake by Bush’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
Shortly thereafter, President Bush renewed China’s “Most Favored Nation” trade status, which, among other things, lowered tariffs on Chinese imports into the U.S. He was widely criticized, often from within his own party, for cutting a deal with a regime some called “The Butchers of Beijing.”
In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton exploited Poppy’s “kowtowing” to great effect. Clinton accused Bush of “indifference toward democracy” in China. And Clinton famously said Bush was willing to “coddle dictators.” On March 9, 1992, Clinton proclaimed, “I do not believe we should extend ‘Most Favored Nation’ status to China unless they make significant progress in human rights, arms proliferation and fair trade.”
Of course, that all changed after he took office. On March 28, 1993, the cagey President announced he’d cut a deal with a Congress to extend a waiver that effectively approved MFN while deferring human rights-related conditions to the following year. Clinton even outlined other concerns, including China’s “$18 billion trade surplus” with the U.S.
But all those concerns, along with his campaign pledge, where jettisoned on March 27, 1994 when Clinton made the economy-changing decision to “de-link” China’s MFN status from human rights. That decision buried Tiananmen Square in the crowded graveyard of America’s often-trumpeted “advocacy” for human rights around the globe.
It also unleashed American corporations to dive headlong into China’s vast, cheap pool of low-wage labor. By the time Clinton made his state visit to China in the summer of 1998, MFN was becoming a footnote to the amazing story of China’s skyrocketing industrial output. Facing charges of hypocrisy on human rights, Clinton countered, “I’m going because I think it’s the right thing to do for our country.”
That may be a debatable point. What’s not in doubt is that it, like MFN, was the right thing to do for the bottom line of American business. And it was specifically beneficial for an emerging retail behemoth that had a long, close relationship with the Clintons.
The Power Greeter
Alice Walton likes Hillary Clinton. That’s a fairly safe assumption given the $353,400 check she cut for the Hillary Victory Fund during a mad dash of pre-election year fundraising at the end of 2015. And she also kicked in another $25,000 into the “Ready for Hillary” SuperPAC. Those big donations are, like the estimated $130 billion net worth of Walton family, a legacy handed-down from Walmart founder Sam Walton.
That legacy dates back to Bill’s time as Governor — when the Walton family began a long history of financial support of the Clintons, according to Bloomberg. It made sense given Walmart’s supersized role in Arkansas.
It also made good political sense that, as Michael Barbaro of the New York Times reported back in 2007, Hillary was brought onto Walmart’s Board of Directors back in 1986 at the behest of Walton’s wife Helen. That effort to add a woman to the boardroom turned into a six-year stint that cemented the long relationship between Arkansas’ most famous corporation and its most famous political family.
As Brian Ross of ABC News reported in the lead-up to her 2008 run, Hillary notably left that glass ceiling-shattering appointment out of her biography. She basically “de-linked” herself from a stridently anti-union company that was also a notoriously thrifty spender on employee wages and benefits. The ABC report also referenced a 1992 report showing her trumpeting Walmart’s “Buy America” campaign in spite of Walmart’s reliance on children working in sweatshops in places like Bangladesh. That’s a practice Walmart continued into the 1990s.
It came to a head in 1996 when All-American “sweetheart” Kathie Lee Gifford got embroiled in a child labor scandal in Honduras. Coincidentally, that scandal broke the same year Walmart entered China “through a joint-venture agreement.” And that was just two years after Bill Clinton “de-linked” human rights from MFN.
It was also the same year that he successfully renewed MFN with an overwhelming vote of support by the House of Representatives. The timing couldn’t have been better for Walmart. They’d auspiciously formed their international division in 1993 and were poised to profit off Bill’s broken promise to “not coddle dictators.”
But, as with all things Clinton, there really isn’t a “smoking gun” linking Bill’s MFN reversal with Walmart’s amazing good fortune in China. There is just the lingering miasma of happy coincidences. Bill Clinton’s crowning coincidence before exiting the Oval Office was Congressional approval of his proposal to give China permanent Most Favored Nation trading status in 2000.
The New Normal
On Oct. 10, 2000, he signed the U.S.–China Relations Act of 2000 into law. Most Favored Nation status officially became Normal Trade Relations. Also in that year, the $18 billion trade deficit he decried in 1993 ballooned to $83 billion. Meanwhile, Walmart rode low-cost Chinese manufacturing to the top of the retail heap. Walmart’s massive workforce is now the third largest in the world behind the U.S. Defense Department and, ironically, China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Amazingly, the U.S. trade deficit with China more than tripled to $263 billion in the eight years after Clinton secured “Normal” trade relations in 2000. Meanwhile, Walmart’s infamous low-wage practices at home were subsidized annually to the tune of “an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing,” according to 2015 report in Forbes.
Also amazingly, the Clintons’ wealth skyrocketed to $111 million in the years after Bill left office. Hillary spent those years in and out of “public service” and the former President turned the Clinton Foundation into a $439 million powerhouse by 2014.
While the Foundation’s philanthropy is demonstrable, criticisms of it as a de facto slush fund remain. But the link between political promises and trade policy persisted. This time it was Hillary running for president. The trade deal was with war-torn Colombia. And the campaign trail leads back to the Clinton Foundation.
Rinse, Repeat
There is a strange symmetry between China’s MFN status, the TPP imbroglio and a notable “flip-flop” on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement by first-time presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008. Then like now, she was competing against a movement candidate in newcomer Barack Obama. And then like now, she struggled to protect her “left” flank on economic issues.
At issue in 2008 was a sweeping deal negotiated by the second Bush Administration with the U.S.-supported, civil war-wracked narco-state of Colombia. Obama “vowed” to oppose the deal. To keep pace with her high-octane opponent, Hillary repeatedly reassured labor leaders of her opposition to the deal.
The rub was two-fold. Not only did she have a decidedly pro-free trade voting record as a senator. But both her free-trading husband and her chief campaign strategist were on record supporting the deal. She ditched her Colombia-linked strategist and matched Obama’s anti-deal stance. But, just like China’s MFN before it, the trade agreement with Colombia eventually became a “big win” for a Democratic President who was for it before he was against it.
This time it was a flip-flopping President Obama. With the help of his flip-flopping former foe and then-current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he scored a trade deal trifecta on Oct. 12, 2011. That’s when Congress approved the United States-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (CTPA) and separate deals with both South Korea and Panama. Obama called the trio of trade deals “a major win for American workers and businesses.” Alas, it turned out that there was a lot more change on trade than reason to hope Obama or Hillary would keep their promises.
Mining The Depths
Meet billionaire mining magnate Frank Giustra. According to the New York Times, the financial power-player’s global interests have included philanthropy and a $45 million stake in a deal to sell strategic uranium mines in Central Asia and the United States to the Russian atomic energy agency Rosatom. Strangely enough, those two interests — charity and strategic resources — fit together nicely. That’s because the uranium deal required U.S. agencies — including the State Department — to sign-off before it was approved.
The eight-year process for the uranium deal required approval by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment of which the State Department is a member. That approval finally came in 2010 when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and while the Clinton Foundation was continuing to collect millions of dollars from related investors.
Throughout, Giustra’s wheeling and dealing continued with his close friend and private jet-setting partner Bill Clinton, who gave a $500,000 speech to a Russian investment bank that gave the stock a buy rating.
Since 2005, Giustra has lavished the Clinton Foundation with repeated donations, adding up to in excess of $100 million. Yet, putting Bill Clinton’s oddly remunerative, but not uncommon $500,000 speech in Moscow aside, there still is no smoking gun linking then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the actual approval of the deal. Once again we just have that miasma of happy coincidences.
More troubling, though, is the coincidence that her husband’s friend Frank Giustra did benefit from the Colombia Free Trade Agreement deal’s “extreme” protections for foreign investors and special rights for corporations engaged in “resource extraction,” according to an eye-opening exposé by David Sirota, Matthew Cunningham-Cook and Andrew Perez of the International Business Times.
At issue is a company formerly known as Pacific Rubiales, an oil company founded by (you guessed it) Frank Giustra. The State Department repeatedly fielded accusations of workers’ rights and human rights abuses, particularly related to a strike targeting Pacific Rubiales in 2011. Strangely, the State Department not only ignored these accusations, but actually praised the Colombian government’s stellar progress on human rights. Was this Hillary Clinton’s “de-linking” MFN moment?
Maybe it’s worse. It looks like there’s a little smoke coming out of this gun. As Sirota, Cunningham-Cook and Perez reported:
“At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire.”
Those “commercial ties” include the “Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership” which its snazzy website calls a “pioneering an innovative approach to poverty alleviation” that “generates both social impact and financial returns by addressing existing market gaps in developing countries’ supply or distribution chains.”
Really, doesn’t that “pioneering approach” sound a lot like the long-term project of the Democratic Leadership Committee?
The “pioneering” privatization of “poverty alleviation” was a big part of then-President Bill Clinton’s famous “welfare reform bill” of 1996. Profitable privatized prisons grew to match the skyrocketing demand created by infamous “crime bill” of 1994. The “financial returns” flowed as the prison “market gap” was closed. And like neoliberal trade policy, deregulation of Wall Street and the media, it’s all symptomatic of the Clinton-led move of the party toward the corporate-friendly “center.”
As Frank Giustra said in a 2006 profile of Bill Clinton for The New Yorker, “All of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton. He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.” Based on a Giustra’s latest venture in Colombia — a big financial play in the Gran Colombia Gold Corporation — he’s still reaping the “free trade” rewards of his bank-shot bet on Hillary Clinton.
In fact, he’s not just going for the gold … but some silver, too.
Big Box Democrats
Back in 1992, the phenomenal Clinton political machine successfully sold the “new,” improved Democratic Party to Reaganomics-starved political consumers. He felt their pain. He also changed his party and opened the door to the big-box consumerism. Now that same sharp messaging machine is repackaging Hillary’s free-trading past, pulling Bill’s mixed political record from the shelves, and hard-selling her latter-day transformation on trade and economic policies.
The question is: Will suspicious voters buy her “Come to Bernie” moment as a wholesale conversion on the road to the White House? Disgruntled and disaffected voters have to buy into the idea that she’s truly changed on trade and is not, as Terry McAuliffe implied, simply repeating a well-worn pattern of bait and switch.
Simply put, she’s got a long, demonstrable history of supporting trade agreements. And by one account she specifically “pushed” the Trans-Pacific Partnership 45 times. But that was then and this now. And now she’s got a disillusioned cadre of #BernieOrBusters to her left and a new army of anti-trade Trumpsters to her right. That’s left her stuck in the “centrist” middle with the corporate donors, financiers and loyalists who’ve been shopping in the supermarket of political influence ever since the Clintons transformed the Democrats into the party of Big Box-style democracy.
The United States poses as a champion against the great threats facing global security and stability, an uphill battle it claims requires equally great sacrifices, especially in terms of defense spending. It must be just a coincidence that the many policy think-tanks promoting this notion just so happen to be funded by huge multinational defense contractors.
The Atlantic Council, for instance, includes among its corporate members, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Thales, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, just to name a few. So when Atlantic Council authors wrote about the subject of close air support (CAS) aircraft, it should come as no surprise that the development or procurement of a new system was the option of choice, this despite the fact that a brand new aircraft, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, was already supposed to fill this role.
… after years of hearing that the F-35A would be the sort-of replacement for the A-10C, it’s worth reviewing why it never could be. It’s not for the gun or the armor. It’s the increased threat: Russian motorized rifle brigades now run with lots of their own 30 mm guns, looking up. Missiles are now a bigger problem too. As Colonel Mike Pietrucha USAF wrote for War On The Rocks last month, the heat from that huge engine is itself a huge target for heat-seekers. Lockheed has worked hard to suppress the signature, but physics dictate there’s only so much that can be done. Overall, the hundred-million-dollar jet is just too expensive to hazard to for busting tanks that way.
The projected cost of the F-35 program in total is estimated to be well over 1 trillion USD. The cost for each aircraft averages 100 million USD. That the Atlantic Council’s authors deem it “too expensive” to use for one of the roles it was allegedly proposed to fill, should make US and allied taxpayers wonder just what they have mortgaged their futures for.
Currently for CAS, the US Air Force depends on the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, as well as multirole aircraft like the Lockheed Martin F-16. To replace the A-10, the US plans to use F-16’s more widely, that is, until a new CAS system is developed.
In the short-term the USAF has plans to replace some A-10s with Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcons, but in the medium- to longer-terms there are plans to procure or develop either a platform that that can operate either in a permissive environment only, or one that can operate in both a permissive and contested environment. The options are being considered under the auspices of the recently announced A-X project.
So in addition to the 1 trillion USD F-35 program, there will be an additional program to develop the next generation of CAS aircraft for the US Air Force. One wonders if the F-35’s other slated roles will also require parallel defense programs to fill as the fundamental flaws of the entire program begin to unfold.
The F-35 is Just One Symptom of a Wider Malady…
A trillion dollars spent on a useless aircraft that requires multiple parallel defense programs to compensate for, represents different problems to different people depending on their perspective. To some, it appears to be supreme incompetence and poor planning. To others, a tragic waste of national resources. But to others still, it appears to be the only logical conclusion a nation and its tax dollars can arrive at, when it is driven by special interests in pursuit of power and profits, rather than any particular purpose.
The 1 trillion USD going into the F-35 program is not disappearing into a black hole. Lockheed Martin is receiving that money. With it, it will purchase more lobbying power in Washington, more clout on Wall Street, more authors to pen favorable “policy” proposals within the halls of think tanks like the Atlantic Council and more journalists across the international press to promote these proposals to the general public. It will also use this wealth to help promote the wars that will in turn, drive demand for yet more costly defense programs it will undoubtedly share a stake in developing and profiting from.
While the F-35, the new CAS program being developed to augment it, and virtually every other defense program the US and its allies are moving forward with, are predicated on maintaining national defense, it appears quite clear that the self-preservation of the corporations involved takes primacy over the former.
The US will not be safer with the F-35 in the air. In conflicts like the 2008 Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine or the war raging in Syria, Russia has proven that a fraction of the resources spent on defense, if spent properly, can meet or exceed the performance of US-NATO military capabilities.
On what is a shoestring budget by comparison, Russia’s combination of pragmatic military spending and proper strategic planning and implementation has become a case study of how a Middle East intervention should be done. The Syria Russia is helping preserve through its military intervention is one with a stable, secular government that has and will continue to be a valuable ally against armed militants throughout the region. Compare this in contrast to the trillions of dollars spent on US interventions throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia where the apparent, or at least evident purpose was to divide and destroy nations, leaving them tinderboxes of violence and conflict as well as breeding grounds for extremism, seemingly, purposefully, inviting conflict after unending conflict.
The US is spending more to make the world a more dangerous place, with unnecessary weapons systems even analysts working for think tanks funded by their manufacturers admit are too expensive and impractical to use on the battlefield for the roles they were intended to fulfill.
It is not that the US and its industry are incapable in technical terms of creating a functional and premier national defense, it is that the US and its industry are incapable of adhering to a rational policy that would require such a national defense. Defense dysfunction amid a world intentionally destabilized, it turns out, is much better for business, and the F-35 with its emerging parallel defense programs it now requires, is symptomatic of this.
Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alamoffers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy: … continue
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Some presidents grow in office and some presidents grow once out of office (Jimmy Carter comes to mind). But some presidents seem to learn very little during their four or eight year term. Unfortunately, especially when it comes to foreign policy, it seems President Obama falls into that latter category.
One of those US policymakers is US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who would say in a 2015 interview on Fox News that:
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