Israel to Build Jewish Settlements over Occupied Historic Muslim Cemetery
IMEMC News & Agencies | July 14, 2015
Q-Press media center for Jerusalem and al-Aqsa affairs today said that the planning and construction committee in occupied Jerusalem, last week, has approved the construction of a huge project on land of the Ma’man Allah historic Islamic cemetery, on which an Israeli school has already been built. The land will also be used for settlement housing, a hotel and a shopping center.
Haaretz newspaper said, according to the PNN, that Israeli occupation authorities pushed to execute the project on the land even though it is Islamic Waqf (property) that cannot be seized.
Israeli occupation is still going on with the project with complete knowledge that there are existing graves underneath the land.
The newspaper added that the Israeli plan includes building 192 settlement units, a hotel and a shopping center. The project was initiated by Eiden company, which follows the Israeli Jerusalem municipality.
To its part, Al-Aqsa foundation for Waqf and heritage said that the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem, through this project, was continuing to Judaize the Islamic cemetery, violating all the laws and conventions which ban desecrating sanctuaries under any occupation.
Israeli authorities have targeted the cemetery for years. They have established different projects including parks, hotels, schools and shopping centers on the land, violating even the rights of the dead.
David Cameron calls for escalation of UK wars at home and abroad
Cameron plans to extend UK involvement in the wars raging in Iraq and Syria, while mounting an hysterical attack on British Muslims.
By Chris Nineham | Stop the War Coalition | July 13, 2015
Last week’s hike in the military budget was not symbolic. Today David Cameron has proved he wants to take Britain back to a lead military role in the Middle East.
He has called for a ‘fresh assault on Isil’. As the extra 2.5 billion pounds voted for the military in the budget kicks in, he has called on the top brass to organise more SAS troop deployments, drone attacks and RAF bombing missions, not just on Iraq, but in Syria too, despite the parliamentary vote in 2013 explicitly ruling out such an attack.
David Cameron makes the extraordinary claim that his experience over the last five years has proved that drone attacks, spy plane flights and special forces are ‘vital in keeping us safe’. But this is precisely the period which has seen the emergence of Isis and constant warnings from the government about the growing threat of terrorism.
The whole history of the ‘war on terror’ suggests in fact the precise opposite. From the attack on Afghanistan in 2001 to the invasion of Iraq two years later and the Cameron lead assault on Libya in 2011, the war has devastated the Middle East and beyond, creating a series of failed states in which violence has flourished.
Since 2001, jihadist organisations have been able to spread from isolated pockets in Central Asia to a vast swathe of the world from Pakistan through the Middle East and into sub-Saharan Africa.
Last time the British people were being asked to back attacks on Syria, it was to support an (illegal) attempt to remove President Assad. Though Cameron was stopped by popular and parliamentary pressure, continued Western intervention in Syria and the renewed bombing of Iraq have plunged the region further into chaos. Infrastructure, both political and physical, has been further pummelled.
The West’s main allies in the conflict, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have been backing violent jihadist groups in Syria for years, including al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. The outcome has been a catastrophic unravelling of whole societies. In the words of Patrick Cockburn :
‘In both countries, the collapse of central government has exposed and sharpened differences between arab and kurd, Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian, secular and religious. And as Syrians and Iraqis live in a permanent state of war,, these differences are almost always settled violently’.
Now, our government wants to intervene on the opposite side, attacking one of the horrific forces that the West’s policies have helped conjure up. Forget the promises that bombing Iraq or Syria would not lead to further military involvement. Today’s open commitment to deploying special forces is not mission creep, its a brazen admission that Cameron wants to go back to full spectrum war in the Middle East.
The terrifying thing is that in this context, failure to learn the lessons of history will not just lead to repetition, but to a cycle of violence that threatens to consume whole regions of the world.
And this is a war abroad that will be accompanied by hysterical attack on the Muslim population at home. If the only foreign policy they can conceive of is escalating violence, domestically they can’t see beyond threats, intimidation and scapegoating.
In an utterly depraved move, the government have accompanied claims that unidentified Muslims who won’t condemn Isis are driving people into their hands with youtube footage showing the carnage created by British bomb attacks in Iraq. Apparently this is supposed to scare young Muslims from joining Isis. It is more likely to look like bringing the war home.
Worryingly, it looks like the Labour leadership is set to fall in with this march to war. The party’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, has been invited to a high-level security meeting on Isis on 14 July 2015. ‘Indications’ have been made that Labour is re-thinking its position on attacking Syria.
In 2013 anti war opinion and protest derailed Cameron’s war plans. Now, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign takes on a new significance, but campaigning against a new front in Britain’s war in the Middle East has become a matter of urgency.
‘Drones, spy planes & Special Forces’: Cameron lays out UK war strategy
RT | July 13, 2015
Covert warfare is progressive, according to Prime Minister David Cameron, who will on Monday unveil plans to ramp up military spending on drones, spy planes and Special Forces operations.
Cameron will visit UK drone base RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, following Chancellor George Osborne’s recent pledge to peg the UK defense budget at 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The PM is expected to say he will task defense and security chiefs to examine how Britain can do more “to counter the threat posed by ISIL [Islamic State] and Islamist extremism.”
“This could include more spy planes, drones and special forces. In the last five years, I have seen just how vital these assets are in keeping us safe,” he will say.
This trend of using drones and engaging in Special Forces operations has grown steadily in recent years – largely as a result of Britain’s military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Responding to the British Prime Minister’s call for increased spending on drones, Kat Craig, legal director at international human rights organisation Reprieve said:
“If the Prime Minister is going to call for more spending on drones, he needs to give us some answers on how they are being used. There is overwhelming evidence that the UK is closely involved in the US’ secret drone war, which risks turning the whole world into a battlefield. Yet ministers have never once answered questions from Parliament or the public on the role Britain plays. Drone technology has enabled a vast expansion of secret bombing campaigns which take place without the knowledge or approval of the public. We need a full debate on these sinister aspects of this new technology before we go any further down this road.”
RT asked Chris Cole of Drone Wars UK on Monday about the rationale behind what he termed “remote warfare.”
“The use of drones, special forces and private security companies has become the favored means of military interventions as the public has grown increasingly war-weary,” he said.
Cole said that public outrage over dead and wounded soldiers has changed the face of warfare in Britain.
He argued the “political cost” of warfare can be whitewashed in incidences where the state employs “remote systems” like drones.
“If you take away that potential political cost by using remote systems like drones, it much easier for our politicians to be seen to be doing something as it is perceived as ‘risk free’,” he said.
Cole stressed the use of drones is not a humanitarian pursuit. The appearance of diminished risk is an illusion, he said.
“Rather we are transferring the risk of war from our troops, on to the heads of innocent civilians on the ground in the countries we are bombing, and also on to our civilians who have become the targets for reprisals,” he added.
Cole’s view appears to be in line with some the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) own internal discussions.
In September 2013, following a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by the Guardian newspaper, it was revealed that an internal MoD discussion paper had argued that less overt forms of warfare would be required to pursue British strategic aims.
The report by the MoD’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), suggested that the armed forces try to “reduce public sensitivity to the penalties inherent in military operations.”
It said the ministry should “inculcate an attitude that service may involve sacrifice and that such risks are knowingly and willingly undertaken as a matter of professional judgment.”
The paper added that the use of drones and mercenaries – which it called “contractors” – were less likely to lead to a public outcry in the face of bloody battles.
The report also cited the case of a group of Special Forces killed in 1982, saying that “the loss of 19 SAS soldiers in a single aircraft accident during the Falklands campaign did not arouse any significant comment.”
Asked what the specific impacts of extended Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) warfare could be, Cole said, “Increased drone and air strikes are bound to increase civilian casualties.”
“Observers report that between 500 and 1,000 civilians have already died in coalition bombing in Iraq and Syria and if the number of strikes increase this will only rise.”
Yemeni Genocide Proceeds Apace, Enjoying World’s Silence
US and ISIS join efforts to kill Yemenis
By William Boardman | Reader Supported News | July 10, 2015
Turns out the United States and the Islamic State, ISIS, are de facto allies of Saudi Arabia and its alliance of dictator states, all bent on exterminating Yemeni Houthis and pretty much any other Yemeni in the neighborhood. This Yemenicide started in earnest in March 2015. After years of US drone strikes proved too slow and ineffective at wiping out people in the poorest country in the Arab world, it was time to expand the arsenal of war crimes. Rarely, in discussions of Yemen, does one hear much about the violations of international law that have reduced the country to its present war-torn and devastated condition.
Failing to acknowledge a foreign policy disaster in Yemen, the Obama administration has chosen instead to trash international law by supporting the criminal, aggressive war that Saudi Arabia’s coalition of police states launched on Yemen on March 26. Now, despite more than three months of Saudi-American terror bombing, the Houthis remain in control of northwest Yemen, their tribal homeland, as well as much of the southeast of Yemen, having overthrown the internationally-installed puppet government, later “elected” without any opponents, of President Abd Rhabbuh Mansur Hadi.
President Obama praised Hadi as his “successful” partner in attacking terrorists, by which Obama meant he was grateful to Hadi for not objecting to the US drone attacks against his own people. Hadi’s legitimacy always depended on foreign puppeteers, and it still does. Having resigned as president, fled the capital, and rescinded his resignation, Hadi fled again, to Saudi Arabia the day before the Saudi blitz began. The official story is that Hadi requested the undeclared Saudi attack on his own country. Hadi remains in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, free to go nowhere while he pretends to head a government-in-exile that is the presently desired fiction of his captor-protectors.
On July 8, from Riyadh, Hadi reportedly proposed a ceasefire in Yemen to start before the month of Ramadan ends July 17. On July 1, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had called for a “humanitarian halt” in combat “until the end of the holy month of Ramadan.” So far, Hadi’s Saudi controllers have used the muslim holy month to rain increased terror on populated areas of Yemen, killing hundreds of civilians and Houthi fighters, with no accurate count available. July 7 saw the highest death toll in Yemen since the Saudi bombing campaign began. This bland-seeming coverage of the carnage by Reuters is riddled by propaganda deceits:
The United Nations has been pushing for a halt to air raids and intensified fighting that began on March 26. More than 3,000 people have been killed since then as the Arab coalition tries stop the Houthis spreading across the country from the north.
The Iran-allied Shi’ite Houthis say they are rebelling against a corrupt government, while local fighters say they are defending their homes from Houthi incursions. Sunni Saudi Arabia says it is bombing the Houthis to protect the Yemeni state.
The Reuters perspective represents the mainstream consensus, which also typically includes some of the same threads of deceit as these:
- “The UN has been pushing …” No, it hasn’t. The UN as a body has done little to protect the Yemenis, but the Security Council has done less for a country in which civil war has spanned generations. Security Council resolutions are determinedly “evenhanded” in their equal treatment of aggressors and victims. In June 2015, after two months of Saudi bombing, the Security Council expressed its “full support” for an impossibility: “a peaceful, inclusive, orderly and Yemeni-led political transition process that meets the legitimate demands and aspirations of the Yemeni people.”
- “pushing for a halt to air raids …” No, it hasn’t. The air raids are being carried out by the nine UN member states in the Saudi Coalition, including Security Council member Jordan. The US, a permanent Security Council member, has supported the aerial war crime campaign with logistics, in-flight refueling of bombers, intelligence, air-sea rescue, and naval support for the blockade (which is also an act of war).
- “intensified fighting that began on March 26 …” Intensified fighting began long before March 26. Yemen’s civil war has waxed and waned over several decades. What began March 26 was the war crime nexus of bombing civilian targets by the nine-member Saudi Coalition that includes Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. The Houthi rebellion is more than a decade old and gained intensity in the fall of 2014. The Houthis drove out the Yemeni government and now control the western half of the country, where most of the population lived and most of the bombing takes place.
- “the Arab coalition tries to stop the Houthis spreading across the country from the north …” Reuters is just wrong on this. The Houthi spread was a fact, and the “Arab coalition” failed in an ill-conceived campaign. Faced with an army advancing on the ground, the “Arab coalition” has not deployed ground troops. Without serious objection from the international community, the “Arab coalition” attacks military forces in another country with which they are not at war, as well as terror-bombing that country’s civilians with US-made cluster bombs.
- As for spreading “from the north,” that is at best wrong, if not duplicitous. Saudi Arabia has declared the northernmost province of Yemen, Saada, a military zone in which every civilian is a presumed combatant. This is the same bloodthirsty policy that leads the US to count every drone victim as a combatant until proven otherwise. This is the same moral numbness that led the US to establish free fire zones in Viet-Nam, where every living thing was deemed an enemy. This is total war as waged by the powerful, at a distance, against the weak and almost defenseless. This is as bad as any Nazi onslaught of World War II.
- The absurdity of the Reuters characterization is illustrated by another UN Security Council position in support of a “political solution to Yemen’s crisis in accordance with the Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative.” The Gulf Cooperation Council is an oxymoron, in that it includes six of the seven Arab states (not Iraq) on the Persian Gulf who allied determinedly NOT to cooperate with the other Persian Gulf state, Iran. Further, the Security Council absurdly supports the “Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative” when five of the six Gulf Council members (not Oman) are busily bombing Yemen in violation of international law.
- “The Iran-allied Shi’ite Houthis …” There is no evidence of an alliance between Iran and the Houthis, certainly not in any sense equivalent to the overt alliances waging undeclared war on Yemen. The Houthis are Shi’ite muslims, and Iran has almost surely supported them to some extent, but most claims of Iranian involvement in the current fighting are patently over-stated and lack supporting evidence. Reuters here is parroting Arab, American, and Israeli propaganda about the “threat” from Iran.
- “say they are rebelling against a corrupt government …” Who says? Reuters doesn’t say. This is specious journalism. Yemen has a long history of corrupt government, but perhaps the Hadi government allowing US troops to wage war on Yemeni territory, killing Yemenis at will, raised the corruption bar to a new level.
- “local fighters say they are defending their homes …” is worse than specious journalism, it’s pretty much a lie since the main opposition to the Houthis comprises forces loyal to Hadi, as well as cohorts of both Al Qaeda and ISIS.
- “Sunni Saudi Arabia says it is bombing the Houthis to protect the Yemeni state” would be a laugh line were it not such a dark lie. Saudi bombing is destroying the Yemeni state in order to “save” it. The Saudis may be “protecting” the Hadi government, but only in the sense that the Mafia provides protection in a protection racket. The Saudis have longstanding territorial conflicts with the Houthis along the northwest Saudi-Yemeni border. And the Saudis are acting as if they believe their own demonizing propaganda about Iran. Saudi Arabia is more likely bombing the Houthis because they are defenseless and Saudi Arabia doesn’t dare bomb Iran.
Nobody seems to care about Yemen, not even The New Yorker
The widespread, bland disinterest in the unending victimization of Yemenis facing unrelenting, daily crimes against humanity is hardly unique to obtuse observers like Reuters. The New Yorker, which eventually distinguished itself in opposition to the horrors of Vietnam, last published a piece on Yemen on May 1 (according to a site search). That piece conveys the American denial of its own terrorism with a tone of mild distaste suitable to Eustace Tilley, whose monocled default opinion is to blame the victim, as Robin Wright wrote little more than a month after the Saudi-American bombardment began:
The current Houthi rebellion – the seventh – is only the latest. The Houthi clan are Zaydi Muslims, who make up about a third of Yemen’s twenty-six million people. A once powerful people from the rugged northern highlands, they ruled an imamate for a millennium and deeply resented their reduced influence under [former President] Saleh [now a Houthi ally]. Between 2004 and 2010, they fought six other wars against his government….
The quarter-century experiment in uniting Yemen has definitively failed. There is no military solution, and there are unlikely to be any winners out of such a multilayered conflict, whatever the territorial gains….
Last week, the United States dispatched the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Teddy Roosevelt to supplement seven American warships off the Yemen coast. Washington strongly supports a political solution to the conflict in Yemen, but without interested players the risks of unintended consequences increase.
Rhetorically the US may support a “political solution” (to its own liking) and gullible reporters may accept that as some sort of reality. The reality on the ground (and on the water) is that the US supports and participates in endless terror bombing and a naval blockade. That is to say, the US supports and participates in the war crimes that are leading toward mass starvation and human devastation, what the discreet Ban Ki-moon refers to as a “humanitarian crisis” or a “catastrophe,” as if there were no agency causing it.
An editorial July 7 in The New York Times takes the same concerned-but-oblivious-to-the-genocidal-actors tone that reinforces the general pretense that no one is responsible:
Yemen has now been added to the United Nations’ list of most severe humanitarian emergencies, along with South Sudan, Syria and Iraq. It is a tragic distinction, highlighting the peril to 80 percent of the country’s 25 million citizens. The international community, including the United States, is not doing enough to push for an immediate cease-fire in the war that is ravaging the country to make it possible to deliver aid.
Yemen, a poor country, was deeply unstable even before a coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States, started bombing the Houthi rebel movement in late March. Last week, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, declared the situation a “catastrophe.”
Is it possible to commit a long string of war crimes in self-defense?
Having tiptoed up to the edge of US war crimes, the Times retreated. The rest of the editorial comprises little more than helpless hand-wringing, without even hinting at the most effective way to save Yemeni lives: stop the bombing. That means you, “Saudi Arabia … backed by the United States.” Like most of the rest of the world, the Times settled for asking for a reasonable-sounding impossibility, which it then undercut with another wisp of Saudi reality:
What is needed is a permanent political solution that will ensure the Houthis, who have some legitimate grievances and are unlikely to give up, get a significant role in any new government. Negotiations should be started without preconditions. But Saudi Arabia and its allies have appeared intent on forcing the Houthis to surrender, no matter what the cost to civilians and Yemen’s cities and villages.
Well, “Saudi Arabia and its allies” includes the US and others. The Times needs to look in the mirror without flinching. Saudi Arabia and its allies need to stop their bombing.
Ironically, they are not bombing Al Qaeda or ISIS forces in Yemen with anything like the same intensity they’re bombing Yemenis. In fact, Al Qaeda and ISIS are supplementing Saudi-American bombing with their own terror-bombing of Yemenis. For whatever reason, if there is one, the Saudi-American aerial genocide against Yeminis is making most of Yemen a much safer haven for terrorists. Yet this lunatic policy continues without serious opposition apparent anywhere. Who decided that Yemen should be treated as if it were the Haiti of the Arab world?
If any of the umpteen candidates for president of the United States has said anything humane, useful, or even dimly relevant about Yemen, it is hard to find (and I have found nothing). And nowhere have I found any call to establish the appropriate International War Crimes Tribunal to judge the illegality of the multiple, heinous predations of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and their sundry allies, all members in good standing of the world peacekeeping authority.
UNSC Resolution on MH17 Tribunal is Untimely, Irrational – German Lawmaker
By Alexander Mosesov – Sputnik – 11.07.2015
On Friday, a source in the UN Security Council told RIA Novosti that a Malaysian proposal to create a tribunal into the crash eastern Ukraine in 2014 will be discussed next week.
The draft UN Security Council resolution on establishing an international tribunal for those who downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 last year in Ukraine is ill-timed, since the Netherlands has not completed its official investigation, a member of the German Bundestag Defense Committee told Sputnik.
Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin said earlier this week that the draft resolution fails to correctly classify the crash, adding that international tribunals have never been created following civilian aircraft crashes.
“I think it makes sense to wait with the tribunal until the investigation is done,” Alexander Neu, the member of the German parliament from the left-wing Die Linke party said.
He stressed that “a parallel process [to the investigation] does not make any sense.”
On July 17, 2014, flight MH17 was en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam when it crashed in southeastern Ukraine. All 298 people on board the aircraft died.
Independence supporters in southeastern Ukraine and Kiev forces, engaged in fighting in the region, accused each other of causing the tragedy.
According to a September 2014 preliminary report by the Dutch Safety Board, MH17 broke up in the air after being hit by multiple “high-energy” objects from outside the airframe. The final report is due in October.
Top 5 Chemical Weapon Tests The British Conducted On Their Own People
By Stuart J. Hooper | 21st Century Wire | July 9, 2015
How anyone could have ever thought any of this was a good idea is simply unconscionable.
Unfortunately, this article is not satirical. Instead, it documents five, historically factual cases where the British Government thought it would be a great idea to test chemical and biological weapons upon their own people during the Cold War.
1) Zinc Cadmium Sulphide Dispersal
Between 1953 and 1964 around 4600 kilos of zinc cadmium sulphide was dispersed from ships, trucks and airplanes. Scientists knew the chemical concoction had a ‘largely unknown toxic potential’, yet still conducted the experiment around Salisbury in Wiltshire, Cardington in Bedfordshire and Norwich in Norfolk. It was also dispersed across areas of the North Sea and English Channel, where the extent of its effects are entirely unknown. Today, we understand zinc cadmium sulphide to be carcinogenic.
Photo Credit: Ronoldson Slim
2) Bacillus Globigii Dispersal in London’s Subway System
To find out whether the long distance traversal of aerosols through London’s tube system was done through the ventilation system or on board the trains, scientists released the bacteria Bacillus Globigii into the subway system. While some scientists are documented as having reservations about the experiment, it is unknown whether or not any adequate, if any, testing was done on the effects of the bacteria before its release. Today, we know it causes food poisoning, eye infections, and septicaemia.
Photo Credit: Ernest Sealing
3) Black Death Released Off Scottish Coast
Live plague bacteria were released just a few miles from the Isle of Lewis, an island that several thousand people called home. The experiment was thought to be safe as the prevailing wind should have blown the bacteria out to sea, however if the wind were to change direction thousands of innocent lives would have been at risk. It is well documented that at least one fishing vessel travelled through the plague cloud. We need not expand upon the effects of the plague.
Photo Credit: Michael B. Watkins
4) Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Experiment in The Bahamas
The case of the fishing vessel becoming an unwilling participant in a plague field test meant that future chemical and biological tests were conducted further afield, where scientists knew of areas ‘without restrictions’. British overseas territories (AKA colonies or occupied lands), like the Bahamas, were the new playground. Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis was released near an uninhabited island in the Bahamas by scientists, despite the fact it can cause high fever, long term fatigue, headaches and occasionally death if it were to reach populated shores.
Photo Credit: Caycee Cook
5) Experimental Nerve Gas Dispersal in Nigeria
In Obanaghoro, located in the South of British-occupied Nigeria, scientists spent over a year dispersing experimental nerve agents. The tropical environment was key to what the scientists were trying to test in relation to these particular agents. Again, the extent to which this nerve gas affected local populations and even employed locals, working as a part of the project, is entirely unknown. Sarin is known to have been tested here, which causes loss of bodily function and usually death, while those who survive are likely to suffer brain damage and psychiatric disorders.
Photo Credit: Wikicommons
Conclusion
Ulf Schmidt, Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent who carried out the research exposing all of these cases, said: ‘the government records I’ve been looking at are conspicuously silent on all this’. He went on to say that ‘officials had clearly good reasons as to why the kind of experiments undertaken in Nigeria were strictly prohibited on the British mainland’.
Schmidt’s work has also found that 30,000 secret chemical warfare experiments were carried out between 1945-1989 on more than 14,000 ‘volunteer’ British soldiers. He believes that most of the soldiers were never given enough information to give informed consent. All of these findings and more can be found in the professor’s new book, Secret Science.
Do you believe similar, deadly experiments are still going today?
Follow Stuart J. Hooper here: http://twitter.com/StuartJHooper
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How the British Government subjected thousands of people to chemical and biological warfare trials during Cold War
During the Cold War, the British Government used the general public as unwitting biological and chemical warfare guinea pigs on a much greater scale than previously thought, according to new historical research.
In more than 750 secret operations, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons were subjected to ‘mock’ biological and chemical warfare attacks launched from aircraft, ships and road vehicles.
Up until now historians had thought that such operations had been much less extensive. The new research, carried out by Ulf Schmidt, Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent, has revealed that British military aircraft dropped thousands of kilos of a chemical of ‘largely unknown toxic potential’ on British civilian populations in and around Salisbury in Wiltshire, Cardington in Bedfordshire and Norwich in Norfolk.
Cancer cases double at Gaza’s Shifa Oncology Department since 2010
Dr. Rami Mokdad
By Dr. Rami Mokdad | ISM | July 10, 2015
Gaza, Occupied Palestine – At Shifa Oncology Department we treat 150 patients everyday, and we are in total 3 doctors, 5 nurses and have just 15 beds. Obviously that’s not enough.
In the last 10 years the number of patients with cancer in the Gaza Strip has grown a lot. Especially in young people and children, before most of the cases affected old people, but since the Zionist aggressions against Gaza started it became normal to receive children and young people with cancer.
The three kinds of cancer that have grown more in those years are thyroid cancer, leukaemia and multiple myeloma cancer.
For example, in 2005 we had less than 50 cases of thyroid cancer, in 2014 we had 300 cases. Actually, each month we are receiving between 70 and 100 new cases of cancer patients. In this oncology department, the most important in the Gaza Strip, we treated around 2,800 patients in 2010. In 2013 the number grew to 5,000 and last year, 2014, we treated around 6,000 patients. And I’m afraid these numbers will continue to grow even more. In 10 years we’ll have a huge crisis in Gaza, as the risk factors are getting worse; the use of war weapons by Israel in highly populated areas, the consumptions of polluted water, the use of polluted land for growing food, etc.
Another special case we find in Gaza is the nasopharyngeal cancer, especially in children. Those cases come from areas where the people had primary contact with the Zionist bombs, especially with white phosphorous, but also in cases where their home was bombed.
Due to the blockade we find a lot of difficulties for making the diagnosis and treating those patients. For example in Gaza we don’t have either radiotherapy or molecular therapy, and we find a lot of obstacles to sending the patients to the West Bank to receive the appropriate treatment. We also don’t have PET scan, isotope scan or laboratory markers. We also suffer from an important shortage of chemotherapy supplies and other drugs, we could say that we work with 40% of the supplies we really need. As even when we receive some of these drugs, we don’t receive them continuously, so we never know if the next week we’ll be able to provide the needed treatment to the patients.
The Palestinian Authority is responsible for this shortage of drugs, as they don’t send the supplies intended for Gaza due to its will to punish Hamas.
This attitude from the Ramallah based government, along with the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt that doesn’t allow the patients to leave the Strip in order to receive the treatment outside, and in the case of Egypt, that also doesn’t allow the entrance of medical supplies and drugs through Rafah Border; are responsible of our inability to properly treat the cancer patients from Gaza.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of resources of the local government we don’t have any serious studies addressing the cancer issue. And we don’t know why any of all the International Agencies or NGOs are [not] studying that.
US-Israeli Imperialists Plot Downfall of Syria and Iran
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | July 9, 2015
The United States has been running a particularly reckless and transparent bluff on the world.
‘We must defeat ISIS’ has been the repetitive mantra bellowed from pulpits and podiums by deceitful US officials. But this bit of shameless Orwellian newspeak is coming from the very same rogue policy makers who have been the primary source of arms and largesse to that group and its sordid affiliates across Syria, Libya, Iraq and elsewhere.
Republican Senator Rand Paul called his own party’s bluff in a summer 2014 interview with CNN, telling the incompetent host that “we [the US government] are allied with ISIS in Syria.”[1] “[ISIS] would not be empowered in Iraq if we hadn’t been providing them a safe haven in Syria by arming their allies,” the Senator said, adding that “we are where we are because we armed the Syrian rebels,” the preponderance of whom are Wahhabi-Salafist extremists. Paul recently doubled down on that line of reasoning, informing another interviewer in May 2015 that “hawks in my party” are responsible for the rise of ISIS because of their purposefully intransigent policy of “distributing arms indiscriminately” to Syrian and Libyan militants in their fanatical drive to depose Gaddafi and Assad.[2]
Paul’s words were confirmed by a recently unearthed US Defense Intelligence Agency report that, in true Machiavellian style, welcomed an ISIS-controlled “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” to serve as a buffer to “isolate the Syrian regime” and roll back Iran. The US defense analysts, writing at the outset of the rebel insurgency in Syria in 2012, acknowledged that the anti-Assad coalition of militants that Washington was enthusiastically supporting were dominated by Salafist extremist elements linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda.[3]
A June 2015 Washington Post report revealed the extent of the CIA’s covert campaign to train, arm and deploy mercenaries against Assad in Syria, pegging it as one of the Agency’s “largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year.”[4] The article’s authors Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung write:
“At $1 billion, Syria-related operations account for about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget, judging by spending levels revealed in documents The Washington Post obtained from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
“U.S. officials said the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.
“The CIA declined to comment on the program or its budget. But U.S. officials defended the scale of the expenditures, saying the money goes toward much more than salaries and weapons and is part of a broader, multibillion-dollar effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to bolster a coalition of militias known as the Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army.
“Much of the CIA’s money goes toward running secret training camps in Jordan, gathering intelligence to help guide the operations of agency-backed militias and managing a sprawling logistics network used to move fighters, ammunition and weapons into the country.”
After weeding through all the phony anti-ISIS bluster emanating from the White House, it becomes clear that Washington’s overarching strategy is to play all Muslim groups and factions in the Middle East off against each other in what amounts to a sinister divide and conquer gambit that ultimately serves the interests of Israel. In 2007, years before the present crisis in Syria and Iraq, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah identified this genocidal US/Israeli-led scheme against the region in an interview with American journalist Seymour Hersh. He told the award-winning reporter that the Bush administration was working in tandem with Israel to instigate a cataclysmic civil war – something akin to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe – in the Muslim world. Nasrallah said that this fitna, an Arabic term which means “insurrection and fragmentation within Islam,” was being deliberately fomented by US and Israeli intelligence agencies to significantly weaken the region and allow the Zionist-American imperialists to achieve full-spectrum dominance.[5]
According to Hersh’s excellent March 2007 reportage published in the New Yorker under the title “The Redirection,” the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia began laying the groundwork for a rebel invasion of Syria that same year.[6] The US and Israel planned to enlist radical Wahhabi-Salafist elements backed by Saudi Arabian largesse as proxy mercenaries against Damascus in a wider effort to undermine Assad and precipitate the demise of Iran. Hersh outlined the criminal plan in these terms:
“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”[7]
Citing officials close to the Bush administration, Hersh explained that the CIA sought to employ radical anti-Syrian militants clandestinely “by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process.” Hersh’s sources told him that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria.” Using the Saudis as a conduit would, in turn, give Washington plausible deniability. “The Israelis,” Hersh wrote, “believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations.”[8]
In an article titled “The Pentagon plan to ‘divide and rule’ the Muslim world,” security scholar Nafeez Ahmed highlighted the contents of a 2008 RAND Corporation report which openly elucidated this belligerent strategy of tension.[9] The Pentagon-backed study group advocated playing all sides and every side in the Muslim world against one another in order to fracture and disorient opposition to Western and Israeli imperialism in the region. The Orwellian strategists identified essentially all Arabs and Muslims – Salafists, Shiites, Sunnis, secular Arab nationalists, communists, Baathists, etc. – as adversaries to be pitted against each other. Already-existing rivalries and fissures would be stoked up and exploited to their maximum potential.
RAND’s divide and conquer objectives are eerily similar to the vile prescriptions of Oded Yinon, an Israeli strategist who authored a geopolitical screed entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,” published in 1982, which called for the break-up of all Arab states surrounding Israel into fragmented polities along ethnic and religious lines. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run,” Yinon expounded in his Machiavellian manifesto, “and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon.”[10] The Israeli militarist gleefully cited the Iran-Iraq war as a prime example of the type of internecine conflict Israel hopes to ignite, exacerbate and capitalize on to achieve its Zionist imperium. In a June 2014 television interview, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a dedicated Jewish imperialist, explicated his Yinonite ideology, emphasizing Tel Aviv’s desire to have Sunni and Shiite Muslims fight each other and thereby cancel each other out while Israel reaps the spoils.[11]
It’s impossible to ignore the primacy of Israel in all of this unscrupulous intrigue. Netanyahu’s Likud Party is not only committed to eliminating what’s left of Palestine, but they also harbor expansionistic aspirations that go beyond Israel’s current borders – what some have called “Greater Israel.” Netanyahu’s seminal role in conceiving the rancid doctrines of the ‘war on terror’ itself, alongside the inescapable reality that the neocons who dominate the US foreign policy establishment are first and foremost loyal to Israel, is paramount in understanding the ‘method to the madness.’
Dismembering Syria
While Western-backed ISIS militants behead their way to Damascus, US foreign policy hawks are now plotting the literal dismemberment of Syria as a whole in accordance with the Zionist neocons’ balkanization plan.
In its latest release, the Brookings Institution, an influential pro-Israel, pro-US Empire think tank, has audaciously called for the break-up of Syria, advancing an incremental strategy to facilitate a stealth US invasion and takeover of the Arab country in the service of Israel.
In the June 2015 report titled “Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country,”[12] neocon ideologue Michael O’Hanlon outlines his hopes for a weakened “confederal” Syria “made up of autonomous zones rather than being ruled by a strong central government.” (Pg. 3) Such “safe zones” are to be controlled by US Special Forces and their trained foot-soldiers of the “Syrian opposition.” Specifically, O’Hanlon calls for the US and its regional proxies,
“to help defend local safe areas using American airpower as well as special forces support once circumstances are conducive, the Syrian opposition fighters would then establish safe zones in Syria that they would seek to expand and solidify. The safe zones would also be used to accelerate recruiting and training of additional opposition fighters who could live in, and help protect, their communities while going through basic training.” (Pg. 3)
O’Hanlon admits that the US has spent upwards of a billion dollars in “arms flows and other assistance to [Syrian militants]” and later suggests that the so-called ‘moderates’ are ineffective fighters, “a collection of groups with no unity, common vision, or survivability on the battlefield.” O’Hanlon proposes that moderation would not be a prerequisite for US support, something that has never been an issue for Washington anyway which has been covertly sponsoring some of the most unsavory characters imaginable.
Later in the document O’Hanlon identifies the anti-Assad orientation of the strategy, envisioning the “safe zones” as buffers to launch operations against Assad and to eventually push the Syrian president out of power. He writes:
“The plan would be directed in part against Assad. But it would not have the explicit military goal of overthrowing him, at least not in the first instance or the near term. Rather, it would seek to constrict the territory that he governs. And if he delayed too long in accepting a deal for exile, he could inevitably face direct dangers to his rule and even his person. The plan would still seek his removal, but over a gradual time period that allowed for a negotiated exit if he were smart enough to avail himself of the opportunity.” (Pg. 10)
O’Hanlon ponders the “outright partition of the country.” (Pg. 11) This partition scheme is evidently aimed at pressuring Assad and perhaps provoking him to strike at one of the US-controlled “safe zones” which would, O’Hanlon contends, give Washington an excuse to attack Damascus directly. “If Assad sought to attack the enclaves,” writes O’Hanlon, “where moderate forces were being aided by American and other outside powers … the United States would need to be ready to escalate quickly and powerfully—even disproportionately.” (Pg. 13)
This Brookings plan typifies an advanced phase of the destruction of Syria, something in the works since at least 2007. Washington’s anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian and broader anti-Muslim agenda clearly transcended both the Bush and Obama administrations, underscoring the existence of a permanent ‘shadow government’ – the neocon-dominated Military-Industrial Complex – that stays in place behind the curtain no matter who is elected. Obama’s ascendance to the White House was merely a public relations facelift, serving to make the American-Zionist Empire’s bloodthirsty aims more palatable to a war-weary public.
NOTES
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e_4tUYc6ag
[2] “Rand Paul says GOP hawks ‘created’ ISIS,” New York Post, May 27, 2015. http://nypost.com/2015/05/27/rand-paul-says-gop-hawks-created-isis/
[3] Brad Hoff, “2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document: West will facilitate rise of Islamic State ‘in order to isolate the Syrian regime’,” The Levant Report, May 19, 2015. http://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/
[4] Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, “Secret CIA effort in Syria faces large funding cut,” Washington Post, June 12, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/lawmakers-move-to-curb-1-billion-cia-program-to-train-syrian-rebels/2015/06/12/b0f45a9e-1114-11e5-adec-e82f8395c032_story.html
[5] Seymour Hersh, “The Redirection,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2007. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection?currentPage=all
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Nafeez Ahmed, “The Pentagon plan to ‘divide and rule’ the Muslim world,” Middle East Eye, April 3, 2015. http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/pentagon-plan-divide-and-rule-muslim-world-1690265165
[10] http://www.scribd.com/doc/155650153/A-Strategy-for-Israel-in-the-Nineteen-Eighties-Oded-Yinon#scribd
[12] Michael O’Hanlon, “Deconstructing Syria Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country,” Brookings Institute, June 2015. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/06/23-syria-strategy-ohanlon/23syriastrategyohanlon.pdf
Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez
Why is the United States Still Terrorizing Laos?
By Brett S. Morris | CounterPunch | July 9, 2015
Last month, the United States announced a new aid package of $15 million for the unexploded ordnance (UXO) sector in Laos. The aid package—the highest annual amount the US has ever given for UXO cleanup in Laos—brings to total about $85 million the US has given to Laos for UXO cleanup since 1993.
This is a shocking and embarrassingly low figure. The UXO is the result of one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in human history, when the United States dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos from 1964 to 1973. One third of the bombs did not explode on impact, and have killed or injured twenty thousand people since 1973.
The United States has a moral responsibility to do everything it can to clean up the UXO and help the victims. The $85 million the US has allocated to date are mere pennies compared to the $18 million (inflation-adjusted) the US spent bombing Laos per day from 1964 to 1973. The best estimated amount to clean up all the UXO is $16 billion, according to UXO expert Mike Boddington (as quoted in the excellent book by journalists Karen J. Coates and Jerry Redfern, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos).
The United States could easily provide the $16 billion needed to clean up the UXO. For comparison, the US spent $610 billion on the military in 2014 (more than the next seven highest spenders combined), according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. $16 billion is just 2.6 percent of $610 billion.
Why does the US government refuse to provide the necessary funds? Clearly, the US could provide the money—if it wanted. And there’s the key. The United States simply doesn’t care. Some poor, suffering people in a developing country that most Americans wouldn’t be able to find on a map just don’t matter. The US has more important things to spend its money on, like a trillion dollars on nuclear arms over the next three decades, a trillion and a half dollars on a new type of plane, almost 5,000 military bases and sites worldwide (587 of them outside the US and its territories), and arming human rights abusers like Israel.
This is an unacceptable state of affairs. Laos is a beautiful country with warm, friendly people that never did anything to the United States and never threatened the United States. Their only crimes were seeking independence through the communist, nationalist group the Pathet Lao (who had fought the French in the First Indochina War and the US-backed royalist government in Laos in the 1960s and 70s) and to have had the misfortune to share a border with Vietnam, another country the United States sought to decimate.
When I visited Laos last year, the effects of the so-called “Secret War” (secret to Americans, but definitely not to Laotians) were ever present. In Phonsavan, the capital of one of the most bombed regions in Laos, Xieng Khouang, bomb casings abound. The tourist information center has a substantial amount of them displayed outside its doors.
Bomb casings are even used for practical or decorative purposes. Laotian homes in rural areas use them as stilts as part of the structure for their houses. Restaurants display them outside to attract tourists. For example, a restaurant called “Craters” has these outside its entrance in Phonsavan:
Anyone who goes to Phonsavan should be sure to pay a visit to the UXO Survivor Information Centre. Inside one will find details of how one Laotian NGO, the Quality of Life Association, is helping the victims of UXO and their families. One way they do this is to gather family members of UXO victims into social groups that knit and create products such as scarves and laptop bags. The exercise serves the dual purpose of providing a social outlet for victims’ families as well as raising money to help themselves. This is an excellent idea, but the fact that the United States won’t provide the necessary funds to help the victims and their families is a moral abomination.
Probably the most heartbreaking component of the UXO Survivor Information Centre is the list of recent UXO victims. They include farmers, scrap metal collectors, and children.
Children are especially vulnerable because they find cluster bombs and try to play with them, mistakenly believing the small, round bombs are toys. Cluster bombs are notably deadly weapons because dozens of them are dispersed over a wide area from a single canister. Of the 270 million cluster bombs dropped on Laos, up to 80 million did not detonate, and forty percent of UXO victims are children. (To this day, the United States refuses to give up its use and exportation of cluster bombs: it refuses to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions; has used cluster bombs in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen; and exports them to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia.)
Outside Phonsavan, one will find the mysterious Plain of Jars, a landscape of ancient stone structures probably used by a prehistoric community for burial purposes thousands of years ago.
There are numerous bomb craters throughout the plain:
Readers may be familiar with the term “Plain of Jars” from the late Fred Branfman’s book, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War, which documented the atrocities US bombers were inflicting on Laotian villagers. An excerpt, as written by a Laotian villager:
The people’s houses burned and were completely destroyed. The people were hit by bombs and killed, and more than thirty were wounded. Because these airplanes dropped bombs on the village without stopping, the people had no place to go to escape. They had never before experienced anything like this. It caused parents to be taken in death from their children and children to be taken in death from their parents in great numbers, causing the people’s tears to flow. Because the airplanes had dropped bombs on the ricefields and rice paddies the people saw that they could not withstand these hardships. So they fled into the forest and the jungle or different streams and caves.
The United States terrorized Laos badly enough in the war, and they are still terrorizing Laos by not providing sufficient funds to clean up the UXO. This grotesque lack of concern for one’s own actions must end!
Brett S. Morris is a freelance writer, journalist, photographer, and author. He has traveled the world, documenting current events and the legacy of US foreign policy. His latest book is 21 Lies They Tell You About American Foreign Policy. He can be reached on his website, Twitter, and Facebook
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