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How Obama Enables Atrocities

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | January 4, 2016

As the New Year dawns, the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks remain firmly in control of Official Washington’s storylines – on Syria, Russia and elsewhere – even as their policies continue to wreak havoc across the Mideast and threaten the stability of Europe and indeed the future of civilization.

The latest proof of this dangerous reality came when Saudi Arabia’s repressive Sunni monarchy executed prominent Shiite political leader Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr for criticizing the nation’s kings and princes. Before the killing, the Obama administration held its tongue in public so as not to antagonize the Saudi royals. (Nimr’s nephew awaits Saudi “crucifixion” for his role as a teenager in Arab Spring protests.)

After the Nimr execution, the State Department issued a mild protest toward the Saudis while blurring the guilt by twinning it with criticism of Iran where outraged protesters damaged the Saudi embassy, which led to Saudi Arabia’s retaliatory breaking of relations with Iran.

“We believe that diplomatic engagement and direct conversations remain essential in working through differences,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said meekly on Sunday, while some senior U.S. officials reportedly seethed in private over the latest Saudi provocation.

“This is a dangerous game they are playing,” one official told The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung while insisting on anonymity to discuss U.S.-Saudi relations.

But the fact that the Obama administration could not voice its revulsion over the Saudi mass head-chopping (along with some firing squads) for 47 men, including Nimr, over the weekend speaks volumes. President Barack Obama and other insiders continue to tip-toe around the unsavory U.S. “alliances” in the Mideast.

Over the past several years, Saudi Arabia sealed its impervious protection from U.S. government criticism by forming an undeclared alliance with Israel around their mutual hatred of Shiite-ruled Iran and its Shiite allies, a cause picked up by American neocons and shared by the career-oriented liberal interventionists.

Some more “realist-oriented” U.S. officials, reportedly including Obama and some national security aides, recognize the havoc that neocon/liberal-hawk strategies continue to wreak across the region and now spreading into Europe, but they act powerless to do anything bold to stop it.

With Israel’s lobby siding with the Sunni states in their bloody rivalry with Shiite states, most U.S. politicians and pundits have scrambled to defend each recurring outrage by the Saudis, Qataris and Turks by trying to flip the script and somehow put the blame on Iran, Syria and Russia.

Getting a Pass

Thus, the Saudis, Qataris and Turks get mostly a pass for arming and enabling radical jihadists, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Israel also provides assistance to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front along the Golan Heights and bombs allies of the Syrian government and, of course, faces no official U.S. criticism.

In 2014, when Vice President Joe Biden blurted out the truth about Saudi support for Islamic terrorism inside Syria, he was the one who had to apologize. [Quote at 53:20 of clip.] In 2015, when Saudi Arabia invaded and bombed Yemen after hyping Iran’s support for Houthi rebels, the Obama administration sided with the Saudis even as their wanton attacks on poverty-stricken Yemen killed thousands of civilians and created a humanitarian crisis.

For more than a year after President Obama announced his air war against the Islamic State in summer 2014, Turkey continued to let the terror group run an industrial-style oil smuggling operation from Syria and Iraq through Turkey. Only when Russia entered the conflict last fall was the U.S. government shamed into joining in bombing raids to destroy the truck convoys. Yet, Obama still defended Turkey and bought its promises about finally trying to seal a 100-kilometer gap in its border.

Then, when Turkey retaliated against the Russian anti-terrorist bombing raids inside Syria by willfully shooting down a Russian Su-24 plane whose pilot was murdered after bailing out, Obama again sided with the Turks even though their claim that the Russian plane had violated Turkish air space was dubious at best. By their account, the plane had intruded over a sliver of Turkish territory for 17 seconds.

In other words, whatever these U.S. “allies” do – no matter how brutal and reckless – the Obama administration at least publicly rushes to their defense. Otherwise, the neocon/liberal-hawk “group think” would be offended – and many angry editorials and columns would follow.

While this strange reality may make sense inside Official Washington – where careerism is intense and offending the Israel Lobby is a sure career killer – this pusillanimous approach to these grave problems is endangering U.S. national interests as well as the world’s future.

Not only has the neocon/liberal-interventionist obsession with “regime change” turned the Middle East into a vast killing field but it has now spread instability into Europe, where the fabric of the European Union is being shredded by dissension over how to handle millions of Syrian refugees.

The United Kingdom may vote to leave the E.U., removing one of the original anchors of the European project which — for all its faults — has deservedly gotten credit for replacing a history of European blood-soaked conflicts with peaceful cooperation.

The spreading disorder has had political repercussions in the United States, too, where panic over terrorism is reshaping the presidential race.

Yet, instead of practical solutions such as pressuring all rational sides in the Syrian conflict to engage in peace talks and hold free elections that give the Syrian people the power to decide who their future leaders will be, Official Washington instead generates “talking points,” such as calling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a “magnet for terrorism” who “must go” – although his forces have done the most to stop an outright victory by Al Qaeda and Islamic State.

If one buys this “magnet” theory, then you’d also have to seek “regime change” in every country that’s been attacked by terrorists, including the United States, France, United Kingdom, Spain, etc. In the case of Syria, what’s remarkable is that the sponsorship of terrorism by U.S. “allies” and indeed by the U.S. government itself has been so blatant. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Climbing into Bed with Al Qaeda.”]

However, as far as Official Washington is concerned, it doesn’t really matter what Assad has or hasn’t done. What’s important is that “regime change” in Syria has been on the neocons’ to-do list since at least the mid-1990s – along with the brilliant idea of “regime change” in Iraq. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Israel Out-Foxed US Presidents.”].

The Infallible Neocons

And since the neocons are infallible – as far as they’re concerned – the goal can’t be changed. The only option is to escalate the “regime change” planning to include other countries that get in the way, including Iran and now nuclear-armed Russia.

Yes, that’s the ultimate neocon idea – make the Russian economy scream, overthrow the calculating Vladimir Putin and risk having him replaced by some extreme and unstable nationalist with his or her hand on the nuclear button. That may be how life on the planet ends – but there will be evermore “group thinks” and “talking points” right up to the moment of Armageddon. The neocons can never stop generating false narratives.

Meanwhile, the “liberal interventionists” can boast of their own “regime change” – in Libya, a policy promoted by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who delighted at the gruesome torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi – “we came, we saw, he died,” she laughed – after having ignored his warnings that the overthrow of his secular government would open the oil-rich country to chaos from radical jihadists, a prediction that has been fulfilled.

Yet, despite this record of spreading chaos and death around the world, the grip that the neocons and liberal hawks have on Official Washington remains almost absolute. They control most of the think tanks – from the Brookings Institution to the American Enterprise Institute – as well as the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times and pretty much the rest of the mainstream media.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Times’ “news” coverage of the Middle East and Russia has been consistently slanted to favor neocon/liberal-hawk positions. Just as the Times eagerly joined President George W. Bush’s bogus case for invading Iraq in 2003, “the newspaper of record” has peddled false and misleading articles about the crises in Syria and Ukraine as well as promoting anti-Russian propaganda.

In this climate of manufactured “reality,” any old-fashioned foreign policy “realist” – especially one who has criticized Israel – cannot expect to win Senate confirmation to any senior position, establishing what amounts to a blacklist against “realists,” such as happened to ex-U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman whose intelligence appointment was dropped by Obama in his early days out of fear of offending the Israel Lobby and its many neocon backers.

As the rise of those neocons has played out since their emergence during the Reagan administration, the “realists” who were known for cold-hearted foreign policy calculations to protect American interests have aged, died out or otherwise disappeared. They have been largely replaced by ideologues, either neocons with their intense devotion to right-wing Israeli interests or liberal interventionists who almost invariably side with the neocons but cite “humanitarian” concerns to justify “regime change” wars.

Blocking Obama

No matter how foolhardy and deadly these policy prescriptions have been, there is almost no way to dislodge the neocons and liberal hawks inside Official Washington, since they monopolize almost all levers of political and media power.

Even when President Obama tried to collaborate under the table with President Putin to reduce tensions in Syria and Iran in 2013, Obama was quickly outmaneuvered by neocons and liberal hawks inside the State Department who pushed for the putsch in Ukraine in 2014 that effectively destroyed the Obama-Putin cooperation. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]

I have long argued that the only way to begin to challenge the neocon/liberal-hawk “group thinks” is to release facts about pivotal events, such as the 2013 Syria-sarin case, the 2014 sniper attacks at Kiev’s Maidan square, and the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine. The neocons/liberal hawks currently control all those narratives, using them as clubs to advance ideological agendas just as they did with the false claims about Iraq’s WMD. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Power of False Narrative.”]

But other evidence suggests very different scenarios. Obama and his national security team could either release evidence to confirm the accuracy of the “group thinks” or puncture that self-certainty. Instead Obama has chosen to withhold what the U.S. intelligence community knows about these events, all the better to protect the dominant propaganda narratives.

So, the Obama administration continues down a road of tolerating or condoning outrages by its Mideast “allies” as the President and his timid intelligence bureaucrats do nothing to empower the American people with the truth. It is a recipe for worldwide catastrophe.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

January 5, 2016 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | al-Qaeda, Iran, Israel, Middle East, New York Times, Obama, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Washington Post, Yemen, Zionism | Leave a comment

Creating Sunnistan: Foreign Affairs Calls for Syria and Iraq to be Balkanized

By Steven MacMillan – New Eastern Outlook – 31.12.2015

On the 29th of November, 2015, Foreign Affairs – the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – published an article titled: Divide and Conquer in Syria and Iraq; Why the West Should Plan for a Partition. It was written by Barak Mendelsohn, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Haverford College and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In the article, he argues that the “solution” to the current crisis in Syria and Iraq is the creation of an “independent Sunni state” (or Sunnistan), in addition to separating “the warring sides:”

“The only way to elicit indigenous support is by offering the Sunnis greater stakes in the outcome. That means proposing an independent Sunni state that would link Sunni-dominated territories on both sides of the border. Washington’s attachment to the artificial Sykes–Picots borders demarcated by France and Britain a century ago no longer makes sense. Few people truly believe that Syria and Iraq could each be put back together after so much blood has been spilled. A better alternative would be to separate the warring sides. Although the sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias was not inevitable—it was, to some extent, the result of manipulation by self-interested elites—it is now a reality.”

Mendelsohn’s so-called “solution” for the region is in fact the strategy Western powers have been pursuing in the Middle East for years. His proposal is pretty much identical to the preferred “outcome” for Syria articulated by the former US Secretary of State and CFR member, Henry Kissinger. Speaking at the Ford School in 2013, Kissinger reveals his desire to see Syria Balkanized into “more or less autonomous regions (from 27.35 into the interview):

“There are three possible outcomes. An Assad victory. A Sunni victory. Or an outcome in which the various nationalities agree to co-exist together but in more or less autonomous regions, so that they can’t oppress each other. That’s the outcome I would prefer to see. But that’s not the popular view…. I also think Assad ought to go, but I don’t think it’s the key. The key is; it’s like Europe after the Thirty Years War, when the various Christian groups had been killing each other until they finally decided that they had to live together but in separate units.”

Carving out Sunnistan in the region was also recently advocated by the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, in his NY Times article: To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State. Bolton wants to create an“independent Sunni State” to act as a “bulwark” against Bashar al-Assad and Baghdad. Make no mistake about it; the strategy of the US had always been to create a Sunni micro-state in Eastern Syria and Western Iraq to isolate Assad. In the 2012 declassified report from the DIA, the document reveals that the powers supporting the Syrian opposition – “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” – wanted to create a “Salafist principality in Eastern Syria in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

Obviously, Salafism (which some argue is synonymous with Wahhabism; whilst others argue that Wahhabism is a more extreme form of Salafism) is a branch of Sunni Islam. Many have argued that “violence” is “central” to Wahhabism and Salafism, as Catherine Shakdam expresses in her article, Wahhabism, Al Saud and ISIS – the Unholy Trinity:

“Wahhabism is no more than an engineered perversion, a division, an abomination which has but spread like a cancer onto the Islamic world and now threatens to destroy all religions… Wahhabism is not of Islam and Islam will never be of Wahhabism – it is a folly to conceive that Islam would ever sanction murder, looting and atrocious barbarism. Islam opposes despotism, injustice, infamy, deceits, greed, extremism, asceticism – everything which is not balanced and good, fair and merciful, kind and compassionate. If anything, Wahhabism is the very negation of Islam. As many have called it before – Islam is not Wahhabism.” […]

“Wahhabism is merely the misguided expression of one man’s political ambition – Mohammed Abdel Wahhab, a man who was recruited by Empire Britain to erode at the fabric of Islam and crack the unity of its ummah (community). Wahhabism has now given birth to a monstrous abomination – extreme radicalism; a beast which has sprung and fed from Salafis and Wahhabis poison, fueled by the billions of Al Saud’s petrodollars; a weapon exploited by neo-imperialists to justify military interventions in those wealthiest corners of the world. ISIS’s obscene savagery epitomises the violence which is inherent and central to Wahhabism and Salafism, its other deviance. And though the world knows now the source of all terror, no power has yet dared speak against it; instead, the world has chosen to hate its designated victim – Islam.”

Fracturing Iraq

In relation to Iraq, the plan to split the country into three parts has been publicly advocated by US officials ad nauseam. The President Emeritus of the CFR, Leslie Gelb, argued in a 2003 article for the NY Times that the most feasible outcome in Iraq would be a “three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.” In 2006, a potential map of a future Middle East was released by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters which depicted Iraq divided into three regions: a Sunni Iraq to the West, an Arab Shia State in the East and a Free Kurdistan in the North. The current US Vice President, Joe Biden, also penned an article which was co-authored by Gelb titled: United Through Autonomy in Iraq. The 2006 article argues for a decentralized Iraqi state where power is held by three “ethno-religious” groups: “Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab.” Furthermore, the NY Times published an article in 2013 titled: Imagining a Remapped Middle East; How 5 Countries Could Become 14, which envisages the Middle East and Libya completely Balkanized.

Responding to the strategy of the West in Iraq, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the division of the country “unacceptable.” Lavrov stated that this was “social engineering” and “state structure manipulation from far outside,” adding that Russia believes “Iraqis – Shia, Sunnis and Kurds – should decide for themselves how to live together.”

The Western elite’s strategy is to create a Middle East (and a world for that matter) devoid of strong, sovereign, independent nation-states that can resist imperial advances. Fracturing countries into feuding micro-states ensures Western interests are not confronted with a cohesive entity which can collectively unite to oppose this belligerent force. “Divide and conquer” as Mendelsohn’s article is titled, the ancient strategy used by an array of imperial powers, from the Romans to the British, remains the strategy of the Western Empire today.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report.

December 31, 2015 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | CFR, Council on Foreign Relations, Iraq, Joe Biden, Libya, Middle East, New York Times, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Who is the Arch Racist: The Donald or Hillary?

By John V. Walsh | Dissident Voice | December 29, 2015

Who is the arch racist, Hillary or Trump? To answer that, let us ask another question, a simple one. Which is worse: to denigrate some members of a group or religion or race – or to kill them by the millions? And maim more millions and displace even more millions? Which is more “racist”? With that in mind, who is the arch racist, Hillary or The Donald?

Do the liberals who criticize Trump, but not Hillary, as racist forget the slogan of the anti-Vietnam War movement, “Stop the Racist Bombing.”

And which causes more blowback, more revenge attacks by the victims – the denigration with words or the killing with bombs and sanctions?

Then consider the careers and statements of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Is there any doubt who is the greater offender in terms of hostility to Muslims? And yet in all of the accusations of “racism” hurled at Trump from the editorial pages of the NYT to the most “progressive” web sites and outlets, there appears no corresponding charge against Hillary as racist. That is symptomatic of a deep imperial sickness, an inability to see what is all too clear. It is also an indication of the deep reach of the elite into all outlets of communication from the mainstream to most of the alternative ones and even into the minds of supposed progressives.

Let us consider some of the things that Donald Trump has had to say, most notably the following from the last debate of 2015 among the GOP candidates:

TRUMP: In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have (been) wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart. (Emphasis, jw)

Doug Fuda, a Catholic antiwar activist, describes this statement as “almost a call for a desperately needed American repentance.”

Just campaign rhetoric, you might say – although hardly the kind you hear from the rest of the candidates, especially on the value of the lives of those the US bombed into oblivion. Then consider the following from Trump’s March, 2004 Esquire interview:

Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over.

What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing! (Emphasis, jw)

That statement was made 11 years ago when Trump was a TV sensation, not a political candidate. A simple rule is that the greater the temporal gap between a candidate’s statements and voting day, the more heartfelt will be the statement. With that statement of 2004 you could not get further from the sentiment expressed by Hillary’s support for the war on Iraq or the proclamation by her close colleague Madeleine Albright that the Clinton sanctions on Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands, five hundred thousand children among them, were “worth it” to overthrow Saddam Hussein! And Hillary herself peddling every neocon war in sight from Iraq to Libya and now Syria. How can the liberals and progressives excoriate Trump but not Clinton as “racist”? And how can they ignore Trump’s words of compassion for those on “the other side”? Those words are unique among the current contenders for the presidency and they ought to earn Trump a sobriquet quite different from “new Hitler” or “racist.” Have the so-called progressives lost touch with reality?

And now Hillary claims that Trump’s words fuel the fire of ISIS. The fires of ISIS were raging long before Trump made his appearance on the national political scene. And they burn bright because the wars waged by the demented Hillary and the rest of the Washington political elite provided the fuel that fed the Jihadist flame. Trump’s words, advocating a temporary halt to the entrance of Muslims into the U.S., if they have had any effect at all, were but a handful of woodchips next to the forests of fuel that Hillary’s wars provided the conflagration that is ISIS. But Hillary is no stranger to the most outrageous of lies, including the charge that ISIS has made a video featuring Trump.

Now on late night TV Hillary, despite all the blood of non-whites on her hands, has the gall to say that Trump is “dangerous.” He certainly has become a danger to her shot at the presidency. But for her to act as though she cares one wit about the lives of people of color, especially Arabs and Muslims, is a very sick joke.

In the context of the presidential campaign, my liberal and progressive friends, go ahead and excoriate The Donald to the max for any genuine racism or bigotry. Have at it. This writer for one welcomes it. But do not do so without mention of Hillary’s record with the blood of millions of Muslims all over it, as the New York Times does. At best that is a half-truth, which, of course, is a full lie.

Postscript. Well worth reading is this fact-based piece “The Media Needs to Stop Telling This Lie About Trump,” by a self-described liberal Alberto Martinez native of Puerto Rico and now a Professor at the University of TX at Austin.

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.

December 30, 2015 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, United States | Leave a comment

A Decade of Questions Over a Paxil Study Vindicated

By Martha Rosenberg | CounterPunch | December 29, 2015

In the last few years, highly promoted drugs like Vioxx, Bextra, Baycol, Trovan, Meridia, Seldane, Hismanal, Darvon, Mylotarg, Lotronex, Propulsid, phenylpropanolamine (PPA), phenacetin, Raxar and Redux have been withdrawn for safety risks after millions used them. Sorry about that. Others like Avandia, Cylert, Ketek and Xarelto are under serious safety clouds.

But Big Pharma insists it is unaware of drugs’ true risks until a wide swath of the population uses them and “safety signals” emerge. Facts sometimes suggest otherwise.

In 1977, almost thirty years before Merck admitted its bone drug Fosamax caused jawbone death, its bone scientist observed the action in rats. (The “anti-fracture” drug also causes fractures.)

Years before the label of the antipsychotic Seroquel was changed in 2011 to warn the drug “should be avoided” in combination with at least 12 other medications because of heart risks, at least 99 articles in the U.S. National Library of Medicine linked the drug to “sudden death,” “QT prolongation” (a heart disturbance that can lead to death), “cardiac arrest” and “death.” In many cases, the Pharma companies “discover” the problems after the drug patent has conveniently expired.

Then there’s Paxil. Paroxetine was a top selling SSRI antidepressant drug for GSK during the “happy pill” craze when Big Pharma was telling everyone they had “depression.” But in 2004, soon after its approval, the New York Attorney General charged that research about the drug published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (known as “Study 329”) buried the drug’s true risks of suicide in adolescents.

And there were more questions about the research. Former Boston Globe reporter Alison Bass and others reported that the paper was not even written by the 22 doctors and researchers listed as “authors” but by a medical communication company hired by GSK. (Ghostwriting helped make Vioxx, Neurontin, hormone replacement therapy and even the flame retardant chemical deca [Deca-BDE] appear safe, according to published reports.) “You did a superb job with this,” wrote the Paxil paper’s first “author” Martin Keller of Brown University to Sally Laden, a ghostwriter working for Scientific Therapeutics Information. “It is excellent. Enclosed are rather minor changes from me.”

In 2006, “author” Martin Keller, former Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Brown, acknowledged that GSK had given him tens of thousands of dollars during and after the time the study was conducted.

There were also questions about where the research appeared. The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is a publication of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry which lists the funders of its “treatment guidelines” for children and adolescents with bipolar disorder as Abbott, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Forest, Janssen, Novartis and Pfizer.

Almost fifteen years after the questionable research was published, the furor had not died down. In 2014, two members of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Edmund Levin and George Stewart, asked the editor of the Academy’s journal why the discredited paper was still standing and had not been retracted. (A quick look at other scientific papers identified in the press as ghostwritten shows that few are retracted and most are standing, to deceive future generations.)

Then, in September 2015, when many reporters, psychiatrists, researchers and professors had given up the Paxil fight, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a reanalysis that amounted to a reversal of the original study. The new research demonstrated that Paxil indeed increases risks of suicide in young people and adolescents.

The reanalysis of Paxil’s suicide risks in the young is a victory for safety activists, medical reporters, the public and freedom of the press. But many pro-pill doctors continue to fight evidence of Paxil’s suicide risks and similar SSRIs. “There is a very reasonable possibility that it has discouraged patients from taking antidepressants and physicians from prescribing these medications [and] the government should rescind the black-box warning on antidepressants altogether,” Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical wrote in the New York Times a month before the Paxil reanalysis.

December 29, 2015 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | New York Times, United States | Leave a comment

Ocean acidification not a current problem, top NOAA scientist insists in FOIA-ed e-mails

JunkScience | December 23, 2015

JunkScience.com got NOAA scientist e-mails via FOIA? Why can’t Congress?

Last October, the New York Times published this dire op-ed on ocean acidification, supposedly authored by NOAA chief Richard Spinrad and his UK counterpart Ian Boyd.

Curious, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to NOAA for the e-mail related to the development and publication of the op-ed. I received 443 pages of e-mail in return.

First, the op-ed was actually written by NOAA staff Madelyn Applebaum, not Spinrad or Boyd. The purpose was to tout NOAA not inform the public about ocean acidification.

Screen Shot 2015-12-23 at 3.15.56 PM Second, the New York Times initially rejected the op-ed for its U.S. print edition and web site, the e-mails show. NOAA staff then submitted the op-ed to the International NYTimes staff in London (because Madelyn knew the INYT staff) where it was placed in the International NYTimes print edition and NYTimes.com.

Screen Shot 2015-12-23 at 5.12.39 PM Next, NOAA staff was appalled at the New York Times-selected title, which was a lot different than the NOAA-picked titled:

Screen Shot 2015-12-23 at 3.13.07 PM Screen Shot 2015-12-23 at 3.18.17 PM But the most notable e-mails stand in stark contrast to the information presented in the NYTimes op-ed.

Specifically, NOAA’s Dr. Shallin Busch insists the op-ed exaggerates the ocean acidification problem:

shallin_busch_headshot Below are clips of Busch doing so:

OA1 OA2 OA3 OA4 JunkScience has maintained for years now that there is no evidence that ocean “acidification” is causing harm. Glad to see that a top NOAA scientist sees it the same way.

BTW, we were about to FOIA scientist e-mail from NOAA. Not sure why Congress can’t get it and Judicial Watch has to sue for it.

December 27, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, Environmentalism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | New York Times, United States | Leave a comment

NY Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Turned a Deaf Ear to Palestinian Suffering

By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | December 22, 2015

As Jodi Rudoren exits the Jerusalem bureau of The New York Times, she leaves behind a series of gaping holes in coverage of Palestine-Israel, above all in her failure to expose the treatment of the most vulnerable, who suffer disproportionately under the constant brutality of the Israeli occupation.

Readers of the Times have never been told of the international outcry over the abuse of Palestinian children detained by Israeli security forces. They know nothing about the myriad Israeli breaches of the 2014 ceasefire with Gaza, especially the frequent attacks on fishermen and farmers; and they are uninformed of the cruel measures imposed on struggling Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley and elsewhere.

Rudoren, who leaves her post as Jerusalem bureau chief at the end of this month, replaced Ethan Bronner nearly four years ago. She has written from inside an Israeli Jewish perspective, giving voice to official Israeli spin and omitting the stories that beg to be told.

Thus, although Rudoren visited Gaza, she had nothing to say about the numerous attacks on defenseless farmers and fishermen there, some of whom have died simply trying to do a day’s work. These attacks are in violation of the truce that ended the assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 (as well as previous agreements), but Rudoren’s reporting from the enclave has strained to deflect the blame from Israel.

Instead of telling the stories we need to hear, Rudoren has written about individual Gazans who are anything but typical—a woman artist who defies the authorities, a man who goes against the grain by advocating for the two-state solution.

In this way she has given us the appearance of entering into Gazan society, of “balance” in covering both Israeli and Palestinian affairs, while she actually provided a smokescreen to avoid looking at the urgent issues.

The Bedouin of the West Bank received even less attention during Rudoren’s term in Jerusalem, but their stories are equally disturbing and compelling. In the Jordan Valley and east of Jerusalem (and also within Israel, in the Negev), Israeli forces often confiscate and destroy the basic necessities of life in these poverty-stricken communities.

The Israeli Civil Administration, a branch of the army, routinely destroys tents, latrines, animal shelters, water pipes, cisterns, wells, houses, solar panels and storage sheds, usually under the pretext that they lack building permits. Many of the confiscated and destroyed items have been donated by the International Committee of the Red Cross or other aid organizations.

The Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, has documented these acts of destruction and the many times Israeli troops have forced entire communities to leave their homes for hours and days at a time under the pretext of needing the area for “military training.” These live fire training sessions have more than once set the Bedouins’ fields on fire, destroying valuable crops and grazing land.

And yet, as she ignored these depredations, Rudoren chose to write about illegal settlers in the Jordan Valley, presenting them as plucky and determined and ignoring the plunder of indigenous communities in the area.

Although B’Tselem, the United Nations, Amnesty International and other monitoring groups have exposed the contemptible actions and policies of the Israeli government and its security forces, Rudoren has almost totally ignored the reports and even worked to undermine them.

Numerous groups, for instance, have raised alarm over the abuse of Palestinian children in Israeli custody, but Rudoren never saw fit to address the issue in the Times—except for a somewhat oblique attempt to defuse the charges. Thus, she wrote about stone throwing as a rite of passage in one West Bank village, presenting the youthful efforts at resistance and the Israeli response as a kind of game, nothing to be taken seriously.

The story mentions the arrests of children and military interrogations, but readers never learn that Israeli courts and security forces have been accused of serious mistreatment, amounting to torture: beatings, forced confessions, sleep deprivation, threats and more.

Instead, Rudoren says that it can be cold in those infamous interrogation rooms, as if that is the worst of it.

In the latest uprising, marked by a series of lone wolf stabbing and vehicular attacks, Rudoren continued to ignore the reports of monitoring groups, saying nothing about the well-documented charges that Israeli security forces are carrying out street executions of Palestinians who pose no threat.

This kind of news is deemed unfit to print in the Times. Rudoren, who goes on the join the international desk at the paper’s headquarters, played her part well, according to Times protocol, which expects that its reporters will maintain the Israeli narrative of victimhood, suppress anything that contradicts this claim and betray its readers under a camouflage of “balanced” reporting.

December 22, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, New York Times, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism | Leave a comment

SAN BERNARDINO IN FLUX: The Fluid Nature of Cover Stories

By Niles and Frasier Mercado • Memory Hole • December 22, 2015

If the reporting on the alleged shooting in San Bernardino, California has left you confused and disoriented, you are not alone. The main stream media has changed substantial aspects of their original official story.

While it is understandable that some details might get misreported in the immediate aftermath of a national tragedy, no mention is made as to WHERE this misinformation originated from and WHY we should think that the NEW news reports are any more reliable.

It is difficult to dispute or verify claims when the narrative is a moving target. These evolving details are pretty significant, and seem to be — along with crisis actors and concurrent drills — another fingerprint of government sponsored shooting hoaxes and false flag events. Let’s take a look at a few of these alterations and how they relate to inconsistencies in other government-sponsored events.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE THIRD SHOOTER? SHE LOOKS LIKE A HE…

As discussed in a previous Memory Hole blog post, Juan Hernandez and Sally Abdelmageed described the shooters as “THREE WHITE MEN” (emphasis ours).

Fox and CNN then reported that the third assailant was FEMALE. She was supposedly on her way to Las Vegas to board an airplane. As time passed, that third accomplice became a MAN and HIS involvement was diminished (eventually to the point of being eliminated). Notice how the Wall Street Journal puts it in the article “Shooting Kills at Least 14; Two Suspects Are Dead” (Dec 2, 2015):

“The chief said a third person fled the scene and was taken into custody, but the police did not know his role, if any…” (emphasis ours)

Similarly varied stories were reported during the mass shooting (hoax) at Umpqua Community College. The shooter’s name changed from Toby Reynolds to Chris Sean Harper-Mercer (after going through several permutations in between – see diagram). His age changed from 20 to 26. When CNN altered his photograph, his race changed from mixed-race to white.

HAVE YOU SEEN MY MOTIVATION? IT WAS AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE…

The motive changed for the UCC shooter (Chris Harper-Mercer) from hatred towards Christians, to hatred towards women, then to hatred towards minorities.

Similarly, the San Bernardino shooting was originally characterized as spontaneous payback over an office party argument. According to the article “Carnage In California” by Tamara Audi and Jim Carlton (also from the Wall Street Journal, Dec 3, 2015)

“Police said that there had been a dispute at the holiday party that sent one person away angry, but it was unclear if that was connected to the later assault.”

Two days later, The New York Times contradicted this account (in the article “For San Bernardino Survivors, a Day of Screams and Chaos”, Dec 5, 2015):

“… But that ended when a colleague, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, who had been there and quietly slipped away, leaving his jacket draped over a chair, returned with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, to unleash what the FBI is calling a terrorist attack.”

If Farook did have some argument at the holiday party, it would have been against his character according to Chris Nwadike. Nwadike, a fellow health inspector for San Bernardino County, said “Farook was a quiet person,” and he goes on to say that he never saw Farook have a disagreement with colleagues at work.

The spontaneous nature of this office party narrative belies the Islamic terrorist motive that would come later. Yet even The Wall Street Journal article, “California Shooters Leave Clues, but No Clear Motive” (Dec 4, 2015), had to admit that there was no clear motive:

“Law-enforcement officials said Thursday they weren’t sure what motivated the killings. Investigators found Mr. Farook had contact, some online and some by phone, with people who came up tangentially in past federal terrorism probes.” (emphasis ours)

The word “tangentially” should be in giant letters. They maybe once visited a website of someone who was IN THE PAST maybe tangentially tied to a mundane federal probe… I mean they are really grasping at straws here.

A few days later (Dec 8, 2015), The Wall Street Journal readdresses the issue of motive (in the article “Shooters Were ‘Radicalized’”) with a rumor of a post they got from “officials” that will make your eyes roll:

“Ms. Malik posted a message on Facebook just before the attack pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the terror group Islamic State, according to officials… ‘We have learned and believe that both suspects have been radicalized, and have been for quite some time,’ David Bowdich, the FBI director in charge in Los Angeles, told reporters in a news conference.” (Emphasis ours)

ACCORDING TO OFFICIALS?! Why on earth couldn’t they go and pull up the Facebook quote themselves rather than depend on the word of an unnamed official? At least with the UCC shooting they created fake accounts and provided us with screenshots of posts.

Speaking of which, in the shooting at Umpqua Community College, Mercer’s social media was used to paint the alleged assailant as a frustrated racist conspiracy theorist with ties to Muslim extremists. These social media posts may leave something to be desired in the way of credibility, however. To that point his MySpace was changed five times after his death.

This Islamic extremism motivation might SEEM predictable and ridiculous to those familiar with false flag events, but it is by no means the most absurd. The winner for the most absurd motive put forth by the media goes to Erin Burnett at CNN. Since Ms. Malik recently had a baby, Burnett blames the shooting on postpartum psychosis. That’s right, the baby blues.

Burnett: “Jim, I mean, obviously, her involvement is a game changer in how enforcement, law enforcement will look at this. But I just have to ask you, could there be something else, anything else that could have explained her involvement? Something like a postpartum psychosis?”

[…]

MOTIVES OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER ARE MANY, BUT CONSISTENT

All of this begs the question: “WHY?” If these events are really government sponsored hoaxes, then they ought to be scripted. If they are scripted, why does the script change so much? One would think the identities and motives of the assailants should remain constant, the way they did during 9/11.

However, the real target is all of us. Rotating through all of the motive possibilities means you can spend time demonizing nearly every demographic or range of thought not fitting the state’s mold. If they were ‘radicalized’, that label can apply to anybody who travels to a non-western country or just uses the Internet and visits a site that’s not government-approved. If they weren’t on the no-fly list, the government will feel justified in expanding that list to include almost everyone. They can easily change a no-fly list to a no-buy list. Not just suspected terrorists, but anybody who associates with suspected terrorists, or any idea considered radical. Even new mothers can’t be trusted.

While this purely constructed hoax is so artificial even the main stream media can’t keep it straight (possibly by design), what will not change is that more hoax shootings are coming. Mass Shootings have exploded like a cottage industry since Obama has taken office. Give it a month or so and it will be obvious that the staged shootings will not stop and that San Bernardino is Just Another C.I.A. False Flag.

December 22, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CNN, New York Times, Obama, United States | Leave a comment

Propaganda Can’t Melt Steel Beams

By Kevin Ryan | Dig Within | December 20, 2015

Eleven years ago, I initiated a discussion about the fact that jet fuel fires could not have melted steel at the World Trade Center. The government agency investigating the WTC destruction responded by holding “some of its deliberations in secret.” Although it’s not a secret that jet fuel can’t melt steel, due to propaganda from sources like The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, Americans often get confused about what facts like that mean to any national discussion. In a nutshell, what it means is that the molten metal found at the WTC, for which there is a great deal of evidence, cannot be explained by the official 9/11 myth.

No one thinks that jet fuel fires can melt steel beams—not even The Posts’ new science champion, who doesn’t bother to actually use jet fuel or steel beams to teach us about “retarded metallurgical things,” believes it. Instead, he uses a thin metal rod and a blacksmith forge to imply that, if the WTC buildings were made of thin metal rods and there were lots of blacksmith forges there, the thin metal rods would have lost strength and this would be the result. If you buy that as an explanation for what happened at the WTC, you might agree that all the “truthers” should just stop bothering everyone and go get jobs.

This absurd demonstration highlights at least two major problems with America’s ongoing struggle to understand 9/11. The first is that there was a great deal of molten metal at the WTC. Those who know that fact sometimes share internet memes that say “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” when they want to convey that “Thermite Melted Steel at the WTC.” The second major problem is that certain mainstream media sources continue to put a lot of energy into dis-informing the public about 9/11.

Sources like The Posts, The New York Times and some “alternative media” continue to work hard to support the official myth of 9/11. That effort is not easy because they must do so while providing as little actual information about 9/11 as possible. The dumbing down of the average citizen is a full time job for such propagandists. Luckily for them, American students receive almost no historical context that encourages them to think critically or consider ideas that conflict with blind allegiance to their government. When it comes to the WTC, it also helps that almost 80% of Americans are scientifically illiterate.

As media companies attempt to confuse the public about 9/11, they must avoid relating details that might actually get citizens interested in the subject. For example, it’s imperative that they never mention any of these fourteen facts about 9/11. It is also important to never reference certain people, like the ordnance distribution expert (and Iran-Contra suspect) who managed security at the WTC or the tortured top al Qaeda leader who turned out to have nothing to do with al Qaeda. In fact, to support the official myth of 9/11 these days, media must ignore almost every aspect of the crimes while promoting only the most mindless nonsense they can find. That bewildering strategy becomes more obvious every day.

December 20, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | 9/11, New York Times, United States, Washington Post | Leave a comment

A Blind Eye Toward Turkey’s Crimes

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 16, 2015

Theoretically, it would be a great story for the American press: an autocrat so obsessed with overthrowing the leader of a neighboring country that he authorizes his intelligence services to collaborate with terrorists in staging a lethal sarin attack to be blamed on his enemy and thus trick major powers to launch punishing bombing raids against the enemy’s military.

And, after that scheme failed to achieve the desired intervention, the autocrat continues to have his intelligence services aid terrorists inside the neighboring country by providing weapons and safe transit for truck convoys carrying the terrorists’ oil to market. The story gets juicier because the autocrat’s son allegedly shares in the oil profits.

To make the story even more compelling, an opposition leader braves the wrath of the autocrat by seeking to expose these intelligence schemes, including the cover-up of key evidence. The autocrat’s government then seeks to prosecute the critic for “treason.”

But the problem with this story, as far as the American government and press are concerned, is that the autocratic leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in charge of Turkey, a NATO ally and his hated neighbor is the much demonized Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Major U.S. news outlets and political leaders also bought into the sarin deception and simply can’t afford to admit that they once again misled the American people on a matter of war.

The Official Story of the sarin attack – as presented by Secretary of State John Kerry, Human Rights Watch and other “respectable” sources – firmly laid the blame for the Aug. 21, 2013 atrocity killing hundreds of civilians outside Damascus on Assad. That became a powerful “group think” across Official Washington.

Though a few independent media outlets, including Consortium News, challenged the rush to judgment and noted the lack of evidence regarding Assad’s guilt, those doubts were brushed aside. (In an article on Aug. 30, 2013, I described the administration’s “Government Assessment” blaming Assad as a “dodgy dossier,” which offered not a single piece of verifiable proof.)

However, as with the “certainty” about Iraq’s WMD a decade earlier, Every Important Person shared the Assad-did-it “group think.” That meant — as far as Official Washington was concerned — that Assad had crossed President Barack Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons. A massive U.S. retaliatory bombing strike was considered just days away.

But Obama – at the last minute – veered away from launching those military attacks, with Official Washington concluding that Obama had shown “weakness” by not following through. What was virtually unreported was that U.S. intelligence analysts had doubts about Assad’s guilt and suspected a trap being laid by extremists.

Despite those internal questions, the U.S. government and the compliant mainstream media publicly continued to push the Assad-did-it propaganda line. In a formal address to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, Obama declared, “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the regime carried out this attack.”

Later, a senior State Department official tried to steer me toward the Assad-is-guilty assessment of a British blogger then known as Moses Brown, a pseudonym for Eliot Higgins, who now runs an outfit called Bellingcat which follows an effective business model by reinforcing whatever the U.S. propaganda machine is churning out on a topic, except having greater credibility by posing as a “citizen blogger.” [For more on Higgins, see Consortiumnews.com’s “‘MH-17 Case: ‘Old Journalism’ vs. ‘New’.”]

The supposedly conclusive proof against Assad came in a “vector analysis” developed by Human Rights Watch and The New York Times – tracing the flight paths of two rockets back to a Syrian military base northwest of Damascus. But that analysis collapsed when it became clear that only one of the rockets carried sarin and its range was less than one-third the distance between the army base and the point of impact. That meant the rocket carrying the sarin appeared to have originated in rebel territory.

But the “group think” was resistant to all empirical evidence. It was so powerful that even when the Turkish plot was uncovered by legendary investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, his usual publication, The New Yorker, refused to print it. Rebuffed in the United States – the land of freedom of the press – Hersh had to take the story to the London Review of Books to get it out in April 2014. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Was Turkey Behind Syria Sarin Attack?”]

The Easier Route

It remained easier for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other premier news outlets to simply ignore the compelling tale of possible Turkish complicity in a serious war crime. After all, what would the American people think if – after the mainstream media had failed to protect the country against the lies that led to the disastrous Iraq War – the same star news sources had done something similar on Syria by failing to ask tough questions?

It’s also now obvious that if Obama had ordered a retaliatory bombing campaign against Assad in 2013, the likely winners would have been the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which would have had the path cleared for their conquest of Damascus, creating a humanitarian catastrophe even worse than the current one.

To confess to such incompetence or dishonesty clearly had a big down-side. So, the “smart” play was to simply let the old Assad-did-it narrative sit there as something that could still be cited obliquely from time to time under the phrase “Assad gassed his own people” and thus continue to justify the slogan: “Assad must go!”

But that imperative – not to admit another major mistake – means that the major U.S. news media also must ignore the courageous statements from Eren Erdem, a deputy of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), who has publicly accused the Erdogan government of blocking an investigation into Turkey’s role in procuring the sarin allegedly delivered to Al Qaeda-connected terrorists for use inside Syria.

In statements before parliament and to journalists, Erdem cited a derailed indictment that was begun by the General Prosecutor’s Office in the southern Turkish city of Adana, with the criminal case number 2013/120.

Erdem said the prosecutor’s office, using technical surveillance, discovered that an Al Qaeda jihadist named Hayyam Kasap acquired the sarin.

At the press conference, Erdem said, “Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism.”

Erdem said the released operatives were allowed to cross the border into Syria and the criminal investigation was halted.

Another CHP deputy, Ali Şeker, added that the Turkish government misled the public by claiming Russia provided the sarin and that “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a U.S. military intervention in Syria.”

Erdem’s disclosures, which he repeated in a recent interview with RT, the Russian network, prompted the Ankara Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation into Erdem for treason. Erdem defended himself, saying the government’s actions regarding the sarin case besmirched Turkey’s international reputation. He added that he also has been receiving death threats.

“The paramilitary organization Ottoman Hearths is sharing my address [on Twitter] and plans a raid [on my house]. I am being targeted with death threats because I am patriotically opposed to something that tramples on my country’s prestige,” Erdem said.

ISIS Oil Smuggling

Meanwhile, President Erdogan faces growing allegations that he tolerated the Islamic State’s lucrative smuggling of oil from wells in Syria through border crossings in Turkey. Those oil convoys were bombed only last month when Russian President Vladimir Putin essentially shamed President Obama into taking action against this important source of Islamic State revenues.

Though Obama began his bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria in summer 2014, the illicit oil smuggling was spared interdiction for over a year as the U.S. government sought cooperation from Erdogan, who recently acknowledged that the Islamic State and other jihadist groups are using nearly 100 kilometers of Turkey’s border to bring in recruits and supplies.

Earlier this month, Obama said he has had “repeated conversations with President Erdogan about the need to close the border between Turkey and Syria,” adding that “there’s about 98 kilometers that are still used as a transit point for foreign fighters, ISIL [Islamic State] shipping out fuel for sale that helps finance their terrorist activities.”

Russian officials expressed shock that the Islamic State was allowed to continue operating an industrial-style delivery system involving hundreds of trucks carrying oil into Turkey. Moscow also accused Erdogan’s 34-year-old son, Bilal Erdogan, of profiting off the Islamic State’s oil trade, an allegation that he denied.

The Russians say Bilal Erdogan is one of three partners in the BMZ Group, a Turkish oil and shipping company that has purchased oil from the Islamic State. The Malta Independent reported that BMZ purchased two oil tanker ships from the Malta-based Oil Transportation & Shipping Services Co Ltd, which is owned by Azerbaijani billionaire Mubariz Mansimov.

Another three oil tankers purchased by BMZ were acquired from Palmali Shipping and Transportation Agency, which is also owned by Mansimov and which shares the same Istanbul address with Oil Transportation & Shipping Services, which is owned by Mansimov’s Palmali Group, along with dozens of other companies set up in Malta.

The Russians further assert that Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian Su-24 bomber along the Syrian-Turkish border on Nov. 24 – which led to the murder of the pilot, by Turkish-backed rebels, as he parachuted to the ground and to the death of a Russian marine on a rescue operation – was motivated by Erdogan’s fury over the destruction of his son’s Islamic State oil operation.

Erdogan has denied that charge, claiming the shoot-down was simply a case of defending Turkish territory, although, according to the Turkish account, the Russian plane strayed over a slice of Turkish territory for only 17 seconds. The Russians dispute even that, calling the attack a premeditated ambush.

President Obama and the mainstream U.S. press sided with Turkey, displaying almost relish at the deaths of Russians in Syria and also showing no sympathy for the Russian victims of an earlier terrorist bombing of a tourist flight over Sinai in Egypt. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama Ignores Russian Terror Victims.”]

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman expressed the prevailing attitude of Official Washington by ridiculing anyone who had praised Putin’s military intervention in Syria or who thought the Russian president was “crazy like a fox,” Friedman wrote: “Some of us thought he was just crazy.

“Well, two months later, let’s do the math: So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted in a Russian civilian airliner carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai. Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it strayed into Turkish territory. And then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots as he parachuted to earth and one of the Russian marines sent to rescue him.”

Taking Sides

The smug contempt that the mainstream U.S. media routinely shows toward anything involving Russia or Putin may help explain the cavalier disinterest in NATO member Turkey’s reckless behavior. Though Turkey’s willful shoot-down of a Russian plane that was not threatening Turkey could have precipitated a nuclear showdown between Russia and NATO, criticism of Erdogan was muted at most.

Similarly, neither the Obama administration nor the mainstream media wants to address the overwhelming evidence that Turkey – along with other U.S. “allies” such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have been aiding and abetting Sunni jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State, for years. Instead, Official Washington plays along with the fiction that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others are getting serious about combating terrorism.

The contrary reality is occasionally blurted out by a U.S. official or revealed when a U.S. intelligence report gets leaked or declassified. For instance, in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted in a confidential diplomatic memo, disclosed by Wikileaks, that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

According to a Defense Intelligence Agency report from August 2012, “AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into the Islamic State] supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media. … AQI declared its opposition of Assad’s government because it considered it a sectarian regime targeting Sunnis.”

The DIA report added, “The salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria. … The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition.”

The DIA analysts already understood the risks that AQI presented both to Syria and Iraq. The report included a stark warning about the expansion of AQI, which was changing into the Islamic State. The brutal armed movement was seeing its ranks swelled by the arrival of global jihadists rallying to the black banner of Sunni militancy, intolerant of both Westerners and “heretics” from Shiite and other non-Sunni branches of Islam.

The goal was to establish a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” where Islamic State’s caliphate is now located, and that this is “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition” – i.e. the West, Gulf states, and Turkey – “want in order to isolate the Syrian regime,” the DIA report said.

In October 2014, Vice President Joe Biden told students at Harvard’s Kennedy School that “the Saudis, the emirates, etc. … were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda.”

Despite these occasional bursts of honesty, the U.S. government and the mainstream media have put their goal of having another “regime change” – this time in Syria – and their contempt for Putin ahead of any meaningful cooperation toward defeating the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

This ordering of priorities further means there is no practical reason to revisit who was responsible for the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack. If Assad’s government was innocent and Ergogan’s government shared in the guilt, that would present a problem for NATO, which would have to decide if Turkey had crossed a “red line” and deserved being expelled from the military alliance.

But perhaps even more so, an admission that the U.S. government and the U.S. news media had rushed to another incorrect judgment in the Middle East – and that another war policy was driven by propaganda rather than facts – could destroy what trust the American people have left in those institutions. On a personal level, it might mean that the pundits and the politicians who were wrong about Iraq’s WMD would have to acknowledge that they had learned nothing from that disaster.

It might even renew calls for some of them – the likes of The New York Times’ Friedman and The Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt – to finally be held accountable for consistently misinforming and misleading the American people.

So, at least for now — from a perspective of self-interest — it makes more sense for the Obama administration and major news outlets to ignore the developing story of a NATO ally’s ties to terrorism, including an alleged connection to a grave war crime, the sarin attack outside Damascus.

December 16, 2015 Posted by aletho | Corruption, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Bellingcat, Erdogan, Human Rights Watch, ISIL, John Kerry, Middle East, New York Times, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, The New Yorker, Thomas Friedman, Turkey, United States | Leave a comment

In an Appalling Act of Hypocrisy, NY Times Promotes Settlers as Peace Builders

By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | December 15, 2015

Gush Etzion Junction was a peaceful corner of the West Bank, according to The New York Times, until Palestinians ruined it with a series of attacks in the latest uprising. Such is the message in Isabel Kershner’s most recent attempt to whitewash Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

Readers are never reminded of the fact that Gush Etzion is an illegal Jewish-only settlement block located in the heart of the West Bank. Nor are they told that its presence means the loss of thousands of acres of land once vital to the livelihood of the indigenous Palestinians, the confiscation of water resources and a choking system of military checkpoints.

In her story today, Isabel Kershner makes no attempt to discern what Gush Etzion means to Palestinians, although it sprawls over a large tract of their heartland, on their confiscated hills and fields. She provides Gush Etzion’s Jewish history but says nothing of the Palestinian experience, and while listing recent attacks on Jews, she makes no mention of Palestinian injuries and deaths, which far exceed those of Israelis.

Her one attempt to provide a motive for Palestinian attacks is ludicrous: The junction has become a target because it is a “hub of coexistence.” Nothing is said about the crushing effects of the occupation, trigger-happy Israeli troops, the continuing confiscation of Palestinian land and the loss of hope.

She writes: “Jewish settler leaders have promoted the slightly shabby complex as a symbol of peaceful coexistence and evidence that Israelis and Palestinians can share the hotly contested territory.”

In other words, the settlers have the best of intentions. After stealing Palestinian land and water to build Jewish-only colonies, they insist that they want only to be good neighbors.

Kershner also makes a feeble effort to provide “balance,” bringing out her stock phrases to defend Israel’s crimes: “The Palestinians and much of the world consider all settlements in the territories seized in 1967 as illegal and an obstacle to establishing a Palestinian state.”

Much of the world. This is a duplicitous way to put it. In fact, the entire world opposes the settlements, even Israeli’s staunchest ally, the United States.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year announced a huge land grab from Palestinian villages surrounding Gush Etzion, the world rushed to condemn the act. This is important context in any discussion of the block, but no mention of it appears in Kershner’s story.

Other factors undermine her claim of peaceful coexistence and good intentions from settler leaders. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights monitoring group, has frequently charged that the Gush Etzion police station is notorious for torturing Palestinian teens in order to extract confessions. It has released reports over several years pointing to significant abuses in the heart of the settlement block.

Kershner makes much of the presence of Palestinian employees at Gush Etzion Junction and manages to quote one of them—at the end of her story—thus suggesting that it is a welcoming place, open and tolerant. The backstory, however, is more revealing. It can be found in this paragraph from The Economist, written after Netanyahu’s land grab announcement last year:

“Encircled by Mr Netanyahu’s latest appropriation, Palestinian residents of the bucolic village of Wadi Fukin have already lost all but 450 of the 3,000 acres they once had, and stand to lose more. The hillsides where the village’s 600 sheep and goats graze are set to go. Unable to farm, many men find work as builders, often on Jewish settlements nearby. They may yet be called upon to build homes for Israelis on land they regard as their own.”

Wadi Fukin is one of the villages destined to lose under the latest expansion of Gush Etzion. Its tragic tale and that of many others are entirely missing from the story in the Times today. In such a context-free effort, Kershner makes her claims of tolerant settlers and a peaceful oasis, and the result is an appalling act of hypocrisy and spin.

Follow @TimesWarp on Twitter.

December 15, 2015 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Gush Etzion, Isabel Kershner, Israeli settlement, New York Times, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism | Leave a comment

Extend draft registration to women — or end it?

By Edward Hasbrouck | The Practical Nomad | December 11, 2015

Congress will soon have to choose whether to amend the Military Selective Service Act to extend draft registration to women, to end all draft registration, or to allow registration to end by court order.

When the Supreme Court upheld the current males-only draft registration in 1981, it based its decision on the ineligibility of women, at that time, for combat assignments, and on the “deference” of the courts to Congress and the President in such military matters. The factual predicate to that decision has now changed, with the announcement last week that women in the military will be eligible for all combat jobs.

On Tuesday of this week, by scheduling coincidence, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument (which had been scheduled for that date months earlier) in one of several lawsuits challenging the Constitutionality of males-only draft registration that were filed two years ago when the military first began opening combat assignments to women.

From watching the oral argument, it seems likely that the Court of Appeals will send this case back to the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for consideration of whether males-only draft registration is still Constitutional.

The complaint was dismissed by the a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles who found that (1) the controversy was not yet “ripe” for decision and (2) the plaintiff’s lacked standing to complain.

On “ripeness”, it seems clear from the oral argument that the 9th Circuit judges think that if the case wasn’t ripe when it was dismissed in 2013, it is now in light of the latest changes to military policy. There would be no point to upholding the dismissal of the original complaint, when an identical new complaint could immediately be refiled, and would be ripe for decision.

On standing, the issue is that none of the plaintiffs in this case are men who can claim that they are being harmed because they didn’t register. There are a named plaintiff, who says he registered, and an organizational plaintiff. But the plaintiffs argued that they have as much basis to claim standing as the plaintiffs in the case the Supreme Court decided in 1981, who were similarly situated. In addition, plaintiffs’ counsel argued very persuasively that the continuing obligation to provide notice of address changes is a continuing harm that gives registrants continuing standing to challenge that registration requirement.

If I’ve read the tea leaves correctly, this means that in a matter of weeks or months — probably before but possibly not until after the November elections — the 9th Circuit will overturn the dismissal of the complaint, and remand this case to the U.S. District Court. The next step after that would be a status conference in Los Angeles to schedule further proceedings (discovery, briefing, etc.) on the merits of the reinstated complaint.

Some other lawsuit might make it to a decision sooner. But once a court looks at one of these cases on the merits, the outcome seems a foregone conclusion, as the Pentagon’s own analysis released last week suggests. It’s highly likely that a court ruling in this or another case will, sooner rather than later, force Congress to choose whether to extend draft registration to women, or to let a court decision ending registration stand.

Under current law, courts can’t order women to register. So if a Federal court finds that males-only registration is illegally discriminatory, registration will have to end unless Congress amends the law to extend the registration requirement to women.

Last Sunday, the New York Times dismissed this issue, editorializing that Congress could “easily” change the law to require young women, as well as young men, to register.

But it’s not so simple as all that. It won’t be enough just to change the law. Draft registration is not self-implementing. Extending registration to women will also require getting women to comply with the law, and enforcing the law if women don’t comply voluntarily.

Thirty-five years of failure by the government to get young men to comply with the draft registration law, and the complete abandonment of any attempt to enforce that law more than 25 years ago, suggest that getting young women to register for a draft is likely to be much more difficult than the Times’ editorial board has realized.

As some of my readers know, although it’s not my most frequent topic in this blog, I spent most of the 1980s, starting just about the time I left the University of Chicago, as an organizer with the National Resistance Committee and an editor of its newspaper, Resistance News.

When draft registration was reinstated in 1980 after a five-year hiatus, our most optimistic prediction was that half a million men in the first age cohorts required to register might not sign up. A month after the initial mass registration period, the first independent analysis of registration data revealed that more than a million of these young men had not heeded the call to register. [“Million Snub Draft”, Boston Globe, August 27, 1980, page 1; the original banner headline in the Globe was apparently added in page makeup and is missing from the wire service versions and the fragment of the article in the Globe’s digital archive.]

Desperate to scare up enough registrations to “maintain the credibility of the system”, as one internal Justice Department memo put it, the government eventually decided to try to intimidate the mass of nonregistrants through “well-publicized prosecutions” of a few of those they considered the “most vocal” resisters. As one of twenty nonregistrants who were singled out for indictment in 1982-1986, I was convicted and spent four and a half months in a Federal Prison Camp in 1983-1984.

(I was prosecuted by Robert Mueller, then a junior Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston and later the Director of the FBI. My case was Mueller’s first high-profile trial, and my head was a significant early stepping stone in his political climb. Mueller’s boss, then U.S. Attorney and later Governor William F. Weld, also attended my trial — annoying my mother by sitting next to her — to observe Mueller’s performance in court.)

But despite convictions and prison sentences, these show trials backfired and were quickly abandoned. They called attention to the resistance to draft registration, made clear that there was safety in numbers, and showed that the government could prove the “willfulness” of only those nonregistrants who made public statements (which were essential to the cases against us in court) acknowledging that we knew we were supposed to register.

Nobody has been prosecuted for refusing to register since 1986. But the government has never been able to find a face-saving way to end registration and shut down the Selective Service System without admitting that its scare tactics failed, or dealing with the implications of young people’s insistence on making their own choices about which wars they are willing to fight.

Today, many young people register only because of laws that link draft registration to drivers licensing in some states, and to eligibility for student aid. The resistance by many states to implementing the Federal “REAL-ID Act” (which I discussed in this presentation at the Cato Institute earlier this year), and the repeated failures, including once again this year, of proposals to link drivers’ licenses to draft registration in the most populous state, California, suggest some of the limitations of this carrot-and-stick approach.

(Today, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, nonregistration is most concentrated among those poor young men of color who see little hope of going to college even with the limited available government aid, and especially among undocumented young men who are categorically ineligible for the government programs linked to draft registration, but who are still required to register.)

Many of the people who registered under these financial pressures would resist if actually drafted, and many of these nominal registrations have been effectively invalidated by unreported address changes, even though they are counted in Selective Service “compliance” statistics.

President Obama, who was in the first age group required to register, has said that he registered for the draft. But he hasn’t commented on whether he informed the Selective Service System every time he changed addresses until his 26th birthday, as is required by the law and as is essential for registration records to be of any use in the event of a draft. Few people did so in the 1980s, or do so now. The only audit of Selective Service address records, in 1982, found that 20-40% of the addresses on file with the SSS for registrants in the age groups that would be drafted first were already outdated, and up to 75% for those registrants in their last year of potential eligibility to be drafted.

Many, perhaps most, induction notices sent to current registrants would wind up in the dead-letter office. Without being able to prove that anyone knew they were supposed to tell the Selective Service System when they moved, it’s impossible to enforce the change-of-address notification requirement.

Is there any reason to think that young women would be more willing to sign up to be drafted than young men have been? I doubt it. When President Carter announced his proposal to reinstate draft registration in his State of the Union address in 1980, some of the strongest initial grassroots opposition came from women. Many women remained active in the resistance even after the bill approved by Congress was narrowed to require only men to register, though the press tended to focus on male resisters.

Women have been among those health care workers most concerned about Selective Service preparations for for a draft of doctors, nurses, and many other medical professionals, which would include women but would be based on professional licensing lists rather than on self-registration of potential draftees.

Women share many of men’s reasons not to register, and have other reasons of their own. There are both feminist and sexist arguments against subjecting women to the draft and draft registration.

Are the government’s arguments for why young women (or men) should register for the draft, and promise to fight for or against whomever they are told, any more persuasive today than ever? I don’t think so.

Draft registration was reinstated in 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to prepare for U.S. intervention in support of the fighters who were then called the “mujahideen” and who would later christen themselves the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That the U.S. government put me in prison for refusing to agree to fight on the side of the Taliban doesn’t say much for its judgment of which wars to intervene in, or on which side. Today, people of all ages and genders question why the U.S. is supporting the fundamentalist (and supremely sexist) monarchy in Saudi Arabia, or the dictatorship in Yemen, among others.

Congress should have no illusions. Extending draft registration to women will provoke at least as much resistance as did draft registration for men in 1980. It will force the government, once again, to choose whether to turn the country into a police state to round up all those who fail to register on demand, or to try (probably unsuccessfully) to terrorize them into compliance through show trials and incarceration of a few of the people seen as “leaders” of the resistance.

Regardless of whether Congress or the President think that young women “should” be ready to be drafted, the only realistic choice for Congress is not to extend draft registration to women, but to end it for all.

That’s not likely to be part of the terms of debate, however, unless opponents of draft resistance — including young women who won’t register voluntarily, and older people who support them — make it an issue.

In 1981, the decision of whether to continue — and whether to enforce — the draft registration program that had been reinstated during the Carter administration was a “wedge issue” that divided hawks from libertarians within the Reagan administration and its supporters.

One of my friends and colleagues in the National Resistance Committee, Alex Reyes, has written about how awareness of plans for demonstrations in support of draft registration resistance precipitated this internal debate, and of how close it came to ending draft registration.

Today, whether to extend draft registration to women or end it entirely is likely to be a similar wedge issue dividing Democrats, Republicans, and military personnel. Will sexist warmongers support subjecting young women to the draft, or depriving the military of its “Plan B” for manpower by ending draft registration entirely? Will supporters of President Obama, or of a future President Hillary Clinton, see subjecting women to the draft as a step towards gender equity, or a step towards more of the gendered violence of war? And if they see it as both, how will they vote?

But there’s more at stake than the opportunity for partisan politicians to embarrass their opponents, and it will be up to draft registration resisters and supporters to make that point.

Draft registration of men has been a fiasco for the government since its resumption in 1980. The likelihood and imminence of a court ruling that males-only draft registration is now unconstitutional provides the perfect opportunity for Congress to end draft registration entirely.

December 14, 2015 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Militarism | al-Qaeda, Human rights, New York Times, Robert Mueller, United States | Leave a comment

Friedman Goes After Trump: Hey, Massive Bombing Was MY Idea!

Thomas Friedman doesn’t like threats of massive bombing when they’re made by someone else

By Jim Naureckas | FAIR | December 9, 2015

Thomas Friedman has some harsh words in his New York Times column (12/9/15) for Donald Trump and his unsophisticated grasp of the complexities of foreign policy:

As for Trump, well, he may be a deal maker, but he’s no poker player ready for the Middle East five-card stud sharks. His xenophobic rhetoric and unrealistic, infantile threats of massive bombing make up the kind of simplistic hand you’d play in “Go Fish” — not in this high-stakes game.

Where could Trump have gotten the idea that his “infantile threats of massive bombing” would be taken seriously as foreign policy proposals? Well, as a resident of New York City, maybe he reads the New York Times:

There is only Option 2 — bombing Iraq, over and over and over again, until either Saddam says uncle, and agrees to let the UN back in on US terms, or the Iraqi people eliminate him…. Given the problems with the other options, we may have no choice but to go down this road. Once we do, however, we better have the stomach to stay the course.

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 1/31/98)

Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.”

–Friedman (New York Times, 1/19/99)

Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted….

Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 4/23/99) on Serbia

People tend to change their minds and adjust their goals as they see the price they are paying mount. Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around. Let’s see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance.

–Thomasa Friedman (New York Times, 4/6/99)

My motto is very simple: Give war a chance.

–Thomas Friedman (ABC News, 10/29/01) on Afghanistan

Let’s all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war a chance. This is Afghanistan we’re talking about.

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 11/2/01)

I was a critic of [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld before, but there’s one thing… that I do like about Rumsfeld. He’s just a little bit crazy, OK? He’s just a little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us, and I’m glad we got some guy on our bench that our quarterback — who’s just a little bit crazy, not totally, but you never know what that guy’s going to do, and I say that’s my guy.”

–Thomas Friedman (CNBC, 10/13/01)

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.

–Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 2/13/02)

We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick… and there was only one way to do it…. What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well: Suck. On. This.” That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

–Thomas Friedman (Charlie Rose, 5/30/03)

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its air force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians–the families and employers of the militants–to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (1/13/09) on why Israel needed to kill civilians in Gaza

December 11, 2015 Posted by aletho | Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Iraq, Israel, New York Times, Thomas Friedman, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

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Wartime internment camps in Australia

National Archives of Australia

World War I

During World War I, for security reasons the Australian Government pursued a comprehensive internment policy against enemy aliens living in Australia.

Initially only those born in countries at war with Australia were classed as enemy aliens, but later this was expanded to include people of enemy nations who were naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants of migrants born in enemy nations and others who were thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security.

Australia interned almost 7,000 people during World War I, of whom about 4,500 were enemy aliens and British nationals of German ancestry already resident in Australia.

Records of World War I internment camps

World War II

During World War II, Australian authorities established internment camps for three reasons – to prevent residents from assisting Australia’s enemies, to appease public opinion and to house overseas internees sent to Australia for the duration of the war.

Unlike World War I, the initial aim of internment during the later conflict was to identify and intern those who posed a particular threat to the safety or defence of the country. As the war progressed, however, this policy changed and Japanese residents were interned en masse. In the later years of the war, Germans and Italians were also interned on the basis of nationality, particularly those living in the north of Australia. In all, just over 20 per cent of all Italians resident in Australia were interned. … continue

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