1917 LEYBA DAVIDOVICH TROTSKY
PROVIDING INFORMATION NOT FOUND IN THE CONTROLLED MEDIA,
MONITORING THE AGE OF DARKNESS, IGNORANCE, GREED AND STUPIDITY,
& THE ZIONIST WAR FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE.
SETTING STRAIGHT THE RECORDS OF HISTORY
QOUTES FOR A PROPER UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY AND THE NEED TO FIGHT ZIONISM
1917 LEYBA DAVIDOVICH TROTSKY
BY MEANS OF TERROR - Leyba Davidovich Trotsky, whose real name was David Bronstein, said:
"We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny
such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny,
not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.
"We mean the word 'red' literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses
suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in
the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the
power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution's funeral, and we shall became a power
before which the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is.
By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to
a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence...
At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers
from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian!
What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia - officers, academics and writers!..."
Taken from the "Memoirs" of Aron Simanovich, a jeweller at the court of the Tsar's Imperial Majesty.
1946 MENACHEM BEGIN
''Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects.
In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement.
Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron.
The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves."
Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983), excerpt from LEHI (the terrorist Stern Gang) training pamphlet, circa 1946, shortly before the organization began a series of murders of unarmed opponents of the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel.
1952 RABBI RABBINOVICH
The goal for which we have striven so concertedly for three thousand years, is at last within our reach and because its fulfillment is so apparent,
it behooves us to increase our efforts and our caution tenfold.
I can safely promise you that before ten years have passed, our race will take its rightful place in the world, with every Jew a king and every Gentile a slave. (Applause from the gathering).
Rabbi Rabbinovitch at a special meeting of the emergency council of European Rabbis in Budapest on January 12th 1952
1961 JOHN F.KENNEDY
"For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence; in infiltration instead of invasion; on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice; on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.
It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined, its dissenters are silenced, not praised; no expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed ....."
The President and the Press: Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association
President John F. Kennedy, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, April 27, 1961.
2005 RABBI YITZHAK GINZBERG
“A Jew is entitled to extract a liver from a goy, if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy.” (goy = non-jew).
2005 RICHARD LYNN
"I've checked out the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War and the statement is quite correct : not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; Churchill's Second World War totals 4,448 pages; and De Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.
In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war."
Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus University of Ulster, December 5, 2005
KALI YUGA REPORT 110619
1 - Libya by the Numbers : War for the Profit of the Usual Suspects
2 - Italy's Interior Ministry Calls For Italy to Withdraw from NATO Libya Operation
3 - NATO Incorporates Libyan Experience For Global War Template - Rick Rozoff
4 - Why the NATO powers are trying to assassinate Moammar Gaddafi, Protecting civilians or western oil companies ? - Brian Becker
5 - Why Regime Change in Libya ? - Ismael Hossein-zadeh
6 - US talks peace and prepares for war in Sudan - Susan Garth
7 - Egyptians warn of Zionist designs to balkanize Libya - Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
8 - America's Next War Theater : Syria and Lebanon ? Washington's War against the Resistance Bloc - Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya .
9 - Jews & Their Self Interest-An Interview with Philip Weiss - Gilad Atzmon,
10 - The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War - Michel Chossudovsky
11 - Everything We're Doing Now Was Planned BEFORE 9/11
12 - Life expectancy declining in many parts of US - Patrick Martin,
13 - PHIL GIRALDI EX-CIA : DESTROYING THE USA FOR ISRAEL & OTHER VIDEOS,
14 - IDF-Soldier gets 6 months community service for raping 10 year-old cousin over 3 year
15 - Lebanon’s Sarah Palin Meets Captain America, Peter King and Brigitte Gabriel (aka Hanan), Xenophobic Dynamic Duo Defeat Freedom - Franklin Lamb
16 - Should Americans Focus More on our Enemies at Home, Ex-CIA Phil Giraldi…The Proper Place for Americans - Jim W. Dean
17 - FBI Expands Surveillance Powers Targeting Activists - Washington's Blog
18 - Psychological Warfare and the New World Order : The Secret War Against the American People,
19 - A Walk on the Dark Side of Israeli-Dominated American Politics - James Wall
20 - U.S.Mayors Urge Washington's Federal Mafia to End Wars for Profit and Instead Invest in US Infrastructure - Johnny Punish
21 - Truth Telling Transfer Agreement Exposes Hitler as Founding Father of Israel - Johnny Punish
22 - Jews Zionism and the Stupidity of Bigotry - Eric L. Wattree
23 - ZIONISTS Financed Hitler’s Regime and Condemned Jews to the Holocaust
24 - Transparent Cabal Rejected for Anti-AIPAC Conference - Stephen Sniegoski,
25 - What’s the Difference Between Zionism and Racism ? - Eric L. Wattree,
26 - All The Proof In The World : HAARP Is Wrecking Havoc Worldwide - Pakalert
27 - Doomsday Ice Age Fears Fuel US-China Land Grabs In South America, Africa - Pakalert
28 - The Prop-Masters - Michael A. Hoffman II
All articles are reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and are for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. The material presented underneath does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the editor. Then : everybody should do research of his own and check for deception or some 'agenda'. As always it is : 'Caveat Lector'!
Thanks to : Debbie Menon (http://mycatbirdseat.com/,http://www.intifada-palestine.com), Alex James, Vatic Project (http://vaticproject.blogspot.com) , "Information Clearing House'', Antiwar.com , DAILY CENSORED, VETERANS TODAY, REDRESS INFORMATION & ANALYSIS, PAK ALERT PRESS, INTIFADA PALESTINA, Global Research, Electronic Intifada, Sabbah Report, RADIO ISLAM, Haze Mac ET AL.
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1 - Libya by the Numbers : War for the Profit of the Usual Suspects
Posted: 2011/06/18
From: Source
Libya: Connect the Dots - You Get a Giant Dollar Sign. Photo: Happier times recently, Colonel Gaddafi with "best friend" Berlusconi, Italy's corrupt billionaire president, now bombing Libya
THE FAKE ARAB SPRING: Connect the dots, and you will see that the evidence points to a plan to create an “Arab Spring” for the Good Old Boys—CIA, banks, oil companies. Read and see if you don’t agree.
by Russ Baker
More pieces are falling into place. Those pieces have names of your favorite players: oil companies, banks like Goldman Sachs, and they paint a picture of endless corporate intrigue. The sort that never seems to come out in the corporate media.
Let’s go for a ride.
This February, several days after Hosni Mubarak resigned in Egypt, civil protest began in neighboring Libya. Quickly, Muammar Qaddafi’s Justice Minister turned against him and became a rebel leader. And, he made the dramatic claim that his ex-boss was the culprit behind the bombing of Pan Am 103:
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ordered the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a former Libyan cabinet minister was quoted as saying by a Swedish newspaper on Wednesday.
Former Justice Minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, reported to have resigned this week over the violence used by the government against protesters, told the tabloid Expressen he had evidence Gaddafi ordered the bombing that killed 270 people.
“I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order for (the) Lockerbie (bombing),” Expressen quoted Al Jeleil as saying in an interview at an undisclosed large town in Libya.
The newspaper did not say what the evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the bombing was.
A Libyan, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was tried and jailed in Scotland for the bombing, and Gaddafi, in power since 1969, was branded an international pariah for years.
In 2009, the Scottish government freed al-Megrahi on humanitarian grounds after doctors said he had terminal prostate cancer, a decision strongly criticized by the United States. He returned to Libya and is still alive.
“In order to conceal it (his role in ordering the bombing), he did everything in his power to get Megrahi back from Scotland,” al Jeleil was quoted as saying.
“He (Gaddafi) ordered Megrahi to do it.”
This story made it into major news media throughout the world, without anyone stopping to raise questions about the propaganda benefit of the statement, or of the timing. For example, the UK paper, The Telegraph, interviewed Jeleil/Jalil:
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of the provisional rebel government in Benghazi and Libya’s former justice minister, said he had evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
“The orders were given by Gaddafi himself,” he told Rob Crilly.
Mr Abel Jalil claimed he had evidence that convicted bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi worked for Gaddafi.
“This evidence is in our hands and we have documents that prove what I have said and we are ready to hand them over to the international criminal court,” he added.
Since then, I haven’t seen any sign that Jalil’s evidence has been shown to anyone. So we don’t know that it actually exists, or that he was telling the truth. But the original headlines did the trick—anyone watching television or reading stories then would have been led to believe that Qaddafi was behind this dastardly deed.
A couple of days later, for the first time, President Obama called for Qaddafi to step down. And not long thereafter, the US, UK and their allies were getting ready to pitch military action against Qaddafi, originally characterized as solely humanitarian, “to protect civilians.” (Eventually, the top British military figure would indiscreetly admit that the relentless bombing was intended to remove the Libyan leader.)
We’ll get back to the propaganda machine and its effectiveness later, but let’s now examine the relationship between the Western governments and Qaddafi. Was it, as presented in the media, merely a case of doing the right thing against a brutal tyrant? One also accused of being behind the murder of those airline passengers?
**
This is not the place to recount the entire back history between Qaddafi and the alliance. Suffice to say that Qaddafi is one of a long string of foreign leaders who insisted on an independent course, including requisite regional bigfooting, and got in trouble. Specifically, we could look at some skirmishes with the US Navy during the Reagan-Bush administration, but there’s a long list of grievances. This, as in the case of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, is compounded by the fact that he sits on massive oil reserves.
As animosity grew, Libya started being labeled a terrorist force, possibly with some truth, and then connected to a series of major outrages with which it may or may not have had anything to do.
One was the death of several US soldiers in a Berlin nightclub in 1986, and another the alleged sponsorship of a hijacking that same year. But the thing that turned much of the world against Qaddafi was the alleged role of Libya in blowing Pan Am 103 apart.
Most of us probably remember, vaguely, that Libya’s role in that is an established fact. If so, we’re off base. Let’s start with this 2001 BBC report, following the conviction of Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer:
Robert Black, the Scottish law professor who devised the format of the Netherlands-based trial, was quoted on Sunday as saying he was “absolutely astounded” that Al Megrahi had been found guilty.
Mr Black said he believed the prosecution had “a very, very weak circumstantial case” and he was reluctant to believe that Scottish judges would “convict anyone, even a Libyan” on such evidence.
The view, published in British newspapers, echoes that of some of the families of UK victims of the Lockerbie bombing, who are calling for a public inquiry to find “the truth of who was responsible and what the motive was”.
Protests
Wednesday’s verdict sparked angry protests in Libya on Saturday, as Washington and London demanded the Libyan Government accept responsibility for the atrocity and pay compensation to the victims’ families.
The protesters condemned what they called a “CIA-dictated” verdict and demanded compensation for the victims of the 1986 US air raids on Tripoli and Benghazi.
For more on doubts about Libya’s role in the bombing, see the excellent summary of powerful evidence that the Libyans may have been framed, evidence not presented at trial, onWikipedia. (While Wikipedia should not be considered a definitive source, it is often a good roundup of what may be found elsewhere and thus a starting point for further inquiry.) The troubling elements, which constitute a very long list, include an alleged offer from the FBI of $4 million for certain incriminating testimony, the subsequent admission by a key witness that he had lied, details of strange goings-on in the FBI’s crime lab, and indications that the bomb may have been introduced at an airport where the defendant was not present.
Nevertheless, Megrahi’s conviction, and the media’s dutiful reporting of it as justice done, meant that Libya, and Qaddafi, would continue under sanctions that had already isolated the country for a decade from the international community.
Qaddafi had sought to undo the cordon, including handing Megrahi over for trial in 1999. But that had not done the trick, and the January 31, 2001 conviction, coming 11 days after the inauguration of George W. Bush, threatened to make things worse—much worse. Qaddafi particularly had to worry about how it might impact his own survival.
By May 2002, with US troops in Afghanistan having ousted the Taliban and four months after Bush listed Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Syria as part of an “axis of evil” seeking “weapons of mass destruction”, Libya was feeling the heat. That month, it offered staggered payments to the Lockerbie victims’ families, as part of a trade for the cancellation of UN and US trade sanctions, and removal of Libya from the State Department’s list of states sponsoring terrorism. By August, 2003, several months after the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi cut a deal, as reported in the New York Times:
Libya and lawyers for families of the victims of the 1988 midair bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, signed an agreement today to create an account for $2.7 billion in expected compensation, a lawyer said.
”Libya and the lawyers representing families of the victims have signed an agreement to create the escrow account at the Bank for International Settlements,” said the lawyer, Saad Djebbar, an Algerian living in London who has followed the case since 1992.
As a result, he said United Nations sanctions might be lifted.
With the agreement, Libya is expected to deposit the money in the account and to send the United Nations Security Council a letter accepting responsibility for the bombing, in which 270 people died.
In Washington, family members said today that the State Department had invited the victims’ families to a briefing on Friday.
It was a package deal, with many tentative aspects. Libya told the UN it “accepted responsibility” in the bombing—though, notably, it did not admit guilt. [Mathaba Editor: not true. Libya "accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials" and allowed the Anglo-American media to twist that into what even this researcher has falsely ascribed]. Indeed, as late as 2008, Qaddafi’s son Saif told a BBC documentary crew that the only reason Libya “admitted responsibility” [Mathaba: for the actions of its officials] was to get the sanctions removed. The documentary noted that several victims’ families had declined compensation because they felt Libya had not actually been behind the bombing.
The 2003 deal was enough, however, to begin welcoming Libya back into the family of nations. The Bush administration moved quickly to begin trade with Libya. By December, 2003, Libya had agreed to give up whatever WMD programs it purportedly had in return for the US lifting sanctions.
This heartened not only Libya, but also major Western companies, which had been champing at the bit for years to get a piece of Libya’s assets, including its vast oil reserves and the income they generated.
The inexorable trade machine kept grinding along. Within a few weeks, Bush signed an executive order restoring Libyan immunity from terror lawsuits and ended pending US compensation cases.
In 2007, strongly encouraged by the UK oil company BP, Britain began pushing for a transfer of Megrahi back to prison in Libya, resulting in a series of events that concluded with his 2009 release from incarceration—on purported medical grounds. (New information on BP’s role has come out recently, with Hillary Clinton and key US senators expressing outrage and declaring their intent to investigate–see here. No mention by the Dems of the doubts about his guilt, just indignation that a “murderer” had been freed.)
In 2009, the same year Megrahi was released, Qaddafi, faced with stiff ongoing Lockerbie payments, began pressing oil companies to pay more to help cover his debt.
We learned of the pressure on the oil companies during the recent propaganda effort to build support for military action against Qaddafi. In a New York Times article headlined “Shady Dealings Helped Qaddafi Build Fortune and Regime”—the crux of which was Qaddafi’s shadiness (though not necessarily that of the oil companies)—was this gem of an item. It was easily missed and as easily misconstrued:
In 2009, top aides to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called together 15 executives from global energy companies operating in Libya’s oil fields and issued an extraordinary demand: Shell out the money for his country’s $1.5 billion bill for its role in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 and other terrorist attacks.
If the companies did not comply, the Libyan officials warned, there would be “serious consequences” for their oil leases, according to a State Department summary of the meeting.
Now why would Qaddafi be desperate for cash? The article didn’t say. But if I’m connecting dots correctly, I’d say that you have to read another paper, then link the two.
Here’s the Wall Street Journal with an exclusive from May 31 that is hugely important but has thus far been seen in isolation, unconnected to the oil demand above. I recommend reading the lengthy excerpt that follows:
In early 2008, Libya’s sovereign-wealth fund controlled by Col. Moammar Gadhafi gave $1.3 billion to Goldman Sachs Group to sink into a currency bet and other complicated trades. The investments lost 98% of their value, internal Goldman documents show.
…In 2004, the U.S. government had lifted an earlier set of sanctions…That opened the door for dozens of U.S. and European banks, hedge funds and other investment firms to pile into the North African nation.
The Libyan Investment Authority set up shop on the 22nd floor of what was then Tripoli’s tallest building and launched in June 2007 with about $40 billion in assets. Libya approached 25 financial institutions, offering each of them a chance to manage at least $150 million, recalls a person familiar with the fund’s plans.
Soon it was spreading chunks of the money to firms around the world. In addition to Goldman, those institutions included Société Générale SA, HSBC Holdings PLC, Carlyle Group, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Och-Ziff Capital Management Group and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., according to internal fund records reviewed by the Journal.
… “The country made a conscious decision to join the major leagues,” says Edwin Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former assistant Treasury secretary. Until then, the investment fund’s money was held in Libya’s central bank, earning ho-hum returns on high-quality bonds.
Goldman seized the opportunity. In May 2007, several Goldman partners met with the Libyans at Goldman’s London office. Mustafa Zarti, then the fund’s deputy chairman, and Hatem el-Gheriani, its chief investment officer, invited the Goldman partners to see the fund’s Libyan headquarters for themselves. Mr. Zarti was a close associate of one of Col. Gadhafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, and reported to a longtime friend of the Libyan ruler.
…Goldman soon carved out a new business with the Libyans, in options—investments that give buyers the right to purchase stocks, currencies or other assets on a future date at stipulated prices. Between January and June 2008, the Libyan fund paid $1.3 billion for options on a basket of currencies and on six stocks: Citigroup Inc., Italian bank UniCredit SpA, Spanish bank Banco Santander, German insurance giant Allianz, French energy company Électricité de France and Italian energy company Eni SpA. The fund stood to reap gains if prices of the underlying stocks or currencies rose above the stipulated levels.
But that fall, the credit crisis hit with a vengeance as Lehman Brothers failed and banks all over the world faced financial crises. The $1.3 billion of option investments were hit especially hard. The underlying securities plunged in value and all of the trades lost money, according to an internal Goldman memo reviewed by the Journal. The memo said the investments were worth just $25.1 million as of February 2010—a decline of 98%.
Officials at the sovereign-wealth fund accused Goldman of misrepresenting the investment deals and making trades without proper authorization, according to people familiar with the situation. In July 2008, Mr. Zarti, the fund’s deputy chairman, summoned Mr. Kabbaj, Goldman’s North Africa chief, to a meeting with the fund’s legal and compliance staff, according to Libyan Investment Authority emails reviewed by the Journal.
One person who attended the meeting says Mr. Zarti was “like a raging bull,” cursing and threatening Mr. Kabbaj and another Goldman employee.Goldman arranged for security to protect the employees until they left Libya the next day, according to people familiar with the matter.
…Following the showdown in Tripoli, the fund demanded restitution and issued vague threats of legal action.
The Journal goes on to describe Goldman’s response—which “audacious” doesn’t begin to describe. Goldman offered to make it all up to Libya by selling it a huge stake…in Goldman itself. That Journal piece is well worth reading, as is this essay from Rolling Stone, but a bit off our topic beyond the notion that Western companies loved rubbing this rube’s nose in it.
The point, at least to me, is that Libya had taken the advice of an American firm and invested, and lost, a huge amount of the funds that are supposed to generate profits used in governing Libya. Including providing the kinds of services that kept Libyans loyal to Qaddafi in the first place.
Is it any surprise that just as this banking disaster unfolded, Qaddafi in 2009 turned desperately to the Western oil companies, which were doing well by Libya, and wanted them to pay more royalties to fund the Lockerbie settlements? Settlements he perhaps should not have had to pay in the first place?
***
By December 2010, when a Tunisian man set himself on fire, the Arab Spring revolt was under way—in Egypt, Bahrain, and elsewhere. Pretty quickly, it was clear to everyone that the Western powers were in danger of losing crucial oil suppliers—and vital military bases.
It certainly was convenient that, right about that time, Libya showed signs of moving in the opposite direction—into the US camp. Read our piece here about the CIA ties to the Libyan uprising.
Then consider the timing of February’s ramped-up claim by the defecting Libyan official, that Qaddafi himself had ordered the Lockerbie bombing.
If that wasn’t enough in the propaganda department to get the global public worked up, next came the Libya rape story. The average person doesn’t have the time or appetite to follow the kinds of complex corporate maneuverings that fascinate us here, but they do understandably get upset about bombs on civilian aircraft and rape.
We wrote about that rape story back here. Our point, which still stands, is that it is highly unusual for rape victims and their families to come forward publicly. It is almost unheard of in Arab countries, where the consequences can be severe. (Update: the woman and her family are being relocated in the West¸ and she’s said she’d like to come to America.)
We noted the timing of the story, the alacrity with which the Western press grabbed it and spread it, and the simple fact that there’s no evidence tying Qaddafi in any way to any such act. Even the woman herself doesn’t claim that. Yet it infuriated untold millions and postings all over the Web show that it moved a lot of public opinion into the column supporting military action to remove the Libyan leader.
That the corporate media cannot see what is going on here, or refuses to see, tells us how far we have not come since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Still, we can hear the other shoe dropping if we listen carefully enough. For example, the website Politico ran a little item the other day on a powwow between Hillary Clinton and corporate executives over business opportunities in Iraq.
FIRST LOOK: WALL STREET IN IRAQ? – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Deputy Secretary Tom Nides (formerly chief administrative officer at Morgan Stanley) will host a group of corporate executives at State this morning as part of the Iraq Business Roundtable. Corporate executives from approximately 30 major U.S. companies – including financial firms Citigroup, JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs – will join U.S. and Iraqi officials to discuss economic opportunities in the new Iraq. Full list of corporate participants: http://politi.co/kOpyKA
Give it a couple of years, and they’ll be having the same party celebrating a more sympathetic regime in Libya.
http://www.mathaba.net/news/libya
Web sites and blogs DO NOT link to this print page,
the original article is at: http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=627168
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2 - Italy's Interior Ministry Calls For Italy to Withdraw from NATO Libya Operation
Posted: 2011/06/18
From: Mathaba
Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni last Wednesday called for Italy to pull out of the illegal NATO operation in Libya.
Italian news quoted Maroni as saying the government should stop spending money to bomb Libya, in a reference to Italy's participation in the illegal NATO aerial bombing of positions in Libya.
Libya has responded to the NATO violation of the No-Fly Zone by shooting down one air force jet and at least four helicopters.
Italians suffer from the negative impact of what's going on in Libya, Italy's interior minister said. Maroni, who belongs to the Northern League party said:
"I hope for an end to the war in Libya so that we can stop the immigration wave... otherwise the flow of immigrants towards the Italian coasts will continue."
Italian press quoted the minister, in remarks to the Italian Trade Union conference, as referring to a decision by the US congress which rejected funding the war on Libya, saying that Italy should follow suit and indeed the other European countries. Italy cannot continue to shoulder the burden of the illegal immigration tide on its own, he said.
France too is suffering from a large influx of immigrants because most of the french-speaking Africans fleeing to Italy don't want to stop in Italy but continue to France because of the language problems.
Once they are in Italy, due to the "Fortress Europe" concept of one big Europe with one visa, and a "strong fence" around it, they can simply cross over to France and other European countries without any hindrance.
The "strong fortress fence" of Europe is useless now that millions are fleeing the bombing in Libya and have to be allowed entry to Europe because of the NATO plan to destroy Libya and remove 98% of its population, so that only the 2% who do not love direct participatory democracy and the symbol of the Libyan revolution, Muammar Qaddafi, would remain.
The colonial powers plan to take over Libya's gold reserves, oil, and billions of liters of pure water, so that the western elite can survive the contamination of the food chain, poisoned by their nuclear blasts, Fukushima, chemical factories waste, and other disasters to come, whilst profiting from the sale of water at high prices for those who wish to have a chance to be cancer free.
The obstacle in the way of the globalist elite's plans is Muammar Qaddafi and the Libyan people, who do not believe in exploitative capitalism, with Libya's resources being shared across Africa, often free of charge, and without any profit.
http://www.mathaba.net/news/libya
Web sites and blogs DO NOT link to this print page,
the original article is at: http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=627167
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3 - NATO Incorporates Libyan Experience For Global War Template
By Rick Rozoff
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25314
Global Research, June 18, 2011
As the West’s war against Libya has entered its fourth month and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has flown more than 11,000 missions, including 4,300 strike sorties, over the small nation, the world’s only military bloc is already integrating lessons learned from the conflict into its international model of military intervention based on earlier wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
What NATO refers to as Operation Unified Protector has provided the Alliance the framework in which to continue recruiting Partnership for Peace adjuncts like Sweden and Malta, Istanbul Cooperation Initiative affiliates Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and Mediterranean Dialogue partnership members Jordan and Morocco into the bloc’s worldwide warfighting network. Sweden, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates also have military personnel assigned to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in the nearly ten-year-long war in Afghanistan. In the first case, troops from the Scandinavian nation has been engaged in their first combat role, killing and being killed, in two centuries in Afghanistan and has provided eight warplanes for the attack on Libya, with marine forces to soon follow.
The military conflicts waged and other interventions conducted by the United States and its NATO allies over the past twelve years – in and against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Macedonia, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Libya – have contributed to the American military budget more than doubling in the past decade and U.S. arms exports almost quintupling in the same period.
The Pentagon and NATO are currently concluding the Sea Breeze 2011 naval exercise in the Black Sea off the coast of Ukraine, near the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Sebastopol. Participants include the U.S., Britain, Azerbaijan, Algeria, Belgium, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Macedonia, Moldova, Sweden, Turkey and host nation Ukraine. All but Algeria and Moldova are Troop Contributing Nations for NATO's Afghan war. The once-annual maneuvers resumed again last year after the Ukrainian parliament banned them in 2009. This year's exercise was arranged on the initiative of chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen. Last year's Sea Breeze drills, the largest in the Black Sea, included 20 naval vessels, 13 aircraft and more than 1,600 military personnel from the U.S., Azerbaijan, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Moldova, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.
This year the guided missile cruiser USS Monterey joined the exercise. The warship is the first deployed to the Mediterranean, and now the Black, Sea for the Pentagon's Phased Adaptive Approach interceptor missile program, one which in upcoming years will include at least 40 Standard Missile-3 interceptors in Poland and Romania and on Aegis class destroyers and cruisers in the Mediterranean, Black and Baltic Seas. Upgraded versions of the missile, the Block IB, Block IIA and Block IIB, are seen by Russian political analysts and military commanders as threats to Russia's long-range missiles and as such to the nation's strategic potential.
As former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar wrote in a recent column:
“Without doubt, the US is stepping up pressure on Russia's Black Sea fleet. The US's provocation is taking place against the backdrop of the turmoil in Syria. Russia is stubbornly blocking US attempts to drum up a case for Libya-style intervention in Syria. Moscow understands that a major reason for the US to push for regime change in Syria is to get the Russian naval base in that country wound up.
“The Syrian base is the only toehold Russia has in the Mediterranean region. The Black Sea Fleet counts on the Syrian base for sustaining any effective Mediterranean presence by the Russian navy. With the establishment of US military bases in Romania and the appearance of the US warship in the Black Sea region, the arc of encirclement is tightening.”
USS Monterey, whose presence in the Black Sea has been criticized as a violation of the 1936 Montreux Convention, will return to the Mediterranean where the U.S.'s newest nuclear supercarrier, USS George H.W. Bush, and its carrier strike group with 9,000 service members and an air wing of 70 aircraft is also present, having recently visited U.S. Naval Forces Europe/Africa and Sixth Fleet headquarters in Naples, Italy, due north of Libya.
Last week the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan engaged in a certification exercise with its French counterpart FS Tonnerre in the Mediterranean. The U.S. Navy website stated that the certification "will provide Tonnerre with additional flexibility during their support to NATO-led Operation Unified Protector," the codename for the Alliance's war against Libya. The USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group includes an estimated 2,000 Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and dozens of warplanes and attack and other helicopters, and is poised for action in Libya and, if the pattern holds, Syria.
The U.S. and NATO allies and partners - Albania, Algeria, Croatia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey - conducted the Phoenix Express 2011 maritime exercise in the Eastern and Central Mediterranean from June 1-15, which included maneuvers in support of the U.S.'s global Proliferation Security Initiative.
Also earlier this month NATO held this year's Northern Viking air and naval exercise, the latest in a series of biennial drills under that name, in Iceland with 450 NATO military members from the U.S., Denmark, Iceland, Italy and Norway. The United States European Command website cited the Norwegian detachment commander saying, "exercises like [Northern Viking 2011] allowed the pilots to prepare for real-world scenarios, like Operation Odyssey Dawn," the name for the Western military campaign in Libya from March 19-30.
This week NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen visited Britain and Spain, meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague in the first country and Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez and Defence Minister Carme Chacon in the second.
While in London Rasmussen focused on the wars in Libyan and Afghanistan, both under NATO command, and promoted the implementation of the European wing of the U.S. international interceptor missile system.
Perhaps in part responding to the dressing down NATO member states had recently received by the person Rasmussen truly, if unofficially, has to account to - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates - he boasted:
"NATO is more needed and wanted than ever, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from the coast of Somalia to Libya. We are busier than ever before."
In Spain he addressed the nation's upper house of parliament in a speech titled "NATO and the Mediterranean: the changes ahead" and, according to the bloc's website, emphasized "NATO’s changing role in the Mediterranean, particularly focusing on Operation Unified Protector and NATO’s future role in the region." He also pledged that "we can help the Arab Spring well and truly blossom." Libya and Syria, tomorrow Algeria and Lebanon, come to mind as the objects of NATO's false solicitude, and Egypt and Tunisia too, as Rasmussen has already mentioned, in regard to NATO training their militaries and rebuilding their command structures in accordance with Alliance standards, as is being done in Iraq.
The war against Libya, NATO's first armed conflict in the Mediterranean and on the African continent, is solidifying control of the Mediterranean already established by the ongoing Operation Active Endeavor surveillance and interdiction mission launched in 2001 under NATO's Article 5 collective military assistance provision.
While Rasmussen was in Britain, Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin said that the Atlantic Alliance "is being drawn into a ground operation," and asserted "The war in Libya means...the beginning of its expansion south."
Two days before, the U.S. and NATO completed Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 2011, which included 20 ships from eleven European nations and the flagship of the Mediterranean-based U.S. Sixth Fleet, USS Mount Whitney, other American warships and Commander, Carrier Strike Group 8.
Concurrently in the Baltic Sea, the 11-day Amber Hope 2011 exercise was launched in Lithuania on June 13 with the participation of 2,000 military personnel from NATO members the U.S., Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Poland and Partnership for Peace members Georgia and Finland. Former Soviet republics and Partnership for Peace affiliates Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Ukraine are attending as observers.
The second phase of the exercise will begin on June 19 and, according to the Lithuanian Defense Ministry, "troops will follow an established scenario based on lessons learnt by Lithuanian and foreign states in Afghanistan, Iraq and off the Somali coast," in the last case an allusion to NATO's ongoing Operation Ocean Shield. The bloc has also airlifted thousands of Ugandan and Burundian troops into Somalia for fighting in the capital of Mogadishu.
Earlier this week NATO also held a conference with the defense chiefs of 60 member and partner states in Belgrade, Serbia, which was bombed repeatedly by NATO warplanes 12 years ago, also focusing on the bloc's current three-month-long war in Libya.
The Strategic Military Partner Conference was addressed by, inter alia, French General Stephane Abrial, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation based in Norfolk, Virginia, who said, "I'm convinced that the operation in Libya will be successful," though conceding that the hostilities may be prolonged well into the future in his opening statement.
The Black Sea Rotational Force, a Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, followed military training exercises in Romania with a two-week exercise in Bulgaria on June 13 with troops from the host nation and, for the first time, Serbia on one of the four air and infantry bases in the country the Pentagon has moved into since 2006. The earlier training in Romania was at one of another four bases acquired in that nation.
The local press reported that most of the U.S. Marines involved arrived at the Novo Selo Range "straight from Afghanistan" on Hercules-C-130 transport aircraft.
Lieutenant Colonel Nelson Cardella of the U.S. Marine Corps said of the drills, "Our troops will be trained to improve the interoperability of our staffs” for the Afghan and future wars.
Bulgaria's Standart News announced that "next year the Black Sea Rotational Force exercise will take place in Serbia."
The mission of the Black Sea Rotational Force, formed last year, is to integrate the armed forces of twelve nations in the Balkans, Black Sea region and Caucasus - Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine - through NATO for deployment to Afghanistan and other war zones and post-conflict situations.
Each of the wars the U.S. and its NATO allies have waged since 1999 has gained the Pentagon and the Alliance new military bases and expeditionary contingents in subjugated and adjoining nations in Southeastern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, and South and Central Asia.
Just as the Yugoslav, Afghan and Iraqi wars contributed to developing a U.S.-led NATO international military intervention capability for use against Libya today, so the Libyan experience is being employed for future conflicts.
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4 - Why the NATO powers are trying to assassinate Moammar Gaddafi
Protecting civilians or western oil companies?
By Brian Becker
Global Research, June 13, 2011
Wikileaks-released State Department cables from November 2007 and afterwards show the real reason for the mounting U.S. hostility to the Libyan government prior to the current civil war.
NATO has been dropping devastating bunker-busting bombs on Muammar Gaddafi's home in an attempt to assassinate him. One son and several grandchildren have died but Gaddafi has survived. The State Department cables give background to the hostility directed against Gaddafi by the United States and other NATO powers.
One State Department cable from November 2007 (Wikileaks reference ID 07TRIPOLI967) sounds the alarm of “growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism” by the Gaddafi government. This was almost identical language employed by the U.S. and British governments against Iranian Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh when he nationalized Iran’s oil field in 1951. Mossadegh was overthrown by a 1953 CIA coup that restored the Shah to the throne. It allowed U.S. and British oil companies to re-take ownership over Iran’s oil until the 1979 revolution.
The crime of “resource nationalism”
Condemning “Libyan resource nationalism” is diplomatic language. The U.S. government was furious that Gaddafi was moving to rein in and limit the power and profits of the western-owned oil giants that he permitted to come back into the country after George W. Bush in 2004 lifted economic sanctions against Libya.
The same cable refers to an angry speech that Gaddafi made in 2006 which was interpreted as a virtual act of war by the oil companies and the U.S. and western governments.
Gaddafi's speech included these unacceptable words: “Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them—now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.”
Oil reserves in Libya are largest in Africa
Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa and the ninth largest in the world with 41.5 billion barrels as of 2007. The U.S. government and oil industry surveys conclude that Libya has 63 years of reserves at current production rates if no new reserves were to be found. But Libya is considered to have many unexplored reserves. Libya has been a big prize for the western oil giants both because of the quantity of oil and of the particularly high quality of Libyan oil.
In 2008, according to another leaked State Department cable, Gaddafi summoned Conoco-Phillips Chief Executive Jim Mulva to a meeting in Sirte, Libya. There he threatened to expel U.S. oil companies and “threatened to dramatically reduce Libya’s oil production.”
The oil companies and the State Department, as the cables indicate, were increasingly agitated by Gaddafi’s interference with their operations. The Washington Post, which is a big cheerleader for the U.S./NATO bombing campaign, published a story on June 11, 2011, about the leaked Libya cables: “Labor laws were amended to ‘Libyanise’ the economy, and oil firms were pressed to hire Libyan managers, finance people and human resource directors.”
Gaddafi 2009 speech suggested nationalizing Libyan oil
Another Wikileaks-released State Department cable from Jan. 30, 2009, (Wikileaks reference ID 09TRIPOLI71) discusses a January 2009 speech by Gaddafi, stating, “Muammar al-Qadhafi suggested that Libya and other oil exporting states could nationalize their oil production in view of sharply plummeting petroleum prices.”
The U.S. government fully backed the Saudi monarchy and the Mubarak dictatorship, but turned on Libya—not because the regime violated human rights or democracy, but because Gaddafi sought to limit their power. The oil companies, however annoyed they were by having to work with the Libyan government, would have certainly continued their current business operations. The opening of a civil war inside of Libya in February 2011, however, gave a perfect pretext to overthrow the regime and place in power a government that the NATO powers hope will serve as a client regime.
In any country, Libya included, the masses of people can have many valid and legitimate grievances against their government. Even those who support Gaddafi against the NATO bombers probably have grievances. But the U.S., British, French and Italian governments are at war to protect their own interests. Protecting civilians and promoting democracy is of zero concern to Conoco-Phillips, Exxon-Mobil or any of the other oil giants.
The Wikileaks-released State Department cables make it clear that the basis for U.S. hostility to the Gaddafi regime was about who should control Libya’s vast oil reserves. Should it be Libya or should it be the biggest capitalist oil enterprises from western countries?
“Those who dominate Libya’s political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector that could jeopardize efficient exploitation of Libya’s extensive oil and gas reserves,” the November 2007 cable states.
Anti-Gaddafi rebels in Washington, D.C.
In mid-May 2011, just six weeks after the NATO bombing of Libya began, leaders of the anti-Gaddafi rebel movement came to Washington, D.C., for “talks.” They spoke at the U.S.-Libya Business Council. The big oil companies were present. The rebels have employed a public relations/lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C., called the Harbour Group.
The principals of the Harbour Group include Hillary Clinton’s staff director from the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. Another served as a spokesperson for the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and other conservative Republicans. The third served as a public relations figure in the last three Democratic presidential conventions, according to Reuters.
“Now you can figure out who’s going to win, and the name is not Gaddafi,” Nansan Saleri, the founder of the Houston-based Quantico Reservoir Impact company told the Washington Post. Saleri, former head of reservoir management at Saudi Aramco, explained why the company wouldn’t do business in Libya until now. “Everything in Libya—everything—had to be approved by Gaddafi or one of his sons,” he told the Post. Saleri continued, “Certain things about the mosaic are taking shape. The western companies are positioning themselves.” Within five years, he predicted, “Libyan production is going to be higher than right now and investments are going to come in.”
Libya today is resisting the new colonialism. The colonizers assign noble names such as “protecting civilians” to their military mission. But their role in Africa and the Middle East during the past decades and centuries deprive such propaganda of any credibility. They rely though on the uniformity of the corporate-owned media coverage about their “humanitarian motives” to disguise their crass and cynical plans in Libya and elsewhere.
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5 - Why Regime Change in Libya ?
By Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Global Research, June 20, 2011
In light of the brutal death and destruction wrought on Libya by the relentless US/NATO bombardment, the professed claims of “humanitarian concerns” as grounds for intervention can readily be dismissed as a blatantly specious imperialistploy in pursuit of “regime change” in that country.
There is undeniable evidence that contrary to the spontaneous, unarmed and peaceful protest demonstrations in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, therebellion in Libya has been nurtured, armed and orchestratedlargely from abroad, in collaboration with expat opposition groups and their local allies at home. Indeed, evidence shows that plans of “regime change” in Libya were drawn long before the insurgency actually started in Benghazi; it has all the hallmarks of a well-orchestrated civil war [1].
It is very tempting to seek the answer to the question “why regime change in Libya?” in oil/energy. While oil is undoubtedly a concern, it falls short of a satisfactory explanation because major Western oil companies were already extensively involved in the Libyan oil industry. Indeed, since Gaddafi relented to the US-UK pressure in 1993 and established “normal” economic and diplomatic relations with these and other Western countries, major US and European oil companies struck quite lucrative deals with the National Oil Corporation of Libya.
So, the answer to the question “why the imperialist powers want to do away with Gaddafi” has to go beyond oil, or the laughable “humanitarian concerns.” Perhaps the question can be answered best in the light of the following questions: why do these imperialist powers also want to overthrow Hugo Cavez of Venezuela, Fidel Castro (and/or his successors) of Cuba, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Rafael Correa Delgado of Ecuador,Kim Jong-il of North Korea, Bashar Al-assad of Syriaand Evo Morales of Bolivia? Or, why did they overthrow Mohammad Mossadeq of Iran, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, Kusno Sukarno of Indonesia, Salvador Allende of Chile, Sandinistas in Nicaragua,Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haitiand Manuel Zelaya in Honduras?
What does Gaddafi have in common with these nationalist/populist leaders? The question is of course rhetorical and the answer is obvious: like them Gaddafi is guilty of insubordination to the proverbial godfather of the world: US imperialism, and its allies. Like them, he has committed the cardinal sin of challenging the unbridled reign of global capital, of not following the economic “guidelines” of the captains of global finance, that is, of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and World Trade Organization; as well as of refusing to join US military alliances in the region. Also like other nationalist/populist leaders, he advocates social safety net (or welfare state) programs—not for giant corporations, as is the case in imperialist countries, but for the people in need.
This means that the criminal agenda of Messrs Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, and their complicit allies to overthrow or kill Mr. Gaddafi and other “insubordinate” proponents of welfare state programs abroad is essentially part of the same evil agenda of dismantling such programs at home. While the form, the context and the means of destruction maybe different, the thrust of the relentless attacks on the living standards of the Libyan, Iranian, Venezuelan or Cuban peoples are essentially the same as the equally brutal attacks on the living conditions of the poor and working people in the US, UK, France and other degenerate capitalist countries. In a subtle (but unmistakable) way they are all part of an ongoing unilateralclass warfare on a global scale—whether they are carried out by military means and bombardments, or through the apparently “non-violent” processes of judicial or legislative means does not make a substantial difference as far as the nature or the thrust of the attack on people’s lives orlivelihoods are concerned.
In their efforts to consolidate the reign of big capital worldwide, captains of global finance use a variety of methods. The preferred method is usually non-military, that is, the neoliberal strategies of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), carried out by representatives of big business disguised as elected officials, or by the multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. This is what is currently happening in the debt- and deficit-ridden economies of the United States and Europe.But if a country like Libya (or Venezuela or Iran or Cuba) does not go along with the neoliberal agenda of “structural adjustments,” of outsourcing and privatization,and of allowing their financial system to be tied to the network of global banking cartel, then the military option is embarked upon to carry out the neoliberal agenda.
The powerful interests of global capitalism do not seem to feel comfortable to dismantle New Deal economics, Social Democratic reforms and welfare state programs in the core capitalist countries while people in smaller, less-developed countries such as Libya, Venezuela or Cuba enjoy strong, state-sponsored social safety net programs such as free or heavily-subsidized education and health care benefits.Indeed, guardians ofthe worldwide market mechanism have always been intolerant of any “undue” government intervention in the economic affairs of any country in the world. “Regimented economies,” declared President Harry Truman in a speech at Baylor University (1947), were the enemy of free enterprise, and “unless we act, and act decisively,” he claimed, those regimented economies would become “the pattern of the next century.” To fend off that danger, Truman urged that “the whole world should adopt the American system.” The system of free enterprise, he went on, “can survive in America only if it becomes a world system” [2].
Before it was devastated by the imperialist-orchestrated civil war and destruction, Libya had the highest living standard in Africa. Using the United Nations statistics, Jean-Paul Pougala of Dissident Voice reports,
“The country now ranks 53rd on the HDI [Human Development Index] index, better than all other African countries and also better than the richer and Western-backed Saudi Arabia. . . . Although the media often refers to youth unemployment of 15 to 30 percent, it does not mention that in Libya, in contrast to other countries, all have their subsistence guaranteed. . . . The government provides all citizens with free health care and [has] achieved high coverage in the most basic health areas. . . . The life expectancy rose to 74.5 years and is now the highest in Africa. . . . The infant mortality rate declined to 17 deaths per 1,000 births and is not nearly as high as in Algeria (41) and also lower than in Saudi Arabia (21).
“The UNDP [United Nations Development Program] certified that Libya has also made ‘a significant progress in gender equality,’ particularly in the fields of education and health, while there is still much to do regarding representation in politics and the economy. With a relative low ‘index of gender inequality’ the UNDP places the country in the Human Development Report 2010 concerning gender equality at rank 52 and thus also well ahead of Egypt (ranked 108), Algeria (70), Tunisia (56), Saudi Arabia (ranked 128) and Qatar (94)” [3].
It is true that after resisting the self-centered demands and onerous pressures from Western powers for more than thirty years, Gaddafi relented in 1993 and opened the Libyan economy to Western capital, carried out a number of neoliberal economic reforms, and granted lucrative business/investment deals to major oil companies of the West.
But, again, like the proverbial godfather, US/European imperialism requires total, unconditional subordination; half-hearted, grudging compliance with the global agenda of imperialism is not enough. To be considered a real “ally,” or a true “client state,” a country has to grant the US the right to “guide” its economic, geopolitical and foreign policies, that is, to essentiallyforgo its national sovereignty. Despite some economic concessions since the early 1990s, Gaddafi failed this critical test of “full compliance” with the imperialist designs in the region.
For example, he resisted joining a US/NATO-sponsored military alliance in the region. Libya (along with Syria) are the only two Mediterranean nations and the sole remaining Arab states that are not subordinated to U.S. and NATO designs for control of the Mediterranean Sea Basin and the Middle East. Nor has Libya (or Syria) participated in NATO's almost ten-year-old Operation Active Endeavor naval patrols and exercises in the Mediterranean Sea and neither is a member of NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue military partnership which includes most regional countries: Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania [4].
To the chagrin of US imperialism, Libya’s Gaddafi also refused to join the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), designed to control valuable resources in Africa, safeguard trade and investment markets in the region, and contain or evict China from North Africa. “When the US formed AFRICOM in 2007, some 49 countries signed on to the US military charter for Africa but one country refused: Libya. Such a treacherous act by Libya’s leader Moummar Qaddafi would only sow the seeds for a future conflict down the road in 2011” [5].
Furthermore, by promoting trade, development and industrialization projects on a local, national, regional or African level, Gaddafi was viewed as an obstacle to theWestern powers’ strategies of unhinderedtrade and development projects on a global level. For example, Gaddafi’s Libya played a leading role in “connecting the entire [African] continent by telephone, television, radio broadcasting and several other technological applications such as telemedicine and distance teaching. And thanks to the WMAX radio bridge, a low cost connection was made available across the continent, including in rural areas” [3].
The idea of launching a pan-African system of technologically advanced network of telecommunication began in the early 1990s, “when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual$500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country. . . . An African satellite only cost a onetime payment of $400 million and the continent no longer had to pay a $500 million annual lease” [3].
In pursuit of financing this project, the African nations frequently pleaded with the IMF and the World Bank for assistance. As the empty promises of these financial giants dragged on for 14 years,
“Gaddafi put an end to [the] futile pleas to the western ‘benefactors’ with their exorbitant interest rates. The Libyan guide put $300 million on the table; the African Development Bank added$50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further $27 million – and that’s how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.
“China and Russia followed suit and shared their technology and helped launch satellites for South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and a second African satellite was launched in July 2010. The first totally indigenously built satellite and manufactured on African soil, in Algeria, is set for 2020. This satellite is aimed at competing with the best in the world, but at ten times less the cost, a real challenge.
“This is how a symbolic gesture of a mere $300 million changed the life of an entire continent. Gaddafi’s Libya cost the West, not just depriving it of $500 million per year but the billions of dollars in debt and interest that the initial loan would generate for years to come and in an exponential manner, thereby helping maintain an occult system in order to plunder the continent”[3].
Architects of global finance, represented by the imperialist governments of the West, also viewed Gaddafi as a spoiler in the area of international or global money and banking. The forces of global capital tend to prefer a uniform, contiguous, or borderless global market to multiple sovereign markets at the local, national, regional or continental levels.Not only Gaddafi’s Libya maintained public ownership of its own central bank, and the authority to create its own national money, but it also worked assiduously to establish an African Monetary Fund, an African Central Bank, and an African Investment Bank.
The $30 billion of the Libyan money frozen by the Obama administration belong to the Central Bank of Libya, which
“had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African Federation – the African Investment Bank in Syrte(Libya), the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaoundé (Cameroon) . . ., and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria, which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc [the French currency] through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.
“The African Monetary Fund is expected to totally supplant the African activities of the International Monetary Fund which, with only $25 billion, was able to bring an entire continent to its knees and make it swallow questionable privatization like forcing African countries to move from public to private monopolies. No surprise then that on 16-17 December 2010, the Africans unanimously rejected attempts by Western countries to join the African Monetary Fund, saying it was open only to African nations” [3].
Western powers also viewed Gaddafi as an obstacle to their imperial strategies for yet another reason: standing in the way of their age-old policies of “divide and rule.” To counter Gaddafi’s relentless efforts to establish a United States of Africa, the European Union tried to create the Union for the Mediterranean (UPM) region. “North Africa somehow had to be cut off from the rest of Africa, using the old tired racist clichés of the 18th and 19th centuries,which claimed that Africans of Arab origin were more evolved and civilized than the rest of the continent. This failed because Gaddafi refused to buy into it. He soon understood what game was being played when only a handful of African countries were invited to join the Mediterranean grouping without informing the African Union but inviting all 27 members of the European Union.” Gaddafi also refused to buy into other imperialist-inspired/driven groupings in Africa such as ECOWAS, COMESA, UDEAC, SADC and the Great Maghreb, “which never saw the light of day thanks to Gaddafi who understood what was happening” [3].
Gaddafi further earned the wrath of Western powers for striking extensive trade and investment deals with BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), especially with China. According to Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce, China’s contracts in Libya (prior to imperialism’s controlled demolition of that country) numbered no less than 50 large projects, involving contracts in excess of $18 billion. Even a cursory reading of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) strategic briefings shows that a major thrust of its mission is containment of China. “In effect, what we are witnessing here,” points out Patrick Henningsten, “is the dawn of a New Cold War between the US-EURO powers and China. This new cold war will feature many of the same elements of the long and protracted US-USSR face-off we saw in the second half of the 20th century. It will take place off shore, in places like Africa, South America, Central Asia and through old flashpoints like Korea and the Middle East” [5].
It is obvious (from this brief discussion) that Gaddafi’s sin for being placed on imperialism’s death row consists largely of the challenges he posed to the free reign of Western capital in the region, of his refusal to relinquishLibya’s national sovereignty to become another unconditional “client state” of Western powers. His removal from power is therefore designed to eliminate all “barriers” to the unhindered mobility of the US/European capital in the region by installing a more pliant regime in Libya.
Gaddafi’s removal from power would serve yet another objective of US/European powers: to shorten or spoil the Arab Spring by derailing their peaceful protests, containing their non-violent revolutions and sabotaging their aspirations for self-determination.Soon after being caught by surprise by the glorious uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the imperialist powers (including the mini Zionist imperialism in Palestine) embarked on “damage control.” In pursuit of this objective, they adopted three simultaneous strategies. The first strategy was to half-heartedly“support” theuprisings in Egypt and Tunisia (of course, once they became unstoppable) in order to control them—hence, the military rule in those countries following the departure of Mubarak from Cairo and Ben Ali from Tunis. The second strategy of containment has been support and encouragement for the brutal crackdown of other spontaneous and peaceful uprisings in countries ruled by “client regimes,” for example, in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. And the third policy of sabotaging the Arab Spring has been to promote civil war and orchestrate chaos in countries such as Libya, Syria and Iran.
In its early stages of development, capitalism promoted nation-state and/or national sovereignty in order to free itself from the constraints of the church and feudalism. Now that the imperatives of the highly advanced but degenerate global finance capital require unhindered mobility in a uniform or borderless world, national sovereignty is considered problematic—especially in places like Libya, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries that are not ruled by imperialism’s “client states.” Why? Because unhindered global mobility of capital requiresdoing away with social safety net or welfare state programs; it means doing away with public domain properties or public sector enterprises and bringing them under the private ownership of the footloose-and-fancy-free global capital.
This explains why the corporate media, political pundits and other mouthpieces of imperialism are increasing talking about Western powers’ “responsibility to protect,” by which they mean that these powers have a responsibility to protect the Libyan (or Iranian or Venezuelan or Syrian or Cuban or …)citizens from their “dictatorial” rulers by instigating regime change and promoting “democracy” there. It further means that, in pursuit of this objective,the imperialist powers should not be bound by “constraints” of national sovereignty because, they argue, “universal democratic rights take primacy over national sovereignty considerations.”In anotoriously selective fashion, this utilitarian use of the “responsibility to protect” does not apply to nations or peoples ruled by imperialism’s client states such as Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. [6].
This also means that the imperialist war against peoples and states such as Libya and Venezuela is essentially part of the same class war against peoples and states in the belly of the beast, that is, in the United States and Europe. In every instance or place, whether at home or abroad, whether in Libya or California or Wisconsin or Greece, the thrust of the relentless global class war is the same: to do away with subsistence-level guarantees, or social safety net programs, and redistribute the national or global resources in favor of the rich and powerful, especially the powerful interests vested in the finance capital and the military capital.
There is no question that global capitalism has thus woven together the fates and fortunes of the overwhelming majority of the world population in an increasingly intensifying struggle for subsistence and survival.No one can tell when this majority of world population (the middle, lower-middle, poor and working classes) would come to the realization that their seemingly separate struggles for economic survival are essentially part and parcel of the same struggle against the same class enemies, the guardians of world capitalism. One thing is clear, however: only when they come to such a liberating realization, join forces together in a cross-border, global uprising against the forces of world capitalism, and seek to manage their economies independent of profitability imperatives of capitalist production—only then can they break free from the shackles of capitalism and control their future in a coordinated, people-centered mode of production, distribution and consumption.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
Notes
1.Michel Chossudovsky, “When War Games Go Live: Staging a ‘Humanitarian War’ against ‘SOUTHLAND’ Under an Imaginary UN Security Council Resolution 3003,”Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24351
2. D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins (New York: Double Day, 1961), p. 436.
3. Jean-Paul Pougal, “Why the West Wants the Fall of Gaddafi?”Dissident Voice: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/why-is-gaddafi-being-demonized/
4. Rick Rozoff, “Libyan Scenario for Syria: Towards A US-NATO ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ directed against Syria?” Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24562
5. Patrick Henningsten, “WEST vs. CHINA: A NEW COLD WAR BEGINS ON LIBYAN SOIL,” 21st Century Wire: http://21stcenturywire.com/2011/04/12/2577/
6. For an insightful and informative discussion of this issue see (1) F. William Engdahl, “Humanitarian Neo-colonialism: Framing Libya and Reframing War—Creative Destruction Part III,” Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24617; (b) Marjorie Cohn, “The Responsibility to Protect - The Cases of Libya and Ivory Coast,” Counter Punch: http://www.counterpunch.org/cohn05162011.html
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6 - US talks peace and prepares for war in Sudan
By Susan Garth
Global Research, June 16, 2011
World Socialist Web Site
In the worsening conflict in Sudan between the Khartoum government and the southern states that voted for independence in the January referendum, an estimated 1,500 people have been killed since the referendum and up to 150,000 people have fled their homes. Aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian disaster as the country edges towards a renewal of the two decades long north-south civil war that claimed more than two million lives.
President Barack Obama has called for a ceasefire, presenting himself as an honest broker in a conflict that is largely of US making. The humanitarian disaster threatens to become a pretext for yet another US military adventure in Africa. Washington has intervened in Libya with bombing raids aimed at overthrowing the Gaddafi regime. Now it has Sudan in his sights.
Obama adopted the same high moral tone that he has used in relation to Libya. “There is no military solution,” he said on the Voice of America. “The leaders of Sudan and South Sudan must live up to their responsibilities. The government of Sudan must prevent a further escalation of this crisis by ceasing its military actions immediately, including aerial bombardments, forced displacements and campaigns of intimidation.”
This is from the president who has sanctioned drone attacks in Afghanistan that have killed civilians, personally ordered assassinations and watched them unfold on closed-circuit television, and is currently assisting the NATO bombing of Tripoli in an effort to kill a head of state. For Obama to speak of peace is entirely hypocritical.
Obama called on Sudanese leaders to seek a peaceful solution and assured them that “the United States will take the steps we have pledged toward normal relations.” But there was a sting in the tail. He went on to threaten that “those who flout their international obligations will face more pressure and isolation, and they will be held accountable for their actions.”
The implication is that President Omar al-Bashir, who like Muammar Gaddafi has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, can expect the treatment like that being administered to Gaddafi’s regime if he does not follow Obama's bidding.
Khartoum was the target of a US cruise missile attack in 1998 when the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory was destroyed. The Clinton administration claimed that it was a chemical weapons plant linked to al Qaeda. Ample evidence has since emerged that the factory was engaged in purely medical work and did not have any such links.
US claims were a complete fabrication and the destruction of the factory was aimed at intimidating the Sudanese population and depriving them of valuable infrastructure. The German ambassador to Sudan, Werner Daum, has calculated that the loss of the factory resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from malaria and tuberculosis because of the resultant shortage of life-saving medicines.
In April this year two people were killed when a car was hit by a missile in Port Sudan. The Sudanese authorities said that the missile had been fired from an unidentified aircraft that flew into Sudanese airspace. They suggested that Israel was behind the attack. The Israeli government has made no comment. Only Israel and the US have the type of military technology used in this attack, and it is hard to believe that the Israeli government could have carried it without US knowledge. The victims have not been identified but it was undoubtedly an assassination.
The conflict that is developing in Sudan is the result of a long period of US involvement in the region. Successive US administrations backed the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) under its US-trained leader John Garang. His sudden death in a helicopter crash in no way disrupted the relationship.
The US provided arms for the SPLM’s fight against the Khartoum government and has continued to pour weapons into the country following the 2005 US-brokered agreement that ended the civil war. That provided for a referendum on southern secession and the creation of a new state in southern Sudan centred on the capital of Juba. The vote for secession has given Obama a platform within Sudan to launch an assault on the Khartoum regime through a proxy force.
The whole of Sudan is covered by US sanctions that forbid the export of arms to the country. The US is only permitted to export non-military goods to Sudan including the south. But according to WikiLeaks a cargo of tanks, grenade launchers and anti-aircraft guns captured by Somali pirates in 2008 was intended for the SPLM. They had been sold to the SPLM by Kenya, a close US ally in the region. The leaked cables revealed that the US was aware of the shipment.
It is clear from this leak that the US has been preparing the SPLM for a new military conflict while all the public pronouncements coming out of the White House and the State Department have been about peace.
Conflict along the still undefined border was inevitable. The border states of South Kordofan and Abyei are among the few oil-producing areas that could remain in Khartoum’s hands after the secession of the south. They were bound to be bitterly contested, but there is evidence that the present conflict was provoked by forces loyal to the SPLM. On May 20, militia units allied to the SPLM ambushed a convoy of UN peacekeepers and northern troops. Diplomatic sources suggest that this was a deliberate attempt to draw Khartoum into a conflict over the border. If so, it worked well, because Khartoum’s response was to send tanks into the border town of Abyei and it has now bombed an airfield in South Kordofan.
A separate referendum was supposed to be held in Abyei to decide whether it should join the northern or the southern state. But the vote was postponed after violent clashes between pro-Khartoum and pro-southern groups. Attempts at mediation by other African states have failed and the two sides are becoming increasingly intransigent.
“Abyei is northern Sudanese land,” President Omar Hassan al-Bashir insisted. He added that Sudan was not afraid of US threats.
Speaking from the southern capital of Juba SPLM spokesman Philip Aguer told the Financial Times “The UN mission has completely failed in Sudan: what is the point of ‘monitoring’ peace when you are ‘monitoring’ people being killed—the UN Security Council must bring a mission that can impose peace, they should do more than lip service.”
The SPLM are in effect demanding UN cover for its own military operations as Alassane Ouattara had in Ivory Coast in his struggle against Laurent Gbagbo.
The SPLM depicts itself as the injured party while at the same time reorganising and re-equipping its army. Atim Garang of the SPLM accused the Khartoum government of wanting war. “We dreamed of good and non-tensed relations between north and south Sudan,” he went on, “and we were arranging for continuation of common interests with the north, namely with regard to our partnership in the field of oil production and marketing, but now we greatly doubt the real intentions of north Sudan.”
Vice-President Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon has visited Washington to ask for more robust support for the SPLM. Having engineered a humanitarian crisis on the border, Washington may well feel that it can now offer more overt military support for the SLPM.
On its part the Khartoum government has turned to its longstanding ally, China. Bashir will visit Beijing in the next weeks. The subject of his talks has not been announced, but China is the main supplier of arms to Sudan.
China has been largely responsible for developing the Sudanese oil industry, 80 percent of which is in the south and will come under southern authority once partition takes place. Most of the paved roads in southern Sudan are in the oil fields and were built by Chinese companies. Potentially, the new government could insist on renegotiating contracts and allowing US companies to have a share of its oil resources. The extent of Chinese investment put at risk by the partition of Sudan is immense. The Chinese National Petroleum Company is thought to have invested some $20 billion in Sudan, which is the source of 30 percent of China’s oil imports.
Sudan has a strategic significance for China, and the provocative stance that the Obama administration has adopted threatens to lead to the kind of confrontation that Beijing has so far studiously avoided in Africa. A civil war over control of Sudan’s oil has potential global implications. It may prove to have a profoundly destabilizing impact on international relations.
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7 - The Plan to Balkanize Libya
Sykes - Picot redux : Egyptians warn of Zionist designs to balkanize Libya
by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO, June 18 (IPS) – Developments in Libya have raised fears among Egyptian analysts and political figures of the possible break-up of the North African nation into two warring halves. To support the assertion, they point to longstanding Israeli designs — supported by the western powers — to balkanize the Arab states of the region.
“Libya could be split in two, with Gaddafi staying on in the west of the country and a revolutionary government loyal to the western powers in control of the east,” Mohamed al-Sakhawi, leading member of Egypt’s as-yet-unlicensed Arabic Unity Party, told IPS.
For three months, Libya has suffered internationally-sanctioned air-strikes by the western NATO alliance, launched with the stated aim of supporting the ongoing popular uprising against the Gaddafi regime. Revolutionary forces based in Ben Ghazi now hold most of the country’s eastern half, while forces loyal to Gaddafi continue to control the country’s western half from the capital Tripoli.
Yet the fact that NATO — despite its overwhelming air superiority — has so far failed to dislodge the Gaddafi regime has led many local observers to question the western alliance’s intentions.
“The western campaign against Libya wasn’t undertaken to protect human rights or foster democracy,” said al-Sakhawi. “It was launched with the aim of breaking Libya up politically so as to prevent the unification of three revolutionary Arab states — Egypt, Libya and Tunisia — which together might pose a threat to Israeli regional dominance.”
Walid Hassan, international law professor at Alexandria’s Pharos University, agreed for the most part, saying that NATO — with Israeli encouragement — “hopes to replace Gaddafi with rulers loyal to the west in advance of breaking the country into small statelets, as they are doing in Iraq.”
“The primary objective is to weaken the Arab states of North Africa, which, if they ever united, would represent a potential threat to Israeli and western interests,” Hassan told IPS. “Libya’s significant oil wealth, of course, constitutes a secondary reason for the intervention.”
Al-Sakhawi pointed to the region’s century-old legacy of balkanization at the hands of foreign powers.
“The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France drew artificial borders across the region and fragmented the Arab world into nation states,” he said. “And in recent years, the drive to further balkanize the Arab world — by Israel and the western powers — has only accelerated.”
Egyptian analysts point to several proposals written to this effect by Israeli strategists, the most well known of which is a 1982 treatise entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s.” Written by Oded Yinon, then a senior advisor for Israel’s foreign ministry, the essay explicitly calls for breaking up the Arab states of the region along ethnic and sectarian lines.
“The Zionist plan to politically fragment the Arab Middle East so as to keep Arab states in a perpetual state of instability and weakness has been well known for the last three decades,” Gamal Mazloum, retired Egyptian major-general and expert on defense issues, told IPS.
While the Yinon document does not devote much space to Libya, it talks in detail about the need to divide Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon into small, ineffectual statelets.
“The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas… is Israel’s primary target on the eastern front in the long run,” the author writes. For Yinon, oil-rich and ethnically-diverse Iraq — which he describes as “the greatest threat to Israel” — constitutes a chief target.
“In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines… is possible,” he writes. “So, three states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”
As for Egypt, Yinon calls for breaking the country up into “distinct geographical regions.” The establishment of an independent Coptic-Christian state in Upper Egypt, he writes, “alongside a number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government…seems inevitable in the long run.”
Yinon goes on to mention Sudan in similar terms, describing it as “the most torn-apart state in the Arab-Muslim world today… built upon four groups hostile to each other: an Arab-Muslim Sunni minority which rules over a majority of non-Arab Africans, pagans and Christians.”
According to Mazloum, political maneuvering in recent years by Israel and the western powers — both overt and covert — appears to conform to this strategy of balkanization.
“Israel and the US have both helped break up Iraq by encouraging the emergence of an independent Kurdish state and fostering Sunni-Shiite division,” he said. “And in Sudan, Israel actively contributed to the war between north and south by providing the latter with weapons and military training.”
Notably, southern Sudan is set to declare independence from the northern Khartoum government next month in a move that will officially split Africa’s largest country in two.
“Israel has an interest in breaking up Sudan and instigating sectarian strife in Egypt so that the latter is faced with crises on both its internal and external fronts,” said Mazloum. “Israel and its western patrons are determined to keep Egypt — the most populous Arab nation by far — in a state of perpetual weakness so that it cannot aid the Arab cause in places like Palestine and Iraq.”
Earlier this month, Mohamed Abbas, a leading member of Egypt’s Revolutionary Coalition Council (RCC), likewise warned of an ongoing “conspiracy” aimed at breaking Egypt into three petty states. The RCC consists of several political movements that played prominent roles in Egypt’s recent Tahrir Uprising.
“This conspiracy is part of a wider scheme to fragment the Arab states — as has happened in Sudan, is happening in Libya and has been attempted in Iraq — in order to render Egypt so weak that the Zionist entity will be sure to remain the dominant power in the new Middle East,” Abbas was quoted as saying by independent daily Al-Shorouk on June 4.
By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
IPS : Experts fear Israeli design to Balkanize Arab states
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8 - America's Next War Theater : Syria and Lebanon ?
Washington's War against the Resistance Bloc
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, June 10, 2011
Washington and its allies, Israel and the Al-Sauds, are taking advantage of the upheavals in the Arab World. They are now working to dismantle the Resistance Bloc and weaken any drive for democracy in the Arab World. The geo-political chessboard is now being prepared for a broader confrontation that will target Tehran and include Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinians.
Tying Hezbollah’s Hands through External and Internal Pressure
In Lebanon, there is a deadlock in regards to the formation of a Lebanese government. Michel Sleiman, who holds the presidency and the new Lebanese prime minister have been delaying the formation of the cabinet in a political row with Michel Aoun, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement.
It may be possible that the formation of a new Lebanese cabinet is being delayed deliberately to keep Lebanon neutralized on the foreign policy front.
The U.N. Security Council and several U.N. bodies are all being used by the U.S. and the E.U. to put pressure on Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is taking his orders fom Washington. He has contributed to providing legitimacy to the U.S. and NATO wars. Moscow has openly accused Ban Ki-moon of treachery for his 2008 secret dealings with NATO.
It is in this context that the U.N. is being used as a forum for insidious attempts to internationalize the issue of the weapons held by the Lebanese Resistance, with a view to disarming it. Despite the fact that U.N. Resolution 1559 is no longer relevant, the Special Representative for the Implementation of Resolution 1559, Terje Roed-Larsen, still remains active and issues reports against Hezbollah.
The envoys of the U.N. to Lebanon resemble colonial figures making uninvited edicts in Beirut and working as agents of Washington, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which has an entire division in the U.S. State Department, is also a loaded political weapon that Washington is planning on using against Lebanon and Syria.
An international tribunal was formed pertaining to the circumstances of the the assassination of Rafic Al-Hariri. Hariri at the time of his murder had no official state position, but an international tribunal has been created for his case alone. On the other hand the so-called international community has taken no interest in forming any type of tribunals to investigate the assassination of thousands of people killed in Lebanon. What does this say about the STL and the justice being sought?
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has also been complicit in Israeli violations against Lebanon. Even the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRAW) has been infiltrated with officials that are supportive of Israeli crimes against Palestinians and Lebanese. This was demonstrated by Christopher Gunness, the spokesperson of UNRAW, in a May 15, 2011 interview with the Israeli military. While Israel’s IDF was firing on unarmed civilian protesters during Nakba Day 2011, Gunness reaffirmed that UNRAW was working in the interest of Israel’s national security, while also accusing the Palestinians of committing terrorist acts against Israel. Even the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip was whitewashed by the UNRAW spokesperson.
The absence of a new cabinet in Lebanon has also allowed Saad Hariri and the March 14 Alliance to continue having an ominous hand in managing Lebanon’s affairs. This also buys time for the STL, which can move forward without being challenged by a Lebanese government in Beirut that would be hostile to the STL. In this regard, a new government in Beirut would most certainly question to legitmacy of the STL.
Moreover, the Internal Security Forces (ISF) of Lebanon is also being used by Saad Hariri against Hezbollah and the political opponents of the Hariri family. The ISF may even have a hand in working against Damascus and helping promote violence in Syria. The ISF takes its orders directly from the Hariri family.
Because of the free hand given to Saad Hariri and his cronies (largely due to the absence of a functioning cabinet in Beirut), Ziad Baroud, the acting interior minister of Lebanon, has refused to sign any more papers from his ministry. Baroud has taken this position, because he believes that the ISF is acting covertly and without his approval or supervision. In this regard, the ISF has refused to follow the orders of Ziad Baroud to allow Charbel Al-Nahhas, the acting telecommunications minister of Lebanon, to enter ISF headquarters for a routine check. The ISF was clearly trying to hide its operations and was acting to prevent Al-Nahhas and his team from going to certain floors at ISF headquarters.
It is also no secret that Lebanon is a nest of intelligence agents and operatives from the U.S., the E.U., Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Their objective is to confront and dismantle Hezbollah and its coalition.
In 2006, during the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon the embassies of E.U. members were also collecting data against Hezbollah. The Al-Sauds have helped facilitate the links between Israel and the network of spies in Lebanon. This is demonstrated by the clear link between Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hussein, the Shiite cleric caught working for Israel, and the Al-Sauds.
In tune with all this, Hezbollah is constantly accused of being an instrument of Iran. Recently, Hezbollah was blamed alongside Iran for stirring protests in the Persian Gulf, specifically in Bahrain and the Shiite-dominated areas of Saudi Arabia. In this regard Lebanese citizens, regardless of their faith in many cases, have also been singled out by the Khaliji regimes and expelled from the Persian Gulf. This is part of a sectarian card to create regional divisions and hate. Within Lebanon it has been used by the Saad Hariri faction to target Hezbollah and its allies. Hariri has ironically accused Iran of interfering in Bahrain at the very moment the Saudi military invaded the island-state to keep the Al-Khalifas in power.
The petro-sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf are now systematically preventing Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, and Pakistani citizens from entering their borders. Kuwait has justified this by saying that there could be trouble within Kuwait due to political instability in these countries.
Destabilizing Syria
Damascus has been under pressure to capitulate to the edicts of Washington and the European Union. This has been part of a longstanding project. Regime change or voluntary subordination by the Syrian regime are the goals. This includes subordinating Syrian foreign policy and de-linking Syrian from its strategic alliance with Iran and its membership within the Resistance Bloc.
Syria is run by an authoritarian oligarchy which has used brute force in dealing with its citizens. The riots in Syria, however, are complex. They cannot be viewed as a straighforward quest for liberty and democracy. There has been an attempt by the U.S. and the E.U. to use the riots in Syria to pressure and intimidate the Syrian leadership. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and the March 14 Alliance have all played a role in supporting an armed insurrection.
The Al-Sauds have also helped drown out any authentic calls for democratic reform and marginalized the democratic elements in the Syrian opposition during the protests and riots. In this regard the Al-Sauds have supported both sectarian factions as well as terrorist elements, which question the foundations of religious tolerance in Syria. These elements are mostly Salafist extremists, like Fatah Al-Islam and the new extremist political movements being organized in Egypt. They have also been rallying against the Alawites, the Druze, and Syrian Christians.
The violence in Syria has been supported from the outside with a view of taking advantage of the internal tensions and the anger in Syria. Aside from the violent reaction of the Syrian Army, media lies have been used and bogus footage has been aired. Money and weapons have also been funnelled to elements of the Syrian opposition by the U.S., the E.U., the March 14 Alliance, Jordan, and the Khalijis. Funding has also been provided to ominous and unpopular foreign-based Syrian opposition figures, while weapons caches were smuggled from Jordan and Lebanon into Syria.
The events in Syria are also tied to Iran, the longstanding strategic ally of Damascus. It is not by chance that Senator Lieberman was demanding publicly that the Obama Administration and NATO attack Syria and Iran like Libya. It is also not coincidental that Iran was included in the sanctions against Syria. The hands of the Syrian military and government have now been tied internally as a new and broader offensive is being prepared that will target both Syria and Iran.
Syria and the Levantine Gas Fields in the Eastern Mediterranean
Syria is the central piece of two important energy corridors. The first links Turkey and the Caspian to Israel and the Red Sea and the second links Iraq to the Mediterranean. The surrender of Syria would mean that Washington and its allies would control these energy routes. It would also mean that the large natural gas fields off the Lebanese and Syrian coastline in the Eastern Mediterranean would be out of reach for China and would instead go to the E.U., Israel, and the U.S.
The Eastern Mediterranean gas fields have been the subject of negotiations between the E.U., Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. Aside from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, the existence of the Levantine natural gas fields is also the reason why the Kremlin has created a military foothold in Syria for the Russian Federation. This has been done by upgrading Soviet-era naval facilities in Syria. Moreover, it has been Iran that has agreed to explore and help develop these natural gas fields off the Levantine coast for Beirut and Damascus.
Hamas-Fatah Rapprochement
There is a strong correlation between war in Southwest Asia and increased talk at the official level about Palestinian statehood. Hopes of Palestinian statehood have been used twice to discharge pressure in the Arab World built from rising tensions from war preparations against Iraq. The first time was by George H.W. Bush Sr. and the second time by George W. Bush Jr., who was praised for being the first U.S. president to seriously talk about a Palestinian state.
Even as he flip-flops on his position, Obama is also now talking about a Palestinian state. Moreover, rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah has taken place as the count-down towards international recognition of Palestinian statehood begins. The Israelis have also released frozen funds to the Palestinians, which they refused to do before due to Hamas.
The rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas has also served to tie the hands of Hamas. Hamas will have to be careful not to effectively become a junior partner in governing Palestine under Israeli occupation. Hamas must effectively now modify its stance in its partnership in a unity government with Fatah. In all likelihood Tel Aviv and Washington will seek to impose Fatah as the senior partner of the Palestinian Authority. In a manner of speaking, Hamas is being domesticated indirectly by Israel and Washington.
Instability in Pakistan
The announcement that Osama bin Laden has been killed by U.S. forces has contributed to a process of covert political destabilization within Pakistan. There has been a calculated effort to present Osama bin Laden as a popular and venerated figure for Muslims. This is with a view of supporting the so-called “Clash of Civilizations.”
At the same time the U.S. government is starting a media campaign against Pakistan. Islamabad has been portrayed as harbouring Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network. In reality any Pakistani involvement with terrorists has been ordered and directed by Washington. There is a much more complicated story to all this, but what is happening in reality is that Pakistan as a nation is being targeted for dismantlement.
The dismantlement and destabilization of Pakistan would serve three objectives:
1. Promoting a scenario of a war with Iran: Pakistan would not be under threat of a takeover by revolutionaries that would side with Iran and its allies.
2. The targetting of Chinese interests in Pakistan, including the energy corridor from Iran to China (and the Chinese port in Gwadar), which transits through Pakistan.
3. Regional destabilization in a key area of Eurasia where Southwest Asia, Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent meet. This area extends from Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan, India, and Western China. At the same time Washington also wants to neutralize the Pakistani nuclear program.
The U.S. has also announced that it has the right to violate the national boundaries of countries which harbour terrorists as well as send troops to these countries as part of the “war on terrorism.” Hillary Clinton has justified Washington’s stance by saying that U.S. forces would be assassinating terrorists. This is merely an opening door for creating a pretext for military intervention in countries such as Iran, where the the Revolutionary Guards have been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., or Syria, where several exiled Palestinian groups have been designated as terrorist organizations by Washington.
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9 - Jews & Their Self Interest-An Interview with Philip Weiss
by Gilad Atzmon
Over a week ago I emailed to the well- known blogger Philip Weiss, an interesting post written by Nahida (AKA The Exiled Palestinian).
In her article, Jewish Voice For Peace? Really?? , Nahida expresses some sharp criticism of Jewish anti-Zionist groups, forcefully arguing that “Anti-Zionist Jewish organisations are trying to silence Palestine’s supporters, to frame the debate” and to “steer the course of the liberation” of her homeland.
Since Weiss runs the most popular Jewish progressive blog, offering an invaluable source of information regarding Israeli crimes, I thought he might be willing to address Nahida’s criticism, and to discuss it with his many progressive Jewish followers.
Weiss did not post Nahida’s article on his blog, but his discussion with me was brave and honest*, and to a certain extent he affirmed Nahida’s criticism, admitting that it was indeed ‘Jewish self-interest’ that he himself was ‘concerned with’.
Weiss had the following to say on the matter: “I believe all people act out of self-interest. And Jews who define themselves at some level as Jews — like myself for instance — are concerned with a Jewish self-interest. Which in my case is: an end to Zionism. A theory of political life based on altruism or concern for victims purely is doomed to fail.”
Openly and bluntly, Weiss confirmed what many of us have been saying for a very long time: it is not solely ‘altruism’ or concern for Palestinians victims that motivates some of the most prominent Jewish campaigners and organisations, but it is also, as Weiss freely admits, ‘Jewish self-interest.’
I confessed to Weiss that I was overwhelmed by his frankness. I think that Weiss may well be the first Jewish activist to admit , or even to define the Judeo-centric impetus behind the Jewish- progressive political discourse.
I decided to press it further, asking Weiss whether he considered himself to be ‘tribal’?
And once again, Weiss’ answer was brave and honest, though he did start to express some frustration. He answered, “Yes I do at some level. And what bugs me about stuff you send me (I guess that Weiss was referring to Nahida’s article) is that I end up in the end inevitably and predictably at some site trashing Jewish religion, to which I have very little connection, though yes I feel some core ‘Id’** and this makes me think in the end, that dialogue with you will not help ME because I am interested in frying different fish. While you seem out rather reductively to prove the degeneracy of a religion which I’m sure is deeply problematic, as Islam is and the Church of Pedophilia…( sic)”
However, I still do not grasp why Weiss thinks that I am interested to reductively ‘prove the degeneracy of a religion’ — I am not really interested in criticising the religion of Judaism, or any other religion for that matter: in fact, I am far more concerned with Jewish secularism and Jewish secular ideology.
However, it was at that stage that I realised that Weiss was a perfect candidate for an interview. He certainly embodies the Jewish-progressive school of thought: a unique mixture of righteousness, charming self-love, mixed together with some deep intolerance towards other people’s belief systems.
I went on to ask Weiss: “What does the word ‘Jewish’ mean for you?”
Weiss was short and precise in his response : “My mother, my father, my grandparents, a family feeling, us-ness, in distinction to the Them.”
I pressed Weiss further , asking him, “this ‘us-ness’ does it really extend beyond family and friends? Do you, for instance, feel ‘us-ness’ with an Iraqi Jew?”, I wondered.
‘I think identity is multi-factorial,’ Weiss replied, ‘I feel American before I feel Jewish. I think that’s the achievement of my life, to have flipped those identities, and Jewish is second. I see Jewish as this great civilization that I am part of. That transcends borders, and it’s not Zionist. Zionism is likeShabbetai Tzvi, It’s a big chapter in a long story. Jews will survive this one too. Jews is: a sense of difference, yes, inevitably of elite identity, that’s part of Jewish history and one I struggle with. Jewish is a Story, a myth…’
I liked the imaginative and poetic manner in which Weiss referred to his own identity. I appreciated his honesty, and I also accepted what seems to be a possible discrepancy between the universal consciousness and the tribal affiliation.
And yet, I really wanted to grasp how Weiss translated his sense of tribalism into a political, or ideological, awareness. I enquired further, to which he responded, ‘I’m against compartmentalized identity but I do think that people are tribal, it’s the nature of the species right now, and the deal is do we call on that or do we try and reduce it? I’m for reducing it but not denying its existence till everyone puts down their shield and that doesn’t seem bloody likely.
I had some “us-ness” from my family, a lot of it, but bridled at it. “Is it good for the Jews?” question bugged the hell out of me. But if Herzl, a Christmas tree Jew like me, was made Jewish by anti Semites, as he was, I was made Jewish by the Neocons. I thought, I’m Jewish too so f**k them with their tribalism.’
You can call it anything you like. you can reduce it to JVP is Jewish, or JVP has multiple dimension. I’m in the multidimensional human camp. My wife is not a Jew. She uses Ayurvedic typology, Jungian typology and Freudian (psychoanalysis) to understand people. She uses Astrology too sometimes. I dip around in all that too and I’m also Jewish and feel a real bond with Jews. Is it Ashkenazi and racist? I’m sure it is at some level. They’re the ones I grew up with. Do I transcend? I hope so.’
That is fairly impressive, I thought to myself : up to that point, Weiss had seemed to be coherent, a healthy amalgam of a self-reflective person who acknowledges his tribalism and roots, yet tries to transcend those aspects.
And yet, I was still slightly confused — I reminded Weiss that only two days earlier he had mentioned in our discussions that Jews like himself were “ concerned with a Jewish self-interest”. I then asked him whether he approved that Jewish anti-Zionist activism may as well be primarily concerned with Jewish interests?
I guess that at that stage, Weiss started to feel irritated or even trapped, for he somehow turned sour, saying :“Primarily concerned with Jewish interests seems a stupid trap to me.”
But, I reminded Weiss that “self-interest” and “Jewish self-interest” had been his own words, quoting to him his initial reaction to Nahida’s post — indeed, Weiss had actually said, “I believe all people act out of self-interest. and Jews ..like myself — are concerned with a Jewish self-interest.”
I suggested to Weiss that I can live with inconsistency — I also offered him the opportunity to feel free to change his words, or amend his narrative to suit his ‘new line’ ( in which he had stated that “primarily concerned with Jewish interests seems a stupid trap”).
I did feel , however, that Weiss should at least be made aware of the contradictions in his own words: after all, one can either argue that “Jews act out of Jewish self-interest” or, one can contend that to be “primarily concerned with Jewish interests is a stupid trap.”
Yet, one cannot have it both ways, and one cannot hold these two views simultaneously, unless an explanation is offered.
But I guess that I asked for too much : Weiss didn’t want to address the contradiction, saying, “( I ) Disown none of them,” explaining to me his opinion that “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind.”
At that point, I felt that it would be the right time to disengage, and to leave Weiss alone, just before things got further out of control.
It seems to me that once again, I have failed to converse with a ‘progressive Jew.’ I guess that in spite of the openness Weiss showed initially, he, like mny others, cannot resolve the tension beyond the universal and the tribal.
And by now, I am increasingly certain that this gap cannot be bridged easily, if at all, for the tribal and universal are like water and oil.
I guess that the difficulties involved in resolving the tension between the universal and the tribal explains why so many progressive Jews prefer to operate in intellectual, ideological and political exclusive ‘Jews only’ cells where these questions are never raised, never asked, and never answered.
*Philip Weiss’ words are published here with his full agreement and concession
** Id- a slang name for a Jew, I guess that it comes from Yiddish. A Id-Yid is a Yiddish speaker.
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10 - The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, June 17, 2011
What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel.
Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency.
The United States is to expand contacts with Syrians who are counting on a regime change in the country.
This was stated by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland. "We started to expand contacts with the Syrians, those who are calling for change, both inside and outside the country," she said.
Nuland also repeated that Barack Obama had previously called on Syrian President Bashar Assad to initiate reforms or to step down from power." (Voice of Russia, June 17, 2011)
The destabilization of Syria and Lebanon as sovereign countries has been on the drawing board of the US-NATO-Israel military alliance for at least ten years.
Action against Syria is part of a "military roadmap", a sequencing of military operations. According to former NATO Commander General Wesley Clark--the Pentagon had clearly identified Iraq, Libya, Syria and Lebanon as target countries of a US-NATO intervention:
"[The] Five-year campaign plan [included]... a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan" (Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark)
In "Winning Modern Wars" (page 130) General Wesley Clark states the following:
"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.
...He said it with reproach--with disbelief, almost--at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either. ...I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."
The objective is to destabilize the Syrian State and implement "regime change" through the covert support of an armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist militia. The reports on civilian deaths are used to provide a pretext and a justification for humanitarian intervention under the principle "Responsiblity to Protect".
Media Disinformation
Tacitly acknowledged , the significance of an armed insurrection is casually dismissed by the Western media. If it were to be recognized and analysed, our understanding of unfolding events would be entirely different.
What is mentioned profusely is that the armed forces and the police are involved in the indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters. Press reports confirm, however, from the outset of the protest movement an exchange of gunfire between armed insurgents and the police, with casualties reported on both sides.
The insurrection started in mid March in the border city of Daraa, which is 10 km from the Jordanian border.
The Daraa "protest movement" on March 18 had all the appearances of a staged event involving, in all likelihood, covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Government sources point to the role of radical Salafist groups (supported by Israel)
Other reports have pointed to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing the protest movement.
What has unfolded in Daraa in the weeks following the initial violent clashes on 17-18 March, is the confrontation between the police and the armed forces on the one hand and armed units of terrorists and snipers on the other which have infiltrated the protest movement.
....
What is clear from these initial reports is that many of the demonstrators were not demonstrators but terrorists involved in premeditated acts of killing and arson. The title of the Israeli news report summarizes what happened: Syria: Seven Police Killed, Buildings Torched in Protests.
(See Michel Chossudovsky, SYRIA: Who is Behind The Protest Movement? Fabricating a Pretext for a US-NATO "Humanitarian Intervention", http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24591Global Research, May 3, 2011)
The Role of Turkey
The center of the insurrection has now shifted to the small border town of Jisr al-Shughour, 10 km from the Turkish border.
Jisr al-Shughour has a population of 44,000 inhabitants. Armed insurgents have crossed the border from Turkey.
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood are reported to have taken up arms in northwest Syria.
There are indications that Turkish military and intelligence are supporting these incursions.
There was no mass civilian protest movement in Jisr al-Shughour. The local population was caught in the crossfire. The fighting between armed rebels and government forces has contributed to triggering a refugee crisis, which is the center of media attention.
Muslim Brotherhood Rebels at Jisr al Shughour Photos AFP June 16, 2011
In contrast, in the nation's capital Damascus, where the mainstay of social movements is located, there have been mass rallies in support rather than in opposition to the government.
President Bashir al Assad is casually compared to presidents Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. What the mainstream media has failed to mention is that despite the authoritarian nature of the regime, president Al Assad is a popular figure who has widespread support of the Syrian population.
The large rally in Damascus on March 29, "with tens of thousands of supporters" (Reuters) of President Al Assad was barely mentioned. Yet in an unusual twist, the images and video footage of several pro-governmentevents were used by the Western media to convince international public opinion that the President was being confronted by mass anti-government rallies.
Syrians display a giant national flag with a picture of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad during a
pro-government rally at the central bank square in Damascus March 29, 2011. (Reuters Photo)
On June 15, thousands of people rallied over several kilometers on Damascus' main highway in a march holding up a 2.3 km Syrian flag. The rally was acknowledged by the media and casually dismissed as irrelevant.
AP. Thousands of supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad carry a 2,300-metre-long Syrian flag in a demonstration in Damascus on Wednesday.
While the Syrian regime is by no means democratic, the objective of the US-NATO Israel military alliance is not to promote democracy. Quite the opposite. Washington's intent is to eventually install a puppet regime.
The objective through media disinformation is to demonize president Al Assad and more broadly to destabilize Syria as a secular state. The latter objective is implemented through covert support of various Islamist organizations:
Syria is run by an authoritarian oligarchy which has used brute force in dealing with its citizens. The riots in Syria, however, are complex. They cannot be viewed as a straightforward quest for liberty and democracy. There has been an attempt by the U.S. and the E.U. to use the riots in Syria to pressure and intimidate the Syrian leadership. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and the March 14 Alliance have all played a role in supporting an armed insurrection.
The violence in Syria has been supported from the outside with a view of taking advantage of the internal tensions... Aside from the violent reaction of the Syrian Army, media lies have been used and bogus footage has been aired. Money and weapons have also been funnelled to elements of the Syrian opposition by the U.S., the E.U....Funding has also been provided to ominous and unpopular foreign-based Syrian opposition figures, while weapons caches were smuggled from Jordan and Lebanon into Syria. (Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, America's Next War Theater: Syria and Lebanon?http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25000, Global Research, June 10, 2011)
The joint Israel-Turkey military and intelligence agreement
The geopolitics of this process of destabilization are far-reaching. Turkey is involved in supporting the rebels.
The Turkish government has sanctioned Syrian opposition groups in exile which support an armed insurgency. Turkey is also pressuring Damascus to conform to Washington's demands for regime change.
Turkey is a member of NATO with a powerful military force. Moreover, Israel and Turkey have a longstanding joint military-intelligence agreement, which is explicitly directed against Syria.
...A 1993 Memorandum of Understanding led to the creation of (Israeli-Turkish) "joint committees" to handle so-called regional threats. Under the terms of the Memorandum, Turkey and Israel agreed "to cooperate in gathering intelligence on Syria, Iran, and Iraq and to meet regularly to share assessments pertaining to terrorism and these countries' military capabilities."
Turkey agreed to allow IDF and Israeli security forces to gather electronic intelligence on Syria and Iran from Turkey. In exchange, Israel assisted in the equipping and training of Turkish forces in anti-terror warfare along the Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian borders."
...
Already during the Clinton Administration, a triangular military alliance between the US, Israel and Turkey had unfolded. This "triple alliance", which is dominated by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, integrates and coordinates military command decisions between the three countries pertaining to the broader Middle East. It is based on the close military ties respectively of Israel and Turkey with the US, coupled with a strong bilateral military relationship between Tel Aviv and Ankara. ....
The triple alliance is also coupled with a 2005 NATO-Israeli military cooperation agreement which includes "many areas of common interest, such as the fight against terrorism and joint military exercises. These military cooperation ties with NATO are viewed by the Israeli military as a means to "enhance Israel's deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria." (See Michel Chossudovsky,"Triple Alliance": The US, Turkey, Israel and the War on Lebanon, August 6, 2006)
Covert support to armed insurgents out of Turkey or Jordan would no doubt be coordinated under the joint Israel-Turkey military and intelligence agreement.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with (former) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (2004)
Dangerous Crossroads: The Broader Middle East War
Israel and NATO signed a far-reaching military cooperation agreement in 2005. Under this agreement, Israel is considered a de facto member of NATO.
If a military operation were to be launched against Syria, Israel would in all likelihood be involved in military undertakings alongside NATO forces (under the NATO-Israel bilateral agreement). Turkey would also play an active military role.
A military intervention in Syria on fake humanitarian grounds would lead to an escalation of the US-NATO led war over a large area extending from North Africa and the Middle East to Central Asia, from the Eastern Mediterranean to China's Western frontier with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It would also contribute to a process of political destabilization in Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. It would also set the stage for a conflict with Iran.
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11 - Everything We're Doing Now Was Planned BEFORE 9/11
By Washington's Blog
Global Research, June 20, 2011
Washington's Blog - 2011-06-18
We've been told that 9/11 changed everything.
Is it true?
Let's look at the facts:
The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)
The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted "crap" in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - who sat on the National Security Council - also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office. And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might "have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.''
Cheney apparently even made Iraqi's oil fields a national security priority before 9/11. And the Sunday Herald reported: "Five months before September 11, the US advocated using force against Iraq ... to secure control of its oil." (remember that Alan Greenspan, John McCain, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, a high-level National Security Council officer and others all say that the Iraq war was really about oil.)
The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11. Indeed, former Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke told Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig:
After 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.
The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.
(4:30 into this video).
Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11
Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this
The government's spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)
The decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11
It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn't work to produce accurate intelligence ... but is an effective way to terrorize people
And - sadly - America played dirty games to justify and win wars before 9/11
9/11 didn't change anything. It was simply an excuse to implement existing plans.
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12 - Life expectancy declining in many parts of US
By Patrick Martin
Global Research, June 16, 2011
World Socialist Web Site
Average life expectancy is falling in many parts of the United States and for many demographic groups, most notably women, according to a study being published Wednesday in the journal Population Health Metrics, and conducted by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The results of the study are particularly striking in terms of women’s health. One quarter of all US counties saw an actual reduction in life expectancy for women between 1997 and 2007, meaning that girls born today are expected to live shorter lives than their mothers. As the Los Angeles Times wrote, “For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.”
This trend has accelerated over the past two decades. From 1987 to 1997, there were 314 counties out of more than 3,000 with either a loss of female life expectancy or no growth in it. From 1997 to 2007, there were 860 counties in which that was the case, compared to only 84 counties where male life expectancy decreased or stagnated.
These 860 counties form a broad swath across Appalachia (parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina) and the entire rural South, from the Carolinas to north Texas, as well as portions of the border states, including 82 percent of all counties in Oklahoma, 66 percent in Tennessee, and 59 percent in Kentucky.
In Mississippi, long the poorest and most unhealthy state, there are five counties where life expectancy for women is the same as that in Honduras, El Salvador and Peru, among the most impoverished countries in Latin America. Madison County, Mississippi, just north of Jackson, saw a staggering drop of two and a half years of life expectancy for women in just the past decade.
For one county in Mississippi, male life expectancy, for whites and blacks combined, was lower than the average male life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa. For five Mississippi counties, male life expectancy was the equivalent of the Philippines and Brazil.
The report, entitled “Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context,” compared life expectancy data for 3,138 U.S. counties and 10 cities with a previous survey from 1987 to 1997.
US life expectancy over a 20-year period, 1987-2007, continued to rise in absolute terms, up 4.3 years for men and 2.4 years for women, in large part because of declining rates of smoking and improvements in medical technology. But the United States lagged behind other industrialized countries, falling from 20th in the world in terms of life expectancy in 1987 to 37th in 2007.
The “falling behind” spoken of in the title of the study is particularly pronounced when data on the United States is compared with equivalent data from the 10 nations with the highest life expectancy. The 10 countries, 7 in western Europe, include Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Australia, Norway, Canada, Spain, France and the Netherlands.
The study calculated historical averages for life expectancy, year by year, for the top 10 countries, and then rated each US county against that scale—in other words, how many years behind (or in a few cases, ahead) each county was, compared to what the study called the health “frontier,” i.e., the average of the top 10 countries.
Some of the Mississippi counties, for example, had life expectancies equal to those achieved in the top 10 countries as far back as 1957, giving them a rating of 50 years “behind” the frontier. A few wealthy areas, such as Fairfax County, Virginia, were actually better than the average of the top 10 countries today, and received a rating of 16 years “ahead” of the frontier.
The overall trend was a wider and wider gap between the US performance and the top 10 countries. In 2007, only 78 US counties had improved their ranking for male life expectancy on this international scale, while 1,406 counties fell further behind and 1,663 counties were essentially unchanged. For female life expectancy, the figures were even worse: only 45 counties improved, 2,054 fell further behind, and 1,048 counties stayed the same.
Another striking feature of the report was the scale of inequality in health outcomes. A relative handful of affluent suburban counties, mainly in the Northeast and West Coast, have life expectancies better than or equal to those in Japan and western Europe. But overall, some 80 percent of US counties were behind the average for the top 10 countries, and this proportion has increased dramatically over the last decade.
One part of the study looked at local variations in Britain and Canada, and found that the United States had much greater internal disparities. While 17 percent of US counties were 30 years or more behind the world’s best countries, only 2 percent of Canadian localities were that far behind—mostly among the Inuit population in the far north—and in Britain, with its National Health Service, only two tenths of 1 percent of local jurisdictions were more than 30 years behind.
There were some positive findings in the study:
*Despite high poverty rates, Southern California and other parts of the Southwest have relatively better life expectancy because the Hispanic immigrant population is much healthier than the US average.
*Twelve states, including the whole of New England, Pennsylvania, and the Upper Midwest, have not a single county where life expectancy has declined.
*Life expectancy increased sharply in New York City, in large measure because of better treatment of AIDS patients, which drastically cut the mortality rate.
Overall, the report on life expectancy underscores the catastrophic effects of economic slump and growing social inequality on the physical survival of large portions of the working class population in the United States. Capitalism is not only inflicting unemployment, poverty, homelessness and hunger, it is literally killing young people, the elderly and people of working age.
Press accounts of the IHME study claimed that the authors discounted the impact of poverty and lack of education and emphasized the significance of behavioral factors such as smoking and obesity. This reporting demonstrates more the bias of the corporate-controlled media than a fair reading of the actual outlook of the scientists involved.
They write in the report summary: “Strong relationships have been documented between race/ethnicity, individual or community income, income inequality, and mortality in the US.” Later, they add, “Any analysis of causes of disparities will draw substantial attention to poverty, inequality, race, and ethnicity, but some of the poor performance and falling performance must be related to other factors.”
Dr. Ali Mokdad, an IHME official who is researching causal factors affecting life expectancy, listed four reasons for the trends found in the report: poverty and lack of education, access to health care, quality of medical care, and preventable risk factors.
The preventable conditions like obesity, untreated high blood pressure and smoking, are also correlated indirectly with poverty and lack of education, as well as lack of access to health care, which is particularly pronounced in isolated rural areas.
The tobacco companies cultivated the women’s market in the United States with heavy advertising in the decades after World War II. Despite the overall decline in smoking from 1965 on, after the Surgeon General’s report identified smoking as a major cause of cancer and lung disease, American women have ever since had a higher rate of smoking than women in other countries, which has had long-term consequences for their health.
Even more dangerous is the enormous increase in obesity, which has doubled in the past 30 years, from 17 percent to 34 percent of the population. Obesity is linked to low incomes, lack of access to healthy food choices, particularly fresh fruit and vegetables, and the dominance of fast-food outlets in poorer areas.
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13 - PHIL GIRALDI EX-CIA : DESTROYING THE USA FOR ISRAEL & OTHER VIDEOS
YouTube - Phil Giraldi Ex-CIA Destroying the USA for Israel ...
44 min - 3 Feb 2011 - Uploaded by o2optimus2o
Phil Giraldi Ex-CIA Destroying the USA for Israel Americas Traitors ... onAmericans June 8, 1967 - USS Liberty Survivor Phil Tourney ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVlpNcen8sk
More videos for Ex-CIA Phil Giraldi…The Proper Place for ... »
Ireland's Holocausthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaKv-Wl-cAs
YouTube - When Ireland Starved - Managing The Famine Part 1
10 min - 4 Jun 2008 - Uploaded by PassWorId
Comments by approval only This is a documentary on the Irish Famine ... be enough to do much good "" (page 5, free ebook irish holocaust) ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aimbgso7LVo
YouTube - Irish Famine film
5 min - 14 Jan 2008 - Uploaded by worcesterjonny
grain and cattle that would have fed 8 million people was taken out of the country by the brits at gunpoint ( irish holocaust - free ebook ...
Nazi America: The End of Liberty
The terrorists won. Our liberties and our rights are diminished in such extreme measures. I really feel and view The Dept. Of Homeland Security can be equated with the Gestapo, the secret police. When you become informed of their operations, fusion centers, propaganda and how it is conducted; it feels like the situations of oppressed people under Nazism. The enemies of the USA seem to have won after causing the nation to pursue “security” for themselves, it feels like oppression to myself.
This Comment by Travis25601
Join the movement: http://inflation.us
GLOBAL RESEARCH Audio Video Library
Global Research TV (GRTV): See the World Through an Independent Lens
AUDIO: The Myth of a Free Press
VIDEO: Contaminated H1N1 Vaccines?
VIDEO: The Nature and Significance of NATO-US-Israeli War Crimes
VIDEO: The Federal Reserve is paying banks NOT to make loans to struggling Americans!
VIDEO: Taxpayers, Where Is Your Money Going?
VIDEO: US-NATO War Crimes: "Humanitarian Intervention" Challenged
VIDEO: SHADOWPLAY: 9/11 PUPPETMASTERS.
VIDEO: Rare Footage - Flight 93 crashes in Pennsylvania - September 11 2001
VIDEO: Canada and the Afghan War
VIDEO: The Dangers of a Nuclear War
VIDEO: 100,000 Iraqi Kids Killed
VIDEO: British Mercenary Company Kills Iraqi Civilians
VIDEO: World Tribunal on Iraq
US Apache Helicopter massacring Iraqis
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14 - IDF-Soldier gets 6 months community service for raping 10 year-old cousin over 3 year, victim gets life
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1115705337832
May. 10, 2005 14:44
Serial sexual abuser get 6 mos. community service
By JPOST.COM STAFF
A 22-year-old who plead guilty as part of a plea bargain to repeatedly sexually abusing a minor over a three-year period was sentenced to six months of community service and fined NIS 20,000.
The youth, who had sexually abused his cousin since she was 10 years old, was sentenced in the Tel Aviv District Court on Tuesday, Army Radio reported.
The sentence was unusually lenient for such a case, Army Radio noted, as the punishment for a comparative sexual offence is generally three years in prison.
The light sentence comes only one day after State Prosecutor Eran Shendar charged the powerlessness of law enforcement was leading to a significant rise in crime in Israel. "The public is increasingly feeling that the law enforcement system gets a failing grade in its war against crime," Shendar said.
However Shendar extended the blame to the judicial system as well. "Courts today are not prepared to deal with the large-scale cases brought against crime organizations. Hearings are often set for months after an indictment is file – sometimes the suspects are held for over nine months [before they are tried], and even then the trials can go on for years," he said.
2)
Soldier gets 6 months community service for raping young cousin
By Zvi Harel, Haaretz Correspondent
Haaretz
Tue., May 10, 2005 Iyar 1, 5765
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/574687.html
Tel Aviv District Court on Tuesday sentenced an Israel Defense Forces soldier to six months community service for raping his young cousin
repeatedly over a period of two years, beginning when she was 11.
The soldier was also ordered to pay his cousin NIS 20,000 in
compensation. The prosecution had requested that he be given a three-year jail sentence.
In deciding on his sentence, the court had taken into account an
psychological evaluation of the accused, which determined that he had no pedophiliac inclinations, or other sexual perversions.
The evaluation also determined that he had low self-image regarding his male identity.
The psychological examination also found that the soldier had
difficulty sleeping at night, and found the possibility of jail very
distressing. The psychologist said that the trauma of imprisonment would cause him to have a nervous breakdown and could even spark thoughts of suicide.
According to the evaluation, the accused, who comes from a religious background, had been living an observant Jewish lifestyle and serving in an elite combat unit. In the wake of his trial, however, he had been moved to a combat support role with the consent of his superiors.
Following the rapes, the girl began to lose her religious faith, had difficulty sleeping and suffered from recurring nightmares. She also lost all of her hair, and has to wear a wig.
In handing down their ruling, the three women judges wrote that they
intended to send the message that it is not pointless for women to
make a rape complaint, and to show the accused that he is directly responsible for an attack on a child, and for the need to seek her forgiveness.
Kedman: Courts more attentive to accused than to victims The National Council for the Child slammed the court's ruling.
"We are, indeed, obligated to respect the court but more than that we are obligated to respect those helpless children who fall victim to abuse without any defense or salvation," organization director Dr.
Yitzhak Kedman said.
"It is unthinkable that over and over we see that the courts provide no defense to abused children and are more attentive to the distress of the accused than to the victims," Kedman said.
He also warned that the "ridiculous" sentence handed to the IDF soldier gives the message that sexual abuse of children is a minor infraction and that it is enough for the accused to express regret
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