The Feds Are Cultivating Their Own “Homegrown Terrorists”
By Seth Freed Wessler | ColorLines |December 10 2010
The FBI caught another homegrown terrorist this week, except like many recent plots the agency has “uncovered,” the attack was a plant, a plan concocted by the FBI itself. It’s the latest in a growing number of terrorism plots that the FBI stirs up by infiltrating communities and helping to devise attack plans. The practice raises serious questions about the government’s implementation of it’s ongoing war on terror.
The recent case involves 21-year-old from Baltimore named Antonio Martinez, who’d reportedly converted to Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Hussain and planned to blow up a bomb outside a military recruitment center in Baltimore. None of the plot, however, existed before the FBI instigated it and Martinez had no contact with any real terrorist organization.
The FBI deployed an informant to pose as an accomplice by adding Martinez as a friend on Facebook and communicated with him through Facebook messages. Martinez reportedly updated his status with comments about his devotion to Jihad. Once the young man had been identified as a target, the FBI informant helped imagine and orchestrate the plot, and supplied Martinez with a fake bomb and a vehicle to transport it. After he attempted to detonate the explosive remotely, the FBI arrested Martinez. If convicted of charges, he could face life in prison.
The case is the second since Thanksgiving and one of many more over the past decade, in which the federal government has deployed informants to “catch” terrorists inside the country. It’s all part of the FBI’s wider practice of targeting American Muslims—largely, according to some reports, Muslim converts as well as American born black Muslims. But far from stopping ongoing plots and interrupting “radicalization,” the FBI is fabricating plans, providing the tools to carry out attacks and inciting suspects to do so.
As U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told the AFP, “There was no actual danger,” because the people posing as accomplices were FBI employees.
Nonetheless, the FBI claims that Martinez posed a real threat because, according to Richard McFeely, an FBI special agent, the young man was “absolutely committed to carrying out an attack which would have cost lives.”
“The case,” reports the AFP:
bore a striking resemblance to that of a Somali-American arrested in Portland, Oregon, last month after trying to set off what he thought was an explosives-laden van parked near a Christmas tree ceremony.
The device was actually a dummy bomb supplied by undercover FBI agents who had contacted him months before and pretended to be accomplices, and the would-be attacker, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was charged with “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.”
The informant program targeting American Muslims is part of a larger and developing FBI policy. As I wrote in October:
An extensive investigation, Anjali Kamat reports that the FBI has repeatedly used secret informants to gather questionable information and even entrap groups of people into supporting acts of terrorism. These informants are often Muslim men found guilty of non-terrorism related crimes and who face deportation or jail time.
In numerous cases, documented at length by the DN investigation, there are serious questions as to whether the tactic is creating crimes out of thin air. In one case, an FBI informant befriended a Muslim business owner. When that business started failing, the informant, who was himself facing deportation, offered the other man a loan that was allegedly laundered for weapons buying. The exchange led to terrorism convictions.
Karen Greenberg of the NYU Center for Law and Security explains, “the conviction rate for cases that involve informants is almost 100 percent.” But according to James Wedick, a former FBI agent, “90 percent of the cases that you see that have occurred in the last 10 years are garbage.”
Wedick also says that economic strains are often the way that informants entrap others. In Newburgh, NY, an FBI informant allegedly entrapped four black Muslim men from a poor neighborhood, pushing them to participate in an attempted attack on a synagogue in the area
High profile domestic terrorism plots appear to have increased in recent months, but they’ve been largely concocted. As the 10th anniversary of September 11th approaches, the government appears to be one of the key players in the maintenance of a believable terrorist threat.
Amna Akbar, fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of New York University School of Law, says, “What’s really interesting is that there’s been a significant increase in high profile so-called homegrown terrorism cases recently where the the actual threat is constructed by the government. There does not seem to be very much actual threat to justify the ongoing ‘war on terror’ and there are serious questions about why the government is going to such lengths in these cases.”
WikiLeaks: Advancing an Israeli Agenda?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | Intifada Palestine | December 11th, 2010
Like 9/11, WikiLeaks has been singularly good for Israel.
Asked on the night of September 11, 2001 what the terrorist attacks meant for U.S.-Israel relations, Benjamin Netanyahu, the then former prime minister, tactlessly but accurately replied, “It’s very good.” And on the day after WikiLeaks’ publication of U.S. diplomatic cables, Netanyahu “strode” into a press conference at the Israeli Journalists Association, looking “undoubtedly delighted” with the group’s latest embarrassment of U.S. President Barack Obama.
“Thanks to WikiLeaks,” Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz, “there is now no fear Washington will exert heavy pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction or to accelerate negotiations on a withdrawal from the territories.” Instead, also courtesy of WikiLeaks, the world’s attention had been shifted exactly where a “vindicated” Netanyahu wanted it – toward Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons programme.
“Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of 60 years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat,” Netanyahu told the assembled journalists. “In reality leaders understand that that view is bankrupt. For the first time in history there is agreement that Iran is the threat.” While there is considerable dispute about the extent to which Arab leaders share Netanyahu’s understanding of “the Iranian threat,” the Arab public overwhelmingly considers Israel to be a far greater threat.
Nevertheless, according to Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, Julian Assange “has shattered the accepted dogma on the understanding in the Middle East in the 21st century.” WikiLeaks, crowed Shavit, “proved” that the Israeli occupation and colonisation of Palestine was not the main cause of instability in the Middle East. Instead, the secret cables “revealed” that “the entire Arab world” is concerned about “one problem only — Iran, Iran, Iran.” Thus, Shavit concluded, the only way to bring peace to the region was to deal with “Iran first.”
Strangely, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seems to accept the Israeli vision of “war is peace” in the Middle East. In an interview with Time magazine, Assange singled out Netanyahu as an example of a world leader who believed the publication of Arab leaders’ provocative privately expressed comments “will lead to some kind of increase in the peace process in the Middle East and particularly in relation to Iran.”
Even more puzzling, Assange had an op-ed piece in Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, in which he quoted something the media mogul had written in 1958: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.” In choosing another pro-Israel apologist as a model of transparency, is it possible that Assange is ignorant of the key role played by Murdoch’s media empire in propagating the lies that led the New York Times to dub the war in Iraq “Mr. Murdoch’s War”?
Assange seems equally oblivious to the significant contribution made by the New York Times itself to the war whose conduct he now claims to oppose. On September 8, 2002, the paper of record led with a front-page story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy aluminium tubes as part of its “worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.” As Michael Massing later wrote, “In the following months, the tubes would become a key prop in the administration’s case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it.” Chosen by Assange to publish its leaked documents because it is one of “the best newspapers in the world for investigative research,” the pro-Israel Times is now busily spinning the leaks to push America into an equally unnecessary but even more disastrous war with Iran.
Given that the WikiLeaks revelations have been such an unexpected “diplomatic coup” for Israel, its American lobby appears to be strangely divided over the issue. On one side, there are those like David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Michael Ledeen who delight in being able henceforth to cloak their incessant Iran warmongering behind a specious Arab cover. “Those who suggest that it’s some ‘Israel lobby’ or Jewish cabal that is driving the confrontation with Iran” should be embarrassed by the leaks, writes Frum. “WikiLeaks confirms that the region’s Arab governments express even more anxiety than Israel about the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”
Meanwhile, the most virulent attacks on WikiLeaks have come from some of Israel’s staunchest supporters. William Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, wants Congress to enable Obama to “Whack WikiLeaks.” Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, appear only too willing to oblige. Both senators have called for the prosecution of Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act. Feinstein is also working with Senator Charles Schumer on media legislation that would allow the prosecution of organizations like WikiLeaks.
How do we reconcile the Israel lobby’s apparently schizophrenic reaction to WikiLeaks? Could it be that Julian Assange has killed two birds for Israel with one document dump?
Thanks to WikiLeaks, the well-publicised remarks of a few Arab leaders provide much-needed cover for pro-Israelis as they relentlessly press America to whack Iran. At the same time, the disclosure of U.S. diplomatic secrets has given the likes of Joe Lieberman another excuse to “kill the internet” — to prevent Americans from ever finding out how they got into such a mess in the Middle East.
But just like 9/11, no matter how much WikiLeaks has benefited Israel, most observers still seem loath to consider the Tel Aviv connection.
Maidhc Ó Cathail writes extensively on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East.
Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job
By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | December 10, 2010
The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.
It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.
He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
Not so secret cables…
The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]
Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea, with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, sends dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.
Excuse to police the Internet?
What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.
The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11/2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?
Notes
1. BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618
2. Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story
Israel appears only in 77 Wikileaks docs
Press TV – December 8, 2010
A study of the U.S. State Department cables so far released by the WikiLeaks showed that there are merely 77 documents which mention Israel and only a handful have material pertaining to Tel Aviv.
On its website WikiLeaks says it has so far released “almost 20,000” of the “251,287 leaked United States embassy cables.”
The release, however, raised questions as it does not contain any incriminating or embarrassing document against Israel.
“No classified Israeli material was exposed by WikiLeaks,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in November, suggesting that Tel Aviv viewed the release as a positive.
An Israeli-born investigative journalist has found evidence that WikiLeaks “struck a deal with Israel,” based on which the website’s founder Julian Assange would withhold cables incriminating Israel in exchange for money.
Lia Abramovitch — an Israeli investigative Journalist born to holocaust-survivor parents — who writes for Syriatruth website, cites former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg as her source.
Domscheit-Berg says Assange had received money from semi-official Israeli sources and promised them, in a “secret, video-recorded agreement.”
That explains why there’s only one document that touches the issue of Israel’s nuclear weapons, albeit indirectly.
Cable 08PARIS245, which is a review of a meeting between acting U.S. Undersecretary of State John Rood and his British and French counterparts Mariot Leslie, Philippe Carre, reiterates the U.S., Britain and France’s support for Israel’s nuclear ambiguity approach.
“Furthermore, it is not in their interest to remove the ambiguity of Israel’s nuclear status which was stabilizing to the region. Carre agreed and said that there was no benefit to weakening the Israeli pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons in the Middle East,” reads the cable.
Highlights
Former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg said he and other WikiLeaks dissidents are planning to launch their own whistleblowers’ platform to fulfill WikiLeaks’ original aim of “limitless file sharing.” Die Tageszeitung
Mr. Domscheit-Berg, who is about to publish a book about his days ‘Inside WikiLeaks’, accuses Assange of acting as a “king” against the will of others in the organization by “making deals” with media organizations that are meant to create an explosive effect, which others in WikiLeaks either know little or nothing about. Der Spiegel
“For us it is always about uncovering corruption and abuse of power, wherever it happens — on the smaller and larger scale — around the world. Recently, however, we have only focused on the major topics and applied practically all of our resources to them.” Der Spiegel
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been denied bail by a judge after surrendering to British authorities over a Swedish arrest warrant Thursday. Assange vowed in court to fight extradition to Sweden, where authorities are hoping to question him over a sexual molestation case. CBS
Assange was arrested at 9:30 a.m local time Tuesday and appeared before Westminster Magistrate’s Court. He surrendered Tuesday under an agreement reached between his own lawyers and the police. CBS
Facts
WikiLeaks was founded by Julian Assange in 2006 with the motto of “keep governments open.” It describes its objectives as bringing “important news and information to the public.”
The site claims it has released more than 1.2 million documents so far and is preparing to release more than two million other documents.
WikiLeaks most important release is arguably a video showing US troops aboard a helicopter opening fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians – including Reuters cameramen.
In May 2010, WikiLeaks said they had video footage of a massacre of civilians in Afghanistan by the U.S. military which they were preparing to release.
In a 2009 Computer World interview, Assange claimed to be in possession of “5GB from Bank of America” documents to be released in 2011.
In December 2010, Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, told The Andrew Marr Show on the BBC, that WikiLeaks had information that it considers to be a “thermo-nuclear device” which it would release if the organization needs to defend itself.
Daniel Ellsberg Exposed Along with the Real Purpose of the Wikileaks Psyop
By Scott Creighton | 5 December 2010
Daniel Ellsberg has been running around singing the praises of Julian Assange ever since his first big-time leak, the Collateral Damage video, which showed a U.S. gunship killing various unarmed civilians in Iraq two of whom happened to be reporters. With the recent pile of “leaked” state department memos, Ellsberg can’t hardly take a breath between interviews and round table discussions, where he is the primary focus and a staunch supporter of everything Wikileaks.
But there is something rotten in Denmark, folks.
It’s not a stretch to say that most Americans don’t believe a thing that comes out of the state department or the government in general for that matter. Confidence in the word of our elected (and unelected) leaders must be at or near an all-time low. If you think this fact is lost on the PR (propaganda) experts working on contracts for the various branches of government, guess again. Mark Penn of Burson-Marsteller gained all of his access to power (and considerable wealth) by being a gifted and relentless pollster. He was able to put his finger directly on the pulse of the public at large and this made him invaluable to corrupt politicians and corporations everywhere. Penn is still deeply connected with the Clinton regime having run her campaign in 2008.
So what do you do when you want to feed the generally left-leaning public a pack of lies given that you know most of them are extremely skeptical about everything you tell them? Well, if “you” are the problem, then you take the “you” out of the equation.
Get someone else to tell them the lies. Someone they are conditioned to trust.
It’s a pretty simple plan: give the leaker something dramatic (but already well-known) to get attention and build his credibility, prime the pot with promises of massive amounts of ”secret” documents that will reveal “the truth”, see to it that they are published in the biggest newspapers on the planet, put on a big show about how much you don’t want him to reveal “the truth”, and make damn sure you have enough “progressive” figures to run around doing interviews praising the leaker for his courage and commitment to getting “the truth” out there no matter how grave the threat to his personal safety.
If you really examine the meat of the “leaked” documents, it doesn’t take long to notice that generally speaking they strongly support every single state department agenda, from invading Pakistan, regime change in North Korea, regime change in Iran, and supporting the role that Israel is playing in destabilizing the Middle East [a long known Israeli objective in the effort to weaken its foes and establish ‘greater Israel’]. And what have we learned that harms the state department? That Obama gave the orders to fire missiles into Yemen that killed 21 kids? We knew that the day it happened and we certainly knew that after the recent UN report came out which clearly identified the parts of those rockets as ours. We learned that the state department works closely with the CIA, but we knew that already as well. We learned that Hillary Clinton gave the order to spy on people, as if that is news of any kind. In short, we didn’t learn anything new that harms the state department, with the possible exception that Hillary wanted someone to steal the head of the U.N.’s credit card numbers.
In the near future, these “leaked’ documents will help build the pretext for the narrative that we have to force regime change on various targeted nations. They will be referenced in articles written by war mongers in the same MSM news papers who were fed the “leaks” in the first place. When that happens, and it will [it HAS already happenned], we won’t be able to question their validity, because frankly, we don’t question them now. Imagine Dick Cheney’s forged “Yellow Cake from Niger” document being ”leaked” by Wikileaks and praised by the likes of Daniel Ellsberg, Amy Goodman, and Glenn Greenwald… imagine that and you start to get the picture.
You see, it doesn’t work without the amen chorus. Just like 9/11 would never have worked without all the media talking heads reading from the exact same script and endlessly repeating “bin Laden” and “al Qaeda” as the buildings were demolished, the same principle holds true here. It’s so obvious that these “leaks” do nothing more than support the Obama regime’s imperial [and Zionist] agenda, if given half a minute to step back and consider their merit on mere fact alone, the truth is pretty obvious. It’s as obvious as Building 7.
But the amen chorus is out there singing the praises of Wikileaks just as fast and as hard as they can, hoping to create an emotional connection between Assange and the anti-war left. And Daniel Ellsberg is key to that. Whether he actually knows it or not.
In a recent interview with Brad Friedman or Bradblog, Ellsberg tipped his hand and from this moment, the truth of Ellsberg’s role in the Wikileaks psyop can easily be exposed for all to see. All who want to that is.
Friedman was talking with Ellsberg about the Wikileaks disclosures and specifically he came to start talking about what Assange had said about firing Hillary Clinton for ordering her staff in the state department to spy on the United Nations. Ellsberg’s comments are quite remarkable and I will let them speak for themselves…
But, as Ellsberg revealed during my interview with him on Wednesday, he disagrees with Assange on at least one point in regard to the latest round of documents released by the controversial organization. Unlike Assange, Ellsberg does not believe Hillary Clinton needs to resign.
… During my on-air interview with him Wednesday, when I asked about that point and whether he agrees with Assange’s assessment, he was direct in his response: “In a word, no,” he told me.
… “In a way, I would have to say as a former insider here, he has far too idealistic and romantic a notion of what it means to be Secretary of State or a high official in the U.S. Government — and really any government. Among the various illegalities, the various recklessness and so forth, shown by our policies, this one is indeed illegal, but it’s not high on the list. Probably all countries do it to a large extent.”
… While Ellsberg strongly condemns the Obama Administration for its failure to hold members of the Bush Administration accountable for “war crimes” and “torture” and for escalating a number of “aggressive wars” the U.S. continues to pursue, he reiterated that he doesn’t believe the disclosures to date rise to serious enough crimes to merit Clinton’s resignation.
… “Everybody involved in aggressive war in Iraq should be prosecuted as a war criminal,” he said. “Obama didn’t get us into Iraq or Aghanistan, though he certainly escalated it. But I’m not sure if it’s criminal.” Brad Friedman
So not only does our respected ”progressive” hero, Daniel Ellsberg, breathlessly support the “truthiness” of the Wikileaks psyops, he is also promoting the idea that Hillary Clinton’s crimes don’t rise to the level of something that she should be held accountable for. After all, all politicians commit crimes and certain ones just have to be accepted as par for the course. Personally, I don’t buy Ellsberg’s argument that since former Secretaries of State committed crimes and got away with it, so too should we afford the same luxury to Hillary Clinton.
Remarkably, Ellsberg also asserts that Obama is probably not guilty of war crimes in the continuation and escalation of the obviously criminal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Currently anti-war sites are taking up a collection for Assange (just like last time when he came out with the Collateral Damage video) in order to get his site back up and running. The way I see it, that would be like seeing a donations button for Scooter Libby on World Can’t Wait’s website.
You have to give it to the Clinton regime at the state department. It’s a pretty slick PR campaign and it appears, at least for the time being, to be working. Ironically, the man who helped bring an end to the Vietnam war is inadvertently helping set the stage for the next one while the antiwar activist websites are steadily promoting the propaganda. Gotta hand it to Clinton and her PR team; that’s slick.
Of course, it could never work without the amen chorus and their featured soloist, Daniel Ellsberg.
I just want you all too remember that in 6 months when they are using Wikileaks disclosures to help justify the invasion of Iran and the deaths of thousands more of our service men and women and perhaps a million more civilians in the Middle East.
UPDATE
If you want a clear cut example of what I am talking about, go here to a CNN video of Fareed Zakaria explaining how the Wikileaks documents actually makes him feel better about the state department.
1. The leaks don’t show the state department doing anything nafarious.
“In these cables there are no stories of coups or attempted assasinations or secret deals.”
2. A transparent U.S. diplomacy
3. Astue American Envoys
“I have to confess that the level and quality of analysis in these cables is a lot better than I would have guessed.
4. Arab Leaders Fear Iran
“They have been urging Washington to do something about Iran including using military force.”
“The cables make clear that far from being loved in the region as he claims, he is feared and despised.”
“But reading through the sum total of this data dump, I came away more impressed and reasured by the way Washington works, or at least the state department, then I was before.” Fareed Zakaria, CNN
WIKILEAKS REPRISED — A WHIFF OF…WHAT?
From what the press is reporting about this Wikileaks “dump,” perhaps 10% are Secret or Confidential, the rest Unclassified, and nothing is Top Secret or above.
ALAN SABROSKY – My Catbird Seat – December 8, 2010
I have followed the unfolding teapot-tempest drama of the latest Wikileaks release with a certain bemusement, accompanied by a growing suspicion shared with others that all is not as it seems with these supposed revelations. But my initial impression, based of course on what I am reading in the mainstream and alternative media and not in the cables themselves, is that it is surprising how little damaging material is there about much of the world. Secretary Clinton cannot be happy at having the UN people know what she told her people there to do, of course, and there is a great deal to whet assorted salacious appetites. More substantive issues will doubtless emerge, but I expect most if not all to be embarrassing rather than destructive.
The Cables
Perhaps the principal reason for this largely titillating, trivial aspect of so many of the released cables is the cables themselves. It is worth understanding that in the US government, even material that is taken from newspapers and clipped together can end up being classified “Secret” or “Confidential.” Really important or sensitive material (as in truly “national security” sensitive) is classified “Top Secret” or above.
From what the press is reporting about this Wikileaks “dump,” perhaps 10% are Secret or Confidential, the rest Unclassified, and nothing is Top Secret or above. This reflects the VERY low-level diplomatic “gossip column” character of much of what has been released and discussed in the media so far. But I suspect the general reaction of politicians and diplomats everywhere, all of whom send the same type of cables about others, will be a blend of public umbrage and private amusement, coupled with overtures to Ukraine for nursing support.
The Middle East Exception
The one striking exception in all of this global tour de farce <sic.> is the Middle East. Certainly, even aside from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s fulsome praise of Binyamin Netanyahu, what is said and what is not represent the message Israel and its partisans in the US Government (itself heavily Zionist and “Israel First” in orientation) want the world to hear, believe and accept. The message coming across in the US diplomatic cables could have been designed and drafted by Avigdor Lieberman, and who knows? It may have been….
The overt theme in the Middle East cables consists of a blend of attacks on prominent political figures in Turkey and Iran, coupled with critical and disparaging commentaries about their actual or alleged policies and ambitions. One might think that the architects of the Ottoman and Persian Empires in their times of splendor were simultaneously on the move again, with everything between them (except poor, brave, steadfast and enduring Israel, of course) trembling in fear and awe.
Complimenting this is a region-wide belief attributed to many Arab leaders of the need for stronger action, including military strikes, to thwart Iran’s regional and especially nuclear ambitions — precisely what Israel has been saying all along. Now, this may be true. I know, for example, that the Sunni leadership in many of those countries have their own concerns about Iran, just as Iran’s current leadership have with some of them.
But at least two things cause me to question this supposed thesis. One is the odd attribution in at least one of the cables to an Arab leader of a remark on Iran being an “existential threat.” Yet no one except Israel and its proponents refer to any other country as an “existential threat” to anyone, suggesting quite clearly that either some of the released cables regarding Iran are forgeries, or they were deliberately cast in terms to create an impression that Arab leaders really want the US and/or Israel to attack Iran, true or not.
And the Israeli Exception
The other part of the covert theme is the apparent absence of anything tough on Israel, which means that anything of the sort is Top Secret or better, was excised from the cables that were released, or simply doesn’t matter at all to anyone in or out of the Middle East. The Arab nations for many years have feared a real nuclear threat from Israel, not a fabricated threat by Iran, but nothing like that comes across, despite 60-plus years of hostility from most to Israel and its ambitions.
Far more significant to me is the utter lack to date of scathing commentaries on Israel and its policies, leadership and actions from SOMEWHERE in the world. Even if Arab leaders felt there was no point in doing so with the Americans, most others would not feel so constrained. Something surely must have come to the attention of the US ambassadors to (e.g.) Turkey, South Africa, Brazil and Ireland, just to name a few of the many who have bitterly condemned Israel, and especially the disgusting duo of Netanyahu and Lieberman to say nothing of their predecessors, for what they have done to Palestine and the Lebanon; for Operation Cast Lead; for the settlements; for flagrant violations of UN Resolutions and the murder of UN officials; for Israel’s hostility to the Goldstone Report; for the blockade; for land expropriation; and for sheer thuggery and brutality.
Surely something so scathing would have been communicated back to Washington, alongside which Iran and its president would come off smelling like several bouquets of roses — slightly wilted roses, perhaps, but vastly better than the Israeli stinkpot.
Reprise
But nothing like that is there, or at least has yet surfaced, which makes me increasingly inclined to see this as just another game of rhetorical smoke and mirrors, with a lot of real cables and real victims (like the poor US soldier who presumably gave Assange at least some of the cables), but with many or most of the Middle East cables “cooked” if not fabricated outright.
So these, at least, are probably the handiwork of Israeli-Americans or just Israelis putting their own spin on things, included in a mass of otherwise legitimate cables as camouflage and for validation. An Australian news website concluded that “[the] WikiLeaks cables [are] the 9/11 of world diplomacy.” Too, too true – same source, different vehicle and venue, all helping pave the road to yet another needless war in Israel’s service, this time against Iran. The gods weep — but not, presumably, Yahweh.
Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) can be contacted at docbrosk@comcast.net
Hasbara at Work: Oren Promotes Fantasies
By Ira Glunts | Palestine Chronicle | December 6, 2010
Three years ago I heard the American-born Israeli Michael B. Oren promoting his new book Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present at a university near my home in upstate New York.
Oren is a tall, good looking man who radiated a quiet confidence. His book had the truly fanciful goal of showing that the intense American involvement in the Middle East and especially our engagement with the idea of a renewal of Jewish sovereignty in the region was not a recent development. Oren claimed that both the Zionist idea and the friction between Americans and Muslims is an important and persistent narrative thread running through American history from very early times. For instance, he describes the military confrontations of a young American republic with the Barbary pirates as the first battles in what we now call the “War on Terror.” My own conclusion after reading his book, was that Oren’s role as a conservative Israeli think-tanker had completely subsumed any desire he may have had to be an honest American historian. I assumed that he believed that this was a good career move for someone who simultaneously lived in Israel and taught at Yale University. At that point this apparently mild-mannered, obviously intelligent scholar seemed harmless enough. Of course, it was impossible to have known then that Oren would become Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United States.
Last week Michael Oren, as Israeli Ambassador to the United States, visited Atlanta in order to lay a wreath upon the grave of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. In addition to the wreath, Oren used his Atlanta visit to lay some of his country’s particularly odious hasbara (meaning public relations, some say propaganda) upon no doubt unsuspecting Georgians.
According to Martha Dalton of Atlanta radio station WABE, Oren exploited the ceremony honoring King by making a statement about the imminent danger Iran’s nuclear program presents to both Israel and the rest of the world. This is far from a universally accepted claim, but after having it repeated enough times in the U.S. media, most accept it as fact. The ambassador also expressed concern about fallout from the recent Wikileaks release of thousands of diplomatic cables, some of which were embarrassing to Israel. [Oren’s fantasy world hasbara at work]
In an opinion piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on November 26 entitled “A 63-Year Search For Mideast Peace” Oren took full advantage of the leeway American newspaper editors give to public figures and especially to pro-Israel columns. According to Oren, Israel has been engaged in a 63-year struggle to make its neighbors and those it expelled from its territory understand that all it has ever wanted is to peacefully share the land it claims for itself with its indigenous population.
The United Nations voted to partition what is now Israel 63 years ago into Jewish and Palestinian states. The wisdom of this decision, which was rejected by the region’s Arab governments and populations, is very much in question today. However to Oren, whose views reflect his own blind faith in Israeli power and a generous serving of fantasy, the partition decision (UN resolution 181) expresses the incontestable truth that “[t]he Arab world was to welcome the Jews, after 2,000 years of exile back to their homeland.”
Surprisingly, at least according to Oren, the Arabs did not understand the imperative that they were morally obligated to welcome the Zionists and their proposed Jewish State on lands upon which the Palestinians had lived for centuries. A war ensued, in which according to Oren (repeating one of the favorite false claims of countless pro-Israel propagandists) “the weakly-armed Israeli defenders defeated the much stronger Arab armies.” This description is on its face false. Of course, the stronger army won, do you think it was God who made the Israelis triumph despite their weakness? (For an extensive and detailed description of the relative military strengths of both sides in the 1948 War see the Israeli historian, Benny Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.)
Continuing to mercilessly ladle on the hasbara (which literally means explanation in Hebrew), Oren writes that despite the Palestinians’ history of rejection of continuous Israeli goodwill, his government persists in reaching out with generous peace proposals. The ambassador points to examples of Palestinian recalcitrance in their refusal to accept the Israeli offers of “full statehood” in 2000 and 2008. The reader is not told how full statehood for the Palestinians is compatible with Israeli control of Palestinian water sources, no foreign policy, no army, and Israeli overflight rights among many other crippling limitations, which are conditions upon which the Israelis always insist. Oren also neglects to mention that this “generous offer” of statehood does not now include Gaza nor its democratically-elected government.
To this point Oren’s op-ed had been a rehash of the Israeli and pro-Israel lobby talking points. But suddenly and unexpectedly the mild mannered ex-historian turned diplomat seeks to incite his audience with an original gem of hasbara. Oren declares, “Hamas …[is a]… group dedicated to the murder of all Israelis – indeed all Jews worldwide.”
Hamas is a political party and a social service organization which was democratically elected to rule the Palestinian territories. It also is a liberation and resistance movement which has employed violence against the Israeli army of occupation, the illegal Israeli settler/colonists, and ordinary Israeli civilians. However, the general statement that Hamas is dedicated to the murder of all Israelis is as valid as saying that the Israeli occupation army is dedicated to killing all Palestinians. The second charge, that Hamas is dedicated to killing all Jews worldwide is as fantastic as Oren’s claim in Power, Faith and Fantasy that the American founding-fathers were proto-Zionists who spent inordinate amounts of resources fighting implacable Muslim enemies. Actually, Hamas explicitly rejects the use of violence against targets outside the occupied territories and Israel. Its behavior has reflected that policy.
Before Oren went to Atlanta he made an appearance at the Jewish Federations General Assembly in New Orleans. In addressing the assembly, Oren urged American Jews to make it a priority to ensure that US politicians continue to give Israel “bipartisan support” even if these same American Jews may believe that Israel’s policies are wrong. Oren insisted that it is not only the duty of American Jews to fall into line with Israel’s wishes, but he further declared, “we [Israelis] expect American Jews to refute” any criticism of Israeli policy.
Ambassador Oren wants American Jews to become hasbara agents who blindly follow Israeli government policy while simultaneously inciting them with false fears of being murdered by what for them is a totally imagined enemy. In assuming his new diplomatic role, Michael B. Oren has, unfortunately, been given the authority and platform to promote fantasies about which he could only theorize, three years ago, when I heard him merely urging his audience of college students to buy his book.
– Ira Glunts first visited the Middle East in 1972, where he taught English and physical education in a small rural community in southern Israel. He was a volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1992. Mr. Glunts lives in Madison, New York where he operates a used and rare book business, writes and is a part-time reference librarian. Contact him at: gluntsi[at]morrisville[dot]edu.
New Scientist magazine plants false story that Pope approves GM crops
By Rady Ananda | The People’s Voice | December 3rd, 2010
Talk about psyops. If you can’t get the people to eat your dangerous, unwanted frankenfoods, just lie and say the Pope approves it. On November 30, the magazine, New Scientist, published “Vatican scientists urge support for engineered crops,” which the Vatican immediately denied.
“The Vatican did not endorse an 11-page final statement in favor of easing restrictions on and allowing more widespread use of genetically modified crops, especially in poorer nations,” a Vatican official said in a statement published by Catholic News Service.
In fact, “the Vatican has never taken a formal position supporting or opposing genetically modified foods,” reported CNS.
The study group who issued the report mostly include people with financial ties to genetically modified foods. Four employees of Monsanto graced that panel.
There are an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics in the world who now have more reason to distrust biotech scientists.
The New Scientist also quoted an outrageous lie by one of the report scientists:
“There has not been a single documented case of harm to consumers or the environment,” says Potrykus.
It then links to a 2005 article which says the opposite. Whatever. Ingo Potrykus is a Swiss scientist who developed a variety of GM rice.
There are numerous scientific studies condemning the use of GM foods which have been linked to organ damage and sterility in mammals, while others correlate rising diabetes and obesity rates with GMO introduction. There’s also the question of allergic reaction to GM foods, proof of which is hidden by lack of labeling.
GM crops (trees, too) are genetically modified to produce or tolerate pesticides. Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, has been linked to birth defects, cancer and miscarriages in humans. Pesticides are suspected in causing or contributing to mass bee, bat and butterfly die-off, as well as a pandemic amphibian decline. Their use is also linked to 11 million acres of superweeds in the U.S.
Finally, GM crops cannot be contained. They’ve spread in nations all over the world, even becoming established in the wild.
For any scientist to say that no environmental damage is linked to GM crops is unconscionable. Given the biotech industry’s penchant for suppressing science, it’s not surprising to find them extending their lies to the social realm.
Confronting the oft-quoted malarky that GM crops can solve world hunger, CNS reported:
“The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said earlier this year that it was not a coincidence that in 2009 the use of genetically modified food crops grew by 13 percent in developing countries and that GM crops covered almost half of the world’s total arable land. And yet ‘the number of hungry people in the world has for the first time reached 1 billion people,’ the paper said.”
CNS further noted that, “Pope Benedict XVI has denounced the continued scandal of hunger in the world, saying its root causes have more to do with problems of distribution and sharing than with there not being enough food in the world.”
Some on the Internet Start to Wonder—Is WikiLeaks for Real?
By Behrouz Saba | New America Media | December 02, 2010
The quarter of a million American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that American diplomats have a low opinion of the thuggish Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. They call him “feckless.” Equally underwhelming are the revelations that Nikolas Sarkozy is “temperamental” and Muammar al-Gaddafi likes flamenco and blondes. What is more, some of Iran’s Arab neighbors look to Tehran with fear and loathing, Afghan politicians are corrupt, and American corporations lobby the Congress.
The global media is in a tizzy, repeating the same mundane, stale information from 251,287 cables released by WikiLeaks, a media organization that claims a loosely organized network of international contributors. Curiously, such publications as The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Le Monde and Spain’s El País have carried the leaks dutifully, even though their well-policed pages are otherwise governed by highly divergent philosophies, policies and practices. Even more curiously, all news organizations repeat the same cherry-picked factoids that their ace reporters apparently culled from the documents.
No wonder that some on the Internet believe WikiLeaks to be a “false flag” operation—part of a Big Lie mounted by the American intelligence community.
Julian Assange, the curious-looking founder of WikiLeaks—a cross between Casper the Friendly Ghost and Illya Kuryakin of the 1960s TV spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—has the kind of checkered, globe-trotting past that makes him a prime recruit for intelligence services.
At the same time, most Americans quickly dismiss these charges, asking why their government would covertly conspire to release information that is potentially damaging to itself.
A closer look shows the many ways that these revelations bolster the status quo in Washington. They mainly deflect public attention from far more urgent issues—including a broken economy, dysfunctional governmental services, Obama’s chimera of hope and change, and a general hollowing out of America at its core, commensurate with its imperial reach.
More than that, the leaks characterize an increasingly unaccountable United States as the “victim,” equate investigative journalism with treason, and communicate without repercussion Washington’s frank opinion of world leaders with whom it is less than pleased. (It doesn’t hurt the Obama administration a bit for the world to know that certain Arab capitals are just as opposed to the Ahmadinejad regime as Tel Aviv is.)
Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of spy craft and the long history of similar false-flag operations would never question the benefits of such ruses to preserving many vested interests. This history includes the Gulf of Tonkin report, the counterproductive “war on drugs,” and “detection” of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, to name just a few.
Yet the majority of Americans would be hard pressed to name even one or two agencies in the vast, well-funded intelligence apparatus that sucks up their taxes while remaining virtually unanswerable to them and their elected representatives.
In reality, the system is composed of 16 agencies whose existence is verifiable and another six that are thought to act in total secrecy. Most Americans know about the Central Intelligence Agency, but it is among the smallest, least well-funded of the group, which is mostly under the Pentagon command with a total annual budget of nearly $50 billion. The fact that the State, Treasury and Energy departments also have covert operations will come as a surprise to many Americans. Asking people on Main Street to define the functions of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is sure to invite blank stares.
America’s covert machinery, easily the largest in world history, reaches every corner of the globe, gathering, hiding, publishing or distorting information to suit its own purposes. On its payroll are politicians and artists, scions of noble families and common gangsters, visionaries, crackpots, assassins and healers the world over.
It would not be surprising at all if WikiLeaks were being used by this intelligence network to do its bidding, knowingly or otherwise. Surely this would explain the almost comical spectacle of WikiLeaks “releasing” tons of potentially damaging information while America’s entire intelligence community merely whimpers like a whipped dog— as if the U.S. were not capable of moving the website out of civilian reach and erasing it from existence as easily as it introduced the Stuxnet virus to the computers of an Iranian nuclear plant. (Overshadowed by the WikiLeaks’s non-news was the Monday morning bombing in Tehran that killed one Iranian nuclear scientist and injured another.)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must be trying hard to keep a straight face as she “apologizes” for or otherwise “explains” the words of the bad boys and girls of American diplomacy. Equally constrained must be Attorney General Eric Holder, who speaks of an “active and ongoing criminal investigation” of WikiLeaks. Sorely missing is a voice sufficiently powerful within the government or major media to question this global spectacle, which doesn’t pass the smell test on many levels.
Top Ten Lies About Senate Bill 510
The Food Safety Modernization Act looks like it’s headed to become law. It’s being hailed as a “breakthrough” achievement in food safety, and it would hand vast new powers and funding to the FDA so that it can clean up the food supply and protect all Americans from food-borne pathogens.
There’s just one problem with all this: It’s all a big lie.
Here are the ten biggest lies that have been promoted about S.510 by the U.S. Congress, the food industry giants and the mainstream media:
Lie #1 – Most deaths from food poisoning are caused by fresh produce
Here’s a whopper the mainstream media won’t dare report: Out of the 1,809 people who die in America every year from food-borne pathogens (CDC estimate), only a fraction die from the manufacturer’s contamination of fresh produce. By far the majority of food poisoning is caused by the consumption of spoiled processed foods, dead foods and animal-human transmission of pathogens.
For example, one of the largest food-borne killers according to the CDC is Toxoplasma gondii, a disease that people acquire from cat feces coming into contact with their food, which can happen right in their own homes (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5n…). Salmonella poisoning accounts for 553 deaths a year. As a reference for relative risk, over 42,000 people die each year from road accidents in the USA, meaning driving a car has a roughly 7600% higher chance of killing you than eating fresh produce. (http://www.driveandstayalive.com/in…)
In terms of food-borne illness, many of the deaths come from things like spoiled tomato sauce, spoiled canned foods and spoiled pasteurized milk. S 510, of course, does absolutely nothing to address these food contamination deaths, since those foods are considered “sterilized” at the time of sale.
Lie #2 – Under S.510, the FDA would only recall products it knows to be contaminated
Not true. S.510 merely requires the FDA to have “reason to believe” a food is contaminated. So right there, that means all raw milk will be targeted by the FDA because even without conducting any scientific tests at all, the FDA can say it has “reason to believe” the milk is contaminated merely because it is raw.
In other words, the FDA no longer needs science to outlaw a food product. It merely needs an opinion.
Is this “reason to believe” section really true? Yep, and here’s how it was amended:
SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.
23 (a) IN GENERAL. – Section 304(h)(1)(A) (21 U.S.C.24 334(h)(1)(A)) is amended by
(1) striking ”credible evidence or information indicating” and inserting ”reason to believe”;
(http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi…)
In other words, in negotiating this bill, the U.S. Senate removed the requirement that the FDA needed “credible evidence” in order to recall a product and, instead, replaced that with the FDA only needing “reason to believe.”
It is utterly amazing that the U.S. Congress would give the FDA to conduct large-scale product recalls and even imprison people based entirely on what the agency “has reason to believe.”
Last time I checked, the FDA held some pretty bizarre (if not downright moronic) beliefs, including this jaw-dropping whopper: The FDA literally believes that there is no food, no herb, no vitamin or supplement that has any ability to prevent disease of any kind. They don’t even believe limes can prevent scurvy, and you’d have to nutritionally illiterate to believe that.
The FDA believes foods are inert and that all the amazing phytonutrients in those foods (carotenoids, antioxidants, therapeutic fats like omega-3 and so on) are utterly useless for human biology.
This belief, held by the FDA that has now been put in charge of the food supply, is the belief system of an insane government agency that has completely lost touch with reality while abandoning nutritional science.
Lie #3 – They didn’t tell you that nearly 70% of grocery store chickens are contaminated with salmonella every day
Yep, it’s true: Amid all the fear-mongering over salmonella, everybody forgot to notice that the vast majority of fresh chickens sold at grocery stores every single day are widely contaminated with salmonella (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c…). Yet S 510 does absolutely nothing to address this. It’s not even mentioned in the bill.
In fact, it is these contaminated chickens that end up cross-contaminating the fresh produce in many kitchens across America. So the so-called “food poisoning” that’s often blamed on spinach or onions often originates with the contaminated chicken meat people bring home and slice on their kitchen cutting boards.
Lie #4 – S.510 will exclude and protect small farmers
The Tester Amendment, which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in the bill. But this dollar amount is not indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more “quantitative easing,” anyone?), food prices will continue to skyrocket — and this will shift even small family farms into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.
In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on that might be only $50,000 or even less.
Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small, successful farms that are doing well and would like to expand will refuse to hire more people or expand their operations. To avoid the tyranny of S 510, small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.
Lie #5 – The FDA needs more power to enforce food safety
The FDA already has the power to effectively recall foods by publicly announcing a product has been found to be contaminated. The FDA already has the power to confiscate “misbranded” products, too, and it could easily use this power to halt the sale of contaminated food items.
But the FDA simply refuses to enforce the laws already on the books and, instead, has sought to expand its power by hyping up the e.coli food scares. The ploy apparently worked: Now in a reaction to the food scare-mongering, the FDA is being handed not just new powers, but more funding, too! And you can bet it will find creative new ways to put this power to work suppressing the health freedoms and food freedoms of the American people.
Lie #6 – Fresh produce is contaminated because of a lack of paperwork
There is no evidence that requiring farms to fill out more paperwork will make their food safer. The real cause of produce contamination is the existence of factory animal farms whose effluent output (huge rivers of cow feces, basically), end up in the water supply, soils and equipment that comes into contact with fresh produce.
The food contamination problem is an UPSTREAM problem where you’ve got to reform the factory animal operations that now dominate the American meat industry. S.510, however, does absolutely nothing to address this. Factory animal farms aren’t even addressed in the bill!
Lie #7 – The American people are dying in droves from unsafe fresh food
The truth is that Americans are dying from processed food laced with toxic chemical additives, not from fresh, raw produce. Partially-hydrogenated oils, white sugar, aspartame, MSG and artificial food colors almost certainly kill far more people than bacterial contaminations.
The American public is also dying from pharmaceuticals — anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 people a year are killed by FDA-approved drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/001894.html), most of which have been approved under the guise of blatantly fraudulent science and drug company trickery. The FDA doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it has been a willful co-conspirator in the scientific fraud carried out by Big Pharma in the name of “medicine.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/027851_h…)
To think that the FDA — the very same agency responsible for the Big Pharma death machine — is now going to “save us” by controlling food safety is highly irrational.
Lie #8 – The FDA just wants to make food “safer”
Actually, the FDA wants to make the food more DEAD. Both the FDA and the USDA are vocal opponents of live food. They think that the only safe food is sterilized food, which is why they’ve supported the fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation efforts that have been pushed over the last few years.
California almond growers, for example, must now either chemically fumigate or pasteurize their almonds before selling them (http://www.naturalnews.com/021776.html). This has destroyed the incomes of U.S. almond farmers and forced U.S. food companies to buy raw almonds from Spain and other countries.
Lie #9 – Food smuggling is a huge problem in America
One of the main sections of S.510 addresses “food smuggling.” Yep — people smuggling food across the country. If you’ve never heard of this problem that’s because it’s not actually a problem.
Not yet anyway.
But there’s a reason why they put this into the bill: Because they’re probably planning on criminalizing fresh produce and then arresting people for transporting broccoli with the “intent to distribute.”
Yep, farmers bringing fresh produce to sell at the weekend farmer’s market could soon be arrested and imprisoned as if they were drug smugglers. Hence the need for the “food smuggling” provisions of S.510.
Soon, we will all have to meet in secret locations just to trade carrots for cash.
Lie #10 – S.510 will make America’s food supply the safest in the world
Actually, even with S.510 in place, America’s food supply is among the most chemically contaminated in the world, second only to China. You can find mercury in the seafood, BPA in the canned soup, yeast extract (MSG) in the “natural” potato chips, and artificial petrochemical coloring agents in children’s foods.
Eating the “Standard American Diet” is probably the single most harmful thing a person can do for their health. It’s the fastest way to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Every nation in the world that begins to consume the American diet starts to show record rates of degenerative disease within one generation. This is the “safe food” that the U.S. Senate is now pushing on everyone.
Remember, with S.510, SAFE = DEAD. And the FDA says it wants to keep everybody safe.
Revelations on Rafik Hariri’s assassination
By Thierry Meyssan | Voltairenet | 29 November 2010
While western media have announced that indictments against Hezbollah will be issued shortly by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the Russian magazine Odnako challenges the entire UN investigation. Thierry Meyssan posits that the weapon used to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hairiri was supplied by Germany. Former German prosecutor and first commissioner in charge of the UN probe, Detlev Mehlis, seemingly doctored evidence to cover up his country’s involvement. These revelations embarrass the Tribunal and reverse the tide in Lebanon.
All the conflicts rocking the Middle East today crystallize around the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL). Peace hinges on it, and so does war. For some, the STL should bring about the dissolution of the Hezbollah, quell the Resistance and establish a Pax Americana. Others consider that the STL is flouting the law and subverting the truth to ensure the takeover of a new colonial order in the region.
The Tribunal was created on 30 May 2007, pursuant to UN Security Council resolution 1757, to prosecute the alleged sponsors of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination. In the political context at that time, this implied nothing more and nothing less than bringing to trial serving Presidents Bashar el-Assad of Syria and Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, not exactly favourites of the neo-conservatives. However, the charges were not pursued since they were based on flimsy evidence planted by false witnesses. With no accused left, the Tribunal could easily have disappeared in the meanders of bureaucracy were it not for a turn of events that catapulted it back into the epicenter of the turbulent Middle East political scene.
On 23 May 2009, Atlanticist journalist Erick Follath disclosed on Der Spiegel Online that the prosecutor was poised to indict new suspects: certain Hezbollah military leaders. For the past 18 months, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, has been proclaiming his party’s innocence. He maintains that the real aim of the proceedings is to decapitate the Resistance and clear the region for the Israeli army. For its part, the U.S. administration in a sudden surge of righteousness pledged that no one would be allowed to shun international Justice.
In any event, the indictment – which all believe to be imminent – against Shia leaders for the assassination of a Sunni leader is of such a nature as to spark off a fitna, namely a Muslim civil war, plummeting the region into new depths of bloodshed and violence.
During his 15 and 16 November official visit to Moscow, Saad Hariri – current Lebanese Prime Minister and son of the deceased – reiterated that the political exploitation of the Tribunal exposes his country to the risk of a new conflagration. President Medvedev retorted that Russia wants Justice to be served and reproves any attempt to discredit, weaken or delay the Tribunal’s proceedings. This position of principle arises from the confidence that the Kremlin decided to place in the STL. But it risks being severely eroded by Odnako’s revelations.
Indeed, we deemed it desirable to delve into the circumstances of Rafik Hariri’s assassination. The data we unearthed has opened a new avenue, making one wonder why it had never been explored until now. In the course of our lengthy investigation, we encountered a great number of actors, too many no doubt, so that the news of our work spread quickly, alarming those for whom the assassination trail implicating the armed Lebanese Resistance represents a real godsend. Aiming to intimidate us, the Jerusalem Post on 18 October launched a preventive attack through a piece referring to our work. In a purely libelous vein, it accuses the author of this article of having received 1 million dollars from Iran to exonerate Hezbollah.
Getting down to facts, Rafik Hariri’s convoy was attacked in Beirut on 14 February 2005. Twenty-three people were killed and one hundred injured. A preliminary report commissioned by the Security Council calls attention to the unprofessional conduct of the Lebanese magistrates and police. To redress the situation, the SC assigned its own investigators, providing them with the important means that Lebanon was unable to offer. From the outset of the investigation, it was generally accepted that the attack had been perpetrated by a suicide bomber driving a van packed with explosives.
Having been established to compensate for the Lebanese lack of professionalism, one would have expected the United Nations mission to scrupulously observe the classical criminal procedures. Not so! The crime scene – on the basis of the topography still intact as well as the photos and video footage shot on that day – was not examined in detail. The victims were not exhumed and no autopsies were performed. For a long time, no attempt was made to ascertain the modus operandi. After discarding the hypothesis of a bomb buried in the ground, the investigators espoused the one involving the van without bothering to verify it.
And yet, this version is implausible: looking at the crime scene, anyone can easily observe the very large and deep crater that a surface explosion could not have dug out. Faced with adamant Swiss experts who refused to endorse the official version, on 19 October the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) recreated the crime scene behind closed doors. It didn’t take place in Lebanon, nor in the Netherlands which is the seat of the STL, but in France, one of the countries funding the Tribunal. The buildings surrounding the crime scene were reconstructed and earth was brought in from Beirut. The convoy was reconstituted, including the armoured vehicle. The aim was to demonstrate that the height of the concrete buildings had confined the explosion, making it possible for the blast to produce the crater. The results of this costly experiment have never been divulged.
When looking at the photos and videos taken immediately after the attack, the first most striking feature is the blaze. Car parts and various types of objects are burning all around. Then, the bodies of the victims: they are charred on one side and intact on the other. An astonishing phenomenon which bears no resemblance to what is normally caused by conventional explosives. The theory that the van was transporting a mix of RDX, PETN and TNT does not account for the damages which occurred.
What is more, from the photos showing Rafik Hariri’s corpse one can observe that his solid gold wristwatch has melted, whereas the collar of his luxury shirt still hugs his neck in pristine condition.
So, what really happened?
The explosion generated a blast of an exceptionally intense heat and exceptionally brief duration. Thus, the flesh exposed to the blast was instantly carbonized, while the body underneath was not burnt.
High-density objects (such as the gold watch) absorbed the heat and were destroyed. Conversely, low-density objects (like the delicate fabric of Hariri’s shirt collar) didn’t have enough time to absorb the heat and were unaffected.
Rafik Hariri’s remains
Moreover, the videos show that a number of limbs were severed by the explosion. Oddly, the cuts are clean, as if made on clay statues. There is no sign of shattered or jutting bones, nor of any torn flesh. The reason is that the explosion sucked up all the oxygen and dehydrated the bodies, rendering them friable. In the hours that followed, several on-the-spot witnesses complained of breathing ailments. Wrongfully, the authorities interpreted them as a psychosomatic reaction following their psychological trauma.
Such observations constitute the abcs of any criminal inquiry. They should have been the starting point, yet they do not figure in any of the reports submitted by the “professional experts” to the Security Council.
When we asked a number of military experts what kind of explosives would be capable of generating such damage, they mentioned a new type of weapon which has been developed over several decades and is featured in reports appearing in scientific journals. The combination of nuclear and nanotechnology science can trigger an explosion the exact strength of which can be regulated and controlled. The weapon is set up to destroy everything within a given perimeter, down to the nearest centimeter.
According to the same military specialists, this weapon can also produce other types of effects: it exerts a very strong pressure on the area of the explosion. The minute it stops, the heaviest objects are propelled upwards. Accordingly, cars were sent flying through the air.
There is one unequivocal fact: this weapon is equipped with a nano-quantity of enriched uranium, emanating radiations which are quantifiable. Now, it just so happens that one of the passengers in Rafik Hariri’s armoured car survived the explosion. Former Minister Bassel Fleyhan was taken to a topnotch French military hospital for treatment. The doctors were astounded to discover that he had been in contact with enriched uranium. But no one linked this to the attack.
Technically speaking, the weapon is shaped like a small missile, a few tens of centimeters long. It must be fired from a drone. Actually, several witnesses assured they had heard an aircraft flying over the scene of the crime. The investigators asked the United States and Israel, whose surveillance satellites are permanently switched on, to provide them with the pertinent images. On the day of the attack, the United States had deployed AWACS aircraft over Lebanon. The live feeds could help to establish the presence of a drone and even to determine its flight path. But Washington and Tel Aviv – which indefatigably urge all parties to cooperate with the STL – turned down the request.
Hezbollah intercepted and released videos from Israeli drones surveying Rafik Hariri’s movements and the scene of the crime.
At a press conference held on 10 August 2010, Hassan Nasrallah showed a video which, according to him, was shot by Israeli military drones and intercepted by his organisation. All of Rafik Hariri’s movements had been registered for months, until the final day when all the surveillance converged on the bend in the road where the attack was staged. Thus, Tel-Aviv had been surveying the area prior to the assassination. Which is not to say, as Mr Nasrallah himself points out, that they were the authors of the crime.
So, who fired the missile?
This is where things get complicated. According to the military experts, in 2005, Germany was the only country which had a handle on this new technology. It is, therefore, Berlin which supplied and set up the crime weapon.
Hence, it is easy to understand why former Berlin Attorney General Detlev Mehlis – a very controversial figure within his own profession – was eager to preside over the UN Investigation Commission. He is, in fact, notoriously linked to the German and U.S. secret services. Assigned in 1986 to shed light on the attack against the La Belle disco in Berlin, he diligently covered up all Israeli and U.S. fingerprints to falsely accuse Libya and justify the bombing of Mouammar Khadafi’s palace by the U.S. Air Force. In the early 2000s, Mr Mehlis was lavishly paid for his stint as researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (a think-tank linked to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby) and at the Rand Corporation (a think-tank attached to the U.S. military industrial complex). All elements which cast a shadow over his impartiality in the Rafik Hariri affair and should have sufficed to have him taken off the case.
Mehlis was seconded by Commissioner Gerhard Lehmann, who is also a well-known German and U.S. secret services agent. He was formally identified by a witness as having taken part in the programme run by the Bush Administration in Europe, involving the abduction, detention and torture of prisoners in “black holes”. His name is mentioned in the ad hoc Report by the Council of Europe. Notwithstanding, he managed to dodge all judicial proceedings on the strength of a strong though unlikely alibi provided by his colleagues in the German police.
Mehlis and Lehmann propagated the theory of the explosives-laden suicide van to deflect the investigation from the German weapon that was used to commit the crime.
Various earth samples were taken from the scene of the crime. They were first mixed, then divided into three jars that were sent to three different laboratories. In the first two no trace of explosives was found. The third jar was kept by Mehlis and Lehmann, who personally sent it to the third laboratory. Here, remnants of explosives were detected. In principle, if the decision is made to resort to three judiciary experts, in case of disagreement it is the majority opinion that prevails. No way! Mehlis and Lehmann violated the protocols. They deemed that theirs was the only reliable sample and embarked the Security Council on a false trail.
The profoundly flawed character of the Mehlis-Lehmann investigations has amply been proven. Their successors acknowledged as much sotto voce and declared entire sections of proceedings nul and void.
Amidst their manipulations, the most famous one relates to the false witnesses. Five individuals purported to have seen the preparations for the attack and incriminated Presidents Bashar el-Assad and Emile Lahoud. While these allegations were fueling the drums of war, their lawyers exposed the lies and the prosecution backed down.
Detlev Mehlis, President of the UN Investigation Commission violated all the rules of the criminal procedure, fabricated evidence and used false witnesses to exonerate Germany and accuse Syria.
Based on these false testimonies, Detlev Mehlis arrested – in the name of the international community – four Lebanese generals and had them incarcerated for four years. Pushing his way with his cow-boys into private homes, without a warrant from the Lebanese authorities, he also detained for questioning members of their entourage. With his assistants – who spoke Hebrew to each other – he manipulated the families. Thus, on behalf of the international community, he showed the wife of one of the generals a doctored picture to prove that her husband had not only obscured his implication in the murder, but was also two-timing her.
Concurrently, he tried the same maneuver on the son of the “suspect”’, but in this case to convince him that his mother was a woman of loose morals, a situation which had plunged his desperate father into a murderous folly. The aim was to induce a family crime of honour, thereby tarnishing the image of respected and respectable people.
Even more incredible is Lehmann’s proposition to liberate one of the four imprisoned generals in exchange for his false testimony against a Syrian leader.
Moreover, German journalist Jürgen Cain Külbel highlighted a disturbing detail: it would have been impossible to trigger the explosion by remote control or by marking the target without first disactivating the powerful interference system built into Rafik Hariri’s convoy. A system among the most sophisticated in the world, manufactured in … Israel.
Külbel was approached by a well-known pro-Palestinian advocate, Professor Said Dudin, to promote his book. However, the outrageous declarations frequently made by Dudin served to torpedo it instead. Külbel, a former East German criminal police officer, was quick to find out that Dudin had a long-standing reputation for being a CIA mole within the German left-wing. The journalist published a number of old East-German reports attesting to this fact and was sentenced and briefly imprisoned for illicit dissemination of documents; meantime, Dudin was settling into the German Embassy in Beirut for the purpose of infiltrating the families of the four generals.
Overlooked in the Middle East, Germany’s role in this region is worth spotlighting. After Israel’s war of aggression against Lebanon in the Summer of 2006, Chancellor Angela Merkel deployed a very large contingent to join the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The 2,400 soldiers from Germany control the maritime infrastructure to prevent arms supplies from reaching the Resistance via the Mediterranean. On that occasion, Ms Merkel declared that the mission of the German army was to protect Israel. A wind of rebellion arose among the officers. By the hundreds, they sent letters to remind her that they had enlisted to defend their homeland not a foreign country, be it an ally.
An unprecedented development took place on 17 March 2008 and 18 January 2010, when the German and Israeli governments held a joint Council of Ministers meeting where various programmes were adopted, especially in the defense sector. At this stage, there shouldn’t be too many secrets left between the Tsahal and the Bundeswehr.
The investigation conducted by Detlev Mehlis is both steeped in ridicule as regards the false witnesses, and tainted with the illegal detention of the four generals. To the extent that the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally and firmly condemned this excess of power.
This being said, the opprobrium that befalls Mr Mehlis’ work should not reflect on the Special Tribunal for Lebanon which is in no way responsible for his manipulations. But here, again, things get complicated. The credibility of the STL rests on its ability to curb, in the first place, all those who attempted to mask the truth and falsely accused Presidents Bashar el-Assad and Emile Lahoud, with the intention of provoking a war.
Now, it transpires that the Tribunal refuses to try the false witnesses, giving the impression that it is covering up the manipulations under Mehlis’ watch and is in fact pursuing the similar political objectives (this time against Hezbollah, and perhaps against others in the future). Even worse, the Tribunal will not hand over to Jamil Sayyed (one of the four generals illegally detained) the minutes of his accusers’ hearings, thereby barring him from requesting compensation and making it look as if it condones four years of arbitrary detention.
In more prosaic terms, the Tribunal is shirking its responsibilities. On the one hand, it must judge the false witnesses to thwart further manipulations and to make plain its impartiality; on the other hand it refuses to undertake a “clean-up” operation which might force it to arrest Prosecutor Mehlis. However, Odnako’s revelations on the German lead render this posture untenable. All the more since it’s already too late: General Jamil Sayyed filed a complaint in Syria and a Syrian examining magistrate has already indicted Detlev Mehlis, Commissioner Gerard Lehmann plus the five false witnesses. One can imagine the commotion at the STL should Syria decide to call on Interpol to have them arrested.
Just as the Mehlis commission was supposed to compensate for the lack of professionalism on the part of the Lebanese forces of law and order, the STL should equally have ensured the impartiality that the Lebanese courts may have been short of. But things are far off target, which raises the question of the Tribunal’s legitimacy.
Kofi Annan didn’t want the Lebanon Tribunal to exert international jurisdiction, but to function as a national Lebanese tribunal with an international character. It would have been subjected to Lebanese law while half of its members would have been nationals of other countries. The plan did not materialize because the negotiations came to a sudden end. More precisely, an agreement was reached with the Lebanese government presided at the time by Fouad Siniora, the former authorised representative of the Hariri estate, but it was never ratified either by Parliament or by the president of the Republic. Hence, the agreement was endorsed unilaterally by the UN Security Council (Resolution 1757 of 30 May 2007). The end result is a hybrid and fragile entity.
As pointed out by Kofi Annan, this Tribunal is not analogous to any other so far created within the purview of the United Nations. “It is neither a subsidiary organ of the UN, nor a component of the Lebanese judiciary system”; it is simply “a conventional organ” sitting between the executive authority of the Lebanese government and the UN. Judging by the international rule of separation of powers and independence of the judiciary, the STL cannot be regarded as a genuine tribunal, but rather as a joint disciplinary commission within the executive frameworks of the UN and the Lebanese Government. Whatever decision it may make will inevitably be coated with suspicion.
Worse still, any Lebanese government can terminate it since, not having been ratified, the related agreement was binding only on the previous government. As a result, the present Lebanese coalition government has become a battlefield between partisans and foes of the Tribunal. In an attempt to maintain governmental stability, week after week Lebanese President Michel Sleimane has been dissuading the Council of Ministers from taking a vote on any issue linked with the STL. This embargo cannot hold out forever.
Bad news coming in pairs, suspicions have now extended to the President of the STL, Antonio Cassese. This reputable international jurist was President of the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He happens to be an ardent supporter of the Jewish colonialisation of Palestine. A personal friend of Elie Wiesel, Cassese received and accepted an honorary award, presented by Wiesel himself. He should normally have withdrawn and resigned when Hassan Nasrallah disclosed that Israeli drones had been reconnoitering the crime scene as well as the victim’s movements for months.
According to the President of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Antonio Cassese, the armed resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan should be tried for “terrorism”.
Worst of all, Judge Cassesse personifies an interpretation of international law that causes division in the Middle East. Although his official curriculum vitae obscures it, he took part in the 2005 negotiations between member states of the European Union and those bordering the Mediterranean Sea (“Barcelona Process: Union for the Mediterranean”). His definition of terrorism blocked the discussions. According to him, terrorism is exclusively the act of individuals or private groups, never states. It follows that a struggle against an occupying army would not be considered to be “resistance” but rather “terrorism”. In the local context, this juridical view is consistent with a colonial framework and disqualifies the STL.
The methods of the Special Tribunal do not differ from those applied by the Mehlis Commission. STL investigators collected mass files on Lebanese students, social security recipients and subscribers of public utility services. On 27 October, in the absence of the Lebanese judges, they even tried to snatch medical records from a gynecological clinic frequented by the wives of Hezbollah members. It is obvious that these probes have no link whatsoever with the Rafik Hariri assassination. Everything leads the Lebanese to believe that the information is actually earmarked for Israel, of which, in their eyes, the STL is merely an offshoot.
All these problems had clearly been foreseen by President Putin when, in 2007, he had vainly made a pitch for a different wording of the STL founding resolution. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin had denounced the “juridical loopholes” of the system. He deplored that the Security Council should threaten to resort to force (Chapter VII) to achieve unilaterally the creation of this “conventional organ”. He had emphasised that while the Tribunal should be working towards the reconciliation of the Lebanese people, it was devised in such a way as to divide them even more. Finally, Russia – as China – refused to endorse Resolution 1757.
The truth ultimately seeps through. The Israeli drone videos released by the Hezbollah expose Israel’s involvement in the crime preparations. The facts revealed by Odnako point to the use of a sophisticated German weapon. The puzzle is nearly complete.
The Non-Election for the Non-Government of the Non-Sovereign State of Haiti
By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | December 1, 2010
The multitudinous assaults on Haiti’s dignity reached a crescendo with this weekend’s elections, imposed by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners against the wishes of the Haitian people and even of most of the candidates. It is as if severely wounded and sick hospital patients – make that prison hospital patients – were ordered to dance and sing for the pleasure of rich visitors. As should have been expected, most Haitians refused to perform like circus animals, on demand.
The Haitian sham elections for president and most of the legislature may go down as the most bizarre and macabre exercise in hypocrisy in the history of U.S. imperialism. Haiti’s most popular political party – no, the ONLY political party with a truly mass following – the Fanmi Lavalas organization of exiled president Jean Bertrand Aristide, was barred from running. By the time Sunday rolled around, 12 of the 19 candidates for president were denouncing the government for perpetrating a “massive fraud” on the citizenry. Turnout was probably not much more than single digits – which is actually the usual for Haitian elections in which Aristide’s party is not allowed to participate – an electoral travesty equivalent to outlawing the Democratic Party in New York City, Boston or Chicago.
With at least 1.5 million Haitians without adequate shelter, the entire population still in shock over the loss of 300,000 in January’s earthquake, an economy in ruins, a non-existent infrastructure and a raging cholera epidemic that international observers say could spread to 200,000 people, Haiti is the last place to stage an election. But the most important question has been: an election to what? There is no Haitian state to speak of, no prize to win. Haiti is no longer a sovereign nation, but has been reduced to a protectorate of the United States, France and Canada, with blue-helmeted United Nations soldiers acting as internal security. French African colonial regimes wielded more authority in the transition to independence than Haiti’s shell of a government exercises, today.
Haiti is an occupied country, the victim of multiple invasions. The U.S. invasion of 2004 and the kidnapping and expulsion of its president opened Haiti to United Nations occupation – proud Haiti, stepped on and ground underfoot by an international cast of foreign armies paid for largely by the United States. Haitians themselves call the country the “Republic of NGOs,” with more foreign “aid” outfits per capita than any place in the world, all of them doing their own thing with no accountability to a single Haitian, including the despised, outgoing president, Rene Preval. Only a fraction of the billions raised for earthquake reconstruction have been spent, and only a small part of that was allocated to the Haitian government.
So, what election, for what government? The exercise only has value for those who paid for it, the Americans, who spent $14 million on this fraud in hopes of disguising the fact that Haiti is a U.S. colony. The U.S. insists on treating Sunday’s results as valid, which may mean that a singer named “Sweet Micky” who sometimes wears diapers on stage will become the nominal head of state. And why not? There is no Haitian state. That is something for the Haitian people to build, once they have thrown off the dictatorship of Washington.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
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British weapons and personnel doing much of the killing in Yemen
Press TV – June 18, 2019
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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