Trumping the New World Order
By Gearóid Ó Colmáin | November 9, 2016
The Trump victory is a blow to liberalism, political correctness and human rights ideology. It is a revolt, albeit limited, against globalisation and therefore a momentary victory for truly progressive forces. Today in Damascus there is at least the hope that the US might wind down its terrorist operations against the Syrian people. Today in Moscow, there is at least a pause in the anxiety of Russians who feared they were going to have to face another Great Patriotic War against Western reaction. Today in Europe, the liberal, child-raping, mass-murdering, lying scumbag establishment are uncomfortable – more so than ever before.
The French media are calling the Trump victory a ‘nightmare’ and a ‘catastrophe’. We who have stood up for the downtrodden workers of this world have long sought to turn the nightmare they have imposed on us back on them. Now, everything depends on how the national democratic movement in the US is turned into the cause of labour against capital. American labour should demand pay rises and an end to ‘free trade’. There will be no more turn-coat Bernie Sanders, no more liberal ‘anti-imperialists’, no more Wall Street ‘democrats’.
A victory for Muslims
Muslims should rejoice at a Trump victory for the Saudis banked on Clinton and lost and the Saudis are the enemies of all Muslims. Trump is unlikely to push for war on Iran. But the United States remains an empire, an extremely predatory war machine. Trump must be pushed in the direction working class people need him to go. He has said he wants to get rid of ‘foreign lobbies’ influencing US policy. It is time to talk about those foreign lobbies – especially the lobby of the Zionist regime. Muslims in the United States should seek to educate Trumpists on the real causes of the wars in the Middle East. They need to understand that Iran and Syria are not enemies of the United States and that the US government should abandon Zionism.
A victory for Blacks
Black people in the United States should be happy with the Trump victory. Black nationalists know that Trump does not care about them. But they also know that he will not impede their cause through espousal of pseudo anti-racism. Black liberation activists will now have allies against the racist, Soros-funded project of ‘Black Lives Matter’ – a programme designed to destroy the Black family through LGBT infiltration of the Black Liberation movement. The Trump victory presents a unique opportunity to expose the agenda of the people waging race war on America’s black proletariat. A halt on mass immigration into the United States will also benefit the Black lumpen proletariat and put it, through organised agitation, back on the ladder of social mobility which was deliberately sabotaged by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Trump will do nothing for Blacks but he has helped lift the weight of political correctness which has sabotaged Black liberation.
A victory for Latinos
American Latinos should also support regime change in Washington. A wall between Mexico and the United States will intensify the class struggle in both countries, to the advantage of workers. Although a wall opposing the entry of desperately poor Mexican families into the United States is undoubtedly cruel, it also hurts the oligarchs and in the long term, no change is possible without hurting them! If Trump were to follow through on the construction of the wall and his promises to end ‘democracy promotion’ in other countries, progressive forces in Latin America could re-organise and be in a better position than ever before to shake off the shackles of international finance capitalism. US isolationism and protectionism is good for Latin American liberation!
Deep state intrigue
As I pointed out before, the US electoral system is rigged and that the American deep state may have been in revolt against the rampant corruption of Washington. But there is also a possibility that senior and highly influential US imperial strategists within the Council on Foreign Relations, such as former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Bzrezinski and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, may have secretly wanted Trump to win. Kissinger has often spoken highly of Russian president Vladmir Putin and Dr. Bzrezinski recently published a paper entitled: ‘Towards a Global Realignment’ where he wrote of the necessity of ‘cooperation’ between the imperial powers. Could the Trump victory be part of a new ‘multi-polar’ marketing strategy of US-led global governance? It is something we cannot rule out. Although the revelations about the crimes of the Clinton dynasty by Wikileaks are most certainly true, the exact role of Julien Assange and his organisation in the global imperial system remains ambiguous.
Looking ahead
So, what can we expect from the new Trump administration? Very little, almost nothing. Everything will depend on how popular movements throughout the world exploit the weaknesses that have been exposed in US imperialism. The leaders of America’s minorities MUST reach out to the white proletarian Trumpists. The Trumpists MUST reach out to the Black Liberation movement, to people like Dr Randy Short, Ezili Danto, Irritated Genie, Dr Umar Johnson and others. Dr Randy Short, while pointing out Trump’s shortcomings, described the Republican as “what America needs” and “anti-globalisation”. Ezili Danto, a Haitian lawyer who has worked tirelessly to expose US imperialism against Haiti urged Americans to vote for Trump.
This election has, more than any other, separated genuine anti-imperialists with a strategic and dialectical analysis from the petty-bourgeois, White, urban, ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-fascist’ mob. The Chomskyites, Trotskyites and anarchists have been trumped! Grass-roots community leaders against the values of globalisation from all ethnic backgrounds must unite against the oligarchs. They need to constantly remind Trump of the necessity of turning the Republican Party into a Workers Party. All of the most nefarious conspiracies against honest labour have been dealt a blow by this result from the global warming scam to the reactionary and racist LGBT to endless foreign wars in the name of ‘human rights’.
My prediction is that Trump will not willingly deliver on any of his promises however a space has been opened for class emancipation; a section of the US proletariat has given the two fingers to the liberal imperialist elite. That is something to be happy about. But watch how the Sorosite oligarchs respond. There will be ‘race riots’ and storms of great magnitude. The Saudi-Israeli backed ‘Islamic State’ will strike. There are violent reactionaries operating at the heart of Trumpism too – far too many! A Sorosite onslaught of race riots and terrorism will be grist to their reactionary mill. That is why Trumpism must become a stepping stone towards a popular front against monopoly capitalism. But we should not overlook the fact that Trump still represents ruling class interests and had considerable support from sections of the oligarchy, such as Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelson.
The Trump victory is, notwithstanding all these problems, good news. There was an applause in the Russian State Duma after the election of Trump. That is an unprecedented development in international relations, which will create a major move for detente between the imperial powers and peace in Syria. There is reason to harbour cautious hope for the new year while not losing sight of the fact that only mass popular movements will bring real change to the world. Conditions today are better than yesterday for the emergence of those movements.
November 9, 2016 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Respecting “Rules of War” in Societal Battles: Science, Sex and Hate Speech
By Denis Rancourt | Dissident Voice | November 8, 2016
Summary: I argue that in the many societal battles that serve to repair continually arising unjust features of the societal hierarchy, individuals must respect two fundamental “rules of war”: (1) Not to violate the natural right of individual self-determination (control over one’s body and mind) and (2) not to violate the natural right of individual free expression (control over one’s expression and attempts to have societal influence by expression). This centrally includes not allowing the state and its institutions to violate the said rights. My main example is drawn from the current society-wide battle around sexual identity and the language of sexual identity.
In a recent TV-Ontario debate1, Dr. Nicholas Matte of the University of Toronto emphatically stated: “Cis normativity is basically that everyone assumes that there is male and female […] It’s not my view, I just know that for over 50 years scientists have shown that that’s not true.” The debate is one where the university is trying to suppress another professor’s right of free expression. In this case, the professor (Jordan Peterson) wants to express and debate on campus that he will not be forced to use gender-neutral pronouns.
Dr. Matte has not responded to my written request for clarification about the alleged scientific consensus that there is no male and female in the human species. I read Dr. Matte’s 2014 PhD thesis2 to seek clarification, and then I did my own examination of the scientific literature about sex differences in humans, including influential books and essays about the “fluidity” of sex and gender.
Leaving questions of self-identity aside, which are largely cultural, it appears that the idea that there is no binary male/female sex divide in humans is simply a vast overstatement of the fact that many other things also occur in the genital and metabolic physiology of a minority of individuals.
Irrespective of the genetic, metabolic, biological and environmental circumstances in which a minority of individuals cannot unambiguously be attributed with a physiological sex that is unambiguously either male or female, there is without a doubt a male/female binary in humans, across time (history) and space (locality), where the male or female sexes correspond to distinct sets or groupings of physiological differences.
Variability in the said physiological differences, and border uncertainty about which physiological attributes contribute to resolving sex, are not valid reasons to deny that there is a clear male/female bimodal distribution of a (variable) set of (variable) physiological attributes, fundamentally linked to natural reproduction.
That environmental factors — including culture and the violence or authoritativeness of the local social dominance hierarchy — affect both natural reproduction and the said set of sex-differentiating physiological attributes does nothing to invalidate the sex binary in human society.
Widespread male/female division is consistent with the reproductive function being distributed in the human species, or at least having the intrinsic possibility of being distributed. Such distribution across classes occurs and is hormonally driven, in societies and cultures in which the dominance hierarchy does not strictly interfere with reproduction in classes of individuals.
Likewise, admitting that, in a distant (dystopic?) future, social hierarchy could result in classes or large populations that are deprived of natural reproduction, or could result in dominance-hierarchy stress dramatically affecting biological expression of sex3, does nothing to invalidate the conclusion of the reality of a dominant male/female binary in present societies. Glimpses of that distant future are visible in present Western societies, such as the fertility problems related to delayed child-bearing, the economic and cultural pressures away from reproduction and family focus and towards models of individual liberation and institutional child-rearing, etc., but these glimpses do not allow one to extrapolate towards an imminent sexless society.
One cannot deny the societal battle for institutional and political territory between traditional “family value” folks and the folks who wish to thrive in a more societally engineered and politically correct “just” environment where natural reproduction and family economic organization take a second place to individual liberation free from criticism and worldview threats. However, denying the reality of the male/female binary does nothing to help anyone see more clearly in the said societal battle.
Individuals must have both self-determination and free expression rights. Despite all the legalistic hubris, these rights are not contradictory. Both self-determination and free expression are methods for shaping society in the inevitable battles that must occur. They are not “values”. Neither right should be suppressed as part of a machination intended to seek advantage, for a given side in a given battle.
All sides should recognize the two fundamental rights of self-determination and free expression as nonnegotiable and not in opposition, and as necessary for the constant adjustments and struggles in society. There needs to be this “rule of war”. Otherwise, both clarity and sanity are lost, and all players become more vulnerable to hierarchical oppression. There is no right not to be offended. There are natural rights of participation, self-determination, and free expression.
Attempting to deny opponents their fundamental right of self-determination (self-definition, body ownership, beliefs, and control over one’s entire person) or of free expression (not hierarchical power but individual free expression, motivated by a desire to influence society or simply to express whatever thought or emotion) is no way to have a decent and healthy societal conflict. In common language, such tactics of denying rights are “fucked up”. The said tactics are societally pathological and always serve those elements in society seeking steeper and broader hierarchical domination, even at the risk of approaching or increasing totalitarianism. The said tactics are both induced by and a positive feedback towards totalitarianism.
Individual expression of disapproval for personal choices or preferences or beliefs, however offensive or vehement, is not suppression of the individual right of self-determination. Only actual (institutional or mob) physical oppression is oppression. Apartheid and segregation laws are oppression. Economic barriers are oppression. Institutionalized exploitative class structures are oppression. Class targeting enforced by the “justice” system against personal consumer or other choices is oppression. Individual expression seeking influence is not oppression. Attempts to make unorthodox life choices are not oppression. Political organizing around common beliefs or desires is not oppression. Oppression occurs when a societal structure uses effective physical force (withdrawal of resources or freedoms) to obtain compliance against individual rights.
The “hate speech” screaming and criminalizing must stop. And the hysteric phobias about individual choices, beliefs, and politics, must be prevented from materializing into state suppression. Already materialized oppressive structures must be dismantled. Our “rules of war”, as individuals in the always changing society, must include both self-determination and free expression, and these rules must be protected beyond all else, as though we were protecting humanity itself. Otherwise, Western states show little restraint in violating these rights4.
To be specific, the exaggerations a la Matte are politically motivated. I think the new “justice warriors” are fighting for territory within academia. What better way than to represent oppressed groups? How dare anyone question the keepers of the new territories, given the enormous suffering that the appropriated victims have endured throughout history (The Holocaust Industry model is a proven method).5 Anyone who questions the new priests is a racist, sexist, etc. Political correctness, like “critical race theory”, is born from the new breed of academics who expressly use oppressed groups as their dominant raison d’être, rather than expressly allege “truth seeking”. Consequently, there is no place or utility for outside criticism. Resulting rampant and predictable intellectual insecurity among followers leads to shrill accusations of “hate”, in place of debate.
The campus battles have little to do with actually alleviating oppression of the lower classes, and much to do with the classic manoeuvres to gain professional status and disciplinal territory. Virtually all academics are service intellectuals that act as overseers, collaborators, and house negroes6,7. This includes the most strident institutional defenders of social justice, who train society’s social justice cadre. That cadre includes foundation-funded Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizations. In the words of Black Panther Elaine Brown, in speaking about BLM tactics: “This to me is a plantation mentality. It smacks of ‘master, if you would just treat me right’. And it has nothing to do with self-determination, empowerment and a sense of justice, or anything else.”8
Are Elaine Brown’s words hate speech? Would they be hate speech if spoken by a white academic? Is Elaine Brown racist? Would she be racist if she was white? We must all reject the harmful notion that state-enforced speech control is acceptable, and we must all reject state-condoned forceful violations against individual self-determination. The way forward is to organize and argue, without ever allowing the state to forcefully violate fundamental freedoms of our opponents or anyone.
If I had my way, no public washrooms would segregate the sexes, starting in schools. People should live together and not be segregated by the state. Agree or disagree but don’t ask the state to remove the rights of those who are different or have different opinions and seek societal influence.
- “Genders, Rights and Freedom of Speech”, The Agenda, TV-Ontario, 2016-10-26.
- Nicholas Matte, Historicizing Liberal American Transnormativities: Medicine, Media, Activism, 1960-1990. 2014 PhD thesis, University of Toronto.
- Stress from dominance hierarchy is the dominant determinant of individual health, and is known to cause large metabolic responses. See, for example: Robert M. Sapolsky, “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health”, Science, 29 Apr 2005: Vol. 308, Issue 5722, pp. 648-652. DOI: 10.1126/science.1106477
- One example for Canada is documented in this report: Denis G. Rancourt, “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, report for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016-02-01
- The exploitation of suffering to shut down criticism or to extract personal or institutional gain is a common machination among management classes. One example is authoritatively documented in Norman G. Finkelstein’s 2000 book: The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
- I defined “service intellectual” in my 2006 essay: “Gradual Change is not Progress”
- I describe the central role of collaborators in maintaining social dominance hierarchies in my 2013 book: Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism
- ‘Black Lives Matter has a plantation mentality’ — Black Panther Elaine Brown on the degradation of black liberation. Tom Slater, Deputy Editor. Spiked: 2016-10-19.
Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009.
November 9, 2016 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Canada, University of Toronto | Leave a comment
The Neocon-Liberal alliance: Clinton coalition that could trigger WWIII
By Neil Clark | RT | November 8, 2016
The 2016 US Presidential election has seen a coming together of hard-core Bush-era neocons and the anti-Bush liberal-left in support of the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The unofficial coalition, which looks likely to help propel the Democratic nominee to the White House (if the polls are to believed), will have surprised many, but it’s not the first time self-identified progressives have – wittingly or unwittingly – aided the cause of the most reactionary people in western politics.
The neocons: a group of ultra-hawkish hard-right imperialists, who are quite happy for the US to illegally invade other sovereign states and drop bombs all over the world. The liberal-left: who profess their support for human rights, internationalism and progressive causes.
At first sight, these two groups don’t appear to have much in common. But the truth is the liberal-left have for a long time been the accomplices of the endless war lobby.
Think back to 1999 and the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia. Never mind that the Balkan state was a multi-party democracy that operated an economy with very high levels of public/social ownership: the liberal-left cheered as bombs rained down on Belgrade, Nis and Kragujevac. Many ‘progressives’ swallowed hook, line and sinker the lurid claims of a ‘genocide’ being committed in the province of Kosovo, which were later dismissed by a UN court.
Although it was promoted as a ‘humanitarian’ venture, the bombing of Yugoslavia was in fact a hard-right project pushed by fiercely anti-socialist/anti-communist Cold War warriors.
It’s worth noting the names on the Executive Committee of the ‘Balkan Action Committee’ which lobbied hard for war against Yugoslavia in 1999. They included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld – three men we would all hear a lot more from in the build-up to war with Iraq.
The liberal-left were also broadly on board for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, an assault we were told would greatly help women’s rights.
However, in 2003, there was a break between most of the liberal-left and the neocons over the invasion of Iraq. This military aggression, unlike the one against Yugoslavia, was led by a Republican president. George W. Bush, the man at the helm, was too much of a Texan ‘redneck’ for educated liberal-leftists to support.
Progressives who had no problem with backing an illegal war against Yugoslavia, found they did have a problem backing an illegal war against Iraq.
In the end, the only ‘liberals’ who supported the Iraq invasion were neo-cons masquerading as liberals, and we all saw through their disguise.
In 2011, though it was ‘business as usual’ for the neocon/liberal-left alliance as a ‘nice’ Democrat administration helped destroy Libya – the country which had the highest living standards in Africa – and whose ‘tyrannical’ government provided free health care, education, and electricity to all of its citizens.
Again, this was a military assault which was pushed by neocons, the same crowd who’d lobbied for war against Yugoslavia and Iraq. Once again the liberal-left didn’t seem to notice, or indeed to care, who was behind it.
The toppling of Muammar Gaddafi (the latest neocon-designated ‘New Hitler’ who was hell-bent on ‘genocide’), would lead to a more democratic Libya with major advances in human rights, liberal-leftists assured us. In fact, the NATO attack on Libya turned the country into a failed state and a haven for jihadists.
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State in 2011, played a prominent role in the destruction of Libya – so much so that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in a recent interview with John Pilger, has labelled it ‘Hillary’s war.’
But Libya has been quietly forgotten during the Presidential election campaign, as indeed has the Iraq war.
Liberal-leftists who couldn’t bear the sight of George W. Bush are lining up with pro-Iraq war hawks to try and get HRC elected.
Film-maker Michael Moore, who made the fiercely anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9-11, finds himself on the same side as Bush’s speechwriter David Frum and Robert Kagan, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. That would have seemed unthinkable a few years back, but it’s happening today, folks.
Why are America’s liberal-left doing this? It’s not as if Trump or Clinton are the only options: Dr Jill Stein’s policies on social justice, war and peace, and climate change are far more progressive than Clinton’s. Why, instead of backing Stein, are they enabling Washington’s war lobby again, just as they did in 1999 and in 2011 during the bombing of Libya? Don’t they ever learn their lesson? How naive are liberals to be fooled by the sudden neo-con concern for ‘women’s rights’ and the rights of immigrants and gay people?
Make no mistake, the PNAC crowd are backing Clinton, not because they are appalled at sexist/racist or politically incorrect statements made by Donald Trump, but because they believe HRC will be the candidate who is more likely to continue the policy of endless war. More specifically, in regards to Syria, they want a US President who will prioritize on toppling the secular government of President Assad – not defeating ISIS. Trump’s great ‘crime’ in their eyes is that he does want to prioritize on ISIS – and horror of horrors – to work with Russia to defeat terrorism.
As America goes to the polls today, the stakes could not be higher. Clinton’s support for the imposition of a No-Fly Zone against Russian and Syrian aircraft risks starting World War Three, and the deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.
Is that what the ‘progressives’ who are lining up with the destroyers of Iraq really want?
Follow Neil Clark on Twitter @NeilClark66
Read more:
Milosevic exonerated, as the NATO war machine moves on
November 8, 2016 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton, United States | Leave a comment
Another U.S. Massacre in Afghanistan
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | November 7, 2016
The latest massacre of many innocent people by U.S. forces in Afghanistan provides another demonstration as to why it is imperative that the American people stop deferring to the authority of the national security state and demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
In a war that has now gone on for 16 years, U.S. forces just killed at least 32 more civilians, many of whom were children. Another 25 people were wounded. Of course, this is on top of all the wedding parties, hospitals, and other victims of U.S. bombing attacks that have brought the death toll from U.S. interventionism in Afghanistan to more than 200,000, not to mention the wounded, maimed, homeless, and refugees. In the last seven days alone, 95 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan and 111 injured.
How many of those 30 people, including the children, who are now being buried had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? It is a virtual certainty that none of them did.
How did this latest U.S. massacre occur? Afghan government forces, assisted by U.S. troops, decided to raid a home in a densely populated neighborhood in a village where a Taliban commander was supposedly having a meeting. The soldiers got trapped in a narrow dead-end street, where they began taking enemy fire from surrounding homes.
So, what did they do? Naturally, to save their lives, they called in air strikes, which necessarily involved firing missiles into the neighborhood, which killed those 32 people, including children.
The U.S. military’s position is the standard one: The military regrets the loss of innocent life but, they say, they didn’t really have a choice. If they didn’t fire the missiles, the U.S. and Afghan troops would be killed. If they did fire the missiles, the innocent people living in the neighborhood would die. Not surprisingly, the military chose to protect the lives of the soldiers at the expense of those innocent people living in the neighborhood.
But let’s be mindful of an important fact: If U.S. troops had not still be intervening in Afghanistan, there never would have been a U.S. bombing raid on that neighborhood.
How do the people who survived the massacre feel about what happened? Not surprisingly, they were chanting “Death to America!” Americans should think about that the next time there is a terrorist attack in the United States.
Despite the bombing attack, two U.S. soldiers — Captain Andrew Byers and Sgt. First Class Ryan Gloyer — were killed in the battle.
What did they die for? No, they did not die protecting our freedom or keeping us safe. That’s nothing but pabulum for the families of those two soldiers — to make them feel okay about losing their loved ones. They died for nothing, the same thing that those 58,000 plus U.S. soldiers died for in Vietnam.
Freedom and security of the American people have nothing to do with America’s 16-year war in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not coming to get us, any more than the North Vietnamese were coming to get us. The conflict in Afghanistan is nothing more than a civil war, one in which one side is battling to oust a regime that has been installed into power by the U.S. government.
Once the U.S. presidential race is over — a race in which the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan has barely been mentioned — the American people need to demand an immediate end to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Continued U.S. interventionism is accomplishing nothing positive and is only pouring fuel on the fire, making matters worse for everyone, including innocent women, children, and others in Afghanistan.
November 8, 2016 Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, United States | Leave a comment
Clinton, Reno and Waco: the Real Story
By Michael Leon | CounterPunch | June, 2003
In Sidney Blumenthal’s book The Clinton Wars (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) he includes a passages summing up the 1993 Waco tragedy.
Writes Blumenthal (page 54):
“On February 23, 1993 agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms surrounded a compound outside Waco, Texas, housing a cult group called the Branch Davidians. Its leader, Vernon Howell, who called himself David Koresh after the biblical King David and Cyrus the Great, preached to his small band of followers that the federal government was the source of evil in the world and that they themselves represented the forces of goodness. All women were sexually shared with him as his ‘wives.’ Apocalyptic war must be waged against the government to bring about the reign of peace on earth and the second coming of the Messiah, who was himself. He stockpiled an arson of weapons. There were reports of sex abuse of children. In their effort to storm the compound four federal agents were killed. The FBI took the place of the ATF and returned on April 19, lobbing tear gas and bulldozing into the building. Suddenly, a fire consumed it. Eighty-nine people were killed, including Koresh and the children.”
Blumenthal also points out that despite criticism mostly from the political right the Clinton administration was exonerated of all charges and that the Branch Davidians were found to have to have been responsible for their own demise in the fire.
The timing of this published version of events at Waco by a key Clinton player is apropos. This spring marked the tenth anniversary of this infamous domestic slaughter, though it has been rarely acknowledged as a slaughter by the few remembrances published in April.
In memory of the 84 people killed at Waco, the standard narrative as promulgated by Blumenthal merits a challenge.
I remember Waco. In April 1993, I wrote a letter of encouragement to Attorney General Janet Reno urging her to stand tall in the shower of condemnation following the deadly FBI assault.
The media, President Clinton and government spokespersons had assured the public that in so many words the Branch Davidians were a bunch of gun-stocking, child-molesting, religious crazies, and that one David Koresh was a dangerous and depraved cult leader.
Taking the broadcast media and government spokespersons at face value I sympathized with Reno, the BATF, and the FBI in their apparent attempt to rescue children from the throes of a bunch of religious whackos. And I had little good will for the efforts of the religious-minded in general, much less these benighted clowns from Texas.
But the Waco attack and its aftermath demonstrate that a bias against the religious-minded among us can be as blinding and deafening as any religious dogma.
A gentle, earnest, and mildly unorthodox group of Americans gathering together and searching for meaning in their lives was deprived of their civil liberties, their religious community center, their home and their lives, and many of the grieving survivors were imprisoned, lied to and slandered afterwards.
Why? Because to make money in Texas some of the religious group sold and bought guns, and then reportedly screwed around with some of the guns making semi-automatics into automatics–not an exceedingly rate occurrence in Texas. And, it was reported as Blumenthal noted, that in accordance with their interpretation of Biblical scripture, David Koresh had parent-sanctioned sexual relationships with teenage women in the community in an apparent effort to repopulate the planet in their reading of God’s Biblical Prophecy. Hardly capital offenses.
Setting the Record Straight
Reno wrote me back a brief note a few weeks later that she supported a full investigation into the events and circumstances of the two deadly government assaults on Waco. Not surprisingly, the subsequent government-sponsored investigations –including former Republican Senator John Danforth’s (as special counsel for the department of Justice)–exonerated the BATF and FBI.
And a bullying political offensive launched by congressional Democrats in the 1995 Joint Sub-Committee Hearings, (with detestable performances by then-Rep. Chuck Schumer D-New York and Rep Tom Lantos D-California) aimed to head off the political damage to the Clinton administration through a mean-spirited attempt to smear anyone as part of the “lunatic fringe” who dared to question the BATF and FBI and ultimately the Clinton administration for its 1993 killing of 80 innocents.
Denial of civil liberties, rampant and deadly police/military power, cover-ups, and bullying political offensives. Does that sound like anything happening today? It surly does, except in 1993 we had an opposition party (as wrong-headed in most other matters as they were and are) with the requisite backbone to come out and call a spade a spade, and not be bullied into silence. Judged solely in terms of guts, a solid sense of right and wrong, and the truth of conviction, I will take the 1993-94 Republicans over today’s supine Democrats any day.
For the record, we can remember Waco by considering the following points of an alternative narrative of the FBI attack that is overwhelmingly supported by the evidence:
–The reported Koresh sexual irregularities were not under the jurisdiction of the BATF and FBI, and no evidence of sexual abuse was ever made public. The allegations were simply reported in the press after being pushed by some in the Waco religious community with a theological ax to grind against Koresh and echoed by the Clinton administration, and then becoming conventional wisdom.
–The whole pre-February 28 investigation and raid smelled of a political stunt against an easy target designed to protect and enhance the reputation of a near-rogue agency, the BATF. Basically, the BATF were looking for a loud and safe gunfight.
–That the FBI lied about the lethality of the CS gas (a type of tear gas) used against the Branch Davidian community center banned by the Geneva Convention for use in warfare.
–The FBI lied about the presence of fragmentation grenades at the scene, which have no use except to kill people.
–The FBI lied about shooting machine gun fire into the building.
–The FBI initially lied to Janet Reno about babies being beaten by the Branch Davidians.
For insightful analyses of Waco, recommended reading is: David Thibodeau. “A Place Called Waco” (BBS, 1999), lauded by Howard Zinn as “An extraordinary account of one of the most shameful episodes in recent American history.” And, James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher. “Why Waco, Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America” (University of California Press, 1995), described by Ramsey Clark as “a critically important book… ”
But it is a film that graphically illustrates the horror of the attacks and the mendacity of the government line–the Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated documentary “Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997),” (www.waco93.com). To this day the executive producer Dan Gifford, a former reporter for ABC, CNN and the McNeil Lehrer Report, remains incensed at the way critics of the government assaults on Waco, including him, have been painted out-of-hand as somehow belonging to the lunatic fringe sympathetic to blowing up federal buildings.
Politics and Violence
Waco, Ruby Ridge, MOVE, Wounded Knee, Kent State, Jackson State, deadly attacks on citizens working for labor and civil rights, and the numerous wars against perceived international enemies of the moment. Government violence is government violence, irrespective of whom the victims are; and in this case that still directly affects the lives of 100s the American left and liberal/left’s response has been inadequate to hostile.
One historical truth is that the raison d’etre for war and government violence generally is a damn lie.
In 1994, with memories of Waco and the Republican and citizens’ vocal challenges to the Waco murders ringing in the political culture, Republicans swept into control of the Senate and House.
For Democrats today, there is perhaps a political lesson to be learned –Speak the truth loudly to those in power, and speak out for the victims of violence. For the survivors and the victims of Waco, there should have been a loud acknowledgment of the truth at Waco: You were murdered because you were different and were thought to be an easy target for a duplicitous and violent federal agency.
In Gifford’s film Waco: The Rules of Engagement, a powerful interview segment presents a sympathetic Sheriff Jack Harwell of McLennan County, Texas nearly in tears as he speaks of his experience with the Branch Davidians: “They were all good people. They had different beliefs than others, different beliefs than I have, maybe different beliefs than you have in their way of life, especially in their religious beliefs. But basically they were good people I was around them quite a lot. They were always nice, mannerly, they minded their own business. They were always clean, and courteous. I liked them.”
In the face of continued government violence and its intimate relative, mendacity, one can take solace in the fact that in the work of a handful of people of all political stripes who identified with the victims of violence the truth can still emerge.
Democrats seeking the truth about war today and the path to an election victory in 2004 can take a cue from Waco–the American electorate does not like liars and accessories to mass killing in charge of its government. But the truth needs to be told.
November 8, 2016 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States, Waco | Leave a comment
Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton and the American Deep State
By Federico PIERACCINI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 08.11.2016
Weiner, Sexting and Emails
It all started with the FBI investigation regarding a ‘sexting‘ scandal. A 15-year-old girl reported having received compromising photos from Anthony Weiner, former husband of Hillary Clinton’s top advisor Huma Abedin. It is the type of situation where the person of interest’s computing devices are reviewed by the FBI to check the contents for clues or evidence. The problem is that Anthony Weiner’s computer is not just like any other but rather one that he shared with his then wife, Huma Abedin. From the small amount of information leaked, it seems that the New York FBI division charged with investigating the affair has for a long time been silent over the enormous 650,000 email archive found. That was until a few days ago, when the director of the FBI revealed, with a letter to Congress, that this data was considered relevant to the ongoing investigation regarding Hillary Clinton and her private email server. It is a huge revelation given the few days left before the elections, causing huge problems for the Democratic campaign.
The more appropriate question to ask is why the director of the FBI, James Comey, decided to inform Congress. The most likely answer points to a leak that would have otherwise caused irreparable damage the reputation of the FBI. Had the new information about Clinton been withheld by the FBI, then it is easy to imagine that the reaction would have been far worse for Comey than the criticism he is currently enduring.
The FBI and Wikileaks
While it is easy to assume that senior federal employees are mostly expressions of political interests, Andrew McCabe being an indicative example, it is unlikely that there is a complete control of all the employees of a large agency like the FBI. This is essentially what the story of Anthony Weiner, former husband of Abedin, centers on. Fox News reported that the FBI detachment in New York had for months ignored the email archive in the computer thanks to the plausible excuse of the lack of a mandate. It almost looks as if the FBI had managed to conceal this new discovery for a long time. It is a fact that in the past Clinton has repeatedly been saved from catastrophe, managing to block federal investigations and forcing the FBI chief to a ridiculous testimony before Congress in order that she not be investigated. It is her trail of scandals that has outraged many federal agents and members of the intelligence community. More than one source has revealed that the Bureau was facing the risk of an internal revolt driven by agents eager to release to the American public basic information regarding an ongoing investigation on one of the presidential candidates.
Therefore it is very difficult to believe that 650,000 emails were found on Abedin’s computer that were of little significance or even irrelevant. Otherwise what sense would there be in trying to keep them hidden? Evidently the agents working on the case have discovered explosive information.
Who is Huma Abedin?
Huma Mahmood Abedin is a good starting point down the rabbit hole of dirty and dangerous money. Born in 1976 in the United States, she moved with her family to Saudi Arabia two years later, returning to the US at the age of 18 to enrol at George Washington University. Certainly more interesting is the story of her parents, both Muslims and both heavily involved in Muslim Brotherhood networks as well as opaque financing mechanisms to structures linked Al Qaeda. How the daughter of two such controversial characters could come to occupy such an important role explains how deep down the rabbit hole this story goes.
To understand the influence of Abedin on Hillary Clinton, just think of all the latest scandals involving Clinton that revolve around the funding and indirect support of radical Islamist groups. From Libya to Egypt to Syria and Iraq, the trail of the State Department and the Clinton Foundation is everywhere. It is no wonder that a family like the Abedins have been able to forge such important friendships as the one with the possible future president of the United States. Abedin seems likely to be an intermediary connecting worlds that are adjacent but never fully overlapping. No American could ever accept the idea that alongside the next POTUS could be a person deeply embedded in such a milieu. But that is how it is. On September 11, 2001, for example, Abedin was simultaneously working for the Clinton Foundation as well as a charity subsequently discovered to be a front for money laundering on behalf of Bin Laden, as covered by Newsweek. The day when the twin towers collapsed, the current top advisor to the probable next US president was working for an organisation indirectly linked to Al Qaeda.
The American Deep State
When addressing the topic of Huma Mahmood Abedin, top advisor to Hillary Clinton, it is good to ask how deep we are willing to go to discover the mechanisms of American power, penetrating into the dark caverns and complex entrails of a state within a state, the so-called deep state.
To answer this question, it is good to define it. Generally, when we talk about the deep state, it means the various branches of power. The best known are certainly the military-industrial complex, energy giants, Wall Street, the mainstream news media, extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and its Wahhabi ideology, in addition to foreign lobbies, especially the Israeli and Saudi lobbies. Their interests are mainly based around the accumulation of money and their ability to generate more of it to buy influence.
Generally the major representatives of deep-state interests are the so-called think-tanks. These organisations, made up of experts and former members of the public and private sectors, exist primarily to influence and condition the political discussions, favoring the interests of their funders, which not surprisingly are precisely the industries and people related to the various branches of American power. As a result, think-tanks have now taken on a more central role in defining the domestic and foreign-policy postures of the United States.
Of course money also buys people in addition to associations. This is the case with direct donations to the election campaigns of senators and members of Congress by the giants of the deep state. Large companies, banks, financial institutions and the military industry use think-tanks, the media and politicians through their money with only one purpose: to protect and nurture their interests and their vision of the state within the state. Put simply, their objective is to continue to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers.
Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Deep State
In addition to the neo-conservative and liberal factions, as well as the Israel lobby, we find the ideological component of Wahhabi Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood participating in the US political system, playing an important role in the fashioning of American foreign policy. Suffice it to say that this trio has for more than two decades completely dominated the choices about foreign policy of the United States, with dire consequences. The Muslim Brotherhood, a creation inspired by the British MI6 in the early 1900s to fight nationalism and Arab governments with communist inclinations, quickly became the spiritual fathers of the Afghan freedom fighters. It is a monster that has continued to morph in our day from the Taliban in Afghanistan to Al Qaeda in the late 1990s to the 2000s, and currently metamorphosing into Al Nusra Front/Daesh. Of course in each of its historical iterations, Islamic extremism has been fomented and directed against nations hostile to American imperialism.
In recent years the once peaceful Arab Spring turned into violent riots thanks to the ideological inspiration of movements such as Saudi Wahhabism or the Muslim Brotherhood. This distorted view of Islam has often been the catalyst transforming initially peaceful movements into violent anti-government clashes. The Wahhabi ideology and the Muslim Brotherhood’s political interpretation of Islam unites such capitals as Riyadh, Doha and Ankara with those fighting for the Islamic caliphate, namely Al Nusra Front/Al Qaeda. US geopolitical ambitions have increased over the years through terrorist attacks and the consequent destabilization of nations opposed to Washington. The use of terrorism as a geopolitical weapon is not new for the United States when one remembers the stay-behind networks that operated in Europe during the Cold War.
This conglomerate of power has in the last 30 years guided American foreign policy, justifying interventions in foreign countries under the pretext of fighting terrorism (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan), or by using terrorism as a tool of destabilization (Syria, Egypt, Yemen). Consequently, the Wahabi/Brotherhood component continues to play to this day a major role in the constant quest for global supremacy by the US deep state.
Clinton Foundation, Huma Abedin and US Deep State
The deep corruption that permeates the deep state has consistently enabled countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to buy modern and advanced means of warfare produced in the US. A summary of the so-called pay-to-play scheme goes as follows: money comes into the coffers of the Clinton Foundation thanks to generous donations from Riyadh and Doha, and in return they are cleared by the State Department (headed for many years precisely by Clinton) for the sale of weapons. It is a simple mechanism that satisfies everyone: the foreign countries are able to get their hands on advanced weapons to be employed in future bloody wars; the weapons traders receive hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts; and the Clinton Foundation, as payment, receives millions of dollars in donations.
In a rather agreeable arrangement, the arms manufacturers earn back the money invested in election campaigns many times over, thanks to the resulting lucrative contracts closed with foreign countries. The consequences of such a wicked arrangement have been seen in wars of aggression by the Saudis against the Yemenis and the Turks against the Kurdish minority, all thanks to weapons sold by Washington. Another aspect of this arrangement relates to the sale of weapons to terrorists in the Middle East from the US thanks to the sponsorship of the Gulf nations. It is an evil system that in addition to enriching the producers of American weapons, as well as the Clinton Foundation together with satisfying the regional allies of the US, uses Gulf nations to provide cover to the US to directly provide advanced weaponry to terrorists. A typical example of this perverse arrangement is easily verifiable in the events in Benghazi, which still awaits truth and justice.
Consequences
The drama around the emails contained on the computer of Huma Abedin and her ex-husband is probably attributable to the concrete risk that all this mess gets uncovered, including the unspeakable role of Clinton and her foundation in international terrorism. It remains to be seen in this complicated journey into the deep state what role the FBI and Donald Trump are playing. Although personally I have many doubts about the figure of Trump, one thing I am quite certain of is that a vast chasm separates him from the center of America’s deep-state establishment. While Clinton is a direct product of this tumor, Donald Trump comes from another set of circumstances, marshalling around him that patriotic feeling that many, even within the US government, are beginning to feel, particularly given that America’s international credibility, together with its confidence domestically, has collapsed dramatically.
Despite the constant efforts of the mainstream media to refute this representation of reality, the feeling is increasingly common in the minds of Americans that much of what ails the country today is this degenerate web of economic, political and strategic corruption. Many Americans are tired of seeing their nation fighting senseless wars far away from home without any real threat to their national security but with costs in the order of trillions of dollars.
Conclusions
The United States has been flirting immorally and illegally with organizations dedicated to terrorism, thanks to the many deep-state links. Such collusion existed before and after September 11, subsequently triggering the Arab Spring and destabilizing countries like Libya, Syria and Iraq. What we have seen in the last few days with Comey’s revelations may represent a veritable Pandora’s box. It is impossible to determine whether this scandal will eventually overwhelm Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the leaders of the deep state have decided to destroy the nomination of the Democratic nominee in favor of Donald Trump. Or maybe not; right now every hypothesis is valid. But if Trump wins on November 8, it may represent the triumph of the American people’s will to discard once and for all anything that even remotely smells of the ‘deep state’, the redolence of which hangs heavily over Clinton and her aide Huma Mahmood Abedin.
November 8, 2016 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | al-Qaeda, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Iraq, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkiye, United States | Leave a comment
Oh, What a Lovely War!
Delusional foreign policy could bring disaster
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 8, 2016
The American people don’t know very much about war even if Washington has been fighting on multiple fronts since 9/11. The continental United States has not experienced the presence a hostile military force for more than 100 years and war for the current generation of Americans consists largely of the insights provided by video games and movies. The Pentagon’s invention of embedded journalists, which limits any independent media insight into what is going on overseas, has contributed to the rendering of war as some kind of abstraction. Gone forever is anything like the press coverage of Vietnam, with nightly news and other media presentations showing prisoners being executed and young girls screaming while racing down the street in flames.
Given all of that, it is perhaps no surprise that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, neither of whom has served in uniform, should regard violence inflicted on people overseas with a considerable level of detachment. Hillary is notorious for her assessment of the brutal killing of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, saying “We came, we saw, he died.” They both share to an extent the dominant New York-Washington policy consensus view that dealing with foreigners can sometimes get a bit bloody, but that is a price that someone in power has to be prepared to pay. One of Hillary’s top advisers, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. led sanctions were “worth it.”
In the election campaign there has, in fact, been little discussion of the issue of war and peace or even of America’s place in the world, though Trump did at one point note correctly that implementation of Hillary’s suggested foreign policy could escalate into World War III. It has been my contention that the issue of war should be more front and center in the minds of Americans when they cast their ballots as the prospect of an armed conflict in which little is actually at stake escalating and going nuclear could conceivably end life on this planet as we know it.
With that in mind, it is useful to consider what the two candidates have been promising. First, Hillary, who might reasonably be designated the Establishment’s war candidate though she carefully wraps it in humanitarian “liberal interventionism.” As Senator and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has always viewed a foreign crisis as an opportunity to use aggressive measures to seek a resolution. She can always be relied upon to “do something,” a reflection of the neocon driven Washington foreign policy consensus.
Hillary Clinton and her advisors, who believe strongly in Washington’s leadership role globally and embrace their own definition of American exceptionalism, have been explicit in terms of what they would do to employ our military power. She would be an extremely proactive president in foreign policy, with a particular animus directed against Russia. And, unfortunately, there would be little or no pushback against the exercise of her admittedly poor instincts regarding what to do, as was demonstrated regarding Libya and also with Benghazi. She would find little opposition in Congress and the media for an extremely risky foreign policy, and would benefit from the Washington groupthink that prevails over the alleged threats emanating from Russia, Iran, and China.
Hillary has received support from foreign policy hawks, including a large number of formerly Republican neocons, to include Robert Kagan, Michael Chertoff, Michael Hayden, Eliot Cohen and Eric Edelman. James Stavridis, a retired admiral who was once vetted by Clinton as a possible vice president, recently warned of “the need to use deadly force against the Iranians. I think it’s coming. It’s going to be maritime confrontation and if it doesn’t happen immediately, I’ll bet you a dollar it’s going to be happening after the presidential election, whoever is elected.”
Hillary believes that Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad is the root cause of the turmoil in that country and must be removed as the first priority. It is a foolish policy as al-Assad in no way threatens the United States while his enemy ISIS does and regime change would create a power vacuum that will benefit the latter. She has also called for a no-fly zone in Syria to protect the local population as well as the insurgent groups that the U.S. supports, some of which had been labeled as terrorists before they were renamed by current Secretary of State John Kerry. Such a zone would dramatically raise the prospect of armed conflict with Russia and it puts Washington in an odd position vis-à-vis what is occurring in Syria. The U.S. is not at war with the Syrian government, which, like it or not, is under international law sovereign within its own recognized borders. Damascus has invited the Russians in to help against the rebels and objects to any other foreign presence on Syrian territory. In spite of all that, Washington is asserting some kind of authority to intervene and to confront the Russians as both a humanitarian mission and as an “inherent right of self-defense.”
Hillary has not recommended doing anything about Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, all of which have at one time or another for various reasons supported ISIS, but she is clearly no friend of Iran, which has been fighting ISIS. As a Senator, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran but she has more recently reluctantly supported the recent nuclear agreement with that country negotiated by President Barack Obama. But she has nevertheless warned that she will monitor the situation closely for possible violations and will otherwise push back against activity by the Islamic Republic. As one of her key financial supporters is Israeli Haim Saban, who has said he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel, she is likely to pursue aggressive policies in the Persian Gulf. She has also promised to move America’s relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a “new level” and has repeatedly declared that her support for Israel is unconditional.
One of Hillary’s advisors, former CIA acting Director Michael Morell, has called for new sanctions on Tehran and has also recently recommended that the U.S. begin intercepting Iranian ships presumed to be carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen. Washington is not at war with either Iran or Yemen and the Houthis are not on the State Department terrorist list but our good friends the Saudis have been assiduously bombing them for reasons that seem obscure. Stopping ships in international waters without any legal pretext would be considered by many an act of piracy. Morell has also called for covertly assassinating Iranians and Russians to express our displeasure with the foreign policies of their respective governments.
Hillary’s dislike for Russia’s Vladimir Putin is notorious. Syria aside, she has advocated arming Ukraine with game changing offensive weapons and also bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, which would force a sharp Russian reaction. One suspects that she might be sympathetic to the views expressed recently by Carl Gershman in a Washington Post op-ed that received curiously little additional coverage in the media. Gershman is the head of the taxpayer funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which means that he is a powerful figure in Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. NED has plausibly been described as doing the sorts of things that the CIA used to do.
After making a number of bumper-sticker claims about Russia and Putin that are either partially true, unproven or even ridiculous, Gershman concluded that “the United States has the power to contain and defeat this danger. The issue is whether we can summon the will to do so.” It is basically a call for the next administration to remove Putin from power—as foolish a suggestion as has ever been seen in a leading newspaper, as it implies that the risk of nuclear war is completely acceptable to bring about regime change in a country whose very popular, democratically elected leadership we disapprove of. But it is nevertheless symptomatic of the kind of thinking that goes on inside the beltway and is quite possibly a position that Hillary Clinton will embrace. She also benefits from having the perfect implementer of such a policy in Robert Kagan’s wife Victoria Nuland, her extremely dangerous protégé who is currently Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and who might wind up as Secretary of State in a Clinton Administration.
Shifting to East Asia, Hillary sees the admittedly genuine threat from North Korea but her response is focused more on China. She would increase U.S. military presence in the South China Sea to deter any further attempts by Beijing to develop disputed islands and would also “ring China with defensive missiles,” ostensibly as “protection” against Pyongyang but also to convince China to pressure North Korea over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. One wonders what Beijing might think about being surrounded by made-in-America missiles.
Trump’s foreign policy is admittedly quite sketchy and he has not always been consistent. He has been appropriately enough slammed for being simple minded in saying that he would “bomb the crap out of ISIS,” but he has also taken on the Republican establishment by specifically condemning the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq and has more than once indicated that he is not interested in either being the world’s policeman or in new wars in the Middle East. He has repeatedly stated that he supports NATO but it should not be construed as hostile to Russia. He would work with Putin to address concerns over Syria and Eastern Europe. He would demand that NATO countries spend more for their own defense and also help pay for the maintenance of U.S. bases.
Trump’s controversial call to stop all Muslim immigration has been rightly condemned but it contains a kernel of truth in that the current process for vetting new arrivals in this country is far from transparent and apparently not very effective. The Obama Administration has not been very forthcoming on what might be done to fix the entire immigration process but Trump is promising to shake things up, which is overdue, though what exactly a Trump Administration would try to accomplish is far from clear.
Continuing on the negative side, Trump, who is largely ignorant of the world and its leaders, has relied on a mixed bag of advisors. Former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency General Michael Flynn appears to be the most prominent. Flynn is associated with arch neocon Michael Ledeen and both are rabid about Iran, with Flynn suggesting that nearly all the unrest in the Middle East should be laid at Tehran’s door. Ledeen is, of course, a prominent Israel-firster who has long had Iran in his sights. The advice of Ledeen and Flynn may have been instrumental in Trump’s vehement denunciation of the Iran nuclear agreement, which he has called a “disgrace,” which he has said he would “tear up.” It is vintage dumb-think. The agreement cannot be canceled because there are five other signatories to it and the denial of a nuclear weapons program to Tehran benefits everyone in the region, including Israel. It is far better to have the agreement than to scrap it, if that were even possible.
Trump has said that he would be an even-handed negotiator between Israel and the Palestinians but he has also declared that he is strongly pro-Israel and would move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, which is a bad idea, not in America’s interest, even if Netanyahu would like it. It would produce serious blowback from the Arab world and would inspire a new wave of terrorism directed against the U.S.
Regarding the rest of the Middle East, Trump would prefer strong leaders, i.e. autocrats, who are friendly rather than chaotic reformers. He rejects arming rebels as in Syria because we know little about whom we are dealing with and find that we cannot control what develops. He is against foreign aid in principle, particularly to countries like Pakistan where the U.S. is strongly disliked.
In East Asia, Trump would encourage Japan and South Korea to develop their own nuclear arsenals to deter North Korea. It is a very bad idea, a proliferation nightmare. Like Hillary, he would prefer that China intervene in North Korea and make Kim Jong Un “step down.” He would put pressure on China to devalue its currency because it is “bilking us of billions of dollars” and would also increase U.S. military presence in the region to limit Beijing’s expansion in the South China Sea.
So there you have it as you enter the voting booth. President Obama is going around warning that “the fate of the world is teetering” over the electoral verdict, which he intends to be a ringing endorsement of Hillary even though the choice is not nearly that clear cut. Part of the problem with Trump is that he has some very bad ideas mixed in with a few good ones and no one knows what he would actually do if he were president. Unfortunately, it is all too clear what Hillary would do.
November 8, 2016 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Israel, NATO, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
NYT Admits Key Al Qaeda Role in Aleppo
By Robert Parry | Consortium news | November 6, 2016
As much as The New York Times and the mainstream U.S. media have become propaganda outlets on most foreign policy issues, like the one-sided coverage of the bloody Syrian war, sometimes the truth seeps through in on-the-ground reporting by correspondents, even ones who usually are pushing the “propo.”
Such was the case with Anne Barnard’s new reporting from inside west Aleppo, the major portion of the city which is in government hands and copes with regular terror rocket and mortar attacks from rebel-held east Aleppo where Al Qaeda militants and U.S.-armed-and-funded “moderate” rebels fight side-by-side.
Almost in passing, Barnard’s article on Sunday acknowledged the rarely admitted reality of the Al Qaeda/”moderate” rebel collaboration, which puts the United States into a de facto alliance with Al Qaeda terrorists and their jihadist allies, fighting under banners such as Nusra Front (recently renamed Syria Conquest Front) and Ahrar al-Sham.
Barnard also finally puts the blame for preventing civilians in east Aleppo from escaping the fighting on a rebel policy of keeping them in harm’s way rather than letting them transit through “humanitarian corridors” to safety. Some of her earlier pro-rebel accounts suggested that it wasn’t clear who was stopping movement of civilians through those corridors.
However, on Sunday, she reported: “We had arrived at a critical moment, as Russia said there was only one day left to pass through a corridor it had provided for people to escape eastern Aleppo before the rebel side was flattened, a corridor through which precious few had passed. The government says rebels are preventing civilians from leaving. Rebels refuse any evacuation without international supervision and a broader deal to deliver humanitarian aid.”
Granted, you still have to read between the lines, but at least there is the acknowledgement that rebels are refusing civilian evacuations under the current conditions. How that is different from Islamic State terrorists in Mosul, Iraq, preventing departures from their areas – a practice which the Times and other U.S. outlets condemn as using women and children as “human shields” – isn’t addressed. But Barnard’s crimped admission is at least a start.
Barnard then writes: “Instead [of allowing civilians to move through the humanitarian corridors], they [the rebels] are trying to break the siege, with Qaeda-linked groups and those backed by the United States working together — the opposite of what Russia has demanded.”
Again, that isn’t the clearest description of the situation, which is stunning enough that one might have expected it in the lede rather than buried deep inside the story, but it is significant that the Times is recognizing that Al Qaeda and the U.S.-backed “moderates” are “working together” and that Russia opposes that collaboration.
She also noted that “Three Qaeda-linked suicide bombers attacked a military position with explosive-packed personnel carriers on Thursday, military officials said, and mortar fire was raining on neighborhoods that until now had been relatively safe. It was among the most intense rounds in four years of rebel shelling that officials say has killed 11,000 civilians.”
While she then throws in a caveat about the impossibility of verifying the numbers, the acknowledgement that the U.S.-backed “moderate” rebels and their Al Qaeda comrades have been shelling civilians in west Aleppo is significant, too. Before this, all the American people heard was the other side, from rebel-held east Aleppo, about the human suffering there, often conveyed by “activists” with video cameras who have depicted the conflict as simply the willful killing of children by the evil Syrian government and the even more evil Russians.
More Balance
With the admission of rebel terror attacks on civilians in west Aleppo, the picture finally is put into more balance. The Al Qaeda and U.S.-backed rebels have been killing thousands of civilians in government-controlled areas and the Syrian military and its Russian allies have struck back only to be condemned for committing “war crimes.”
Though the human toll in both sides of Aleppo is tragic, we have seen comparable situations before – in which the U.S. government has supported, supplied and encouraged governments to mount fierce offensives to silence rockets or mortars fired by rebels toward civilian areas.
For instance, senior U.S. government officials, including President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, have defended Israel’s right to defend itself from rockets fired from inside Gaza even though those missile rarely kill anyone. Yet, Israel is allowed to bomb the near-defenseless people of Gaza at will, killing thousands including the four little boys blown apart in July 2014 while playing on a beach during the last round of what the Israelis call “mowing the grass.”
In the context of those deaths, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who has built her career as a supposed humanitarian advocating a “responsibility to protect” civilians, laid the blame not on the Israeli military but on fighters in Gaza who had fired rockets that rarely hit anything besides sand.
At the United Nations on July 18, 2014, Power said, “President Obama spoke with [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning to reaffirm the United States’ strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself…. Hamas’ attacks are unacceptable and would be unacceptable to any member state of the United Nations. Israel has the right to defend its citizens and prevent these attacks.”
But that universal right apparently does not extend to Syria where U.S.-supplied rockets are fired into civilian neighborhoods of west Aleppo. In that case, Power and other U.S. officials apply an entirely different set of standards. Any Syrian or Russian destruction of east Aleppo with the goal of suppressing that rocket fire becomes a “war crime.”
Perhaps it’s expected that the U.S. government, like other governments, will engage in hypocrisy regarding affairs of state: one set of rules for U.S. allies and another for countries marked for U.S. “regime change.” Statements by supposed “humanitarians” – such as Samantha Power, “Ms. R2P” – are no exception.
But double standards are even more distasteful when they come from allegedly “objective” journalists such as those who work at The New York Times, The Washington Post and other prestige American news outlets. When they take the “U.S. side” in a dispute and become crude propagandists, they encourage the kind of misguided “group thinks” that led to the criminal Iraq War and other disastrous “regime change” projects over the past two decades.
Yet, that is what we normally see. A thoughtful reader can’t peruse the international reporting of the U.S. mainstream media without realizing that it is corrupted by propaganda from both government officials and from U.S.-funded operations, often disguised as “human rights activists” or “citizen journalists” whose supposed independence makes their “propo” even more effective.
So, it’s worth noting those rare occasions when The New York Times and the rest of the MSM let some of the reality peek through. When evaluating the latest plans from Hillary Clinton and other interventionists to expand the U.S. military intervention in Syria – via prettily named “safe zones” and “no-fly zones” – the American people should realize that they are being asked to come to the aid of Al Qaeda.
For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The De Facto US/Al Qaeda Alliance.”
November 7, 2016 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | al-Qaeda, New York Times, Obama, Syria, United States | Leave a comment
Fallujah battle toxic legacy: ‘Damage done to DNA’
RT | November 7, 2016
The level of congenital malformation and ill health in Iraqi children is not improving, which means whatever happened during the US-led war is still there and the damage has been done to DNA, says Chris Busby a health inspector in Fallujah.
November 7 marks 12 years since Washington began what became the bloodiest battle in its invasion of Iraq. It took two months for the Pentagon to push insurgents out of the city of Fallujah with hundreds of civilian victims as collateral damage.
Following studies on the ground, the World Health Organization claimed that rates of stillbirths and congenital defects across Iraq are consistent with or even lower than international estimates.
Nevertheless, other studies have linked serious health issues to the use of depleted uranium weapons in both the 1991 and 2003 wars. Those weapons were designed to be “armor-busters”. However the US has reportedly used them on soft targets as well.
Depleted uranium is toxic and mildly radioactive and there are growing calls to ban the use of such arms altogether.
RT talked to Dr. Chris Busby who has studied what’s been described as an epidemic of cancer and birth defects in Iraq and particularly Fallujah. He’s behind a major report on the issue and says the situation on the ground remains drastic, years after the war ended.
‘Health situation not improving’
“The most interesting thing is that nothing has got any better. The level of congenital malformation, the level of ill health in the children as they are born is not improving, which means that whatever it was that happened long ago is still there in the genetic make-up of the people who live there.”
‘WHO report – disgraceful’
“The problem with that study is that it wasn’t a study that was carried out at a hospital like ours. The study that was carried out by the WHO – which is incidentally a disgraceful study – just looked at children whose parents said that they had congenital malformations. On that basis in fact they found that they had a lower level of congenital malformations than the expected number throughout the world should have led them to the idea that maybe the study wasn’t working.”
‘Cause of health problems’
“We know it was exposed to uranium because we measured the uranium in one study. We spent a lot of money looking at the uranium levels in the hair of the parents of the children with congenital malformations. So, there is no doubt about it being uranium.”
‘Need for depleted uranium ban’
“It is becoming clear now that uranium has very serious genetic qualities that weren’t understood. And they are still not conceded by the authorities. The last people to concede it will be the Americans, the American military, the people who are most dependent upon it. They don’t want to get rid of this magical weapon. And they are fighting tooth and nail, including scientifically, to try and show that there isn’t a serious problem that quite obviously is.”
‘Damage done to DNA can’t be cleaned up’
“The problem is not that there are these contamination sites. It is very difficult to decontaminate an area that has been affected by depleted uranium because it spreads so uniformly across the area in the form of these very fine particles. So, it is not a case of going somewhere and finding something that is radioactive and removing it. Though, you can do that. Lots of the tanks and armored vehicles that were attacked in the First Gulf War, they can be taken away and dumped somewhere. But that is not the problem. The thing that is causing the problem is the inhalation of this dust. And once the dust is created, it goes all over the place. After 10-20 years the dust will get washed down by the rain into the soil and won’t be so hazardous. The problem is that the damage that has been done to the DNA – you can’t clean that up. The continuing level of congenital malformations and cancer presumably is an indicator of the fact that the genome of these people has been affected and that is like a sort of trans-generational curse that will go on for a very long time, for generations,” Busby told RT.
Christopher Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia. See also: http://www.chrisbusbyexposed.org, http://www.greenaudit.org and http://www.llrc.org.
November 7, 2016 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Fallujah, Iraq, United States, World Health Organization | Leave a comment
Obama’s gambit to create legacy in Syrian war takes Russia by surprise
By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | November 7, 2016
The most fateful chapter of the war in northern Syria may be deemed to have commenced on Sunday with the launch of the offensive by Syrian Kurdish militia, backed by American and French Special Forces, to retake control of Raqqa, ‘capital’ of the Islamic State, situated almost mid-point between Aleppo and Mosul. (Japan Times )
Raqqa’s fall will be a lethal blow for IS. But expert opinion has been that US is ill-prepared for a full-bodied campaign on Raqqa. A former US Army colonel Daniel Davis wrote in the National Interest magazine last week that with no state-supported military unit leading the assault, no allied militia, no resupply lines through friendly territory, wresting control of a major city such as Raqqa, “in a hostile foreign land enmeshed in a years-long civil war… could… result in deadly consequences.” (National Interest )
Yet, President Barack Obama decided otherwise. US soldiers have been spotted on the frontline. (RT)
What is the US gameplan? Indeed, driving the IS out of Raqqa is invested with symbolism, as Obama will be fulfilling his pledge to “degrade and defeat” the IS before leaving office. With the November 8 election no longer constraining him, Obama hopes to notch up a legacy in Syria as the president who ‘defeated’ the IS.
Second, there is the ‘big picture’. Washington is hoping to stall the capture of Aleppo by Syrian government forces (backed by Russia and Iran) so that the next US president has the option to revisit Syrian conflict. Control of Raqqa would allow the US to keep a direct influence on Aleppo.
Again, in immediate terms, the IS fighters coming under pressure in Mosul may evacuate to Raqqa and the US intends to blockade Raqqa at least partially so as to revisit the front after the battle for Mosul has been won.
To be sure, Raqqa is shaping up to be the bloodiest battle yet in the Syrian conflict. An estimated 5000 IS fighters are located in Raqqa.
The ‘known unknown’ will be the reactions of Turkey and Russia. The Turkish-Russian rapprochement faces a litmus test here. Suffice it to say, Russia will be watching Turkey’s ‘strategic autonomy’ vis-à-vis the US. There are conflicting signals that US and Turkey have a tacit understanding over Raqqa. (KUNA )
Meanwhile, Syrian Kurds also claim to have an understanding with the US to keep Turkey out in the cold. (Rudaw )
The Americans are playing a smart game. Turkey couldn’t have chosen this moment to push to capture the hugely strategic town of al-Babi without informing US, because the operation’s main aim is to thwart Kurdish plans to establish a contiguous enclave in northern Syria. Simply put, how is it possible that Turks are ostensibly hitting the Syrian Kurds hard just when the latter are fighting Obama’s war on IS in Raqqa? How could that possibly happen without some back-to-back US-Turkish understanding? (Read an excellent analysis in Al-Monitor on the Turkey’s plans in northern Syria)
In the developing situation, a Russian-Syrian consolidation in Aleppo becomes complicated if Americans and the French manage to establish a base camp in Raqqa from where they can lend support seamlessly to rebel groups in Aleppo. Prima facie, Obama’s one-year old warning of a ‘quagmire’ for Russians in Syria no longer seems far-fetched. (Reuters )
But then, Russians seem to estimate that capturing Raqqa is beyond the US’ capability anytime soon. For Tehran, too, Turkey and US’s control of al-Bab and Raqqa could foreclose a direct Iranian access route via Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, which is crucial for bolstering the military capability of Hezbollah. In fact, Raqqa leads to Zeir e-Zor city in eastern Syria, just 120 kilometers away, which is under Syrian government control and is a gateway for Iran to access Lebanon. The US and Israel have been hoping to bring Zeir e-Zor under control of Salafi groups hostile to Iran.
Read an impromptu commentary by Russian news agency Sputnik titled Operation Euphrates Rage: What is Known So Far About Raqqa Offensive.
November 7, 2016 Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Aleppo, Hezbollah, ISIS, Israel, Lebanon, Mosul, Obama, Raqqa, Syria, Zionism | Leave a comment
The Lethal Lie of Hillary Clinton: Saving Lives with a No-Fly Zone in Syria
By Luciana Bohne | CounterPunch | November 7, 2016
Why are they lying? Everything is being done to convince the public that Russia wants war; that it has annexed Ukraine; that it will attack Western Europe; that it will crush the Baltic states and Poland in its advance; that it’s committing war crimes in Syria; that Assad is a dictator and a butcher; that he has met peaceful demands for reform with brutal repression; that those fighting Assad are moderate rebels; that he is dropping barrel bombs on civilians.
Why are they lying? Because the people don’t want war: they want jobs and bread. They will not agree to murder people who have done them no harm. They will consent to war if told they are under attack or that the war will save other people from genocide, rape, or other gross violations of human rights. The people are not interested in world domination, but the elite are. The people are, therefore, the enemy within. They must be persuaded to support the elite’s plan by perverting their decency. They must be made to cringe in fear. They must be made to believe that war—any war—will be defensive.
This is the tactic of terrorists: terrorizing the population to obtain political ends.
Hillary Clinton is lying: a no-fly zone in Syria will not “save lives.”
In her last presidential debate, Clinton said that she wants a no-fly zone in Syria because it will “save lives”:
“I’m going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria, not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to, frankly, gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians.”
The “leverage” she is seeking is Russian roulette with the planet. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford, noted in response that a no-fly zone in Syria might trigger a war with Russia, a nuclear power. Neither does she believe that a no-fly zone will save lives. In a closed-door speech to Goldman Sachs in 2013, Clinton said:
“To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians.”
She knows what is at stake with a no-fly zone in Syria, and yet she tells us the opposite of what she knows will happen. In other words, she’s lying.
What has changed Clinton’s mind since 2013?
In 2013, there was no need to risk nuclear war over Syria. The so-called Free Syrian Army and assorted rebel groups were doing just fine in their offensive. In 2013, Syria stood alone, apart from some Iranian assistance. Until 2015, the Assad government was on its last breath, in retreat from the provinces of Raqqa, Aleppo, Hama, Idlib, and Latakia. By September 2015, the generous financial, military, and operational support by the United States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to the “anti-Syrian coalition”– Islamic State, the Jabbat al-Nusra, the “Free Syrian Army”–was paying great dividends in advancing the destabilization of the Assad government. Soon, it could be expected that the symbolic head of Assad would sit on a silver platter in the White House, along with other colonial trophies.
The humanitarian consequences for Syrians, however, were catastrophic. Fleeing the terror of a Syria in the clutches of cutthroat mercenary armies, refugees flooded Turkey, Jordan, Greece, and other countries, becoming human barter between Turkey and the European Union. The EU paid Turkey two billion euro to keep within its borders this human avalanche of “collateral damage.”
That was the situation in September of 2015, when Russia, invited by the legitimate Syrian government, legitimately intervened in Syria with aircraft, support personnel, military advisors and equipment. In a year of Russian efforts to establish a premise for a peaceful solution in Syria by eliminating the militant rabble the Western chorus of “Assad must go” has mutated into a furious hiss of impotent rage. No one expects Assad to go now, unless the US comes up with a strategy to reverse the losses the Russian intervention has inflicted.
Enter Hillary’s reversal on the no-fly zone, which now, contrary to her judgment in 2013, will “save lives.”
What is a no-fly zone?
A no-fly zone is a coercive appropriation of the partial airspace of a sovereign country. It is the arbitrary creation of a demilitarized zone in the sky to prevent belligerent powers from flying in that air space. In Syria, the “belligerent power,” ironically, would be the internationally recognized legitimate Syrian government and its legitimate ally, Russia.
According to former UN Secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in an interview with John Pilger, a no-fly zone is illegal under international law. No-fly zones are post-Soviet inventions. The measure was never proposed, used, or authorized to this day by the UN Security Council until the Soviet Union virtually dissolved. This restraint was exercised by the US for the excellent reason that no such aggression on a sovereign state would have been tolerated without massive fuss at the UN Security Council and a bad rap for the US. There have been only three instances of a no-fly zone so far, all in the wake of the disappearance of the USSR: Iraq (1991-2003), Bosnia (1993-95), and Libya (2011), all initiated on the hypocritical pretense of “saving lives.”
What is Plan B?
In one word: escalation. Apart from partitioning the air space of Syria, Plan B would provide for supplying, through Qatar or Saudi Arabia, man-portable air defense systems to the “moderate opposition,” including if it is acknowledged that the “moderate opposition” has allied itself openly with the al-Nusra front. Plan B has not been approved, but the media has floated a series of reports throughout October as being under consideration.
On October 28, the New York Times published an astonishing conclusion about an aspect of the Obama administration’s strategy in Syria, though gently and benevolently worded. The Times indicated that it was being felt that Obama had insufficiently armed the “moderate opposition,” so that in Aleppo it had “no choice” but to partner with al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly al-Nusra) to fight off Putin and Assad. At the same time, Reuters noted that the Obama administration had formerly considered arming the “moderates” with anti-air missiles but was constrained by the fear that such weapons would fall in the hands of ”extremists.”
Such reports suggest, rather boldly, I think, that “former restraint” might have to give way to greater support for the “moderate” militants, including if they partner with “extremists.” Thus, we arrive at a point of utter bewilderment in which we verify the absurdity of launching a War on Terror to end up fighting a War with Terror.
Oppose US imperialism
It is good and proper that we should denounce Hillary Clinton for her vile record of regime change (in Honduras), crime of aggression (Libya), threats to Russia and China, corruption, illegality, and abuse of power. She’s clearly unfit to be president of any decent country that calls itself democratic.
However, fixating on her individual agency lets the policy off the hook. The US is not yet a banana republic, in which the patriarch of some rich landowning family becomes the patriarch-autocrat of a country. An intricate network of powerful interests, which determine the policy, rules the US, frantic to maintain global economic and military dominance. This ruling class selects the candidate who will best carry out the policy. Hillary Clinton will be the servant of the interests of the ruling class of which she is a member. She will be their president.
So it’s the policy that must be opposed, and this policy is imperialist. We must develop a principled opposition to this policy, without prevarications. The task falls on the left, but it cannot be a left divided by relativist consideration of “evil” on all sides. However we may feel about the morality of governments in Russia, China, Syria, Iran, etc., one thing is clear: they did not launch a war on Iraq, opening the door to all the crimes that followed from that original crime. It is time to decide whether we want to live with things as they are or change them. And we must begin by changing them at home.
Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: lbohne@edinboro.edu
November 7, 2016 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Hillary Clinton, Syria, United States | Leave a comment
IPCC, Climate Science And The Crisis of Peer Review
Foreword to Donna Laframboise’s new report Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential
By Christopher Essex and Matt Ridley – GWPF – 31/10/16
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly and falsely claimed that it depends entirely on peer-reviewed papers. Donna Laframboise used volunteers to check this claim and found that a significant part of the references in the fourth assessment report of the IPCC were to ‘grey literature’ – that is, press releases, ‘reports’ from pressure groups and the like, which are not remotely the normal peer reviewed scientific literature.
Yet even if all the citations used by the IPCC were peer-reviewed, this would not mean they were infallible. Peer review is not, never was, and never can be a general protection against prejudice, error, or misconception about scientific matters. That it seems otherwise to some people is a misapprehension on their part, reflecting widespread myths about the reality of human investigations into the natural world.
It is startling for non-scientists who actually visit the sausage factory of science for the first time. There, peer review proves to be an often biased, prejudicial, and perfunctory process contrary in every respect to popular expectations about science. But scientists know that no increased regulation or standards can ever improve things, because there are no higher authorities to appeal to in a domain of human endeavour where no one knows or ever knew the answers – hence the name ‘peer review’ and not ‘expert correction’.
Donna Laframboise observes that, ‘There is a reason publishing insiders are among peer review’s most derisive critics. They know it’s mostly just a game. Everyone is pretending that all is well despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.’ Most scientists grudgingly tolerate peer review because they cannot think of anything better. Experienced ones do not expect much from it, even if they must play along to succeed given modern customs (until about the mid-20th century it hardly existed).
Most scientists cringe when they hear other scientists claim that because their work is peer-reviewed, they do not have to respond to criticisms, even those from qualified colleagues, whether peer-reviewed or not. Some surely do make such claims: ‘…many academics insist that the research they present to the world has been fully vetted. Indeed, they often behave as though it meets a standard unrivalled elsewhere’, observes Laframboise.
Furthermore, those same scientists retreat to the truth about the state of human knowledge of Nature when facts go against their claims. She points out that: ‘On the other hand, they take no responsibility when information they’ve produced turns out to be mistaken. In such cases everyone is then reminded that scholarly publishing is vii really just an exchange of ideas.’ Few competent scientists regard current scientific thinking as anything more than provisional. It is always fully open to challenge.
Peer-review is also abused as a form of gatekeeping to defend orthodox ideas from challenge, as Laframboise says: ‘Alternative schools of thought are more likely to encounter scorn than a fair hearing, and the secretive nature of peer review provides ample cover for intolerance and tribalism. . . It places unconventional thinkers at the mercy of their more conventional colleagues. Indeed, this approach seems designed to extinguish – rather than nurture – the bold, original thinking that leads to scientific breakthroughs.’ Many unorthodox ideas prove to be wrong, but they are the lifeblood of scientific advance. They challenge our orthodoxies, either sharpening them or overthrowing them. Thus the notion of challenging the orthodox is accepted in science by necessity, even if grudgingly.
Gatekeeping against the unorthodox is not remotely a new problem. Oracular mediocrities down the centuries have doggedly resisted human advances in knowledge from Galileo to Semmelweis to Einstein, and thousands of other cases that only the most learned science historians will ever know. Spectacular scandals come and go, but science is in the end a long game of the generations, not something played out in news cycles. So why then has the public debate about the perfunctory, crony, gate-keeping aspects of peer review grown in volume in the media now? Partly it is because science has become a ‘bigger’ and more centralized endeavor, with massive budgets invested in conventional wisdom, and more politicians involved in pushing certain conclusions. How else can one comprehend the term ‘orchestrated’ used by one founder of the IPCC to describe how scientific opinion was designed to be treated for the use of policymakers?
It is clear that people who have never studied the history of science, or have never been on the unfashionable side of a scientific debate are in for a shock upon encountering this messy and sordid reality for the first time. Not least in for a shock is the media, which has been busy identifying heartbreaking science scandals in medicine, social science, neuroscience, and economics. But curiously they offer none from the subject of climate, despite it being one of the most policy driven and lavishly funded branches of science today.
Is this because there are few examples of bad practice, irreproducibility, retraction, pal review and gatekeeping in climatology? Far from it. The Climategate emails of 2009 revealed gatekeeping at its most blatant. Who can forget Phil Jones writing to Michael Mann on 8 July 2004 ‘can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ Or Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick struggling to publish (leading to a US Congressional hearing, no less) their comprehensive demolition of the statistical errors and data-selection issues in the infamous ‘hockey stick’ paper? Or Richard Tol’s exposure of the practices employed in the Cook et al ‘97% viii consensus’ paper? Again and again, peer-reviewed climate papers have fallen apart under post-publication scrutiny from the likes of McIntyre, Willis Eschenbach, Donna Laframboise, Judith Curry and Nic Lewis. And these do not even touch on the challenge of independently reproducing climate model output without the machinery and resources necessary to do so, as Laframboise rightly observes in the following paper.
Indeed, the field of climate science could supply a rich harvest of examples of this crisis of scientific credibility all on its own. Yet it is the scandal that dare not speak its name. The discussions of the crisis in peer review in Nature, Science, the Economist and elsewhere studiously ignore any examples from climate science. Why is this? It is an article of faith among certain scientists and science journalists that because climate scepticism is also a position supported by those on the right of politics, so nobody in science must give fodder to the sceptics.
This is nothing less than the modern manifestation of gatekeeping continuing its ancient legacy, driven by sheer ignorance and self-delusion, to keep the forces that actually advance science away from the door. Scientific research stretches human faculties to their limits, and it is at such limits where human frailties become most prominent.
Humans are fallible. That is one of the greatest lessons from the history of science. The message to be taken from these heartbreaking scientific scandals and absurdities is not one of chagrin and a temptation to adopt cynicism. The true authors of such scandals are the laymen, academics, journalists, and policymakers who do not give a fair hearing to the many highly trained scientists motivated by alternative views who would put such dubious claims to the test. A pervasive uneducated appeal to science as a monolithic incomprehensible authority, assessed only in terms of moral purity rather than factual accuracy, has made such a fair hearing nearly impossible, and done great harm to science and us all.
November 7, 2016 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | IPCC, UK, United Nations, United States | Leave a comment
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Left-leaning despisers of 9/11 Truth movement: Do you really believe in miracles?
David Ray Griffin | Global Research | 06 Jul 2010
An Open Letter to Terry Allen, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, David Corn, Chris Hayes, George Monbiot, Matthew Rothschild, and Matt Taibbi.
[1]According to several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, some of its central claims, especially about the destruction of the World Trade Center, show its members to be scientifically challenged. In the opinion of some of these critics, moreover, claims made by members of this movement are sometimes unscientific in the strongest possible sense, implying an acceptance of magic and miracles. … Full article
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