Israel is not a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention. It signed the Convention in 1993 when it opened for signature, but it has never ratified it.
Now that Syria has become a party to the Convention, Israel is one of only 6 states in the world that are not. They are: Angola, Egypt, Israel, Myanmar, North Korea and South Sudan [1].
As a matter of fact, Israel isn’t a party to any of the three “weapons of mass destruction” treaties, that is, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) [2] and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) [3], in addition to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) – and it is the only state in the Middle East that isn’t a party to any of them.
Almost all states in the Middle East (including Iran) are party to all three, the exceptions being:
NPT Israel
BWC Israel, Egypt, Syria
CWC Israel, Egypt
What is more, Israel is the only state in the world (apart from South Sudan, which only came into existence in 2011) that isn’t a party to any of these treaties. Since it also holds the world record for being in breach of Security Council resolutions that require action by it and it alone, unkind people might say that it deserves the title of a rogue state.
(North Korea isn’t party to either the BWC or the CWC. Having joined the NPT as a ‘non-nuclear-weapon’ state in 1985, it withdrew in 2003, but its withdrawal has not been formally accepted and the UN still lists it as a party [2].)
Mainstream media carried very little
The mainstream media carried very little about this during the controversy about Syria’s chemical weapons, when one might have thought that Israel should have been asked to explain why it was refusing to become a party to the CWC, while being enthusiastic about its Syrian neighbour doing so. Could it be that it didn’t want to give up its chemical weapons?
Fox News did run a story called Syria deal shines light on suspected Israeli chemical weapons program on 16 September 2013 [4], in which a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Paul Hirschson, is quoted as saying that “Israel could not ratify the treaty in such an uncertain environment”. He continued:
“These things are regional and we’re not going to go out there on our own.”
That is close to an admission that Israel does possess chemical weapons – which will only be given up when all other regional players have given up theirs. Syria has done so. Presumably, the Israeli spokesman had Egypt in mind. Like Israel, it is suspected of having chemical weapons (and of using them during its intervention in the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s). Like Syria, Egypt has linked its refusal to join the CWC to Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons and refusal to join the NPT.
(The Fox News article also quoted from former Israeli Defense Minister, and Labour Party leader, Amir Peretz, on the issue. He said the international community’s attitude toward Israel is “different” from Syria, because “it’s clear to everyone that Israel is a democratic, responsible regime” – that has invaded every one of its neighbours, in its short life, and has occupied large tracts of territory not its own for nearly half a century, and annexed East Jerusalem and a bit of Syria, he might have added.)
Has Israel got chemical and biological weapons too?
Nobody seriously doubts that Israel has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, perhaps as many as 400 of them, though it refuses to confirm or deny this. But does it also possess chemical weapons? There are strong suspicions that it does and that it has biological weapons as well. See, for example, Israel’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: An Overview (2008) by Professor Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies [5], which was published in 2008.
Recently, on 9 September 2013, Foreign Policy magazine published an article entitled Does Israel Have Chemical Weapons Too?[6]. This quoted from a 1983 CIA intelligence estimate which said that Israel had a “probable chemical weapon nerve agent production facility and a storage facility… at the Dimona Sensitive Storage Area in the Negev Desert”. It continued:
“several indicators lead us to believe that they have available to them at least persistent and nonpersistent nerve agents, a mustard agent, and several riot-control agents, matched with suitable delivery systems.”
Of course, none of this constitutes conclusive proof that Israel had a chemical arsenal in the 1980s let alone now. Nor does conclusive proof exist that it possesses biological weapons. But, given its distinction as the only state in the world (apart from South Sudan) that isn’t a party to any of the three “weapons of mass destruction” treaties, one might expect a little more media attention to the matter.
Monumental double standard
For more than two decades, Israeli political leaders have claimed that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and demanded that the world put a stop to it, otherwise Israel would have to take military action to do so. As long ago as 1992, the present Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, predicted that Iran was 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the US” [7].
While insisting that Iran must not have nuclear weapons, Israel has continued to enhance its own nuclear weapons systems. This is a double standard of monumental proportions. But, in all this time, the mainstream media have rarely drawn attention to the fact that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, let alone challenged Israeli leaders to justify the application of this double standard.
The two exceptions to the latter that I am aware of were both on the BBC Today programme recently, the first on 14 June 2013 [8] (and that was down to Jack Straw) and the second on 26 September 2013. See my article The BBC spreads untruths about Iran’s nuclear activities [9]for transcripts of these.
Mainstream journalists know that Israel has nuclear weapons and it is clearly newsworthy that Israel is applying a monumental double standard by demanding that Iran must not acquire what Israel itself already possesses in large numbers. So why is the question rarely put? Presumably, because mainstream journalists are simply too craven to put it for fear of the consequences from their employer or from Israel itself.
Since it is Israeli policy neither to confirm nor to deny that it has nuclear weapons, it is impossible for Israeli spokesmen to answer such a question if it were put.
1969 Nixon/Meir deal
The same is true of US spokesmen, since it is also US policy neither to confirm nor deny that Israel has nuclear weapons.
The US took a vow of silence on this issue over 40 years ago: to be precise, on 26 September 1969, when President Nixon made a secret, unwritten, agreement with Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, in a one-to-one meeting in the Oval Office in the White House. Since then, the phrase “Israel’s nuclear weapons” has rarely if ever come out of the mouth of a US spokesman.
Under the Nixon/Meir deal, the US agreed not to acknowledge publicly that Israel possessed nuclear weapons, while knowing full well that it did. In return, Israel undertook to maintain a low profile about its nuclear weapons: there was to be no acknowledgment of their existence, and no testing which would reveal their existence. That way, the US would not be forced to take a public position for or against Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons.
(For the fascinating story of how this came to be US policy, see Israel crosses the threshold by Avner Cohen and William Burr, published in the May-June 2006 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists[10]).
US refuses to discuss Israel’s nuclear weapons
In accordance with the Nixon/Meir deal, the US has refused ever since to acknowledge that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. This leads to the absurd situation in which US discussion of nuclear matters has to proceed without Israel’s nuclear weapons being mentioned.
Thus, for example, in his speech in Prague on 5 April 2009, when Obama announced “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” [11], Israel’s nuclear arsenal was off limits. This led to an amusing exchange at a press briefing onboard Air Force One en route to Prague between a journalist and a White House briefer, Denis McDonough (now Obama’s Chief of Staff). The dialogue included the following [12]:
Q Have you included Israel in the discussion [about a world without nuclear weapons]?
MR. McDONOUGH: Pardon me?
Q Have you included Israel in the discussion?
MR. McDONOUGH: Look, I think what you’ll see tomorrow is a very comprehensive speech.
It is rare for journalists to ask the US administration awkward questions about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. However, at the President’s press conference on 13 April 2010 after the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Scott Wilson of the Washington Post asked:
“You have spoken often about the need to bring US policy in line with its treaty obligations internationally to eliminate the perception of hypocrisy that some of the world sees toward the United States and its allies. In that spirit and in that venue, will you call on Israel to declare its nuclear program and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty? And if not, why wouldn’t other countries see that as an incentive not to sign on to the treaty that you say is important to strengthen?” [13]
President Obama replied:
“… as far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their program.”
That’s the Nixon/Meir deal in action 40 years after it was done.
Israel stood outside the international non-proliferation regime
Iran was one of the original signatories to the NPT on 1 July 1968 as a ‘non-nuclear-weapon’ state, forbidden under Article II of the Treaty to acquire nuclear weapons. After the Islamic revolution in 1979, when the Islamic Republic reviewed all its international treaty commitments, the new rulers continued its adherence to the Treaty.
Over the past 20 years, there has been a continuous stream of accusations from Israel, the US and others that Iran was engaged in nuclear weapons development, contrary to its NPT commitments, but there has been little in the way of hard evidence to that effect. Even its detractors agree that it hasn’t got any nuclear weapons today, let alone an operational nuclear weapons system.
In their book, Going to Tehran: Why the US must come to terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran published earlier this year, Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett (who both served on the US National Security Council in the first Bush administration until 2003) put it this way:
“American, Israeli and other Western intelligence services have claimed since the early 1990s that Iran is three to five years away from acquiring nuclear weapons; at times, Israel has offered more alarmist figures. But twenty years into this resetting forecast, no Western agency has come remotely close to producing hard evidence that Iran is trying to fabricate weapons. In Russia, which has its own extensive intelligence and nuclear weapons communities and close contacts with the Iranian nuclear program, high-level officials say publicly that Iran is not seeking to build nuclear weapons – a judgment echoed privately by Russian officials knowledgeable about both nuclear weapons and Iran’s nuclear programme. Mohamed ElBaradei, who served as director general of the IAEA from 1997 to 2009 … has said on multiple occasions that there is no evidence that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.” (p81-2)
Unlike Iran, for more than 40 years, Israel has stood outside the international non-proliferation regime, refusing to join the NPT so that it could be free to develop nuclear weapons. Today, it has the ability to deliver them by aircraft, ballistic missile and submarine-launched cruise missiles (using submarines supplied at knockdown prices by Germany [14]). It is in a position to wipe off the map every capital in the Middle East (and probably much further afield). It is guilty of nuclear proliferation on a grand scale.
It introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Without this, the Middle East would be a nuclear weapons free zone today.
Yet, it is Iran that has been treated as a pariah state and subjected to fierce economic sanctions by the US/EU and their allies, while Israel is showered with largesse by the US/EU. It receives over $3bn a year in military aid from the US, more than any other state in the world, even though its GDP per capita is on a par with that of the EU. And, since 2000, it has enjoyed privileged access to the EU market for its exports. Not only that, Germany has subsidised the enhancement of Israel nuclear weapons systems by supplying it with submarines.
Iran and other Israeli neighbours can withdraw from NPT
Clearly, Iran made the wrong choice in 1968 by signing the NPT. Had it taken the same route as Israel and refused to sign, it would have been free to engage in any nuclear activities it liked in secret, including activities for military purposes, without breaking any obligations under the NPT.
In fact, given Israel has acquired a nuclear arsenal since Iran signed the NPT in 1968, under Article IX of the NPT, Iran would be well within its rights to withdraw from the Treaty and remove the constraints upon it due to NPT membership (and so would every one of Israel’s neighbours). Article IX says:
“Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.” [15]
By any objective standard, Iran (and other neighbours of Israel) has good grounds for withdrawing, because of the build up over the past 40 years of an Israeli nuclear arsenal directed at them. There could hardly be a better example of “extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty”, which “have jeopardized [their] supreme interests”.
Thanks to Germany, Israel has second strike capability
A further point: the impression is often given, not least by the Israeli leadership, that Iran’s possession of even one nuclear weapon would put Israel’s existence as a state in jeopardy. But, once account is taken of Israel’s possession of a nuclear arsenal, this proposition loses its force, especially since, thanks to German generosity with submarines, it is impossible for any aggressor to destroy Israel’s nuclear weapons systems in a first strike. Thanks to Germany, Israel has second strike capability.
The plain fact is that if Iran were ever foolish enough to make a nuclear strike on Israel, it is absolutely certain that Israel would retaliate in kind and overwhelmingly and, as a result, many Iranian cities would be razed to the ground. The rulers of Iran know that to be the case and are not suicidal.
The Israeli leadership is well aware of this. In February 2010, when he was Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barack said:
“I don’t think the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, [would] drop it in the neighbourhood. They fully understand what might follow. They are radical but not totally crazy. They have a quite sophisticated decision making process, and they understand reality.” [16]
What he is saying – obliquely, since he doesn’t want to state openly that Israel possesses nuclear weapons – is that Iran would not make a nuclear strike against Israel if it had the capacity to do so, because its leadership is fully aware of the awful consequences.
NPT signatories agree to Middle East WMD free zone
The 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference (attended by all parties to the NPT and therefore excluding Israel) passed a resolution calling for the creation of WMD free zone in the Middle East – to be precise, “an effectively verifiable Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and their delivery systems” [17]. It also called for all states in the region to accede to the NPT as soon as possible. This resolution was co-sponsored by the US, UK and Russia.
Nuclear weapons free zones have come into existence in other areas of the world since the late 60s (for example, in Latin America & the Caribbean and in Africa), where states in the area have agreed to ban the use, development, or deployment of nuclear weapons.
The creation of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East had been the subject of resolutions in international fora since the mid 70s, when evidence began to emerge that Israel was developing nuclear weapons. In December 1974, for example, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 3263 (XXIX) [18], proposed by Iran and Egypt, calling for the establishment of such a zone and for all states in the region to adhere to the NPT. The resolution was adopted almost unanimously, with only Israel (and Burma) abstaining.
Security Council Resolution 687, the resolution passed at the end of the Gulf War in April 1991, which demanded the destruction of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”, also called on UN member states “to work towards the establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of such weapons.” [19].
NPT signatories agree to conference on Middle East WMD free zone
The 1995 NPT resolution calling for a WMD free zone in the Middle East was reaffirmed at the next NPT Review Conference in 2000. However, needless to say, there was no progress whatsoever on its implementation.
In December 2003, when Syria was a member of the Security Council, it introduced a resolution reiterating the clause from the Iraq disarmament resolution calling for a WMD free zone in the Middle East, but the US threatened to veto it and it was never voted on [20].
The 2005 NPT Review Conference failed to agree a final consensus declaration, a sticking point being the lack of progress on implementing the 1995 resolution. The US had refused to put its name to any text which involved taking additional measures to induce Israel to give up its nuclear weapons and accede to the NPT.
The Obama administration was anxious to avoid a similar outcome at the 2010 NPT Review Conference. This time, a coalition of the 118 states in the Non-Aligned Movement, led by Egypt, lobbied strongly for progress on this (and other) issues. In order to achieve a final consensus declaration, the US had to agree to “a process leading to full implementation of the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East”, to quote from the conference final document [21] (p30).
Specifically, in a resolution on the Middle East, the Conference agreed that,
“The Secretary-General of the United Nations and the co-sponsors of the 1995 Resolution [the US, UK and Russia], in consultation with the States of the region, will convene a conference in 2012, to be attended by all States of the Middle East, on the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction, on the basis of arrangements freely arrived at by the States of the region, and with the full support and engagement of the nuclear-weapon States. The 2012 Conference shall take as its terms of reference the 1995 Resolution;”
The resolution also specifically stated that Israel should accede to the NPT as a “non-nuclear weapon” state (ie that it should give up its nuclear weapons) and place all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive IAEA safeguards (p29/30). Iran’s nuclear activities weren’t mentioned in the resolution. Surprisingly, the US put its name to this, since it effectively calls for Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.
US postpones conference
The proposed conference, which was supposed to be held in 2012, has yet to take place. At one point it was scheduled to be held in Finland in December 2012, with Finnish Undersecretary of State Jaakko Laajava as the facilitator. But, the US called it off at the last moment, a statement issued by the State Department on 23 November 2012 saying:
“As a co-sponsor of the proposed conference on a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction (MEWMDFZ), envisioned in the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference Final Document, the United States regrets to announce that the conference cannot be convened because of present conditions in the Middle East and the fact that states in the region have not reached agreement on acceptable conditions for a conference.” [22]
At that time, one state in the Middle East was refusing to attend. No marks for guessing that the odd man out was Israel.
At the time of writing (7 November 2013), the conference has not been rescheduled.
US accords Israel veto over holding conference
It wasn’t a surprise that the US called the conference off because Israel didn’t want to attend, because immediately after the US had put its name to the consensus declaration on 28 May 2010, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, General James Jones, stated that the US had “serious reservations” about the proposal for the conference [23]. He went on:
“The United States has long supported such a zone, although our view is that a comprehensive and durable peace in the region and full compliance by all regional states with their arms control and nonproliferation obligations are essential precursors for its establishment.”
So, as far as the US is concerned, it is OK for Israel to keep its nuclear weapons until there is a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East
General Jones continued:
“As a co-sponsor charged with enabling this conference, the United States will ensure that a conference will only take place if and when all countries feel confident that they can attend. Because of [the] gratuitous way that Israel has been singled out, the prospect for a conference in 2012 that involves all key states in the region is now in doubt and will remain so until all are assured that it can operate in a[n] unbiased and constructive way.”
So, within hours of the 189 signatories of the NPT, including the US, agreeing to the conference being held, the US unilaterally accorded Israel a veto over whether the conference would be held.
Lest there be any doubt about this, listen to this from President Obama, meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Washington a couple of months later on 6 July 2010:
“The President emphasized that the conference will only take place if all countries feel confident that they can attend, and that any efforts to single out Israel will make the prospects of convening such a conference unlikely.” [24]
Israel has to be singled out
General Jones’ assertion that it is gratuitous to single out Israel when talking about a WMD free zone in the Middle East is beyond absurdity.
Israel is the only state in the Middle East that isn’t a party to any of the three WMD treaties. The only state in the Middle East that possesses nuclear weapons is Israel (and they are the only weapons which merit the name “weapons mass destruction”).
Egypt and Syria (and Israel) may possess other forms, but it is generally believed that their pursuit of them was driven by Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) organisation says of Egypt:
“Cairo continues to lead efforts to establish a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone (WMDFZ) in the Middle East and to criticize Israel’s alleged nuclear weapons program, linking its refusal to participate in further arms control agreements such as the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) to Israel’s nonparticipation in the NPT.”[25]
And of Syria:
“The country’s primary motivation for pursuing unconventional weapons and ballistic missiles appears to be the perceived Israeli threat, as Israel has superior conventional military capabilities and is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons.” [26]
So, unless Israel is singled out for WMD elimination, there will never be a WMD free zone in the Middle East.
US accords Israel veto over creation of Middle East WMD free zone
However, it is clear that the US is not going to be singling out Israel any time soon. When he met Prime Minister Netanyahu on 6 July 2010:
“The President told the Prime Minister he recognizes that Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats, and that only Israel can determine its security needs.” [24]
In that, the Obama administration accepts that Israel has a right to nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes – and the right to decide when, if ever, it no longer needs nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes. That accords Israel a veto over the creation over a WMD free zone in the Middle East – and over the achievement of “a world without nuclear weapons”, which he embarked on rhetorically in Prague in April 2009.
If the US were to apply that principle universally, then every state in the world would have a right to nuclear weapons, if it believed that their possession was necessary to deter aggression. However, it’s likely that the US will restrict the application of this principle to very special friends.
On Saturday the 30th November, the Stop The War Coalition will host a conference to discuss the most effective ways to resist the drive to war against Syria – stalled for now, but not necessarily indefinitely. Due to speak (at the time of writing) are Diane Abbott MP, Seamus Milne, Tariq Ali and Lindsey German, among many others.
To cut a long story short, the Stop the War website is also advertising that Mother Agnes Mariam is due to speak at the conference. Agnes is a christian Nun who is suspected by some observers of the war in Syria of being little more than a mouthpiece for the Assad regime. Let’s just accept for arguments sake that this is true, and that inviting her was a bad idea (I will confess here to not being totally au fait with her views).
The presence of Mother Agnes has lead to Jeremy Scahill, the excellent American investigative journalist, and Owen Jones, a columnist with The Independent newspaper, pulling out of the conference, on the grounds that they don’t want to share a platform with an apologist for war criminals.
But I just want to share a few thoughts on why I think Jones’ position is confused at best.
Jones is a member and supporter of the Labour party, and thinks other lefties should be as well. As is hardly a secret, Labour is a party that plays host to plenty of major war criminals and apologists for those war criminals, but that apparently isn’t enough for him to want to part ways with them.
Indeed, he has in the past quite happily appeared on platforms with John Prescott, who was deputy Prime Minister at the time of the aggression against Iraq – not just an apologist for war crimes then, but an active participant in them.
Jones’ argument for staying a member of Labour is that while he doesn’t agree with these people on various issues, he thinks it’s worth trying to win the argument against them to change the party for the better, from within. It’s not a totally unreasonable position, and I think he’s certainly sincere in arguing it.
Why couldn’t he apply that same logic to the Stop The War Conference though? Say that while he obviously doesn’t agree with the opinions of all the speakers there, he thinks it’s still worth going and making his argument as to what the best anti-war position is or should be? He could even outline why he doesn’t agree with people like Mother Agnes in his talk, and maybe change a few minds.
But no, unlike his continuing embrace of the blood soaked Labour party, he’s just going to shun the conference altogether, thus giving plenty of ammunition to those who are trying to smear Stop The War, and anti-war people in general, as pro-Assad. ‘Even Owen Jones wants nothing to do with them, see!’.
My hunch is that he’s scared of being tarred with a pro-Assad brush, because that would be damaging to his reputation (certainly in the eyes of a state-corporate media Establishment that has embraced him) in a way that being seen as broadly pro-Labour – despite their horrific track record and the massive trail of corpses they left behind them last time they were in power – isn’t, given that Labour are part of that Establishment themselves.
Nuns who’ve made some dodgy comments in defense of the Assad regime? He’ll have no part of it.
A political party who instigated some of the worst and most murderous war crimes of the modern era, and whose leader continues to act as an apologist for the perpetrators, as well as the brutal wars in Afghanistan and Libya? Count him in.
For me, it shows how even some lefties have a moral vision that is badly skewed by power, and the need for Establishment approval, when it comes to assessing and reacting to Their crimes (or even alleged supporters of Their crimes), and Ours
Jeremy Scahill, the “investigative journalist” who once publicly expressed his belief in the official 9/11 story, says he won’t take part in an international antiwar conference scheduled for later this month if he has to share the same platform with Syrian nun Mother Agnes.
“I’ve informed organizers of @STWuk that I will not participate in their conference if Mother Agnes is on the platform,” Scahill tweetetd on Friday.
“@STWuk” is the Stop the War Coalition, which will hold the all-day conference in London on November 30, and which had apparently extended an invitation for Mother Agnes to speak, along with roughly a dozen or so other speakers.
The conference is to include a session on “The Syrian war in context,” and obviously Mother Agnes, who has struggled so hard to end the bloodshed in her country, would have provided a valuable perspective for all in attendance. But she will now no longer speak. In response to the controversy surrounding her participation, she has withdrawn. Blessed are the peacemakers.
Scahill, it seems, isn’t the only speaker in the lineup with an apparent disliking for the Syrian mother superior. British writer Owen Jones, a columnist for The Independent, reportedly also threatened to withdraw should she not be axed from the program.
Mother Agnes is head of the Syrian organization Musalaha (reconciliation). In October she played a key role in the evacuation of more than 5,000 people, mainly women and children, from the besieged town of Moadamiya. An account of the evacuation can be found here. In order for the operation to succeed, it was necessary for Mother Agnes to gain the trust both of government troops as well elements of the Free Syrian Army who were holding the town. Remarkably she seems to have pulled it off. Click here to watch a video of her sharing a dish of olives with one of the rebel leaders and some of her evacuees.
But it isn’t her relationship with the Western-backed mercenaries that has gotten her in trouble. In fact, had she been their vocal champion, she probably wouldn’t be near the controversial figure she is today. But Mother Agnes has seriously undermined the Western narrative of Bashar Assad as a brutal dictator intent on “killing his own people.” In September she published a report suggesting that insurgents, rather than the Assad government, were responsible for the August 21 chemical attack and that videos uploaded immediately after that attack had been staged and doctored. And for her trouble she has been maligned as an “apologist” for the Syrian government and worse. In September the New York Times published a highly-critical piece on her which is analyzed here by blogger Stephen Lendman.
Scahill, an author and frequent contributor to The Nation, is taking heat for his postion. Owen seems to be taking heat as well. Both are heavily criticized in an article by blogger Phil Greaves:
Following the news that Mother Agnes Miriam, a nun who heads the Musalaha (reconciliation) initiative in Syria, was due to speak at the Stop The War conference in London, two journalists also due to speak at the event, Jeremy Scahill and Owen Jones, decided to withdraw participation unless Mother Agnes was removed from the speaking list. At the time of writing, neither “journalist” has offered to explain their act of public censure and decision to bolster Zionist-led smear campaigns; aside from a few tweets expressing their “concern” over sharing a platform with an evil Assad-supporting nun. It seems baseless conspiracy theories are more than acceptable in the higher echelons of “professional” journalism, as long as the target of said conspiracy is a supporter of an enemy state of the west and Israel.
Another blogger, Joe Emersberger, has issued the following appeal to Scahill:
Dear Jeremy,
I read your book “Dirty Wars” and admired it greatly. It led to me to obtain a great deal of respect for your courage and political judgement.
You tweeted that you “informed organizers of @STWuk that I will not participate in their conference if Mother Agnes is on the platform.”
If you haven’t already, I think you shoud provide a very clear public explanation for your publicly announced stance.
There are extremely nasty allegations being circulated about Mother Agnes based on zero evidence.
For example, this piece accuses Mother Agnes of helping the Asaad regime assassinate journalists in Syria.
To avoid lending any credibility to toxic crap like this, I think you should elaborate on your position regarding Mother Agnes.
Joe Emersberger
So far as I’m aware, Scahill has not issued the “clear public explanation” that Emersberger has called for.
In a letter dated November 16, the day after Scahill posted his tweet, Mother Agnes notified the Stop the War Coalition of her decision to withdraw from the conference. Here is what she wrote:
My dear friends,
It has come to my attention that my participation in your conference has become a matter of serious contention, even prompting some other speakers to consider withdrawing. This is apparently due to a campaign of cruel and unsubstantiated accusations which seek to work against my efforts and those of the Mussalaha (Reconciliation) Initiative in Syria.
The basis of our work toward peace is reconciliation and forgiveness. This means extending an olive branch to some who may initially refuse it, and accepting an olive branch from others who are despised, even by our friends.
In the case of Syria, I am guided by the terrible events of human provenance that are reaping misery and death without end in sight. I and my fellow members of the Mussalaha movement feel compelled to find a path toward national redemption that applies the principles of reconciliation and forgiveness that is different from either the way of the sword or even the nonviolent exclusion of other Syrians, whatever their views or affiliations may be. This is by its nature a difficult path but I am a cleric and am guided by my love for all. We are all children of God.
Some may feel that an injustice will be done if I speak at your conference. Others may think that injustice will be done if I do not. Because my participation in your conference may be used by some to distract from your valuable efforts towards peace, non-violence and reconciliation, I believe it best to withdraw from participation.
I thank you for your sincere invitation, and wish to offer my blessings for a successful conference that brings together a multitude of people of good will who will work together for peace and justice through mutual cooperation and I hope we shall at a future date have an opportunity to meet and discuss this issue and the wider work of the Mussalaha in Syria.
Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross
The letter is available in pdf format here. During the early part of November Mother Agnes has been on a speaking tour of the US. Click here to read a report by blogger Madison Ruppert of a speech she gave in Los Angeles.
In the video below, uploaded in 2010, you will see Scahill sharing his views on 9/11:
“I believe that the United States was attacked by Al Qaeda on 9/11 by men who flew airplanes into those buildings,” says Scahill.
I would recommend Scahill watch the newly-released documentary September 11: The New Pearl Harbor. One of the things he will learn is that the “men who flew airplanes into those buildings” could barely pilot a twin engine plane.
In the above video you will also notice Mr. Scahill, the investigative reporter, discussing, almost angrily, his belief that efforts to determine the truth of what happened on 9/11 are “destructive” to “an honest dialog in this country about US policy,” and then going on to describe such efforts as “insulting to the people who died on 9/11.” Again, I would recommend he go here and watch a discussion by licensed clinical psychologists on cognitive dissonance and 9/11 denial.
Revelations about the long-term global, intrusive spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other allied intelligence apparatuses have provoked widespread protests and indignation and threatened ties between erstwhile imperial allies.
Allied regimes have uniformly condemned NSA espionage as a violation of trust and sovereignty, a threat to their national and economic security and to their citizens’ privacy.
In contrast, Washington has responded in a contradictory manner: on the one hand, US officials and intelligence chiefs have acknowledged ‘some excesses and mistakes’, on the other hand, they defend the entire surveillance program as necessary for US national security.
Interpretations vary about the US global spying apparatus – how it was built and why it was launched against hundreds of millions of people. ‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’ explanations abound, evoking psychological, social, economic, strategic and political considerations.
A multi-factorial explanation is required.
The Integrated Hypothesis of the Global Police State
One of the essential components of a police state is an all-pervasive spy apparatus operating independently of any legal or constitutional constraints. Spy operations include: 1) massive surveillance over text, video and audio communications and 2) the capacity to secretly record, store and use information secretly collected. This information strengthens political and economic leaders who, in turn, appoint and direct the spy chiefs. The political and economic rulers control the spy-lords by setting the goals, means and targets of the surveillance state. The US global spy apparatus is neither ‘self-starting nor self-perpetuating’. It did not arise in a vacuum and it has virtually no strategic autonomy. While there may be intra-bureaucratic conflicts and rivalries, the institutions and groups function within the overall ‘paradigm’ established and directed by the political and economic elite.
The Global Spy Structure
The growth and expansion of the US spy apparatus has deep roots in its history and is related to the colonial need to control subjugated native and enslaved peoples. However, the global operations emerged after the Second World War when the US replaced Europe as the center of world imperialism. The US assumed the principal role in preventing the spread of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements from the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Vietnam and Cuba to war and crisis-burdened countries of Europe, North and Southeast Asia and Latin America. When the collectivist states fell apart in the 1990’s the US became the sole superpower and a unipolar world emerged.
For the United States, ‘unipolarity’ meant (1) an impetus toward total global domination; (2) a world-wide network of military bases; (3) the subordination of capitalist competitors in other industrial countries, (4) the destruction of nationalist adversaries and (5) the unfettered pillage of resources from the former collectivist regimes as they became vassal states. The last condition meant the complete dismantling of the collectivist state and its public institutions – education, health care and worker rights.
The opportunities for immense profits and supreme control over this vast new empire were boundless while the risks seemed puny, at least during the ‘golden period’, defined by the years immediately after (1) the capitalist takeover of the ex-Soviet bloc, (2) the Chinese transition to capitalism and (3) the conversion of many former African and Asian nationalist regimes, parties and movements to ‘free-market’ capitalism.
Dazzled by the vision of a ‘new world to conquer’ the United States set up an international state apparatus in order to exploit this world-historical opportunity. Most top political leaders, intelligence strategists, military officials and business elites quickly realized that these easy initial conquests and the complicity of pliable and kleptocratic post-Communist vassal rulers would not last. The societies would eventually react and the lucrative plunder of resources was not sustainable. Nationalist adversaries were bound to arise and demand their own spheres of influence. The White House feared their own capitalist allies would take on the role of imperialist competitors seeking to grab ‘their share’ of the booty, taking over and exploiting resources, public enterprises and cheap labor.
The new ‘unipolar world’ meant the shredding of the fabric of social and political life. In the ‘transition’ to free market capitalism, stable employment, access to health care, security, education and civilized living standards disappeared. In the place of once complex, advanced social systems, local tribal and ethnic wars erupted. It would be ‘divide and conquer’ in an orgy of pillage for the empire. But the vast majority of the people of the world suffered from chaos and regression when the multi-polar world of collectivist, nationalist, and imperialist regimes gave way to the unipolar empire.
For US imperialist strategists and their academic apologists the transition to a unipolar imperial world was exhilarating and they dubbed their unchallenged domination the ‘New World Order’ (NWO). The US imperial state then had the right and duty to maintain and police its ‘New World Order’ – by any means. Francis Fukiyama, among other academic apologists celebrated the ‘end of history’ in a paroxysm of imperial fever. Liberal-imperial academics, like Immanuel Wallerstein, sensed the emerging challenges to the US Empire and advanced the view of a Manichean world of ‘unipolarity’ (meaning ‘order’) versus ‘multipolar chaos’– as if the hundreds of millions of lives in scores of countries devastated by the rise of the post-collectivist US empire did not have a stake in liberating themselves from the yoke of a unipolar world.
By the end of its first decade, the unipolar empire exhibited cracks and fissures. It had to confront adversarial nationalist regimes in resource-rich countries, including Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Bashar Assad in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Khamenei in Iran. They challenged US supremacy in North Africa and the Middle East. The Taliban in Afghanistan and nationalist Islamist movements questioned US influence over the vassal rulers of Muslim countries – especially the puppet monarchs in the Persian Gulf.
On the other side of the imperial coin, the domestic economic foundations of the ‘New World Order’ were weakened by a series of speculative crises undermining the support of the US public as well as sectors of the elite. Meanwhile European and Japanese allies, as well as emerging Chinese capitalists, were beginning to compete for markets.
Within the US an ultra-militarist group of political ideologues, public officials and policy advisers, embracing a doctrine combining a domestic police state with foreign military intervention, took power in Washington. ‘Conservatives’ in the Bush, Sr. regime, ‘liberals’ in the Clinton administration and ‘neo-conservatives’ in the Bush, Jr. administration all sought and secured the power to launch wars in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans, to expand and consolidate the unipolar empire.
Maintaining and expanding the unipolar empire became the trigger for the White House’s global police state apparatus. As new regimes were added to Washington’s orbit, more and more surveillance was needed to make sure they did not drift into a competitor’s sphere of influence.
The year 2000 was critical for the global police state. First there was the dot-com crash in the financial sector. The speculative collapse caused massive but unorganized disaffection among the domestic population. Arab resistance re-emerged in the Middle East. The cosmically corrupt Boris Yeltsin vassal state fell and a nationalist, Russian President Vladimir Putin took power. The willing accomplices to the disintegration of the former USSR had taken their billions and fled to New York, London and Israel. Russia was on the road to recovery as a unified nuclear-armed nation state with regional ambitions. The period of unchallenged unipolar imperial expansion had ended.
The election of President Bush Jr., opened the executive branch to police state ideologues and civilian warlords, many linked to the state of Israel, who were determined to destroy secular Arab nationalist and Muslim adversaries in the Middle East. The steady growth of the global police state had been ‘too slow’ for them. The newly ascendant warlords and the proponents of the global police state wanted to take advantage of their golden opportunity to make US/Israeli supremacy in the Middle East irreversible and unquestioned via the application of overwhelming force (‘shock and awe’).
Their primary political problem in expanding global military power was the lack of a fully dominant domestic police state capable of demobilizing American public opinion largely opposed to any new wars. ‘Disaster ideologues’ like Phillip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice understood the need for a new ‘Pearl Harbor’ to occur and threaten domestic security and thereby terrify the public into war. They lamented the fact that no credible regimes were left in the Middle East to cast as the ‘armed aggressor’ and as a threat to US national security. Such an enemy was vital to the launching of new wars. And new wars were necessary to justify the scale and scope of the new global spy apparatus and emergency police state edicts the warlords and neoconservatives had in mind. Absent a credible ‘state-based adversary’, the militarists settled for an act of terror (or the appearance of one) to ‘shock and awe’ the US public into accepting its project for imperial wars, the imposition of a domestic police state and the establishment of a vast global spy apparatus.
The September 11, 2001 explosions at the World Trade Center in New York City and the plane crash into a wing (mostly vacant for repairs) of the Pentagon in Washington, DC were the triggers for a vast political and bureaucratic transformation of the US imperial state. The entire state apparatus became a police state operation. All constitutional guarantees were suspended. The neo-conservatives seized power, the civilian warlords ruled. A huge body of police state legislation suddenly appeared, as if from nowhere, the ‘Patriot Act’. The Zionists in office set the objectives and influenced military policies to focus on Israel’s regional interests and the destruction of Israel’s Arab adversaries who had opposed its annexation of Palestine. War was declared against Afghanistan without any evidence that the ruling Taliban was involved or aware of the September 11 attack of the US. Despite massive civilian and even some military dissent, the civilian warlords and Zionist officials blatantly fabricated a series of pretexts to justify an unprovoked war against the secular nationalist regime in Iraq, the most advanced of all Arab countries. Europe was divided over the war. Countries in Asia and Latin America joined Germany and France in refusing to support the invasion. The United Kingdom, under a ‘Labor’ government, eagerly joined forces with the US hoping to regain some of its former colonial holdings in the Gulf.
At home, hundreds of billions of tax dollars were diverted from social programs to fund a vast army of police state operatives. The ideologues of war and the legal eagles for torture and the police state shifted into high gear. Those who opposed the wars were identified, monitored and the details of their lives were ‘filed away’ in a vast database. Soon millions came to be labeled as ‘persons of interest’ if they were connected in any way to anyone who was ‘suspect’, i.e. opposed to the ‘Global War on Terror’. Eventually even more tenuous links were made to everyone… family members, classmates and employers.
Over 1.5 million ‘security cleared’ monitors were contracted by the government to spy on hundreds of millions of citizens. The spy state spread domestically and internationally. For a global empire, based on a unipolar state, the best defense was judged to be a massive global surveillance apparatus operating independently of any other government – including the closest allies.
The slogan, ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) became an open-ended formula for the civilian warlords, militarists and Zionists to expand the scope and duration of overt and covert warfare and espionage. ‘Homeland Security’ departments, operating at both the Federal and State levels, were consolidated and expanded with massive budgets for incarceration and repression. Constitutional protections and the Writ of Habeas Corpus were ‘rendered quaint vestiges of history’. The National Security Agency doubled its personnel and budget with a mandate to distrust and monitor allies and vassal states. The targets piled upon targets, far beyond traditional adversaries, sweeping up the public and private communications of all political, military and economic leaders, institutions, and citizenry.
The ‘Global War on Terror’ provided the ideological framework for a police state based on the totalitarian conception that ‘everybody and everything is connected to each other’ in a ‘global system’ threatening the state. This ‘totalistic view’ informs the logic of the expanded NSA, linking enemies, adversaries, competitors and allies. ‘Enemies’ were defined as anti-imperialist states or regimes with consistently critical independent foreign and domestic policies. ‘Adversaries’ occasionally sided with ‘enemies’, or tolerated policymakers who would not always conform to imperial policies. ‘Competitors’ supported the empire but had the capacity and opportunity to make lucrative trade deals with adversaries or enemies – Allies were states and leaders who generally supported imperial wars but might provide a forum condemning imperial war crimes (torture and drone attacks). In addition, allies could undermine US imperial market shares and accumulate favorable trade balances.
The logic of the NSA required spying on the allies to root out any links, trade, cultural or scientific relations with adversaries and enemies, which might have spillover consequences. The NSA feared that associations in one sphere might ‘overlap’ with adversaries operating in strategic policy areas and undermine ally loyalty to the empire.
The spy logic had a multiplier effect – who gets to ‘spy on the spies?’ The NSA might collaborate with overseas allied intelligence agencies and officials – but American spymasters would always question their reliability, their inclination to withhold vital information, the potential for shifting loyalties. ‘Do our allies spy on us? How do we know our own spies are not colluding with allied spies who might then be colluding with adversarial spies?’ This justified the establishment of a huge national vacuum cleaner to suck up all transactions and communications – justified by the notion that a wide net scooping up everything might catch that big fish!
The NSA regards all ‘threats to the unipolar empire’ as national security threats. No country or agency within or without the reach of the empire was excluded as a ‘potential threat’.
The ‘lead imperial state’ requires the most efficient and overarching spy technology with the furthest and deepest reach. Overseas allies appear relatively inefficient, vulnerable to infiltration, infected with the residue of a long-standing suspect ‘leftist culture’ and unable to confront the threat of new dangerous adversaries. The imperial logic regards surveillance of ‘allies’ as ‘protecting allied interests’ because the allies lack the will and capacity to deal with enemy infiltration.
There is a circular logic to the surveillance state. When an allied leader starts to question how imperial espionage protects allied interest, it is time to intensify spying on the ally. Any foreign ally who questions NSA surveillance over its citizens raises deep suspicions. Washington believes that questioning imperial surveillance undermines political loyalties.
Secret Police Spying as a “Process of Accumulation”
Like capitalism, which needs to constantly expand and accumulate capital, secret police bureaucracies require more spies to discover new areas, institutions and people to monitor. Leaders, followers, citizens, immigrants, members of ethnic, religious, civic and political groups and individuals – all are subject to surveillance. This requires vast armies of data managers and analysts, operatives, programmers, software developers and supervisors – an empire of ‘IT’. The ever-advancing technology needs an ever-expanding base of operation.
The spy- masters move from local to regional to global operations. Facing exposure and condemnation of its global chain of spying, the NSA calls for a new ‘defensive ideology’. To formulate the ideology, a small army of academic hacks is trotted out to announce the phony alternatives of a ‘unipolar police state or terror and chaos’. The public is presented with a fabricated choice of its perpetual, ‘well-managed and hi-tech’, imperial wars versus the fragmentation and collapse of the entire world into a global war of ‘all against all’. Academic ideologues studiously avoid mentioning that small wars by small powers end more quickly and have fewer casualties.
The ever-expanding technology of spying strengthens the police state. The list of targets is endless and bizarre. Nothing and no one will be missed!
As under capitalism, the growth of the spy state triggers crisis. With the inevitable rise of opposition, whistleblowers come forward to denounce the surveillance state. At its peak, spy-state over-reach leads to exposure, public scandals and threats from allies, competitors and adversaries. The rise of cyber-imperialism raises the specter of cyber-anti-imperialism. New conceptions of inter-state relations and global configurations are debated and considered. World public opinion increasingly rejects the ‘necessity’ of police states. Popular disgust and reason exposes the evil logic of the spy-state based on empire and promotes a plural world of peaceful rival countries, functioning under co-operative policies – systems without empire, without spymasters and spies.
What is the stunning similarity between the Renisha McBride story and that of Miriam Carey? What justifies prosecution in the former and complete silence in the latter? You might be surprised just how obvious this hypocrisy is. And no, it’s not about race.
Manslaughter? Involuntary manslaughter? Any of those would do if in fact the gun he was holding went off by accident. Murder in the 2nd degree is also a possibility in that it is not premeditated and there is nothing to suggest he was planning on having Renisha show up at his home so he could kill her.
The fact is, Wafer shot her through a closed and locked screen door according to his own statement. Unlike the Trayvon Martin case, Renisha wasn’t assaulting him and there is nothing at this point to indicate she posed a threat to his life.
As far as the reports go to this point, Wafer only attempted to call the police after the shooting. That fact in itself is reason enough to suggest Mr. Wafer handled the situation badly and must therefore answer for the actions that took place afterward resulting in the death of Renisha McBride.
You don’t have a right to take a life simply because someone is drunk and beating on your door at 4 in the morning. You might want to, but you don’t get to. We have laws in this country which we “little people” have to abide by.
Had Wafer simply called the cops and waited for them to show up, Renisha would have been arrested for being intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident as well as a DUI … but she would be alive to pick up the pieces of her life and move on. As it turns out, because of the actions of Theodore Wafer, her parents are now faced with that task while Renisha lies covered in a premature grave.
Miriam Carey was the 35 year-old mother of one who was shot and killed by Capitol Police and the Secret Service after she made a wrong turn into an access road at the White House and immediately turned around to leave. That’s the official story.
She was chased by Secret Service from the scene in broad daylight down Pennsylvania Ave. and she ended up being surrounded and subsequently executed… while unarmed… with her 14 month-old child watching a few feet away.
Miriam was shot multiple times.
The police as well as the Secret Service violated their SOP by firing at her car on a busy city street while she was simply trying to flee the area.
Whenever the MSM have to report on this case (and it is extremely rare at this point) they always make the claim that she tried to “ram the gates” at the White House in order to gain entry.
That simply didn’t happen.
It didn’t happen according to the one eyewitness at that location and it didn’t happen according to the police report and the official story. But that doesn’t stop the press from using that lie to justify the shooting.
According to both the eyewitness and the police report, Miriam was attempting to leave the grounds of the White House when a Secret Service agent placed a barricade, a portable bike-rack, in front of her car. That is an important distinction.
She pushed through that bike-rack with her vehicle and the Secret Service agent jumped up on her hood to stop her. She sped off once clear of the others causing the agent to fall off her vehicle.
The point is, she was only viewed trying to leave the grounds and the “ramming” she did, was an effort to accomplish that goal, not as the the press would have you believe, to gain access to the grounds.
Now let’s go back to the Renisha McBride story.
What if Renisha had knocked on Wafer’s door, realized she was at the wrong house (her house was on a corner as well) and as she tried to leave, Wafer came out, grabbed her, pointed weapons at her and told her she couldn’t?
What if Renisha had “rammed through” his barricade (porch chairs) and made it out onto the street running away as fast as she could and Wafer had opened fire on her multiple times giving chase?
What if Wafer had caught up with Renisha 10 blocks away and gunned her down while she begged for mercy?
Would there be any question as to his guilt? Would there even be a need for a trial? Of course not. That’s murder in the first, by the way.
But essentially, as ridiculous as my hypothetical “what if” story is, that is EXACTLY what happened to Miriam Carey.
Carey wasn’t trying to gain access to the White House, where-as it can be argued that Renisha was doing just that at Theodore Wafer’s residence.
Carey was no longer on the president’s property, where-as Renisha was still on Wafer’s front porch when she was tragically killed.
And though it only pertains to the story by way of estimating their state of mind, Carey was sober as a judge when she died, where-as Renisha had more than double the legal limit of intoxicants in her system (alcohol and pot)
In the case of the Secret Service, they fired at Miriam at multiple locations with the intention to kill her and in the case of Renisha, one shot was fired and it may turn out it was by accident (still doesn’t absolve Wafer from responsibility or prosecution in my opinion)
In Washington, at the White House, the Secret Service reserves the right to use deadly force in order to prevent unwarranted access to the president’s home.
Ultimately that’s the justification given for the execution of Miriam Carey. That she attempted to “ram the gates” at the White House and gain entry to the building. And she died for it, according to the official story.
But of course, none of that is true.
Not a word from the like of Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson on behalf of Miriam Carey is to be found.
When viewed in these terms, the stories are remarkably similar and yet the end results in terms of moral outrage from the press and the community are vastly different.
Why is it that Renisha has posters and Twitter feeds and marches while Miriam lays unavenged in her premature grave as well?
You have to be the judge of that.
Should Theodore Wafer be prosecuted? Yes, he should.
Should the Secret Service be investigated for the extra-judicial murder of Miriam Carey? Should there be a real, independent investigation into what really happened that afternoon at the White House?
Renisha wasn’t armed and neither was Miriam. There is no indication that either had malice on their minds when they made their respective geographical mistakes.
So why scream outrage over the one while ignoring the other?
Concerns about human rights records in China and Russia are highlighted on a regular basis in western media. One cannot argue much with the fact that they have both struggled in this area.
The US, however, is not well placed to criticize or sermonize. Severe human rights violations are rampant in the US prison system. According to Pew Research, imprisonment rate (per capita) in the US is almost 50 percent higher than Russia’s and 320 percent higher than China’s.
The racist and arbitrary application of the death penalty is on historic record. African Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated than a white person and non-white Latinos are almost three times more likely to be incarcerated, says the Pew Center.
America’s privatized health care system exclusively for the wealthy is an equal disgrace.
While critiquing China and Russia, the US has supported and is supporting some of the worst human rights violators in the world: Saudi-Arabia and Uzbekistan to name but a few. It has and is supporting the overthrow of democratically elected leaders all over the world. And, then there is Guantanamo and the drone attacks.
What’s noteworthy is that the US has not objected to other notorious human rights violators becoming members of the UN Human Rights Commission in the past.
Among the rights bodies, the US-based HRW (Human Rights Watch) has called the election “troubling” calling the new entrants ‘negative players”. I think, HRW has done outstanding work in some countries and written pro-US, biased reports in others.
Incidentally, Ms. Power, the US delegate to the UN HR Commission, had also written a eulogy for Richard Holbrooke, the man who made a career out of covering up US supported massacres in East-Timor and elsewhere and highlighting massacres by official US enemies.
She works in the same vein, much ado about human rights abuses by official enemies, apologetic about US and US-sponsored atrocities.
Being selective about human rights violations does not make the world a better place; it makes matters worse, since it sends out a clear message to the tyrants of the world. “Be on our side and do whatever you please, as long you take care of our interests, otherwise you are toast … “.
However, it would be unfair to point fingers to the US exclusively. The US is indeed not alone with its “selective indignation”.
France, UK, any EU-member state, China, Russia, Israel, they are all faithful followers of the same doctrine that divides human rights atrocities in three technical categories:
1) Human rights abuses (real ones and invented ones) committed by our official enemies: they are ‘human rights abuses’.
2) Human rights abuses committed by ourselves, our allies, our friends: they are retaliation, surgical strikes, slightly excessive responses, tactical mistakes based on incomplete information, lack of democratic culture (ours), our enemies placing their children at military target sites, etc etc … the list of excuses is endless. After all, we are ‘the good guys’.
3) Human rights abuses committed somewhere by someone where we have no interests, where we do not care, they are relegated to small print on the back pages, ‘violent clashes’, ‘a culture of internecine violence‘, … or ignored completely.
I am not inventing anything here. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky analyzed the political instrumentalisation of human rights already in 1979 in their seminal books ‘The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I. The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism and Volume II. Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology. Their case studies may be somewhat outdated, but their analysis still applies today.
It comes down to this. Our terrorism is not ‘terrorism’. Their terrorism is ‘terrorism’. We may from time to time make mistakes, judgment errors, exaggerate, but our intentions are always good, by imperial definition.
The reaction of the US to the Russian and Chinese accession to the UN HR Commission fits perfectly into that mold.
Is there a way out? Mass media not perpetuating this mythology but exposing it for the sham it is would be a start. Unfortunately and as much as it pains me to admit, today that is hardly the case.
Does this mean one should refrain from exposing human rights abuses? Certainly not. When doing so, just apply the same standards of judgment to all human rights abuses everywhere. That’s how you get credibility and real impact.
After the Aug. 21 chemical weapons incident in Syria, a number of senior U.S. intelligence analysts disagreed with the Obama administration’s rush to judgment blaming the Syrian government, but their dissent on this question of war or peace was concealed from the American people.
The administration kept the dissent secret by circumventing the normal intelligence process and issuing on Aug. 30 something called a “Government Assessment,” posted at the White House press office’s Web site and fingering the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad as the guilty party.
Normally, such an important issue – a possible U.S. military engagement – would be the focus of a National Intelligence Estimate, but that would also cite the disagreements expressed within the intelligence community. By avoiding an NIE, the Obama administration was able to keep the lid on how much dissent there was over the Assad-did-it conclusion.
Once the “Government Assessment” was issued, Secretary of State John Kerry was put forward to present the case for launching a military strike against Syria, an attack that was only averted because President Barack Obama abruptly decided to ask congressional approval and then reached a diplomatic agreement, with the help of the Russian government, in which the Syrian government agreed to dispose of its chemical weapons arsenal (while still denying that it was responsible for the Aug. 21 attack).
Although war was averted, the Obama administration’s deception of the American public – by pretending that there was a government-wide consensus regarding Syrian government guilt when there wasn’t – was reminiscent of the lies and distortions used by President George W. Bush to trick the nation into war with Iraq over bogus WMD claims in 2003.
The behavior of the rest of Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. news media also shows that little has changed from a decade ago. Obvious indications of a deception were ignored and the few voices who raised the alarm were treated with the same mocking contempt that greeted skeptics of Bush’s case for invading Iraq.
Writers for Consortiumnews.com were among the few in the American media who noted the glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s case, including its refusal to release any of its supposed proof to support its conclusions and the curious absence of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper from the public presentation of the administration’s casus belli.
The reason for keeping the DNI on the sidelines was that he otherwise might have been asked if there was a consensus in the intelligence community supporting the administration’s certitude that Assad’s regime was responsible. At that point, Clapper would have had to acknowledge the disagreement from rank-and-file analysts (or face the likelihood that they would speak out).
Inspectors’ Doubts
Similarly, it appears that on-the-ground inspectors for the United Nations had their own doubts about the Syrian government’s responsibility, especially since Assad’s regime had allowed a UN team into Damascus on Aug. 18 to investigate what the regime claimed was evidence of rebels using chemical weapons.
It never made sense to some of these inspectors that Assad – just three days later – would launch a chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus just a few miles from the hotel where the UN inspectors were staying. Assad would have known that the Aug. 21 incident would mean serious trouble for his government, very possibly drawing the U.S. military into the Syrian civil war on the side of the rebels.
The UN inspectors also failed to find Sarin or other chemical agents at one of the two sites that they subsequently examined near Damascus, and they inserted a qualification in their report about apparent tampering at the one area where Sarin was found.
However, instead of noting the many holes in the U.S. “Government Assessment” and the UN report, the mainstream U.S. news media simply joined the rush to judgment, hyping dubious claims from both U.S. government officials and non-governmental organizations favoring U.S. military intervention in Syria.
The New York Times and other major news outlets that swallowed Bush’s false claims about Iraq WMD a decade ago also began reporting Obama’s dubious assertions about Syria as flat fact, not as issues in serious dispute. As I wrote on Oct. 25, one typically credulous Times story accepted “as indisputable fact that the Syrian government was behind the Aug. 21 attack on a suburb of Damascus despite significant doubts among independent analysts, UN inspectors and, I’m told, U.S. intelligence analysts.”
New details of the rebellion among the intelligence analysts have just been reported by former CIA officer Philip Giraldi for the American Conservative magazine. According to Giraldi’s account, a “mass resignation of a significant number of analysts” was threatened if the Obama administration issued an NIE without acknowledging their dissent.
A “hurriedly updated” NIE had reflected the Syrian government’s suspected use of chemical weapons against rebels and civilians, “while conceding that there was no conclusive proof,” Giraldi wrote, adding:
“There was considerable dissent from even that equivocation, including by many analysts who felt that the evidence for a Syrian government role was subject to interpretation and possibly even fabricated. Some believed the complete absence of U.S. satellite intelligence on the extensive preparations that the government would have needed to make in order to mix its binary chemical system and deliver it on target was particularly disturbing.
“These concerns were reinforced by subsequent UN reports suggesting that the rebels might have access to their own chemical weapons. The White House, meanwhile, considered the somewhat ambiguous conclusion of the NIE to be unsatisfactory, resulting in considerable push-back against the senior analysts who had authored the report.”
Demands from Above
When Obama’s National Security Council demanded more corroborative evidence to establish Syrian government guilt, “Israel obligingly provided what was reported to be interceptions of telephone conversations implicating the Syrian army in the attack, but it was widely believed that the information might have been fabricated by Tel Aviv, meaning that bad intelligence was being used to confirm other suspect information, a phenomenon known to analysts as ‘circular reporting,’” Giraldi wrote.
“Other intelligence cited in passing by the White House on the trajectories and telemetry of rockets that may have been used in the attack was also somewhat conjectural and involved weapons that were not, in fact, in the Syrian arsenal, suggesting that they were actually fired by the rebels.
“Also, traces of Sarin were not found in most of the areas being investigated, nor on one of the two rockets identified. Whether the victims of the attack suffered symptoms of Sarin was also disputed, and no autopsies were performed to confirm the presence of the chemical.
“With all evidence considered, the intelligence community found itself with numerous skeptics in the ranks, leading to sharp exchanges with the Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. A number of analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down.”
The Obama administration’s “solution” to this analyst revolt was to circumvent the normal intelligence process and issue a white paper that would be called a “Government Assessment,” declaring the Syrian government’s guilt as indisputable fact and leaving out the doubts of the intelligence community.
While this subterfuge may have satisfied the institutional concerns of the intelligence community – which didn’t want another Iraq-War-style violation of its procedural protocols on how NIEs are handled – it still left the American people vulnerable to a government deception on a question of war or peace.
Yes, there was no scene comparable to the positioning of CIA Director George Tenet behind Secretary of State Colin Powell as he delivered his deceptive Iraq War speech to the UN Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. Both Clapper and Brennan were absent from the administration’s testimony to Congress, leaving Secretary Kerry to do most of the talking with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey bracketing Kerry as mostly silent wing men.
And, yes, one could argue that the Obama administration’s hyping of its case against the Assad regime had a happy ending, the Syrian government’s agreement to eliminate its entire CW arsenal. Indeed, most of the grousing about the Syrian outcome has come from neocons who wanted to ride the rush to judgment all the way to another regime-changing war.
Dogs Not Barking
But Americans should be alarmed that a decade after they were deceived into a disastrous war in Iraq based on bogus intelligence – and the complete breakdown of Official Washington’s checks and balances – a very similar process could unfold that brought the country to the brink of another war.
Besides the disturbing fact that the Obama administration refused to release any actual evidence to support its case for war, there was the gullibility (or complicity) of leading news outlets in failing to show even a modicum of skepticism.
The New York Times and other major news organizations failed to note the dogs not barking. Why, for instance, was there no NIE? Why were the U.S. government’s top intelligence officials absent from public presentations of what amounted to an intelligence issue? It shouldn’t have required a Sherlock Holmes to sniff out the silenced intelligence analysts.
When a government leader refuses to reveal any of his supposed proof for a claim and conceals the professionals who don’t agree with his claim, any reasonably savvy person should draw the conclusion that the government leader doesn’t really have a case.
Though some Americans may cite the work of a few Web sites, like our own Consortiumnews.com, as having challenged the misguided conventional wisdom on Syria as we also did on Iraq, they should not draw too much comfort from this. After all, our readership is tiny when compared to the many sources of misinformation being disseminated to the broad American public.
The dangerous reality is that the United States remains vulnerable to the kinds of stampedes in judgment that can end up crushing people around the world.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Since the formation of Israel and even before that, Tel Aviv has always resorted to lobbying to pursue its illegitimate objectives, including efforts to earn recognition for its so-called government.
Israel’s most active lobby is in the US, but it is also highly active in European countries such as Britain, Germany, France and even Italy and Spain.
This article seeks to discuss the influence of the Zionist lobby and France-Israel ties.
After a book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt about the influence of the Israeli lobby on US foreign policy was published in 2007, French daily Le Monde published an article in October that year describing the Zionist lobby in France as a non-transparent and deceitful group. From that point, the issue of the Zionist lobby in France and its influence on the country’s foreign and domestic policy has been taken into consideration.
The Zionist lobby in France has extensive influence in three areas: A: Media and their affiliate companies, including Eutelsat; B: Political parties who receive campaign funding and media sponsorship from the Zionist lobby; C: Oil and arms companies.
The history of Zionist lobby in France
The Zionist movement led by Joseph Fisher started its activities in France between the first and second World Wars. Later in 1949, Fisher became Israel’s ambassador to Belgium. France had incurred heavy losses during World War II and that laid the groundwork for the presence of affluent Jews in different economic, social, judicial, cultural, religious and political arenas of the country.
At present, there are over 100 Jewish organizations and societies in France and all of the active Israeli parties have offices in Paris. In 1977, different Jewish groups in France merged and formed the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (Le Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF)).
The group is tasked with pursuing the interests of Israel inside France and its foreign policy. The group which owns a myriad of newspapers, magazines, TV networks and satellite service providers, has extensive influence in France’s political and legal bodies. Moreover, the Zionist lobby has a lot of lucrative businesses and financial institutions under its control.
The Zionist lobby in Israel has also formed certain groups for defaming, suing and even bringing to trial the individuals and groups which do not assert Israel’s interests. The French Union of Jewish students, the union of Jewish merchants in France, the SOS Racisme (established by the French Socialist Party to curry favor with Israel), the Organization of Lawyers without Borders France and the Anti-Defamation League are some examples.
French parties and the Zionist lobby
In domestic politics, some of the political parties are in competition with each other to forge friendly ties with Israel due to their need of pro-Israeli funds for victory in elections.
One of the examples of the Zionist Lobby’s sway in France is the naming of one the key roundabouts in Paris as David Ben-Gurion by the council of the city, which is comprised of rightist and socialist parties. Interestingly, the socialist mayor of Paris performed the ceremony with Shimon Peres.
Moreover, there are other Parisian squares named after the Zionist leaders such as Theodor Herzl and Yitzhak Rabin.
In 2012, around 112 French lawmakers, both rightists and leftists, held a festival in support of Israel. The move was aimed at opposing Palestine’s UN membership. The French parliamentarians stood up singing Israel’s national anthem.
The influence of the Zionist lobby in France reaches its peak during the election campaign in the country where each candidate competes with the others to ingratiate itself with Israel.
Among the French parties, the Socialist party has the closest ties with Israel and it adjusts most of its work plans, particularly vis-à-vis foreign policy, with the officials in Tel Aviv. The recent stance of Socialist French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius regarding the nuclear talks with Iran was aligned with his illogical compliance with Tel Aviv’s policies towards Tehran.
Israel-France intelligence and security cooperation
Apart from the poisoning of Yaser Arafat, the former president of the Palestinian National Authority, and his hospitalization at a military hospital in Paris — which was a sort of French-Israeli intelligence and security coordination – the history of Paris-Tel Aviv ties is fraught with such cooperation.
From the outset of the fake Israeli regime, the French government authorized its intelligence apparatus to cooperate with the Mossad elements in assassinations of Arab and Palestinian fighters.
In 1965, under the presidency of Charles De Gaulle, Mossad abducted Mehdi Ben Barka, an opponent to King Hassan II, in cooperation with the French intelligence service. In 1972, Mossad killed Palestine Liberation Organization’s Representative to Paris, Mahmoud Al-Hamshri in cooperation with French intelligence elements.
Moreover, in the judiciary section, the French government has always acted in accordance with the interests of the Zionist lobby, the trial of Roger Garaudy, the writer of The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, being an example.
Most of the world media are under the Zionist lobby’s sway and, using this powerful tool, they have managed to control world public opinion. That’s why when a media outlet moves in the path of actually informing the public, they spare no effort to prevent its activities.
The Zionist lobby in France puts pressure on the companies which provide services to the anti-Zionist satellite networks. The pressures by the Zionist lobby on the French Satellite service provider Eutelsat to stop the broadcasting of al-Manar, al-Alam, Press TV, Sahar and other networks is another example of such media sway.
Generally speaking, the Zionist lobby in France is enormously powerful in different spheres, despite its unpopularity among the French public. It has tried hard to portray Israelis as oppressed people. However, given the growth in public awareness, the information revolution and expansion of information dissemination tools, Zionism can no longer dominate public opinion.
The domineering and greedy nature of the Zionist regime and the futility of its claims about its opponents are being unmasked on a daily basis. This will lead to mounting pressure of public opinion’s pressure on the politicians. Nonetheless, for the time being, the majority of French politicians need the money and economic leverage of the Zionist lobby for the achievement of their objectives and the French media have to keep silent in order to survive and avoid the anti-Semitism tag.
In other words, at present France is under the domination of Zionists and their supporters, but the French public is gradually becoming aware of the fact.
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Tahmineh Bakhtiari is an Iranian journalist and an expert on the Middle East and Latin America. Her writings have appeared in many print and online journals and newspapers including The Khorassan Daily, Jam-e Jam, Jomhuri Islami and Aftrab-e Yazd. Her book ‘The Genealogy of Zionism’ was published in 2001. Bakhtiari has a master’s degree in international relations.
Over the weekend, the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, published a piece investigating the Times’ thirteen month delay in the publication of a bombshell report on the Bush Administration’s domestic mass surveillance program back in 2004 and 2005. Sullivan’s revisitation of the issue in light of what we’ve learned since this summer about the NSA was a great public service.
We now know that the government lied to the New York Times about the legality of its spying to delay the publication of the story that would eventually win the Pulitzer Prize, hiding a tremendous fight inside the government about the legality of the spying. The report also contains an important new admission from former NSA chief—and its current public booster—General Michael Hayden, that “he can’t prove any harm to national security from the publication of the eavesdropping stories — then or now.” We hope Mr. Hayden will now revise the many hyperbolic statements he has made to the contrary.
Yet as the folks who, along with the ACLU, have been leading the lawsuits against NSA spying since early 2006, we need to point out a big problem with the New York Times’ characterization of the current mass spying.
The piece quotes Eric Lichtblau as saying that, as a result of the revelations, Congress made “all this stuff” legal, then adds: “There may be public outrage over the latest wave of surveillance revelations, but the government has a helpful defense: Hey, it’s legal.”
Not so. The government’s claims of “legality” are wrong, have been strongly criticized by national security law professors, and are currently being challenged in court by EFF, ACLU, and EPIC, among others. The Times dis-serves its audience by repeating them as if they were true.
In fact, the ACLU has a hearing in New York on Friday, November 22, in its key challenge to one of those “legal” claims: that the NSA’s indiscriminately collecting telephone records is “legal” under a convoluted interpretation of the section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act that mentions neither telephone records nor the NSA. To try to make it fit, the government attempts to redefine the limits on production of “relevant” things to allow the collection of massive amounts of “irrelevant” information. In other words, by a plain reading of the statute, what the NSA is currently doing in collecting massive amounts of telephone records on an ongoing basis is not legal.
And that’s not even addressing the Fourth Amendment problems with mass, suspicionless seizure of records of our calls with doctors, business associates, churches, friends and lovers, records that can create an extremely intimate portrait of our lives and political activities. The government’s claim that the Fourth Amendment is not triggered by the ongoing collection of this sensitive information in an untargeted mass is far from settled.
The Fourth Amendment isn’t even the only amendment the NSA is violating. EFF focused on the First Amendment in our motion for partial summary judgment against the mass telephone records collection program we filed in California last Wednesday. The motion features declarations from 22 associations, from the California Gun Owners to Patient Privacy Rights to People for the American Way to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, attesting to the First Amendment chilling effect from the collection of telephone records.
Also not “legal” is the mass collection of communications, including content, that the government claims is justified by section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. That’s the law Lichtblau references, passed in 2008 after the Times revelations. Section 702 also doesn’t say that mass, untargeted surveillance of Americans is allowed. To the contrary, 702 expressly forbids the government from intentionally acquiring any communications that are purely domestic. The NSA’s “upstream” access, tapping into the domestic fiber optic cables of AT&T and other carriers that carry the content of our emails, web searches, social networking posts and many of our phone calls, plainly violates section 702 and also violates the Constitution. EFF will be presenting these arguments before an open, adversarial public federal court starting in the spring.
These points were made well by former EFF attorney Jennifer Granick of Stanford and Professor Christopher Sprigman of the University of Virgnia in a piece in the Times in June, so it’s surprising that the Times simply repeated the government’s conclusions without question.
In short, nowhere in federal law, before or after the Times story in 2005, has Congress ever openly authorized the mass spying on Americans that is taking place. EFF is still fighting to force the release of the key FISA Court rulings, so we don’t know the specifics, but the fact that the government has convinced the secret, non-adversarial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to sign off, apparently based on contorted statutory interpretation, doesn’t change that. These questions need to be presented in the public courts where rule of law and due process rules are clear.
The piece admits that the Times was taken in by claims of “legality” in 2004. It shouldn’t get fooled again by government claims of “legality” of mass surveillance.
In a new piece over at Al-Monitor, Iranian-born Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar commends the blocking of a preliminary nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius over the issue of Iran’s continuing construction of the Qatran Complex, a heavy water facility near Arak, a city southwest of Tehran.
When Mr. Javedanfar, writing clearly about the IR-40 reactor and not the production plant, claims that “the Iranian regime has not allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the site since 2011” and that the “IAEA has since had to rely on satellite images to assess developments regarding the site,” he is simply wrong. That he then states that this “reinforces concern and urgency” demonstrates a distinct lack of clarity on his part as to what risks actually exist or do not exist.
Here’s why:
What Mr. Javedanfar is actually referring to (though he doesn’t seem to know it) is the production plant at Arak, not the reactor. Iran voluntarily allowed IAEA access to the production plant in 2011. According to the most recent safeguards report, the Arak reactor however was visited by IAEA monitors on August 7, 2013. Another report will be issued soon, which means inspectors have also been there since.
The reactor, which Mr. Javedanfar never mentions is not operational and may not be for another year, is not in itself a proliferation risk. Plutonium is produced as a byproduct of running the reactor, and must be separated out from irradiated fuel and reprocessed to weapons-grade material before it poses any actual danger.
Still, Mr. Javedanfar writes that the “Arak heavy water reactor… could produce plutonium to make a bomb while the talks continue,” which is misleading and wholly speculative at best, intimating as he does that once the Arak reactor is switched on, weapons-grade plutonium pops out.
First, talks are not expected to continue for years to come. With the reactor not yet up and running (it’s projected to come online in mid-2014, but will most likely be delayed as it has in the past), the timeframe on Arak is an important factor in determining the potential (and, at this stage, totally hypothetical) risk it poses.
As Daryl G. Kimball and Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Associationexplained this past summer:
[T]he reactor at Arak would need to be operational for perhaps up to a year before the plutonium could be extracted. Even then, Iran does not have a reprocessing facility for separating the plutonium to produce weapons-usable material, having revised its declaration to the IAEA regarding the Arak site in 2004. The revision eliminated plans for a reprocessing facility at the site. Tehran maintains that it does not intend to build a plant to separate plutonium from the irradiated fuel that the reactor will produce.
By this measure, taken with Mr. Javedanfar’s claim, talks would need to continue without progress for at least another year and half, perhaps two years, for Iran to even begin extracting plutonium from spent fuel. That’s mid-2015 at the earliest.
Plus, Iran can’t even reprocess that extracted plutonium into weapons-grade material because it doesn’t have the facilities to do so.
This past weekend, Kimball toldThe Guardian that, if anything, “Arak represents a long-term proliferation risk not a near-term risk and it can be addressed in the final phase of negotiations,” adding, “France and the other… powers would be making a mistake if they hold up an interim deal that addresses more urgent proliferation risks over the final arrangements regarding Arak.”
Yet Mr. Javedanfar calls the blocking of a preliminary deal by the French “fair and logical.”
That, it would appear, is the real risk for Israel and its analysts.
*****
UPDATE:
Following a meeting in Tehran between IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano and President of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi, it was agreed that Iran would provide “relevant information and managed access to the Heavy Water Production Plant” at Arak.
This is a voluntary, confidence-building measure taken by Iran in an effort “to strengthen their cooperation and dialogue aimed at ensuring the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme through the resolution of all outstanding issues that have not already been resolved by the IAEA.”
The New York Times’ editorial board has made a disappointing endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), even as the actual text of the agreement remains secret. That raises two distressing possibilities: either in an act of extraordinary subservience, the Times has endorsed an agreement that neither the public nor its editors have the ability to read. Or, in an act of extraordinary cowardice, it has obtained a copy of the secret text and hasn’t yet fulfilled its duty to the public interest to publish it.
Without a publicly available agreement, readers are forced into the uncomfortable position of taking official government statements at face value. That’s reflected in the endorsement, which fails to note the myriad ways in which TPP has been negotiated undemocratically, shutting out public oversight while permitting corporate interests to drive the agenda. Given these glaring issues, it is disconcerting that the Times would take such a supportive stance on an agreement that is likely to threaten innovation and users’ digital rights well into the 21st century.
That situation leaves unanswered questions. Does the editorial board, for example, support the TPP provisions that would give private corporations new tools to undermine national sovereignty and democratic processes? Because “investor-state dispute settlement,” slated for inclusion in both the TPP and the EU-US trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), would give multinational companies the power to sue countries over laws that might cut into expected future profits. This could allow corporations to unravel any policy designed to protect users against violations of their right to privacy or free speech online. The paper’s endorsement notes that copyright enforcement could be expanded to suit legacy media companies, but provides no explanation of why a trade agreement is an acceptable venue for deciding such issues.
Does the New York Times also endorse an initiative to scrap democratic oversight of TPP by elected lawmakers? After all, Senate Finance committee leaders, Sen. Max Baucus and Sen. Orrin Hatch have renewed their call to pass fast-track, which would hand over Congress’ constitutional mandate over US trade policy to the Obama administration. Fast-track, also known as Trade Promotion Authority, would restrict lawmakers from having any proper hearings on its provisions, limiting them to an up-or-down vote on the entire 29 chapter treaty.
The paper’s statement emphasizes how the Obama administration strives to make TPP’s policies “an example for the rest of the world to follow.” But if that’s the case, then it’s all the more important that the agreement be published immediately. Such a significant body of international law regulating digital policy must not be negotiated without proper, informed public debate. The secrecy of the process itself ensures that only some private interests will be represented at the expense of others. In addition, the U.S. Trade Representative’s history of pushing forth extreme copyright enforcement policies through other trade agreements gives little assurance that users’ rights will be considered in the TPP.
Trade representatives are working to finalize TPP negotiations by the end of the year. Negotiators are scheduled to meet in Salt Lake City next week to negotiate outstanding issues in this agreement, including provisions on liability for Internet Service Providers and anti-circumvention measures over DRM. Following that, trade delegates are seeking to finalize and sign this agreement in December in a ministerial meeting in Singapore.
It’s unfortunate that news outlets are giving little coverage to TPP, when media attention could have a major impact on how the US and the other 11 nations draft digital policy. But public media coverage is precisely the sort of accountability that official secrecy thwarts. Instead of endorsing an agreement the public can’t read, a responsible paper would condemn the secrecy involved. And if the Times has seen the text and knows what’s contained in the TPP, then they have a responsibility to publish the text immediately and expose the US government’s back room dealings.
In either case, it is deeply disappointing that the New York Times would even support the TPP when the public remains in the dark. An endorsement of TPP at this stage is an endorsement of opaque, corporate-driven policymaking.
~
We need to demand that our lawmakers oppose fast track, ask them to call for a hearing, and exercise their authority to oversee the U.S. trade office’s secret copyright agenda.
Seventy percent of voters paticipating in a new ICM poll for The Telegraph believe the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) exclusive right to the television licence fee should be cut or scrapped.
According to the poll, 21 percent of voters believe the BBC must face a cut in the amount it receives or have to share with other broadcasters while about 50 percent said the charge should be scrapped entirely.
Only 10 percent of the voters say they want to see the fee increase in the BBC’s Charter in 2016.
Chairman of the Commons media select committee John Whittingdale said the poll shows “considerable public dissatisfaction” with the current system of funding.
He added that there was a strong case for allowing other broadcasters to compete for licence fee funding to put an end on the BBC’s “monopoly”.
According to earlier reports, British ministers are willing to consider licence fee reforms if the BBC fails to undertake changes in the wake of a series of scandals hitting the corporation.
Earlier last week, the Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps said the corporation needs to tackle a culture of “secrecy” following the Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall scandals as well as disclosures about pay-offs to senior executives.
The licence fee, which is currently frozen at £145.50 annually, brings the broadcaster some £3.6 billion in revenue.
Russia’s allegations that the US funded clandestine biological laboratories near its borders – claims denied until recently by Washington – have remained a persistent flashpoint in the steadily deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West for nearly a decade.
The biolabs affair was revealed in a 2017 exposé by RT that questioned a shady US military tender seeking the genetic material of living Russians. Over the years, Moscow has raised allegations against Washington of conducting clandestine bio-research, including potential WMD development and illicit human testing, in a network of labs located across multiple nations, the bulk of which operated in Ukraine. The claims were met with a blanket denial in the West, which repeatedly dismissed them as “Russian propaganda.”
This abruptly changed the past week when US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that her department had identified more than 120 US-funded biological laboratories in 30 countries, with over a third of them located in Ukraine. The agency is now working to “identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what ‘research’ is being conducted to end dangerous gain-of-function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and the world,” according to Gabbard.
RT looks back at the timeline of the biolabs saga and the US denial of its existence until now. … continue
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