The Syrian Endgame, “A Lost War is Dangerous”. US-NATO, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, “Losers on The Rampage”
By Prof. Tim Anderson It should be clear by now that every single anti-government armed group in Syria has been created by Washington and its allies. Several senior US officials have admitted the fact. Regime change has always been the goal.
Anderson
The Geneva process over Syria is in many respects different, because it is a charade. The NATO and Gulf monarchy sponsors pretend to support Syrian ‘opposition’ groups and pretend to fight the same extremist groups they created.
Yet the dangers are very real because the Saudis and Turkey might react unpredictably, faced with the failure of their five year project to carve up Syria. Both countries have threatened to invade Syria, to defend their ‘assets’ from inevitable defeat from the powerful alliance Syria has forged with Russia, Iran, Iraq and the better party of Lebanon.
It should be clear by now that every single anti-government armed group in Syria has been created by Washington and its allies. Several senior US officials have admitted the fact. Regime change has always been the goal. Nevertheless, the charade of a ‘War on ISIS’ goes on, with a compliant western media unwilling to point out that ‘the emperor has no clothes’.
Geneva 3 has actually brought some results. First, none of the NATO-backed ‘opposition’ groups managed to show a credible face. Second, and more importantly, the US and Russia kept talking and actually developed another de-escalation plan. It is not conclusive but it is encouraging.
The ‘moderate rebel’ masks are down, we now know who they are: the internationally proscribed terrorist group Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria) and its long term Salafist allies Jaysh al Islam (the Army of Islam) and Ahrar as Sham. The latter two are the remnants of the Syrian Salafist groups. In northern Syria they are also welded together by Turkey and the Saudis into the very non-moderate-sounding Jaysh al Fatah (the Army of Conquest).
These extremist groups represent very few in Syria, as MINT Press journalist Mnar Muhawesh pointed out in her editorial piece ‘The Syrian Opposition’s NATO Sponsored Apocalyptic Vision For Syria’: In ideology they are no different to ISIS.
It may be stating the obvious to say that al Qaeda groups have poor negotiating skills. In any event, they proved it in Geneva. Losing on the battlefield they demanded capitulation in Geneva, then stormed out.
Foreign backed terrorists aside, who are the real Syrian opposition?
Firstly, they are the groups that created the 2005 Damascus Declaration but who sided with the state and the army in early 2011, when the Salafist insurrection hijacked the reform demonstrations.
Some of them like Haytham Manna and former minister Qadri Jamil appeared in Geneva. Others like the powerful Syrian Social National Party (SSNP) backed Bashar al Assad’s government, back in 2011.
Still others sat on the sidelines, frustrated at the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent hijacking of the reform movement. Sharmine Narwani’s piece at RT ‘Will Geneva talks lead right back to Assad’s 2011 reforms?’ illustrates this very well. As the Damascus Declaration made plain, most of the Syrian opposition rejected both foreign sponsorship and violent attacks on the state.
Second are the Syrian Kurds, who were open to foreign assistance but rejected attacks on the Syrian Army and state. They have received most of their arms from Damascus. Preferring to side with the Syrian Army than the Salafists, their presence in Geneva was not tolerated by Erdogan or his clients.
Jihadist with powerful anti-tank rocket launcher almost certainly procured by the CIA on the international arms market. (The M79 OSA is an effective anti-armor rocket system manufactured in the former Yugoslavia.) Washington and its allies have been channeling weapons to the lunatics and insurgents for years, primarily via Turkey and Jordan.
That left Russia and the USA to discuss their supposed common goals (destroying terrorists) while Erdogan and the Saudis seethed. The aims of the two big powers are worlds apart. Hat difference is seen in the loss of Washington’s proxies in Syria in face of the rise of the 4+1 (Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah).
That shift, in turn, threatens to derail the Bush plan for a ‘New Middle East’. The US wanted to control the entire region, now it faces losing it all.
Russia for its part has pursued its own interests in the region, backing its allies in accordance with international law. Its use of air power in Syria followed the Syria-Iran-Iraq-Hezbollah accord on ground power forces. That is the force currently prevailing on Syrian soil.
The good news is that, despite these widely differing aims, Washington and Moscow have kept talking and managed a provisional agreement at Geneva, with three heads.
The first agreement is over humanitarian aid, which faces serious obstacles due to the series of sieges taking place. Some of these are al Qaeda groups’ sieges, such as that on Foua and Kafraya in the north; but increasingly they are becoming Syrian Army sieges on al Qaeda fighters who hole up in towns and cities, such as Madaya and Eastern Aleppo. Most ground aid is going in through the Government-supervised Syria Arab Red Crescent, but air drops are being organised for Deir eZorr, and some other places.
Second, there is a political process which (it has been agreed) must be exclusively between Syrians, unconditional and inclusive. Contrary to many outside reports, there is not yet any framework for this, nor plans for early elections. The Syrian position, backed by Russia, is that the Syrian constitution (and the legally mandated schedule of elections) prevails until the Syrian people vote to change it.
HYPOCRISY RULES— “The Obama administration has always approached the Syrian conflict in an arms-length way, reminiscent of the CIA’s ‘plausible deniability’ over its death squads in Latin America…”
Finally the agreement on ‘cessation of hostilities’, due almost immediately, has a task force to oversee the details. This ceasefire does not apply to any group identified by the UN Security Council as a terrorist group. That immediately rules out ISIS or Jabhat al Nusra. The major obstacle here is that Russia wants Jaysh al Islam and Ahrar as Sham (which have both collaborated with al Nusra for many years) added to the UNSC list. If Washington agrees to this, they will virtually abandon their ‘moderate rebel’ option. There is no other force of substance on the ground. The Saudis and Erdogan would be furious.
How will the US manage these tensions? The Obama administration has always approached the Syrian conflict in an arms-length way, reminiscent of the CIA’s ‘plausible deniability’ over its death squads in Latin America. But credibility problems have grown and Washington does seem more concerned at finding a way out rather than risking a new desperate gambit. That would certainly lead to serious escalation, and without any guarantee of success.
Would Washington allow Erdogan and the Saudis to initiate a major escalation, without US approval? I think not. Obama resisted Saudi and Israeli provocations, when the Iran deal was imminent. Even Bush could not be provoked into a confrontation with Russia, when invited by Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili.
For its part, Russia is well prepared for a provocation across the Turkish border. Logic suggests that the losers must lose. But this is a dangerous time.
About the Author
Tim Anderson has degrees in economics and international politics, and a doctorate on the political economy of economic liberalisation in Australia. His current research interests relate to (i) Development strategy and rights in development, (ii) Melanesian land and livelihoods, and (iii) Economic Integration in Latin America. Dr Anderson is a senior lecturer attached to the University of Sydney.
Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com
We apologize for this inconvenience.
=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you—ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.
Nauseated by the vile corporate media? Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?
GET EVEN. Send a donation to The Greanville Post–or
SHARE OUR ARTICLES WIDELY! But be sure to support YOUR media.
If you don’t, who will?
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOTTHE AUTHORS.
Syria: Phantom “Rebels” Return from the Dead
By Tony Cartalucci
Crosspost with Global Research, March 07, 2016
New Eastern Outlook 7 March 2016
During early victories against the West’s proxy forces, Al Qaeda and ISIS militants would dress as women to flee the battlefield. Now, they are dressing up as the otherwise nonexistent “FSA.”
A photo taken on January 30, 2015 shows the eastern part of the destroyed Syrian town of Kobane, also known as Ain al-Arab. This is what the utterly hypocritical and criminal Western meddling in Syria has wrought.
The French colonial green, white, and black banner of Syria adapted by the West’s proxy “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) had long been forgotten in the sea of black banners held aloft by Washington and Riyadh’s more extreme ploy to gain leverage upon and more direct access to the battlefield.
However, as Syrian forces backed by its regional allies and Russian airpower overwhelm these forces while building alliances with other factions, including the Kurds, the West’s entire regime change enterprise faces ignominious collapse.
It appears that – having exhausted all other options – the West has decided to change as many of those black banners back to the “rebel” green, white, and black as possible, before the conflict draws to a close, giving the West the most favorable position achievable ahead
The West’s Shape-Shifting Proxies
For years, just looking at maps – including those produced by Washington-based think tanks themselves – revealed the true nature of Syria’s ongoing conflict. Forces could be seen flowing into the country as one would expect amid an invasion, not a “civil war.” While the West’s military campaigns over and upon Syrian soil claimed to be taking on the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), it was clear that nothing was being done about of “peace talks.”cutting off the obvious supply corridors sustaining ISIS’ fighting capacity.
There are really no “moderate” rebels, as has been demonstrated many times. Those who fight and cause he mayhem are usually al-Qaeda in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra), or outright ISIL. They are now being used to claim territory which by rights should go to the Syrian Army and the legitimate government.
In other words, the US and its “coalition’s” war on ISIS was feigned. No genuine military campaign would ever be fought on the front lines while neglecting the enemy’s logistical lifelines – especially when those lifelines led from NATO territory.
It wasn’t until Russia’s intervention on behalf of the Syrian government, that these corridors were targeted and disrupted – thus fully exposing the gambit for all the world to see.
Not surprisingly, as soon as this began, it had an immediate effect on the West’s proxy forces across the country. Since then, Russian-backed Syrian forces have incrementally begun sealing off Syria’s borders, isolating stranded terrorist factions within the interior of the country, and retaking territory as these forces atrophy and dissipate.
For years it has been asked why the West has done nothing about cutting these obvious supply corridors leading into Syria and sustaining terrorist factions like ISIS, Al Nusra, and their allies – groups which now clearly constitute the vast majority of militants fighting the Syrian government – even by the US government’s own admission.
The rebels have had advanced and expensive weapons from the very earliest.
The company we keep. Thank you, US taxpayers.
As the global public becomes increasingly aware of this glaring point of logic, it appears that the West is now attempting to cynically leverage it, while simultaneously rescuing thousands of trapped terrorist mercenaries facing encirclement and eradication in the closing phases of the Syrian conflict.
Just last week, the “New Syrian Army,” a monkier for the discredited FSA, suddenly appeared on the Iraqi-Syrian border, “cutting off” ISIS supply lines leading back and forth between the two countries.
Reuters in their article, “Syrian rebels seize Iraq border crossing from Islamic State: monitor,” would claim:
Syrian rebel fighters seized a border crossing with Iraq from Islamic State on Friday, Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Radical Syrian militants have reportedly come into possession of high-powered anti-tank weaponry supplied by US. Just by “accident” says the US government. Right
Islamic State had controlled the al-Tanf border crossing, which is also near the Syrian-Jordanian border, since May last year after seizing it from Syrian government forces. It had been the last border crossing with Iraq that was under the control of the Syrian government.
The only “source” is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is in fact a single man living in England who regularly coordinates with the British Foreign Ministry.
One could ask why such border interdiction operations haven’t been done before, and in fact, why these “rebels” who are admittedly harbored, trained, funded, and armed in Jordan and Turkey to begin with, didn’t first begin by securing Syria’s borders to prevent ISIS from entering the country in precisely the same areas “rebels” are supposedly operating?
The answer is simple. The West had no intention of stopping ISIS. In fact, ISIS is the “rebels” and the “rebels” are ISIS. Their “taking” of the Syrian-Iraqi border is superficial at best. The weapons, cash, and fighters will still flow, just as they do past NATO forces along the Turkish-Syrian border. The only difference is that now these terrorists will be flying the “FSA” flag, lending them protection amid a ceasefire agreed to in good faith by the Syrian government and its allies.
Rebels are Not Prevailing – ISIS is Just Flying a New Flag
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he ceasefire has, at least temporarily, bought time for terrorists groups Syria and Russia have – perhaps mistakenly – recognized as militant groups to be negotiated with. Taking full advantage of this, the “FSA” is now suddenly appearing as if rising from the dead, everywhere ISIS and Al Qaeda have dominated for years.
The New York Times published its own desperate bid to convince the global public that once again “pro-democracy protesters” were climbing out of the rubble in Idlib and Aleppo – two cities admittedly overrun by Al Qaeda and ISIS long ago – and flying the “FSA” flag.
The article titled, “Syrian Protesters Take to Streets as Airstrikes Ease,” claims that:
Street protests erupted across insurgent-held areas of Syria on Friday, as demonstrators took advantage of the relative lull in airstrikes during a partial truce, coming out in the largest numbers in years to declare that even after five punishing years of war they still wanted political change.
ISIS is rapidly being repackaged as “moderate FSA” so it can live on and be used later. Washington refuses to let go of a Frankenstein it created at big cost with Qatar and the Saudis over several years.
Under the slogan “The Revolution Continues,” demonstrators waved the green, white and black pre-Baathist flag adopted during the early, largely peaceful stages of the revolt, before the proliferation of armed Islamist factions with black jihadist banners.
Five years on from the so-called “Arab Spring,” the fully engineered nature of the original protests in 2011 have been so thoroughly exposed and understood by the public, that few if anyone believes these protests now are anything but a desperately staged public-relations campaign to prove that there are people elsewhere besides Washington, Langley, London, and Brussels, that still seeks regime change in Syria.
The West’s terrorist proxies are changing from a war-footing – having lost the war – to a last-ditch posture of claiming legitimate opposition in hopes of salvaging what’s left of the political networks and terrorist fronts that collaborated with the West in this highly destructive conspiracy.
“Uprising” in Al Raqqa
Finally, in the very heart of the West’s proxy terrorist forces, Al Raqqa – the defacto capital of ISIS – there are suddenly reports of “uprisings” by the local population. This happens conveniently as the Syrian Arab Army approaches from the west and Kurds descend upon the city from the northeast.
Leading up to this “uprising” was a story in the London Telegraph titled, “Islamic State ‘hit by cash crisis in its capital Raqqa‘,” which claims:
Faced with a cash shortage in its self-declared caliphate, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has slashed salaries, asked Raqqa residents to pay utility bills in black market American dollars, and is now releasing detainees for a price of $500 a person.
Sectarian conflict is one of the many ingredients in Syria’s volatile mix. The Sunnis have set a record for ferocity and sheer brutality.
While the Telegraph credits “coalition airstrikes” for this turn of fortune, it is quite obvious that Syrian and Russian airstrikes along the Turkish border destroying entire convoys bound for ISIS territory has led to a reduction in ISIS’ fighting capacity as well as its ability to administer seized territory.
With a terrorist force the West has spent 5 years and untold billions creating facing complete encirclement and eradication, what options are left? An “uprising” where suddenly the entire city is flying “FSA” flags, thus negating the need for Syrian or Kurdish forces to move in and retake the city?
That appears to be the narrative the West is already preparing – in Raqqa and elsewhere across Syria – as a component amid the so-called “ceasefire” and “peace talks.”
The BBC had dressed up a terrorist commander in FSA regalia for an interview – but included footage of the commander in the field operating under clearly terrorist banners. It was but an individual example of what it appears the West is doing now on a much larger scale – playing dress-up to save its immense but now stranded terrorist hordes.
During early victories against the West’s proxy forces, Al Qaeda and ISIS militants would dress as women to flee the battlefield. Now, they are dressing up as the otherwise nonexistent “FSA.”
Will the West expect Syria and its allies to negotiate with this phantom army operating under a fictional banner? For Syria and its allies, what the West is doing is a clear violation of the spirit of the ceasefire and of upcoming peace talks. It is also a reaffirmation of the West’s disingenuous commitment to fighting terrorism – clearly using it as a tool to fight its battles for it, to serve as a pretext for intervening when terrorism alone cannot achieve an objective, and then, when all else fails, covering up entire legions of terrorists so that they can live to fight another day.
Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com
We apologize for this inconvenience.
=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you—ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.
“The biggest problem is the growing inequality between well-off whites and the majority of black people. And that chasm is growing economically, socially and in the realm of opportunity.”
In 2013, Ronnie Kasrils, a former commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the once-outlawed African National Congress who also served as minister of intelligence in the ANC government, declared that the post-apartheid ANC had ‘sold out’ the poor in a ‘Faustian pact’ with international capital. In a recent interview, Kasrils warns that South Africa cannot fully vanquish racism unless it tackles the root causes. Kasrils was interviewed by Janet Smith, of #RacismStopsWithMe, where this article previously appeared.
“If we just prattle on papering over the cracks, the demon of racism and xenophobia will grow.”
Janet Smith: Please describe the suburb in which you grew up in terms of racial identities, and how people did or did not find each other across those divides.
Ronnie Kasrils: Well, first let us start with another question. What are the causal roots of racism?
Racism is a system of domination that came into being over five centuries ago as the seafaring powers of Europe conquered the peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia to establish their trans-oceanic empires. Because imperial conquest was so brutal, an exculpatory ideology of European (white) racial superiority over the dark skinned people of the world was invented to lend moral justification to the brutalities of empire.
Prior to that, empires embracing peoples of different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic communities did not elevate their “racial” group above others. The Mongols, the Ottomans, the Moors, even the Ancient Romans, all sought to integrate, assimilate and co-opt the elites among those they’d conquered. Post-Renaissance European conquerors behaved otherwise.
We are all products of our environment and times.
I was born in 1938 and grew up in Yeoville, Johannesburg. It was a lower middle class suburb, possibly one-third Jewish, with a mix of English-speaking white South Africans and some Portuguese and Afrikaans families. The only blacks in evidence were domestic workers and menial employees in the nearby shops.
My family, like most Jews in the area, were first or second generation immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania in eastern Europe or English cities with large Jewish populations like Manchester or London.
“Relationships between whites and blacks only existed within the master-servant set-up and white domination was accepted as immutable and natural.”
We lived in an apartment block whose residents were all Jewish. The fathers were either small shopkeepers or, like mine, worked as commercial travellers. My father drove his own 1947 Plymouth. They worked hard to build up savings and move north to own property in more salubrious suburbs such as Sydenham, Cyrildene and ultimately Houghton.
They tried to augment their income at the Turffontein race course and loved playing poker. The wives contributed to family fortunes by taking part or full-time employment as shop assistants.
My folks, like most of their peers, were not particularly religious, but went through the motions of Sabbath meals and attended synagogue on high holidays. The sum of all this was a Jewish group identification within the privileged whiteness of South Africa.
Boer and Brit hegemony was unquestioned with Jewish outsiders nervy of the anti-Semitism of both “races.” Virtually all Jewish voters supported Smuts’s United Party.
We kids played in the streets, and I must say we were happy and carefree with a rumbustious spirit afoot in the neighborhood. Relationships between whites and blacks only existed within the master-servant set-up and white domination was accepted as immutable and natural.
Attitudes to blacks were downright racist, rude and aggressive, even to a family’s long suffering domestic paid a lowly rate, living in a squalid back room, separated from rural family and children by race laws.
I was fortunate that my parents were more considerate than most.
JS: You were 10 in 1948. Can you remember the launch of apartheid, and what your family and friends said about it?
RK: My family were dismayed at the result. I particularly remember three girls of a neighboring family whose father was a Jewish worker from Russia telling me the Nats were fascists and things were going to be very bad for us all. But things passed and such nightmares soon dispersed. By 1952 an uncle announced he was voting Nat and that enraged me at the age of 14.
I remember a slogan painted on a wall: “An Attack on Communism is an Attack on You.” That was 1950 with the banning of the Communist Party and soon the advent of the Group Areas Act.
The slogan made a lasting impression on me and got me questioning its meaning.
Photographs of police brutality appeared in the media and horrified me. The 1956 Treason Trial saw the arrest of a Durban cousin, Jacqueline Arenstein, and my mother consequently taking sandwiches for the accused appearing in Jo’burg’s downtown Drill Hall. She was caught up in a police baton charge on demonstrators, and some shooting, and was urged by my father to stop attending.
My grandfather said she was mad to have got involved in the first place and I had a furious row with him in her defense.
When I asked our domestic worker what she thought, she grew grave and said things were bad and “boers” were “izinja” (dogs). The cleaners of the flats were rural Zulu and told me the Boers were out to avenge Dingaan slaying Piet Retief and it was amaZulu who they feared most.
JS: Did you know any black people, personally, as a child?
RK: Only the domestic workers referred to. But I adored Poppy, our nanny, who must have been in her twenties. She was pretty, stylish and full of fun. She loved to go to Sophiatown on her day off, dressed in flared skirt, blouse, chic beret. She showed my sister and I dance steps and we loved her singing songs like “Chatanooga Choo Choo” which became one of my all-time favourites.
There was a resident labourer at the Yeoville synagogue who intriqued me because he could speak fluent Yiddish, a language I love, and learnt a bit from my grandparents. His name was Solomon and he told me he was from the Lembe people in the Venda area of the old Northern Transvaal, who claim to be Jews.
I sometimes visited him in his stuffy room back of the synagogue and noticed he had a store of books: Dickens, Shakespeare and Alan Paton’s Cry The Beloved Country, recently published. He told me I should read it and I did. I cried like hell.
JS: Can you remember witnessing racism when you were growing up, or was it so much a part of white culture that white people didn’t think particularly of it?
RK:If you didn’t shut your ears and eyes, it was all around you. Most of the neighbors, including school mates, used the “K” word incessantly. I loathed it.
I recall two white neighbors getting into a dispute and almost exchanging blows. A crowd gathered around and the one man’s wife intervened to prevent her husband getting a beating. “How can you behave like K*****s”, she cried to the two men, gesturing in disgust to the domestic workers congregating nearby. I could not but note the calm dignity of those women who slaved away in our kitchens.
But far worse was the terror visited on black people in the city streets. Who could forget the sight of African males scurrying away when the police swooped during downtown pass raids; the sight of victims being thrown into the waiting police vans; or children being sjambokked for daring to beg on cold winter nights outside the cinema houses.
“We closed a Faustian bargain…we traded off commitment to radical economic change for political power…”
In my early teens I began going to the downtown bioscopes and once saw a group of coarse young drunks beating a black man into the gutter, blood flowing, because he was better dressed than them and would not give way on the pavement. Elder boys from my suburb, who I looked up to as tough role models, scurried away, while I cried out. White adults averted their eyes. When one read in the papers about police brutality or the latest apartheid measures it became more and more obvious what the state of the country was. Simply seeing the visible poverty of blacks, the endless queues for buses to the townships, the suffering and dismay in people’s eyes, told the story – if you had half a heart.
JS: Your parents’ Jewish heritage must have given you a greater understanding of what it meant to be outside the predominant white frame at the time?
RK: Again, this is only true if you were prepared to open your eyes and question. I say this because the overwhelming majority of my “tribal” group behaved like so many other whites – then as now.
Yet Jews are sensitive to a form of racism termed anti-Semitism. Zionism preaches that anti-Semitism is intrinsic in all non-Jews. That, I believe, is a falsehood aimed at playing the perpetual victim and the motivation through fear of group identity and unity at all costs.
Though hardly unexpected, the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 shook South Africa.
Sharpeville: the people try to escape.
Trucks laden with coffins of black victims of South African shooting roll through lines of mourners during mass funeral ceremony at Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, South Africa, March 21, 1960. No whites were permitted into the area during the funeral of 70 victims, who were killed by South African white police. (AP Photo)
Mass burial.
SIDEBAR
EVENTS LEADING TO THE SHARPEVILLE MASSACRE. READ MORE DETAILS HERE. CLICK ON THIS BAR.
On March 21, a group of between 5,000 and 10,000 people converged on the local police station in the township of Sharpeville, offering themselves up for arrest for not carrying their passbooks.[6] The Sharpeville police were not completely unprepared for the demonstration, as they had already been forced to drive smaller groups of more militant activists away the previous night.[7] Many of the civilians present attended to support the protest, but there is evidence that the PAC (a rival of ANC) also used intimidating means to draw the crowd there, including the cutting of telephone lines into Sharpeville, the distribution of pamphlets telling people not to go to work on the day, and coercion of bus drivers and commuters.[3]:p.534
By 10:00, a large crowd had gathered, and the atmosphere was initially peaceful and festive. Fewer than 20 police officers were present in the station at the start of the protest. Later the crowd grew to about 20,000,[2] and the mood was described as "ugly",[2] prompting about 130 police reinforcements, supported by four Saracen armoured personnel carriers, to be rushed in. The police were armed with firearms, including Sten submachine guns and Lee–Enfield rifles. There was no evidence that anyone in the gathering was armed with anything other than rocks.[2] F-86 Sabre jets and Harvard Trainers approached to within a hundred feet of the ground, flying low over the crowd in an attempt to scatter it.
The protestors responded by hurling a few stones (striking three policemen) and menacing the police barricades. Tear gas proved ineffectual, and policemen elected to repel these advances with their batons.[7] At about 13:00 the police tried to arrest a protestor, resulting in a scuffle, and the crowd surged forward.[2] The shooting began shortly thereafter.[2]
Death and injury toll The official figure is that 69 people were killed, including 8 women and 10 children, and 180 injured, including 31 women and 19 children. Many were shot in the back as they turned to flee.[8]
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
SIDEBAR ENDS HERE. REGULAR TEXT RESUMES
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his laager mentality is no different from other reactionary beliefs justifying ones exclusive rights over another – a source of racism. It applied to colonization, slavery, ethnic cleansing of continents, apartheid South Africa and to Israel.
My parents were not intellectuals or political thinkers. Many of my generation did far better than I at school. I never even got a university degree. They supposedly had the same Jewish heritage. We came from similar backgrounds, had same parental love and opportunities. Why then did I – and a few like me then and now – act in general for others and not simply for self?
“Narrowness, sectarianism, living in a cocoon, exclusively bound within one’s own tribe, undermines universal justice and the meaning of liberty, equality, fraternity.”
That’s a many-layered question. I reckon the big turning point in my life came when I asked my mother sometime in 1945 whether black people in South Africa were being treated like Jews in Germany. She was a kind, simple woman, with the sense to tell her young son that although Africans were not being thrown into gas ovens in concentration camps, the evil starts with racial prejudice and cruelty. It can then get out of hand.
That was the similarity. That was the most important lesson of my life. My friends would surely have asked such questions. My lived experience is that they were fobbed off, their minds kept shut.
My understanding of the Jewish heritage is, as Rabbi Hilel put it over 2000 years ago: “Do not unto others which is hateful to you.” Well, actually, is that not true of the sacred message of all religions and creeds? “Do unto others as you wish them do unto you?”
I believe narrowness, sectarianism, living in a cocoon, exclusively bound within one’s own tribe, undermines universal justice and the meaning of liberty, equality, fraternity.
The first political meeting I attended of the ANC-aligned white Congress of Democrats opened my eyes. I thought the likes of Luli Callinicos, Mary Turok and Helen Joseph were all Jews because they appeared kindly, like some of the thinking Jews I knew. I soon discovered I was the only Jew present – a good lesson in breaking away from stereotypical imaginings.
Undoubtedly my misperception was fed by the reality that among the whites, that the tiny minority who identified with the Struggle, were overwhelmingly Jewish.
JS: Perhaps you were more fortunate than most in that you spent time as a young adult in the creative industries, but what was the atmosphere then, in the late 1950s into the early part of the 1960s, around so-called racial mixing?
RK: As I approached matric year and learnt from our history teacher at King Edward (KES) about the French Revolution – he helped us see the equivalents of aristocrats and serfs in South Africa’s colonial apartheid system – I consciously inclined towards crossing the color line.
I had become appalled by apartheid and wished to forge a new existential identity inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s books. Making my own choices I felt would free me from the baggage of typical whiteness.
This came naturally because I was a rebel by nature. I dispensed with the standard hair parting and dyed my forelocks blond as a token of revolt thus foregoing prefect-status and sports colours at school. Leaving school I inclined to the Bohemian circles of Hillbrow, mixed with lesbians and gays, artists, poets, musicians, writers. I forged friendships with the Drum, Golden City Post journalists and went to racially mixed parties.
I enjoyed liaisons with beautiful black women and found we were all the same under the skin.
Some school pals were horrified with my behavior, actually more with my having gay friends than crossing the color line, since at Wits, such behavior was not unknown.
JS: You’ve said the Sharpeville Massacre prompted you to join the ANC. Please describe how it affected you.
RK: The Sharpeville massacre hit me with the force of an express train. I was at work when it happened and argued with the white workers. They scoffed at me: “Don’t you realize we sink or swim together.”
They were angry at the way I fraternized with the black workers who gave me leaflets issued by the ANC. I argued with family and friends and felt isolated. Even the crowd I partied with, while critical of the shootings, were merely inclined to go on drinking and debating.
I realized my existentialism was no answer. I could not be free unless the black majority was liberated. That required action. I took holiday leave that Easter and headed for Durban to contact my communist cousin Jackie Arenstein and her lawyer husband Rowley. That set me on the active road to freedom and my entire being was changed and fashioned by the common struggle of our people.
I would never change that, whatever the vicissitudes of life.
JS: How did those around you react to what some must have seen as you embracing black people?
RK: When I became actively involved, my parents were most anxious but stood loyally by me from banning to disappearing underground and going into exile in 1963.
I had previously married a Hillbrow woman who loved the township jols but was frightened off by the political activism which led to an early divorce. My next marriage to fellow activist Eleanor Logan, who shared my views, led to a 45-year marriage until her death in 2009.
Life in the liberation struggle was far more emotionally meaningful and enriching than in my past racial and ethnic persona. Well, I was unaware of that in 1960 but by then I believe I had shed any fundamental racial prejudices…male chauvinism took longer to consciously combat.
I did not succumb to racist brainwashing through school, society, environment owing to the psychological impact of the early formative years I have referred to. At an early age I saw the ugliness of racism and it repelled me. The Jewish aspect played a part but I do not believe it was fundamental. However what would have been necessary was having a mother like I was fortunate to have who kept my childhood basic instincts flowing.
I believe children are innately decent. It is when a negative socialization intervenes in the guise of parents, education, friends, social system that the wrong values are inculcated and difficult to correct whether by self or external intervention.
JS: Within four years of Sharpeville, you were in Odessa in the USSR, receiving training. Did your experience there change you even more deeply around race?
RK: I’ll never forget the impact the Soviet Union made on MK cadres training there in Odessa, Moscow, the Crimea and elsewhere through the sixties and seventies.
My 1964 year, all 200 of us, with me the only non-black, excelled in the environment, the training, the comfort and care.
From Soviet instructors, to female kitchen staff, we were treated as family. Young black recruits from all over our country were cooked for, waited on at table, taught by an officer core that had fought the fascist invaders.
On weekends we had pocket money and were free to discover Odessa and attend its Officers’ Palace where dances took place Saturday evenings. Some older comrades developed relationships with the many Soviet war widows and sometimes I would accompany them for Sunday lunch. Old Ngapepe, from the Eastern Cape, was clucked over by his romantic attachment, and wore gown and slippers in her modest home.
Political classes fortified our understanding and the easy wit of the lecturers had us laughing with such comments as “Comrades, Revolution is not Rock and Roll.” It was Marxism and its class basis that deepened our understanding and explained the role that racism played in conquering territory and nations, dividing workers and people, creating myths, furthering exploitation and fermenting wars – all to further the interests and power of the capitalists and their imperialist system.
Whatever problems the Soviet enterprise faced that led to its collapse, the positive experience has not been forgotten.
There were negative racial attitudes and there was racist conduct by Soviet citizens towards African students in the USSR (and other countries of the socialist bloc), which MK trainees were perhaps spared. But it was nothing like the lynchings and police massacres in the US. Unlike the US, the authorities in the USSR actively tried to enforce racial equality.
JS: What was it like to mix with true non-racial people at that time? You knew Joe Slovo, Albie Sachs, Bram Fischer, Walter Sisulu, JB Marks, Moses Kotane, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, Thabo Mbeki…the list goes on.
RK: I was fortunate to interact with the senior figures by 1965 and they had an indelible impact on me. In those early years, and before familiarity became rooted, I regarded the older comrades as virtual saints – when one became aware of particular weaknesses and egos that only made them more human.
They worked in the first place to serve the people. They made huge sacrifices. They had solid principles and were of great moral integrity. This does not mean they were infallible. They were for the working class and the poor, the emancipation of the African majority and minority groups, and the liberation of all our people – including the whites.
White comrades such as Rica Hodgson and Brian Bunting did not believe they were exceptional, but I know that, once in prison together (in 1960, during the State of Emergency), they spoke about their belief that white people could change and that they were but among the first “through the door” (having freed themselves from racial prejudice).
When you rubbed shoulders with the likes of Yusuf Dadoo, Marks, Duma Nokwe, Pallo Jordan, Mbeki, you felt absolutely equal under the skin.
JS: In your experience, are many or even most white people, specifically white South Africans, racist in some way?
RK: Black people are best placed to provide an answer. Regrettably it appears far too many whites remain out there with backward ideas and prejudices.
The list of white democrats and communists from the Struggle years were a minority of a minority. Yet in looking at how the numbers increased, gives cause for hope.
But while government needs to be doing more, the reason there is so little headway is owing to the resistance of the whites. The bloc voting of the white minority – first for the Nats in 1994; and since 1999 for the DA is a manifestation of that resistance of the majority of whites.
The Sparrows and Kohler-Barnards are the tip of the iceberg.
It is misleading to generalise. The list of white democrats and Communists from the Struggle years were a minority of a minority. Yet look how the numbers increased. That’s not only those who went to prison, but hundreds who, over the decades, protested against apartheid, from the Black Sash to the universities, and as the tempo of struggle increased, died in detention like Neil Agget, gunned down like David Webster.
I do not believe all or most whites are racist. Yes, we need to act firmly when racism rears its ugly head, with a skilled police and judicial service operating in a transparent and just manner, we need to enforce our Bill of Rights and knowledge of the Constitution, we need the start of a sustained civic education program in schools and society at large.
Our leaders need to be clear about what racism is and give positive and creative leadership.
It’s one heck of a task but it needs to be tackled sooner than later.
JS: Since your outspokenness about some positions of and individuals in the ANC, has anyone dared to brand you a racist?
RK: So far they have confined their cheap slanders to “traitor,” “counter-revolutionary” and “agent of foreign intelligence services” and in the case of Blade Nzimande, “factory rejects.”
I was once referred to as a Boer in an Angolan camp where minor defiance by 1976 recruits took place. The culprit was none of the young black-conscious influenced cadres but an older man newly arrived from home who sought to win their respect.
JS: Has the neo-liberal formula, which the ANC essentially agreed to in 1994, allowed racist thought to flourish, through retaining the power of white capital and supporting elites?
RK: I do believe the compromises made with regard to the economy have resulted in those consequences. Not that the centuries of ingrained colonial racism would disappear overnight. Not that it was easy to remove statutory apartheid and achieve universal franchise and the establishment of democratic rule.
These have been momentous achievements under the ANC’s leadership.
The advent of majoritarian political power and demise of minority white rule took years of struggle and sacrifice and is akin to revolutionary change. But the compromises which left existing economic and property relations largely intact; the heights of the economy in white hands and under the diktat of international monopoly capital, are a fetter to real economic emancipation.
The biggest problem is the growing inequality between well-off whites and the majority of black people. And that chasm is growing economically, socially and in the realm of opportunity.
To be sure, the Mandela-Mbeki government, myself included, believed that once we had political power, we could by degrees refashion the economy to meet our people’s needs. It can be argued there was no other way. Perhaps the demise of our once-powerful ally, the Soviet Union, as a counter to Western capitalist control, left no alternative.
“The biggest problem is the growing inequality between well-off whites and the majority of black people.”
So we traded off commitment to radical economic change for political power. Kwame Nkrumah once stated: “First comes the political kingdom.” We had constantly critiqued that as a formula for disaster. Those who controlled the economy would be the hidden masters of the new political elite, who would inevitably be caught up in a system of corruption and crony capitalism.
We used to call that neo-colonialism and warned of the dangers of a new black elite becoming junior partners of big business and agents of international capital, as elsewhere in post-colonial Africa. It would be impossible to address the people’s needs.
This is why I have characterised the compromises as a Faustian Pact, where power and wealth in the classical tale were granted by the devil to Faust in exchange for his soul.
Growing unemployment and poverty, the concentration of massive wealth in fewer hands while the majority starve, are part of the toxic mix providing fertile ground for the poison of racism.
The have-nots rebel; the ignorant seek refuge in their white skins. Corporate heads consign thousands of workers into unemployment at the stroke of a pen and have no compunction about shooting down striking workers.
Lest I am accused of wanting to obstruct black people becoming capitalist and preserving that class formation for whites.. that is not the case. We cannot debar anyone who wants to be one from becoming a capitalist. That class is now slightly de-racialised, with a handful of high profile blacks. From a racial point of view that is an advance which is better than the constraints of apartheid but cannot be the solution.
But poverty and inequality are growing and are highly racialized and gendered, with African women the poorest and most brutally exploited.
JS: Where are we, in terms of racism? Are you disheartened?
RK: I have referred to some notorious incidents. On social media idiots vent their spleen. I believe such ignoramuses are a minority, but if left unstopped, if we just prattle on papering over the cracks, the demon of racism and xenophobia will grow.
I am certainly not disheartened – only realistic. The menace can be stopped by mobilizing black and white people in support of the best human values of tolerance and fairness.
We need sustained education campaigns. We need mobilization, all singing from the same page, and we need tough policy and action from government.
The message must be rational and balanced, able to persuade and transform people’s values and thinking. People must not feel targeted but won over as part of the process.
However, unless we tackle the root cause of the problem – the economic disparity giving rise to immense inequality and the polarization of wealth and poverty as never before in history – we cannot fully vanquish racism, as we see in the violence against blacks in America or in the racism against migrants in Europe or the sheer hatred for Palestinians in Israel.
JS: Is an entirely non-racial future a mythology?
RK: I do not believe that a non-racial future is a mythology. A people awake and united can achieve great things. In that respect I am a believer and an optimist committed to keeping the fires of hope alive.
About the Author
Ronnie Kasrils is a former commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, a former Cabinet minister and a writer. He won the 2011 Alan Paton award for his book, The Unlikely Secret Agent.
Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com
We apologize for this inconvenience.
=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you—ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.
Nauseated by the vile corporate media? Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?
GET EVEN. Send a donation to The Greanville Post–or
SHARE OUR ARTICLES WIDELY! But be sure to support YOUR media.
If you don’t, who will?
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOTTHE AUTHORS.
The Caesar Photo Fraud that Undermined Syrian Negotiations
by Rick Sterling
A 30 page investigative report on the “Caesar Torture Photos” has been released and is available online here. The following is a condensed version of the report. Readers who are especially interested are advised to get the full report which includes additional details, photographs, sources and recommendations.
The great Iraq War lie. The pictured girl told the world under tears that she saw how Saddam Hussein’s soldiers took babies out of their incubators and let them die on the cold floor. In November 1990 Bush41 told this lie to the poor soldiers. In truth she hadn’t been in Kuwait at the time. The girl was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, USA. The scam was “ideated” and fabricated by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, experts in the art of mass deception and whitewashing tyrants.
Introduction
There is a pattern of sensational but untrue reports that lead to public acceptance of US and Western military intervention in countries around the world:
* In Gulf War 1, there were reports of Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwait, leaving babies to die on the cold floor. Relying on the testimony of a Red Crescent doctor, Amnesty International ‘verified’ the false claims. (For details about this outrageous hoax, see above image and our sidebar below)
* Ten years later, there were reports of yellow cake uranium going to Iraq for development of weapons of mass destruction.
* One decade later, there were reports of Libyan soldiers drugged on Viagra and raping women as they advanced.
* In 2012, NBC broadcaster Richard Engel was supposedly kidnapped by pro-Assad Syrian militia but luckily freed by Syrian opposition fighters, the “Free Syrian Army”.
All these reports were later confirmed to be fabrications and lies. They all had the goal of manipulating public opinion and they all succeeded in one way or another. Despite the consequences, which were often disastrous, none of the perpetrators were punished or paid any price.
It has been famously said “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” This report is a critical review of the “Caesar Torture Photos” story. As will be shown, there is strong evidence the accusations are entirely or substantially false.
Overview of ‘Caesar Torture Photos’
On 20 January 2014, two days before negotiations about the Syrian conflict were scheduled to begin in Switzerland, a sensational report burst onto television and front pages around the world. The story was that a former Syrian army photographer had 55,000 photographs documenting the torture and killing of 11,000 detainees by the Syrian security establishment.
SIDEBAR
THE KUWAIT BABY INCUBATOR FRAUD. ANATOMY OF A HUGE IMPOSTURE, THE WORK OF PROFESSIONAL DECEPTION EXPERTS. FRAMING SADDAM AND PREPPING THE NATION FOR A “WAR OF CHOICE” NOT NECESSITY.
The great Iraq War lie.
How the public relations industry sold the Gulf War to the US public, the mother of all clients. (A dispatch from What Really Happened)
HILL & KNOWLTON FABRICATES A HUGE LIE ON BEHALF OF US POLICY OF AGGRESSION. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he pictured girl told the world under tears that she saw how Saddam Hussein's soldiers took babies out of their incubators and let them die on the cold floor. In November 1990 Bush41 told this lie to the poor soldiers [recruited for the "cause"]. In truth she hadn't been in Kuwait at the time. The girl was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, USA. Here are some texts compiled from the internet, which will give you some clues: [The PR firm] Hill and Knowlton produced dozens of video news releases (VNRs) at a cost of well over half a million dollars, but it was money well spent, resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of "free" air time. The VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around the world who rarely (if ever) identified Kuwait's public relations (PR) firm as the source of the footage and stories. TV stations and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted propaganda to unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real" journalism.
After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show him some of the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony TV news reports had served their purpose and it would do H&K no good to help a reporter reveal the extent of deception. In Unreliable Sources, authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted that "when a research team from the communications department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about U.S. policy in the region, they drew some sobering conclusions. The more television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to back the Bush administration.1
Throughout the campaign, the Wirthlin Group conducted daily opinion polls to help Hill & Knowlton take the emotional pulse of key constituencies so it could identify the themes and slogans that would be most effective in promoting support for U.S. military action. After the war ended. the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced an Emmy award-winning TV documentary on the PR campaign titled "To Sell a War." The show featured an interview with Wirthlin executive Dee Alsop in which Alsop bragged of his work and demonstrated how audience surveys were even used to physically adapt the clothing and hairstyle of the Kuwait ambassador so he would seem more likeable to TV audiences. Wirthlin's job, Alsop explained, was "to identify the messages that really resonate emotionally with the American people." The theme that struck the deepest emotional chord, they discovered, was "the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped."2 Every big media event needs what journalist and flacks alike refer to as "the hook." An ideal hook becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf War, the "hook" was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style, substance and mode of delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance to England's World War I hearings that accused German soldiers of killing babies.
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill which provided the first opportunity for formal presentations of Iraqi human rights violations. Outwardly, the hearing resembled an official congressional proceeding, but appearances were deceiving. In reality, the Human Rights Caucus, chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, was simply an association of politicians. Lantos and Porter were co-chairs of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a legally separate entity that occupied free office space valued at $3,000 a year in Hill & Knowlton's Washington, DC office. Notwithstanding its congressional trappings, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus served as another Hill & Knowlton front group, which -- like all front groups -- used a noble-sounding name to disguise its true purpose.3 Only a few astute observers noticed the hypocrisy in Hill & Knowlton's use of the term "human rights." One of those observers was John MacArthur, author of The Second Front, which remains the best book written about the manipulation of the news media during the Gulf War. In the fall of 1990, MacArthur reported, Hill & Knowlton's Washington switchboard was simultaneously fielding calls for the Human Rights Foundation and for "government representatives of Indonesia, another H&K client. Like H&K client Turkey, Indonesia is a practitioner of naked aggression, having seized . . . the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975. Since the annexation of East Timor, the Indonesian government was killed, by conservative estimate, about 100,000 inhabitants of the region.4 [This besides the CIA-engineered coup in 1965 that took more thna a million lives in an orgy of anti-communist hysteria.—Eds.] MacArthur also noticed another telling detail about the October 1990 hearings. "The Human Rights Caucus is not a committee of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered by the legal accouterments that would make a witness hesitate before he or she lied . . . Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations.5
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."6 from http://www.io.com/~patrik/gulfwar2.htm see also http://www.io.com/~patrik/gulfwar1.htm
The mother of all lies | Senator Faircloth.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LAUCH FAIRCLOTH (NC) Senator Faircloth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for holding this hearing. It's necessary and it's going to serve an excellent purpose. In the wake of the Gulf War, it is time we looked back to see what was done wrong and what was done right. We can't change what was done, but we will be accountable for what we do now. My statement also gets to another cover-up of that conflict, not as touching as the sick veterans, but well worth a review. The Commerce Department has a lot of questions to answer about its role leading up to the Gulf War. It is also time that we in the Banking Committee revisit a current Commerce Department nominee -- Lauri Fitz-Pegado, who played a crucial role in shaping public opinion toward U.S. involvement, and she did it by personally orchestrating perjured testimony before Congress.
Fitz-Pegado, also an advisor to Obama's campaigns. Her PhD aside, and glowing resume, just another pr operative in the service of imperial crimes. Although an African American (a community she disgraces), Fitz-Pegado would have been cheerfully useful to the Reich and the devil itself, if it paid well enough.
Mr. Chairman, in 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of their country, the Kuwaiti government in exile formed Citizens for a Free Kuwait. They hired the lobbying firm of Hill and Knowlton to influence public opinion in this country toward entering the conflict. Lauri Fitz-Pegado (1) was in charge of the effort. Her strategy was to use alleged witnesses to atrocities, to tell stories of human rights violations in occupied Kuwait. Using their testimony, she orchestrated what has come to be known as the Baby Incubator Fraud.
She first coached a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only at the time as Naira, to testify before Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers remove Kuwaiti babies from hospital respirators. Naira claimed to be a refugee who had been working as a volunteer in a Kuwaiti hospital throughout the first few weeks of the Iraqi occupation. She said that she had seen them take babies out of the incubators, take the incubators, and leave the babies ``on the cold floor to die.'' Naira's emotional testimony riveted human rights organizations, the news mediums, and the Nation. That incident was cited by six Members of the U.S. Senate as reasons to go to war with Iraq. However, it was later discovered that the girl was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. It turns out that Lauri Fitz-Pegado had concealed Naira's real identity. Since then, reputable human rights organizations and journalists have concluded that the baby incubator story was an outright fabrication. Every study commissioned by the Kuwaiti government could not produce a shred of evidence that the ambassador's daughter had been back in occupied Kuwait to do volunteer work in a hospital. It was a total fabrication.
Lauri Fitz-Pegado then put on a repeat performance in front of the U.S. Security Council on November 27, 1990. In the testimony before Congress, they claimed they couldn't fully identify who the witness was because they wanted to protect her family that supposedly was still trapped in Kuwait. But, in fact, they were here on Embassy Row. In front of the United Nations, Lauri Fitz-Pegado abandoned that pretense and instead employed witnesses who testified using false names and occupations. The most important of these phony witnesses was a man who called himself Dr. Ebrahim. With Lauri Fitz-Pegado there in New York, he claimed to have personally buried 40 babies pulled from incubators by the Iraqis. Dr. Ebrahim told the Security Council that he was a surgeon. But after the war, when the scam was exposed as a total fraud, he admitted to being a dentist and had never buried any babies or seen any. More lies.
The Fitz-Pegado scam continues. Mr. Chairman, as a supporter of our country's involvement in the Gulf War, I am offended that Lauri Fitz-Pegado believes that those kinds of illegal and unethical activities were necessary to get this country to face the threat of Saddam Hussein. None of these facts and allegations were disclosed to either you, Mr. Chairman, or other Members of the Banking Committee when her nomination was voted on here. If confirmed, Lauri Fitz-Pegado would have control over a global network of 200 trade offices in 70 countries. My opposition is based not on party or ideology. It is based on the fact that there are few people in America who have less business being in charge of our Nation's trade secrets than Lauri Fitz-Pegado. Lauri Fitz-Pegado's nomination should be returned to the Banking Committee for further review. If it is not, then facts that are far more embarrassing to Ms. Fitz-Pegado and to others in Government will be revealed in other speeches and in long, protracted debate on the Senate floor. Mr. Chairman, the Banking Committee was hoodwinked by a professional scam artist. Lauri Fitz-Pegado should be asked to disclose her entire past and then be prepared to defend what I believe is a totally indefensible past. I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
RECAPITULATING
The day after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Kuwaitis living in the US hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton - a job worth $1 million a month. This was the biggest ever contract in the history of public relations to improve the image of their corrupt, oil-rich regime. The story of how Iraqi troops, in the first days of the invasion, went into Al-Adan hospital, tore the sick babies from incubators and left them on the cold floor to die was graphically told to Congress on November 1990 before the crucial vote to send US troops (passed by about 5 votes). What the audience didn't know however was that the 15-year old girl who made the moving, tearful testimony was none other than Niyirah al-Sabah - daughter of the US Ambassador to Kuwait. She had allegedly worked as a volunteer in the maternity ward of the hospital. But nurses who live in the two story white building opposite the hospital in Kuwait City claimed that they had never seen the girl before in their life. The entire move towards the Gulf War had thus been motivated by a blatant lie. The girl had been "trained" by Hill and Knowlton. The renowned international human rights group Amnesty International took out full-page newspaper spreads to publicise the babies incident. It had unwittingly (and not for the first time) transformed itself from a charity to a propaganda tool. Andrew Whitley of Middle East Watch described the story as a fabrication but it took months for the truth to come out.
President Bush mentioned the incubator incident in five of his speeches and seven senators referred to them in speeches backing a pro-war resolution. Highly exaggerated reports of thousands of deaths were accepted uncritically, as the PR firm using Kuwaiti contacts inside the country smuggled 24 videotapes to a hungry, unquestioning and gullible mass media. From http://hydraulix.bangor.ac.uk/nus/islam/pages/reports/gulf.html
NEWS BRIEF: TV Guide, February 22-28, 1992, "Fake News"
"Over the last few years, fake news has grown into big business. Every day PR (Public Relations) pros supply the country's 700-plus local TV outlets and the national net-works with news-like reports and features...Most material... arrives as a 'video news release (VNR)'. This is a collection of pictures and words, delivered free of charge by satellite or cassette, which usually includes everything from background shots that can be edited into a story to a fully produced piece ready to air." In other words, these 'Video News Releases' (VNR'S) are not spontaneous news which has been recorded, nor is it on-scene news reporting; rather, it is carefully planned and executed acting, designed to look like spontaneous news. TV stations, both national and local, are running these VNR'S as though they were really news, even to the point of showing the TV logo at the bottom of the screen during the time of transmission. And viewers are being deceived.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are many types of VNR's currently being utilized:
•Private companies, such as General Mills, advertising their products, or introducing new products. •Sporting events •Disney World issues many VNR's. •Pharmaceutical companies •Hollywood promotional clips for new films
[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ow often are TV stations and networks using VNR's? "Roughly 80% of the country's news directors acknowledge that they employ VNR material at least several times a month ...If anything, this statistic probably understates how commonly the PR-produced material airs...newscasters may carry a piece produced by someone else, without knowing that the original story included VNR footage." This incredible information means that VNR material is being passed off as spontaneous news or as journalism produced by the network every evening of the week! We are being lied to every day by our newscasters.
(1)FITZ-PEGADO, PROFESSIONAL TRUTH-KILLER, DEEP IN THE FOLDS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY MAFIA, BLACK AMERICANS DEPT. "Dr. Lauri Fitz-Pegado is a partner at The Livingston Group, LLC,which provides public affairs, government relations and strategic communications counsel to governments, corporations, educational institutions and non-profit organizations. She contributes to the development of new business strategies, proposals and presentations and is the Director of the International Relations/Business Development Practice Group... Appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate in 1994, she served under the late Secretary Ronald H. Brown, Secretaries Mickey Kantor and William Daley, she served as Assistant Secretary and Director General of the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service. At the Department of Commerce she promoted U.S. exports and assisted U.S. companies expand market share and compete for contracts around the world, managing 130 export promotion offices overseas, 90 offices in the United States and organizing and leading scores of trade and investment missions to countries throughout the world. Fitz-Pegado served on the Obama for President campaign's foreign policy experts teams for Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. She was Director for Public Liaison of the Clinton-Gore Inaugural and advisor on international issues to Democratic Committee Chairman Ronald H. Brown. In 1997 she joined Iridium LLC, the world's first global satellite and paging company,as VP for Global Gateway Mgt. and VP for Corporate Affairs and Communications. A former Foreign Service officer who served in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, Ms. Fitz-Pegado also provided domestic and international clients strategic communications counsel, public and government relations services at Gray and Company and Hill and Knowlton. Ms. Fitz-Pegado is Board Chair of the National Education Association Foundation. She is on the board of CHF International, the Ron Brown Scholar Program, and is an advisor and mentor to professionals in the University of Denver's International Career Advancement Program (ICAP). She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington Government Relations Group. Ms. Fitz-Pegado is a graduate of Vassar College and has a Masters degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Economics and Latin American Studies.
END OF SIDEBAR REGULAR TEXT RESUMES HERE
The Syrian photographer was given the code-name ‘Caesar’. The story became known as the “Caesar Torture Photos”. A team of lawyers plus digital and forensic experts were hired by the Carter-Ruck law firm, on contract to Qatar, to go to the Middle East and check the veracity of “Caesar” and his story. They concluded that “Caesar” was truthful and the photographs indicated “industrial scale killing”. CNN, London’s Guardian and LeMonde broke the story which was subsequently broadcast in news reports around the world. The Caesar photo accusations were announced as negotiations began in Switzerland. With the opposition demanding the resignation of the Syrian government, negotiations quickly broke down.
For the past two years the story has been preserved with occasional bursts of publicity and supposedly corroborating reports. Most recently, in December 2015 Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report titled “If the Dead Could Speak” with significant focus on the Caesar accusations.
Following are 12 significant problems with the ‘Caesar torture photos’ story.
1. Almost half the photos show the opposite of the allegations.
The Carter Ruck Inquiry Team claimed there were about 55,000 photos total with about half of them taken by ‘Caesar’ and the other half by other photographers. The Carter Ruck team claimed the photos were all ‘similar’. Together they are all known as ‘Caesar’s Torture Photos’.
The photographs are in the custody of an opposition organization called the Syrian Association for Missing and Conscience Detainees (SAFMCD). In 2015, they allowed Human Rights Watch (HRW) to study all the photographs which have otherwise been secret. In December 2015, HRW released their report titled “If the Dead Could Speak”. The biggest revelation is that over 46% of the photographs (24,568) do not show people ‘tortured to death” by the Syrian government. On the contrary, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence (HRW pp2-3). Thus, nearly half the photos show the opposite of what was alleged. These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians.
2. The claim that other photos only show ‘tortured detainees’ is exaggerated or false.
The Carter Ruck report says ‘Caesar’ only photographed bodies brought from Syrian government detention centers. In their December 2015 report, HRW said, “The largest category of photographs, 28,707 images, are photographs Human Rights Watch understands to have died in government custody, either in one of several detention facilities or after being transferred to a military hospital.” They estimate 6,786 dead individuals in the set.
The photos and the deceased are real, but how they died and the circumstances are unclear. There is strong evidence some died in conflict. Others died in the hospital. Others died and their bodies were decomposing before they were picked up. These photographs seem to document a war time situation where many combatants and civilians are killed. It seems the military hospital was doing what it had always done: maintaining a photographic and documentary record of the deceased. Bodies were picked up by different military or intelligence branches. While some may have died in detention; the big majority probably died in the conflict zones. The accusations by ‘Caesar’, the Carter Ruck report and HRW that these are all victims of “death in detention” or “death by torture” or death in ‘government custody” are almost certainly false.
3. The true identity of “Caesar” is probably not as claimed.
The Carter Ruck Report says “This witness who defected from Syria and who had been working for the Syrian government was given the code-name ‘Caesar’ by the inquiry team to protect the witness and members of his family.” (CRR p.12) However, if his story is true, it would be easy for the Syrian government to determine who he really is. After all, how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and Military 601 Hospitals during those years and then disappeared? According to the Carter Ruck report, Caesar’s family left Syria around the same time. Considering this, why is “Caesar” keeping his identity secret from the western audience? Why does “Caesar” refuse to meet even with highly sympathetic journalists or researchers?
The fact that 46% of the total photographic set is substantially the opposite of what was claimed indicates two possibilities:
* Caesar and his promoters knew the contents but lied about them expecting nobody to look.
* Caesar and his promoters did not know the contents and falsely assumed they were like the others.
The latter seems more likely which supports the theory that Caesar is not who he claims to be.
4. The Carter Ruck Inquiry was faulty, rushed and politically biased.
The credibility of the “Caesar” story has been substantially based on the Carter-Ruck Inquiry Team which “verified” the defecting photographer and his photographs. The following facts suggest the team was biased with a political motive:
* the investigation was financed by the government of Qatar which is a major supporter of the armed opposition.
* the contracted law firm, Carter Ruck and Co. has previously represented Turkey’s President Erdogan, also known for his avid support of the armed opposition.
* the American on the legal inquiry team, Prof David M. Crane, has a long history working for U.S. Dept of Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency. The U.S. Government has been deeply involved in the attempt at ‘regime change’ with demands that ‘Assad must go’ beginning in summer 2011 and continuing until recently.
* Prof Crane is personally partisan in the conflict. He has campaigned for a Syrian War Crimes Tribunal and testified before Congress in October 2013, three months before the Caesar revelations.
* by their own admission, the inquiry team was under “time constraints” (CRR, p.11).
* by their own admission, the inquiry team did not even survey most of the photographs
* the inquiry team was either ignorant of the content or intentionally lied about the 46% showing dead Syrian soldiers and attack victims.
* the inquiry team did their last interview with “Caesar” on January 18, quickly finalized a report and rushed it into the media on January 20, two days prior to the start of UN sponsored negotiations.
The self-proclaimed “rigor” of the Carter Ruck investigation is without foundation. The claims to a ‘scientific’ investigation are similarly without substance and verging on the ludicrous.
5. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is involved.
In an interview on France24, Prof. David Crane of the inquiry team describes how ‘Caesar’ was brought to meet them by “his handler, his case officer”. The expression ‘case officer’ usually refers to the CIA. This would be a common expression for Prof. Crane who previously worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The involvement of the CIA additionally makes sense since there was a CIA budget of $1Billion for Syria operations in 2013.
Prof. Crane’s “Syria Accountability Project” is based at Syracuse University where the CIA actively recruits new officers despite student resistance.
Why does it matter if the CIA is connected to the ‘Caesar’ story? Because the CIA has a long history of disinformation campaigns. In 2011, false reports of viagra fueled rape by Libyan soldiers were widely broadcast in western media as the U.S. pushed for a military mandate. Decades earlier, the world was shocked to hear about Cuban troops fighting in Angola raping Angolan women. The CIA chief of station for Angola, John Stockwell, later described how they invented the false report and spread it round the world. The CIA was very proud of that disinformation achievement. Stockwell’s book, “In Search of Enemies” is still relevant.
6. The prosecutors portray simple administrative procedures as mysterious and sinister.
The Carter Ruck inquiry team falsely claimed there were about 11,000 tortured and killed detainees. They then posed the question: Why would the Syrian government photograph and document the people they just killed? The Carter Ruck Report speculates that the military hospital photographed the dead to prove that the “orders to kill” had been followed. The “orders to kill” are assumed.
A more logical explanation is that dead bodies were photographed as part of normal hospital/morgue procedure to maintain a file of the deceased who were received or treated at the hospital.
The same applies to the body labeling/numbering system. The Carter Ruck report suggest there is something mysterious and possibly sinister in the coded tagging system. But all morgues need to have a tagging and identification system.
7. The photos have been manipulated.
Many of the photos at the SAFMCD website have been manipulated. The information card and tape identity are covered over and sections of documents are obscured. It must have been very time consuming to do this for thousands of photos. The explanation that they are doing this to ‘protect identity’ is not credible since the faces of victims are visible. What are they hiding?
8. The Photo Catalog has duplicates and other errors
There are numerous errors and anomalies in the photo catalog as presented at the SAFMCD website.
For example, some deceased persons are shown twice with different case numbers and dates.
There are other errors where different individuals are given the same identity number.
Researcher Adam Larson at A Closer Look at Syria website has done detailed investigation which reveals more errors and curious error patterns in the SAFMCD photo catalog.
9. With few exceptions, Western media uncritically accepted and promoted the story.
The Carter Ruck report was labeled “Confidential” but distributed to CNN, the Guardian and LeMonde.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour gushed the story as she interviewed three of the inquiry team under the headline “EXCLUSIVE: Gruesome Syria photos may prove torture by Assad regime”. Critical journalism was replaced by leading questions and affirmation. David Crane said “This is a smoking gun”. Desmond de Silva “likened the images to those of holocaust survivors”.
The Guardian report was titled “Syrian regime document trove shows evidence of ‘industrial scale’ killing of detainees” with subtitle “Senior war crimes prosecutors say photographs and documents provide ‘clear evidence’ of systematic killing of 11,000 detainees”
One of the very few skeptical reports was by Dan Murphy in the Christian Science Monitor. Murphy echoed standard accusations about Syria but went on to say incisively, “the report itself is nowhere near as credible as it makes out and should be viewed for what it is: A well-timed propaganda exercise funded by Qatar, a regime opponent who has funded rebels fighting Assad who have committed war crimes of their own.”
Unfortunately that was one of very few critical reports in the mainstream media.
In 2012, foreign affairs journalist Jonathan Steele wrote an article describing the overall media bias on Syria.. His article was titled “Most Syrians back Assad but you’d never know from western media”. The media campaign and propaganda has continued without stop. It was in this context that the Carter Ruck Report was delivered and widely accepted without question.
10. Politicians have used the Caesar story to push for more US/NATO aggression.
Politicians seeking direct US intervention for ‘regime change’ in Syria were quick to accept and broadcast the ‘Caesar’ story. They used it to [further] demonize the Assad government and argue that the US must act so as to prevent “another holocaust’, ‘another Rwanda’, ‘another Cambodia’.
When Caesar’s photos were displayed at the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress, Chairman Ed Royce said “It is far past time that the world act…. It is far past time for the United States to say there is going to be a safe zone across this area in northern Syria.”
The top ranking Democrat in the House Foreign Affairs Committee is Eliot Engel. In November 2015 he said “We’re reminded of the photographer, known as Caesar, who sat in this room a year ago, showing us in searing, graphic detail what Assad has done to his own people.” Engel went on to advocate for a new authorization for the use of military force.
Rep Adam Kinzinger is another advocate for aggression against Syria. At an event at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in July 2015 he said, “If we want to destroy ISIS we have to destroy the incubator of ISIS, Bashar al-Assad.”
The irony and hypocrisy is doubly profound since Rep Kinzinger has met and coordinated with opposition leader Okaidi, who is a confirmed ally of ISIS. In contrast with Kinzinger’s false claims, it is widely known that ISIS ideology and initial funding came from Saudi Arabia and much of its recent wealth from oil sales via Turkey. The Syrian Army has fought huge battles against ISIS, winning some but losing others with horrific scenes of mass beheading [by the ISIS fanatics].
11. The Human Rights Watch assessment is biased.
HRW has been very active around Syria. After the chemical attacks in greater Damascus on August 21, 2013, HRW rushed a report which concluded that, based on a vector analysis of incoming projectiles, the source of the sarin-carrying rockets must have been Syrian government territory. This analysis was later debunked as a “junk heap of bad evidence” by highly respected investigative journalist Robert Parry. HRW’s assumption about the chemical weapon rocket flight distance was faulty. Additionally it was unrealistic to think you could determine rocket trajectory with 1% accuracy from a canister on the ground. To think you could determine flight trajectory from a canister on the ground that had deflected off a building wall was preposterous. [The infamous chemical attack was later shown to be a
In spite of this, HRW stuck by its analysis which blamed the Assad government. HRW Director Ken Roth publicly indicated dissatisfaction when an agreement to remove Syrian chemical weapons was reached. Mr. Roth wanted more than a ‘symbolic’ attack.
In light of the preceding, we note the December 2015 HRW report addressing the claims of Caesar.
HRW seems to be the only non-governmental organization to receive the full set of photo files from the custodian. To its credit, HRW acknowledged that nearly half the photos do not show what has been claimed for two years: they show dead Syrian soldiers and militia along with scenes from crime scenes, car bombings, etc…
But HRW’s bias is clearly shown in how they handle this huge contradiction. Amazingly, they suggest the incorrectly identified photographs support the overall claim. They say, “This report focuses on deaths in detention. However other types of photographs are also important. From an evidentiary perspective, they reinforce the credibility of the claims of Caesar about his role as a forensic photographer of the Syrian security forces or at least with someone who has access to their photographs.” (HRW, p.31) This seems like saying if someone lies to you half the time that proves they are truthful.
The files disprove the assertion that the files all show tortured and killed. The photographs show a wide range of deceased persons, from Syrian soldiers to Syrian militia members to opposition fighters to civilians trapped in conflict zones to regular deaths in the military hospital. There may be some photos of detainees who died in custody after being tortured, or who were simply executed. We know that this happened in Iraqi detention centers under U.S. occupation. Ugly and brutal things happen in war times. But the facts strongly suggest that the ‘Caesar’ account is basically untrue or a gross exaggeration.
It is striking that the HRW report has no acknowledgment of the war conditions and circumstances in Syria. There is no acknowledgment that the government and Syrian Arab Army have been under attack by tens of thousands of weaponized fighters openly funded and supported by many of the wealthiest countries in the world.
There is no hint at the huge loss of life suffered by the Syrian army and supporters defending their country. The current estimates indicate from eighty to one hundred and twenty thousand Syrian soldiers, militia and allies having died in the conflict. During the three years 2011 – 2013, including the period covered by Caesar photos, it is estimated that over 52,000 Syrian soldiers and civilian militia died versus 29,000 anti-government forces.
HRW had access to the full set of photographs including the Syrian army and civilian militia members killed in the conflict. Why did they not list the number of Syrian soldiers and security forces they identified? Why did they not show a single image of those victims?
HRW goes beyond endorsing the falsehoods in the ‘Caesar’ story; they suggest it is a partial listing. On page 5 the report says, “Therefore, the number of bodies from detention facilities that appear in the Caesar photographs represent only a part of those who died in detention in Damascus.”
On the contrary, the Caesar photographs seem to mostly show victims who died in a variety of ways in the armed conflict. The HRW assertions seem to be biased and inaccurate.
12. The legal accusations are biased and ignore the supreme crime of aggression.
The Christian Science Monitor journalist Dan Murphy gave an apt warning in his article on the Carter Ruck report about ‘Caesar’. While many journalists treated the prosecutors with uncritical deference, he said:
Association with war crime prosecutions is no guarantor of credibility – far from it. Just consider Luis Moreno Ocampo’s absurd claims about Viagra and mass rape in Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya in 2011. War crimes prosecutors have, unsurprisingly, a bias towards wanting to bolster cases against people they consider war criminals (like Assad or Qadaffi) and so should be treated with caution. They also frequently favor, as a class, humanitarian interventions.
The Carter Ruck legal team demonstrated how accurate those cautions were. They were eager to accuse the Syrian government of “crimes against humanity” but the evidence of “industrial killing”, “mass killing”, “torturing to kill” is dubious and much of the hard evidence shows something else.
In contrast, there is clear and solid evidence that a “Crime against Peace” is being committed against Syria. It is public knowledge that the “armed opposition” in Syria has been funded, supplied and supported in myriad ways by various outside governments. Most of the fighters, both Syrian and foreign, receive salaries from one or another outside power. Their supplies, weapons and necessary equipment are all supplied to them. Like the “Contras” in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the use of such proxy armies is a violation of customary international law.
It is also a violation of the UN Charter which says:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other matter inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
The government of Qatar has been a major supporter of the mercenaries and fanatics attacking the sovereign state of Syria. Given that fact, isn’t it hugely ironic to hear the legal contractors for Qatar accusing the Syrian government of “crimes against humanity”?
Isn’t it time for the United Nations to make reforms so that it can start living up to its purposes? That will require demanding and enforcing compliance with the UN Charter and International Law.
Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com
We apologize for this inconvenience.
=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you—ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.
Nauseated by the vile corporate media? Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?
GET EVEN. Send a donation to The Greanville Post–or
SHARE OUR ARTICLES WIDELY! But be sure to support YOUR media.
If you don’t, who will?
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOTTHE AUTHORS.
Syria: Another Pipeline War
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | ecowatch.com During the 1950’s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia.
The fossil fuel industry’s business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world’s addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.
As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.
America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.
As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.
To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians’ perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.
Wall Street shill John Foster Dulles (and his brother Allen, helming the CIA) dominated US foreign policy in the aftermath of World War 2, with utterly nefarious results. [2CC BY-NC by Wofford Archives]
During the 1950’s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allen Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect.”The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba’ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with the oil giant, BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles’ needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.
The CIA admitted carrying out the 1953 coup that toppled Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister and first elected leader in Iran’s 4000 year history. Much of the ugliness that has ensued stems from this criminal and arrogant act.
When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.
Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States of America. His presidency is remembered as one of social peace and almost mythical happiness for the expanding new middle class, but the reality was far tawdrier than that.
Flush from his Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime. Working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Stone schemed to assassinate Syria’s Chief of Intelligence, its Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Communist Party and to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm” provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba’athists.
The CIA’s plan was to destabilize the Syrian government, and create a pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control. Roosevelt forecasted that the CIA’s newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power.”
But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government.
The Syrians ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers—the first time any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone’s confession as “fabrications and slanders,” a denial swallowed whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the American people, who shared Mosaddegh’s idealistic view of their government.
READ MORE ABOUT ROCKY STONE'S CRIMINAL CIA CAREER BELOW. CLICK ON THE BAR
"
ROCKY" STONE: FROM CIA TO SHHH / by Stan Griffin
Note: The tone of this obit/bio is laudatory, which is certainly not something we would apply to this notorious scoundrel, but in duplicating this author's work we will not modify his overall slant. Griffin's way of covering Stone's career is often eerily disingenuous. Of Stone's direct participation in the coup that toppled Mossadegh in Iran, he writes: "His first foreign assignment was to Iran. He arrived there in time to take part in the events that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne..." Caveat emptor.
CIA Director William Colby presents Rocky Stone with the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA's highest honor on October 30, 1975.
"Rocky": the name calls to mind someone or something tough and unyielding such as: Rocky Balboa, the movie prizefighter who refused to be beaten; "the Rock," a professional wrestler and actor (also Alcatraz, once the country’s most formidable prison); the Rocky Mountains; the Rock of Gibraltar, a symbol of strength; and rock climbing, a dangerous profession (or hobby) calling for courage and resourcefulness. Howard Stone was given the nickname "Rocky" because (1) his father was an amateur boxer; and (2) Stone’s own "scrappy nature." He overcame a profound hearing loss to have a 25-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency. After his retirement, Stone took on a second vocation as an advocate for the hard of hearing, founding Self Help for Hard of Hearing People (SHHH). an organization which " ... grew to international stature ..."
In 1994 Stone lost his sight to macular degeneration. Refusing to be sidelined, he continued to work on behalf of others with hearing losses until his death in August, 2004. Howard E. Stone was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 3, 1925. He grew up during the depression. When he was seven, his father deserted the family; and Howard had to help support his mother and two sisters. For a time, he ran a corner newsstand. At age 14, he managed a dairy bar said to have been one of the busiest in town. When World War II broke out, Stone enlisted in the U. S. Army. His military career ended suddenly when he suffered a bilateral hearing loss (in both ears) from exposure to explosions during basic training. Subsequently he was given a discharge from the service.
In 1945 Stone entered the University of Southern California as a business student. He found he was missing a lot of class discussions and lectures and realized his hearing loss was more extensive than he thought. Deciding he hated business, Stone switched to international affairs and graduated with an honors degree in International Relations. He won a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and completed one year in their Master Studies program. Stone also eventually received an Honorary Doctorate degree from Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C. While he was in Washington, Stone was signed up by the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency.
His first foreign assignment was to Iran. He arrived there in time to take part in the events that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne. The Shah (king) had been forced to leave Iran (1953) after Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized (took over) the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Loss of the oil fields combined with a fear of increasing Communist influence brought together British intelligence and the CIA. They gave "overt support" to the Iranian army when it attempted to take control of the government later that same year (1953). They called it "Operation Ajax."
A critical meeting between two American reporters and the son of Fazlollah Zahedi, the general who was leading the rebels, was held in Stone’s residence. Mrs. Stone sat in a rocking chair near Zahedi with a pistol hidden beneath her knitting. She was "internal security" for that encounter. Later General Zahedi was in Stone’s basement when he learned of the revolt’s imminent successful climax. Tanks arrived to take him to his temporary headquarters. Stone had to help the general button the tunic of his dress uniform when Zahedi was too nervous to do it himself. During a victory party at the CIA office that same night, two overjoyed Zahedis (father and son) came up to Stone and said: "We’re in ... We’re in ... What do we do now?"
Here is a partial list of places where Stone was employed by the C.I.A along with a few career highlights: (1) 1957–Chief of Station in Damascus, Syria Here he tried to arrange a coup (rebellion) against the government. When it failed, he and his family had to leave the country in a hurry. (2) 1960s (early)–Chief of Station in Katmandu, Nepal He heard rumors of a possible coup against the king by a former government minister so he arranged to have a gift sent to that man: a miniature replica of a cannon. In its base was a microphone and a battery-powered transmitter. Stone was able to listen in to "the plot"; as a result, there was no coup. (3) 1966 Deputy Station Chief and Chief of Intelligence in Saigon, South Vietnam Stone tried to gain a "negotiated settlement" instead of a military solution to the problem there. He was able to make contact with the Viet Cong but couldn’t work out a peaceful answer. (4) Pakistan (5) Sudan-- Chief of Station in Khartoum (6) Stone was Chief of Operations of the Soviet Bloc Division (Eastern Europe)–based at CIA headquarters. (7) Italy–Chief of Station in Rome
This was Stone’s last C.I.A. post. It was there he fell down a flight of stairs and lost what was left of his hearing. He was forced to retire (1975) and received the Agency’s highest honor: the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Describing "Rocky" Stone, his supervisors and co-workers used the following words and phrases: "Intellectually brilliant ... (with) superior concentration, ... a tenacious personality ... (and) a relentless work ethic ... "His intelligence assessments were accurate and blunt but responsible."
It was 1979 when Stone incorporated "Self Help for Hard of Hearing People" (SHHH) as a non-profit corporation. He set up an office in the basement of his home in Bethesda, Maryland. Its aims are to: (1) inform the hard of hearing and their families of hearing devices; (2) inspire them to deal with their deafness as "simply one more life crisis." It is now the chief consumer organization for people with hearing loss and has grown to more than 250 groups and chapters meeting in 49 states, a sister organization in Australia, and members in 15 other countries. Stone devoted his time and energy to working for the welfare of hard-of-hearing people and focusing attention on their interests. His " ... selfless service and dedication to advancing the quality of life for people with hearing loss ..." earned him praise from many quarters. Stone’s "aggressive advocacy on behalf of persons with disabilities" brought him into close working relationships with U.S. Senators. It culminated in enactment of the revolutionary Americans with Disabilities Act (1990).
He was appointed by President Reagan to serve on the Access Board that drafted accessibility guidelines, and he saw to it that "communication access needs of the hard of hearing were written into (them)." Stone traveled extensively and was an internationally known speaker. Stone retired from SHHH in 1993. The following year was a significant one for him. He lost his sight to macular degeneration, and he also had a cochlear implant that restored much of his hearing. This allowed him to communicate with his family as well as to keep working on behalf of others who had the same problems. Stone served on numerous committees, boards, and coalitions, all of which were attempting to improve the quality of life for hard-of-hearing people. From 1996-2000 he was president of the International Hard of Hearing Federation. He founded and was executive director of Teamwork for Hearing Health Services. It was made up of hearing health professionals working to promote cooperation between components of their community.
Howard E. "Rocky" Stone died on August 13, 2004 at Washington Hospital Center (Bethesda, MD), of adult respiratory distress syndrome. He was survived by his wife, four children, and ten grandchildren.
END OF SIDEBAR
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]yria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason. In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled 50,000 troops on Syria’s borders and only backed down in the face of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention. (The Turks have been imperial accomplices for a long time, as we see here.—Els.]
Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected Ba’athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee” and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot.” (Matthew Jones in The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA’s mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.
Scion to an illustrious plutocratic clan, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. saw (like most men of his class and generation) the CIA as a private playground for their antics, albeit always dedicated to the advancement of their class interests.
Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mid-East to work as an executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career. Roosevelt’s replacement, as CIA Station Chief, James Critchfield attempted a failed assassination plot against the new Iraqi president using a toxic handkerchief. Five years later the CIA finally succeeded in deposing the Iraqi president and installing the Ba’ath Party to power in Iraq.
A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA’s Ba’athists team. The Ba’ath Party’s Interior Minister, Said Aburish, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a CIA train.” Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a “murder list” of people who “had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success.”
Critchfield later acknowledged that the CIA had, in essence, “created Saddam Hussein.” During the Reagan years, the CIA supplied Hussein with billions of dollars in training, Special Forces support, and weapons and battlefield intelligence knowing that he was using poisonous mustard and nerve gas and biological weapons—including anthrax obtained from the U.S. government—in his war against Iran.
Reagan and his CIA Director, Bill Casey, regarded Saddam as a potential friend to the U.S. oil industry and a sturdy barrier against the spread of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Their emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, presented Saddam with a pair of pearl-handled revolvers and a menu of chemical/biological and conventional weapons on a 1983 trip to Bagdad. At the same time, the CIA was illegally supplying Saddam’s enemy—Iran—with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight Iraq, a crime made famous during the Iran Contra scandal. Jihadists from both sides later turned many of those CIA supplied weapons against the American people.
[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ven as America contemplates yet another violent Mid-East intervention, most Americans are unaware of the many ways that “blowback” from previous CIA blunders [actually crimes] has helped craft the current crisis. The reverberations from decades of CIA shenanigans continue to echo across the Mid-East today in national capitals and from mosques to madras schools over the wrecked landscape of democracy and moderate Islam that the CIA helped obliterate.
In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA’s failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America’s imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S.
Kennedy’s speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.
Thanks in large part to Allen Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA’s clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report,” to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government’s denials.
The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today.” The Bruce Lovett Report pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had compromised America’s international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The report points out that the CIA never considered how we would treat such interventions if some foreign government engineered them in our country. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mid-East nationalists “hate us for our freedoms.”
The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America’s reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA’s bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.
While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.
A Pipeline War
In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
Qatar shares with Iran, the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world’s richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo, until recently, prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad and ensured that Qatar’s gas could only reach European markets if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs.
The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey which would pocket rich transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central Command’s Mid-East headquarters.
The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin’s stifling economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia’s second largest gas customer, was particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia’s conservative Sunni Monarchy by giving them a foothold in Shia dominated Syria.
The Saudi’s geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom’s principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe.
Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin’s view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally.”
Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.
Bashar Assad’s family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the Shia camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president,” says journalist Sy Hersh. “His father brought him back from medical school in London when his elder brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash.”
Before the war started, according to Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize the country—“They had internet and newspapers and ATM machines and Assad wanted to move toward the west. After 9/11, he gave thousands of invaluable files to the CIA on Jihadist radicals, who he considered a mutual enemy.”
Assad’s regime was deliberately secular and Syria was impressively diverse. The Syrian government and military, for example, were 80 percent Sunni. Assad maintained peace among his diverse peoples by a strong disciplined army loyal to the Assad family, an allegiance secured by a nationally esteemed and highly paid officer corps, a coldly efficient intelligence apparatus and a penchant for brutality which, prior to the war, was rather moderate compared to other Mideast leaders, including our current allies.
According to Hersh, “He certainly wasn’t beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca.” Another veteran journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the region has clean hands but in the realms of torture, mass killings, civil liberties and supporting terrorism, Assad is much better than the Saudis.”
No one believed that the regime was vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. By the spring of 2011, there were small, peaceful demonstrations in Damascus against repression by Assad’s regime. These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring which spread virally across the Arab League states the previous summer. However, Huffington Post UK reported that in Syria the protests were, at least in part, orchestrated by the CIA. WikiLeaks cables indicate that the CIA was already on the ground in Syria.
But the Sunni Kingdoms wanted a much deeper involvement from America. On Sept. 4, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told a congressional hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had offered to foot the bill for a US. invasion of Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we’ve done it previously in other places [Iraq], they’ll carry the cost,” he stated. Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table.”
Despite pressure from Republicans, Barack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents.” But by late 2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into the fray.
In 2011, the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the “Friends of Syria Coalition,” which formally demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA provided $6 million to Barada, a British T.V. channel, to produce pieces entreating Assad’s ouster. Saudi intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad’s Shia allied regime. Qatar, which had the most to gain, invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the Pentagon to train insurgents at U.S. bases in Qatar. U.S. personnel also provided logistical support and intelligence to the rebels on the ground. The Times of London reported on Sept. 14, 2012, that the CIA also armed Jihadists with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons from Libyan armories that the agency smuggled by ratlines to Syria via Turkey. According to an April 2014 articleby Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons ratlines were financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The idea of fomenting a Sunni-Shia civil war to weaken the Syrian and Iranian regimes so as to maintain control of the region’s petro-chemical supplies was not a novel notion in the Pentagon’s lexicon. A damning 2008 Pentagon funded Rand report proposed a precise blueprint for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of the Persian Gulf oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a strategic priority” that “will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.”
Rand recommends using “covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare” to enforce a “divide and rule” strategy. “The United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch a proxy campaign” and “U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world … possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran.”
WikiLeaks cables from as early as 2006 show the U.S. State Department, at the urging of the Israeli government, proposing to partner with Turkey, Qatar and Egypt to foment Sunni civil war in Syria to weaken Iran. The stated purpose, according to the secret cable, was to incite Assad into a brutal crackdown of Syria’s Sunni population.
As predicted, Assad’s overreaction to the foreign made crisis—dropping barrel bombs onto Sunni strongholds and killing civilians—polarized Syria’s Shia/Sunni divide and allowed U.S. policymakers to sell Americans the idea that the pipeline struggle was a humanitarian war. [Note: Bobby Kennedy is here buying the “barrel bomb” trope depicting Assad as a bloodthirsty tyrant, but this has been exposed by several experts in the Syria conflict, particularly Prof. Tim Anderson, whose meticulous research indicates this has been and continues to be a lie sustained by false flags and propaganda. See Dr. Tim Anderson: The Dirty War on Syria, Chapter 3: Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda].
When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian Army began defecting in 2013, the Western Coalition armed the “Free Syrian Army” to further destabilize Syria. The press portrait of the Free Syria Army as cohesive battalions of Syrian moderates was delusional. The dissolved units regrouped in hundreds of independent militias most of whom were commanded by or allied with Jihadi militants who were the most committed and effective fighters. By then, the Sunni armies of Al Qaeda Iraq (AQI) were crossing the border from Iraq into Syria and joining forces with the battalions of deserters from the Free Syria Army, many of them trained and armed by the U.S.
Despite the prevailing media portrait of a moderate Arab uprising against the tyrant Assad, U.S. Intelligence planners knew from the outset that their pipeline proxies were radical jihadists who would probably carve themselves a brand new Islamic caliphate from the Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq. Two years before ISIS throat cutters stepped on the world stage, a seven-page Aug. 12, 2012 study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), obtained by the right wing group Judicial Watch, warned that thanks to the ongoing support by U.S./Sunni Coalition for radical Sunni Jihadists, “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (now ISIS), are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”
Using U.S. and Gulf State funding, these groups had turned the peaceful protests against Bashar Assad toward “a clear sectarian (Shiite vs Sunni) direction.” The paper notes that the conflict had become a sectarian civil war supported by Sunni “religious and political powers.” The report paints the Syrian conflict as a global war for control of the region’s resources with “the west, Gulf countries and Turkey supporting [Assad’s] opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime.”
The Pentagon authors of the seven-page report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the ISIS caliphate:
“If the situation continues unravelling, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.” The Pentagon report warns that this new principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul and Ramadi and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
Of course, this is precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria occupied by ISIS exactly encompass the proposed route of the Qatari pipeline.
But then in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and driving a million refugees toward Europe. “Strategies based upon the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be kind of blinding,” says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force between 2004 and 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq between the FBI, the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. Military. “We made the same mistake when we trained the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The moment the Russians left, our supposed friends started smashing antiquities, enslaving women, severing body parts and shooting at us.”
When ISIS’ “Jihadi John” began murdering prisoners on TV, the White House pivoted, talking less about deposing Assad and more about regional stability. The Obama Administration began putting daylight between itself and the insurgency we had funded. The White House pointed accusing fingers at our allies. On Oct. 3, 2014, Vice President Joe Biden told students at the John F. Kennedy, Jr. forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard that “Our allies in the region are our biggest problem in Syria.” He explained that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were “so determined to take down Assad” that they had launched a “proxy Sunni-Shia war” funneling “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons to Jihadists of the al-Nusra front and al-Qaeda”—the two groups that merged in 2014 to form ISIS.
Biden seemed angered that our trusted “friends” could not be trusted to follow the American agenda. “ISI[S] is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” declared Obama, disassociating himself from the Sunni rebellion, “which is an example of unintended consequences which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.” As if to demonstrate their contempt for America’s new found restraint, our putative allies, the Turks, responded to the U.S. rebukes by shooting down a plane belonging to our other putative ally, the Russians—probably to spoil a potential deal between Russia and the U.S. that would leave Assad in power.
Across the Mid-East, Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created ISIS. To most Americans immersed in U.S. media perspective, such accusations seem insane. However, to many Arabs, the evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they conclude that our role in fostering ISIS must have been deliberate. On Sept. 22, 2014, according to the New York Times, Iraqi leader, Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Baghdad demonstrators that “the CIA created ISIS.” Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, Bahaa Al-Araji, echoed al-Sadr’s accusation. “We know who made Daesh,” Iraq’s Treasury Secretary, Haidar al-Assadi, told the Digital News Aggregate, “The Islamic State is a clear creation of the United States, and the United States is trying to intervene again using the excuse of the Islamic State.”
In fact, many of the ISIS fighters and their commanders are ideological and organizational successors to the Jihadists that the CIA has been nurturing for 30 years. The CIA began arming and training the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in 1979 to fight the Soviets. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the CIA’s Afghan Mujahedeen became the Taliban while its foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, formed Al-Qaeda. In 2004, then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that Al-Qaeda took its name—meaning “database” in Arabic—from the voluminous CIA database of Jihadists—Mujahedeen foreign fighters and arms smugglers trained and equipped by the CIA during the Afghan conflict.
Prior to the American invasion, there was no Al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Bush destroyed Saddam’s secularist government and his viceroy, Paul Bremer, in a monumental act of mismanagement, effectively created the Sunni Army, now named ISIS. Bremer elevated the Shiites to power and banned Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party laying off some 700,000, mostly Sunni, government and party officials from ministers to school teachers. He then disbanded the 380,000 man army, which was 80 percent Sunni.
Bremer’s actions stripped a million of Iraq’s Sunnis of rank, property, wealth and power; leaving a desperate underclass of angry, educated, capable, trained and heavily armed Sunnis with little left to lose. General Petraeus’ decision to import dirty war tactics, including torture and death squads, from the CIA’s El Salvador conflict in order to shock and awe the Sunni resistance, instead ignited a shockingly bloody spiral of sectarian violence that devolved quickly into escalating atrocities topped finally by the Sunni Army signature head cutting. The Sunni insurgency named itself Al-Qaeda Iraq (AQI).
Syria’s Dair Ez Zor—a pile of rubble. Would you live here? This is what US foreign policy does wherever it casts its criminal shadow.
Beginning in 2011, our allies funded the invasion by AQI fighters into Syria. In June 2014 having entered Syria, AQI changed its name to ISIS. According to the New Yorker, “ISIS is run by a council of former Iraqi Generals … many are members of Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’ath Party, who converted to radical Islam in American prisons.” The $500 million in U.S. military aid that Obama did send to Syria almost certainly ended up benefiting these militant Jihadists. On Sept. 16, 2015, incredulous senators from the Armed Services Committee listened to U.S. General Lloyd Austin, Commander of the U.S. Central Command, explain that the Pentagon had spent $500 million to train and arm “moderate” insurgents in Syria and had only “four or five reliable moderate fighters” to show instead of the promised 5,000. The remainder apparently deserted or defected to ISIS.
Tim Clemente told me that the incomprehensible difference between the Iraq and Syria conflicts are the millions of military aged men who are fleeing the battlefield for Europe rather than staying to fight for their communities. “You have this formidable fighting force and they are all running away. I don’t understand how you can have millions of military aged men running away from the battlefield. In Iraq, the bravery was heartbreaking—I had friends who refused to leave the country even though they knew they would die. They’d just tell you it’s my country, I need to stay and fight,” Clemente said.
The obvious explanation is that the nation’s moderates are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply want to escape being crushed between the anvil of Assad’s Russian backed tyranny and the vicious Jihadi Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding in a global battle over competing pipelines. You can’t blame the Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their nation minted in either Washington or Moscow. The super powers have left no options for an idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider fighting for. And no one wants to die for a pipeline.
What is the answer? If our objective is long-term peace in the Mid-East, self-government by the Arab nations and national security at home, we must undertake any new intervention in the region with an eye on history and an intense desire to learn its lessons. Only when we Americans understand the historical and political context of this conflict will we apply appropriate scrutiny to the decisions of our leaders.
Using the same imagery and language that supported our 2003 war against Saddam Hussein, our political leaders led Americans to believe that our Syrian intervention is an idealistic war against tyranny, terrorism and religious fanaticism. We tend to dismiss, as mere cynicism, the views of those Arabs who see the current crisis as a rerun of the same old plots about pipelines and geopolitics. But, if we are to have an effective foreign policy, we must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.
It’s the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudi’s just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.
Clemente compares ISIS to Colombia’s FARC—a drug cartel with a revolutionary ideology to inspire its foot soldiers. “You have to think of ISIS as an oil cartel,” Clemente said. “In the end, money is the governing rationale. The religious ideology is a tool that inspires its soldiers to give their lives for an oil cartel.”
Once we strip this conflict of its humanitarian patina and recognize the Syrian conflict as an oil war, our foreign policy strategy becomes clear. Instead, our first priority should be the one no one ever mentions—we need to kick our Mid-East oil jones, an increasingly feasible objective, as the U.S. becomes more energy independent. Next, we need to dramatically reduce our military profile in the Middle East and let the Arabs run Arabia. Other than humanitarian assistance and guaranteeing the security of Israel’s borders, the U.S. has no legitimate role in this conflict. While the facts prove that we played a role in creating the crisis, history shows that we have little power to resolve it.
As we contemplate history, it’s breathtaking to consider the astonishing consistency with which virtually every violent intervention in the Middle East since World War II by our country has resulted in miserable failure. The long list of CIA and military adventures has each cost us dearly in national treasure, in liberty at home, in our moral authority abroad and in our national security. Without any memorable exception, every violent intervention has resulted in a catastrophic blowback far more costly to our country than any problems the authors our meddling intended to solve. Our mischief has neither improved life in the Middle East nor has it made America safer.
A 1997 U.S. Department of Defense report found that “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S.” Let’s face it, what we call the “war on terror” is really just another oil war. We’ve squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Cheney declared the “Long War” in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies who have pocketed historic profits. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have turned America, once the world’s beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.
America’s founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign entanglements and, in John Adams’ words, “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at home. They wanted America to be a “city on a hill”—a model of democracy for the rest of the world.
The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal that each nation should have the right to self-determination. Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney Gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors who have literally made a killing from these conflicts. It’s time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending our ruinous addiction to oil.
About the Author
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions. Kennedy was named one of Time magazine's “Heroes for the Planet” for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River. The group's achievement helped spawn more than 190 Waterkeeper organizations across the globe.
Kennedy serves as Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and is co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio.
READ MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR—CLICK HERE
Earlier in his career he served as Assistant District Attorney in New York City. He has worked on environmental issues across the Americas and has assisted several indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada in successfully negotiating treaties protecting traditional homelands. He is credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's water supply. The New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. Among Kennedy's published books are the New York Times’ bestseller Crimes Against Nature(2004), The Riverkeepers (1997) and Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr: A Biography (1977) and two children’s books St Francis of Assisi (2005), American Heroes: Joshua Chamberlain and the American Civil War and Robert Smalls: The Boat Thief (2008). His articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Nation, Outside Magazine, The Village Voice and many other publications. His award winning articles have been included in anthologies of America’s Best Crime Writing, Best Political Writing and Best Science Writing. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard University. He studied at the London School of Economics and received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. Following graduation he attended Pace University School of Law, where he was awarded a Masters Degree in Environmental Law.
Bobby Kennedy, Jr’s historical summation is commendable on several grounds, beginning with the unusual fact his statements come from the lips of a member of one of the great political clans still very much embedded in the plutocratic and mythological fabric of America. That said, although it seems clear Bobby Kennedy Jr is totally sincere in his embrace of ecological defense and even, we might say, a left interpretation of history (which by definition aligns itself far closer with truth than the self-serving establishment narratives or the rightwing tropes), I very much doubt his activism goes beyond the boundaries of left-liberalism’s visions. While that is eminently welcome and salutary for the planet, as his record shows, it is probable that Kennedy is still not quite prepared to disavow his allegiance to capitalism, as the reigning global paradigm. This is a grave handicap for any champion of environmental causes. As any serious environmentalist will attest, to denounce the ills and crimes of the corporations without advancing the view that the capitalist system itself produces such crimes, that it is irrefutably on a collision course with nature, is grossly insufficient. Corporate crime in regard to the environment (and all other major areas of social interest) is not aberrational but both intrinsic and inevitable. And as history shows, this system is not amenable to reform, no matter how grand and well intentioned. As far as humanity is concerned, the moment is past for reform, and to endorse such a position is at best naive and conducive to further delays and delusions.
Indeed, the problem may even transcend capitalism, making it something bigger, something that spans the entire behavior and consciousness of our species at this moment. Thus, a theoretical victory of socialism without an ethical ecological platform would be a hollow victory. As the case of China and Russia illustrate, the environment is not treated there much more kindly than in the Western bloc (the reasons for this are however somewhat different than those that obtain in the West, and in large measure precipitated by the desperate need of these nations to attain economic and military sufficiency to defend their sovereignty from US-led assault and threats). In any case, these nations have something of a mixed system, with many more economic sectors socialized, and the drift seems to be toward more socialism than capitalism, while the opposite is seen in America, where global finance capital has its main citadel.
Sadly, Kennedy’s current liberal blinders cause him to make statements that sound very much like those of a mainstream anti-communist and even anti-Russian politician:
“The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America’s reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA’s bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance…”
There’s a great deal of ignorance in the above pronouncement. What reputation, except that manufactured by our own propaganda system is Bobby talking about here? First, US imperialism and international meddling is not that new, it did not start in the postwar, (1) although it did invest itself with a new more ambitious and deceptive dimension. The US was manufacturing false flags to promote “wars of choice” (i.e., the blowing up of the Maine in 1898 and ensuing war with Spain) by the turn of the 20th century, and later, once in the shoes of the former colonial master, using brutal methods to subdue the native patriots. Some of the earliest photos of people being waterboarded do not come from the Middle East but from the Philippines, and they show US marines waterboarding filipino rebels.
Second, Kennedy restricts the genesis of the Syrian mess to a superpower rivalry over pipelines. Th conflict is much broader and its undercurrents run much deeper. While the pipeline angle no doubt carries significance, a great deal of the conflict stems from the unrelenting, neocon-inspired agenda demanding that America maintain its long-held global hegemony, a policy guaranteeing friction in a world with rising powers pushing for multipolarism. More specifically, while US planners see China as a rising threat, they see Russia as a much bigger and more immediate one, a fact complicated by these two nations increasing international symbiosis, chiefly as arrest of Washington’s imperialist pressures.
Thus, much of Washington’s aggressive, interventionist policies issue from this fount, a desire to see Russia broken up and converted into a second-rate, subjugated nation, incapable of braking America’s drive for total and permanent global dominance. Naturally, if the Yeltsin/Atlanticist faction—the conservatives’ wet dream— had continued in office to this day, that is probably what we might be seeing at this juncture. Instead, Russia (and the world) were fortunate enough to witness the emergence of a new type of independent-minded capable nationalist leader, Putin, whose faction—the Eurasian-integrationists— has quickly restored Russia to a position of rough parity with the United States in terms of strategic power. This has forced Washington again into a policy of constant proxy wars, of which Syria and the Ukraine are two recent examples. The latter fact has not stopped the saber-rattling, however, as the US continues to provoke Russia and China in a variety of reckless ways.
Lastly, it is arrogant to assume that America ever enjoyed a genuine democracy, instead of a corporate plutocracy in varying degrees of virulence, or that such a system could be regarded as an exportable model for other nations, regardless of historical and cultural factors. While America and its partners in crime did “plough the fields of Islamic jihadism”, it is somewhat sloppy to classify all strong lay leaders in the Arab nation as “dictators”. Nations exist at any historical moment in varying degrees of politico-cultural evolution; as in their economic development, they are “uneven”. The real test is what the “dictator” does. Even the Greeks who debated and created the notion of democracy also considered other models of governance, including enlightened despotism, tyranny, etc. In each of them they found pluses and minuses, the upshot being there was no firm consensus on what constituted the best system of rule. Plato and Aristotle define a tyrant as “one who rules without law, and uses extreme and cruel tactics—against his own people as well as others”, but a tyranny may not be limited to an individual. Tyranny can also apply to a collective structure, like a corporation. Considering the lengthening list of abominable crimes committed by the US, a nation controlled by an unelected corporate class, it is clear that America today is far closer to a global hegemonist tyranny than a democracy. This record makes it hard to speak with any moral authority about the flaws in other systems and governments, or (however mildly) imply that an alliance with Russia is something inherently evil or misguided.—PG
Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com
We apologize for this inconvenience.
=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you—ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.