Most European Nations Act More Like US Colonies Than Sovereign States
By Stephen Lendman | June 5, 2016
Instead of declaring their independence, most European nations let Washington pressure, bully and bribe them to go along with its imperial agenda, harming their own national security.
Economic powerhouse Germany remains occupied since WW II ended, permitting numerous US bases on its territory, some jointly operated, harming its security, not protecting it.
Instead of normalizing relations with Russia, a reliable ally, Die Welt newspaper said a new Defense Ministry White Paper near completion lists it as one of Germany’s 10 major threats, despite no credible evidence suggesting it – plenty proving otherwise.
Other threats include international terrorism – without explaining it is US created and Berlin supported. Terrorist groups can’t exist without state sponsors.
According to sources quoting what the report says, Russia is Germany’s key rival, using “hybrid instruments to blur the boundaries between war and peace… undermin(ing) other states.”
Moscow’s military strength (almost entirely on its own territory, solely for defense and fighting terrorism in Syria), technological capability, nonexistent “aggression,” reunification with Crimea, and ability to influence public opinion are contrived reasons for considering Moscow a key rival and threat, not a partner – despite Putin urging cooperative relations with all nations, the world’s preeminent peacemaker.
Germany’s Merkel is polar opposite. So are most other European leaders, allied with Washington’s killing machine, humanity’s greatest threat.
She urges greater militarism, not less, at a time demilitarization and all-out efforts for world peace are desperately needed.
The alternative is endless war, European nations threatened because of allying with Washington’s imperial agenda instead of firmly opposing it for their own self-interest.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.
Tensions as Zionists ’Celebrate’ 1967 Occupation of Al-Quds
Al-Manar | June 5, 2016
Tensions were high in al-Quds on Sunday as Zionists ‘celebrated’ the 1967 occupation of eastern part of the holy city.
AFP news agency reported there were strict security measures in al-Quds.
Meanwhile, Palestine Today reported that more than 27 Zionist organizations had called for storming the holy al-Aqsa Mosque in al-Quds on Sunday.
The website said that the Zionists are to mark anniversary of the 1967 Israeli invasion and occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights that began on June 5.
In that day East al-Quds (Jerusalem) was occupied by the Israeli forces.
The Zionist organizations called Israelis on social media to commemorate what they called “unification of Jerusalem Day” through parades in the holy city.
The calls on social media noted that there is a deal between the organizations and the occupation authorities on ensuring security for the parades.
Israeli media also reported that the Israelis are marking “Jerusalem Day”, with multiple parades and events are scheduled in al-Quds on Sunday.
Earlier, Palestine Today said that Zionist settlers tried to torch shops in al-Quds early on Saturday, noting that Palestinian youth confronted such attempts.
Netanyahu steps up opposition to French ‘peace’ initiative
Press TV – June 2, 2016
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up his opposition to a French initiative aimed at reviving talks between Israelis and Palestinians.
“The path to peace is not via international conferences that attempt to force a settlement, that make the Palestinian demands more extreme and in the process distance peace,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday.
Paris will be hosting on Friday a gathering of more than 20 countries as well as UN and EU diplomats to discuss the Middle East conflict.
The Israeli prime minister reiterated his call for “direct negotiations and without preconditions.”
“If the countries gathering this week in Paris really want to advance peace, they should join my call to Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] to come to such direct negotiations … There is no other way,” said Netanyahu.
In a meeting with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls last month, Netanyahu rejected the initiative, saying direct talks with the Palestinian Authority are “the only way to proceed to peace.”
However, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah dismissed Netanyahu’s proposal, calling it an attempt to “buy time.”
The last round of the so-called peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians collapsed in 2014.
Tel Aviv’s illegal settlement activities and its refusal to release senior Palestinian prisoners were among major reasons behind the failure of the talks.
The Israeli premier formally suspended the so-called peace talks with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority on April 24, 2014, after Abbas forged a unity pact with Hamas.
Israel responded to the unity pact by announcing tenders for the building of 4,800 illegal settler units on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Palestinians are seeking to create an independent state on the territories of the West Bank, East al-Quds (Jerusalem), and the Gaza Strip.
They are demanding that Israel withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel, however, has refused to return to the 1967 borders and is unwilling to discuss the issue of al-Quds (Jerusalem).
Diseases killed 10,000 Yemeni children in past year: UN
Press TV – June 2, 2016
The United Nations says some 10,000 of Yemeni children, all under five years of age, have lost their lives during the past year alone.
The deaths were caused by “totally avoidable and preventable diseases” such as diarrhea and pneumonia, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday.
Yemen has been under Saudi military attacks almost on a daily basis since March 2015, which have killed thousands and destroyed the country’s civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and factories.
Dujarric said the heavy loss was due to the closure of hundreds of health centers and the total collapse of the healthcare system in the war-torn country.
“The overall healthcare system throughout Yemen has all but collapsed, over 600 health facilities closing their doors due to the lack of financial resources to procure medicine, supplies and fuel for generators,” he said, adding thousands of medical staff have gone unpaid or left Yemen.
“This suffering should, however, turn into an incentive to reach a rapid and comprehensive solution as we approach the month of Ramadan,” he said.
UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed also said reports from several cities showed the horrifying magnitude of the suffering that the Yemeni people are going through because of shortages in basic services.
In a March report, the UN Children’s Fund said a year of Saudi war on Yemen had left 934 children dead and 1,356 more injured, with an average of six children suffering casualties every day.
The report said some 320,000 children faced acute malnutrition, a serious case which can leave a child vulnerable to deadly respiratory infections, pneumonia and water-borne diseases.
In a similar report in March, Save the Children, a non-governmental organization, said about 90 percent of children in Yemen needed emergency humanitarian aid.
More than 9,400 people have been killed and at least 16,000 others injured since Saudi Arabia launched its attacks on Yemen. The kingdom launched the offensive in a bid to bring former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power.
Hadi’s loyalists are fighting an all-out war against Houthis who have taken the control of Sana’a and some other areas to prevent them from falling to Takfiri extremists.
Saudi Arabia has been supporting Hadi forces from the air, ground and sea with attacks which, some analysts say, have helped Takfiris expand their foothold in Yemen.
Airstrikes have continued despite a ceasefire put in place since April, scuttling efforts to end the conflict.
Dujarric urged the warring parties to make concessions and put the interests of Yemen and Yemenis above all.
Fake “Humanitarians” and Fake “Leftists” taking Canada down the wrong path
Special Envoy of the UNHCR addresses the Security Council meeting on the continuing conflict in Syria. Credit: UN Photo/ Mark Garten/ flickr
By Mark Taliano | American Herald Tribune | May 30, 2016
There’s really no excuse for supporting the NATO/terror position. We’ve seen the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, now Syria, all built on lies, all beneath the guise of “humanitarian interventions”. Since people with any sense of historical memory can not legitimately plead ignorance, supporters of the terrorist invasion of Syria fall into the category of “fake humanitarians”. They aren’t “progressive” or “left” when they support the criminal violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Canadian peace activist Ken Stone, recently returned from Syria, expresses similar sentiments in his newly released book, Defiant Syria|dispatches from the Second Tour of Peace to Syria. He explains,
“The point for me is to ask why otherwise intelligent people can fall for such shit (referring to a 2015 New Internationalist magazine article: “The forgotten revolution of Syria”), and not once but repeatedly. It’s not as if Syria is the very first government targeted for regime change by the USA. It’s not that people are unaware of the fact that the first casualty of war is the truth … there is never a shortage of “leftists” in the West who can be either bought or convinced through incredible naivété, warped political outlook, or Eurocentric arrogance, that the motives of Empire are good.”
People such as Ken, who have visited Syria and have seen with their own eyes the devastation wrought by Western-supported terrorists against civilization, have less tolerance for the lies, the propaganda and the “fake humanitarians” who enable it all.
Stone doesn’t mince words when he describes some of his on-the-ground observations of Homs, Syria; observations fortified by his historical memory of NATO’s imperial destruction elsewhere:
To their detriment, the fake “humanitarians” and pseudo “leftists” are shielded from such on-the-ground realities.
In a later chapter, “Palmyra: Bride Of The Desert”, Stone also bemoans the self-proclaimed “leftists” who cast the Russians as “imperialists” and as guilty as the West in the war against Syria – conveniently forgetting that Russia is legally in Syria, while NATO is not:
“It’s true,” he writes, “that Russia is unfortunately no longer a socialist country. However, it doesn’t act like an imperialist country either. Mr. Putin consistently respects the sovereignty of other countries, such as Syria, and speaks up at the United Nations for the observance of international law, which the USA, priding itself as “the exceptional country” and the “sole indispensable country”, tramples on almost every day.”
This resonates with the author’s earlier piece, “Western Hegemony vs Russian Sanity”, and the “Saker’s” observations of the differences between the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model” and the “Russian Multi-polar Model”.
Sustainable evidence demonstrates, for example, that the current Russian multi-polar model respects the rule of international law, ideological and cultural pluralism, and the use of military force as a last resort.
The illegal Western war of aggression against Syria, on the other hand, is consistent with the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model” which defies the rule of international law, negates ideological and cultural pluralism, and uses military violence as a first resort.
The West’s invasion contradicts the rule of international law: Russia is in Syria legally, whereas the West is not; it negates Syria’s ideological and cultural pluralism and seeks to replace it with a Wahhabist stooge government or an assortment of stooge governments in balkanized states; and it demonstrates the West’s propensity to use military violence as a first resort – the invasion, after all, was planned well in advance.
Given the fact of the West’s criminality, consistent with the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperialist Model”, and the concurrent failures of the “fake humanitarians” and the fake “left” to reconcile themselves to evidence-based findings and historical memory, Stone reiterates some concrete steps that should be taken by those of us who support foreign policy trajectories consistent with peace and the rule of international law, rather than the current reality of war and barbarism.
Important steps would include normalizing diplomatic relations with Syria, ending illegal sanctions, withdrawing from all criminal military interventions against Syria, and withdrawing from NATO.
Canada needs to assert an independent foreign policy, and it needs to reject the current barbarity implicit in its status as a vassal appendage of the Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model. This is what Real Change would look like.
Mark is a retired high school teacher.
Turkey is Preparing an Offensive Military Operation in Northern Syria
By Said Al-Khalaki – Global Research – May 30, 2016
It’s been quite a while since the treaty on cease-fire in Syria was signed. We can say February 27 became the new anchor for the people of Syria who are tired of war and havoc. However, the situation doesn’t suit the main sponsors of the “Syrian revolution”, i.e. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar which had already planned how the country would be divided between them.
Turkey is interested in Syria’s division most of all. The most attractive “piece” for Turkey is Northern Syria and its destroyed economic capital Aleppo.
Obviously, the seized Northern territories would be a step forward in Erdogan’s plan to resurrect the Ottoman Empire he is dreaming about. That is why the seizure of Aleppo is a strategic goal for Erdogan and his partners.
The Turkish government has been supporting Syrian terrorists from the very outset of the war in March 2011.
As the Egyptian news site El-Badil reports, in late 2015 the Turkish government was supplying the Syrian opposition with money and food. Also, it allowed them to cross the border between Turkey and Syria. The fact that militants from terrorist groups fighting in Syria can freely cross the border is also reported by the Kurdish news agency ANHA. According to it, militants go through Bab Al-Salama border crossing point to the North of Aleppo from the Turkish city Kilis towards the Syrian town Azaz. As a rule, militants visit Turkey for two reasons: to undergo a qualified medical treatment to heal their wounds or to attend a military training in a special camp where Turks and Saudis work.
Despite all the efforts of Turkish officials to conceal their support in favor of the terrorists, the (Turkish and Western) media has nonetheless acknowledged Ankara’s insidious role. Even the Syrian opposition’s leaders have never hidden such facts. For example, in last September, one of its leaders, Ahmed Tuma, told the British newspaper Al-Arabi that Turkey was supplying Syrian militants with fuel and food. Tuma is proud of his relations with Turkish leaders and highly appreciates the role of Turkey in forming the so-called “new Syrian state.” And it’s no wonder as the oppositional leader lives on money received from Turkey.
According to the activists of the media center Syria from Inside in Ankara, all the operations of sponsoring the Syrian opposition leaders and field commanders of armed groups are conducted through a number of accounts in a Turkish based bank. Moreover, through this bank, Turkey finances NGOs whose main purpose is to support the Syrian revolution.
Besides that, Turkey’s support for Syrian militants, i.e. financing and training, is included in the US secret program Timber Sycamore, according to a New York Times report in January, 2016. The NYT acknowledges that Turkey has been sponsoring Syrian terrorists since 2013.
It’s obvious that the cease-fire in Syria is not to the advantage of Ankara, whose political leaders seek to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad.
Now, the most important point of the face-off is Aleppo province. As locals say, more than 1000 terrorists arrived there between April to mid-May. The fighters were accompanied by trucks with arms and ammunition and off-road vehicles with large-caliber machine guns. Notably, the vehicles’ deployment is covered by Turkish artillery, regularly shelling Syrian border regions from the Turkish side. It’s clear that all these actions are evidence of the fact that terrorists are preparing a large-scale offensive in Aleppo.
No doubt, the attack on Aleppo is a part of the “hybrid” war implemented by Turkey in Syria. The artillery shelling of Syrian territories and the support for Syrian terrorists – Turkish news agency Anadolu calls these “a fight against ISIS.” And the Turkish government justify Erdogan’s desire to seize Northern Syria by claiming that it is just an attempt to create the so-called “safety zone” for refugees.
While the world is trying to reach a peace treaty in Syria, Turkish leaders are planning large-scale operations involving “opposition” terrorists and radical groups.
However, we want to believe that their plans won’t be crowned with success as everyone in Syria understands who is behind the “opposition” and what the “revolutionists” want to achieve.
Copyright © Said Al-Khalaki, Global Research, 2016
Remembering All the Deaths From All of Our Wars
By Gary G. Kohls and S. Brian Willson | Consortium News | May 30, 2016
Introduction by Gary G. Kohls
One of the many heroes of the peace movement who came out of the Vietnam War was Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson. Just like millions of other draft-age Americans, law student Willson had been drafted into that illegal and genocidal war – against his will – and came back disturbed and angry.
For reasons discussed below, he joined the anti-war movement after witnessing the Reagan/Bush Central American war after he traveled to Nicaragua and saw peasants being murdered by US-backed Contras (aka “freedom fighters”). Willson joined the antiwar movement in 1986 and has protested vigorously against America’s aggressive war policies ever since.
But his real life change came on Sept. 1, 1987, in Concord, California, where Willson was part of a gathering of antiwar protestors that were symbolically trying to stop the transport of weapons from a U.S. Navy munitions base. The weapons were destined for Nicaragua and El Salvador as part of the U.S.-backed war in Central America.
As a Vietnam veteran, Willson understood well the satanic nature of America’s perpetual wars against peasants, campesinos and other poor people in Third World countries who were unjustly accused of being “communists” as they were seeking relief from the tyranny of their ruling classes. He also knew about the poisonous realities of military toxins that are used in war that regularly poison innocent civilians, children, babies, villages, farm fields, water supplies and all the future inhabitants of the warzone.
Willson felt so strongly about the criminality of his country’s foreign policy against militarily inferior countries, that he put himself directly in harm’s way that day by lying down in front of the weapons supply train, expecting the engineer to stop. Instead of stopping, the engineer actually increased its speed above the speed limit and ran over him, severing both legs. The engineer later testified that he had only been obeying orders on how to deal with antiwar protesters.
Willson survived his near-fatal injuries, and he became a universally celebrated near-martyr for peace. He has vowed to spend the rest of his life speaking out against war. The piece below was written on May 27, 2016, and published in CounterPunch.
The Vietnam War radically changed him from a conservative Republican who had been raised in a Christian fundamentalist household. In Willson’s autobiography, titled Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, he wrote about his war experience:
“in April 1969, I witnessed the incredible destruction that had just been inflicted (by aerial bombing and napalm ‘practice’) … on a typically defenseless village about the size of a large baseball stadium. With smoldering ruins throughout, the ground was strewn with bodies of villagers and their farm animals, many of whom were motionless and bloody, murdered from bomb shrapnel and napalm. Several were trying to get up on their feet, and others were moving ever so slightly as they cried and moaned. Most of the victims I witnessed were women and children.
“At one dramatic moment I encountered at close range a young wounded woman lying on the ground clutching three young disfigured children. I stared, aghast, at the woman’s open eyes. Upon closer examination, I discovered that she, and what I presumed were her children, all were dead, but napalm had melted much of the woman’s facial skin, including her eyelids. As the Vietnamese lieutenant and I silently made the one-plus hour return trip to our airbase in my jeep, I knew that my life was never going to be the same again.”
An eyewitness to Willson’s 1987 act of resistance to the US War Machine wrote that Brian questioned “the lessons of ‘patriotism’ with which we so proudly indoctrinate our children, especially our boy children. … Nearly twenty years later, I stood just behind Brian on a California train track in a well-publicized effort to block munitions trains carrying American weapons to kill other poor villagers in El Salvador and Nicaragua, thinking about the words he had spoken that morning, before one of those trains ripped his legs from his body. He said, ‘…each train that gets by us is going to kill people, people like you and me. … And the question that I have to ask on these tracks is: am I any more valuable than those people?’”
Here is the latest, very powerful testimony about what he thinks of Memorial Day from the American antiwar hero, S. Brian Willson:
Remembering All the Deaths From All of Our Wars
Celebration of Memorial Day in the US, originally Decoration Day, commenced shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. This is a national holiday to remember the people who died while serving in the armed forces. The day traditionally includes decorating graves of the fallen with flowers.
As a Viet Nam veteran, I know the kinds of pain and suffering incurred by over three million US soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen, 58,313 of whom paid the ultimate price whose names are on The Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC. The Oregon Vietnam Memorial Wall alone, located here in Portland, contains 803 names on its walls.
The function of a memorial is to preserve memory. On this US Memorial Day, May 30, 2016, I want to preserve the memory of all aspects of the US war waged against the Southeast Asian people in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia – what we call the Viet Nam War – as well as the tragic impacts it had on our own people and culture. My own healing and recovery requires me to honestly describe the war and understand how it has impacted me psychically, spiritually, and politically.
Likewise, the same remembrance needs to be practiced for both our soldiers and the victims in all the other countries affected by US wars and aggression. For example, the US incurred nearly 7,000 soldier deaths while causing as many as one million in Afghanistan and Iraq alone, a ratio of 1:143.
It is important to identify very concretely the pain and suffering we caused the Vietnamese – a people who only wanted to be independent from foreign occupiers, whether Chinese, France, Japan, or the United States of America. As honorably, and in some cases heroically, our military served and fought in Southeast Asia, we were nonetheless serving as cannon fodder, in effect mercenaries for reasons other than what we were told. When I came to understand the true nature of the war, I felt betrayed by my government, by my religion, by my cultural conditioning into “American Exceptionalism,” which did a terrible disservice to my own humanity, my own life’s journey. Thus, telling the truth as I uncover it is necessary for recovering my own dignity.
I am staggered by the amount of firepower the US used, and the incredible death and destruction it caused on an innocent people. Here are some statistics:
–Seventy-five percent of South Viet Nam was considered a free-fire zone (i.e., genocidal zones)
–Over 6 million Southeast Asians killed
–Over 64,000 US and Allied soldiers killed
–Over 1,600 US soldiers, and 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers remain missing
–Thousands of amputees, paraplegics, blind, deaf, and other maimings created
–13,000 of 21,000 of Vietnamese villages, or 62 percent, severely damaged or destroyed, mostly by bombing
–Nearly 950 churches and pagodas destroyed by bombing
–350 hospitals and 1,500 maternity wards destroyed by bombing
–Nearly 3,000 high schools and universities destroyed by bombing
–Over 15,000 bridges destroyed by bombing
–10 million cubic meters of dikes destroyed by bombing
–Over 3,700 US fixed-wing aircraft lost
–36,125,000 US helicopter sorties during the war; over 10,000 helicopters were lost or severely damaged
–26 million bomb craters created, the majority from B-52s (a B-52 bomb crater could be 20 feet deep, and 40 feet across)
–39 million acres of land in Indochina (or 91 percent of the land area of South Viet Nam) were littered with fragments of bombs and shells, equivalent to 244,000 (160 acre) farms, or an area the size of all New England except Connecticut
–21 million gallons (80 million liters) of extremely poisonous chemicals (herbicides) were applied in 20,000 chemical spraying missions between 1961 and 1970 in the most intensive use of chemical warfare in human history, with as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese living in nearly 3,200 villages directly sprayed by the chemicals
–24 percent, or 16,100 square miles, of South Viet Nam was sprayed, an area larger than the states of Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island combined, killing tropical forest, food crops, and inland forests
–Over 500,000 Vietnamese have died from chronic conditions related to chemical spraying with an estimated 650,000 still suffering from such conditions; 500,000 children have been born with Agent Orange-induced birth defects, now including third generation offspring
–Nearly 375,000 tons of fireballing napalm was dropped on villages
–Huge Rome Plows (made in Rome, Georgia), 20-ton earthmoving D7E Caterpillar tractors, fitted with a nearly 2.5-ton curved 11-foot wide attached blade protected by 14 additional tons of armor plate, scraped clean between 700,000 and 750,000 acres (1,200 square miles), an area equivalent to Rhode Island, leaving bare earth, rocks, and smashed trees
–As many as 36,000,000 total tons of ordance expended from aerial and naval bombing, artillery, and ground combat firepower. On an average day US artillery expended 10,000 rounds costing $1 million per day; 150,000-300,000 tons of UXO remain scattered around Southeast Asia: 40,000 have been killed in Viet Nam since the end of the war in 1975, and nearly 70,000 injured; 20,000 Laotians have been killed or injured since the end of the war
–7 billion gallons of fuel were consumed by US forces during the war
–If there was space for all 6,000,000 names of Southeast Asian dead on the Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC, it would be over 9 sobering miles long, or nearly 100 times its current 493 foot length
I am not able to memorialize our sacrificed US soldiers without also remembering the death and destroyed civilian infrastructure we caused in our illegal invasion and occupation of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. It has been 47 years since I carried out my duties in Viet Nam. My “service” included being an eyewitness to the aftermath of bombings from the air of undefended fishing villages where virtually all the inhabitants were massacred, the vast majority being small children. In that experience, I felt complicit in a diabolical crime against humanity. This experience led me to deeply grasping that I am not worth more than any other human being, and they are not worth less than me.
Recently I spent more than three weeks in Viet Nam, my first trip back since involuntarily being sent there in 1969. I was struck by the multitudes of children suffering from birth defects, most caused presumably by the US chemical spraying some 50 years ago. I experienced deep angst knowing that the US is directly responsible for this genetic damage now being passed on from one generation to the next. I am ashamed that the US government has never acknowledged responsibility or paid reparations. I found myself apologizing to the people for the crimes of my country.
When we only memorialize US soldiers while ignoring the victims of our aggression, we in effect are memorializing war. I cannot do that. War is insane, and our country continues to perpetuate its insanity on others, having been constantly at war since at least 1991. We fail our duties as citizens if we remain silent rather than calling our US wars for what they are – criminal and deceitful aggressions violating international and US law to assure control of geostrategic resources, deemed necessary to further our insatiable American Way Of Life (AWOL).
Memorial Day for me requires remembering all of the deaths and devastation of our wars, and it should remind all of us of the need to end the madness. If we want to end war, we must begin to directly address our out-of-control capitalist political economy that knows no limits to profits for a few at the expense of the many, including our soldiers.
S. Brian Willson, as a 1st lieutenant, served as commander of a US Air Force combat security police unit in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta in 1969. He is a trained lawyer who has been an anti-war, peace and justice activist for more than forty years. His psychohistorical memoir, “Blood On The Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson” was published in 2011 by PM Press. A long time member of Veterans For Peace, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon
US ‘leverage in Syria’ thanks to collusion with terrorists
By Finian Cunningham | RT | May 20, 2016
There is a simple explanation why Washington refuses to proscribe the militant groups Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist. Because Washington relies on them for regime change in Syria.
Therefore, Washington and its Western and Middle East allies cannot possibly designate Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist; otherwise it would be a self-indicting admission that the war in Syria is a foreign state-sponsored terrorist assault on a sovereign country.
This criminal conspiracy is understood by many observers as an accurate description of the five-year Syrian conflict and how it originated. Syria fits into the mold of US-led regime change wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, Washington and its allies, assisted by the Western corporate news media, have maintained a fictitious alternative narrative on Syria, claiming the war is an insurgency by a pro-democracy rebel movement.
That narrative has strained credulity over the years as the putative “secular rebels” have either vanished or turned out to be indistinguishable from extremist groups like al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and so-called Islamic State (also known as Daesh).
Washington asserts that it only supports “moderate, secular rebels” of the Free Syrian Army. British Prime Minister David Cameron has claimed that there are 70,000 such “moderate rebels” fighting in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But no-one can locate these supposed pro-democracy warriors.
All that can be seen is that the fight against the Syrian government is being waged by self-professed extremist jihadists who have no intention of establishing “democracy”. Instead, they explicitly want to carve out an Islamic state dominated by draconian Sharia law.
In addition to Jabhat al-Nusra and Daesh, the two other major militant groups, Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, are vehemently committed to forming a Caliphate based on Salafi or Wahhabi ideology. That ideology views all other religious faiths, including moderate Sunni Muslims, as well as Shia and Alawites, as “infidels” fit to be persecuted until death.
Leaders of both Jaysh and Ahrar have publicly declared their repudiation of democracy.
Yet these two groups are nominated as the Syrian “opposition” in the Geneva talks, as part of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC). The HNC was cobbled together at a summit held in the Saudi capital Riyadh in December ahead of the anticipated negotiations to find a Syrian political settlement.
The HNC is endorsed by Washington as official representatives of the Syrian opposition. It is supported by Saudi Arabia, or indeed more accurately, orchestrated by the Saudi rulers since the main components of the HNC are Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham. Other major sponsors of the militant groups are Qatar and Turkey.
Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy to Syria, also plays an important part in the charade of furnishing an opposition composed of extremists who demand the Syrian government must stand down as a precondition for talks. This maximalist position is one of the main reasons why the negotiations have come unstuck, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Another basic reason is that the HNC members have been involved in breaching the cessation of violence the US and Russia brokered on February 27, as a confidence-building measure to assist the talks process in Geneva.
That Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham have not observed the shaky ceasefire is a corollary of the fact that both groups are integrated with al-Qaeda-affiliated terror organizations, al Nusra and Daesh, which are internationally designated terrorist organizations.
The UN excluded al-Qaeda franchises from the ceasefire when it passed Security Council Resolution 2254 in December to mandate the purported Syrian peace talks. In that way, Syria and its foreign allies, Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, have been legally entitled to continue offensive operations against the extremists in parallel to the Geneva process.
The offensive on the terror groups should include HNC members Jaysh and Ahrar. Both groups have publicly admitted to fighting alongside both Nusra and Daesh in their campaign against the Syrian army. All of these organizations have been involved at various times in bloody feuds and turf wars. Nevertheless, they are at other times self-declared collaborators.
Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are also well-documented to having engaged in massacres and barbarities as vile as the other higher profile terror outfits.
Only last week, Ahrar al-Sham was responsible for the massacre of women and children in the village of Al-Zahraa, near Aleppo, according to survivors. The group has carried out countless no-warning car bombings in civilians neighborhoods. It claimed responsibility for a bombing outside the Russian base at Idlib earlier this year, which killed dozens.
Jaysh al-Islam has publicly admitted using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in recent weeks, also near Aleppo, Syria’s second city after the capital Damascus, and currently the key battleground in the whole conflict.
The same jihadist militia is allegedly linked to the chemical weapon atrocity in August 2013 in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta, when hundreds of civilians, including children, were apparently killed from exposure to Sarin gas. That attack was initially blamed on Syrian government forces and it nearly prompted the Obama administration to order direct military intervention on the pretext that a “red line” was crossed. Until that is, Moscow steered a ground-breaking deal to decommission chemical weapons held by the Syrian state. It later transpired that the more likely culprit for the East Ghouta atrocity was the Jaysh al-Islam militants.
A former commander of the group, Zahran Alloush, once declared that he would “cleanse” all Shia, Alawites and other infidels from the Levant. Many Syrian civilians later rejoiced when the “terrorist boss” – their words – was killed in a Syrian air force strike on December 25. Notably, Saudi Arabia and Turkey vehemently protested over Alloush’s death.
It is irrefutable from both their actions and self-declarations that Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are by any definition terrorist groups. Certainly, Russia and Iran have officially listed both as such.
But not so Washington and its allies. Earlier this month, a Russian proposal at the UN Security Council to proscribe Jaysh and Ahrar was blocked by the US, Britain and France. An American spokesperson told the AFP news agency that it rejected the Russian motion because it feared the tentative Syrian ceasefire would collapse entirely. This is an unwitting US admission about who the main fighting forces in the Syrian “rebellion” are.
This week US Secretary of State John Kerry made an extraordinary claim which, as usual, went unnoticed in the Western media. Kerry said the US “still has leverage in Syria” because if the Syrian government does not accept Washington’s demands for political transition then the country would face years of more war.
Kerry’s confidence in threatening a war of attrition on Syria is based on the fact that the main terror groups are directly or indirectly controlled by Washington and its regional allies in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are essential to the terror front that gives Washington its leverage in Syria. But the charade must be kept covered with the preposterous denial that these groups are not terrorists.
Three civilians killed in new Saudi strikes in Yemen
Press TV – May 21, 2016
At least three Yemeni civilians have lost their lives and several others sustained injuries in new Saudi airstrikes against Yemen.
Saudi jets attacked two trucks loaded with bags of cement in the Hardin neighborhood of the southern Yemen port city of Mokha, situated 346 kilometers (214 miles) south of the capital, Sana’a, on Friday evening, killing three people and injuring five others, Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah satellite television network reported.
Local sources said the trucks had made a stopover in the area where they were targeted on their way to the city of Ta’izz.
Eyewitnesses said charred body parts were strewn about the area, noting that the death toll would further increase as some of the injured are in a critical condition.
Saudi fighter jets also flew over several areas in the provinces of Ta’izz, Ma’rib and Amran, but there were no immediate reports of attacks.
Separately, a woman lost her life when Saudi warplanes conducted an airstrike in Sahar district of the northwestern Yemeni province of Sa’ada on Friday.
Another Saudi aerial raid against Qa’atabah district in Yemen’s southern province of Dhale left a woman injured.
Moreover, militiamen loyal to former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi lobbed a barrage of mortar shells against a position of Ansarullah fighters in al-Wazi’iyah district of Ta’izz Province on Friday, but no casualties were reported.
Elsewhere in al-Mansura district of the southern province of Aden, unidentified armed men fatally shot a pro-Hadi commander.
Moreover, there are reports that clashes have broken out between Hadi loyalists and Takfiri terrorists in the port city of Aden, with both sides exchanging heavy gunfire.
Saudi Arabia launched its military aggression against Yemen on March 26, 2015, in a bid to bring former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi —a staunch ally of Riyadh who resigned from the presidency — back to power and undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement.
More than 9,400 people have been killed and at least 16,000 others injured since the onset of the aggression.
The Saudi strikes have also taken a heavy toll on the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories.
Last week, UN-brokered peace talks between delegates from Ansarullah movement and the Saudi-backed former Yemeni government in Kuwait were suspended after the latter declared its withdrawal from the talks.
Abdulmalek al-Mikhlafi, a representative of the pro-Hadi delegation, blamed Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and allies of torpedoing the talks, saying they have backtracked on their commitments.
The development came as UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Sheikh Ahmed had said he was optimistic about achieving a settlement for the conflict in Yemen.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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- CHD Scientist: CDC, FDA COVID Vaccine Safety Monitoring ‘Insulting, and Many People Are Injured’
- COVID Conniving Receives First Federal Indictment
- Iran Blockade Complications /Lt Col Daniel Davis & Nima Alkhorshid
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- Minab children massacre not ‘unfortunate situation’ but ‘heinous war crime’: Tehran
- If Americans Knew
- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
- Israeli Strikes Kill at Least 32 Across S Lebanon, Including Children – Amid “Ceasefire”
- Israel to pour $730m into propaganda arm amid reputational crisis
- Real Cost of Iran War Likely Double the $25 Billion Figure the Pentagon Gave to Congress
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- In Gaza, Israel commits 10+ ceasefire violations a day – Daily Update
- US ships 6,500 tons of munitions, equipment to Israel in 24 hours
- A New Library in Gaza Rises From the Ashes of Destruction
- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- Nun assaulted in Jerusalem amid ‘pattern’ of anti-Christian attacks by Israelis
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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