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The Persistent Myth of U.S. Precision Bombing

By Nicolas J S Davies | Consortium News | June 20, 2018

Opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom have found that a majority of the public in both countries has a remarkably consistent belief that only about 10,000 Iraqis were killed as a result of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq actually range from 150,000 to 1.2 million. Part of the reason for the seriously misguided public perception may come from a serious belief in guided weapons, according to what the government tells people about “precision” bombing.  But one must ask how so many people can be killed if these weapons are so “precise,” for instance in one of “the most precise air campaigns in military history,” as a Pentagon spokesman characterized the total destruction last year of Raqqa in Syria.

The dreadful paradox of “precision weapons” is that the more the media and the public are wrongly persuaded of the near-magical qualities of these weapons, the easier it is for U.S. military and civilian leaders to justify using them to destroy entire villages, towns and cities in country after country: Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq; Sangin and Musa Qala in Afghanistan; Sirte in Libya; Kobane and Raqqa in Syria.

An Imprecise History

The skillful use of disinformation about “precision” bombing has been essential to the development of aerial bombardment as a strategic weapon. In a World War II propaganda pamphlet titled the “Ultimate Weapon of Victory”, the U.S. government hailed the B-17 bomber as “… the mightiest bomber ever built… equipped with the incredibly accurate Norden bomb sight, which hits a 25-foot circle from 20,000 feet.“

However, according to the website WW2Weapons, “With less than 50 per-cent cloud coverage an average B-17 Fortress Group could be expected to place 32.4% of its bombs within 1000 feet of the aiming point when aiming visually.” That could rise to 60 percent if flying at the dangerously low altitude of 11,000 feet in daylight.

The U.K.’s 1941 Butt Report found that only five percent of British bombers were dropping their bombs within five miles of their targets, and that 49 percent of their bombs were falling in “open country.”

In the “Dehousing Paper,” the U.K. government’s chief scientific adviser argued that mass aerial bombardment of German cities to “dehouse” and break the morale of the civilian population would be more effective than “precision” bombing aimed at military targets. British leaders agreed, and adopted this new approach: “area” or “carpet” bombing, with the explicit strategic purpose of “dehousing” Germany’s civilian population.

The U.S. soon adopted the same strategy against both Germany and Japan, and a U.S. airman quoted in the post-war U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey lampooned efforts at “precision” bombing as a “major assault on German agriculture.”

The destruction of North Korea by U.S.-led bombing and shelling in the Korean War was so total that U.S. military leaders estimated that they’d killed 20 percent of its population.

In the American bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the U.S. dropped more bombs than all sides combined in the Second World War, with full scale use of horrific napalm and cluster bombs.  The whole world recoiled from this mass slaughter, and even the U.S. was chastened into scaling back its military ambitions for at least a decade.

The American War in Vietnam saw the introduction of the “laser-guided smart bomb,” but the Vietnamese soon learned that the smoke from a small fire or a burning tire was enough to confuse its guidance system.  “They’d go up, down, sideways, all over the place,” a GI told Douglas Valentine, the author of The Phoenix Program. “And people would smile and say, ‘There goes another smart bomb!’  So smart a gook with a match and an old tire can fuck it up.”

Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome

President Bush Senior hailed the First Gulf War as the moment that America “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Deceptive information about “precision” bombing played a critical role in revitalizing U.S. militarism after defeat in Vietnam.

The U.S. and its allies ruthlessly carpet-bombed Iraq, reducing it from what a UN report later called “a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society” to “a pre-industrial age nation.” But the Western media enthusiastically swallowed Pentagon briefings and broadcast round-the-clock bomb-sight footage of a handful of successful “precision” strikes as if they were representative of the entire campaign. Later reports revealed that only seven percent of the 88,500 tons of bombs and missiles devastating Iraq were “precision” weapons.

The U.S. turned the bombing of Iraq into a marketing exercise for the U.S. war industry, dispatching pilots and planes straight from Kuwait to the Paris Air Show. The next three years saw record U.S. weapons exports, offsetting small reductions in U.S. arms procurement after the end of the Cold War.

The myth of “precision” bombing that helped Bush and the Pentagon “kick the Vietnam syndrome” was so successful that it has become a template for the Pentagon’s management of news in subsequent U.S. bombing campaigns since. It also gave us the disturbing euphemism “collateral damage” to indicate civilians killed by errant bombs.

‘Shock and Awe’

As the U.S. and U.K. launched their “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq in 2003, Rob Hewson, the editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, estimated that about 20-25 percent of the U.S. and U.K.’s “precision” weapons were missing their targets in Iraq, noting that this was a significant improvement over the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, when 30-40 percent were off-target. “There’s a significant gap between 100 percent and reality,” Hewson said. “And the more you drop, the greater your chances of a catastrophic failure.”

Since World War II, the U.S. Air Force has loosened its definition of “accuracy” from 25 feet to 10 meters, but that is still less than the blast radius of even its smallest 500 lb. bombs. So the impression that these weapons can be used to surgically “zap” a single house or small building in an urban area without inflicting casualties and deaths throughout the surrounding area is certainly contrived.

“Precision” weapons comprised about two thirds of the 29,200 weapons aimed at the armed forces, people and infrastructure of Iraq in 2003. But the combination of 10,000 “dumb” bombs and 4,000 to 5,000 “smart” bombs and missiles missing their targets meant that about half of “Shock and Awe’s” weapons were as indiscriminate as the carpet bombing of previous wars. Saudi Arabia and Turkey asked the U.S. to stop firing cruise missiles through their territory after some went so far off-target that they struck their territory. Three also hit Iran.

“In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them,” a puzzled Hewson said. “But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.”

‘Precision’ Bombing Today

Since Barack Obama started the bombing of Iraq and Syria in 2014 more than 107,000 bombs and missiles have been launched. U.S. officials claim only a few hundred civilians have been killed. The British government persists in the utterly fantastic claim that none of its 3,700 bombs have killed any civilians at all.

Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd from Mosul, told Patrick Cockburn of the Britain’s Independent newspaper that he’d seen Kurdish military intelligence reports that U.S. airstrikes and U.S., French and Iraqi artillery had killed at least 40,000 civilians in his hometown, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble. Almost a year later, this remains the only remotely realistic official estimate of the civilian death toll in Mosul. But no other mainstream Western media have followed up on it.

The consequences of U.S. air wars are hidden in plain sight, in endless photos and videos. The Pentagon and the corporate media may suppress the evidence, but the mass death and destruction of American aerial bombardment are only too real to the millions of people who have lived through it.

Nicolas J.S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

June 20, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Trump withdrawal from UN Human Rights Council is business as usual for US

By John Laughland | RT | June 20, 2018

Unlike other decisions taken by Donald Trump the announcement that the US is leaving the UN Human Rights Council has a lot of background in the policies adopted by previous administrations, many of which also despised the body.

Trump has gone a little further than his predecessors but his attitude is not fundamentally different from theirs.

Not only has the US had a long-running dispute with the UN in general, over its budget contribution and the body’s alleged hostility towards Israel, it has also sought to undermine the role of the Human Rights Council in particular, long before Trump was elected.  A former US representative to the UN founded the NGO UN Watch in 1993 to campaign against the UN’s perceived anti-Israeli bias.

In 2004, even before the Human Rights Council was created in 2006, the USA sponsored the creation of a “democracy caucus” within the UN whose goal was to increase the influence of the US and its allies in the organization, on the basis that countries deemed democratic should have greater rights.

The potential for abuse of this principle was both enormous and obvious. Yet it reflected the decision taken by the Clinton administration in 1999 to arrogate to the US and its allies, especially NATO, the right to adjudicate and enforce human rights around the world. As the British Prime Minister Tony Blair explained at the time, the 78-day NATO attack against Yugoslavia was designed to establish this as a new principle of international relations. In its new strategic concept promulgated at the height of the bombing of a small Balkan country by the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, NATO announced that “the abuse of human rights” was a security threat to which it had the right to react.

This in turn was a continuation of the assumptions underlying the creation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in November 1990, which provided a structure for covert operatives from Western states to manipulate elections across post-Communist Europe in the name of human rights and democracy promotion. The OSCE itself was initially created as the CSCE (Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe) at Helsinki in 1975 when the goal was also to undermine the USSR on the same pretext.

So, when Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, says that the US will continue to “lead” on human rights from outside the Human Rights Council, she is not saying much that is new. The novelty lies only in that the US feels that it can no longer control that body. In 2011, things were the other way around: the US encouraged a gross abuse of the Human Rights Council’s own procedures when it helped secure the expulsion of Libya from it on 25 February 2011, without the Universal Periodic Review, which the HRC had published for Libya the previous month, being even considered.

The expulsion occurred on the basis of allegations made by bogus NGOs (front organizations for the then Libyan opposition) which, not surprisingly, turned out later to have been utterly baseless. But the momentum was such that a Security Council resolution was obtained on 17 March 2011 and NATO launched its attack two days later.

A war launched ostensibly to protect civilians was then used to effect regime change (as the then-Foreign Minister of France confirmed at the time), and no attempt was made to protect civilians deemed loyal to Gaddafi. NATO’s allies justified their massacre at Sirte in September 2011 by saying that the town’s residents had “chosen to die”. The fact that these decisions were taken “multilaterally”, as Emmanuel Macron likes to say, is irrelevant when it comes to judging their fundamental injustice.

The allegation of US double standards on human rights is probably familiar to many readers. But what the continuity of US policy shows (a continuity only slightly masked by this latest institutional change of tack) is the inevitable damage caused when political conflict is translated into the language of rights. Such a translation only aggravates the all too human tendency to identify one’s own cause with the highest moral principles.

Because this danger is so obvious, the UN was created to evacuate such issues from international discourse. Its charter and practices until the 1980s were based on the principles of state sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of states, not on human rights. Resolutions by the General Assembly, in 1965 and in 1981 on the inadmissibility of intervention in the internal affairs of states, and in 1970 on friendly relations between states, when non-interference was reiterated, were all totally unambiguous. In 1981, for instance, the General Assembly recalled “the duty of a State to refrain from the exploitation and the distortion of human rights issues as a means of interference in the internal affairs of States”.

These resolutions were bolstered by rulings by the International Court of Justice, the supreme judicial body of the UN system, for instance in a famous 1986 case opposing the USA and Nicaragua where the former was supporting the Contra rebels. The ICJ ruled that “the Court cannot contemplate the creation of a new rule opening up a right of intervention by one State against another on the ground that the latter has opted for some particular ideology or political system” and that “in any event, while the United States might form its own appraisal of the situation as to respect for human rights in Nicaragua, the use of force could not be the appropriate method to monitor or ensure such respect.”

These principles came under sustained assault in the post-Cold War period and they are now considered to have been buried under the Western doctrines of humanitarian intervention and “the right to protect”. Their burial reflects a far deeper problem, which constitutes the biggest threat to the international order today: the almost psychotic inability of the US leadership to engage with other international actors on the basis of that complexity which is inherent in states having a different point of view, a different culture and a different value system.

Instead, the US remains in hock to what was originally known as the “Open Door” school of US diplomacy of William Appleman Williams (1921-1990), which holds that America will be safe in the world only when the world becomes like America and is dominated by it.

Stated forcefully by George W. Bush and by Donald Trump’s administration in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, this doctrine was also endorsed by Clinton and Obama.

Many years after Clinton’s Kosovo war, Obama’s Vice-President, Joe Biden, proudly told his Albanian taxi driver outside the US military base in Kosovo, where the soldiers were of different ethnic backgrounds: “There’s America. Until you figure out how to live together like we do, you will never, never, never make it.”

Between Trump and his nemesis Biden, therefore, there is no essential difference – and that is a major problem for the rest of us.

John Laughland is a historian and specialist in international affairs.

June 20, 2018 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Here’s Why Pro-Migrant Protesters Changed US Policy While Anti-War Protesters Didn’t End America’s Recent Wars

By Adam Garrie | EurasiaFuture | June 20, 2018

Donald Trump has just signed an executive order reversing the Clinton era policy of separating children from their illegal migrant parents at the southern border of the United States. While this policy has been in operation since the 1990s, it was only in the last month that it caught the attention of American media and the political class.

Ultimately, the issue is one for the leaders of the US to decide and under immense media and political pressure, the US President has taken the matter into his own hands and changed a policy based entirely on a public pressure campaign rather than his own apparent line of thinking which favours an increasingly tough border policy.

What this proves is that on issues effecting the well being of humans who happen not to be US citizens, public pressure campaigns can in fact get policies changed, especially in an election year. When one thinks that George W. Bush illegally invaded Iraq just over a year before facing re-election while Tony Blair did the same only two short years before facing the UK electorate, it beggars belief that anti-war campaigns have been so ineffective at reversing policies that slaughter millions, destroy entire regions and all the while unleashing the most barbaric forms of terrorism in places where there once was little or none.

Irrespective of one’s views of America’s border policy, even those who believe it to be inhumane must admit that it did not result in the deaths, terrorism and destruction of the US led wars on Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and the hybrid war against Syria.

While millions of people marched against the Iraq war throughout the world in 2003, far more than have gone on demonstrations against the controversial child separation policy of the US border authorities, it nevertheless had no effect on US policy in the Middle East. In fact, the amount of wars and number of troops committed across the Middle East by the US and its partners only increased since 2003.

Why then did the anti-war marches fail while the pro-migrant movement accomplished its goal? The reason is simple. While masses of protesters can control the streets and non-corporate air waves, the corporate media in the United States that is willing to take a side on issues like migration is unwilling, unable or not wanting to go up against the pro-war factions of Washington. The same is true even for most so-called independent minded politicians in the US, almost all of whom lose their independent streak when it comes to war, with retired Congressman Dr. Ron Paul, his son Senator Rand Paul and Senator Bernie Sanders being exceptions in the wilderness.

While corporate media is losing viewership at a rapid pace among the wider public and the young in particular, among the policy making class, there is still a tendency to literally view the world through a bubble and refuse to look at non-corporate or non-western originated media for any other purpose than to mock, sneer and at times, attempt to censor.

It is because of this, that the kind of invisible connection between the narrative of mainstream media pundits and politicians can lead to meaningful policy change while this is not the case when it comes to anti-war issues that the mainstream media in the US tends to either ignore or berate (before ignoring).

In this sense, the political-media complex has worked to insure that the issues that are important to the boardrooms of CNN and MSNBC are those which are important to the politicians who can then pressure a reluctant President to change a policy he previously appeared to support.

It is only when politicians begin to take non-corporate western media sources at face value rather than look for conspiracies (aka Russian meddling) which do not exist, that the growing number of people opposed to war might be able to affect policy change. Until then, the anti-war voices of millions will be ignored, while the loud but comparatively quieter thousands of voices raised against America’s border policies will be heeded.

The solution for anti-war protesters is to not give up but to shame the part-time humanitarians who cried at the thought of strangers in a strange land being separated from their families, yet who say nothing when families living in their ancestral homes are separated from one another by the force of a bomb – never to be reunited. If you think that America’s long standing border policy was inhumane but do not feel similar things towards the families America’s military slaughters in their own home – then you do not have a heart after all… but you probably have a high definition television.

June 20, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Ex-British soldier to face manslaughter charge over Troubles checkpoint killing

RT | June 19, 2018

A former British soldier has been informed that he will stand trial over the death of a Catholic man in Northern Ireland in 1988.

Victim, Aidan McAnespie, 23, was shot dead after being hit by one of three bullets fired from a machine gun in Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, while he was on his way to a local Gaelic football match.

Named as David Jonathan Holden, 48, in a letter by the solicitors representing the deceased’s family, the former Grenadier Guardsman is believed to be currently living in England. His first court appearance is expected to take place within the next three months.

Holden had been initially charged with manslaughter immediately after the killing, however, charges were dropped in 1990. He was subsequently fined for negligent discharge of his weapon and medically discharged from the Army, saying that having wet hands during the incident had caused his weapon to accidentally misfire.

The family of the deceased, however, have maintained that prior to his killing, McAnaspie was subject to a campaign of sustained harassment by the Army.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, Mr McAnespie’s death was the subject of an Historical Enquiries Team (HET) review which reported in 2008. The British government expressed “deep regret” about the killing in 2009.

Calls by the family for a fresh investigation into the killing were taken up by the Northern Ireland Attorney General John Larkin, who in turn asked the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) for a re-examination of the killing.

In 2016, the PPS adhered to the request, saying the dropped charges would again be investigated using all available evidence, including a new ballistic report.

Upon deciding to go forward with the prosecution, a statement from the PPS said that the decision was made after “careful consideration of all the evidence currently available in this case.”

“That evidence includes further expert evidence in relation to the circumstances in which the general purpose machine gun was discharged, thereby resulting in the ricochet shot which killed Mr McAnespie.

“The decision to prosecute was reached after the Test for Prosecution was applied to the available evidence in this case in accordance with the Code for Prosecutors.”

Speaking through one of their solicitors, the McAnespie family said that “a crime is a crime,” adding that “everyone deserves justice”.

Vincent McAnespie, Aidan’s brother said: “It’s truth and justice we want to get. He was just an ordinary local lad from the community that just wanted to go about his ordinary everyday life.”

News of the new investigation was met with blowback from a politician supporting the introduction of a Statute of Limitations for British soldiers. Tory MP Leo Docherty, in a series of tweets, called the legal pursuit of soldiers and veterans “a national disgrace,” and stressed the need for legislation to be introduced to protect them “from this madness.”

June 19, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Unprecedented Israeli Strikes Target Iraqi Shia Militias In Syria

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 06/18/2018

A day after a mysterious airstrike close to the Iraq-Syria border reportedly killed over 30 Syrian government soldiers and Iraqi paramilitary forces backed by Iran, a US official has told CNN the attack was carried out by Israel and not by the US coalition.

Syrian state media blamed the strike on the US-led coalition — though in the immediate aftermath any level of confirmation or evidence was hard to come by. The claims prompted the US coalition spokesman to issue a formal denial, calling Syria’s accusation “misinformation” as US-backed SDF forces are only operating east of the Euphrates, and not near Abu Kamal, which lies west, according to the statement.

If confirmed it would mark the first time in the war that Iraq’s paramilitary forces have been targeted by Israel. The Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Units (PMU, or PMF) have increasingly coordinated with the Syrian Army as well as pro-Syrian irregular Shia fighters during anti-ISIS operations along Syria’s eastern border of late.

The incident marks the second time in three weeks that the Syrian Army has accused the US Coalition of bombing their troops in southeast Syria; however it is uncertain as yet how Damascus will respond to this new claim of Israeli responsibility.

The CNN source is an unnamed US official, who gave no other details on the strike, including how many jets conducted the mission or the flight path into the Iraq-Syria border area, though CNN notes, “The area is some distance from Israel and Israeli jets would have had to overcome significant logistical hurdles to strike that area.”

And as Al Masdar News points out, Israel “has never attacked the Syrian military this far from their border, so if they were behind this – this would be the first time they have every bombed the Deir Ezzor Governorate.” 

The last confirmed Israeli strike in Deir Ezzor was in 2007, when Israel destroyed an alleged nuclear reactor in al-Kibar. Up until now in the war confirmed there have been acknowledged Israeli attacks in western Syria, around Damascus, and in the Homs desert (T-4 airbase).

Syrian military sources initially told Reuters that the strikes were conducted by attack drones flying from the direction of U.S. lines. Syrian forces did not respond to the attacks which left dozens of Syrian Army, allied National Defense Forces (NDF), and Iraqi paramilitary troops killed and wounded in the town of Al-Harri, in the Abu Kamal countryside.

Though casualty numbers have varied slightly — with opposition media site SOHR citing 38 and pro-government sources citing well over 40 — it marks a significant escalation given the high death toll against units which were in the midst of battling remnant ISIS pockets in Syria’s east.

The attack came the same day that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a cabinet meeting, “We will take action – and are already taking action – against efforts to establish a militarily presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria. We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria.”

Netanyahu’s words follow similar statements made last week wherein he accused Iran of importing 80,000 Shia fighters into the Syrian conflict from places like Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to both “covert” Syrian Sunnis and prepare attacks against Israel, claiming that a broader “religious war” would emerge. 

“That is a recipe for a re-inflammation of another civil war – I should say a theological war, a religious war – and the sparks of that could be millions more that go into Europe and so on … And that would cause endless upheaval and terrorism in many, many countries,” Netanyahu said before an international security forum in Jerusalem last Thursday.

“Obviously we are not going to let them do it. We’ll fight them. By preventing that – and we have bombed the bases of this, these Shi’ite militias – by preventing that, we are also offering, helping the security of your countries, the security of the world,” he said.

Currently, new reports of a “massive build-up” of Syrian Army troops and their allies in Syria’s south continue to emerge after Assad recently reaffirmed his desire to liberate “every inch” of sovereign Syrian territory. As the army conducts operations increasingly close to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the likelihood of more direct Syria-Israel clashes to come is high.

June 19, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Western Media Whitewash Yemen Genocide

By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | 18.06.2018

With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as “genocide”.

The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes.

But the latest offensive on the Red Sea city of Hodeida threatens to turn the world’s already worst humanitarian disaster into a mass extermination.

Hodeida is the entry point for 90 per cent of all food and medical aid into Yemen. If the city’s port stops functioning from the military offensive – as UN aid agencies are warning – then an entire country population of more than 20 million will, as a result, be on the brink of death.

The Saudi coalition which includes Emirati forces and foreign mercenaries as well as remnants from the previous regime (which the Western media mendaciously refer to as “government forces”) is fully backed by the US, Britain and France. This coalition says that by taking Hodeida it will hasten the defeat of Houthi rebels. But to use the cutting off of food and other vital aid to civilian populations as a weapon is a blatant war crime. It is absolutely inexcusable.

This past week an emergency session at the UN Security Council made the lily-livered call for the port city to remain open. But it stopped short of demanding an end to the offensive being led by Saudi and Emirati forces against Hodeida, which is the second biggest stronghold for Houthi rebels after the capital Sanaa. The port city’s population of 600,000 is at risk from the heavy fighting underway, including air strikes and naval bombardment, even before food, water and medicines supply is halted.

Since the Security Council meeting was a closed-door session, media reports did not indicate which members of the council voted down the Swedish call for an immediate end to hostilities. However, given that three permanent members of the council, the US, Britain and France, are militarily supporting the Saudi-led offensive on Hodeida, one can assume that these states blocked the call for a cessation.

As the horror of Hodeida unfolds, Western media are reporting with a strained effort to whitewash the criminal role of the American, British and French governments in supporting the offensive. Western media confine their focus narrowly on the humanitarian plight of Hodeida’s inhabitants and the wider Yemeni population. But the media are careful to omit the relevant context, which is that the offensive on Hodeida would not be possible without the crucial military support of Western governments. If the Western public were properly informed, the uproar would be an embarrassing problem for Western governments and their servile news media.

What is notable in the Western media reportage is the ubiquitous descriptor when referring to the Houthi rebels. Invariably, they are described as “Iran-backed”. That label is used to implicitly “justify” the Saudi and Emirati siege of Hodeida “because” the operation is said to be part of a “proxy war against Iran”. The BBC, France 24, CNN, Deutsche Welle, New York Times and Washington Post are among media outlets habitually practicing this misinformation on Yemen.

Both Iran and the Houthis have said that there is no military linkage. Granted, Iran politically and diplomatically supports the Houthis, and the Yemeni population generally, suffering from the war. The Houthis share a common Shia Muslim faith as Iran, but that is a far cry from military involvement. There is no evidence of Iran being militarily involved in Yemen. The claim of a linkage relies heavily on assertion by the Saudis and Emiratis which is peddled uncritically by Western media. Even the US government has shied away from making forthright accusations against Iran supporting the Houthis militarily. Washington’s diffidence is a tacit admission that the allegations are threadbare. Besides, how could a country which is subjected to an illegal Saudi blockade of its land, sea and air routes conceivably receive weapons supplied from Iran?

By contrast, while the Western media repeatedly refer to the Houthis as “Iran-backed”, what the same media repeatedly omit is the descriptor of “American-backed” or “British and French-backed” when referring to the Saudi and Emirati forces that have been pounding Yemen for over three years. Unlike the breathless claims of Iranian linkage to the Houthis, the Western military connection is verified by massive weapons exports, and indeed coy admissions by Western governments, when they are put to it, that they are supplying fuel and logistics to aid and abet the Saudi and Emirati war effort in Yemen.

Last week, the New York Times affected to lament the infernal conditions in Yemen as a “complex war”, as if the conflict is an unfathomable, unstoppable mystery. Why doesn’t the New York Times publish bold editorials bluntly calling for an end to US government complicity in Yemen? Or perhaps that is too “complex” for the Times’ editorial board?

The Washington Post also wrung its hands last week, saying: “The world’s most dire humanitarian crisis may get even worse. Emirati-led [and Saudi] offensive underway against port city of Hodeida, which is controlled by Iran-backed [sic] Houthi rebels.”

In its report, the Post did not mention the fact that air strikes by Saudi and Emirati forces are carried out with American F-15 fighter jets, British Typhoons and French Dassault warplanes. Incongruously, the Post cites US officials claiming that their forces are not “directly involved” in the offensive on the port city. How is that credible when air strikes are being conducted day after day? The Washington Post doesn’t bother to ask further.

In a BBC report last week also lamented the “humanitarian crisis” in Hodeida, there was the usual evidence-free casual labelling of Houthi rebels as “Iran-backed”. But, incredibly, in the entire article (at least in early editions) there was not a single mention of the verifiable fact that the Saudi and Emirati military are supplied with billions-of-dollars-worth of British, American and French weapons.

In the final paragraph of its early edition of the report, the BBC editorializes: “In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and eight other mainly Sunni Muslim Arab states launched a military campaign to restore [exiled president] Hadi’s government after becoming alarmed by the rise of the Houthi group which they see as an Iranian Shia Muslim proxy.”

Note the BBC’s lame and unconvincing implication of Iran. This is a stupendous distortion of the Yemeni conflict by the British state-owned broadcaster which, astoundingly, or perhaps that should be audaciously, completely airbrushes out any mention of how Western governments have fueled the genocidal war on Yemen.

At the end of 2014, the American and Saudi puppet self-styled “president” Mansour Hadi was kicked out by a Yemeni popular revolt led by the Houthis, but not exclusive to these rebels. The Yemeni uprising involved Shia and Sunni. To portray Iran as sponsoring a Shia proxy is a vile distortion which the Saudis and their Western backers have used in order to justify attacking Yemen for the objective of re-installing their puppet, who has been living in exile in the Saudi capital Riyadh. In short, covering up a criminal war of aggression with lies.

In reality, the Yemen war is about Western powers and their Arab despot client regimes trying to reverse a successful popular revolt that aspired to bring a considerably more democratic government to the Arab region’s poorest country, overcoming the decades it languished as a Western, Saudi client kleptocracy.

For over three years, Saudi and Emirati forces, supported with Western warplanes, bombs, missiles, attack helicopters, naval power, and air refueling, as well as targeting logistics, have waged a non-stop bombing campaign on Yemeni civilians. Nothing has been off-limits. Hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, funerals, wedding halls, family homes, farms, water-treatment plants and power utilities, all have been mercilessly obliterated. Even graveyards have been bombed.

Even during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Saudi-led coalition – the supposed custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina – has continued to massacre innocents from the air.

Elsewhere in the region, Western politicians and media have mounted hysterical protests against the Syrian government and its Russian ally when they have liberated cities from Western-backed terrorists, accusing Syria and Russia of “war crimes” and “inhuman sieges”. None of these hyperbolic Western media campaigns concerning Syria has ever been substantiated. Recall Aleppo? East Ghouta? The Syrian people have gladly returned to rebuild their lives now in peace under Syrian government protection after the Western terror proxies were routed. Western media claims about Syria have transpired to be outrageous lies, which have been hastily buried by the media as if they were never told in the first place.

Yet in Yemen there is an ongoing, veritable genocidal war fully supported by Western governments. The latest barbarity is the siege of Hodeida with the callous, murderous objective of finally starving a whole population into submitting to the Western, Saudi, Emirati writ for dominating the country. This is Nuremberg-standard capital crimes.

With no exaggeration, Western news media are a Goebbels-like propaganda ministry – par excellence – whose duty is to whitewash genocide conducted by their governments. The barefaced lies and sly omissions being told about Yemen is one more reason among many reasons why the Western media have forfeited any vestige of credibility. They are serving as they usually do – Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria among others – as accomplices in an epic war crime against Yemen.

Photo: Geopolitics Alert

June 18, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Former Israeli spy chief: Iran’s energy sector, ‘next 9/11 in cyber’

Press TV – June 18, 2018

Former chief of an Israeli spy service unit has said that the first cyber target in any future conflict with Iran should be its energy infrastructure.

Speaking at a major cyber conference in Israel, former Unit 8200 chief Ehud Schnerosen referred to the energy sector as a “major pillar economy, state’s cardiovascular system.”

“We should not attack water, food, healthcare on ethical grounds, and should not attack banks because of the potential butterfly effect,” he said. “The next 9/11 in cyber will be energy sector.”

Israel is widely believed to be behind a cyber attack on the Iranian nuclear energy program in 2011.

The Washington Post reported in June 2012 that US spy services and Israel’s military had worked together to launch the Stuxnet computer virus against a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, Iran. It was the first publicly known example of a virus being used to attack industrial machinery.

Since Stuxnet’s discovery in 2010, security researchers have uncovered a handful of other sophisticated pieces of computer code they believe were developed by the US and Israel in tandem to engage in espionage and warfare.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over the weekend that Israel would strike against Iranian efforts to entrench itself militarily throughout Syria, and not only along the Syrian border with the occupied Palestinian territories.

“First of all, Iran needs to withdraw from all of Syria,” he told the weekly cabinet meeting.

“Second, we will take action – and are already taking action – against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria, both close to the border and deep inside Syria. We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria.”

Diplomatic officials said that Netanyahu raises the issue of Iranian activity in Syria in all his conversations with foreign leaders.

June 18, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

ISIL Blast Kills Dozens Celebrating Afghanistan Ceasefire

Al-Manar | June 17, 2018

The ISIL Takfiri group has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed at least 36 people and wounded 65 others in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar.

The group’s Amaq website said the attack on Saturday targeted “a gathering of Afghan forces” in Nangarhar, but gave no details.

According to Attaullah Khogyani, the provincial governor’s spokesman, the attack happened in Rodat district, some 25km from Jalalabad.

Civilians, security forces and Taliban members were among the casualties as people celebrated Eid Al-Fitr, marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The attack came as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani announced the government’s extension of a ceasefire with the Taliban, without giving a timeframe.

In a televised address to the nation, Ghani called for the Taliban to also extend the truce, which is due to expire on Sunday after both sides agreed to halt hostilities for Eid.

Ghani also said that in the spirit of Eid and the ceasefire, the attorney general’s office had released 46 Taliban prisoners.

The Taliban had announced a ceasefire for the first three days of Eid, which started on Friday, promising not to attack Afghan security forces for the first time since the 2001 US invasion.

That came after Ghani said that security forces would temporarily cease operations against the Taliban for eight days, starting last Tuesday – though he warned that operations against other fighters, including ISIL group, would continue.

Governors in Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul said both sides had adhered to the ceasefire.

June 17, 2018 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Houthis say Saudi-led forces bogged down outside Hudaydah

Press TV – June 17, 2018

Yemen’s Houthi fighters have dismissed reports that Saudi-led forces have seized the airport in the port city of Hudaydah, saying the aggressors are on the retreat on all front lines.

Militants and foreign mercenaries armed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are attempting to capture the well-defended city and push the Houthis out of their sole Red Sea port in the biggest battle of the war.

“A battle of attrition awaits the Saudi alliance which it cannot withstand. The Saudi coalition will not win the battle in Hudaydah,” Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam told Lebanon-based al-Mayadeen TV.

Saudi Arabia on Sunday conducted airstrikes on the airport, to support forces attempting to seize it. The official SABA news agency said warplanes carried out five strikes on Hudaydah – a lifeline to millions of Yemenis.

Ground troops including Emiratis, Sudanese and Yemenis have surrounded the main airport compound.

Mohammed al-Sharif, deputy head of Yemen’s civil aviation, said images circulated online about the airport had been taken in October 2016.

A fence shown as proof of the airport’s capture is actually situated near the al-Durayhimi district, on a piece of land belonging to a Yemeni lawmaker, the official SABA news agency quoted him as saying.

Ahmed Taresh, the head of Hudaydah airport, also denied news of the airport’s capture, but said that it has been completely destroyed in airstrikes conducted by the Saudi-led coalition.

Abdulsalam warned that the Saudi-UAE offensive against the port city would undermine chances for a peaceful settlement of the Yemen crisis.

The rebuttals came after the media office of the Saudi-backed Yemeni forces loyal to ex-president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi said on Twitter that they had “freed Hudaydah international airport from the grip of” the Houthis.

Reports on Sunday said Saudi-backed forces had been surrounded in the al-Durayhimi Bayt al-Faqih district and at least 40 Saudi mercenaries killed by Yemeni sniper fire over the past two days.

Al-Mayadeen, meanwhile, cited informed sources as saying that the invading forces had retreated from all fronts in Hudaydah’s west.

A Yemeni military source said clashes had left 50 Saudi-backed forces dead and destroyed 13 of their armored vehicles in southern Hudaydah.

Yemeni forces have also managed to confiscate a French or American ship off Hudaydah’s coast, president of the Houthi Revolutionary Committee Mohammed Ali al-Houthi tweeted.

The UAE, a key member of the Saudi-led coalition waging the war on Yemen, launched the Hudaydah assault on Wednesday despite warnings that it would compound the impoverished nation’s humanitarian crisis.

Le Figaro newspaper on Saturday reported that French special forces were present on the ground in Yemen supporting the operation.

According to the Houthis, British and French warships were also on standby on Yemen’s western coast to launch missile and aerial attacks on Hudaydah.

Fighting on Saturday closed off the city’s northern exit, blocking a key route east to Sana’a and making it harder to transport goods from Yemen’s biggest port to mountainous regions.

The UN World Food Program and the World Health Organization have both expressed concern over the situation.

More than 70 percent of Yemeni imports pass through Hudaydah’s docks and the fighting has raised fears of a humanitarian catastrophe in a country already teetering on the brink of famine.

On Saturday, the UN envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths arrived in Sana’a to hold emergency talks on Hudaydah. He was believed to be pushing a deal for the Houthi fighters to cede control of the Red Sea port to a UN-supervised committee.

June 17, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Blood Diamonds: Human Rights Campaigners Want ‘Kimberley Process’ to Suspend Israel

Palestine Chronicle | June 16, 2018

Human Rights campaigners say that Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) must suspend Israel and ban Israeli diamonds exports.

A global coalition of organizations working for justice and peace in Palestine have called on the EU to seek the suspension of Israel from the Kimberley Process and a ban on Israel diamond exports at next week ’s meeting of the diamond regulatory body in Antwerp.

The KPCS is the process established in 2000 to prevent “conflict diamonds” from entering the mainstream rough diamond market by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 55/56 following recommendations in the Fowler Report.

The process was set up “to ensure that diamond purchases were not financing violence by rebel movements and their allies seeking to undermine legitimate governments.”

In the wake of the latest Israeli massacres in Gaza, which Human Rights Watch said “may amount to war crimes” and called on the international community to “impose real costs for such blatant disregard for Palestinian lives” it is imperative that diamonds which generate revenue used to fund the Israeli military are banned.

Israel is the biggest net beneficiary of the global diamond trade with exports worth US$11 billion net in 2014 when diamonds accounted for 30% of manufacturing exports.

Revenue from the Israeli diamond industry is a highly significant source of funding for the Israeli government and its violent settler-colonial project in Palestine.

Despite generating an estimated $1 billion per year in funding for Israeli occupation forces which stand accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, the proliferation of unregulated nuclear weapons and the enforcement of a system of apartheid jewelers claim diamonds processed in Israel are conflict-free.

Diamonds that are a significant source of funding for violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law are regarded as blood diamonds.

The jewelry industry refuses to ban all blood diamonds and limited the remit of the KPCS to “conflict diamonds” which are defined as rough diamonds used by rebel groups to fund violence against legitimate governments.

June 16, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

US to Leave ‘Foolish, Unworthy’ UN Human Rights Council Over Anti-Israel Bias

Sputnik – June 15, 2018

The United States’ demands regarding reforming the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) have failed to be met, and as such Washington is reportedly ready to pull out over what it calls anti-Israel bias and the inclusion of alleged rights abusers.

Diplomats told Reuters that it’s merely a matter of time before the US exits the council, which will convene Monday for a three week convention that will last until July 6. One US source who spoke anonymously said that an announcement looks “imminent.”

Another US official in Geneva, where the UNHRC will meet June 18, said, “we are still moving ahead with our engagement for the coming session.”

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has cast shade on the council since taking the job, while both the US State Department and US President Donald Trump himself found issue with it in 2017.

On June 6, 2017, Haley went to Geneva to give the council a series of ultimatums. At the meeting, she said, “It’s hard to accept that this council has never considered a resolution on Venezuela, and yet it adopted five biased resolutions in March against a single country: Israel. It is essential that this council address its chronic anti-Israel bias if it is to have any credibility.”

Later in the day, she expanded on her grievances against the council at a speech she gave to the Graduate Institute of Geneva, noting that the UNHRC had, by then, passed “more than 70 resolutions targeting Israel” since its inception in 2006, but “just seven on Iran.” The UNHRC has passed more resolutions against Israel than the rest of the world’s countries combined, according to the Geneva-based UN Watch.

“This relentless, pathological campaign against a country that actually has a strong human rights record makes a mockery not of Israel, but of the council itself.”

She also called on the body to do two things: “Act to keep the worst human rights abusers from obtaining seats on the council,” and remove permanent Agenda Item 7, which requires that the council address the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” regularly when it meets.

Trump later echoed those demands in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 19, 2017, calling the inclusion of governments with “egregious human rights records” in the UNHRC a “massive source of embarrassment to the United Nations.” He also singled out North Korea and Iran for their hostility to Israel.

After the UNHRC, a body of 47 nations, adopted five resolutions condemning Israel on March 23, 2018, Haley warned “our patience is not limited,” reminding the body that “The United States continues to evaluate our membership in the Human Rights Council.”

Those resolutions called on governments to stop selling weapons to Israel; for Palestinian self-rule according to Israel and the Palestinian territories’ pre-1967 borders; for Israel to remove itself from the Golan Heights, which it has illegally occupied since the 1967 Six Day War; and for an end to Israeli settlements and human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Haley called the council “foolish and unworthy of its name” for treating Israel “worse than North Korea, Iran and Syria.”

The US ambassador hasn’t only struggled with the Human Rights Council, but also with the UN General Assembly and Security Council. On Wednesday, she failed to prevent the assembly from condemning Israel’s use of deadly force against Palestinians demonstrating in the Great Return March after having vetoed a similar resolution in June. She fired back against the vote, saying that for some, “attacking Israel is their favorite political sport.”

More than 120 Palestinians have been killed and more than 13,000 injured, many by live ammunition, since the start of the protest on March 30, Sputnik News reported. Haley previously told the UN Security Council that Israel acted with “restraint” in the protests. One Israeli soldier was “slightly wounded” in the protests, according to an IDF spokesperson.

The US has boycotted the UNHRC before, as former President George W Bush and his Ambassador to the UN John Bolton — now Trump’s national security adviser — opposed it from its outset in 2006. The Bush administration refused to run in its first election and also declined to participate the following year.

The main points of opposition then were the “focus on Israeli human rights violations while failing to address human rights abuses in other parts of the world,” according to the US Congressional Research Service’s 2009 “Issues for Congress” report on the UNHRC.

However, former President Barack Obama began to work with the council after his election in 2008, believing it was better to work on human rights issues within the council than from the outside, according to a similar report from 2017.

June 15, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The World Must Work to Peacefully De-nuclearise the “Israeli” Regime

By Adam Garrie | EurasiaFuture | June 14, 2018

Now that the DPRK, a former signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which later withdrew has agreed to a full de-nuclearisation process, it is time to focus on other nations that possess nuclear weapons that have yet to sign the NPT.

Of all the world’s nuclear powers only “Israel”, India and Pakistan have refused to sign the NPT and of these three only “Israel” refuses to officially declare its nuclear capability even though unofficially, officials of the Tel Aviv regime have boasted of their illegal nuclear arsenal. While India and Pakistan only became nuclear capable in the late 1990s, Tel Aviv’s first successful nuclear tests came in the early 1960s and were privately a bone of contention between US President John F. Kennedy and the Tel Aviv regime. Even more worryingly, Tel Aviv maintains a plan to launch a large scale nuclear war on its neighbours and the wider region should it fear that it is on the verge of losing a traditional conflict. The award winning journalist Seymour Hersh first revealed the existence of the Samson Option – a classified “Israeli” military doctrine advocating for the use of nuclear weapons on a wide scale should the regime feel sufficiently threatened. As the regime recently stated that it feels threatened by the kites and balloons being flown by Palestinains to attempt and disrupt airstrikes on Gaza, it is clear that Tel Aviv has a very low threshold for what it considers “threatening”. Against this background, the existence of the Samson Option should be incredibly worrying to the so-called international community.

Not only has “Israel” had its illegal stockpile of nuclear weapons for longer than India or Pakistan, but “Israel” has been at war with and has occupied more countries over the last 50 years than either south Asian nuclear power. Since its inception, the Tel Aviv regime has been at war with Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. It has occupied Palestine since 1947 and part of Syria since 1967.

The regime also occupied part of Egypt between 1967 and 1982. 1982 was also when “Israel’s” full scale occupation of southern Lebanon began while hostile regime forces only vacated in 2006, subsequent to a  partial withdrawal in the year 2000. The regime had also occupied parts of Lebanon as early as 1978 while in 1981 the “Israeli” air force launched an illegal aerial assault on Iraq. While continually occupying Syria, recent years have seen ever more unprovoked “Israel” bombardments of south-western Syria which have increased in terms of their frequency and intensity in recent months.

While India and Pakistan have had a hostile relationship ever since both nations became independent of UK imperial rule, they have nevertheless engaged in fewer conflicts than those inaugurated by “Israel” and this fact in and of itself is quite remarkable. Furthermore, in spite of an alliance dating back many decades, “Israel” has also engaged in hostilities with the United States.

In 1967, the American Naval Ship USS Liberty came under a sustained attack from the “Israeli” air-force and torpedo boats without any warning or justification. In spite of Liberty’s commanders sending communications informing “Israel” that they were an “allied” US ship, the attack persisted for hours. Archival material has revealed that some of the pilots were aware that the ship was American, but that they were ordered by their superiors to keep attacking. Ultimately, 34 Americans died in the attack while 171 were severely wounded. The incident was systematically hushed up by the US government and media. Many researchers suspect that “Israel” had attempted to stage a false flag incident that would later be blamed on Egypt, in order to coerce the US into attacking Egypt and its Soviet ally. Because “Israel” was not able to kill all the men on board, the plan failed as the survivors knew full well that it was “Israel” and not Egypt nor any other Soviet ally that had attacked their ship.

While the ultimately non-lethal incident of the American Navy ship USS Pueblo being captured by the DPRK in 1968 received a great deal of attention in the US media, the USS Liberty incident from the prior year was quickly hushed up. Later, many scholars and journalists accused then US President Lyndon B. Johnson of covering up “Israel’s” wanton aggression upon a US flagged ship.

With Donald Trump publicly declaring that the DPRK no longer poses a threat to the United States, it remains clear that the undeniably aggressive “Israeli” should be the next nation to de-nuclearise for the benefit of wider global peace. While nuclear weapons in south Asia are indeed a worrying prospect, no regime has been so wantonly aggressive, so frequently in violation of UN resolutions and so threatening to all of its neighbours than the “Israeli” regime has been since its dubious inception.

With the DPRK out of the equation, it now remains a matter of focusing on countries which continue to stockpile nuclear weapons without signing the NPT. Of all such nations, “Israel” is by far the most dangerous and should be the next to be pressured by the wider world to give up its nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the close and frequently sycophantic US relationship with Tel Aviv means that this might not happen until it is too late. Such a worrying prospect ought to galvanise a wider support throughout the world for such a peaceful de-nuclearisation process to begin at once.

June 14, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

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