How the Washington Post Distorts Colombia
What Dana Priest Left Out
By JACK L. LAUN | CounterPunch | January 2, 2014
On December 21, 2013 the Washington Post published an article titled “Covert action in Colombia” by reporter Dana Priest. Ms. Priest is a veteran reporter who has over the course of her career produced significant reports on important topics. However, in her report on the role of the United States government in supporting the Colombian state’s war on the FARC guerrillas she has overlooked or ignored some very basic aspects of this relationship.
The most significant of these is that she ignores the nature and history of the paramilitary forces’ activities and the link of these to the United States government. As Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., correctly observed years ago, the paramilitaries in Colombia are a strategy of the Colombian state. Furthermore, this strategy was suggested to the Colombian government by a United States military mission to Colombia in February 1962, in response to fear of the spread of influence of the Castro Revolution in Cuba. The mission was led by Lieutenant General William Yarborough, the Commander of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center. A Wikipedia entry cites a secret report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff quoting Yarborough as recommending “development of a civilian and military structure…to pressure for reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known Communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.” (See this citation and more information at Wikipedia.org/wiki/William_P_Yarborough.) The basic idea behind the reliance upon paramilitaries has been to keep the Colombian military from being involved directly in the Colombian government’s dirty war against the guerrillas and rural noncombatants and thus avoid having “dirty hands”. As Father Giraldo observed back in 1996, “Paramilitarism becomes, then, the keystone of a strategy of “Dirty War”, where the “dirty” actions cannot be attributed to persons on behalf of the State because they have been delegated, passed along or projected upon confused bodies of armed civilians.” (Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy, Common Courage Press, 1996, p. 81). There are many examples of the paramilitary death squad actions. One of these was a terrible slaughter by machetes and chainsaws of an estimated 30 civilians in the town of Mapiripan in Meta Department on July 15-20, 1997, in which paramilitary forces under the command of Carlos Castano in northern Colombia were allowed to travel by airplane with Colombian military acquiescence to reach their target community in southeast Colombia. A second example of the vicious attacks of paramilitary forces upon civilians was the slaughter on February 21, 2005 of 8 persons of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado in Antioquia Department, including a founder and leader of that Community, Luis Eduardo Guerra. The latter massacre was carried out with the assistance of Colombian Army soldiers from the Seventeenth and Eleventh Brigades.
While Ms. Priest approvingly suggests that Colombia “with its vibrant economy and swanky Bogota social scene” is far removed from Afghanistan, she fails to recognize that most of Bogota’s nearly 8 million residents are very poor, while a great majority of the country’s rural residents are impoverished. To be accurate in her portrayal of present-day Colombia, Ms. Priest should recognize and acknowledge that the distribution of land among Colombia’s population is the second worst in South America, after Paraguay, and the 11th worst in the world. (Oxfam Research Reports, “Divide and Purchase: How land ownership is being concentrated in Colombia”, 2013, p.7. See http://www.oxfam.org.) In rural areas paramilitary forces, supposedly demobilized in a sham proceeding during Alvaro Uribe’s Presidency, continue to threaten and murder campesinos (small-scale farmers) and force them and their families off their lands, so they can be taken over by large landowners or multinational corporations with mining and petroleum plans encouraged by the government of President Juan Manuel Santos. Paramilitary activity also continues to account for murders of labor union leaders and organizers, more of whom are killed in Colombia year after year than in any other country in the world.
It is also disappointing that Ms. Priest makes no mention of the fact that there are some 6 million internally-displaced persons in Colombia, more than any other country in the world. In his December 27-29 article in Counterpunch, titled “Mythmaking in the Washington Post: Washington’s Real Aims in Colombia”, Nick Alexandrov correctly calls attention to Ms. Priest’s failure to take into account these displaced persons. And he also properly focuses criticism upon Ms. Priest’s failure correctly to acknowledge one of the most important links of the United State to Colombia and one of the most damaging: the drug trade and the effects of coca crop spraying (fumigation) upon Colombia’s rural population. Here again the responsibility of the United States government is clear and direct. As Mr. Alexandrov points out, tens of thousands of Colombia’s campesinos have been decimated economically as their legal food crops are destroyed through fumigation under direct control of the United States government. As a Colombia Support Network delegation was told by U. S. Embassy personnel while Anne Patterson was Ambassador there, the crop-spraying campaign using Round-Up Ultra has been controlled from the Embassy itself. Indeed, mayors of towns in Putumayo Department (province) told us they are not informed in advance and have no control over when fumigation of farm fields in their municipalities occurs.
Furthermore, the assertion that the FARC are principally responsible for Colombia’s production of illicit drugs is questionable. Right-wing paramilitaries, protected by the Colombian Army and linked to many Colombian political figures, have been involved in the drug trade for decades, and continue to benefit from this trade, as do their benefactors in the private sector, such as owners of large cattle ranches, merchants, and banana plantation owners. And the United States government has supported and even idealized one of the persons most responsible for corruption of the political process in Colombia, Alvaro Uribe Velez. Before his election as President in 2002, Alvaro Uribe had been identified by the United States government as linked to drug-trafficking. As Virginia Vallejo, a Colombian television journalist and sometime love interest of Pablo Escobar, suggested to me in a telephone conversation and mentioned in her book, Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar (Random House Mondadori, September 2007), Alvaro Uribe was favored by Escobar. He allegedly approved the opening of drug-transit airstrips as Director of Civil Aeronautics. Later, as Governor of Antioquia Department, Uribe promoted the formation of so-called “self-defense” forces, which morphed into cut-throat, illegal paramilitaries who ravaged the countryside. His cousin Mario Uribe, with whom he has been particularly close, was convicted of corrupt actions and spent time in prison, while his brother Santiago Uribe Velez is about to be prosecuted for organizing and training illegal paramilitary forces on a Uribe family ranch. When Alvaro Uribe ran for re-election in 2004, his agents bribed Congresswoman Yidis Medina to get her to change her vote in committee so that Uribe could be re-elected (not permitted at that time by the Colombian Constitution). Yidis Medina went to prison for having received the bribe, but neither Alvaro Uribe nor his staff members who offered the bribe have been convicted and sentenced for the offenses they committed.
What was the reaction of the United States government to President Uribe’s alleged promotion of illegal activities? He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, the highest honor a President can convey upon any person! (For a detailed account of Alvaro Uribe’s purported misdeeds, see the Master’s thesis of Francisco Simon Conejos at the University of Valencia, Spain, of December 2012, titled, in English translation, “Crimes Against Humanity in Colombia: Elements to Implicate Ex-President Alvaro Uribe Velez before Universal Justice and the International Criminal Court”.)
No analysis of the United States’ role in Colombia can properly ignore the relationships and responsibilities outlined above. But even beyond these points if one is to consider whether the United States’ actions toward and in Colombia have been beneficial for that country and its people, one must look at the effect of the United States government’s support for corporate interests of companies from this country and their actions in Colombia. The policies of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama in the past two decades have advanced the agendas of mining and petroleum companies— such as Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, and Drummond— and food companies— such as Chiquita Banana and, most recently, Cargill— while these companies’ activities in rural Colombia have caused environmental damage, massive displacement of residents of these areas and destruction of the campesino economy. One wishes that Ms. Priest had treated the Colombian context much more broadly to provide a much more complete and honest view of how United States government actions and policies have affected the population of this important country, with Latin America’s third largest population (after Brazil and Mexico).
John I. Laun is president of the Colombia Support Network.
Turkey slaps 36 protesters with terrorist charges
Press TV – January 3, 2014
Prosecutors in Turkey have charged 36 people with terrorism in connection with massive anti-government protests that rocked the country last year.
According to the indictment published on Friday, the suspects face a range of charges including membership in a terrorist organization, illegal possession of hazardous material, and terrorist propaganda.
“Protests that began in May went beyond a democratic reaction and turned into propaganda and demonstration outlets of terrorist organizations with the guidance of marginal groups,” read the document.
“As a result, public property was destroyed, civil servants were incapacitated and security forces were injured,” it added.
The defendants will face up to 58 years in prison if convicted.
In December 2013, more than 250 other protesters were indicted with similar charges.
Anti-government demonstrations erupted in late May 2013, when people in Istanbul protested against the planned destruction of Gezi Park, in the city’s Taksim Square.
However, the protests soon spread across the country and snowballed into a nationwide outburst of anger against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule.
Panic, Predictions and Propaganda: Endless Empty Estimates on Iran’s Nuclear Program
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | December 31, 2013
“As you know, Iran is just a week away from a nuclear weapon. ‘They have been for the past 20 years…,’ says people who would like to bomb Iran.” – Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, November 12, 2013
It has been three years since I published “The Phantom Menace: Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-Mongering about Iran’s Nuclear Program,” a timeline of constant American, Israeli, and European assertions regarding the supposed inevitability and imminence of a nuclear-armed Iran – hysterical allegations that have been made repeatedly for the past three decades, none of which has ever come true.
So far, through August 2013, 80 updates cataloging new alarmist claims and dire predictions have been added to the original piece (they can all be read here). More extensive follow-up catalogs were posted in November 2011 and October 2012.
Over the past few months, new estimates and predictions have poured in. Below are some of them.
While reading, please remember that any estimate given for a potential Iranian “breakout” scenario in which Iran makes a “dash” for a nuclear weapon (or simply just enriching enough uranium to weapons grade levels for a single bomb) relies on the presumption that Iran:
1. has a nuclear weapons program;
2. wants to build nuclear weapons or acquire sufficient capability to be able to quickly develop a bomb;
3. and has made or will soon make a decision to militarize its fully legal, strictly safeguarded and constantly monitored civilian nuclear energy program.
Not a single one of these assertions is confirmed and there is overwhelming evidence that argues that each assumption is demonstrably false.
The consensus view of all 16 American intelligence agencies has maintained since 2007 that, by 2003, Iran ceased whatever research (if any) into nuclear weaponization it may have conducted up until that point, and has never resumed that work. This determination has been consistently reaffirmed ever since (in 2009, 2010, and again in 2011).
The United States intelligence community and its allies, including Israel, have long assessed that Iran is not and never has been in possession of nuclear weapons, is not building nuclear weapons, and its leadership has not even made the political decision to do so.
In early 2012, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, stated in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We do not know…if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”
The same day, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Ronald Burgess said that “the agency assesses Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict” and maintained that Iran’s military doctrine is defensive in nature and designed only for deterrence.
Clapper repeated this conclusion verbatim a number of times this past year.
Moreover, the IAEA itself continually confirms that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program and has stated it has “no concrete proof that Iran has or has ever had a nuclear weapons program.”(emphasis added) Beyond this, IAEA inspectors have never found evidence of illegal nuclear activity in Iran, even after Iran voluntarily accepted the intrusive inspections of the IAEA’s Additional Protocol for over two years.
In November 2003, the IAEA affirmed that “to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons programme.” And the following year, after extensive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities were conducted under the auspices of the Additional Protocol, the IAEA again concluded that “all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.”
Even if Iran were to technically acquire the capability to make nuclear bombs and stopped short of militarizing its program, far from being a rogue outlier, it would be joining a nuclear club of dozens of other nations that currently have the materials and knowledge to rapidly produce nuclear weapons.
The alarming time frames dished out constantly are all hypothetical, not actual. The beginning of each worrying countdown to any potential Iranian bomb must start after a decision is made by the Iranian leadership to actually start developing weapons grade fuel, which it is not currently doing.
It is like predicting it would take only a year to learn how to speak French fluently once one actually begins using Rosetta Stone, except without ever making the decision, let alone move, to actually buy the program. The year time frame, in that case, doesn’t make sense. You’ll always be a year away from something that supposedly will take a year if you never actually start the process of accomplishing whatever it is.
As senior Iranian officials have confirmed constantly for decades, that decision will never be made (and if it were, the move to weaponize would be immediately detected by the international community), which means that the timelines are all fantasies based on a starting point that will never occur.
With this in mind, sit back and enjoy:
SEPTEMBER 2013
On September 5, Jasmin Ramsey of Inter Press Service (IPS) reported, “U.S. and Israeli fears that Iran could achieve the capability to dash toward a nuclear weapon by as early as 2014 according to worst-case assessments,” though she added, “To date, the U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Iran has not made the decision to pursue nuclear weapons.”
Ramsey quoted Colin Kahl, Obama’s former senior Middle East advisor at the Pentagon, as saying, “The issue then is not whether Iran will make the decision in 2014 to dash for nuclear weapons. We don’t know whether they will or whether they want to and probably the probability is that they won’t, but they might.”
On September 8, perennial Israeli hysteric Yuval Steinitz – currently Netanyahu’s International Relations, Intelligence and Strategic Affairs Minister – warned against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s “offensive of friendliness and moderation toward the West,” which he deemed to be a ruse to charm and deceive world leaders and the media and “calm fears over a nuclear Iran.” Rouhani’s real plan, Steinitz announced at an annual conference held by Israel’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism, is to “laugh all the way to the bomb.”
“The centrifuges continue to spin. The heavy water facility [at Arak] continues to work. Make no mistake; Iran must be judged on its actions, not on its words,” Steinitz declared. If one were to judge Steinitz by his own words, however, one might point out that not a single one of Iran’s centrifuges produces weapons-grade uranium, all are under strict international inspection, and that the operational heavy water production plant at Arak is not a nuclear site. The heavy water nuclear reactor at Arak, however, is still under construction and is not yet up and running.
On September 10, the routinely hilarious Gregory S. Jones published another speculative analysis on Iran’s breakout capacity, again based solely on fantastical notions that Iran would be able to somehow convert its entire stockpile of low enriched uranium to weapons-grade in the blink of an eye and without detection or international intervention.
This time around, Jones uses a fancy calculator and elaborate daydreams to surmise that “Iran can produce enough HEU for a nuclear weapon in just six weeks and its entire stockpile of enriched uranium can be used to produce enough HEU for three weapons in four months.” Moreover, Jones asserts that, were Iran to have some “clandestine enrichment facility specifically designed to enrich uranium from 20% to 90%,” it could then “produce enough HEU for a nuclear weapon in just three weeks.”
Jones writes that, while using a secret enrichment lair has the “disadvantage” of “violating IAEA safeguards,” he points out that “the time needed for Iran to produce HEU by this method is so short as to make it very doubtful that any effective counteraction could be taken before Iran obtained a nuclear weapon.”
The fact that enriching uranium to weapons-grade is not the same thing as producing a deliverable nuclear weapon is irrelevant to Jones, as are over a decade of consistent IAEA inspections and safeguards that have never once detected any move by Iran to militarize its civilian nuclear program.
On September 20, Reuters quoted Yuval Steinitz as saying, “There is no more time to hold negotiations” with Iran over its nuclear program. “If the Iranians continue to run, in another half a year they will have bomb capability,” he told the right-wing, Sheldon Adelson-owned Israel Hayom daily in an interview.
The same day, in an apparent attempt to prove just how dedicated he is to spouting nonsensical propaganda, New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote, “Unless a good deal of the current infrastructure is dismantled, Iran will be able to maintain a threshold nuclear capability — that is, it will be just a few weeks, and a few screwdriver turns, from building a weapon. It is unclear whether Mr. Obama can live with that; the Israelis say they cannot.”
Also on September 20, a post by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a right-wing, pro-war outfit that is effectively one of the neoconservative successors to the Project for a New American Century, declared that nothing – diplomacy, sanctions, threats – has caused Iran “to halt its drive to nuclear weapons-making capability. Instead, the potential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program has only grown.”
The post, penned by Robert Zarate, continues, “Even if it is true that Iranian leaders have not made the final decision to assemble a nuclear weapon, Iran not only holds all of the raw ingredients required that for an atomic bomb, but also is making technical advances that could rapidly shorten the amount of time it would need to build a nuclear weapon to a matter of months, if not weeks.”
On September 22, The New York Times reported, “American intelligence experts believe Iran is still many months, if not years, away from having such a [nuclear] weapon.”
An Israeli intelligence assessment, leaked to and published by The Washington Post on September 23, concluded that “[t]he current Iranian charm offensive aims at reaching a deal with the international community… will preserve Iran’s ability to rapidly build a nuclear weapon at a time of its choosing — the so-called breakout option.” It adds that Iran has continued to “move full-steam ahead toward attaining a nuclear weapons capability.”
The same day, Brookings analyst Kenneth Pollack wrote in The New Republic that, were Iran’s “enrichment capability” to be “capped and constrained by intrusive inspections” (which, mind you, it already is) and “its ability to work on weaponization is precluded by those same inspections,” it would then “take Iran at least six months and probably more like a year to assemble a crude nuclear device, once it decided to do so, and it would be highly likely that the inspectors would discover such a gambit long before it came close to fruition.”
In a one minute-long video message, issued on September 24, in response to U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Iran thinks that soothing words and token actions will enable it to continue on its path to the bomb.” He added, “Israel will welcome a genuine diplomatic solution that truly dismantles Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons, but we will not be fooled by half measures that merely provide a smokescreen for Iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and the world will not be fooled either.”
On September 27, Maariv reporter Shalom Yerushalmi quoted anonymous Israeli “government security sources up to date on development in Iran” as telling him, “It’s too late for Israel [to prevent an Iranian bomb]. Iran has crossed all the borders and all the constraints, and it has a first nuclear bomb in its possession, and maybe more than that.”
The same day, Ehud Yaari, an analyst for Israel’s popular Channel 2 TV News, said on the air that Iran was no more than “one to two months away” from having a sufficient amount of highly-enriched uranium with which to build its first bomb. He added that, if Iran begins using more advanced centrifuges, that time frame could be cut to merely “two or three weeks.”
On September 28, New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren wrote that Israeli and Arab leaders “worry about Iran’s sincerity, and fear that Mr. Obama’s desire for a diplomatic deal will only buy Iran time to continue a march toward building a nuclear weapon.” Yuval Steinitz – who else? – was quoted as saying, “The most critical problem with Iran is its aim of achieving nuclear weapons, but the problem with Iran is wider. Iran is not a peace-seeking country or regime — on the contrary. Iran is maybe the most aggressive country in the world, and it’s not just against Israel.”
Rudoren also gave space to other Israeli analysts who oppose diplomacy. Their “main concern now is that four to six months of negotiations would allow Iran to get to the breakout point for developing a bomb,” she wrote, before quoting Jonathan Spyer of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya as warning, “It’s not just that forever we go on with an Iranian nuclear program that never reaches conclusion, it’s that diplomacy can be a way of helping it get to the finishing line.”
Paper of record, people, paper of record.
On September 29, Britain’s Sunday Times reported that, at their upcoming meeting at the White House, Netanyahu would provide Obama “with an intelligence report asserting that Iran has amassed enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon,” according to the Times of Israel.
The same day, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told ABC News‘ George Stephanopolous, “Mr. Netanyahu and his colleagues have been saying since 1991 — and you can refer to your records — that Iran is six months away from a nuclear weapon. And we are how many years, 22 years after that and they are still saying we’re six months away from nuclear weapons.”
“We’re not seeking nuclear weapons. So, we’re not six months, six years, sixty years away from nuclear weapons. We don’t want nuclear weapons,” he added.
The next day, on September 30, FPI board member Bill Kristol wrote in his Weekly Standard column that “the accommodation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons lies ahead as surely as the accommodation of Nazi Germany’s expansionist dreams,” and shamelessly continued, “As Iran moves closer to nuclear weapons, undeterred by the West’s leading power, a 21st-century tragedy threatens to unfold.”
OCTOBER 2013
On October 1, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in an interview on Iranian television, “We have seen nothing from Netanyahu but lies and actions to deceive and scare, and international public opinion will not let these lies go unanswered.”
“For 22 years, the Zionist regime has been lying by repeating endlessly that Iran will have the atomic bomb in six months,” Zarif said, speaking from the United Nations in New York City. “After all these years, the world must understand the reality of these lies and not allow them to be repeated.”
On October 4, Kurt Eichenwald wrote a cover story for the first online issue of Newsweek entitled, “The Phantom Menace” (sound familiar?), in which he called out all the speculation and fear-mongering over Iran as “hysteria,” explaining:
Interviews with military strategists and foreign and domestic intelligence officers, and a review of the 34 years of warnings about the Iranians’ threat to America’s vital interests, all show that the doomsaying is based on suspicion, supposition and precious little hard data. It is, in many ways, a repeat of the supposed threat from Iraq that led to war – except this time, the intelligence world knows there are no weapons of mass destruction.
Eichenwald cites the view of Christopher J. Bolan, a former army intelligence officer who served as a national security advisor to both Al Gore and Dick Cheney and who now teaches military strategy at the prestigious United States Army War College: “Iran is not a threat to American vital interests. They don’t want nuclear weapons. I think it has just been overly alarmist when folks are advocating a more aggressive reaction,” Bolan said “Even if they manage to get sufficient enriched uranium, it is going to be years before they can weaponize it. The timeline is not urgent. We have years, if that is the objective of the government, which, again, I think is a pretty questionable claim.”
In an interview with the Associated Press on October 5, President Barack Obama stated that the current “U.S. intelligence assessment” maintains that Iran “continues to be a year or more away” from being able to produce a nuclear bomb. “And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services,” he added.
AP itself, in its interview of the American president, inadvertently revealed just how tedious and interchangeable these constant, recycled predictions really are. The question posed to Obama – the one eliciting the above response – was set up with the following statement: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week that Iran is about six months away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.”
This wasn’t true, it was a misinterpreted reiteration of something stupid Netanyahu said a year ago. Note the correction issued by AP in its transcript of the interview:
Last year. Most. Needed to produce. All gibberish, signifying nothing.
On October 6, French Foreign Minister Fabius Laurent said in a radio interview with Europe 1 that nuclear negotiations with Iran must bear fruit quickly lest Iranian facilities be allowed to progress to a point beyond which they can be bombed into oblivion. If the heavy water reactor at Arak, for example, were to become operational, “we wouldn’t be able to destroy it because if you bomb plutonium it will leak. This means it’s a race against time,” he said, continuing that there is “roughly a year” before this becomes a possibility.
The next day, on October 7, Reuters quoted an unnamed “Israeli official” in reaction to Obama’s “year or more” timeframe as saying, “If Iran decides to complete uranium enrichment, it would be able to do so within a few weeks from the moment of decision.”
On October 17, BuzzFeed‘s Sheera Frenkel quoted an anonymous “Israeli diplomat” as telling her that a nuclear-armed Iran “is not a far off possibility but a very near, almost actualized thing.” In an exceptionally alarmist post entitled, “What If Iran Already Has a Nuke?” – which reads more like an Israeli Foreign Ministry press release than an independent news report – Frenkel writes of another recent Maariv article by Shalom Yerushalmi that claimed Israeli officials believe Iran already has a nuclear warhead.
“They made it very clear that Iran already had the uranium for one bomb, and it was very very probable that they had put that one bomb together,” Yerushalmi told Frenkel. “This opinion is growing though many are afraid to say it too loudly because they would then be admitting that Israel, specifically Netanyahu, has failed the central mission of his political life.”
Relaying what an unnamed Israeli official told him, Yerusalmi said, “This is no longer about how to prevent a bomb but about how to prevent its being launched, and what to do if and when.”
Meanwhile, Gary Samore, a former advisor to Obama and longtime pro-Israel hawk, told Frenkel, “We have seen a number of significant changes in the last few weeks that have suggested that Iran is closer, much closer to a bomb than ever before,” adding, “We can’t be precise about the timeline, nobody can because there are too many factors. What we can say is that they are very close and there is nothing standing in their way other than international pressure.”
On October 22, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor delivered a speech before the UN Security Council during which he declared that “Iran is marching towards a bomb,” and warned, “The clock is ticking and time is running out.”
On October 24, David Albright and his colleagues at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) issued a new report estimating Iranian nuclear “breakout” capacity. They write that Iran could potentially produce one nuclear bomb’s worth of weapons grade uranium (WGU) in about a month or two, depending on the specific stockpile and method used. “It is possible that Iran could use a covert plant to break out in as little as approximately one to two weeks,” the report claims.
The authors also note that “the estimates in this report do not include the additional time that Iran would need to convert WGU into weapons components and manufacture a nuclear weapon.”
This report was publicized in an error-filled USA Today article by Oren Dorell on October 25, headlined, “Iran may be month away from bomb.”
The same day, Ian Bremmer, president of the consulting firm Eurasia Group, wrote a commentary for Reuters in which he stated, “Iran is getting significantly closer to nuclear weapons capability” and cited an International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report from August as claiming that Iran “is on pace to become nuclear-weapons capable in 2014 or 2015 — and that window could narrow further.”
Bremmer added, “Iran is approaching nuclear breakout capacity, the point at which it could conceivably race to produce sufficient material for a nuclear weapon and hide it in a secure location before the U.S. or Israel could amass a military response to stop them. A realistic worst-case scenario could see breakout time drop to around 10 days — a span too short to assemble an effective response — by the middle of next year.”
NOVEMBER 2013
A series of infographics provided by the New York Times on November 8 used David Albright’s hypothetical estimates to promote the dire assessments that “Iran has the technology and material to produce fuel for power or a weapon” and “Iran could quickly move to a nuclear ‘breakout.'” The graphics, created by Sergio Peçanha, illustrate potential measures, outlined in the Institute for Science and International Security report, “that could elevate the breakout time to more than six months.”
One of the graphics (seen above) shows Iran having 19,000 centrifuges, but does not note that roughly half of those, while installed, are not operational.
In testimony before the House Foreign Relations Committee on November 13, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, Iran-obsessed think tank, said that if Iran is able to continue construction of its heavy water reactor at Arak over the next six months, “Tehran will gain an extra six months to develop the capacity to produce a plutonium bomb.” He added, that “while keeping all existing sanctions in place, Iran should be given an ultimatum” to suspend its enrichment at both the Natanz and Fordow facilities, where, he said, “nuclear experts estimate that Iran is no more than eight months from achieving an undetectable nuclear breakout.”
The chairman of the committee, Congressman Ed Royce of California, declared during the same hearing, “Only when the Iranian regime is forced to decide between economic collapse or compromise on its rush to develop a nuclear weapons capability, do we have a chance to avoid that terrible outcome.”
At the hearing, Colin Kahl, Obama’s former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, made the case for diplomacy, citing ISIS estimates for emphasis. “The Institute for Science and International Security estimates it would currently take Iran as little as 1.3-2.3 months to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium using a combination of its 3.5 percent and 20 percent uranium stockpile,” he said. “However, if Iran stops 20 percent enrichment and neutralizes most of its 20 percent stockpile, this would lengthen the breakout time for weapons-grade uranium to 3.1-3.5 months.”
Later in the hearing, Kahl explained that, if accepted and implemented, the deal proposed to Iran by the P5+1, would thus “double Iran’s breakout time.”
The same day, November 13, top U.S. officials – including Secretary of State John Kerry, Undersecretary Wendy Sherman, Vice President Joe Biden, and others – met with members of the Senate Banking Committee in a closed-door session to convince them of the benefit of working toward a nuclear deal with Iran and dispel rumors about potential sanctions relief floated by the Israeli government and their lobbyists in Washington.
Senator Mark Kirk, a leading Iran hawk who has stated, “It’s okay to take the food out of the mouths of the citizens” of Iran and who, in 2010, received vastly more money from pro-Israel lobbying groups than any other politician, was unhappy with what he heard from Kerry.
The presentation, Kirk told reporters after the meeting, was “very unconvincing” and “fairly anti-Israeli. I was supposed to disbelieve everything the Israelis had just told me, and I think the Israelis probably have a pretty good intelligence service.”
Presumably, he was referring to the same Israelis who have insisted Iran has been on the brink of having a nuclear bomb for over two decades now.
Kirk added that the Israelis had told him that the “total changes proposed set back the program by 24 days.”
On November 14, Adiv Sternman of the Times of Israel wrote, “Responding to an International Atomic Energy Agency report claiming that Iran had substantially cut uranium enrichment since the election of President Hassan Rouhani last June, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu said he was ‘not impressed,’ and that Iran still strives to acquire nuclear weapons.”
Netanyahu continued, “Iran is not expanding its nuclear program because it already has the foundations needed for nuclear weapons. The question is not whether they are expanding the program, but how to stop the Iranian military nuclear program.”
On November 24, New York Times reporter David Sanger – who has a dubious history of writing ignorant and incorrect things about Iran – doubled-down on his complete misunderstanding of Iran’s nuclear program (or any nuclear program or weapons development whatsoever), writing of the “deep suspicion inside Mr. Netanyahu’s government that Mr. Obama will settle for a final agreement that leaves Iran a few screwdriver turns short of a weapon.”
Sanger also wrote that the just-inked interim nuclear deal, “according to American intelligence estimates, would slow Iran’s dash time by only a month to a few months,” and added that “it will take Iran several months to produce weapons-grade fuel from its current stocks, and perhaps a year or more to fashion that fuel into a usable weapon and shrink it to fit atop one of the country’s Shahab missiles.”
In a November 25 op-ed for the Washington Post about the tenets of the interim nuclear deal signed in Geneva between Iran and six world powers and the voluntarily accepted limitations on the Iranian program, ISIS head David Albright wrote, “If Iran used all of its installed centrifuges, the time it would need to produce a weapon would expand to at least 1.9 to 2.2 months, up from at least 1 month to 1.6 months.”
On November 26, Siegfried Hecker, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, claimed that Iran was “[v]ery close, possibly weeks away from making sufficient highly enriched uranium bomb fuel, and six months or so away from building a nuclear weapon.” He further suggested that “Iran had likely previously done most of the work necessary to build nuclear weapons once it obtained the capacity to produce bomb fuel. Iran’s extensive missile development and testing program also points to Tehran pursuing the option of missile deliverable nuclear weapons.”
On November 27, a report from the Israeli daily Maariv claimed “that Israeli experts have estimated that Tehran’s schedule for nuclear enrichment has only been delayed for up to two weeks.”
A summary of the report by the Israeli settler-run news outlet Arutz Sheva confused Iran’s hypothetical capacity to enrich one bomb’s worth of uranium to weapons grade levels with Iran’s ability to manufacture a deliverable nuclear warhead, issuing the screaming headline, “Estimate: Iran Could Produce a Nuclear Weapon Within 36 Days.”
DECEMBER 2013
In a grossly misleading and disingenuous December 2 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz wrote that the recently-signed “interim agreement leaves Iran, hopefully only temporarily, in the position of a nuclear threshold power—a country that can achieve a military nuclear capability within months of its choosing to do so.”
Speaking at the pro-Israel Saban Center’s annual conference in Washington D.C. on December 7, President Barack Obama said that aspects of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure “cannot justify simply wanting some peaceful nuclear power, but frankly hint at a desire to have breakout capacity and go right to the edge of breakout capacity.” He later stated that, without an interim deal that slows Iran’s nuclear progress, “all the breakout capacity we’re concerned about will accelerate in the next six months… They would be that much closer to breakout capacity six months from now.”
Later that day, John Kerry addressed the same conference and reiterated the White House line. “Iran’s breakout time, the period required to produce enough weapons-grade material intended for nuclear weapons, will have been increased because of our diplomacy,” he said.
On December 10, Fredrik Dahl of Reuters wrote, “Last month’s preliminary accord reached after marathon talks in Geneva is seen as a first step towards resolving a decade-old standoff over suspicions Iran might be covertly pursuing a nuclear weapons ‘breakout’ capability, a perception that has raised the risk of a wider Middle East war.”
On December 11, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Israeli Economy Minister Naftali Bennett had told Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to leverage its temporary membership on the United Nations Security Council to scuttle the nascent diplomacy over the Iranian nuclear program. After absurdly stating that “Iran is on the verge of having to give up its nuclear production because of the economic sanctions,” Bennett said, “Our objective is to dismantle effectively all their centrifuges so the time they need for a nuclear break-out is not six weeks but three years.”
On December 19, French Foreign Minister Fabius Laurent cast doubt on the ability to reach a final deal with Iran over the latter’s nuclear program. “It is unclear if the Iranians will accept to definitively abandon any capacity of getting a weapon or only agree to interrupt the nuclear programme,” he said, “What is at stake is to ensure that there is no breakout capacity.”
In a December 30 interview with the Times of Israel, former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren said that Iran already has “enough in their 3.5% stockpile for more than four bombs,” and that Iran could “breakout” as a nuclear weapons state in a matter of “weeks.”
On December 30, former Senator Joe Lieberman, now with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, issued his own rabid predication for the next twelve months. Speaking on FOX News, Lieberman declared, “tougher sanctions will not convince Iran to find a diplomatic way to end their nuclear weapons project and I think there is a better than even chance that before the end of 2014 the U.S. and/or Israel will take military action to disable Iran’s nuclear program.”
A NEW YEAR, A RESOLUTION?
Despite so much incessant nonsense, the year thankfully ended on a high note. Writing for the indispensable LobeLog on December 31, 2013 – New Year’s Eve – François Nicoullaud, a career diplomat and former French ambassador to Iran, addressed the claim that, with its current technical capabilities, Iran “would be able to produce the fissile material necessary for a bomb in just a few weeks.”
“But what is the practical value of such estimates?,” Nicoullaud rhetorically asks, before laying out some important facts:
First, having the material for the bomb does not mean having the bomb. Several months, possibly a good year or more, would still be necessary to manufacture and test a first nuclear explosive device. Second, to maintain a minimal deterrent effect after an initial test, at least two or three bombs should be kept in stock. To obtain such a deterrent, however, would significantly add to the time needed for enrichment to 90%. Some argue that as soon as this highly enriched uranium would be produced, and subsequently diverted, it would escape the safeguards of the IAEA, making it much more difficult for the international community to react. But why? The whole country would still be there, both as a possible target for increased sanctions and more. And if a few weeks are theoretically enough for a successful breakout, a few days should be enough to deploy and deliver an adequate response.
The entire article is worth reading, if only to rinse the awful taste of hysteria with some effervescent and much-needed rationality and honesty.
Just a day earlier, on December 30, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani published an article that was syndicated around the world. In addition to talk of rejuvenating the Iranian economy, improving relations with European and North American nations, and working toward a peaceful end to the bloody civil war in Syria, Rouhani wrote clearly about “Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy programme which has been subject to enormous hype in recent decades.”
Since the early 1990s, one prediction after another regarding how close Iran was to acquiring a nuclear bomb has proved baseless. Throughout this period, alarmists tried to paint Iran as a threat to the Middle East and the world.
We all know who the chief agitator is, and what purposes are to be served by hyping this issue. We know also that this claim fluctuates in proportion to the amount of international pressure to stop settlement construction and end the occupation of Palestinian lands. These false alarms continue, despite US national intelligence estimates according to which Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon.
In fact, we are committed not to work toward developing and producing a nuclear bomb. As enunciated in the fatwa issued by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, we strongly believe that the development, production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are contrary to Islamic norms. We never even contemplated the option of acquiring nuclear weapons, because we believe that such weapons could undermine our national security interests; as a result, they have no place in Iran’s security doctrine. Even the perception that Iran may develop nuclear weapons is detrimental to our security and overall national interest.
Don’t expect Rohani’s statements to temper the obsessive rhetoric so frequently published in our mainstream media. It would be imprudent to anticipate 2014 will see fewer platforms for anti-Iran propaganda in the press and less lies from Israeli and American politicians.
Nevertheless, with both the Rouhani and Obama administrations current and continuing dedication to diplomacy, we can hope that the new year will finally bring out a verifiable resolution to the ridiculous impasse over Iran’s nuclear program.
Until then, the least we can demand is the truth and less scare-mongering.
Happy New Year, dear readers.
Let’s hope it’s a good one, as the man says. Without any fear.
War is over, if we want it.
How Much Money Do The Rothschilds Have?
Bilzerian Report / March 16, 2012
For more than 200 years the Rothschild family has kept their banks in family hands, out of the general view of the public, in an effort to conceal their vast wealth. The Rothschilds have taken advantage of tax-free jurisdictions and have purposefully established their banks in countries with strict banking secrecy laws like Monaco, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
The Rothschild dynasty first began to acquire prominence around the mid 1700′s. The first major patriarch of the family, Mayar Amschel Rothschild, sent his 5 sons to strategic banking centers throughout Europe. Nathan Rothschild went to London, Jabob to Paris, Salomon to Vienna, Asmchel (Jr.) to Frankfurt, and Calmann Rothschild to Naples.
From 1813-1815 Nathan Rothschild almost single handedly financed the British war effort while his brothers financed the French war effort. In one year of the war, 1815, Nathan Rothschild provided the British government with nearly 10 million pounds, which is equivalent to 6.5 billion pounds today.
Since the Rothschilds were playing both sides of the warring parties, they were the only ones who could get through both sides of the blockades quickly. Their network of banks provided news of major battles to Nathan Rothschild in London before even the British government received it. The Rothschilds traded on this inside information on the London stock exchange, making vast fortunes in the process. After the final battle of Waterloo, Nathan Rothschild received news that the British were victorious and promptly started to sell British government treasuries. The market knew by this point that Nathan was getting information before anyone one else and therefore assumed the British had lost the battle and started selling their British government bonds. Once the price had crashed, Nathan used his agents to secretly buy up nearly the entirety of the British government debt. Using large amounts of leverage, Nathan Rothschild made many multiples of his money on this one trade.
After the war, Nathan Rothschild bragged of turning his 20k pound fortune into 50 million pounds in only 17 years. In 1820, 50 million pounds would be equivalent to 32 billion pounds today. It was at this point that Nathan Rothschild so famously said, “I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”
In 1850, Jacob Rothschild’s recorded net worth was 600 million francs, which was significantly more than all the other French bankers combined. In today’s US dollars that would be equivalent to $11.4 billion. James and Nathan Rothschild became two of the richest men in the world in only a few decades. With this vast wealth they built or bought 41 massive mansions and palaces across Europe. The video below (at 2:22) shows just a fraction of their real estate holdings.
In 1840, the Rothschild family became the Bank of England’s bullion brokers.
In 1844, Salomon Rothschild purchased the United Coal Mines of Vitkovice and Austro-Hungarian Blast Furnace Company which went on to become one of the top ten global industrial companies.
In 1845, the Rothschild family was granted exclusive access to build a rail transport company across much of France. The company was called Chemin de Fer du Nord.
In 1871, the Rothschild family raised 5 billion francs so the French government could pay reparations to Prussia. This sum would be equivalent to $95 billion today.
In 1880, the Rothschild family took control of Rio Tinto, ending up with a 30% stake. Rio Tinto is now the 4th largest mining company in the world. In the same year, the Rothschilds founded Imerys, which is currently a world leader in industrial metals mining.
In 1890, the Rothschild family founded the mining company Eramet, which is currently a multi-billion dollar company listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange.
Kuhn and Loeb, which received financing from the Rothschilds, financed Standard Oil, various profitable railroad projects, and Carnegie’s steel empire. The European Rothschild dynasty also had close financial ties to multiple leading American banks including J.P. Morgan.
In 1886, the French Rothschild bank acquired significant Russian oil fields and formed the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company, which became the world’s second largest oil producer. They sold their interest to Royal Dutch Shell in 1911 for an undisclosed amount.
In 1887, the Rothschild family financed and invested in the Kimberly diamond mines in South Africa, which became De Beers. The Rothschilds were the largest shareholders.
To this day the Rothschild family own and operate some of the largest and most profitable investment banks around the world.
During the first 17 years of his career, Nathan Rothschild’s annual rate of return was 81.4%, while Jacob’s annual rate of return from 1812-1868 was 14%.
Based on historical records and financial calculations it is possible to provide a rough estimate of their wealth today. The following estimate of the Rothschild family fortune will be based on an annual rate of return of 5%, which is extremely conservative given their past track record of using power, political connections, and inside information to make incredibly high annual returns. When the extremely profitable investments listed above are factored in, it is a certainty that they were able to achieve such a modest return.
In 1817, Nathan Rothschild bragged of having 50 million pounds. At a 5% annual rate of return that would equate to roughly 500 billion pounds today. In 1850, Jacob Rothschild was worth 600 million francs. At a 5% annual return that would equate to 860 billion francs, which would have been converted to Euros in 2001 at a 6.56 to 1 ratio, equalling €130 billion. By 2012, that fortune would total €224 billion.
Combined their fortunes would equal more than 1 trillion US dollars, which could do any one of the following:
1. Buy every stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange
2. Support the military of every NATO country combined for a year
3. Buy everyone on earth an iPod
4. Pay off Greece’s debt 2.5 times
5. Run the Australian government for nearly 3 years.
Obviously this estimate is conservative in its own right, and does not take into account the fortunes of the other three brothers who built financial empires in Switzerland, Frankfurt, and Italy. The Rothschild family eventually spread their operations to America, Israel, and most tax-free jurisdictions around the world.
As per the command of the patriarch, Mayar Amschel Rothschild, the family has intermarried and maintained cohesiveness until the present day so the fortune was not squandered or dispersed. One of their websites today reads: “Across two centuries and many generations, the qualities associated with the Rothschild family have remained unchanged: innovation, industriousness and, above all, strength through unity.”
In 1909, British Prime Minister Lloyd George claimed that Lord Nathan Rothschild was the most powerful man in Britain. This is of course at a time when Britain was considered to be one of the world’s preeminent superpowers. During the 20th century the Rothschild family started to disappear from mainstream attention. Many Rothschild financed biographies were released during this time period, which claimed that their fortunes have dwindled in modern times. It should be noted that these biographies have not given any detailed accounting of the families’ assets or mentioned the specific investments that lost more money than was made through some of the world’s most profitable investments listed above.
The real questions that must be asked are why the most powerful family in the history of the world, who financed nations and provided the money to create Israel, are not prominently featured in history courses? And why the media refuses to even mention the name of this incredibly wealthy and powerful family today?
The answers to these questions are one in the same. As the video below proves, nearly the entirety of the American (and European) media are controlled by Jewish Zionists. And these Zionists know that if the world knew that one family controlled more wealth than dozens of poor nations put together, there would be a public outcry.
Why Did the Justice Department Kill the Madoff Subpoena Against JPMorgan?
By Pam Martens | Wall Street on Parade | December 31, 2013
Since December 16, major business media have failed to dig deeper into a potentially blockbuster story involving the Justice Department’s refusal to honor a Wall Street regulator’s request for a subpoena against JPMorgan Chase to obtain Madoff related documents the firm was refusing to turn over. JPMorgan Chase was Madoff’s banker for the last 22 years of his fraud. The Trustee in charge of recovering funds for Madoff’s victims, Irving Picard, said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court this Fall that JPMorgan stood “at the very center of Madoff’s fraud for over 20 years.”
It’s a big story when a serial miscreant like JPMorgan – which has promised its regulators to change its jaded ways in exchange for settlements – risks obstruction of justice charges by denying one of its key regulators internal documents. It becomes an explosive story when the Justice Department, the highest law enforcement agency in the land and the regulator’s only source of help in enforcing a subpoena for the documents, sides with the serial miscreant instead of the regulator.
The story began on December 16 when Scott Cohn of CNBC posted a story with this headline: “Feds Probe JPMorgan Interference in Madoff Case.” The article revealed that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a JPMorgan Chase regulator and part of the U.S. Treasury Department, had been so riled by JPMorgan’s refusal to turn over documents related to what its employees knew about the Madoff fraud that it referred the matter to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General.
The article quotes Richard Delmar, legal counsel to the Inspector General, who explains that “This office was looking into allegations made by JPMC’s regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that its oversight of the bank was being impeded, specifically with respect to the bank’s provision of banking services to Madoff.”
The Inspector General’s office clearly believed there was merit to the OCC’s claim because it issued its own administrative subpoena for the documents, according to the CNBC story. JPMorgan refused that request as well, leading the Inspector General to ask the Justice Department to enforce the subpoena – a request it refused to honor.
When the Justice Department refused to enforce this subpoena, it went against not one, or two, but three sets of investigators who had found a serious basis for suspecting JPMorgan of wrongdoing in the Madoff fraud.
Irving Picard, the Madoff victims’ fund trustee, had already filed a lower court lawsuit mapping out his case against JPMorgan. Picard told the court:
“Evidence of Madoff’s fraud permeated every facet of JPMC [JPMorgan Chase]. It ran from the Broker/Dealer Group, where BLMIS [Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC] maintained a bank account that no one honestly could have believed was serving any legitimate purpose, to Equity Exotics, where JPMC learned of the red flags inherent in BLMIS’s investment strategy, to JPMC’s London office, which learned that individuals might be laundering money through BLMIS feeder funds, to the Private Bank, which maintained intimate relationships with one of BLMIS’s largest customers, to Treasury & Security Services, which was responsible for investing the balance of the 703 Account in short-term securities.”
In a more recent filing with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn lower court findings that he lacked standing to sue JPMorgan and other banks, Picard further detailed his case against JPMorgan, explaining that JPMorgan was well aware that Madoff was claiming to invest tens of billions of dollars in a strategy that involved buying large cap stocks in the Standard and Poor’s 500 index while simultaneously hedging with options. But the Madoff firm’s primary bank account at JPMorgan, which the bank had intimate access to review for over 20 years, was devoid of evidence of stock or options trading.
Picard’s petition to the Supreme Court reads: “As JPM [JPMorgan] was well aware, billions of dollars flowed from customers into the 703 account, without being segregated in any fashion. Billions flowed out, some to customers and others to Madoff’s friends in suspicious and repetitive round-trip transactions. But in the 22 years that JPM maintained the 703 account, there was not a single check or wire to a clearing house, securities exchange, or anyone who might be connected with the purchase of securities. All the while, JPM knew that Madoff was using the account to run an investment advisory business with thousands of customers and billions under management and knew that Madoff was using its name to lend legitimacy to his enterprise…”
Picard also informed the Court that employees inside JPMorgan were well aware of the suspicions surrounding Madoff. JPMorgan’s Chief Risk Officer, John Hogan, had warned his colleagues 18 months prior to Madoff’s confession of his Ponzi scheme that “there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a ponzi scheme.”
Rather than reporting their concerns to the Justice Department, according to Picard, JPMorgan invested over $250 million of its own money with Madoff feeder funds while it simultaneously created structured investment products that allowed its own investors to make leveraged bets on the returns of the feeder funds invested with Madoff.
In September 2008, just two months before Madoff would confess to running an unprecedented fraud that bilked investors out of over $17 billion in real money and $65 billion in assets shown on customer statements, JPMorgan conducted a new round of due diligence and decided it was time to get out of its $250 million investment involving the feeder funds to Madoff.
One week ago, David Cay Johnston picked up on the subpeona story for Newsweek, writing: “Bernard Madoff’s principal bank, JPMorgan Chase, has for years obstructed federal bank examiners trying to ascertain what it knew about his gigantic Ponzi scheme, an official document obtained by Newsweek shows.”
Johnston cited an internal document he had obtained from the Government Attic, a public interest website that posts documents it obtains from Freedom of Information Act requests. Johnston said that “The JPMorgan memos Justice declined to pursue are almost certain to show that years earlier the bank had grounds to suspect Madoff was running a fraud.”
The most critical aspect of this subpoena story has thus far been overlooked. It may well be that there is an official position at the U.S. Department of Justice not to issue any subpoenas against the largest Wall Street firms.
On January 22 of this year, the award-winning producer, Martin Smith, aired a Frontline program for PBS titled “The Untouchables.” Smith had this to say on air:
“We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.”
One day after that program aired, the Washington Post reported that Lanny Breuer, head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice was stepping down from his post.
Now it would appear that the Justice Department’s problem of quashing subpoenas against Wall Street did not end with the departure of Lanny Breuer.
Related articles
- New Revelation that AG Eric Holder Is Protecting JPMorgan Chase NYC From Criminal Investigation (truth-out.org)
- JPMorgan May Face Criminal Charges for Blowing the Whistle on Madoff – To the Wrong Country (blacklistednews.com)
- New Revelation that AG Eric Holder Is Protecting JPMorgan Chase NYC From Criminal Investigation (blacklistednews.com)
NSA Admits Lots Of People Could Have Done What Snowden Did
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | December 31, 2013
The NSA keeps changing its story about Snowden. Was he brilliant or a nobody? Did he have access to all these documents or did he have to hack into systems? Did he get the important stuff or not? Each time the story seems to be different. A few months ago, you may recall the NSA insisted that Snowden needed to borrow the identities of others to access the documents he had. They also argued that he must have bypassed or deleted log files. However, in an interview, the NSA’s Director of Technology, Lonny Anderson, admits that basically anyone at the NSA with top secret clearance could all access the same stuff and also claims that all the log files were there:
contrary to much of what’s been reported about Snowden’s work at the NSA, it wasn’t his position as a systems administrator and the broad access to networks and databases that came with it that allowed him to steal so many secrets. Rather, Anderson said, “the lion’s share” of the information Snowden obtained was available to him because of his top-secret security clearance — TS/SCI — which allowed him to access so-called sensitive compartmented information.
That’s an important distinction, because it means any number of the thousands of people at the NSA with the same clearance level could have done what Snowden did — not just the smaller number of systems administrators, who have a kind of “super user” access that isn’t granted to all other employees. That helps explain why Anderson couldn’t tell the White House that there were no more Snowdens. Theoretically, there could have been thousands of them.
Of course, who knows if Anderson is telling the truth. Later in the interview he seems to contradict himself — both claiming that Snowden’s activities on the network were tracked (“He was not a ghost. It’s not like he was so stealthy that we didn’t see his activities”) and that Snowden was able to get away with what he did because he was “anonymous” on the network.
“Where I think we were negligent — if we were negligent — where we were is that we allowed him some form of anonymity as he did that. Someone wasn’t watching all of that. So the lesson learned for us is that you’ve got to remove anonymity from the network.”
I guess it’s possible that the actions were tracked without the identification of who it was. Amusingly, you could argue that the NSA had the metadata on Snowden’s actions, but not the actual details of who he was. Oh, the irony.
The one area where Snowden’s sysadmin role apparently did play a part was in being able to get many of those documents off the network without being noticed. Part of his job was, as revealed earlier, to move documents around within the NSA’s network, but his sysadmin status allowed him to download those documents without any alarm bells going off.
What Snowden could do as a systems administrator, as opposed to an employee without those privileges, was to “exfiltrate,” or remove data from the NSA networks, Anderson said. “That, a normal user would not have been able to do.” He acknowledged that the NSA’s information control regime is not currently designed to alert officials when documents are being removed by a systems administrator. That’s going to change, Anderson said. In the future, individuals will also be locked out of the networks if they remove data without authorization.
At this point, it’s difficult to believe anything that the NSA is saying about Snowden, because so much of it seems to contradict what the NSA itself has said in the past. Perhaps that’s just part of the disinformation campaign. Or, perhaps it’s a sign that the NSA still has no clue what happened.
Related article
- The NSA’s Oversharing Problem (arstechnica.com)
NSA’s Personal Propagandist For CBS Officially Takes Counterterrorism Job Everyone Knew He Was Getting
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | December 30, 2013
When 60 Minutes did its hack PR job for the NSA a few weeks ago, lots of people called out the fact that the reporter who handled the segment, John Miller, wasn’t just a former intelligence official working for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (which oversees the NSA), but that he was widely rumored to have worked out a deal for a new job for the NYPD, heading up “counterterrorism.” Even though there were multiple reports at the time, including one that claimed it was a “99.44% done deal,” when asked about it, Miller lied. He told a reporter, “you know as much about this as I do.”
That was clearly Miller lying — something that Miller has had an issue with in the past — as the “rumor” is now confirmed and Miller has accepted his job doing “counterterrorism” for the NYPD. And while some might say that doing counterterrorism for a city police force is different than working for national intelligence, that’s only because you’re not familiar with the NYPD, which has set up something of a shadow NSA/CIA to do all sorts of activities not normally associated with a police force.
And, of course, since the press was clearly familiar with Miller’s expected role, it raises serious questions about why 60 Minutes allowed the puff piece to move forward with a seriously conflicted “journalist.” While Miller has lashed out at critics, rather than respond to a single point raised, the brand that comes out worst in all this is clearly CBS and 60 Minutes — which basically let an intelligence official do an entire propaganda piece on the NSA. 60 Minutes used to be about hard hitting journalism. Now, apparently, they think it’s “journalism” to shill for the surveillance state.
The cover-up police
The Shay Police Unit manage to avoid basic investigative actions – even while holding two suspects caught red-handed in custody
By Yossi Gurvitz | Yesh Din | December 29, 2013
On July 26th, 2010, Israeli civilians – some of whom were seen coming from the direction of the settlements of Yizhar and Har Bracha – went on two rampages in the Palestinian village of Burin. In the first and more severe case, they attacked and destroyed property; when the owner, Ibrahim Eid, could no longer stand watching his property go up in flames and approached the scene, they hit him over the head with an iron bar. Eid lost consciousness and had to be treated in a hospital.
During the second rampage, Israeli civilians stoned the nearby home of Bashir Hamza Zaban. Unfortunately for the hoodlums, border policemen were on the scene and spotted them. The cops chased the attackers, detaining two of them. One of the detainees chose to hide a knife in his shoe. The two refused to identify themselves, but later were identified in the police station. The two maintained their right to remain silent during their interrogation. Zaban also managed to identify a third attacker, who – unlike the detainees – was not hooded.
On its face, this is an open and shut case. Yet lo and behold: even though two suspects were arrested, having been caught red-handed; even though one of them was carrying a concealed knife; and even though they refused to identify themselves – the police wouldn’t do the bare minimum, i.e. ask the victim to identify his attackers. Instead, the police closed the case, citing lack of evidence.
Hold on, the epic screw-up of this case is just beginning. Despite the fact that Zaban noted in his statement to the police that he was aware of the attack on Eid, and although he gave the police a disc containing photos of the attack on Eid, the police took their sweet time and summoned Eid for a statement in November of 2010, a mere five months after the incident. After all, we all know that the memory of witnesses just improves as time passes by.
We’re not done yet: Eid, in his statement to the police, noted the existence of the disc, containing quite clear images of the Israeli civilians who attacked him, who can be easily identified. Even so, the police – who had had the disc since July – didn’t bother summoning him to a lineup so he could point out his attackers; hence, it naturally did not summon any of them for an interrogation. And to top it all off, the police closed the case in December 2012 – after two years and five months of doing little investigative work – but only bothered to inform us, who represent the victims, in August 2013.
Such phenomenal incompetence, which would not surprise anyone familiar with the SJPD (‘Samaria and Judea’ Police Department), generally has two plausible explanations. The first is that the cops and their superiors are complete failures at their duties. The second is that they’re not that dumb, in fact they’re quite smart: we can assume they have a good reason to believe that if they do their jobs properly, they will be harmed. Some of them, after all, live among the population they’re charged with investigating. So they do a half-assed job, ignore evidence, silence nasty questions, and bullshit their way through the closing of a case, hoping no one pays attention.
Such a police force is the hallmark of dark regimes. The SJPD has been functioning this way for years. Anyone who thinks that these investigators, when re-posted within Israel proper, will not retain the work norms developed beyond the ‘separation’ wall, is deluding herself. As for us, once we lifted our jaws off the floor, we appealed the decision to close this case. We hope that the embarrassing negligence of the SJPD will force the prosecution to act. We’ll keep you informed.
Related article
- While you were sleeping…. (imemc.org)
Lines of the Game: Price to Pay for the Shatah Assassination
By Sami Kleib | Al-Akhbar | December 28, 2013
The assassination of former Lebanese Finance Minister Mohammed Shatah will open a dangerous chapter in Lebanon, a bit similar to the one that followed the assassination of late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Shatah was no ordinary man in the region, and the attack occurred at a crucial moment in Lebanon and its neighborhood’s history. Here, escalated tensions and sedition will never let such a crime pass by without major repercussions. The killer knew it!
Hariri’s assassination in 2005 was a turning point for Hezbollah’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and contributed to the Syrian army’s withdrawal from Lebanon. These events weren’t just a result of local demands. Former US President George W. Bush and his French counterpart Jacques Chirac were also involved.
The Sunni-Shia strife that ripped Iraq apart after the American-British invasion was further consolidated when Hezbollah, with its large Shia base, was accused of murdering the new symbol of modern Sunnism in the region: Rafik Hariri. Back then, political accusation preceded all real investigations on the ground.
Now, what to expect after Shatah’s assassination?
Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri was brief, while Future bloc leader Fouad Siniora elaborated, hinting that the Syrian regime planned the crime, and its Lebanese allies, mainly Hezbollah, carried it out. In the March 14 statement, Siniora echoed the calls that followed Hariri’s murder, urging to take Shatah’s assassination to the international level, something we expect to hear quite often in the coming weeks amid international pressure on Hezbollah and Lebanon.
Head of the National Struggle Bloc MP Walid Jumblatt was alone in his call for reason and moderation. He knows quite well that some are seeking to exploit the assassination to achieve bigger political gains. He also understands that this assassination is apt to take the country from sectarian sedition to the battlefield.
The Shatah assassination occurred while Lebanon was at a crossroads. The future government and the current presidency are now up for grabs amid political bickering between Hezbollah and March 14. But behind both parties is a larger and deeper conflict taking place in Syria.
The assassination ought to increase pressure on the formation of a Lebanese government and a formula for a presidential agreement. Previously hesitant, the international community is now expected to support these solutions as the death of Shatah and the other martyrs raised the alarm about a bloody year awaiting Lebanon.
Shatah’s murder also paves the way for further assassinations, clashes, and blasts. Obviously there is a plan to transform Lebanon into an arena for a regional and international conflict that has not been settled in Syria.
What if a Hezbollah leader or ally is killed in the coming days? Will we hear that it is a retaliation for the Shatah murder? Who will break this vicious cycle?
Israel may also find an opportunity to conduct a military operation. It is reported that Hezbollah’s incursion in Syria and the widening rift with its former Sunni base offers Israel the right opportunity to strike. In Lebanon, Israel may redeem what it couldn’t achieve in Iran. At least that’s what the Israelis believe.
The assassination put the Syrian regime and Hezbollah in a raging storm of accusations at a critical time. The world is heading toward the Geneva II conference and an historic understanding with Iran. The international tribunal investigating Hariri’s murder will soon begin its sessions.
Martyr Mohammed Shatah was no ordinary man. Neither was martyr Wissam al-Hassan. Shatah, a man with hefty economic and political baggage, was, just like security man Hassan, standing on a pivotal local, regional, and international intersection. With such assassinations, it is easy to point figures, but it is hard to support accusations with evidence as political exploitation comes in smoothly.
A dark period of major transformation is awaiting Lebanon, but unfortunately the fierce battle ahead won’t yield any winners. What if a fait accompli government was imposed on Hezbollah and its allies? How will Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah put his words “don’t mess with us” into action? Those messing with him this time will have an international cover far larger than the one they had before the assassination.
Related article
Oligarchs, Demagogues, and Mass Revolts against Democracy
By James Petras | The People’s Voice | December 28, 2013
In ancient Rome, especially during the late Republic, oligarchs resorted to mob violence to block, intimidate, assassinate or drive from power the dominant faction in the Senate. While neither the ruling or opposing factions represented the interests of the plebeians, wage workers, small farmers or slaves, the use of the ‘mob’ against the elected Senate, the principle of representative government and the republican form of government laid the groundwork for the rise of authoritarian “Caesars” (military rulers) and the transformation of the Roman republic into an imperial state.
Demagogues, in the pay of aspiring emperors, aroused the passions of a motley array of disaffected slum dwellers, loafers and petty thieves (ladrones) with promises, pay-offs and positions in a New Order. Professional mob organizers cultivated their ties with the oligarchs ‘above’ and with professional demonstrators ‘below’. They voiced ‘popular grievances’ and articulated demands questioning the legitimacy of the incumbent rulers, while laying the groundwork for the rule by the few. Usually, when the pay-master oligarchs came to power on a wave of demagogue-led mob violence, they quickly suppressed the demonstrations, paid off the demagogues with patronage jobs in the new regime or resorted to a discrete assassination for ‘street leaders’ unwilling to recognize the new order’. The new rulers purged the old Senators into exile, expulsion and dispossession, rigged new elections and proclaimed themselves ‘saviors of the republic’. They proceeded to drive peasants from their land, renounce social obligations and stop food subsidies for poor urban families and funds for public works.
The use of mob violence and “mass revolts” to serve the interests of oligarchical and imperial powers against democratically-elected governments has been a common strategy in recent times.
Throughout the ages, the choreographed “mass revolt” played many roles: (1) it served to destabilize an electoral regime; (2) it provided a platform for its oligarch funders to depose an incumbent regime; (3) it disguised the fact that the oligarchic opposition had lost democratic elections; (4) it provided a political minority with a ‘fig-leaf of legitimacy’ when it was otherwise incapable of acting within a constitutional framework and (5) it allowed for the illegitimate seizure of power in the name of a pseudo ‘majority’, namely the “crowds in the central plaza”.
Some leftist commentators have argued two contradictory positions: On the one hand, some simply reduce the oligarchy’s power grab to an ‘inter-elite struggle’ which has nothing to do with the ‘interests of the working class’, while others maintain the ‘masses’ in the street are protesting against an “elitist regime”. A few even argue that with popular, democratic demands, these revolts are progressive, should be supported as “terrain for class struggle”. In other words, the ‘left’ should join the uprising and contest the oligarchs for leadership within the stage-managed revolts!
What progressives are unwilling to recognize is that the oligarchs orchestrating the mass revolt are authoritarians who completely reject democratic procedures and electoral processes. Their aim is to establish a ‘junta’, which will eliminate all democratic political and social institutions and freedoms and impose harsher, more repressive and regressive policies and institutions than those they replace. Some leftists support the ‘masses in revolt’ simply because of their ‘militancy’, their numbers and street courage, without examining the underlying leaders, their interests and links to the elite beneficiaries of a ‘regime change’.
All the color-coded “mass revolts” in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR featured popular leaders who exhorted the masses in the name of ‘independence and democracy’ but were pro-NATO, pro-(Western) imperialists and linked to neo-liberal elites. Upon the fall of communism, the new oligarchs privatized and sold off the most lucrative sectors of the economy throwing millions out of work, dismantled the welfare state and handed over their military bases to NATO for the stationing of foreign troops and the placement of missiles aimed at Russia.
The entire ‘anti-Stalinist’ left in the US and Western Europe, with a few notable exceptions, celebrated these oligarch-controlled revolts in Eastern Europe and some even participated as minor accomplices in the post-revolt neo-liberal regimes. One clear reason for the demise of “Western Marxism” arose from its inability to distinguish a genuine popular democratic revolt from a mass uprising funded and stage-managed by rival oligarchs!
One of the clearest recent examples of a manipulated ‘people’s power’ revolution in the streets to replace an elected representative of one sector of the elite with an even more brutal, authoritarian ‘president’ occurred in early 2001 in the Philippines. The more popular and independent (but notoriously corrupt) President Joseph Estrada, who had challenged sectors of the Philippine elite and current US foreign policy (infuriating Washington by embracing Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez), was replaced through street demonstrations of middle-class matrons with soldiers in civvies by Gloria Makapagal-Arroyo. Mrs. Makapagal-Arroyo, who had close links to the US and the Philippine military, unleashed a horrific wave of brutality dubbed the ‘death-squad democracy’. The overthrow of Estrada was actively supported by the left, including sectors of the revolutionary left, who quickly found themselves the target of an unprecedented campaign of assassinations, disappearances, torture and imprisonment by their newly empowered ‘Madame President’.
Past and Present Mass Revolts Against Democracy: Guatemala, Iran, and Chile
The use of mobs and mass uprisings by oligarchs and empire builders has a long and notorious history. Three of the bloodiest cases, which scarred their societies for decades, took place in Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, and Chile in 1973.
Democratically-elected Jacobo Árbenz was the first Guatemalan President to initiate agrarian reform and legalize trade unions, especially among landless farm workers. Árbenz’s reforms included the expropriation of unused, fallow land owned by the United Fruit Company, a giant US agro-business conglomerate. The CIA used its ties to local oligarchs and right-wing generals and colonels to instigate and finance mass-protests against a phony ‘communist-takeover’ of Guatemala under President Arbenz. The military used the manipulated mob violence and the ‘threat’ of Guatemala becoming a “Soviet satellite”, to stage a bloody coup. The coup leaders received air support from the CIA and slaughtered thousands of Arbenz supporters and turned the countryside into ‘killing fields’. For the next 50 years political parties, trade unions and peasant organizations were banned, an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were murdered and millions were displaced.
In 1952 Mohammed Mossadegh was elected president of Iran on a moderate nationalist platform, after the overthrow of the brutal monarch. Mossadegh announced the nationalization of the petroleum industry. The CIA, with the collaboration of the local oligarchs, monarchists and demagogues organized ‘anti-communist’ street mobs to stage violent demonstrations providing the pretext for a monarchist- military coup. The CIA-control Iranian generals brought Shah Reza Pahlavi back from Switzerland and for the next 26 years Iran was a monarchist-military dictatorship, whose population was terrorized by the Savak, the murderous secret police.
The US oil companies received the richest oil concessions; the Shah joined Israel and the US in an unholy alliance against progressive nationalist dissidents and worked hand-in-hand to undermine independent Arab states. Tens of thousands of Iranians were killed, tortured and driven into exile. In 1979, a mass popular uprising led by Islamic movements, nationalist and socialist parties and trade unions drove out the Shah-Savak dictatorship. The Islamists installed a radical nationalist clerical regime, which retains power to this day despite decades of a US-CIA-funded destabilization campaign which has funded both terrorist groups and dissident liberal movements.
Chile is the best-known case of CIA-financed mob violence leading to a military coup. In 1970, the democratic socialist Dr. Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. Despite CIA efforts to buy votes to block Congressional approval of the electoral results and its manipulation of violent demonstrations and an assassination campaign to precipitate a military coup, Allende took office.
During Allende’s tenure as president the CIA financed a variety of “direct actions” –from paying the corrupt leaders of a copper workers union to stage strikes and the truck owners associations to refuse to transport goods to the cities, to manipulating right-wing terrorist groups like the Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty) in their assassination campaigns. The CIA’s destabilization program was specifically designed to provoke economic instability through artificial shortages and rationing, in order to incite middle class discontent. This was made notorious by the street demonstrations of pot-banging housewives. The CIA sought to incite a military coup through economic chaos. Thousands of truck owners were paid not to drive their trucks leading to shortages in the cities, while right-wing terrorists blew up power stations plunging neighborhoods into darkness and shop owners who refused to join the ‘strike’ against Allende were vandalized. On September 11, 1973, to the chants of ‘Jakarta’ (in celebration of a 1964 CIA coup in Indonesia), a junta of US-backed Chilean generals grabbed power from an elected government. Tens of thousands of activists and government supporters were arrested, tortured, forced into exile or killed. The dictatorship denationalized and privatized its mining, banking and manufacturing sectors, following the free market dictates of Milton Friedman-trained economists (the so-call “Chicago Boys”). The dictatorship overturned 40 years of welfare, labor and land-reform legislation which had made Chile the most socially advanced country in Latin America. With the generals in power, Chile became the ‘neo-liberal model’ for Latin America. Mob violence and the so-called “middle class revolt”, led to the consolidation of oligarchic and imperial rule and a 17-year reign of terror under General Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The whole society was brutalized and with the return of electoral politics, even former ‘leftist’ parties retained the dictatorship’s neo-liberal economic policies, its authoritarian constitution and the military high command. The ‘revolt of the middle class’ in Chile resulted in the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the oligarchs in Latin America to this day!
The Contemporary Use and Abuse of “Mass Revolts”: Egypt, Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, and Argentina
In recent years “mass revolt” has become the instrument of choice when oligarchs, generals and other empire builders seek ‘regime change’. By enlisting an assortment of nationalist demagogues and imperial-funded NGO ‘leaders’, they set the conditions for the overthrow of democratically elected governments and stage-manage the installment of their own “free market” regimes with dubious “democratic” credentials.
Not all the elected regimes under siege are progressive. Many ‘democracies’, like the Ukraine, are ruled by one set of oligarchs. In the Ukraine, the elite supporting President Viktor Yanukovich, decided that entering into a deep client-state relationship with the European Union was not in their interests, and sought to diversify their international trade partners while maintaining lucrative ties with Russia. Their opponents, who are currently behind the street demonstrations in Kiev, advocate a client relationship with the EU, stationing of NATO troops, and cutting ties with Russia. In Thailand, the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, represents a section of the economic elite with ties and support in the rural areas, especially the North-East, as well as deep trade relations with China. The opponents are urban-based, closer to the military-monarchists and favor a straight neo-liberal agenda linked to the US against the rural patronage-populist agenda of Ms. Shinawatra.
Egypt’s democratically-elected Mohamed Morsi government pursued a moderate Islamist policy with some constraints on the military and a loosening of ties with Israel in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. In terms of the IMF, Morsi sought compromise. The Morsi regime was in flux when it was overthrown: not Islamist nor secular, not pro-worker but also not pro-military. Despite all of its different pressure groups and contradictions, the Morsi regime permitted labor strikes, demonstrations, opposition parties, freedom of the press and assembly. All of these democratic freedoms have disappeared after waves of ‘mass street revolts’, choreographed by the military, set the conditions for the generals to take power and establish their brutal dictatorship – jailing and torturing tens of thousands and outlawing all opposition parties.
Mass demonstrations and demagogue-led direct actions also actively target democratically elected progressive governments, like Venezuela and Argentina, in addition to the actions against conservative democracies cited above. Venezuela, under Presidents Hugo Chavez and Vicente Maduro advances an anti-imperialist, pro-socialist program. ‘Mob revolts’ are combined with waves of assassinations, sabotage of public utilities, artificial shortages of essential commodities, vicious media slander and opposition election campaigns funded from the outside. In 2002, Washington teamed up with its collaborator politicians, Miami and Caracas-based oligarchs and local armed gangs, to mount a “protest movement” as the pretext for a planned business-military coup. The generals and members of the elite seized power and deposed and arrested the democratically-elected President Chavez. All avenues of democratic expression and representation were closed and the constitution annulled. In response to the kidnapping of ‘their president’, over a million Venezuelans spontaneously mobilized and marched upon the Presidential palace to demand the restoration of democracy and Hugo Chavez to the presidency. Backed by the large pro-democracy and pro-constitution sectors of the Venezuelan armed forces, the mass protests led to the coup’s defeat and the return of Chavez and democracy. All democratic governments facing manipulated imperial-oligarchic financed mob revolts should study the example of Venezuela’s defeat of the US-oligarch-generals’ coup. The best defense for democracy is found in the organization, mobilization and political education of the electoral majority. It is not enough to participate in free elections; an educated and politicized majority must also know how to defend their democracy in the streets as well as at the ballot box.
The lessons of the 2002 coup-debacle were very slowly absorbed by the Venezuelan oligarchy and their US patrons who continued to destabilize the economy in an attempt to undermine democracy and seize power. Between December 2002 and February 2003, corrupt senior oil executives of the nominally ‘public’ oil company PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela) organized a ‘bosses’ lockout stopping production, export and local distribution of oil and refined petroleum products. Corrupt trade union officials, linked to the US National Endowment for Democracy, mobilized oil workers and other employees to support the lock-out, in their attempt to paralyze the economy. The government responded by mobilizing the other half of the oil workers who, together with a significant minority of middle management, engineers and technologists, called on the entire Venezuelan working class to take the oil fields and installations from the ‘bosses’. To counter the acute shortage of gasoline, President Chavez secured supplies from neighboring countries and overseas allies. The lockout was defeated. Several thousand supporters of the executive power grab were fired and replaced by pro-democracy managers and workers.
Having failed to overthrow the democratic government via “mass revolts”, the oligarchs turned toward a plebiscite on Chavez’ rule and later called for a nation-wide electoral boycott, both of which were defeated. These defeats served to strengthen Venezuela’s democratic institutions and decreased the presence of opposition legislators in the Congress. The repeated failures of the elite to grab power led to a new multi-pronged strategy using: (1) US-funded NGO’s to exploit local grievances and mobilize residents around community issues; (2) clandestine thugs to sabotage utilities, especially power, assassinate peasant recipients of land reform titles, as well as prominent officials and activists; (3) mass electoral campaign marches, and (4) economic destabilization via financial speculation, illegal foreign exchange trading, price gouging and hoarding of basic consumer commodities. The purpose of these measures is to incite mass discontent, using their control of the mass media to provoke another ‘mass revolt’ to set the stage for another US-backed ‘power grab’. Violent street protests by middle class students from the elite Central University were organized by oligarch-financed demagogues. ‘Demonstrations’ included sectors of the middle class and urban poor angered by the artificial shortages and power outages. The sources of popular discontent were rapidly and effectively addressed at the top by energetic government measures: business owners engaged in hoarding and price gouging were jailed; prices of essential staples were reduced; hoarded goods were seized from warehouses and distributed to the poor; the import of essential goods was increased and saboteurs were pursued. The Government’s effective intervention resonated with the mass of the working class, the lower-middle class and the rural and urban poor and restored their support. Government supporters took to the streets and lined up at the ballot box to defeat the campaign of destabilization. The government won a resounding electoral mandate allowing it to move decisively against the oligarchs and their backers in Washington.
The Venezuelan experience shows how energetic government counter-measures can restore support and deepen progressive social changes for the majority. This is because forceful progressive government intervention against anti-democratic oligarchs, combined with the organization, political education and mobilization of the majority of voters can decisively defeat these stage-managed mass revolts.
Argentina is an example of a weakened democratic regime trying to straddle the fence between the oligarchs and the workers, between the combined force of the agro-business and mining elites and working and middle class constituencies dependent on social policies. The elected-Kirchner-Fernandez government has faced “mass revolts” in the a series of street demonstrations whipped up by conservative agricultural exporters over taxes; the Buenos Aires upper-middle class angered at ‘crime, disorder and insecurity’, a nationwide strike by police officials over ‘salaries’ who ‘looked the other way’ while gangs of ‘lumpen’ street thugs pillaged and destroyed stores. Taken altogether, these waves of mob action in Argentina appear to be part of a politically-directed destabilization campaign by the authoritarian Right who have instigated or, at least, exploited these events. Apart from calling on the military to restore order and conceding to the ‘salary’ demands of the striking police, the Fernandez government has been unable or unwilling to mobilize the democratic electorate in defense of democracy. The democratic regime remains in power but it is under siege and vulnerable to attack by domestic and imperial opponents.
Conclusion
Mass revolts are two-edged swords: they can be a positive force when they occur against military dictatorships like Pinochet or Mubarak, against authoritarian absolutist monarchies like Saudi Arabia, a colonial-racist state like Israel, and imperial occupations like against the US in Afghanistan. But they have to be directed and controlled by popular local leaders seeking to restore democratic majority rule.
History, from ancient times to the present, teaches us that not all ‘mass revolts’ achieve, or are even motivated by, democratic objectives. Many have served oligarchs seeking to overthrow democratic governments, totalitarian leaders seeking to install fascist and pro-imperial regimes, demagogues and authoritarians seeking to weaken shaky democratic regimes and militarists seeking to start wars for imperial ambitions.
Today, “mass revolts” against democracy have become standard operational procedure for Western European and US rulers who seek to circumvent democratic procedures and install pro-imperial clients. The practice of democracy is denigrated while the mob is extolled in the imperial Western media. This is why armed Islamist terrorists and mercenaries are called “rebels” in Syria and the mobs in the streets of Kiev (Ukraine) attempting to forcibly depose a democratically-elected government are labeled “pro-Western democrats”.
The ideology informing the “mass revolts” varies from “anti-communist” and “anti-authoritarian” in democratic Venezuela, to “pro-democracy” in Libya (even as tribal bands and mercenaries slaughter whole communities), Egypt and the Ukraine.
Imperial strategists have systematized, codified and made operational “mass revolts” in favor of oligarchic rule. International experts, consultants, demagogues and NGO officials have carved out lucrative careers as they travel to ‘hot spots’ and organize ‘mass revolts’ dragging the target countries into deeper ‘colonization’ via European or US-centered ‘integration’. Most local leaders and demagogues accept the double agenda: ‘protest today and submit to new masters tomorrow’. The masses in the street are fooled and then sacrificed. They believe in a ‘New Dawn’ of Western consumerism, higher paid jobs and greater personal freedom … only to be disillusioned when their new rulers fill the jails with opponents and many former protestors, raise prices, cut salaries, privatize state companies, sell off the most lucrative firms to foreigners and double the unemployment rate.
When the oligarchs ‘stage-manage’ mass revolts and takeover the regime, the big losers include the democratic electorate and most of the protestors. Leftists and progressives, in the West or in exile, who had mindlessly supported the ‘mass revolts’ will publish their scholarly essays on ‘the revolution (sic) betrayed” without admitting to their own betrayal of democratic principles.
If and when the Ukraine enters into the European Union, the exuberant street demonstrators will join the millions of jobless workers in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, as well as millions of pensioners brutalized by “austerity programs” imposed by their new rulers, the ‘Troika’ in Brussels. If these former demonstrators take to the streets once more, in disillusionment at their leaders’ “betrayal”, they can enjoy their ‘victory’ under the batons of “NATO and European Union-trained police” while the Western mass media will have moved elsewhere in support of ‘democracy’.
Beirut murder: Dirty tricks get dirtier
By Finian Cunningham | Press TV | December 28, 2013
The latest deadly attack in Lebanon’s capital Beirut is yet another desperate attempt to destabilize not only that country, but the entire Middle East to precipitate all-out sectarian war.
The murder of senior Lebanese Sunni political figure, Mohamad Shatah, on Friday in a massive bomb blast that hit his motorcade as it drove through downtown Beirut was aimed at implicating the Shia Hezbollah and closely allied Syrian and Iranian governments.
Syria’s government of President Bashar al-Assad, along with Hezbollah and Iran, swiftly condemned the assassination of Shatah, who was formerly Lebanon’s finance minister between 2008 and 2011.
But the condemnations didn’t stop anti-Syria politicians within Lebanon and various Western media outlets from pointing the finger.
“Anti-Assad ex-minister killed in Beirut bomb,” was the headline carried by Reuters and Britain’s Daily Telegraph, among others.
This contrived innuendo betrays who the real perpetrators are.
Mohamad Shatah, a senior political adviser to Lebanese opposition leader Saad Hariri, was indeed a strident critic of Hezbollah and Syria’s Assad, accusing them of fuelling bloodshed in Syria and also sectarian tensions inside Lebanon. His political views were consistent with the narrative of the pro-Zionist Western media, as well as Saudi Arabia.
Shatah could therefore be considered an ally of the West, Saudi Arabia and the Zionist Israeli regime. But that very profile may have been what made him a prime target, not for Hezbollah or Syria, but for his so-called allies.
The day before his killing, Shatah had reiterated criticism of Hezbollah, claiming that the group was using Syria to consolidate its military strength in Lebanon.
Within minutes of Shatah’s murder, the Saudi-backed Lebanese opposition leader Saad Hariri implicated Hezbollah for the attack. “Shatah’s murderers are the same ones who assassinated former premier Rafik Hariri.” This was a reference to the bomb-blast killing of his father, Rafik, also a former prime minister, in 2005.
A United Nations-backed Lebanese tribunal has indicted five members of Hezbollah for that 2005 murder. The trial is set to open in the coming weeks in a Hague court. For the past eight years Hariri’s group have accused Hezbollah as well as Syrian intelligence over that assassination, without the accusations gaining much credibility.
Both Hezbollah and Syria have strenuously denied any involvement, saying that there is no evidence, and that the tribunal is politically driven. Hence, they have refused to cooperate with the forthcoming trial.
That is why Saad Hariri said of the latest killing: “The accused… are the same ones who are running away from international justice.”
Shatah’s assassination this week comes at a sensitive time, which strongly suggests who the real perpetrators might be.
First, the atrocity serves to re-ignite the accusations against Hezbollah, and its regional allies, in the murder of Rafik Hariri just when the case is being re-opened in an international court.
Secondly, there is the forthcoming Geneva II political talks organized to find a peaceful solution to the nearly three-year Syrian crisis. If Hezbollah, and by extension Syria and Iran, can be linked by sensational media claims of involvement in the murder of high-profile Lebanese politicians, then that would have a damaging impact on the Assad government during the Geneva negotiations.
Thirdly, and this is more to the point of who are the likely perpetrators, the murder of Mohamad Shatah comes at a time of mounting sectarian tensions and violence across the region. Lebanon has witnessed a wave of deadly bomb attacks and assassinations in recent months, which have mainly targeted Shia areas of Beirut.
Earlier this month, a senior Hezbollah commander was shot dead. And at the end of last month, a twin suicide bomb attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut killed 29, including Iran’s cultural attaché, Ebrahim Ansari. Back in August, a bomb outside a Sunni mosque in Sidon reportedly butchered 40 people.
This violence replicates the pattern of sectarian bloodshed unleashed in neighboring Syria and Iraq. There is ample evidence to show that that violence is being systematically fuelled by Saudi Arabia, working in collusion with Israeli and Western intelligence.
Israel in particular has a long track record of sabotaging Lebanon from within, having invaded that country in 1978, 2000 and 2006. There is also evidence that its agents were the real authors of the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005.
Lebanon is particularly vulnerable to sectarian strife. The country’s communal wounds are still raw from the 15-year-old civil war between its Sunni, Shia, Christian and Druze communities, which ended in 1990. There have been renewed sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shia/Alawite groups in Sidon, Tripoli and several other towns over the past year. Saudi-backed Sunni clerics have been prominent in agitating sharper tensions in Lebanon.
This pattern of sectarian destabilization within Lebanon and across the Middle East by external forces is consistent with the latest murder of Mohamad Shatah in Beirut. The massive blast is believed to have come from a 50-60 kg bomb wired in a booby-trapped car. Wreckage was scattered 100 meters away and some 40 other cars were damaged, some of them upended. This was a professional hit with a devastating message.
In the grand nefarious scheme of geopolitics it matters little that Shatah was a prominent Sunni figure who was an ardent critic of Hezbollah and Syria. Indeed, from the viewpoint of the agents of subversion and destabilization, Shatah’s political and religious affiliation would have made him a prime target for their purpose of trying to explode sectarian war.
The heinous role played by Saudi, Israeli and Western intelligence in inflicting untold suffering on civilians across the Middle East, whether Shia, Sunni or Christian, means that their capability of using the dirtiest tricks knows no limits. The murder of Mohamad Shatah would be viewed by these dark forces as merely an expendable sacrifice if that means achieving the bigger aim of inciting all-out sectarian war in Lebanon; and engulfing the entire region in internecine flames.
The powers that gain from this atrocity are those that sow division and thrive on conflict in order to shore up their illegitimate hegemony over the region and over the mass of its ordinary, decent people.
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On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, wrote to a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The sentence sat in a letter from one of the world’s largest private cancer research centers, concerning an herbal tea an elderly English woman had learned from an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp in the 1890s. The tests were terminated the following year after Sloan-Kettering admitted, in sworn affidavit three years later, that they had prepared the injectable solution improperly from the dried material supplied — freezing and thawing the herb rather than boiling it as Rene had instructed. By the time Calling of an Angel was published in 1988, Rene Caisse had been dead for a decade, having treated thousands of cancer patients across fifty-six years in her Bracebridge, Ontario kitchen, never charging a fee, and refusing every offer — from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations dangling contracts up to $1 million — to release her formula before the medical establishment admitted her remedy had merit. … continue
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