A Decade of Questions Over a Paxil Study Vindicated
By Martha Rosenberg | CounterPunch | December 29, 2015
In the last few years, highly promoted drugs like Vioxx, Bextra, Baycol, Trovan, Meridia, Seldane, Hismanal, Darvon, Mylotarg, Lotronex, Propulsid, phenylpropanolamine (PPA), phenacetin, Raxar and Redux have been withdrawn for safety risks after millions used them. Sorry about that. Others like Avandia, Cylert, Ketek and Xarelto are under serious safety clouds.
But Big Pharma insists it is unaware of drugs’ true risks until a wide swath of the population uses them and “safety signals” emerge. Facts sometimes suggest otherwise.
In 1977, almost thirty years before Merck admitted its bone drug Fosamax caused jawbone death, its bone scientist observed the action in rats. (The “anti-fracture” drug also causes fractures.)
Years before the label of the antipsychotic Seroquel was changed in 2011 to warn the drug “should be avoided” in combination with at least 12 other medications because of heart risks, at least 99 articles in the U.S. National Library of Medicine linked the drug to “sudden death,” “QT prolongation” (a heart disturbance that can lead to death), “cardiac arrest” and “death.” In many cases, the Pharma companies “discover” the problems after the drug patent has conveniently expired.
Then there’s Paxil. Paroxetine was a top selling SSRI antidepressant drug for GSK during the “happy pill” craze when Big Pharma was telling everyone they had “depression.” But in 2004, soon after its approval, the New York Attorney General charged that research about the drug published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (known as “Study 329”) buried the drug’s true risks of suicide in adolescents.
And there were more questions about the research. Former Boston Globe reporter Alison Bass and others reported that the paper was not even written by the 22 doctors and researchers listed as “authors” but by a medical communication company hired by GSK. (Ghostwriting helped make Vioxx, Neurontin, hormone replacement therapy and even the flame retardant chemical deca [Deca-BDE] appear safe, according to published reports.) “You did a superb job with this,” wrote the Paxil paper’s first “author” Martin Keller of Brown University to Sally Laden, a ghostwriter working for Scientific Therapeutics Information. “It is excellent. Enclosed are rather minor changes from me.”
In 2006, “author” Martin Keller, former Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Brown, acknowledged that GSK had given him tens of thousands of dollars during and after the time the study was conducted.
There were also questions about where the research appeared. The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is a publication of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry which lists the funders of its “treatment guidelines” for children and adolescents with bipolar disorder as Abbott, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Forest, Janssen, Novartis and Pfizer.
Almost fifteen years after the questionable research was published, the furor had not died down. In 2014, two members of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Edmund Levin and George Stewart, asked the editor of the Academy’s journal why the discredited paper was still standing and had not been retracted. (A quick look at other scientific papers identified in the press as ghostwritten shows that few are retracted and most are standing, to deceive future generations.)
Then, in September 2015, when many reporters, psychiatrists, researchers and professors had given up the Paxil fight, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a reanalysis that amounted to a reversal of the original study. The new research demonstrated that Paxil indeed increases risks of suicide in young people and adolescents.
The reanalysis of Paxil’s suicide risks in the young is a victory for safety activists, medical reporters, the public and freedom of the press. But many pro-pill doctors continue to fight evidence of Paxil’s suicide risks and similar SSRIs. “There is a very reasonable possibility that it has discouraged patients from taking antidepressants and physicians from prescribing these medications [and] the government should rescind the black-box warning on antidepressants altogether,” Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical wrote in the New York Times a month before the Paxil reanalysis.
December 29, 2015 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | New York Times, United States | Leave a comment
Government Forcibly Sterilized Latina Women Without Their Consent
Counter Current | December 28, 2015
Disturbing revelations about a U.S. government program to forcibly sterilize Latina women are now coming out, and the evidence is more damning that previously expected.
The documentary No Más Bebés has compiled a litany of evidence that sheds the light on one of California’s most disturbing secrets, which are reminiscent of Nazi eugenics programs: forced sterilization of Latina women.
For decades, California was one of several states that performed forced sterilization. For women, it meant having one’s “tubes tied” after giving birth – usually without their consent. It wasn’t just women, though. Men were also given vasectomies without their knowledge. Hardest hit: Spanish-speaking immigrants.
The eugenics program ran from 1909 to 1963. During that time, over 20,000 Californian Latina women were subject to forced sterilization to “control” the population of Latinos in the state.
By the 1970s, that same program had continued but was scaled back just slightly.
Before that gradual phasing out of the program, Latina women – particularly immigrants – in the 1960s had been forcibly sterilized at the Los Angeles County Hospital, without their consent.
The sterilization happened via government instruction to the hospital, after Latina women gave birth at the hospital.
Many women were told about the procedure, but only after it was performed on them.
As more and more women were told about what was done to them, word began to spread among the Latino community that the government was sterilizing them against their will.
To add insult to injury, many Caucasian Californians saw the government program as “legitimate population control.”
California’s government argued passionately that forced sterilization was “necessary” to keep “welfare” expenditures to a minimum.
But others knew very well that this was a further attempt to stem the growing Mexican American population in California.
The documentary No Más Bebés has now uncovered proof that the real intention was to rid society of “undesirables.”
Eventually a class action lawsuit was filed against the government for the forced sterilization program, in the case of (Madrigal v. Quilligan). Further implicated in the suit, was not just L.A. county doctors as well as the state governments, but also the U.S. federal government itself.
Perhaps the worst part of this infuriating story is that the class action suit – brought by the victims of this racist government program – actually lost the lawsuit when it was brought to court.
Watch the full trailer for the documentary No Más Bebés below…
December 29, 2015 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Human rights, United States | Leave a comment
Turkey: A Criminal State, a NATO State
By Eric Draitser | New Eastern Outlook | December 28, 2015
It is now openly discussed even in mainstream media the fact that Turkey has been intimately involved in fomenting and supporting the war on Syria, with its ultimate goal being the overthrow of the Syrian government and its replacement by a compliant proxy aligned with Turkish President Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood. That this is no longer a ‘conspiracy theory’ but a conspiracy fact not only vindicates my analysis over the last four years, but it also brings to the fore the nefarious role of a NATO member in stoking a brutal and bloody war for its own ends.
Beyond just the war itself, Turkey has been implicated in a wide variety of crimes (some constituting war crimes) which cast Ankara in a very bad light: a supporter of terrorism, a criminal government engaging in acts of aggression against its neighbors and other world powers, the repression of journalists and others who have brought the truth to the light of day, among many others. Taken in total, it becomes clear that under President Erdogan Turkey has become a belligerent actor with delusions of hegemony and a complete disregard for human rights and sovereignty.
But how exactly has this transformation happened? What has been proven regarding Turkish government actions that make it so clear that the regime in Ankara is criminal in nature?
Cataloging Turkish Crimes
The criminality of the Erdogan government can be roughly broken down into the following categories: aggression against sovereign states, material support for international terrorism, and systematic violation of human rights. Naturally, there are many other crimes that would also be included in a full and completing accounting of Ankara’s illegal actions including, but not limited to, corruption, promoting and tacitly supporting fascist gangs, and many others. But it is the support for international terrorism that rises above all others to thrust Turkey into the spotlight as one of the single most important supporters of the global scourge of terrorism.
Turkey’s central role in each and every aspect of terrorism in Syria must be the starting point of any analysis of Turkey’s grave crimes. President Erdogan has not been shy about calling for regime change in Syria, but his position has been far more than merely rhetorical; Erdogan’s government has played a very direct role in the sponsorship, arming, facilitation and military backing of everyone from the Free Syrian Army to Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria) and the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh).
In 2012, the New York Times confirmed that the CIA was sending weapons and other military materiel into the hands of anti-Assad forces from the Turkish side of the border, using their connections with the Muslim Brotherhood to do so. However, it has also come to light that Turkish intelligence has been front and center in the ongoing campaign to arm and resupply the terror groups such as the al-Nusra Front and others. This fact was exposed by Can Dündar, the editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet, who now faces a potential life sentence at the behest of President Erdogan, who himself called for Dündar to receive multiple life sentences.
What is the reason for the attack on Dündar and other opposition journalists? The Cumhuriyet, one of the most widely read Turkish dailies, published video footage confirming the widespread allegations that Turkish trucks, ostensibly loaded with humanitarian supplies, were actually filled with arms bound for terror groups fighting against Assad, and that those trucks were operated by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT). But it goes much further than that.
Turkey has been directly involved on the ground in Syria both in active military and support roles. In fact, transcripts of wiretaps obtained by Cumhuriyet, and presented in Turkish courts, along with shocking video footage, have confirmed what numerous eyewitnesses have stated: Turkish security forces have been directly involved in shelling and support operations for Nusra front and other jihadi groups in and around Kassab, Syria, among other sites. This is a crucial piece of information because it explains just why those terror groups were able to successfully capture that region in 2014, and recapture it this year. Eyewitnesses in Kassab have confirmed what Syrian soldiers speaking on condition of anonymity had reported, namely that Turkish helicopters and heavy artillery were used in support of Nusra and the other terror groups during both the 2014 and the current campaign.
Of course this policy of alliance with anti-Assad terrorists has been part of Turkey’s modus operandi since the beginning of the conflict. In 2012, Reuters revealed that Turkey, “set up a secret base with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military and communications aid to Syria’s rebels from a city near the border… ‘It’s the Turks who are militarily controlling it. Turkey is the main coordinator/facilitator. Think of a triangle, with Turkey at the top and Saudi Arabia and Qatar at the bottom,’ said a Doha-based source.”
This information was confirmed by Vice President Joe Biden in his spectacular foot-in-mouth speech at Harvard University where he stated:
Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends… [and] the Saudis, the Emirates, etcetera. What were they doing?… They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad — except that the people who were being supplied, [they] were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world.
But one must guard against the false notion that somehow Turkey’s role has been merely as auxiliary in Syria, as a supporter, but not leader, of the terrorist factions wreaking havoc on the Syrian battlefield. Instead, it is now an inescapable fact, even acknowledged by some high-ranking military and intelligence officials, that Turkey has been the principal financier and supporter of the Islamic State and the other jihadist groups.
According to the UK Independent, President Erdogan’s son Bilal Erdogan, along with a number of other close associates, have been directly benefiting from the illicit oil trade with the Islamic State. The paper noted that, “Bilal Erdogan… is one of three equal partners in the BMZ group, a major Turkish oil and marine shipping company, which both the Russian and Syrian governments have accused of purchasing oil from ISIS… Bilal Erdogan has been directly involved in the oil trade with ISIS… Turkey downed a Russian jet on 24 November specifically to protect his oil smuggling business.”
In fact, Syria’s Information Minister Omran al-Zoabi explained that “All of the oil was delivered to a company that belongs to the son of Recep [Tayyip] Erdogan. This is why Turkey became anxious when Russia began delivering airstrikes against the IS infrastructure and destroyed more than 500 trucks with oil already. They’re importing not only oil, but wheat and historic artefacts [sic] as well.”
So it seems that Erdogan and his clique are involved not simply in fomenting war and terrorism in Syria, but also in its plunder, with complex smuggling networks being directly tied to the Turkish President himself. Indeed, just such smuggling networks have been uncovered throughout Asia, tying Turkey into the broader international architecture of terrorism trafficking.
In late 2014 and early 2015, a human trafficking ring was exposed by Chinese authorities. It was revealed that at least ten Turks were responsible for organizing and facilitating the border crossings of a number of Uighurs (Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang), at least one of whom was a wanted Uighur terrorist with others being “radicalized potential terrorists.” These individuals were likely part of a previously documented trend of Uighur extremists traveling to the Middle East to train and fight with the Islamic State and/or other terror groups.
In fact, precisely this trend was exposed two months earlier in September 2014 when Reuters reported that Beijing formally accused militant Uighurs from Xinjiang of having traveled to Islamic State-controlled territory to receive training. Further corroborating these accusations, the Jakarta Post of Indonesia reported that four Chinese Uighur jihadists had been arrested in Indonesia after having traveled from Xinjiang through Malaysia. Other, similar reports have also surfaced in recent months, painting a picture of a concerted campaign to help Uighur extremists travel throughout Asia, communicating and collaborating with transnational terror groups such as IS.
Now, with these latest revelations regarding Turkish nationals being involved in the trafficking of extremists, it seems an invaluable piece of the terrorist transit infrastructure has been exposed. Indeed my assertions above (initially made here in early February 2015) have been substantiated by Syria’s ambassador to China, quoted at length by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his piece Military to Military which notes the following:
[Syria’s ambassador to China Imad Moustapha explained that] ‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations… and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria’ [emphasis added].
Moustapha’s concerns were echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst who has closely followed the passage of jihadists through Turkey and into Syria. The analyst, whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that ‘Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.’ He added that there was also what amounted to another ‘rat line’ that was funnelling Uighurs – estimates range from a few hundred to many thousands over the years – from China into Kazakhstan for eventual relay to Turkey, and then to IS territory in Syria [emphasis added]. ‘US intelligence,’ he said, ‘is not getting good information about these activities because those insiders who are unhappy with the policy are not talking to them.’ He also said it was ‘not clear’ that the officials responsible for Syrian policy in the State Department and White House ‘get it’. IHS-Jane’s Defence Weekly estimated in October that as many as five thousand Uighur would-be fighters have arrived in Turkey since 2013, with perhaps two thousand moving on to Syria. Moustapha said he has information that ‘up to 860 Uighur fighters are currently in Syria.’
It has become clear that Turkey is now unmistakably a major supporter of international terrorism, with Syria being merely the proving ground for a stable of terror groups directly or indirectly working with Erdogan’s government. This is further evidenced by the now documented and verified fact that the Erdogan government was directly involved in the transfer of chemical weapons into the hands of ISIS.
As Turkish MP Eren Erdem explained before the Turkish parliament and to international media, “There is data in this indictment. Chemical weapon materials are being brought to Turkey and being put together in Syria in camps of ISIS which was known as Iraqi Al Qaeda during that time.” Erdem noted that according to an investigation launched (and abruptly closed) by the General Prosecutor’s Office in Adana, Turkish citizens with ties to the intelligence community took part in negotiations with ISIS-linked and Al-Qaeda-linked militants to sell sarin gas for use in Syria. The evidence of these allegations came in the form of wiretapped phone conversations similar to those published earlier this year by Cumhuriyet.
Taken in total, the case against Erdogan’s government is damning. At the same time, one must also note Erdogan’s grave crimes against his own people.
As noted already, Can Dündar and his colleagues at Cumhuriyet have been targeted by Erdogan’s state for their disclosure of Ankara’s dealings with the terrorists of Syria. Just a few weeks ago Dündar, along with Cumhuriyet’s Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul, were charged in a Turkish court with “spying” and “divulging state secrets.” This should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Turkey’s track record when it comes to opposition journalism.
In fact, in December 2014, the Turkish police raided the offices of the Zaman newspaper, one of the most popular in the country, alleging that Zaman was responsible for “launching an armed terror organization.” The authorities detained the Zaman Editor-in-Chief Ekrem Dumanlı , as well as the head of the Samanyolu Media Group, Hidayet Karaca, along with a producer, scriptwriter and director.
The Turkish Journalists Association (TGC) and the Turkey Journalists’ Labor Union (TGS) released a joint statement in condemnation of the raids and the ongoing repression of journalists by the Erdogan government, noting that “Almost 200 journalists were previously held in prison on charges of being a member of a terror organization, violating their right to a fair trial. Journalists are now being detained once again. These developments mean that freedom of the press and opinion is punished in Turkey, which takes its place in the class of countries where the press is not free.”
International organizations too expressed their outrage at this blatant violation of freedom of the press. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and its regional group the European Federation of Journalists (EFL), stated that, “We are appalled by this brazen assault on press freedom and Turkish democracy… One year after the exposure of corruption at the heart of government, the authorities appear to be exacting their revenge by targeting those who express opposing views… This latest act demonstrates that the authorities’ contempt for journalism has not diminished.”
Of course, Ankara’s war on freedom of speech, and the media generally, is not relegated to established media outlets such as Zaman and Cumhuriyet, but also to citizen media and social media as well. In response to the leaking of recordings on Twitter documenting corruption among Erdogan cronies and political elites within his Justice and Development Party (AKP), Erdogan attacked the social media platform, and his government immediately moved to restrict access to Twitter.
Erdogan even went so far as to suggest a total ban on all social media sites, including Facebook and YouTube, saying that “The international community can say this, can say that. I don’t care at all. Everyone will see how powerful the Republic of Turkey is.” This sort of megalomaniacal rhetoric has become the norm for Erdogan, who sees himself as less a president and more a sultan or absolute monarch.
The famous words of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg succinctly and matter-of-factly state that the waging of aggressive war is “essentially an evil thing… to initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” This is undeniably true. But what happens when one is engaged in an international campaign to destroy a neighboring country through war? What happens when one country enables and participates in the destruction of another? What happens when one country will stop at nothing to come out victorious in a war it is not officially involved in, but covertly manages, and from which it directly benefits? Are these not simply different forms of the same crime, the supreme crime, as it were?
Let’s face it, Turkey is now a mafia state ruled by a criminal regime. It is also a NATO member state. Perhaps now the pernicious illusion of NATO as military alliance defending justice, human rights, and the rule of law can finally be put to rest. While the propagandists will continue the charade, Turkey has permanently exposed the US-NATO-GCC-Israel for the warmongers they are in Syria and around the world. Let’s just hope the world notices.
December 29, 2015 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Da’esh, Erdogan, GCC, ISIL, ISIS, Israel, NATO, Syria, Turkiye, United States | Leave a comment
Tear it down, Oriel
By John Andrews | Dissident Voice | December 28, 2015
I was brought up in Rhodesia, the country named after Cecil Rhodes, so I’m quite interested in the current controversy about the removal of his statue outside Oriel College in Oxford.
The supporters of Rhodes and other champions of British imperial history, argue that it was people like him who made Britain “great”, and “civilised” the countries they conquered. They talk about the thousands of miles of railways, and imposing colonial architecture. Whilst those things may indeed still be used by the native populations there today, that was never their original purpose. Railways were laid to help transport stolen minerals and other products of slavery as quickly as possible back to Britain, and to move British soldiers efficiently around hostile lands. And the fine colonial buildings were built to facilitate the administration of the plundering and oppression, and provide opulent luxury for the oppressors. None of it was done to help the natives; it was done to exploit and steal from them, and crush any resulting dissent.
If Rhodes and his kind had indeed tried to improve the lives of the people of the foreign lands they looted, the catastrophic revolutions that tore through the British Empire after WW2 may never have happened. In the 1960s, for example, almost nothing was provided by the followers of Rhodes for the natives of Rhodesia. We white-skinned sons of empire, a mere 5% of the population, went to fine schools, had good health care, great sports clubs, public swimming pools and spacious parks – access to which was either wholly forbidden to black-skinned people or severely restricted. I clearly remember the public buses and toilets labelled “whites only”, the fine railways that 95% of the population couldn’t use – except for riding in filthy, overcrowded, rickety third class carriages; I remember the shops, hotels, restaurants and bars that black people could work in but not use.
In the African tribal lands schools and health clinics were few and far between, very basic, and more likely to be run by Catholic missionaries rather than the government. Black-skinned people could only work as labourers, domestic servants or do other menial jobs that white people didn’t want to do. They couldn’t take managerial positions or serve as officers in the police or army. They couldn’t vote or stand in elections. When I worked on Rhodesia Railways, as late as 1979, black people weren’t even allowed to become train drivers because, it was said, they weren’t clever enough. We white people lived in pampered comfort in exclusive leafy suburbs, whilst the black-skinned people who provided our comfort were forced to live out of sight in sheds at the bottom of the garden, or miles away in segregated overcrowded shameful townships. This was the true legacy of Rhodes and his kind.
Tear down his statue, Oriel, and smash it to atoms.
December 28, 2015 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Cecil Rhodes, Oriel College, Rhodesia, UK | Leave a comment
Israel threatens Brazil with cold diplomacy unless it accepts settler ambassador
Dani Dayan © Wikipedia
RT | December 28, 2015
Israel has warned Brazil that relations will deteriorate unless it accepts the former Israeli head of the West Bank settlement program as ambassador. The appointment was made four months ago and has still not been approved by Brazil’s government.
The country has continuously failed to give in to diplomatic pressure, leading Israel to up the stakes and issue threats.
Brazilian refusals have gone on since August, when the political appointment was made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The main sticking point for Brazilian opposition to the appointment is the fact that Dani Dayan – the nominee – lives in the occupied West Bank, as well as being the former head of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea and Samaria.
Like most [all] of the international community, Brazil’s leftist government believes the building of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land to be illegal. But condemnation at all levels has not resulted in any action on the part of Israel.
Reda Mansour, Israel’s previous ambassador, left Brasilia last week, and now the Israelis are warning that if Dayan does not replace him, there will be consequences for bilateral relations.
“The State of Israel will leave the level of diplomatic relations with Brazil at the secondary level if the appointment of Dani Dayan is not confirmed,” Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said in an interview to Israel’s Channel 10, according to Reuters. Israel has refused to nominate another candidate for the position.
Hotovely then said Israel would continue to press Brasilia through various means, including the Brazilian Jewish community, as well as direct appeals from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is one of the more outspoken defenders of Israel’s settlement-building in the West Bank.
According to Hotovely, as cited by the Jerusalem Post, this lobbying will take place with the aim of showing that Dayan is “a man who is respectable, worthy, and accepted across Israel’s political spectrum.”
Hotovely added that in the event of Brazil’s refusal, there will be “a crisis in relations between the two countries, and it is not worth going there.”
There has been no comment yet from President Dilma Roussef on whether Brasilia would cave to Israeli demands, but a senior source in the Foreign Ministry told Reuters they “do not see that happening.” And if Dayan is not, in fact, named the next ambassador, the only real alternative will be to have the next highest-ranking official acting in his stead.
Dayan for months remained silent, but on Saturday, in an interview to Channel 2, attributed Brazil’s refusal to “classic BDS” – or boycott, divestment and sanctions. He believes the entire situation owes itself to pressure from Israeli activists, Palestinians and select circles in Brazil.
Tensions between the two countries have been on the rise since the last administration, when Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva worked to warm Brazilian ties with Iran. They rose further last year when an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman labeled Brazil “a diplomatic dwarf.” This was after Brasilia recalled its ambassador from Israel as a show of protest over the continuing military offensive in Gaza.
December 28, 2015 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Benjamin Netanyahu, Brazil, Dani Dayan, Dilma Roussef, Israel, Latin America, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment
Iran MPs introduce US compensation bill
Press TV – December 28, 2015
Iran’s lawmakers introduce an urgent bill, demanding compensation from the US for “the damages which it has inflicted” on the country since 1953.
The MPs, irked by recent moves in the US for appropriation of Iran’s frozen assets, presented the bill Monday with a single urgency status, meaning it will be discussed immediately in parliament.
“In order to redeem the rights of the Iranian nation, the Administration is obliged to take necessary legal measures on receiving compensations and damages from the American government in proportion to its role in the following cases,” the draft bill said, listing the cases in 11 entries.
On top of the list, the bill demands restitution from the US over loss of lives and property damage resulting from the CIA-led 1953 coup which toppled the government of Mohammad Mosaddeq and restored the shah as an absolute dictator.
The US should also pay compensation for more than 223,000 Iranians killed and about 600,000 others injured “due to American intelligence, political and military cooperation” with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his 1980-1988 war on Iran, it said.
The bill further seeks damages over US support for MKO and other terrorist groups in assassinating and kidnapping Iranians and hijacking the country’s flights as well as Washington’s sanctions on Tehran and blockade of its assets.
The MPs have also cited the US government complicit in Saudi killing of Iranian pilgrims in 1987 and deaths of several hundred others during the Hajj stampede in Mina in September and demanded compensation.
‘American theft’
The motion comes in the wake of recent measures taken in the US to appropriate Iranian assets frozen in bank accounts in the country.
The US Supreme Court is reportedly considering a case filed by over 1,300 Americans pressing to receive billions of dollars of the Iranian money in awarded damages over two bombings in Beirut and Saudi Arabia in 1983 and 1996.
The Obama administration has reportedly urged the court not to overturn the decisions of US circuit and appeals courts to award the plaintiffs.
In 2012, President Barack Obama issued an executive order blocking all of the Central Bank of Iran’s assets held in the US in order to prevent Tehran from repatriating them.
At the same time, Congress passed a law which included a provision making it easier for the Americans to use Iranian funds frozen in the US.
“The American government’s move to lay hands on Iran’s blockaded assets amounts to theft and we are working to answer it,” Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said on Monday.
On Thursday, US media said each of the 53 hostages held during the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Tehran by Iranian students would receive compensation under a spending bill passed last Friday.
December 28, 2015 Posted by aletho | Economics, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Iran, Sanctions against Iran, United States | Leave a comment
America Was Prepared to Annihilate Prague, Warsaw, Other Capitals
By Wayne MADSEN – Strategic Culture Foundation – 27.12.2015
Recently-declassified nuclear targeting documents from 1959 describe how Washington planned to obliterate the capital cities of what are now America’s NATO allies in Eastern and Central Europe. The revelation casts doubt on Washington’s Cold War commitment to the protection of what it referred to as «captive nations» in Europe. The documents are contained in a report titled, «SAC (Strategic Air Command) Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959».
The US Air Force study called for the «systematic destruction» of such major population centers as Warsaw, East Berlin, Prague, Bucharest, Tallinn, and others, as well as Peiping (Beijing), Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and Moscow.
Atomic bombs eight times to destructive force of that dropped by the United States on Hiroshima were trained on a number of targets in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There were 179 «designated ground zeros» for atomic bombs in Moscow and 145 in St. Petersburg.
US atomic weapons would have laid waste to Wittstock, just upwind of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hometown of Templin in Brandenburg in the former East Germany. It is most certain that had the US launched an atomic attack on Europe, Merkel, her parents Horst and Herlind Kasner, and brother Marcus would have been vaporized in the massive pre-targeted strike on East Berlin and the regions surrounding it.
George Soros’s hometown of Budapest would have been completely destroyed after the US hit the Tokol military airfield on the banks of the Danube River with one of its «city-busting» nuclear weapons. The blast would have rendered the Danube a radioactive drainage ditch and anyone exposed to the poisonous Danube waters downriver would have succumbed to an agonizing death from radiation sickness. Adding to the misery of anyone living alongside the Danube was the fact that Bratislava, also on the banks of the Danube, was also targeted for nuclear annihilation. The first major urban center casualties outside of Hungary and then-Czechoslovakia from the radioactive Danube would have been in Belgrade, the capital of neutral Yugoslavia.
The nuclear targeting of Vyborg on the Finnish border would have brought death and destruction to the border region of neutral Finland. Four atomic bombs were targeted on the former Finnish city: Koyvisto, Uras, Rempeti airfield, and Vyborg East.
Nuclear weapons, as the United States knew in 1959 and very well knows today, are not «precision-guided munitions».
For all of its propaganda beamed to Eastern Europe on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the United States was willing to sacrifice the very peoples it proclaimed to want to «free» from the Soviet bloc. America’s «mutually assured destruction» policy was based on increasing the «mega-death» count around the world by having the ability to hit the enemy with more nuclear «throw weight».
Increasing the mega-death count was why the United States targeted such large population centers as Peiping (Beijing), Shanghai, Mukden (Shenyang), and Tientsin in China. The pummeling of metro Moscow with atomic bombs was also designed to increase body count. The formerly Top Secret nuclear targeting document lists the following areas of Moscow for nuclear bombardment: Bykovo airport, central Moscow, Chertanovo, Fili, Izmaylovo, Khimki, Kuchino, Lyubertsy, Myachkovo airport, Orlovo, Salarevo, Shchelkovo, and Vnukovo airport.
Eighteen nuclear targets were programmed for Leningrad: Central Leningrad (including the historic Hermitage), Alexandrovskaya, Beloostrov, Gorelovo, Gorskaya, Kamenka North, Kasimovo, Kolomyagi, Kolpino, Krasnaya Polyana, Kudrovo, Lesnoy, Levashovo, Mishutkino, Myachkovo, Petrodvorets, Pushkin, Sablino, Sestroretsk, Tomilino, Uglovo, and Yanino.
Bucharest, Romania, was the target for three city busters aimed at Baneasa, Otopeni airport, and Pipera. Ulan Bator, the capital of the present America-idolizing Mongolia, would not have been spared. The Pentagon nuclear target list does not even list Mongolia as a separate country. The entry for the nuclear strike reads: «Ulaan Baatar, China».
Two uncomforting facts stand out from the disclosure of the targeting list. First, the United States remains as the only country in history that used nuclear weapons in warfare – hitting the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Second, some Pentagon officials, notably Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer, called for a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. In fact, while the USSR, China, and France rejected the first use of nuclear weapons, NATO and the United States, on the other hand, chiseled in stone the first use of tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But, as seen with the wishes of LeMay, Lemnitzer, and others, a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and its allies, including China, was on the wish list of the Pentagon’s top brass.
Because the Soviet Union had virtually no intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 1959 and hinged its nuclear warfare capabilities on strategic bombers, the Pentagon brass wanted to hit the Soviet Union in a pre-emptive strike before they reached missile parity with the United States. At the heart of the crazed Pentagon reasoning was what the nuclear warfare champions called the «missile gap».
There is not much of a leap from the «black comedy» nuclear Armageddon film «Dr Strangelove» to actual Cold War era meetings on pre-emptive nuclear strikes held in the White House and Pentagon. Attorney General Robert Kennedy walked out of one such meeting in disgust while Secretary of State Dean Rusk later wrote: «Under no circumstances would I have participated in an order to launch a first strike». In 1961, President John F Kennedy questioned the motives of his generals and admirals after one such nuclear war pep talk from the Pentagon brass by stating, «And we call ourselves the human race».
Kennedy and his brother Robert had every reason to be fearful that the Pentagon would circumvent civilian authority and launch a nuclear strike either against Cuba, the Soviet Union, or both during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. According to Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, Robert Kennedy told Soviet ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin during the height of the crisis that «the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American military could get out of control».
Today, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe continue having their love affair with NATO and the Americans. Yet, it was the same NATO and the forefathers of the present gung ho military interventionists in Washington who once wanted to rain nuclear fire upon the cities of Warsaw (six ground zeroes: Ozarow, Piastow, Pruszkow, Boernerowo, Modlin, and Okecie), Prague (14 designated ground zeroes at Beroun, Kladno, Kralupy nad Vltavou, Kraluv Dvor, Neratovice, Psary, Radotin, Roztoky, Slaky, Stechovice, Velvary, Kbely, Ryzyne, and Vodochody), Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia (three ground zeroes: Bozhurishte, Kumaritsa, and Vrazhdebna), Bratislava, Kiev (three nuclear targets: Bortnichi, Post-Volynskiy airport, and Svyatoshino airport), Leipzig (where seven atomic bombs were targeted on Altenhain, Boehlen, Delitzsche, Grimma, Pegau, Wurzen, and Brandis), Weimar, and Wittenberg.
Also not to be spared nuclear annihilation were Potsdam, Vilnius (five nuclear ground zeroes: Novo Vilnya, Novaya Vileyka, Vilnyus (Center), Vilnyus East, and Vilnyus Southwest), Lepaya (Latvia), Leninakan (Gyumri) in Armenia, Alma Ata (Kazakhstan), Poznan, Lvov (three ground zeroes: Gorodok, Lvov Northwest, and Sknilov), Brno, Plovdiv in Bulgaria, Riga (four ground zeroes: Salaspils, Skirotava, Spilve, and Riga West), Ventspils in Latvia (two targets: Ventspils South and Targale), Tallinn (two ground zeroes: Lasnamae and Ulemiste), Tartu, Tirana, Vlone (Albania), Berat/Kucove (Albania), Kherson (Ukraine), Baku/Zabrat, Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Republic, Syktyvkar in the Komi Autonomous Republic, Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic on the Iranian border, Osh in Kyrgyzstan, Stalinabad (Dushanbe) in Tajikistan, Tashkent in Uzbekistan, and Tbilisi (seven ground zeroes at: Tbilisi central, Agtaglya, Orkhevi, Sandar, Sartichala, Soganlug, and Vaziani).
NATO and neo-conservative propagandists continue to paint Russia as an enemy of the peoples of central and eastern Europe. However, it was not Russia that had nuclear weapons once trained on the cities of the Eurasian land mass but the United States. Had the Pentagon generals and admirals had their way, today the eastern front of a rapidly expanding NATO would have been nothing more than a smoldering and radioactive nuclear wasteland, all courtesy of Uncle Sam’s nuclear arsenal.
December 28, 2015 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | United States | Leave a comment
Foreign Weapons, Fighters and Agenda: Syria’s War is Not a Civil War – it Never Was
By Ulson Gunnar | New Eastern Outlook | December 28, 2015
The weapons are foreign, the fighters are foreign, the agenda is foreign. As Syrian forces fight to wrest control of their country back and restore order within their borders, the myth of the “Syrian civil war” continues on.
Undoubtedly there are Syrians who oppose the Syrian government and even Syrians who have taken up arms against the government and in turn, against the Syrian people, but from the beginning (in fact before the beginning) this war has been driven from abroad. Calling it a “civil war” is a misnomer as much as calling those taking up arms “opposition.” It is not a “civil war,” and those fighting the Syrian government are not “opposition.”
Those calling this a civil war and the terrorists fighting the Syrian state “opposition” hope that their audience never wanders too far from their lies to understand the full context of this conflict, the moves made before it even started and where those moves were made from.
When did this all start?
It is a valid question to ask just when it all really started. The Cold War saw a see-sawing struggle between East and West between the United States and Europe (NATO) and not only the Soviet Union but also a growing China. But the Cold War itself was simply a continuation of geopolitical struggle that has carried on for centuries between various centers of power upon the planet. The primary centers include Europe’s Paris, London and Berlin, of course Moscow, and in the last two centuries, Washington.
In this context, however, we can see that what may be portrayed as a local conflict, may fit into a much larger geopolitical struggle between these prominent centers of special interests. Syria’s conflict is no different.
Syria had maintained close ties to the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. That meant that even with the fall of the Soviet Union, Syria still had ties to Russia. It uses Russian weapons and tactics. It has economic, strategic and political ties to Russia and it shares mutual interests including the prevailing of a multi-polar world order that emphasizes the primacy of national sovereignty.
Because of this, Western centers of power have sought for decades to draw Syria out of this orbit (along with many other nations). With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the fractured Middle East was first dominated by colonial Europe before being swept by nationalist uprising seeking independence. Those seeking to keep the colonial ties cut that they had severed sought Soviet backing, while those seeking simply to rise to power at any cost often sought Western backing.
The 2011 conflict was not Syria’s first. The Muslim Brotherhood, a creation and cultivar of the British Empire since the fall of the Ottomans was backed in the late 70s and early 80s in an abortive attempt to overthrow then Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, father of current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The armed militants that took part in that conflict would be scattered in security crackdowns following in its wake, with many members of the Muslim Brotherhood forming a new US-Saudi initiative called Al Qaeda. Both the Brotherhood and now Al Qaeda would stalk and attempt to stunt the destiny of an independent Middle East from then on, up to and including present day.
There is nothing “civil” about Syria’s war.
In this context, we see clearly Syria’s most recent conflict is part of this wider struggle and is in no way a “civil war” unfolding in a vacuum, with outside interests being drawn in only after it began.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its Al Qaeda spin-off were present and accounted for since the word go in 2011. By the end of 2011, Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise (Al Nusra) would be carrying out nationwide operations on a scale dwarfing other so-called rebel groups. And they weren’t this successful because of the resources and support they found within Syria’s borders, but instead because of the immense resources and support flowing to them from beyond them.
Saudi Arabia openly arms, funds and provides political support for many of the militant groups operating in Syria since the beginning. In fact, recently, many of these groups, including allies of Al Qaeda itself, were present in Riyadh discussing with their Saudi sponsors the future of their joint endeavor.
Together with Al Nusra, there is the self-anointed Islamic State (IS). IS, like the Syrian conflict itself, was portrayed by the Western media for as long as possible as a creation within a vacuum. The source of its military and political strength was left a mystery by the otherwise omniscient Western intelligence community. Hints began to show as Russia increased its involvement in the conflict. When Russian warplanes began pounding convoys moving to and from Turkish territory, bound for IS, the mystery was finally solved. IS, like all other militant groups operating in Syria, were the recipients of generous, unending stockpiles of weapons, equipment, cash and fighters piped in from around the globe.
The Syrian conflict was borne of organizations created by centers of foreign interests decades ago who have since fought on and off not for the future of the Syrian people, but for a Syria that meshed more conveniently into the foreign global order that created them. The conflict has been fueled by a torrent of weapons, cash, support and even fighters drawn not from among the Syrian people, but from the very centers of these foreign special interests; in Riyadh, Ankara, London, Paris, Brussels and Washington.
How to settle a civil war that doesn’t exist?
If the Syrian conflict was created by foreign interests fueling militant groups it has used for decades as an instrument of executing foreign policy (in and out of Syria), amounting to what is essentially a proxy invasion, not a civil war, how exactly can a “settlement” be reached?
Who should the Syrian government be talking to in order to reach this settlement? Should it be talking to the heads of Al Nusra and IS who clearly dominate the militants fighting Damascus? Or should it be talking to those who have been the paramount factor in perpetuating the conflict, Riyadh, Ankara, London, Paris, Brussels and Washington, all of whom appear involved in supporting even the most extreme among these militant groups?
If Damascus finds itself talking with political leaders in these foreign capitals, is it settling a “civil war” or a war it is fighting with these foreign powers? Upon the world stage, it is clear that these foreign capitals speak entirely for the militants, and to no one’s surprise, these militants seem to want exactly what these foreign capitals want.
Being honest about what sort of conflict Syria is really fighting is the first step in finding a real solution to end it. The West continues to insist this is a “civil war.” This allows them to continue trying to influence the outcome of the conflict and the political state Syria will exist in upon its conclusion. By claiming that the Syrian government has lost all legitimacy, the West further strengthens its hand in this context.
Attempts to strip the government of legitimacy predicated on the fact that it stood and fought groups of armed militants arrayed against it by an axis of foreign interests would set a very dangerous and unacceptable precedent. It is no surprise that Syria finds itself with an increasing number of allies in this fight as other nations realize they will be next if the “Syria model” is a success.
Acknowledging that Syria’s ongoing conflict is the result of foreign aggression against Damascus would make the solution very simple. The solution would be to allow Damascus to restore order within its borders while taking action either at the UN or on the battlefield against those nations fueling violence aimed at Syria. Perhaps the clarity of this solution is why those behind this conflict have tried so hard to portray it as a civil war.
For those who have been trying to make sense of the Syrian “civil war” since 2011 with little luck, the explanation is simple, it isn’t a civil war and it never was. Understanding it as a proxy conflict from the very beginning (or even before it began) will give one a clarity in perception that will aid one immeasurably in understanding what the obvious solutions are, but only when they come to this understanding.
December 28, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | Al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkiye, UK, United States | Leave a comment
Jeb Bush’s Zionist Paymasters: Bloomberg and Rothschild
By Christopher Bollyn | July 8, 2015
John Ellis “Jeb” Bush may wear an American flag on his lapel but his loyalty is to the Zionist financiers who made him rich, most notably the Rothschild family of Britain.
The terror attacks of 9-11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are immense crimes that have greatly shaped our current political reality. In spite of the historical importance of these events, for nearly fourteen years the U.S. government and mainstream media have engaged in a conspiracy to promote a blatant cover-up about what happened on September 11, 2001.
While we may want to close the book on the sordid saga of 9-11, and the awful wars that followed, and get on with our lives by pretending that we live in a normal political situation, that would be living in denial.
We should understand that the 9-11 cover-up is an ongoing crime that has to be maintained by the criminal cabal that is behind it. The real culprits need to maintain the official deception of what happened on 9-11. They can’t allow the truth about 9-11 to come out, for if it does they’re toast, so they have no alternative but to maintain the cover-up. As they say, no rest for the wicked.
For the real perpetrators, controlling the executive branch of the government is essential to maintain the 9-11 cover-up. The criminal cabal achieves this by making sure that one of their agents occupies the office of the president of the United States. The president decides who serves at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so by controlling the president the criminal cabal can prevent its crimes, like 9-11, from being investigated and prosecuted.
The real criminals, therefore, desperately need to control the White House in order to maintain the 9-11 deception because they are culpable for the false-flag terror atrocity and the two wars of aggression that followed in its wake. Only by controlling the U.S. president can the criminal gang behind 9-11 and these illegal wars avoid prosecution, which is essential for the survival of their criminal regime.
For the American people and our republic, however, it is of vital importance that we put an end to this criminal regime, which has hijacked our nation – as soon as possible – by investigating and prosecuting those who are truly behind the terror attacks of 9-11. It is unrealistic to expect our government, which is controlled by this criminal cabal, to investigate 9-11 when it has promoted the cover-up for the past 13 years. This is why a proper criminal investigation and prosecution of the crimes of 9-11, which is what one would expect in a normal functioning state, would be completely revolutionary in America. Such an investigation and purge would bring down the criminal regime that controls our government. This is why I say that the revolution begins with 9-11 truth.
The election of 2016 is actually a struggle for the very survival of the American republic. This is why the presidential election of 2016 began so early, more than two years before the election, with the names of the two leading controlled candidates bubbling up into our political consciousness, courtesy of the controlled press. The two names that were foisted on the American people: John Ellis “Jeb” Bush and Hillary Clinton, are, of course, members of two of America’s most prominent criminal families. The criminal and treasonous character of the Bush and Clinton families should be known to anyone who has followed American politics for the past few decades.
It is absolutely preposterous that either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton should be president and the idea would be laughable, if the situation weren’t so serious. These people have virtually no popular support and are only candidates for the highest office in the land because they are vigorously promoted by the moneyed special interest groups that dominate U.S. politics and their controlled press. While there are other candidates in the field, Bush and Clinton are leading in the polls although the first primary is still more than 6 months away.
One might very well wonder why Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton would even run for president. Neither has a great following or stands for anything that the public is very interested in. So, why are they running?
The answer is fairly simple. Both Bush and Clinton are members of families that are tied to the ruling criminal cabal through their involvement in criminal activity. They are rewarded with filthy lucre as payment and are expected to do exactly as they are advised because, in reality, they don’t have any other option. While Hillary Clinton and her treachery and Zionist connections are fairly well known, much less is known about Jeb Bush.
For those of us who seek truth and justice for the crimes of 9-11, and a restoration of lawful government in the United States, we need to understand who is behind Jeb Bush and how that influence would be used to maintain the 9-11 cover-up if he were to occupy the White House.
Firstly, we can be sure that Jeb Bush would not support the criminal prosecution of his brother for conspiring, planning, and waging wars of aggression against Iraq or Afghanistan. Secondly, we can be fairly sure that he would not call for a proper criminal investigation of 9-11, based on his support for Israel, and particularly its extreme right-wing leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the chief suspects of the false-flag terror attacks.
As the New York Times reported in an article entitled “Jeb Bush on the Issues” on June 15, 2015:
Mr. Bush calls himself “an unwavering supporter” of Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and distanced himself from recent comments by an adviser, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, that were critical of Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Netanyahu is known for saying that 9-11 was “very good,” on the very day of the attacks, and telling Israeli audiences that Israel has benefitted from 9-11 and America’s struggle in Iraq. Netanyahu is also a war-monger who tells brazen lies in his efforts to push the United States into waging war against Iran. Jeb Bush takes the same hard-line position on Iran as Netanyahu, as the New York Times reports:
He has called the Obama administration’s framework of an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program a “horrific deal” and, like fellow Republican contenders, said he would most likely cancel any final agreement reached by the administration should he become president.
To understand why Jeb Bush supports hard-line Zionist extremists like Benjamin Netanyahu, we need to consider what Bush has done since he left the governor’s mansion in Florida. When Bush left public office in 2007, he went to work for Michael Bloomberg and Lehman Brothers, the disgraced investment firm at the epicenter of the financial crisis of 2008-2009.
When the London-based Barclays, a foreign bank controlled by the Rothschild family, announced that it would take over Lehman Brothers – the day after its collapse – Jeb Bush effectively became a highly-paid adviser to the Rothschild-controlled bank. During the time that Jeb Bush was paid more than $1 million a year at Barclays, the disgraced British bank was run by Marcus Agius, who is married to Katherine de Rothschild, daughter of Edmund Leopold de Rothschild, former head of the Rothschild financial dynasty of England.
Agius is also Senior Independent Director for the Executive Board of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and was the first non-executive director appointed to the BBC’s new Executive Board in December 2006. He is also one of the three current trustees of the Bilderberg Group.
ROTHSCHILD BANKSTERS FLEECE AMERICA – Marcus Agius, the son-in-law of Edmund Rothschild, was CEO of Barclays bank, which took over Lehman Brothers after its collapse led to the massive taxpayer-funded bailout of 2008-2009. George W. Bush was president and Jeb Bush was a highly-paid adviser at both Lehmans and Barclays, the Rothschild-controlled bank that received $8.5 billion – from the U.S. taxpayer. He is also a senior director of the BBC.
It should be noted that Barclays received about $8.5 billion from the U.S. taxpayer-funded bail-out during the last few months of the administration of George W. Bush, Jeb’s older brother:
AIG disclosed payments of $105.3 billion between September and December 2008. And some of the biggest recipients were European banks. Societe Generale, based in France, was the top foreign recipient at $11.9 billion, Deutsche Bank of Germany got $11.8 billion and Barclays, based in England, was paid $8.5 billion.
Source: “AIG ships billions in bailout abroad” by Eamon Javers, March 15, 2009
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20039.html
When Jeb left public office in 2007 he is reported to have been worth about $1.3 million. After seven years working for Bloomberg, Lehman, and Barclays, Bush is now worth about $29 million – half of it coming from the Rothschild-controlled Barclays, as Charles Gasparino reported in his recent article, “Jeb Bush’s Big Lehman Brothers Problem”:
Not much is known about what Bush actually did for Lehman—the firm that went belly-up in 2008 and sparked the wider financial crisis, and Barclays, the bank that purchased Lehman out of bankruptcy and continues to work out of its midtown Manhattan headquarters. He began working for the former after his term as Florida governor ended in 2007, and continued working for the latter until the end of 2014, when he decided to run for president.
The two banks were his biggest sources of income in recent years: Bush earned more than $14 million working for Lehman and then Barclays, which based on my understanding of simple math accounted for nearly half of the $29 million he made after he left government.
Source: “Jeb Bush’s Big Lehman Brothers Problem”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/02/jeb-bush-s-big-lehman-brothers-problem.html
Jeb Bush’s work as an adviser at Lehman Brothers and Barclays puts him squarely in the middle of two of the largest financial crimes in recent history:
While it seems like less of a political detriment since Bush is an adviser rather than a principal, his Barclays work isn’t without potential controversy. Writes the FT: “Mr Bush, who served as an adviser to Lehman Brothers before its collapse during the financial crisis, has rarely spoken about his work at the British bank, which has been ensnared by scandals such as the manipulation of key benchmark interest rates and the mis-selling of payment protection insurance in recent years.”
Source: “Jeb Bush Signals Business Wind-Down with Barclays Departure,” Bloomberg.com, December 18, 2014
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-18/jeb-bush-leaving-barclays-report-says
For the past four years, Jeb Bush has also served on the board of Michael Bloomberg’s foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has donated millions of dollars to Bush’s educational foundation:
Four companies and nonprofits that appointed Bush to their boards of directors or advisory boards backed the educational foundation [of Jeb Bush]. One, Bloomberg Philanthropies, was among the most frequent supporters, making seven donations worth between $1.2 million to $2.4 million. Bush served on Bloomberg’s board from 2010-14.
Source: “Backers of Bush nonprofit include banks, schools, lottery,” AP, July 1, 2015
http://news.yahoo.com/backers-bush-nonprofit-banks-schools-lottery-174449361–election.html#
Rupert Murdoch’s media giant News Corp. has also donated generously to Jeb Bush’s educational foundation. Murdoch’s News Corp. has reportedly made three contributions, at $500,001 to $1 million apiece.
The fact that Jeb Bush has become quite wealthy since leaving public office in Florida in 2007 is not the important thing for 9-11 truth; it’s more important to understand who made him wealthy. More than half of his wealth came from the corrupt Rothschild-controlled Barclays bank, while much of the rest came from Michael Bloomberg.
Michael Bloomberg is a leading Zionist agent who oversaw the suppression of 9-11 truth in New York City for 12 years after the false-flag terror attacks. Bloomberg is very supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu and the ruling right-wing Likud coalition of Israel.
The Rothschild family is the original financial and ideological founder of the Zionist state in Palestine. In Britain, the Lord Rothschild is considered the head of British Jewry. In 1998, senior partners of a wholly-owned Rothschild subsidiary, known as Global Technology Partners, LLC, authored a document entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism”, which was published in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This document discussed the possibility of a catastrophic terror attack on the United States and what should be done if it were to happen.
This article put the idea of a 9-11 type attack into the minds of the American people, and provided a kind of blueprint for how the government should respond when it did. Less than three years later, the catastrophic event that the authors imagined became real. Today, the lead author of that article is the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ashton B. Carter. Like Jeb Bush, Carter worked for years as a paid agent of the Rothschild family of Britain. (See more on this read “The Zionist Network behind 9-11”)
Understanding Jeb Bush’s ties to Michael Bloomberg and the Rothschild family of Britain helps us understand his support of Benjamin Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing Zionist movement he heads in Israel. These connections reveal how the Zionist financial cabal that is behind the 9-11 cover-up controls our political leaders and why we cannot expect our controlled government to ever investigate 9-11 until this foreign criminal element is purged from the U.S. government.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
“AIG ships billions in bailout abroad” by Eamon Javers, Politico.com, March 15, 2009
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20039.html
“Are there any more skeletons, Mr Agius?”, The Telegraph (UK), July 9, 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeffrandall/9385765/Are-there-any-more-skeletons-Mr-Agius.html
“Backers of Bush nonprofit include banks, schools, lottery” by Ronnie Greene and Steve Peoples, AP, July 1, 2015
news.yahoo.com/backers-bush-nonprofit-banks-schools-lottery-174449361–election.html#
Barclays, Wikipedia, July 8, 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barclays
Edmund Leopold de Rothschild, Wikipedia, July 8, 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Leopold_de_Rothschild
“Former Barclays chairman on payroll until March 2014”, The Guardian (UK), November 7, 2013
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/07/barclays-resigned-chairman-marcus-agius-consultancy-libor
“Jeb Bush Paid By Bank That Violated Cuba Sanctions”, BuzzFeed.com, December 18, 2014
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/jeb-bush-paid-by-bank-that-violated-cuba-sanctions#.jx9leXeB2R
“Jeb Bush Signals Business Wind-Down with Barclays Departure”, Bloomberg.com, December 18, 2014
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-18/jeb-bush-leaving-barclays-report-says
“Jeb Bush’s banking career ripe for attack”, CNN, December 18, 2014
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/18/politics/bush-barclays-bailout/
“Jeb Bush’s Big Lehman Brothers Problem” by Charles Gasparino, TheDailyBeast.com, July 2, 2015
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/02/jeb-bush-s-big-lehman-brothers-problem.html
“Jeb Bush’s Rush to Make Money May Be Hurdle”, New York Times, April 20, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/us/politics/jeb-bushs-rush-to-make-money-may-be-hurdle.html?_r=0
“Jeb Bush to resign from Barclays in preparation for 2016 campaign” by Philip Rucker, Washington Post, December 18, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/12/18/jeb-bush-to-resign-from-barclays-in-preparation-for-2016-campaign/
Marcus Agius, Wikipedia, July 8, 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Agius
“The Zionist Network behind 9-11,” Bollyn.com, December 7, 2006
www.bollyn.com/the-zionist-network-behind-9-11/
December 27, 2015 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, UK, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
UK activists’ clarion call to civil societies around the world: ‘Expel Israel from the United Nations’
By Stuart Littlewood | Intifada – Palestine | December 26, 2015
At least some people are determined to kick off the New Year on a positive note. A motion to expel Israel from the United Nations is to be put to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s AGM. It reads as follows:
Motion, PSC AGM 23 January 2016 to expel Israel from the United Nations
Considering that Israel’s admission to the UN on 11 May 1949 by General Assembly Resolution 273 was conditional upon its (1) honouring the UN Charter and (2) implementing UNGA Resolutions 181 of 29 November 1947 and 194 of 11 December 1948;
Noting that Israel has:
(1) repeatedly acted inconsistently with the Purposes of the UN expressed in Article 1.2 of the UN Charter and thus also with Article 2 (introduction);
(2) repeatedly violated the provisions and Principles of the Charter as expressed in Articles 2.3, 2.4, 4, 55 and 56;
(3) failed to implement GA Resolutions 181 and 194;
(4) violated numerous other resolutions of the Security Council and GA; and (5) beginning in 1948 killed many Palestinian civilians and forcibly expelled many others from their homes and land;
Noting further that all attempts to ensure through negotiation Israel’s adherence to the Purposes and Principles contained in the Charter and to general principles of international law have failed;
Considering that effective measures should be taken to resolve the present situation arising out of Israel’s unlawful policies that violate the Charter and UNGA Res 273;
Recalling that Article 6 of the Charter states,
“A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”;
This AGM resolves that the PSC Executive Committee shall
request the government of the United Kingdom, enforced by a petition and lobbying, to submit a motion to the Security Council recommending that the General Assembly expel Israel from the UN in compliance with the Charter, Article 6.
And many will be saying, “About time too.” Israel has enjoyed impunity for its criminal acts for 67 years. And each year the international community’s failure to take disciplinary action has made the Israeli regime more aggressive, more arrogant, more brutal and more loathsome.
Israel’s endless defiance of civilised rules of behavior
When drafting the motion it would have done no harm, I think, to mention the important ruling by the International Court of Justice that Israel’s separation wall is illegal and must come down, and the Palestinians affected properly compensated. The 400-miles long barrier known to all as the Apartheid Wall bites deep into the Palestinian West Bank dividing and isolating communities and stealing their lands and water.
If the Wall was simply for security, as Israel claims, it would have been built along the 1949 Armistice ‘Green Line’. But the Wall’s purpose is plainly to annex plum Palestinian land and water sources for illegal Israeli settlements and to that end closely follows the line of the Western Aquifer. It is a crude attempt to change the ‘facts on the ground’ in order to expand Israeli territory and greatly reduce the viability of a future Palestinian state. In 2004 the International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled that construction of the Wall was “contrary to international law” and Israel must dismantle it and make reparation. The ICJ also ruled that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction”.
Eleven years later Israel, contemptuous of international law, continues to build its hideous Wall with American tax dollars and protected by America’s veto. While Israelis fill their swimming pools, wash their cars and sprinkle their golf courses the Palestinians, who would normally be self-sufficient, now have to pay Israel’s grossly inflated price for a mere trickle of their own water, or go without.
Perhaps the motion should also note how Israel continues to defy the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, an important set of undertakings to which Israel itself and 136 other States are signed up.
Article 1 states that “all peoples have the right of self-determination…. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.” Israel should not be interfering, for example, with fishing in Gaza’s territorial waters, Gaza’s off-shore gas resources or the West Bank’s water. Furthermore “the States that are party to the Covenant… shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations”.
Article 2 requires all States to guarantee that the rights enshrined in the Covenant will be exercised without discrimination of any kind.
Article 6 says that States recognize the right of everyone to gain a living from work of their own choosing and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right. But for Palestinians it is impossible until the siege on Gaza is lifted and free, unfettered access to the outside world restored. The same goes for the West Bank and East Jerusalem which are also blockaded by Israel’s military and strangulated by Israel’s Matrix of Control.
What about the threat Israel poses not just to the region but the rest of the world? According to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission Israel has a nuclear arsenal numbering in the hundreds and is the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nor has it signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention. Perhaps the facts about Israel being a lethal misfit ought to be noted in the PSC motion.
Also worth adding, as justification for launching the motion, is how the Israeli regime enjoys preferential treatment under the EU-Israel Association Agreement of 1995 but fails to observe its terms. These require adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter, and Article 2 says that “respect for human rights and democratic principle constitute an essential element of this agreement”. Israel has never complied but continues to enjoy association benefits. Despite many calls to suspend the Agreement the EU has instead upgraded the relationship and enhanced the benefits. In Israel’s case breaches of legal and human rights obligations are rewarded not punished.
Will the whole world take up the call to expel?
The PSC motion’s originator, Blake Alcott, provides a useful ‘Long Dossier’ on the need for Israel’s expulsion on his blogsite. He writes: “I’m anticipating that, like last January, the PSC Executive Committee will oppose it – not its substance, but because the time isn’t yet ripe for it. Ben-Gurion always said that time is on Israel’s side, and I fear he was right. So I say, let’s throw the book at them….”
The time not ripe after more than six decades of Palestinian suffering during which the situation has gone from disgraceful to intolerable? Baroness Morris, president of Medical Aid for Palestinians, reminds us in her Christmas message,
“In Gaza, 95,000 Palestinians remain homeless following the last conflict [the 2014 Israeli blitzkrieg ‘Protective Edge’ and ongoing 8-year blockade], forcing many to face the winter cold in tents, shipping containers, or among the ruins of their former houses.”
Such inhumanity defies all understanding and reason. And still the international community turns a blind eye to the evil of a small Zionist gang who have somehow managed to grab the Western political élite by the balls.
The patience of decent folk is finally exhausted. Civil society now must set the pace, make the running and oust their compromised leaders. In the coming weeks the PSC has an opportunity to strike a spark that starts a worldwide civil society eruption, with the aim of amplifying the expulsion message, overriding current political inertia and speaking firmly from the grass roots to governments across the globe.
It would help too if the churches in the West found the backbone to take an orchestrated stand against Israel’s seizure of the Holy Land and the threat posed to the very wellspring of the Christian faith. They should be outraged by the regime’s persecution of Christian communities — as well as their Muslim brothers and sisters — residing in the place where Christianity was born.
Perhaps then the UN will sit up, take notice and make amends for its lamentable record.
December 27, 2015 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, UK, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
9/11 Generation Needing ‘Safe Space’ for Sacrosanct Myths
By Jonathan Taylor | CounterPunch | December 25, 2015
Does Generation Safe Space need the military to protect them from hurt feelings? Recent polls indicate increasing support among young people for military rule. Given the constant assault on their fragile identities posed by such atrocities as ethnic Halloween costumes, culturally insensitive Banh Mi sandwiches and the like, who can blame them for craving a new authoritarianism?
Critics on the right have increasingly bemoaned the oversensitivity of the not-so-greatest generation but this critique is starting to show up all over the place. Liberal professors are, somewhat hyperbolically, terrified. Eminent sociologists are deeply concerned. Radical environmentalists allege a new liberal McCarthyism. When some of the saner voices on both the right and left start to agree so broadly, it’s past time to pay attention.
Who is to blame? Helicopter parents? Nanny-state bureaucrats? Rule-obsessed educrats? A rhetorical coup in academic discourse in which disagreement becomes disrespect or insult? Widespread mental illness with a lack of corresponding cognitive therapy? Economic insecurity and the increasing impoverishment of the middle class? Increasing job instability for the young? Accusations fly all over the place as we try to understand why the insufficiently trigger-warned would throw out free speech because of the existence of hate speech, or move to reject democracy itself in favor of authoritarian rule. Few though examine the broader political atmosphere of fear and intolerance since 9-11 that our young people have grown up in, and the role of mass surveillance and the militarization and securitization of political discourse. Could broader notions of vulnerability be leading to an increased sense of personal vulnerability? Or perhaps, a little bit of all of the above?
Whatever the cause, there is no doubt a backlash is brewing, and trending in an unfortunate direction. While the Ivy Leaguers purge a few token administrators (while simultaneously creating new administrative positions that students demand), hate crimes outside of universities are on the rise. While in the classroom each utterance is more and more carefully subjected to scrutiny for microaggressions, populist pundits and politicians are increasingly open about their racism and xenophobia. What do the students expect? With some campus activism devolving into 50% group therapy and 50% primal screaming at hapless administrators, does anyone think this is actually helping create safe spaces for the sort of nuanced, open-minded public debate necessary for real learning and growth? Why create a movement that allows yourself to be viewed as a mass of coddled, over-sensitive elitists, unless of course the problem is that this is what you are?
Watching authoritarianism on the right grow simultaneously with authoritarianism from the campus liberal-left produces anxiety, but anxiety itself fuels these attacks on free speech. Is it time for another Free Speech movement ala Berkeley 1964-6? Or would that potentially hurt somebody’s feelings?
Jonathan Taylor is a Professor in the Geography Department at California State University, Fullerton.
December 25, 2015 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | European Union, Human rights, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Amnesty Publishes a Biased Report About Russia’s Campaign in Syria
Report makes wild allegations of war crimes without substantiating evidence
By Alexander Mercouris | Russia Insider | December 24, 2015
Amnesty International has just released a report accusing the Russian authorities of “shamefully concealing” large numbers of civilian deaths caused by Russian air strikes in Syria.
The report also says the Russians might be committing war crimes in Syria.
The Russians have responded to the report by saying it is littered with cliches.
Having read the report, I can say it provides no evidence a court could use.
As Amnesty says, its report was researched “remotely”.
That means there was no field work. No investigators visited the six places where Amnesty says the attacks by the Russians discussed in the report took place.
The report is based entirely on reports of alleged eye witnesses and video evidence provided to Amnesty by third parties.
This in itself is worrying. Given that Syria is in a state of civil war with a long history of evidence being manipulated by both sides – especially by the rebels – in pursuit of their objectives, this is a fragile reed upon which to build a report like this.
As it happens, detailed examination of the six incidents shows there is no conclusive evidence linking the Russians to any of them.
An attack on Talbisseh on 30th September 2015 is said to have been the result of “suspected Russian air strikes on Karama Street”. Use of certain munitions is attributed to the Russians because “Syrian government forces are not considered capable of delivering them” (“considered” by whom and what if that assumption is wrong?). An attack on Darat Izzah is attributed to a “suspected Russian sea-launched cruise missile”. Civilian deaths on Nuqeyr “purportedly involved cluster munitions”. An attack on Al-Ghantu involved “suspected Russian air strikes”. Two missiles that attacked Sermin were “fired by suspected Russian warplanes”.
Lastly, the report discusses an attack on Ariha without mentioning the Russians or providing any evidence they were involved at all.
Given the myriad number of air forces now operating in Syria, it is impossible to see how Amnesty can be sure that any of these incidents – if they even happened – involved the Russians.
Amnesty tries to get round this by saying the volume of noise of some of the attacks, and comparisons with post-attack reports provided by the Russians, indirectly confirms their involvement.
To say this is unconvincing would be an understatement.
As any investigator knows, relying on what a witness claims to have seen is problematic enough. Drawing deductions from the volume of sound a witness claims to have heard is hopeless.
As for the coincidence of some of the incidents to the post-attack reports the Russians have provided, that is interesting but hardly conclusive. It would after all be an obvious step for someone trying to fabricate evidence of atrocities by the Russians to try to match incidents to attacks the Russians have admitted being involved in.
In a particularly farfetched piece of reasoning, Amnesty tries to use a Russian denial of the destruction of the Omar Bin Al-Khattab mosque in Jisr Al-Sughour in order to “prove” its claim the Russians did actually destroy the Omar Bin Al-Khattab mosque.
The argument is that because the Russians denied they destroyed the mosque, but supported their denial by showing a picture of a different mosque, that somehow “proves” they destroyed the mosque.
That is a classic example of a non sequitur (“it does not follow”).
To see how bad this reasoning is, just consider what Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa programme, has said about this incident:
“By presenting satellite imagery of an intact mosque and claiming it showed another that had been destroyed, the Russian authorities appear to have used sleight of hand to try to avoid reproach and avert scrutiny of their actions in Syria. Such conduct does not cultivate confidence in their willingness to investigate reported violations in good faith. Russia’s Ministry of Defence must be more transparent and disclose targets of their attacks in order to facilitate assessment of whether they are complying with their obligations under international humanitarian law.”
If there is a “sleight of hand” it is in this argument.
Firstly, it is a huge – and unwarranted – leap to say it proves bad faith because the Russians provided a photograph of the wrong mosque.
It is equally possible there was simply a mistake. That would be very likely if the Russians were confused about which mosque they were supposed to have destroyed – because they didn’t in fact destroy any mosque.
More fundamentally, what this argument does is try to prove a positive – that the Russians destroyed the Omar Bin Al-Khattab mosque – out of a negative – that the Russians showed a satellite image of the wrong mosque.
This is flawed reasoning by any measure, and it proves nothing. It does not prove that the mosque – if it was destroyed – was destroyed by the Russians. It could equally well have been destroyed by someone else. In a conflict like the one in Syria there is no shortage of others who might have done it.
The entire report is in fact riddled with this sort of bad reasoning. Besides its repeated use of the word “suspected” (“suspected” by whom?) exposes it for what it actually is – a tissue of guesses and suppositions.
The real concern must however be about the provenance of the information – such as it is – upon which the report is based.
When discussing the attack on Maasran the report says it arrived at its conclusions based on “images and reports sent to it by Syrian human rights activists and also documented by military and security organisations”.
Though Amnesty claims to have spoken to some of the alleged witnesses, it is likely most of the information in the report – and all the video evidence which Amnesty claims to have seen – comes from these sources.
This begs the obvious question of who these “Syrian human rights activists” and “military and security organisations” are, and how much reliance can be placed on them?
What criteria does Amnesty use to determine whether someone reporting out of Syria is a “human rights activist”?
The expression “human rights activist” implies someone whose primary concern is for human rights and who is therefore in some way detached from the political struggle.
Anyone who has followed the Syrian conflict with any care knows that no such people exist. Individuals and organisations who report about Syria claiming to be “human rights activists” – such as the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights – turn out invariably to be anti-Assad activists and members of the Syrian opposition. As such they cannot be assumed to be unbiased or impartial reporters of what is going on.
A reporter does not have to be impartial to be objective and accurate. Gleb Bazov and Colonel Cassad who report about the Ukrainian war from a militia perspective are neither unbiased nor impartial and make no pretence to be. However experience has shown them to be extremely reliable and accurate.
The same unfortunately is not true of the Syrian conflict. This has been proved countless times (see for example here my discussion about the Ghouta chemical attack of August 2013) whilst the fact that the people Amnesty is in contact with claim to be “human rights activists” as opposed to “opposition supporters” – which is what they really are – is in itself good reason to doubt what they say.
Far more disturbing than this reliance on “Syrian human rights activists” is however the reference to “military and security organisations”.
Who are these “military and security organisations”? Are they perhaps the intelligence agencies of the Western powers? If so, should Amnesty be getting its information from such a source?
It is comments like this that explain the concern of many people like me, who have strong historic links to Amnesty, and who are left wondering whether it bears any resemblance to the organisation they once knew?
I have dissected Amnesty’s report on the Russian campaign in Syria to expose its obvious flaws.
Doing so in a sense is however hardly necessary. There is no need to get lost in the detail.
The reality – as everyone knows – is that it is hardly conceivable Amnesty would ever publish a report about the Russian military campaign in Syria that gave it a clean bill of health.
The report in fact brings together two of Amnesty’s perennial villains – the Russian government and the Syrian government – and given what Amnesty routinely says about each of them, nothing different from the report Amnesty has just published could have been expected.
Ever since the start of the Syrian conflict Amnesty has campaigned against the Syrian government, calling for Western military intervention in Syria to “protect civilians”, for the establishment of “safe havens” and “no-fly zones” (as to what all that means see my discussion here) and has tried to orchestrate public campaigns against Russia’s support or perceived support for the Syrian government.
To expect Amnesty not to find fault with a Russian military intervention in Syria that is defeating all those objectives would be naive.
This is quite apart from the fact that Amnesty has a long history of hostility to the Russian government.
It has backed groups like Pussy Riot. It named people like the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky – an individual the European Court of Human Rights says is guilty of massive tax evasion – “prisoners of conscience”.
Amnesty’s reporting of the Ukrainian conflict has also leaned heavily in favour of the Ukrainian government and against the east Ukrainian militia and Russia.
It has for example laid heavy stress on individual human rights violations it claims were committed by the militia whilst all but ignoring the Ukrainian army’s indiscriminate shelling of cities and its attempts to besiege them.
Amnesty has also vigorously supported the claims of Western governments that the Russian army is intervening on the militia’s side in the Ukrainian war – to the point of publishing actually inconclusive satellite pictures to prove it – as if it was itself an intelligence agency.
The report on the Russian campaign in Syria has to be read in this context.
It is not an impartial fact-based study carried out after careful field work on the ground. Rather it is simply part of the ongoing campaign in the West to turn Western public opinion against Russia’s military campaign in Syria.
That this is so is shown by the claim in the report that the Russians are deliberately targeting civilians and are therefore committing war crimes – an incendiary allegation Amnesty has also made against President Assad.
In the case of the Russians it makes no sense. Why would the Russians deliberately target civilians – something that can only provoke them to join the rebels – at the same time as they have been working hard to get a political process started to end the Syrian war? Surely the one contradicts – and completely undermines – the other?
None of this is to say that no civilians have died in Syria as a result of Russian air strikes. Some have certainly died and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. However to claim there is a deliberate policy of targeting civilians defies logic, and finds no support in anything the Russians have said or done, or which appears in the report whose flaws I have dissected.
As it happens the report does give an account of one incident which might – if true – show how civilians might have been killed during a Russian air strike without the Russians intending it.
This is the attack on Al-Ghantu, in which several members of a single extended family sheltering in the basement of what the report calls a civilian building are alleged to have been killed as a result of a Russian air strike.
The report says the family “were related to a commander of a local armed group who was away at the time of the attack”.
Amnesty does not identify the man in question or the group he leads. One wonders why?
Regardless, this account sounds very like an attempt to kill a rebel commander which missed him but which killed instead members of his family.
The Russians have claimed on several occasions that they have killed rebel commanders in air strikes. It is entirely plausible that they target rebel commanders intentionally, and that this was an attempt to kill one.
If so then it obviously was not intended to kill civilians since the intended target was not the civilians but the rebel commander.
The Russians might have been guilty of recklessness about whether civilians were in the basement when they attacked it in the belief the rebel commander was there. Or they might have mistaken the basement for a bunker or command post. Or they might have thought only the commander and his guards were there.
In any of these cases the killing of the civilians would not have been deliberate. It would have been – in the horrible language of modern war – not intentional but “collateral”.
Some might argue – as I do – that trying to assassinate someone far from the battlefield in this way is wrong. However the point is that it is precisely what the Western powers do all the time – with barely any complaint from Amnesty.
To take one example amongst legions: during the 2011 Libyan campaign the Western military made what were obvious attempts to kill Gaddafi. The fact Gaddafi was being intentionally targeted was not even denied, though the Russian government complained about it.
One such attempt involved an air strike on a residential villa. It missed Gaddafi – who was not there – but killed one of his infant children and three of his grandchildren. Here is what I wrote about it.
At the time I called this an “ongoing descent into barbarism”.
If Amnesty condemned it I never heard about it, and I have found no record of it. If Amnesty did condemn it, they certainly don’t draw attention to it. Certainly they have not accused the Danish government – whose aircraft carried out the strike – of committing war crimes.
Why then does Amnesty find the attack on Al-Ghantu so much more objectionable?
The short answer – there is no other – is that it is because the attack on Gaddafi’s villa – like scores of other attacks on civilian facilities in any number of countries before and since – were carried out by the Western powers, whilst the attack on Al-Ghantu was – allegedly though not definitely – carried out by the Russians.
It is impossible to avoid the feeling that for the authors of the Amnesty report it is that – not the deaths of civilians – that is in the end what matters.
Amnesty International was once a universally respected organisation, greatly admired for its courage and integrity. Its founding purpose was to campaign for political prisoners – people imprisoned not for their crimes but for their beliefs – regardless of their political views or of the political views of those who had imprisoned them.
As someone who has supported Amnesty’s campaigns in the past, it pains me to see it departing so far from its founding purpose by taking sides in conflicts so openly and in such a brazenly political way.
I hope and believe there are still people in Amnesty who realise the folly of this, and who will fight back against it before it is too late.
As for the report about Russia’s military campaign in Syria that Amnesty has just published, it falls so far below its old standards that it has to be treated more as a piece of anti-Russian propaganda than as a serious critique of the Russian military campaign.
December 25, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Amnesty International, Human rights, Russia, Syria | Leave a comment
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Zionism’s Violent Legacy
By Donald Neff | Washington Report On Middle East Affairs | January 1996
On January 4, 1948, Jewish terrorists drove a truck loaded with explosives into the center of the all Arab city of Jaffa and detonated it, killing 26 and wounding around 100 Palestinian men, women and children.[1] The attack was the work of the Irgun Zvai Leumi – the “National Military Organization,” also known by the Hebrew letters Etzel – the largest Jewish terrorist group in Palestine. The Irgun was headed by Revisionist Zionist Menachem Begin and had been killing and maiming Arabs, Britons and even Jews for the previous ten years in its efforts to establish a Jewish state.
This terror campaign meant that at the core of Revisionist Zionism there existed a philosophical embrace of violence. … continue
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