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Paul Merrell

Obama's Gun-Running Operation: Weapons and Support for "Islamic Terrorists" in Syria and Iraq. "Create Constructive Chaos" and "Redraw the Map of the Middle East" | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5450832

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Obama CIA Benghazi-coverup Iraq Syria ISIL must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 15 - No Cached
  • Newly disclosed Pentagon documents prove what we’ve known for a while now: the Obama administration knew as early as 2012 that weapons were being sent from Benghazi, Libya, to rebels in Syria. The U.S. government also knew at the time that: “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and [Al Qaeda in Iraq were] the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” But did they just “know” or was it part of the plan? These official documents of the Obama administration add to the large  amount of evidence proving that the actual chaos and havoc wreaked by extremist groups in the Middle East was deliberately created by the U.S. and its allies and is not the result of a “failed foreign policy”.
  • Although the documents do not reveal who was responsible for sending weapons to Syria, it is quite obvious from the language used in the documents that it was a US initiative and the CIA presence in Benghazi at the time suggests that US intelligence was behind this gun-running operation.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 May 15
     
    A must-read. The alternative press is on to Obama's "secret" strategy to overthrow the Syrian government and trifurcate Iraq. This article provides lots of links to support its conclusion.
Paul Merrell

Embracing the Saudi War on Yemen | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...bracing-the-saudi-war-on-yemen

war & peace Yemen U.S.-foreign-policy Saudis Iran

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • As the humanitarian crisis in Yemen worsens, the Obama administration seems less concerned about the plight of the desperate Yemeni people than the feelings of the Saudi royals who have spent the last month indiscriminately bombing a nearly defenseless Yemen, using high-tech U.S. jets and bombs to reportedly kill hundreds of civilians and damage its ancient cities.On Friday, the Obama administration took credit for blocking nine Iranian ships from reaching Yemen with relief supplies, claiming that the ships may have carried weapons that the Yemenis could use in their civil war or to defend against Saudi attacks. President Barack Obama had dispatched a U.S. aircraft carrier fleet to the Yemeni coast to enforce an embargo that has helped the Saudis seal off the country from outside help.
  • A person closely involved with the Yemen crisis told me that the Iranian ships carried food and medicine, not weapons, but turned back to avoid the risk and humiliation of being boarded by the U.S. Navy. Meanwhile, Yemen, already one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, is facing shortages of basic supplies since the Saudis have cut off normal trade routes into Yemen.Yet, despite the suffering of Yemen, the U.S. government appears more worried about the sensitivities of Saudi Arabia, one of the richest countries in the region. A Defense Department official, speaking anonymously, told the New York Times that it was “important that the Saudis know that we have an arm around their shoulders.”
  • Defense Department officials also acknowledged that they didn’t know what type of cargo was being transported aboard the Iranian ships, the Times reported. Though the Obama administration had touted the possibility that the Iranian ships carried weapons, the decision by Iran to avoid a confrontation may have reflected Tehran’s desire not to worsen relations with the United States and thus disrupt fragile negotiations over international guarantees to ensure that its nuclear program remains peaceful.But the losers in this military/diplomatic maneuvering appear to be the Yemenis who, in effect, face a Saudi strategy of starving the country into submission with the help of the United States. While U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power built her public image as a “humanitarian interventionist” asserting a “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations, she has said little about the Saudi role in Yemen’s humanitarian crisis.
Gary Edwards

Feds confiscate investigative reporter's confidential files during raid | The Daily Caller - 3 views

dailycaller.com/...confidential-files-during-raid

Audrey-Hudson Whistleblower-Protection-Act

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed. In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter. A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates that the August raid allowed law enforcement to search for firearms inside her home.
  • But without Hudson’s knowledge, the agents also confiscated a batch of documents that contained information about sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, she said. Outraged over the seizure, Hudson is now speaking out. She said no subpoena for the notes was presented during the raid and argues the confiscation was outside of the search warrant’s parameter. “They took my notes without my knowledge and without legal authority to do so,” Hudson said this week. “The search warrant they presented said nothing about walking out of here with a single sheet of paper.”
  • After the search began, Hudson said she was asked by an investigator with the Coast Guard Investigative Service if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written a series of critical stories about air marshals for The Washington Times over the last decade. The Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Oct 13
     
    If reality is as stated, the reporter has a pretty strong civil rights case against the government officials who knowingly participated in the theft and retention of the reporter's notes, two distinct conspiracies. Under the 4th Amendment, officers executing a search and seizure warrant may lawfully seize the items particularly described in the warrant and any other evidence of crime that is in plain view during the search. It's a big push of credibility to argue that reading documents stored in a bag in search for a gun falls within the "plain view" doctrine. The officer could instead just reach his hand into the bag and feel around for a gun. Quite a few extra steps involved in removing the documents and reading them simply to determine whether the bag contains a gun. Add in the facts that: [i] the supposed recognition of government documents argument does not explain why the officers seized personal handwritten notes too; and [ii] the evidence that the officer who discovered the docs had learned that the reporter was one who had called the conduct of his agency into question, and it comes out smelling a lot more like an attempt to discover the reporters' sources than a legitimate search for guns when the bag was searched.   Only one side heard from so far, of course. But this sounds more like low-level government officials who were ignorant of their legal obligations than a White House-driven scandal. But I wouldn't want to be the government lawyer who authorized the retention of the seized notes and other documents. They should have been returned without retaining copies the instant the lawyer learned of the circumstances of their seizure. There's not only a 4th Amendment liberty interest but also a 1st Amendment freecdom to communicate anonymously right protecting those documents and notes. 
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Oct 13
     
    I listened to an interview with Audrey Hudson last night. It seems to me the key fact is in this clip; "But without Hudson's knowledge, the agents also confiscated a batch of documents that contained information about sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, she said." Audrey had written a series of articles describing how the Homeland Security and Transportation agency had been lying about air marshalls and the post 911 program to secure passenger flights. The documents that were stolen listed her sources - the whistle blowers inside the Homeland Security administration who leaked information about the lies and the many problems with the program that the Obama administration was covering up. This sounds to me like another example of Obama hunting down and persecuting whistleblowers. A direct violation of the 1989 - 2007 Whistleblower Protection Act. Not surprisingly, Ms Hudson had not tried to contact any of her whistleblowing sources for fear that the NSA would be watching and that this persecution would happen. Interestingly, the warrant was to seize a "potato launcher". No kidding! It seems Ms. Hudson's husband had, at one time been a licensed arms dealer. He lost that license having sold a gun with faulty paperwork. This event had occurred years earlier, and Mr. Hudson had long since moved on and was currently working for the Coast Guard as an outside contractor/consultant. So they seized the toy "potato launcher", as described in the warrant. But they also ransacked the home looking for the key documents that listed Ms Hudson's inside Homeland Security sources behind her air marshal scandal articles. These documents were the only items seized - other than the "potato launcher" that was the only item listed in the warrant. Seems we've been here before. From wikipedia, the story of Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller: ........................... Arrested on 1 July 1937, N
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Oct 13
     
    "But without Hudson's knowledge, the agents also confiscated a batch of documents that contained information about sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, she said."
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Oct 13
     
    What troubles me the most about this event, assuming the truth of what's reported, is how well known the limitations on execution of a search warrant are within the law enforcement community. If it happened as described, it seems very unlikely that the officer who grabbed the documents did not know he was violating the 4th Amendment. Ditto for the lawyer or other official(s) who learned of what went down shortly thereafter, but kept the documents anyway. There's an arrogance that goes with government and corporate officials who don't have to personally pay damage awards. With no personal monetary liability (in reality, since the government or corporation picks up the tab), it becomes a matter of personal ethics and whether the misbehavior will anger or please the boss. If the ethics are weak, that becomes a pretty simple choice.
Paul Merrell

Erdogan's Dirty Dangerous ISIS Games | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ans-dirty-dangerous-isis-games

war & peace ISIL Turkey Erdogan

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Turkey is a beautiful land, rich in resources, with many highly intelligent and warm people. It also happens to have a President who seems intent on destroying his once-proud nation. More and more details are coming to light revealing that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, variously known as ISIS, IS or Daesh, is being fed and kept alive by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish President and by his Turkish intelligence service, including MIT, the Turkish CIA. Turkey, as a result of Erdoğan’s pursuit of what some call a Neo-Ottoman Empire fantasies that stretch all the way to China, Syria and Iraq, threatens not only to destroy Turkey but much of the Middle East if he continues on his present path.
  • In October 2014 US Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard gathering that Erdoğan’s regime was backing ISIS / ISIL with “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons…” Biden later apologized clearly for tactical reasons to get Erdogan’s permission to use Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base for airstrikes against ISIS in Syria, but the dimensions of Erdoğan’s backing for ISIS since revealed is far, far more than Biden hinted. ISIS militants were trained by US, Israeli and now it emerges, by Turkish special forces at secret bases in Konya Province inside the Turkish border to Syria, over the past three years. Erdoğan’s involvement in ISIS goes much deeper. At a time when Washington, Saudi Arabia and even Qatar appear to have cut off their support for ISIS, they remaining amazingly durable. The reason appears to be the scale of the backing from Erdoğan and his fellow neo-Ottoman Sunni Islam Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu. Nice Family Business The prime source of money feeding ISIS these days is sale of Iraqi oil from the Mosul region oilfields where they maintain a stronghold. The son of Erdoğan it seems is the man who makes the export sales of ISIS-controlled oil possible. Bilal Erdoğan owns several maritime companies. He has allegedly signed contracts with European operating companies to carry Iraqi stolen oil to different Asian countries. The Turkish government buys Iraqi plundered oil which is being produced from the Iraqi seized oil wells. Bilal Erdoğan’s maritime companies own special wharfs in Beirut and Ceyhan ports that are transporting ISIS’ smuggled crude oil in Japan-bound oil tankers.
  • In addition to son Bilal’s illegal and lucrative oil trading for ISIS, Sümeyye Erdoğan, the daughter of the Turkish President apparently runs a secret hospital camp inside Turkey just over the Syrian border where Turkish army trucks daily being in scores of wounded ISIS Jihadists to be patched up and sent back to wage the bloody Jihad in Syria, according to the testimony of a nurse who was recruited to work there until it was discovered she was a member of the Alawite branch of Islam, the same as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who Erdoğan seems hell-bent on toppling. Turkish citizen Ramazan Başol, captured this month by Kurdish People’s Defence Units,YPG, as he attempted to join ISIS from Konya province, told his captors that said he was sent to ISIS by the ‘İsmail Ağa Sect,’ a strict Turkish Islam sect reported to be tied to Recep Erdoğan. Başol said the sect recruits members and provides logistic support to the radical Islamist organization. He added that the Sect gives jihad training in neighborhoods of Konya and sends those trained here to join ISIS gangs in Syria. According to French geopolitical analyst, Thierry Meyssan, Recep Erdoğan “organised the pillage of Syria, dismantled all the factories in Aleppo, the economic capital, and stole the machine-tools. Similarly, he organised the theft of archeological treasures and set up an international market in Antioch…with the help of General Benoît Puga, Chief of Staff for the Elysée, he organised a false-flag operation intended to provoke the launching of a war by the Atlantic Alliance – the chemical bombing of la Ghoutta in Damascus, in August 2013. “
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Meyssan claims that the Syria strategy of Erdoğan was initially secretly developed in coordination with former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé and Erdoğan’s then Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, in 2011, after Juppe won a hesitant Erdoğan to the idea of supporting the attack on traditional Turkish ally Syria in return for a promise of French support for Turkish membership in the EU. France later backed out, leaving Erdoğan to continue the Syrian bloodbath largely on his own using ISIS. Gen. John R. Allen, an opponent of Obama’s Iran peace strategy, now US diplomatic envoy coordinating the coalition against the Islamic State, exceeded his authorized role after meeting with Erdoğan and “promised to create a « no-fly zone » ninety miles wide, over Syrian territory, along the whole border with Turkey, supposedly intended to help Syrian refugees fleeing from their government, but in reality to apply the « Juppé-Wright plan ». The Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, revealed US support for the project on the TV channel A Haber by launching a bombing raid against the PKK.” Meyssan adds. There are never winners in war and Erdoğan’s war against Syria’s Assad demonstrates that in bold. Turkey and the world deserve better. Ahmet Davutoğlu’s famous “Zero Problems With Neighbors” foreign policy has been turned into massive problems with all neighbors due to the foolish ambitions of Erdoğan and his gang.
Paul Merrell

Is an Ukronazi attack imminent? Yes! So what else is new? | The Vineyard of the Saker - 0 views

thesaker.is/minent-yes-so-what-else-is-new

war & peace Ukraine coup-government attack Novorussia

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Novorussian officials have called a press conference today to warn about the high risks of an Ukronazi assault on Novorussia in the very near future.  I have asked our translation team and friends to subtitle the video of this press conference and I hope to get it in the next 24 hours or less. The press conference was unique in that Edward Basurin, the Deputy Defense Minister and spokesman for the Novorussian armed forces showed a map with what he described as the Ukrainian attack plans:
  • While I don’t doubt for one second that the Novorussians have pretty much near perfect intelligence about the situation in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine and the plans of the junta (all that provided courtesy of the Russian GRU), I have to say that what this maps shows is extremely predictable too and not fundamentally different from what the Ukronazis tried last year: surrounding and cutting off Donetsk from Lugansk and taking control of key parts (or even all) of the Ukrainian-Russian border.  Basurin also quoted the figures for the junta forces and those are in line with what others, including Cassad, have reported.  The Ukronazi force is most definitely numerically large. Basurin also warned that the attack would be preceded by a false flag attack organized by the junta and blamed on the Novorussians.  Again, nothing new here. To be honest, we are all getting used to ‘cry wolf’ about an impending Ukronazi attack.  And this is hardly our fault.  Such an attack has, indeed, been impending for a long while already and the junta’s bellicose rhetoric has only reinforced this sense of imminent danger.  Furthermore, the recent visit of the British Defense Minister in Kiev only made things worse as the junta always does something ugly when western dignitaries visit Kiev.  Add to this that Poroshenko is scheduled to meet with his German and French counterparts next week and the sense of crisis will be total.  And logically so. So while the tensions are real and definitely based in reality, they are also nothing new here, really.  You could also legitimately that all this panic is nothing else but business as usual and that it will remain so until the regime of Nazi freaks in Kiev is finally replaced by something more or less civilized.  This will inevitably happen but, alas, not in the near future.
  • So we are left with this exhausting and frustrating situation where yet another Ukronazi attack might happen anytime but where it also might not.  That is the inevitable consequence of having evil, weak and insecure psychopaths in charge of an entire country. Yesterday a rumor was started indicating that the Novorussians were planning to organize a referendum to join Russia.  I still don’t know if that rumor is based in reality or not, but I will note that this kind of rumor could also serve as a perfect pretext for a Ukronazi attack. It is clear to me that something has to give, probably soon.  The Ukrainian economy is dead, the stocks of basic goods and energy for next winter are empty, the country is in ruins and social tensions are on the raise everywhere.  I personally cannot image that regime change could happen in Kiev before at least one more attack on Novorussia.  The junta really has nothing left to lose and by massing a large attack force, regardless of how ill prepared this force is, and at least the theoretical such an attack could possibility draw Russia in and, thereby, save the Ukronazi junta in Kiev.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Nobody in Kiev is seriously thinking that they can occupy Donetsk or Lugansk or pacify the Donbass.  Everybody is pretending otherwise, but that ain’t happening.   Everybody in Kiev is fully aware of the fact that the Donbass is lost forever.  So I will repeat this again: the real purpose of an attack will not be to ‘reconquer’ Novorussia, it will be to draw Russia into the Donbass.  How? Well, in theory, if the junta can launch enough men and armor to overwhelm the Novorussian defenses and if these forces succeed in surrounding Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia will really have no other option than to intervene.  Of course, the Russians will easily defeat the Ukronazi forces, in 24 hours or less, but at that point the Nazi regime in Kiev will be saved: it will be able to declare full mobilization, blame every difficulty in Russia, crush any resistance with even more brutality than before and politically force all the US allies to provide aid to the regime in Kiev.  The regime itself, by the way, would be safe as, contrary to the hopes of many, the Russians will not push much beyond the current line of contact.  At most they will liberate Mariupol and or Slaviansk/Kramatrosk as a “penalty” for the Ukronazi attack.  The junta in Kiev will remain safe, at least from the Russians. The real danger for the junta does not come from the Russian military, but from the disillusioned and impoverished Ukrainian people with whom the regime will remain “one on one” unless the Russians intervene.  And as long as this situation will remain like this, a Ukronazi attack will possibly at any moment.  Starting right now.
Paul Merrell

M of A - Turkey Lauches War On Islamic State's Worst Enemies - The Kurds - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...y-re-lauches-war-on-kurds.html

war & peace Syria Iraq Turkey Kurds attacks

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Since 2013 a ceasefire between the state of Turkey and Kurdish PKK rebels in south-east Turkey held up well. The government pledged some support for Kurdish cultural autonomy and in return the ruling AK Party gained votes from parts of the Kurdish constituency. The AKP government also has good relations with the Kurds in north Iraq. It buys oil from the Kurdish regional government and supports the kleptocracy of the ruling Barzani clan in that autonomous Iraqi region. The PKK is a militant Kurdish organization in Turkey. The equivalent in Syria is known as YPG. In Iran the group is called PJAK and in Iraq HPG. The HDP party in Turkey is the political arm of the PKK. The PYD is the political arm of the Syrian YPG. All these are essentially the same egalitarian, secular marxist/anarchist organization striving for Kurdish autonomy or independence. Turkey has now reopened its war on the PKK Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and in Syria. Turkish police rounded up hundreds of Kurdish activists in Turkey and tonight dozens of Turkish fighter planes attacked PKK positions in Syria and Iraq. This war is likely to escalate and will be long and bloody. It will be mostly fought on Turkish ground. How did it come to this?
  • The war on Syria and support by Turkey for even the most radical islamists fighting the Syrian government changed the relations with the Kurds. It is undeniable that Turkey not only supports the Free Syrian Army but also the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Turkey is the transit country for international suicide bomber candidates joining these organizations. Weapons, ammunition and other goods are smuggled into Syria with the help of the Turkish secret services and the Islamic State exports oil to Turkey. The Islamic State is recruiting in Turkey and is believed to have many sleeper cells throughout the country. When the Islamic State attacked Kurdish positions in Kobane in north Syria the U.S. intervened on the side of the Kurds. Turkey was miffed and at first blocked all support. The Kurds in Kobane are, like the Kurdish rebels in Turkey, organized in the PKK/YPG. They want an continuous autonomous region in north Syria connecting all Kurdish enclaves along the Turkish Syrian border. Ankara fears that such a region could be joined by the Kurdish areas in south-east Turkey. This would be a threat to the Turkish state. Turkey wants to gain land in the war on Syria not lose any. Idleb and Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq are regions that Erdogan would like to add to his realm.
Gary Edwards

Obama's secret TPP scheme will criminalize saving seeds, push biotech patent monopolies - NaturalNews.com - 0 views

www.naturalnews.com/rmers_TPP_biotech_patents.html

Banksters TPP Monsanto

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • TPP will allow evil corporations like Monsanto to rule over national governments One major aim of TPP is to punish countries that attempt to mandate the labeling of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) or ban them outright. Key provisions in the international decree would allow corporations like Monsanto to actually sue governments for trying to protect their people against GMOs, all in the name of fostering "free trade."Farmers would also be prohibited from saving seeds under the plan as countries are forcibly grafted into a regulatory paradigm governed by patent monopolies. Although not every country attending the TPP meetings is on board with this agenda, the stated goal is to force all negotiating parties to make patents on plants available as well as to protect plant varieties under the 1991 Protection of New Varieties of Plants Act (UPOV 1991).
  • "The TPP will eliminate all nation states as the ruling authority and it will be supplanted by corporate authority," adds Hodges. "This will be made possible because of an obscure provision of the TPP known as the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).""ISDS allows corporations to sue governments, for any government action (at any level, including local government level) which hinders a corporation's future profits. Literally, Monsanto could provably be poisoning the entire population of a nation and the nation could do nothing which might result in the loss of profits to Monsanto."
  • The existing patent monopoly provisions of UPOV 1991 combined with TPP's even stricter one will create an agricultural nightmare for farmers who wish to grow clean, patent-free foods as well as save the seeds of their crops year after year. This will hit poorer farmers particularly hard. The new-found power of multinational corporations under TPP to dictate the agricultural destinies of signatory countries represents yet another plank in the establishment of corporations eventually holding absolute control over food.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "[T]he new TPP language will prohibit farmers from saving and exchanging many varieties of seeds -- a practice vital to the livelihood and welfare of traditional farming communities -- and most likely increase multinational control of the farming industry in TPP nations," reads a review of TPP's provisions published in the Harvard Law School Human Rights Journal.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Jun 15
     
    "TPP will allow evil corporations like Monsanto to rule over national governments One major aim of TPP is to punish countries that attempt to mandate the labeling of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) or ban them outright. Key provisions in the international decree would allow corporations like Monsanto to actually sue governments for trying to protect their people against GMOs, all in the name of fostering "free trade." Farmers would also be prohibited from saving seeds under the plan as countries are forcibly grafted into a regulatory paradigm governed by patent monopolies. Although not every country attending the TPP meetings is on board with this agenda, the stated goal is to force all negotiating parties to make patents on plants available as well as to protect plant varieties under the 1991 Protection of New Varieties of Plants Act (UPOV 1991). "
Paul Merrell

Emails to Hillary contradict French tale on Libya war - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...ench-spies-rebels-support.html

war & peace Libya France Hillary-emails Blumenthal

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • French spies secretly organized and funded the Libyan rebels who defeated Moammar Gadhafi, according to confidential emails to Hillary Clinton that were made public on June 22.
  • “In return for their assistance,” the memo states, “the DGSE officers indicated that they expected the new government of Libya to favor French firms and national interests, particularly regarding the oil industry in Libya.” The email goes on to state that Jalil and Younis “accepted this offer” and “have maintained contact with the DGSE officers in Cairo.” The memo is titled, “How the French created the National Libyan Council, ou l’argent parle.” Another memo dated May 5 asserts that individuals close to the council stated “in strictest confidence” that as early as mid-April 2011 French humanitarian flights also included “executives from the French company TOTAL, the large construction from VINCI and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company N.V. (EADS).” Subsequent flights have allegedly carried representatives “from the conglomerate THALYS and other large French firms, all with close ties to [Sarkozy].” “After meeting with the [council] these French business executives leave discreetly by road, via Tobruk to Egypt,” the memo states. “These convoys are organized and protected by para-military officers [from the DGSE].” The memo adds that Levy himself came up with the idea and obtained the council’s signature on an agreement to give French firms “favorable consideration” in business matters. He is said to have used “his status as a journalist to provide cover for his activities.”
  • The memos from Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal contradict the popular French narrative about its intervention in Libya, raising fresh questions about a war that toppled a dictator but left chaos and radicalism in his stead. They were allegedly written by retired CIA operative Tyler Drumheller and released by a special congressional panel investigating the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. The oft-repeated media tale in France holds that then-President Nicolas Sarkozy was outraged by Gadhafi’s crackdown on protesters in February 2011 but had no clear idea who to support. Enter a swash-buckling “intellectual,” Bernard-Henri Levy, who met with Transitional National Council leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil on March 4, immediately called Sarkozy, and had the French president invite Jalil to the Elysee Palace — and recognize the council as the country’s official government by March 10. The emails to Clinton tell a distinctly less heroic story. According to one entry from March 22, 2011, “officers” with the General Directorate for External Security — the French intelligence service — “began a series of secret meetings” with Jalil and Gen. Abdul Fatah Younis in Benghazi in late February and gave them “money and guidance” to set up the council, whose formation was announced Feb. 27. The officers, “speaking under orders from [Sarkozy] promised that as soon as the [council] was organized France would recognize [it] as the new government of Libya.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A later memo, from September 2011, asserts that Sarkozy urged the Libyans to reserve 35% of their oil industry for French firms — Total in particular — when he traveled to Tripoli that month. In the end, however, Italy’s Eni came out ahead with Russian and Chinese firms biding their time, even as the Libyan oil production plummeted because of the civil war. The veracity of the memos’ content is difficult if not impossible to ascertain. While Levy has long been a controversial figure in France, the council was riven by internal rivalries. Younis himself was assassinated in July 2011 — at Jalil’s urging according to an Aug. 8 memo to Clinton. And Drumheller himself has courted controversy for his role in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, with liberals celebrating him as a truth-teller and conservatives saying he helped concoct some of the false information he later debunked.
  • French spymasters’ role in Libya has been alluded to before, most notably in the 2012 book “The Truth About our War in Libya” by French historian Jean-Christophe Notin. That book said Henry-Levy’s role in the French decision to go to war had been overblown. “All has not been said about this war, because it has only had one narrator: Bernard-Henri Levy,” Notin told L’Express magazine. “Yes, he was one of the Libyans’ interlocutors. But his telling glosses over not only the coalition’s military exploits, but also the underground work of diplomatic and military officials on the ground, sometimes for quite some time, in Libya.” Other memos released June 22 give credence to the notion that Sarkozy was determined from the start of the uprising to get rid of Gadhafi, despite earlier efforts to court him after he abandoned his weapons program and sought closer ties with the West. A March 20 memo, for instance, states that Sarkozy “plans to have France lead the attacks on [Gadhafi] over an extended period of time” and “sees this situation as an opportunity for France to reassert itself as a military power.”
Paul Merrell

WikiLeaks - NSA Helped CIA Outmanoeuvre Europe on Torture - 0 views

www.wikileaks.org/nsa-germany

surveillance state NSA CIA torture Europe

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Central to today's publication is a Top Secret NSA intercept of the communications of Foreign Minister Steinmeier. The intercept dates from just after an official visit to the United States on 29 November 2005, where FM Steinmeier met his US counterpart, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. According to the intercept, Steinmeier "seemed relieved that he had not received any definitive response from the U.S. Secretary of State regarding press reports of CIA flights through Germany to secret prisons in eastern Europe allegedly used for interrogating terrorism suspects." The visit occurred in the context of an escalating and ongoing scandal in Europe over clandestine "rendition flights" conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using the airspace and airport facilities of cooperating European countries, in which it was alleged by leading news publications that European citizens and residents had been abducted outside of any legal process and taken to secret "black site" prisons, where they could be tortured with impunity. After the scandal emerged, European governments defied their publics, continuing to cooperate with the United States while denying all knowledge of rendition flights. These denials relied heavily on the insistence of European governments that they had received confidential "diplomatic assurances" from the United States that nothing illegal was taking place. It was subsequently shown in numerous court proceedings and commissions of inquiry that the activity was illegal. At the time of Steinmeier's meeting, reports of CIA rendition flights through Germany had recently emerged, and were publicly dismissed as unconfirmed by German authorities.
  • In the years since 2005, successive investigations by human rights groups and international bodies, such as the Council of Europe, have substantiated that extraordinary rendition was indeed occurring. In 2007 the European Parliament approved a finding in a report by a special investigative committee where it was stated that Germany, among other states, aided or knew about the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme. Prior to becoming Foreign Minister in 2005, Frank-Walter Steinmeier served as Head of Chancellery (Chief of Staff) in the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, where he was responsible for coordinating the work of German intelligence agencies. In 2004, during this tenure, Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, was abducted by the CIA and renditioned to a black site in Afghanistan where he was interrogated and tortured for four months. Eventually the CIA realised that it had the wrong "El-Masri", and dumped the German on a desolate road in Albania and began a cover-up. El-Masri's case has been substantiated and confirmed in numerous inquiries, and at the European Court of Human Rights.
  • Today's publication of the 20 target selectors adds to the previous WikiLeaks publication of 125 German numbers targeted by the NSA, showing systematic mass spying on the Chancellor and the Chancellery (All the Chancellor's Men, 8 July) and German politicians and officials handling economic, trade and financial affairs (The Euro Intercepts, 1 July).
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 15
     
    Hmmmm.... I don't remember anything in the Senate Intelligence Committee's published executive summary on CIA torture about the CIA getting an assist from NSA on its rendition and torture projects. 
Paul Merrell

CISPA is back! - 0 views

www.faxbigbrother.com

surveillance state legislation CISA digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • OPERATION: Fax Big Brother Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they'll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of "cybersecurity." CISA won't stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology. So this week we're sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand. Stop CISA. Send a fax now!
  • (Any tweet w/ #faxbigbrother will get faxed too!) Your email is only shown in your fax to Congress. We won't add you to any mailing lists.
  • CISA: the dirty deal between government and corporate giants. It's the dirty deal that lets much of government from the NSA to local police get your private data from your favorite websites and lets them use it without due process. The government is proposing a massive bribe—they will give corporations immunity for breaking virtually any law if they do so while providing the NSA, DHS, DEA, and local police surveillance access to everyone's data in exchange for getting away with crimes, like fraud, money laundering, or illegal wiretapping. Specifically it incentivizes companies to automatically and simultaneously transfer your data to the DHS, NSA, FBI, and local police with all of your personally-indentifying information by giving companies legal immunity (notwithstanding any law), and on top of that, you can't use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what has been shared.
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  • The NSA and members of Congress want to pass a "cybersecurity" bill so badly, they’re using the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management as justification for bringing CISA back up and rushing it through. In reality, the OPM hack just shows that the government has not been a good steward of sensitive data and they need to institute real security measures to fix their problems. The truth is that CISA could not have prevented the OPM hack, and no Senator could explain how it could have. Congress and the NSA are using irrational hysteria to turn the Internet into a place where the government has overly broad, unchecked powers. Why Faxes? Since 2012, online and civil liberties groups and 30,000+ sites have driven more than 2.6 million emails and hundreds of thousands of calls, tweets and more to Congress opposing overly broad cybersecurity legislation. Congress has tried to pass CISA in one form or another 4 times, and they were beat back every time by people like you. It's clear Congress is completely out of touch with modern technology, so this week, as Congress rushes toward a vote on CISA, we are going to send them thousands of faxes, a technology from the 1980s that is hopefully antiquated enough for them to understand. Sending a fax is super easy — you can use this page to send a fax. Any tweet with the hashtag #faxbigbrother will get turned into a fax to Congress too, so what are you waiting for? Click here to send a fax now!
Paul Merrell

12 Banks Reveal 'Living Wills' That Hint Toward a Future Bail-in | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...t-hint-toward-a-future-bail-in

banksters major-U.S.-banks bail-ins living-wills too-big-to-fail

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Twelve major banks have made their living wills open to the public in response to US regulators pushing for more “convincing plans” for self-dismantling should their operations fail.
  • The purpose of living wills is a way “to give bankers and regulators a clearer understanding of a bank’s operations and its assets and liabilities [and] map out the steps the banks would take to distribute large losses among stakeholders.” The Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) are overseeing the bank’s contingency plans, ensuring that no bank is “too big to fail”. This includes financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets; as well as non-financial firms that are considered systemically important as understood by the US Department of Treasury (USDT) Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). The banks participating in this exercise include:
  • • JPMorgan Chase & Co • Morgan Stanley • Bank of America • Credit Suisse Group AG • Goldman Sachs Group • Wells Fargo & Co • State Street Corp • Bank of New York Mellon Corp • UBS Group AG • Deutsche Bank AG • Barclays Plc Should another financial crisis rear its head again, these revelations provide investors and traders a better sense of the standing of banks.
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  • Collectively, the banks divulged that they have “stockpiled long-term debt” within holding companies (or the parent company that owns the bank) to make their portfolios appear to be “less complex”. In other words, banks have placed their derivatives (or stockpiled long-term debt) within the main corporation that owns their subsidiaries. The only problem is that if the parent fails, so do its “children”. The bank’s assets could be placed into receivership with the intention of being split up and auctioned off; however some corporations abuse receivership and bankruptcy to make investors and creditors think they are dead in the water only to pull out at the last minute and enjoy large primary debt write-offs. This is a sort of corporate version of playing possum.
  • This classic con tactic would provide the unique advantage of not having to go to the Senate and demand a taxpayer bailout. The banks could simply file for bankruptcy and exert social pressure via public outcry, protests and demands of the people that Congress consider another bailout. In this scenario, the parent company gets saved and not the subsidiaries. This tactic is a reserve version of what happened after the crash in 2008. Regarding the bank’s contingency plans, JPMorgan’s “hypothetical death”would see the bank downsize by a 3rd and provide a resolve for the bank “without systemic disruption or taxpayer support”. Citigroup has proposed shrinking by selling off $300 billion in corporate assets and “cut US retail banking to about $200 billion”; as well as get rid of broker-dealers.
  • Mark Costigilo, spokesperson for Citigroup, explained that should Citigroup go into bankruptcy, their living will “demonstrates that we can do so without the use of taxpayer funds and without adverse systemic impact.” And Bank of America (BoA) stated that their rise out of bankruptcy would involve the unloading of $1.2 trillion in assets; as well as “shedding most of … non-bank operations”. Last year, the major banks were told to revise previously submitted living wills because their plans did not provide a “credible or clear path through bankruptcy that doesn’t require unrealistic assumptions and direct or indirect public support.” All of this adds up to a bail-in, as predicted by economic analyst Jim Sinclair who said: “Bail-ins are coming to North America without any doubt, and will be remembered as the ‘Great Leveling,’ of the ‘great Flushing’ (of Lehman Brothers). Not only can it happen here, but it will happen here. It stands on legal grounds by legal precedent both in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.”
  • Sinclair pointed out: “Bail-ins do not require a crisis to occur and can surface one bank at a time, spread out over years. The major situation is deposits above insurance levels in banks too big to fail. Those deposits are directly in harm’s way.”
Paul Merrell

'More than 90%' of Russian airstrikes in Syria have not targeted Isis, US says | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ikes-syria-not-targetting-isis

war & peace Syria Russia Russia-targets U.S.-whinging

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • A large majority of Russia’s military strikes in Syria have not been aimed at the Islamic State group or jihadists tied to al-Qaida, and have instead targeted the moderate Syrian opposition, the US State Department said on Wednesday. “Greater than 90% of the strikes that we’ve seen them take to date have not been against Isil or al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists,” said spokesman John Kirby.
  • “They’ve been largely against opposition groups that want a better future for Syria and don’t want to see the Assad regime stay in power.” It was the first time that American authorities have offered any specific figures about the impact of Russian airstrikes in the war-torn country.
  • Washington, which supports the moderate Syrian opposition, has consistently said that the Russian action will only add more fuel to the fire and will benefit the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. “So whether they’re hit by a cruise missile from the sea or a bomb from a Russian military aircraft, the result is the same, that Assad continues to get support from Russia,” added Kirby. “Assad continues to be able to have at his, you know, at his hands the capability of striking his own people, including those who are opposed to his regime. “And that’s not a good future for Syria. It’s also, as we’ve said before, we believe a mistake for Russia, because not only are they going to be exacerbating sectarian tensions there in Syria, but they’re potentially exacerbating sectarian tensions in Russia itself. “They’re putting themselves at greater risk.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 15
     
    Sorry, Mr. Kirby. Anyone within Syria  bearing arms against the elected Syrian government is a legitimate Russian target under international law. Get used to it.
Paul Merrell

Victory! World's Largest Nation Bans GMO Food Crops | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

m.journal-neo.org/...est-nation-bans-gmo-food-crops

GMOs economic-warfare Russia homesteads

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Victories are to be celebrated and for the future of healthy life on our planet we all can celebrate a beautiful victory. The world’s largest nation, the Russian Federation, whose landmass spans Eurasia from the Baltic and Ukraine on the west to Vladivostock and the Pacific on her east, has formally declared all commercial planting of Genetically Modified Organisms, GMOs, to be prohibited. The issue has been subject of a heated debate for some months inside Russia. In February 2014, just days prior to the US-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev created a national research project to obtain scientific information so the Government and Duma might make a decision on GMOs in Russia. Now a definitive decision has been made, and it goes against Monsanto and the US-led GMO cartel. We can say Russia’s crisis has concentrated minds on the essentials of life.
  • Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dorkovich told an international biotechnology conference in Kirov September 18, “As far as genetically-modified organisms are concerned, we have made the decision not to use any GMO in food productions.” Last year the Duma or parliament voted to make tough GMO labeling laws as a first step to the new ban in order to inform consumers of presence of GMO in various foods they buy. That was before US and EU sanctions led to Russian counter-sanctions against EU imports of agriculture products. In August 2014, the Russian government announced its bans on import from the EU and several other countries of meat, fish, dairy products, fruit and vegetables as a response to the sanctions. It produced surprising results. Since the imposition of tough Russian food import bans, Russian agriculture has undergone a spectacular rebirth.
  • This July, taking a page out of American history, the Russian government announced it was drafting a Russian “Homestead Act.” The Russian government is finalizing a bill which will give an opportunity to every Russian citizen to obtain one hectare of land, or a maximum of five hectares for a family of five, in the Russian Far East for free. They can use the land to farm, to do forestry or simply build a home and live, so long as they use the land for the first five years. After, they own the land free if the plot has been used for activities not banned by Russian laws, reported TASS. In the case of non-use the land will be confiscated and revert back to the government. Foreigners will have no right to get the free land. The new land law, if passed in the Duma, will take effect in January, 2016.
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  • Food production in Russia’s under-populated far-east region is also set to boom. On September 3 in Vladivostok at the first Eastern Economic Forum, Russia’s Agriculture Ministry announced the creation of a new $10 billion agriculture development fund together with China. A number of financial institutions, including Russia’s state-owned Sberbank, will participate in its operations. The aim of the fund is to stimulate the production of 10 million tons of grain and agricultural products annually, beginning 2020.
  • A recent poll suggests there is significant interest in the offer, with some 30 million mostly young Russians ready to “go east.” Following the economic devastation of Russia during the Yeltsin era of the 1990s, eastern regions suffered economic collapse and significant depopulation as people migrated to cities to survive. Into this broader context of recent developments, the definitive government ban on growing GMO crops in the Russian Federation adds a major new attraction. Russia stands to become one of the world’s most desired producers of natural, organic non-GMO-contaminated food for the world. Today, the once-great American agriculture has been de-humanized, industrialized, by giant agribusiness concerns, and contaminated by Monsanto and GMO plants along with its deadly herbicides containing toxic glyphosate. More than 80% of all US corn is GMO and almost 100% of USA soybeans. This is no small matter. Exports of GMO soybeans and corn are allowed unlabeled, by loopholes, into the European Union as well as into China. That means that most of the meat and even farmed fish that European and Chinese consumers eat contains indirect GMO crops and toxins. In light of all this it might make sense to treat Russia a little more politely in the future if we want to eat healthy food. They are doing what we should be doing, but don’t. Why?
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 15
     
    5 hectares == 12.35 acres. Times 30 million Russians == 370.5 million acres less space for a home and a driveway. That's a lot of new agricultural production.  Bear in mind that Russia imported most of its food from Europe before the Ukraine sanctions. This article is about the evaporation of foreign trade that Europe will never get back.And it's about new Russian agricultural exports to China. Perhaps even about eventual exports to the U.S. for those who want a "GMO-free" label on their food. This is very bad news for Monsanto and other biotech companies in the U.S, especially a few years down the road when other countries begin importing Russian GMO-free food.  
Paul Merrell

The Mystery of ISIS' Toyota Army Solved | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

m.journal-neo.org/...ery-of-isis-toyota-army-solved

war & peace ISIL Toyotas U.S.-foreign-policy Treasury

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The US Treasury has recently opened an inquiry about the so-called “Islamic State’s” (ISIS/ISIL) use of large numbers of brand-new Toyota trucks. The issue has arisen in the wake of Russia’s air operations over Syria and growing global suspicion that the US itself has played a key role in arming, funding, and intentionally perpetuating the terrorist army across Syria and Iraq. ABC News in their article, “US Officials Ask How ISIS Got So Many Toyota Trucks,” reports: U.S. counter-terror officials have asked Toyota, the world’s second largest auto maker, to help them determine how ISIS has managed to acquire the large number of Toyota pick-up trucks and SUVs seen prominently in the terror group’s propaganda videos in Iraq, Syria and Libya, ABC News has learned. 
  • Toyota says it does not know how ISIS obtained the vehicles and is “supporting” the inquiry led by the Terror Financing unit of the Treasury Department — part of a broad U.S. effort to prevent Western-made goods from ending up in the hands of the terror group. The report went on to cite Iraqi Ambassador to the US, Lukman Faily: “This is a question we’ve been asking our neighbors,” Faily said. “How could these brand new trucks… these four wheel drives, hundreds of them — where are they coming from?” Not surprisingly, it appears the US Treasury is asking the wrong party. Instead of Toyota, the US Treasury’s inquiry should have started next door at the US State Department.
  • Just last year it was reported that the US State Department had been sending in fleets of specifically Toyota-brand trucks into Syria to whom they claimed was the “Free Syrian Army.” US foundation-funded Public Radio International (PRI) reported in a 2014 article titled, “This one Toyota pickup truck is at the top of the shopping list for the Free Syrian Army — and the Taliban,” that: Recently, when the US State Department resumed sending non-lethal aid to Syrian rebels, the delivery list included 43 Toyota trucks. Hiluxes were on the Free Syrian Army’s wish list. Oubai Shahbander, a Washington-based advisor to the Syrian National Coalition, is a fan of the truck. “Specific equipment like the Toyota Hiluxes are what we refer to as force enablers for the moderate opposition forces on the ground,” he adds. Shahbander says the US-supplied pickups will be delivering troops and supplies into battle. Some of the fleet will even become battlefield weapons..
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  • The British government has also admittedly supplied a number of vehicles to terrorists fighting inside of Syria.
  • It’s fair to say that whatever pipeline the US State Department and the British government used to supply terrorists in Syria with these trucks was likely used to send additional vehicles before and after these reports were made public. The mystery of how hundreds of identical, brand-new ISIS-owned Toyota trucks have made it into Syria is solved. Not only has the US and British government admitted in the past to supplying them, their military forces and intelligence agencies ply the borders of Turkey, Jordan, and even Iraq where these fleets of trucks must have surely passed on their way to Syria – even if other regional actors supplied them. While previous admissions to supplying the vehicles implicates the West directly, that nothing resembling interdiction operations have been set up along any of these borders implicates the West as complicit with other parties also supplying vehicles to terrorists inside of Syria.
  • Of course, much of this is not new information. So the question remains – why is the US Treasury just now carrying on with this transparent charade? Perhaps those in Washington believe that if the US government is the one asking this obvious question of how ISIS has managed to field such an impressive mechanized army in the middle of the Syrian desert, no one will suspect they had a role in it.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 15
     
    Of course those who follow this stuff already knew the answer when Treasury popped the question. The question Treasury hasn't asked yet is why the U.S. didn't bomb all those Toyotas when they convoyed out of Syria into Iraq for the opening of the ISIL war in Iraq? Out in the open desert, the U.S. surely was aware of that mass movement of vehicles.
Gary Edwards

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Superpower in Distress | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...lare%2C_superpower_in_distress

Iraq ISIS

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In response, the Obama administration dispatched thousands of new advisers and trainers and began shipping in piles of new weaponry to re-equip the Iraqi army.  It also filled Iraqi skies with U.S. planes armed with their own munitions to destroy, among other things, some of that captured U.S. weaponry.  Then it set to work standing up a smaller version of the Iraqi army.  Now, skip nearly a year ahead and on a somewhat lesser scale the whole process has just happened again.  Less than two weeks ago, Islamic State militants took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province.  Iraqi army units, including the elite American-trained Golden Division, broke and fled, leaving behind -- you’ll undoubtedly be shocked to hear -- yet another huge cache of weaponry and equipment, including tanks, more than 100 Humvees and other vehicles, artillery, and so on. The Obama administration reacted in a thoroughly novel way: it immediately began shipping in new stocks of weaponry, starting with 1,000 antitank weapons, so that the reconstituted Iraqi military could take out future “massive suicide vehicle bombs” (some of which, assumedly, will be those captured vehicles from Ramadi).  Meanwhile, American planes began roaming the skies over that city, trying to destroy some of the equipment IS militants had captured.
  • Notice anything repetitive in all this -- other than another a bonanza for U.S. weapons makers?  Logically, it would prove less expensive for the Obama administration to simply arm the Islamic State directly before sending in the air strikes
  • In any case, what a microcosm of U.S. imperial hubris and folly in the twenty-first century all this training and equipping of the Iraqi military has proved to be.  Start with the post-invasion decision of the Bush administration to totally disband Saddam’s army and instantly eject hundreds of thousands of unemployed Sunni military men and a full officer corps into the chaos of the “new” Iraq and you have an instant formula for creating a Sunni resistance movement.  Then, add in a little extra “training” at Camp Bucca, a U.S. military prison in Iraq, for key unemployed officers, and -- Voilà! -- you’ve helped set up the petri dish in which the leadership of the Islamic State movement will grow.  Multiply such stunning tactical finesse many times over globally and, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes clear today, you have what might be called the folly of the “sole superpower” writ large. Tom
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  • Delusionary Thinking in Washington The Desperate Plight of a Declining Superpower By Michael T. Klare
  • Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the face of such defiance? This is no small matter. For decades, being a superpower has been the defining characteristic of American identity. The embrace of global supremacy began after World War II when the United States assumed responsibility for resisting Soviet expansionism around the world; it persisted through the Cold War era and only grew after the implosion of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. assumed sole responsibility for combating a whole new array of international threats. As General Colin Powell famously exclaimed in the final days of the Soviet era, “We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives Here,’ no matter what the Soviets do, even if they evacuate from Eastern Europe.”
  • The problem, as many mainstream observers now acknowledge, is that such a strategy aimed at perpetuating U.S. global supremacy at all costs was always destined to result in what Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, unforgettably termed “imperial overstretch.” As he presciently wrote in that 1987 study, it would arise from a situation in which “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is… far larger than the country’s power to defend all of them simultaneously.”
  • The first of two approaches to this conundrum in Washington might be thought of as a high-wire circus act.  It involves the constant juggling of America’s capabilities and commitments, with its limited resources (largely of a military nature) being rushed relatively fruitlessly from one place to another in response to unfolding crises, even as attempts are made to avoid yet more and deeper entanglements. This, in practice, has been the strategy pursued by the current administration.  Call it the Obama Doctrine.
  • In other words, whoever enters the Oval Office in January 2017 will be expected to wield a far bigger stick on a significantly less stable planet. As a result, despite the last decade and a half of interventionary disasters, we’re likely to see an even more interventionist foreign policy with an even greater impulse to use military force.
  • The first step in any 12-step imperial-overstretch recovery program would involve accepting the fact that American power is limited and global rule an impossible fantasy.
  • Accepted as well would have to be this obvious reality: like it or not, the U.S. shares the planet with a coterie of other major powers -- none as strong as we are, but none so weak as to be intimidated by the threat of U.S. military intervention.
  • Having absorbed a more realistic assessment of American power, Washington would then have to focus on how exactly to cohabit with such powers -- Russia, China, and Iran among them -- and manage its differences with them without igniting yet more disastrous regional firestorms. 
  • fewer military entanglements abroad, a diminishing urge to garrison the planet, reduced military spending, greater reliance on allies, more funds to use at home in rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of a divided society, and a diminished military footprint in the Middle East.
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 15
     
    Thanks Marbux! "Think of this as a little imperial folly update -- and here's the backstory.  In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein's military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into "standing up" a new Iraqi army.  By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least 50,000 "ghost soldiers," was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps Washington.  When relatively small numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning four cities -- including Mosul, the country's second largest -- and leaving behind enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles.  In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight."
Paul Merrell

A young prince may cost Syria and Yemen dear - Voices - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...a-and-yemen-dear-10156167.html

war & peace Saudis Yemen Syria Al-Nusrah

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • A succession of crucially important military and diplomatic events are convulsing the political landscape of the Middle East. The most significant development is the understanding between the US and five other world powers with Iran on limiting Iran’s nuclear programme in return for an easing of sanctions. But the muting of hostility between the US and Iran, a destabilising feature of Middle East politics since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, may not do much to stem the momentum towards ever greater violence in Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
  • What is striking about developments in the past few weeks is that it is Saudi Arabia that is seeking radical change in the region and is prepared to use military force to secure it. In Yemen, it has launched a devastating air war and, in Syria, it is collaborating with Turkey to support extreme jihadi movements led by Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate that last week captured its first provincial capital.The Saudis are abandoning their tradition of pursuing extremely cautious policies, using their vast wealth to buy influence, working through proxies and keeping close to the US. In Yemen, it is the Saudi air force that is bombarding the Houthis, along with Yemeni army units still loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh who was once seen as the Saudis’ and Americans’ man in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. As with many other air campaigns, the Saudis and their Gulf Co-operation Council allies are finding that air strikes without a reliable military partner on the ground do not get you very far. But if Saudi ground forces are deployed in Yemen they will be entering a country that has been just as much of a quagmire as Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • The Saudis are portraying their intervention as provoked by Iranian-backed Shia Zaidis trying to take over the country. Much of this is propaganda. The Houthis, who come from the Zaidi tribes in Yemen’s northern mountains, have an effective military and political movement called Ansar Allah, modelled on Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have fought off six government offensives against them since 2004, all launched by former President Saleh, then allied to the Saudis. Saleh, himself a Zaidi but drawing his support from the Zaidi tribes around the capital, Sanaa, was a casualty of the Arab Spring in Yemen but still has the support of many army units.
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  • Why has Saudi Arabia plunged into this morass, pretending that Iran is pulling the strings of the Shia minority though its role is marginal? The Zaidis, estimated to be a third of the 25 million Yemeni population, are very different Shia from those in Iran and Iraq. In the past, there has been little Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Yemen, but the Saudi determination to frame the conflict in sectarian terms may be self-fulfilling.Part of the explanation may lie with the domestic politics of Saudi Arabia. Madawi al-Rasheed, a Saudi visiting professor at LSE’s Middle East Centre, says in the online magazine al-Monitor that Saudi King Salman’s defence minister and head of the royal court, his son Mohammed bin Salman, aged about 30, wants to establish Saudi Arabia as absolutely dominant in the Arabian Peninsula. She adds caustically that he needs to earn a military title, “perhaps ‘Destroyer of Shiite Rejectionists and their Persian Backers in Yemen’, to remain relevant among more experienced and aspiring siblings and disgruntled royal cousins”. A successful military operation in Yemen would give him the credentials he needs.
  • A popular war would help unite Saudi liberals and Islamists behind a national banner while dissidents could be pilloried as traitors. Victory in Yemen would compensate for the frustration of Saudi policy in Iraq and Syria where the Saudis have been outmanoeuvred by Iran. In addition, it would be a defiant gesture towards a US administration that they see as too accommodating towards Iran.
  • Yemen is not the only country in which Saudi Arabia is taking a more vigorous role. Last week, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria suffered several defeats, the most important being the fall of the provincial capital Idlib, in northern Syria, to Jabhat al-Nusra which fought alongside two other hardline al-Qaeda-type movements, Ahrar al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa. Al-Nusra’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, immediately announced the instruction of Sharia law in the city. Sent to Syria in 2011 by Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to create al-Nusra, he split from Baghdadi when he tried to reabsorb al-Nusra in 2013. Ideologically, the two groups differ little and the US has launched air strikes against  al-Nusra, though Turkey still treats it as if it represented moderates.The Syrian government last week accused Turkey of helping thousands of jihadi fighters to reach Idlib and of jamming Syrian army telecommunications, which helped to undermine the defences of the city. The prominent Saudi role in the fall of Idlib was publicised by Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and adviser to the government, in an interview in The New York Times. He said that Saudi Arabia and Turkey had backed Jabhat al-Nusra and the other jihadis in capturing Idlib, adding that “co-ordination between Turkish and Saudi intelligence has never been as good as now”. Surprisingly, this open admission that Saudi Arabia is backing jihadi groups condemned as terrorists by the US attracted little attention. Meanwhile, Isis fighters have for the first time entered Damascus in strength, taking over part the Yarmouk Palestinian camp, only ten miles from the heart of the Syrian capital.
  • Saudi Arabia is not the first monarchy to imagine that it can earn patriotic credentials and stabilise its rule by waging a short and victorious foreign war. In 1914, the monarchs of Germany, Russia and Austro-Hungary had much the same idea and found out too late that they had sawed through the branch on which they were all sitting. Likewise, Saudi rulers may find to their cost that they have been far more successful than Iran ever was in destroying the political status quo in the Middle East.
Paul Merrell

Actual text (!) of the Corker/Cardin Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 | Just Security - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...lear-agreement-review-act-2015

war & peace Iranian-nukes-myth negotiations sanctions legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Perhaps you’ve read a few–even a few dozen–stories describing the negotiated compromise legislation that passed unanimously out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, which the President will sign.  Odds are, however, that virtually none of those stories, online or in print, contains the language of the agreement, or even a link to it so that you might assess it for yourself.  (Why does this media failure to link to the relevant documents–even to legislation!–remain the default rule?)  [UPDATE:  Not surprisingly, Jack Goldsmith is the exception to the rule.  A bit more on Jack’s post below.] Well, here is the amended Act, which would add a new Section 135 to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Apr 15
     
    The irony here, of course, is that U.S. negotiators will have to give ground to the Iranians on something else in order to gain their acceptance of the delay and uncertainty added by the legislation just passed. So from the viewpoint of the opponents of the deal, the legislation actually works contrary to their interests unless the deal can be shot down in its entirety. 
Paul Merrell

Do The Math: Global War On Terror Has Killed 4 Million Muslims Or More - 1 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...208225

war & peace war on terror™ casualties stats

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • A study released earlier this year revealed the shocking death toll of the United States’s “War on Terror” since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the true body count could be even higher. Published in March by Physicians for Social Responsibility, the study, conducted by a team that included some Nobel Prize winners, determined that at least 1.3 million people have died as a result of war since Sept.11, 2001, but the real figure might be as high as two million. The study was an attempt to “close the gaps” in existing research, including studies like the Iraq Body Count,” which puts the number of violent deaths in that country at about 219,000 since 2003, based on media reports of the time period. Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, writing in April for Middle East Eye, explained some of the ways the previous figures fell short, according to the physicians’ research: “For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC [Iraq Body Count] recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.
  • Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor of 40.” The physicians behind the study also praised a controversial report from the medical journal The Lancet that placed the toll count far higher than that of Iraq Body Count, at closer to one million dead. In addition to the war in Iraq, the PSR study added additional victims from other countries where the United States has waged war: “To this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of US-led war: a ‘conservative’ total of 1.3 million. The real figure could easily be ‘in excess of 2 million’.” These figures may still be underestimating the real death toll, according to Ahmed. These studies only account for the victims of violent conflict, but not the many more who will die as a result of the damage war brings to crucial infrastructure, from roads to farms to hospitals — not to mention devastating sanctions like those placed on Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991. He continues:
  • “Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children. The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to ‘an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq.’” Similar figures for Afghanistan, he reports, could bring totals to four million or more. As Ahmed points out in his article, the majority of those killed in these wars and those suffering most from these wars, statistically speaking, were Muslim — a stark contrast to the common view that radical Muslim terrorists are the deadliest group in the Middle East. Rather, it would seem the American military are the worst killers, and the death toll resembles religious genocide. In 2009, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, wrote in Foreign Policy:
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.” Or, as Ben Affleck famously quipped to Bill Maher last year: “We’ve killed more Muslims than they’ve killed us by an awful lot.”
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 15
     
    Reminds of an opinion poll conducted in the UK a couple of years ago. When asked how many Iraqis were killed by the invasion and occupation, the media answer was "about 5,000." 
Gary Edwards

Obama's Bait and Switch: Karl Rove describes how Obama's Policies Break His Campaign Promises - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB123621161271234665.html

financial-crisis karl-rove obama-socialism obamanomics banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Mar 09 - Cached
  • For example, Mr. Obama didn't run promising larger deficits -- but now is offering record-setting ones. He'll add $4.9 trillion before his term ends and $7.4 trillion if given a second, doubling the national debt in five years and tripling it in 10.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 06 Mar 09
       
      Obama railed against the Bush deficits, accusing Bush of irresponsible stewardship. Obama promised fiscal responsibility.
  • Mr. Obama cannot dismiss critics by pointing to President George W. Bush's decision to run $2.9 trillion in deficits while fighting two wars and dealing with 9/11 and Katrina. Mr. Obama will surpass Mr. Bush's eight-year total in his first 20 months and 11 days in office, adding $3.2 trillion to the national debt. If America "cannot and will not sustain" deficits like Mr. Bush's, as Mr. Obama said during the campaign, how can Mr. Obama sustain the geometrically larger ones he's flogging?
  • Mr. Obama pledged "no tax hikes on any families earning less than a quarter million dollars." What he didn't draw attention to was $600 billion in higher energy taxes he wants to impose through a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. These taxes will hit everyone who drives, flips a light switch, or buys anything manufactured, grown or shipped.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Mar 09
     
    Barack Obama won the presidency in large measure because he presented himself as a demarcation point. The old politics, he said, was based on "spin," misleading arguments, and an absence of candor. He'd "turn the page" on that style of politics. Last week's presentation of his budget shows that hope was a mirage.
Gary Edwards

Barack Obama's Stimulus Plan Will Get Little Value for Money - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB123396623933859023.html

finacial-crisis

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 09 - Cached
  • This is so manifestly false that we doubt Mr. Obama really believes it. He has to know that it matters what the government spends the money on, as well as how it is financed. A dollar doled out in jobless benefits may well be spent by the worker who receives it. That $1 of spending will count as economic activity and add to GDP. But that same dollar can't be conjured out of thin air. The government has to take that dollar away from someone else -- either in higher taxes, or by issuing new debt in the form of a bond. The person who is taxed or buys the bond will have $1 less to spend. If the beneficiary of that $1 spends it on something less productive than the taxed American or the lender would have, then the net impact on growth will be negative.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 09
     
    The stage was thus set for the popular President to forge a bipartisan consensus that combined ideas from both parties. A major cut in the corporate tax favored by Republicans could have been added to Democratic public works spending for a quick political triumph that might have done at least some economic good. Instead, Mr. Obama chose to let House Democrats write the bill, and they did what comes naturally: They cleaned out their intellectual cupboards and wrote a bill that is 90% social policy, and 10% economic policy. (See here for a case study.) It is designed to support incomes with transfer payments, rather than grow incomes through job creation. This is the reason the bill has run into political trouble, despite a new President with 65% job approval. The 11 Democrats who opposed it in the House didn't do so because they want to hand Mr. Obama a defeat. The same is true of the Senate moderates of both parties working to trim their $900 billion version. They've acted because they can't justify a vote for so much spending for so little economic effect.
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