Affirms that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening. Urges increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to secure an agreement that includes: (1) suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, (2) complete cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran’s nuclear activities, and (3) a permanent agreement that verifiably assures that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful. Supports: (1) the universal rights and democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, and (2) U.S. policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. Rejects any U.S. policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran. Urges the President to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat. (emphasis mine)

The resolution passed the House 401-11, with a few representatives absent and a few abstaining. This means it had massive bipartisan support – for those of you who only consider Republicans to be warmongers: 166 of 190 Democrats voted in support, including some of its ostensibly most progressive members, such as Barney Frank and Rush Holt.

The language used bodes terribly for the United States’ already disastrous and destructive foreign policy. The House affirms not merely that Iran will not be allowed to manufacture nuclear weapons, but that it will not be permitted the capability of said manufacturing. Never mind that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta observed that Iran is not actually pursuing these weapons; given the extreme and persistent threats from the nuclear-armed Israel and United States, coupled with the U.S. forces surrounding Iran, we would have no right to prevent them if they were.

Further, examining the House’s reasoning for denouncing Iran as a repressive regime highlights severe hypocrisy:

Whereas, on December 26, 2011, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution denouncing the serious human rights abuses occurring in Iran, including torture, cruel and degrading treatment in detention, the targeting of human rights defenders, violence against women, and ‘the systematic and serious restrictions on freedom of peaceful assembly’, as well as severe restrictions on the rights to ‘freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.’

Switch in that paragraph “the United States” for “Iran” and you might think we should be sanctioning ourselves. Regarding the first several accusations, consider this: the United States tortures foreign adversaries by proxy, abuses accused whistle-blowers in prison before trial, detains more prisoners than any country on Earth, and continues to pass state laws assaulting women’s rights. Perhaps the most hypocritical, though, is the accusation of the repression of peaceful assembly. Just two days after the House passed this resolution, Chicago riot police beat protesters with nightsticks, hit others with CPD vehicles, and used sound canons to disrupt peaceful demonstrators against the NATO summit. So the idea that the U.S. deems Iran a barbaric nation that represses political speech is extremely two-faced at best.

The worst part about the bill, though, is not what policies it specifically introduces or accusations it announces but rather what it signifies more broadly: the U.S. is taking the next step in the war on Iran that has already begun.

For one thing, Israel has already teamed up with a U.S.-backed terror group within Iran to assassinate nuclear scientists, serving both the temporary, practical purpose of inhibiting Iran’s nuclear progress and the long-term, psychological purpose of instilling fear within Iran and its fledgling nuclear program.

More insidiously, the U.S. has imposed severe sanctions on Iran that most describe as “crippling” and that all should describe as acts of war. Just today, the Senate voted unanimously to escalate those very sanctions. While President Obama may say that sanctions are intended to isolate Iran’s leaders in their nuclear position, it is citizens who bear the burden of these economic moves. Look to Iraq for the devastating effects, where a senior U.N. official estimated that U.N.-imposed sanctions in the 1990s killed a staggering 500,000 children under the age of 5. They don’t call ‘em “crippling” for nothing.

We should also look to Iraq to understand how this bipartisan process of escalation works, from sanctions to bombing to occupation. Arguing against sanctions on Iran in April 2010, Rep. Ron Paul recalled how sanctions on Iraq led inevitably to war:

Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.

The Iraq war did not begin with the 2003 invasion – it began with the 1990s embargo. Sanctions on Iraq not only killed hundreds of thousands, but they structured the narrative on Iraq to winnow out peaceful options on the path to war. And the same is true of Iran. Now debates on Iran focus on whether Ahmadinejad will relent in his pursuit of weapons, whether sanctions are “working” sufficiently, or where the U.S. and Israel should draw “red lines” for attack.

President Obama called last month’s “negotiations” with Iran that country’s “last chance,” effectively threatening to escalate sanctions or initiate an attack if Iran didn’t cease and desist its nuclear enrichment program entirely. How are those “negotiations”? How is that “diplomacy”? Threatening Iran to completely submit to the U.S.’s will to get nothing in return is not a discussion – it’s bullying.

What would Iran have to gain in that situation? Iran is seeking to defend itself from nuclear-armed bullies surrounding it constantly. Passively complying would only speed up the U.S. plan to replace the Iranian regime with one even more compliant.

But the United States will not relent on Iran – just as it did not relent on Iraq. Examine again the House resolution’s first principle:

…it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening.

Compare that with President Bill Clinton’s 1998 remarks on Iraq:

One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.

This is how American bipartisanship – or more accurately, duopoly – works. Both parties want war with Iran, the way both parties wanted war with Iraq. It is in both of their interests – appeasing Israel and its chief lobby, AIPAC, and posturing for their respective bases. Republicans take the hard line on our “enemies,” using blatantly aggressive language, refusing to “apologize for America” and reducing our victims to less than human. Democrats take the more “pragmatic” approach, adopting “national security” rhetoric based in protecting Americans that disguises the exact same policies. The Senate vote to go to war with Iraq, after all, didn’t barely squeak through on Republican support: it passed 96-4. (Now, 9/11 catalyzed the whole process in Iraq and made dissent even less popular, but the biggest antiwar protest in recorded history couldn’t sway more than four measly votes in the Senate.)

This endless posturing is how President Obama can be accused of being “soft on terror” and simultaneously escalate sanctions on Iran and massive drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

This is why, in the interest of war, sanctions by one party is a huge gift to the other. If Mitt Romney is elected this year, he’ll likely announce that Obama’s sanctions were insufficient and encourage an Israeli attack on Iran behind closed doors. If Obama is re-elected, he’ll continue on the path he’s currently on: allowing Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists, officially recognizing the terror group seeking regime change in Iran, and escalating sanctions that cripple the Iranian people and isolate its leaders.

Citing Glenn Greenwald and Greg Sargent on liberal support for Obama’s escalated drone strikes, here’s Stephen Walt on ‘Why Hawks Should Vote for Obama’:

Obama can do hawkish things as a Democrat that a Republican could not (or at least not without facing lots of trouble on the home front). It’s the flipside of the old “Nixon Goes to China” meme: Obama can do hawkish things without facing (much) criticism from the left, because he still retains their sympathy and because liberals and non-interventionists don’t have a credible alternative (sorry, Ron Paul supporters). If someone like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush had spent the past few years escalating drone attacks, sending Special Forces into other countries to kill people without the local government’s permission, prosecuting alleged leakers with great enthusiasm, and ratcheting up sanctions against Iran, without providing much information about exactly why and how we were doing all this, I suspect a lot of Democrats would have raised a stink about some of it. But not when it is the nice Mr. Obama that is doing these things.

So if you vote for Barack Obama because you think that Mitt Romney would put troops on the ground, you’ll only be doing it to make yourself feel better. You’ll be playing right into the partisan posturing that seeks to fabricate a meaningful difference between the two major parties, both with long histories of support for wars of aggression. You’ll be fundamentally misunderstanding how American duopoly works: both parties decry each other for tactically approaching the same policies differently in the interest of electing their own representatives to power. Both parties want war – they just want to play it to their respective bases properly.

If you think Al Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, that Ralph Nader ruined the antiwar movement and George Bush is all to blame, point me to where Gore opposed Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq when he was Vice President. In the meantime, read how Gore argued for regime change in Iraq a few short months before Bush invaded: “Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”

If you think Bush’s war was a terrible mistake that warranted John Kerry’s election in 2004, read Kerry on Iraq two months before the invasion:

Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime … He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation … And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction … So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real…

Find more quotes from Democrats leading up to and supportive of Bush’s 2003 invasion here.

Liberals criticize President Obama for escalating drone strikes, failing to close Guantanamo, aggressively persecuting Bradley Manning, illegally invading Libya, offering cuts to Social Security, and immunizing the war crimes and torture of the Bush administration – but many same liberals say that despite all of these transgressions, the ostensible likelihood of Mitt Romney attacking Iran makes them feel they have to re-elect the president.

If this were true, wouldn’t these liberals be criticizing Obama’s sanctions on Iran? Wouldn’t they have abandoned Clinton, Gore, and Kerry after their comments on Iraq? More to the point, if these liberals despise war so much, why aren’t Obama’s surge in Afghanistan or expanded wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen deal-breakers for re-election?

If you actually don’t want war with Iran, you have to help end duopoly. You can’t support either of the two establishment parties who feed the military-industrial complex and fear-monger voters into submission. We must make it known that the people want peace – meaning no sanctions, no assassinations, no threats of war.

We must make war making and fear mongering unacceptable. Come Election Day, we can vote third party, or boycott the election, or protest to shut down military recruitment centers or drone bases. But we can’t fund or vote for the war parties – our victims can’t afford it. No votes for empire, no money for war. No exceptions.

Reforms in Myanmar have made the past experience just described less dangerous. However, from time to time these days I find myself feeling like a hypocrite when speaking about American ideals and Democracy. Democracy in the United States, seen from abroad, looks more like Communism in China. American foreign policy looks more like mafia thuggery. I’ve begun feeling like I’m misleading my students who deeply believe in American political policy and projected principles solely for the reason that the United States government is – rightly so for a change of pace – Aung San Suu Kyi’s greatest ally.

My students aren’t absent any ideas about what Democracy means. All of them were ex-political prisoners or family members of political prisoners. The youngest among them was detained just six months ago after supporting her father’s single-person protest against an obscure land-seizure case that left his family farm in the hands of a corrupt government crony. The father was arrested and the daughter went to the police station to demand his release. She was arrested when she did so. Three or four years ago they would both have been sentenced to several years in prison.

These days, as Myanmar eases into sort of becoming a fledgling democracy in its earliest stages, reforms have opened doors and minds and after nearly a week, both father and daughter were set free without any pending charges — absent their land. Human rights abuses and injustices still occur wholesale in Myanmar, yet with less frequency except in the frontier regions where westerners are banned from entering. In the United States, human rights abuses and injustices still occur, yet more frequently every day.

When I see video’s of American police brutality against Occupy protesters, people being evicted from their homes, TSA security hacks accosting four-year old children at airports and calling the child “a suspect”, TSA searches of innocent American citizens travelling on buses, trains and sidewalks, police busting down the door of an African American Vietnam Veterans home in white Plains, New York and electrocuting him, then shooting him to death, and when I read the news of the madness of war zone atrocities of murderous drones flying over half of Arabia, bombing and killing at random, American soldiers pissing on corpses, raping and rampaging death and destruction on to impoverished uneducated people with no electricity in their villages, I wonder, what the hell is Democracy?

What is the United States anymore? I hardly can recognize it from the days long ago when I had Civics class in seventh grade; the American military had just finished slaughtering 3 million people in Vietnam, untold numbers more in Laos and was unquestionably responsible for the genocide of 3 million more in Cambodia. Didn’t Nazi Germany in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia behave this way long before Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II? No country dared, then or now, to stand up to American militarism abroad and now that it’s come home to roost in the styles of fascism on American streets and in American homes. Few Americans actually can resist the police state without their lives and livelihoods being  destroyed more than they’ve become.

When the world finally stood up to the spread of fascism in the 1940’s it was too late to save the so-called civilized world from total destruction. That the United States was the only power left not destroyed was because of geography, not superiority. Can the rest of the world stand up to the United States military and security complex?  The BRICS nations are succeeding at bringing imperial American economic might down by devaluing the dollar to 65% of the world’s currency reserve from 85% a few years ago. But as our  politicians have caved like lemmings jumping over a cliff to the security industrial complex, more and more money is being wasted to reap death, destruction, and surveillance over the world and in the United States. American militarism is out of control. Americans collectively have  become like the solitary young man standing in front of the huge tank during the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1979.

What has become of the United States? The nation’s police departments behave as if they are occupying army’s hell bent on subduing the populace that pays them, even to the point of a citizen being subjected to being stripped searched not once, but twice, for failing to pay for a traffic violation. That means if your spouse, grandparents or children forget or fail to pay a parking ticket, for whatever reason, they can be arrested, strip searched and stored away in a jail and possibly even left there out of professional  neglect such as the kid in California who was doomed to spend four days in prison cell by the DEA, forced to drink his urine to survive, he was never charged with a crime.

America imprisons close to 2.5 million people at a time, year in and year out. African Americans are  disproportionately jailed per capita more than are white people. Where is the democracy? What on earth could 2.5 million Americans be doing so badly that all of them deserve to be in prison? Millions more each year are subjected to the legal system of parole and probation.  Corporations run the prisons in the United States. They lobby for tougher laws in all areas of law in order to arrest and detain more and more American citizens, because they make profits from having people in their prisons. Police and judges have been exposed as being corrupted with kickbacks and payoffs in some places in America as they’ve been caught arresting and sentencing with abandon while getting paid commissions in the form of cash. It’s probable many more have not been caught.

I tell my students to go on YouTube and search “police taser” and watch the many, many videos of American police electrocuting its citizens. They report back to me in shock and horror. They proclaim, “This never even happen in Burma!” It’s hard to teach Democracy when you come from a country where Democracy doesn’t really exist anymore.  Where the police state is the enemy of its citizens, where every form of communication is captured and stored, analyzed and used for advertising or – who knows – future blackmail? American citizens are all “suspects” to the police state. They are now subjected to drones hovering in their air space. No more laying out topless in the back yard on a sunny day or going for a romantic walk in a cornfield or forest and finding a nice cozy place to snuggle. If seen by a police drone, the police will arrive to arrest, strip search, and imprison the couple and they will inevitably be labeled sex-offenders and have their lives forever ruined. All for being in love under the clear blue sky on a pleasant summer day. Clear except for the police watching.

What does Democracy mean regarding the upcoming presidential election? There’s a choice between two people for president who swear they will give more money to the security state, cut social safety nets, privatize public education, cut taxes on the wealthy, spend more money on drug prohibition, continue to kill, torture and destroy more in Afghanistan, and in many other countries in the middle east – for what? Oil? The minority of Israel’s leaders and their insane but wealthy American supporters who are extreme warmongers and zealots hell bent of attacking Iran and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their ancestral lands? Most Israelis and Jewish Americans oppose these warmongers among them. The American corporate media is complicit in fueling the airwaves with propaganda against Iran and Islam, immigrants, and any idea left of what was once considered fascism. In today’s bizarre political world Richard Nixon would be called a  progressive.

What are Americans doing about the injustices and high-crimes and misdemeanors of American government and its Wall Street puppeteers? Mitt Romney has a car lift in his home. He’s the Republican nominee – thankfully since all of his opponents were nearly intellectually catatonic  evangelical non-Christ-like Christians. He’s a hedge fund financier – or whatever they call such crooks these days. Call them anything except guilty as charged. Barack Obama is a traitorous liar who sold himself to the American people as a new deal liberal peace-loving reformer who would ends wars, curtail the security state, and fight Wall Street – hahaha. Last time I looked, Guantanamo was still operating full steam ahead.  Americans will be at war in Afghanistan until 2024. (Hasn’t the bloodthirsty response to the September 11, 2001 tragedy been satisfied enough?) Wall Street crooks are still robbing the nation with ease. Terrorism of all kinds rules the world around us.

I want to be clear. I fear terrorism. Make no question about it. I fear police drones watching me from above, being tracked electronically and fondled by the TSA, being  harassed by police at roadblocks – but I fear it coming from Americans in America. I fear it from a psychotic night watchman like Mr. Zimmerman who murdered Trayvon Martin for wearing a hoodie. I fear it from a policeman wanting to arrest me in case my auto insurance payment is late and my insurance lapses. Or maybe I might forget to put the little sticker on my license plate that says I paid for the auto registration. I don’t deserve to be arrested, strip-searched and put in prison where I or anyone one, male or female, could be raped by other prisoners or abused by under-educated, unskilled, under-paid power tripping prison guards working for a corporation.

Maybe we should lobby local towns and cities to blood test and strip search people who want to run for office. I can’t imagine why a person who is not criminally inclined would want to do so. Call it a pre-emptive test of character. If one is willing to be blood tested and strip searched in order to be an elected politician, then they are either going to be guilty of something or they are insane. In either case, they will not be fit for office. Maybe that way we can keep the criminals and crazies out of politics. And then we can keep politics out of American society and return America to the rule of law and not the rule of the wealthy corporatists and the police. Call it the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. What a dream it was to think it could last. What a nightmare American Democracy has become.

Dan Freeman-Maloy: In your book, you describe the determination of Israeli planners to develop closer ties with the European Union. Has Israel’s traditional policy of trying to limit European diplomatic involvement in the Middle East changed?

David Cronin: Yes and no.

In recent years, there has been quite a bit of strategic thinking undertaken by the Israeli foreign ministry. This was particularly the case when Tzipi Livni was in charge of that ministry.

One of the conclusions of that thinking was that Israel should not rely entirely on the US to defend its indefensible actions. There was a realisation that while the US remains the only superpower at the moment, other powers are emerging. The decision to “reach out” more to the EU was taken in that context. Israel is similarly seeking to engage more with China, India and Brazil, particularly with regard to sales of weaponry and surveillance technology.

There is a perception in some circles that European diplomats are hostile to Israel. In the first few months of this year, a series of leaked reports from EU representatives in East Jerusalem and Ramallah expressed frustration with the expansion of Israeli settlements. Yet it’s significant that these reports were drawn up by people who witness the results of Israel’s activities “on the ground”. The EU also has representatives in Tel Aviv and Brussels, who see things very differently and have been beavering away to increase cooperation between Israel and the Union.

We occasionally see newspaper articles in which Israeli ministers accuse the EU of meddling in Israel’s affairs or suggesting that the EU is biased towards the Palestinians. Yet if you dig even a tiny bit beneath the surface, you will see that this apparent tension is at odds with the real picture. The real picture is one where the EU has become so close to Israel that, I would argue, it has become complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

DF: Not long after Operation Cast Lead, then NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made a cordial visit to Israel (where his hosts drew a parallel between Israeli operations in Gaza and NATO operations in Afghanistan). You report that NATO-Israel relations may be set to deepen.

DC: We should never forget that in 2010, Israel killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American in international waters, while these activists were taking part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. I’m not an expert on these matters but my understanding is that this attack was tantamount to an act of war against Turkey, a member of NATO.

I think it’s fair to say that if Iran had done something comparable, NATO would have reacted forcefully. Yet Israel has a so-called “individual cooperation programme” with NATO since 2006, under which both sides share sensitive information; the scope of the programme was extended in 2008. Israel’s relationship with NATO has remained strong despite how the alliance condemned the flotilla attack. Shortly before Gabi Ashkenazi stepped down as head of the Israeli military last year, he was treated to a farewell dinner by senior NATO officers in Brussels. He also was called in to give NATO advice on how to fight the war in Afghanistan.

And Israel is taking part in a NATO operation in the Mediterranean called Active Endeavour. Originally, this was supposed to be an “anti-terrorism” initiative in response to the 11 September 2001 atrocities. But it has subsequently been broadened to cover immigration. What this means is that Israel is helping Western governments, especially Greece, to prevent vulnerable people fleeing poverty and persecution from reaching Europe’s shores. It’s quite disgusting.

DF: Turning back to the EU specifically, where does the recent Conformity Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA) agreement fit in the broader struggle around Europe’s preferential trade ties with Israel?

DC: ACAA sounds dull and technical. But it is deeply political.

This is an agreement reached between the EU and Israel, whereby quality checks carried out by the Israeli authorities on manufactured goods would have the same status as similar checks carried out by authorities within the EU. At the moment, it’s limited to pharmaceutical products but it could easily be extended to other goods.

This agreement is a top priority for the Israelis because once it enters into force, Israel would take an important step towards being integrated into the EU’s single market.

To their credit, some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been asking difficult questions about ACAA for a few years. And this has meant that the Parliament has not yet approved the agreement. It’s not clear when the Parliament will make a final decision about the matter. There was a discussion at the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee in the past couple of weeks, where it was decided to delay holding a vote on the dossier until legal assurances are provided on the question of whether or not the agreement would apply to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

It’s significant that the Israelis have hired a top public relations firm, Kreab Gavin Anderson, to help with their efforts to break the deadlock on ACAA. Kreab’s Brussels office is headed by a guy who used to be the chief adviser to MEPs with the Swedish Conservative Party. It cannot be a coincidence that one of the MEPs most vocal in supporting ACAA, Christoffer Fjellner, belongs to that party. He is arguing that if the agreement is not approved, Europeans will have less access to medicines. This is scaremongering, in my view, and is hypocritical because Fjellner is very supportive of the big players in the global pharmaceutical industry, who are actively seeking to use intellectual property issues to prevent the poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America from having access to affordable medicines.

DF: Even people writing for quasi-official EU publications have felt compelled to question ‘the sincerity of repeated declarations encouraging Palestinian unity’ from official spokespeople. How have EU donor and diplomatic policies contributed to fragmenting Palestinian politics?

DC: Those declarations have zero credibility.

The EU always claims that it wishes to promote democracy around the world. In 2006, an election took place in Palestine. The EU’s own observation team found the election to be free and fair and something of a model for the Arab world. And then the EU decided to ignore that election because in its eyes the “wrong” party – namely Hamas – won.

I’m personally not a fan of either Hamas nor Fatah but if Hamas won a democratic mandate, that should be respected.

It’s a classical colonial attitude for an imperial power to show preference for one side in an occupied territory over another. Divide and rule. That’s exactly what’s been happening in recent years. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, and Salam Fayyad, the so-called prime minister, lack any democratic mandate. Yet they are treated as real darlings by the EU and US. Why? Because rather than resisting the occupation, they accommodate it.

In particular, they are also happy to pursue the kind of neo-liberal economic policies that are treated as sacrosanct in Brussels and Washington. Salam Fayyad used to work for the International Monetary Fund and has clearly been inculcated with its ideology.

DF: Can you describe the EUPOL COPPS programme and its relationship to the US training of PA forces in the West Bank?

DC: This is another “divide and rule” case.

The EU’s police mission for Palestine (COPPS) was originally supposed to apply to both the West Bank and Gaza. But in practice it only applies to the West Bank because the Union refuses to deal with the Hamas administration in Gaza.

What has happened is that the EU is in charge of training civil police and the US has been charged of training more militarised police units in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority. We are told that this is helping the Palestinian Authority get ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood. This is nonsense. One of the key aims of the these training missions is to boost cooperation between the PA police and Israeli forces. So the EU is really helping Palestinians to police their own occupation.

Worse again, it has been documented that police loyal to Fatah have used brutal methods – including torture – against their political rivals. Even though these police are trained by the EU, the Union says nothing about these human rights abuses. This silence is shameful.

DF: Germany is reportedly in the process of selling Israel a sixth partially subsidized ‘Dolphin’ submarine. What’s the significance of these sales?

DC: I’d put these sales in the context of wider military cooperation between the EU and Israel.

As well as helping to arm Israel, Europe is helping Israel to sell its weaponry abroad. The British Army has been using Israeli unmanned warplanes, or drones as they are generally called, in Afghanistan, for example. The ethical question of using weapons that have been “battle-tested” in an obscene manner isn’t even broached in “polite society”. Drones were used extensively to kill and maim innocent civilians during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009.

What’s also significant is that Israeli arms companies are receiving scientific research grants from the Union. These include Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, the two suppliers of drones used in Cast Lead. At the moment, Israel is taking part in 800 EU-financed research projects, which have a total value of 4 billion euros. This means that my tax is helping to subsidise Israel’s war industry.

DF: Historically, France has been seen as the European power most likely to challenge the US monopoly on diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. Is this reputation still deserved?

DC: Definitely not.

Jacques Chirac demonstrated occasionally that he could be independent of the US when he was president. But Nicolas Sarkozy has been much more of an “Atlanticist” – for example, he decided that France should participate more fully in NATO than it has for a number of decades.

I’m answering this question a few days before the second round of voting in France’s presidential election. If Francois Hollande wins, then I don’t predict any major changes in terms of France’s policy on Israel-Palestine. I hope, however, that I am proved wrong.

Hollande has been quite happy to pander to the Zionist lobby in France. Both he and Sarkozy turned up at the annual dinner of CRIF, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Paris, earlier this year. It was clear that Hollande wasn’t there to denounce Israel’s crimes.

DF: The Greek government brazenly cooperated with Israel in blocking the ‘Freedom Flotilla II’ from challenging the Gaza blockade last summer. You’ve suggested that specific US-Israeli pressure (‘possibly even financial blackmail’) was at work, but that the incident was also a ‘logical consequence of a process that was already underway’.

DC: Yeah. This is quite closely connected to the question you asked about NATO. Greece and Israel have been working together in NATO operations a lot recently.

George Papandreou, the former Greek prime minister, was quite happy to court Israel. When it became clear that relations between Israel and Turkey had soured, Papandreou sniffed an opportunity for Greece to replace Turkey as Israel’s key ally in the Mediterranean.

Even though Greece has been going through an economic nightmare, the Athens authorities have decided to take part in a series of military operations with Israel over the past few years. Let’s not forget that Greece has been spending more on the military as a proportion of national income than most countries in Europe. You can see why the Israeli arms industry would be interested in cultivating stronger links with Greece because, even though Greece is in the doldrums financially, it’s still spending much more than it should be on weapons, while cutting back drastically on essential services like healthcare.

DF: One of your recent articles notes that many of the British officers deployed in post-WWI Palestine were veterans of the Black and Tans, the colonial force infamous for its brutality in Ireland. How has the Irish anti-colonial experience affected Irish politics on the Palestine question?

DC: Among the Irish public, there is a huge amount of sympathy for the Palestinians. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been described by some Zionist watchdogs as the best organised Palestine solidarity group in the world. That’s very interesting because the IPSC relies almost entirely on volunteers.

The Dublin government is a different story. In the current Irish government, there are at least three strong supporters of Israel. These include the ministers for defence and education.

Last year, a number of Irish activists were abducted by Israel as they tried to sail to Gaza. The response of the Dublin government was extremely weak. The Irish foreign minister, Eamon Gilmore, even attended a ceremony film festival sponsored by the Israeli government soon after that incident. He appears to regard avoiding or minimising tension with Israel as a priority.

Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that it’s Ireland’s representative at the European Commission, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is administering the research grants to Israeli arms companies I mentioned earlier. She won’t even acknowledge that giving money to firms profiting from human rights abuses is problematic.

DF: In 2010, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights issued a report criticizing EU maintenance of ‘anti-terrorist’ blacklists that effectively function ‘as ideological and political tools for undermining the right to popular resistance and self-determination.’ How do these lists constrain European politics on Palestine, and are there active campaigns to get them overturned?

DC: This is an important issue.

Israel has lobbied successfully over the past decade to have both the political and military wings of Hamas placed on the EU’s “anti-terrorist” blacklist. EU officials and governments have, as a result, been able to say “we don’t talk to terrorists”, even when the “terrorists” have a democratic mandate. I note, however, that there have been press reports lately indicating that Hamas has had some contacts with European governments. So perhaps this is changing a little bit. But in general, there is an enormous double standard, when the EU is happy to embrace Israel, a state that uses violence and intimidation against civilians on a daily basis, yet brands those who resist Israeli oppression as “terrorists”.

DF: Finally, in recent years the gap between European government support for Israel and public opinion has sometimes been so wide that the EU leadership has issued official apologies to Israel for polling results. What opportunities does this gap provide for strategic Palestine solidarity?

DC: The European public is way more critical of Israel than our governments are. This offers real hope.

The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was only launched in 2005. And it has made enormous progress. Veolia, the major French corporation, has ignominiously lost a number of major contracts around the world, for example. Why? Because of public outrage at how Veolia is involved in constructing a tramway that would effectively be reserved for Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem. This illustrates how supporting Israeli apartheid can prove bad for business if ordinary people monitor what corporations get up to and protest.

The BDS campaign is often compared to the one undertaken against South Africa. As it happens, the call for boycott was originally made by South African political activists in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that it had a major impact internationally. So the Palestinian BDS campaign has achieved in seven years what it took the South African campaign three decades to achieve.

The challenge now is to maintain the momentum – and intensify the pressure on Israel and its “corporate sponsors”.

1. Cronin maintains a blog.

In his opening statements in a Concord, New Hampshire (USA) courthouse on February 23, 2012, federal prosecutor John Capin launched the U.S. government’s trial against a 41 year-old Rwandan ‘genocide fugitive’ by wielding satellite photographs purportedly showing the road blocks where she “commanded extremist Hutu militia and ordered the rapes and killings of Tutsi” in Rwanda in 1994.

In a remarkable development, this is the first time in the history of the ‘Rwanda genocide’ trials or related Rwanda asylum hearings where Pentagon satellite photographs have been produced as evidence, and the first time that the existence of satellite photographs taken over Rwanda during the so-called ’100 days of genocide’ has ever been revealed.

Later in the trial the U.S. prosecutors produced a ‘Pentagon analyst’ who testified about the satellite photographs.  The name of the Pentagon analyst and the satellite photographs have not been made public. The existence of satellite reconnaissance and intelligence photographs newly implicates the U.S. government in the mass atrocities of 1994, and raises serious new questions about the coverup of the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994 and the atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) commanded by now President Paul Kagame.

The sudden and unexpected revelation of the existence of satellite imagery shot over Rwanda in 1994 also further corroborates claims and evidence that U.S. and Pentagon officials had plenty of satellite evidence of the numbers and whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees massacred by the Kagame war machine in Congo’s forests.

Eighteen years after the so-called ’1994 Rwanda genocide,’ Rwanda is today everywhere peddled as an economic miracle of recovery and freedom, once again ‘the Switzerland of Africa’ and the model homeland for the Tutsi ‘Jews of Africa’ narrative.  All thanks to His Supreme Majesty President Paul Kagame, who is everywhere applauded for rescuing the Tutsis, stopping the genocide, and rebuilding Rwanda in His own image.

Meanwhile, the real situation for ordinary people in Central Africa is everywhere inhumane and unjust.  The average Ugandan citizen suffers under the brutal dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni.  The people in northern Uganda, already subject to genocide as policy under the Museveni government, now have a new threat: the hysterical KONY2012 movement.

The people of Congo continue to suffer under the terrorist government of Hyppolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila), a Tutsi and the nephew of Rwandan Tutsi general James Kabarebe.  Since January 2012 more than 100,000 Congolese have been internally displaced by violence under the occupation of the Kagame regime in the Kivu provinces.

And, as it as been since 1994, both Hutus and Tutsis suffer massive repression under the Kagame regime inside Rwanda.

Million Dollar Munyenyezi Trial

On June 24, 2010, Beatrice Munyenyezi (MOON’-yen-yezi) was arrested in Manchester, New Hampshire (USA) and charged, according to U.S. prosecutors, with “procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully by misrepresenting her activities during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.”

Munyenyezi is a U.S. citizen falsely accused of Rwanda genocide rape crimes in yet another case adding up to millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars being used to fund fabricated Rwanda genocide and asylum trials — and now genocide tourism expeditions in Rwanda.

The U.S. Department of Justice seeks to deport Beatrice Munyenyezi to face genocide charges in Rwanda. But Ms. Munyenyezi’s will be a milestone case: this is the first ever international legal proceeding in the United States involving a woman accused of rape as a genocide and war crime.

According to the government of Rwanda, Beatrice Munyenyezi, 41, allegedly “participated in, committed, ordered, oversaw, conspired to, aided and abetted, assisted in and directed persecution, kidnapping, rape and murder during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

The Kagame regime makes general accusations that you can arrest and charge any Hutu with. These are generic genocide charges used by the Rwandan military regime against all people of the Hutu ethnicity.

The fifteen-day trial of Beatrice Munyenyezi in February and March 2012 was concluded with four additional days of deliberations by an all-white jury. On March 15 the jury delivered a deadlocked decision and the U.S. government declared a ‘mistrial.’ The re-trial is set to begin September 10, 2012.

Mark Howard, one of Beatrice Munyenyezi’s attorneys, revealed to the press the huge sums of money spent by the U.S Judiciary to try Rwandan genocide suspects.

Howard estimated that U.S. taxpayers paid between US$ 2.5 million and $US 3 million for Munyenyezi’s recent prosecution and trial in federal court. Howard estimates that a retrial is likely to cost an additional US$1 million.

Howard’s estimated costs include attorney fees, agent salaries, the “extraordinary expense” of investigating in a foreign country, the costs of bringing some fifteen witnesses to New Hampshire, and the hiring of experts.

Several of the prosecution witnesses brought over from Rwanda in the latest charade staged by the Kagame military regime are described by the U.S. and Rwanda government as “extremist Hutu genocidaires” who were convicted of life in prison. Others are witnesses from a women’s genocide survivor organization in Butare, paid by the U.S. government to travel to New Hampshire, whose profits from the traveling and testifying can be used to support their mission in Butare. Such economic interests play a major role in the official choice and production of ‘genocide witnesses’ and ‘genocide survivors.’

Defense attorneys described the fifteen Rwandan witnesses flown over to the U.S. from Rwanda as “psychopathic killers who never mentioned Munyenyezi in nearly two decades of trials and investigations into the Rwanda genocide.”

The cost of bringing Kagame’s witnesses to the United States and putting them up — some under tight security and others at expensive hotels — for the duration of the trial represents additional massive costs to U.S. taxpayers for what amounts to fraud by the U.S. government.

The credibility of ‘witnesses’ incarcerated in Rwanda is highly suspect. First, there is the problem of coercion: many people in prison in Rwanda or accused by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) and Gacaca [people's] courts have been framed. Other ‘confessed genocidaires‘ have been tortured, and some have been coerced by the RPA threat of retaliation against their families.

Often enough, ‘witnesses to killings’ and ‘genocide survivors’ are frauds, sometimes they are people who were not even in Rwanda during the 1994 cataclysm. Other government plants and handlers have been coached.

In Munyenyezi’s case, the press apparently decided that the witnesses brought in to accuse Beatrice Munyenyezi were not credible.

First, the claim by the RPA that Munyenyezi commanded soldiers to rape Tutsi women in the basement of the hotel is presented as an absolute. The rape occurred ‘in the context of genocide’ and so it is believable and believed. However, no Rwandan woman in the context of Rwandan culture would ever oversee mass rape of other Rwandan women. In fact, Beatrice Munyenyezi was also pregnant at the time — making the hypothesis of rape even less plausible.

Second, we can imagine that any credible testimony on a genocide rape charge against a woman would have provoked an endless barrage of news stories titled ‘Hutu genocidaire woman ordered rape of innocent Tutsis in hotel’s basement’, stories that would have made their way right up to CNN and the New York Times. But the decision on the rape charges went unmentioned by the New Hampshire press because the credibility of dishonest government witnesses (coached to lie) was easily destroyed.

It is as implausible as the charge by Invisible Children founder Jason Russel that “Joseph Kony forced children to kill their parents and then eat them.”

Some so-called ‘genocidaires‘ may be guilty, but others are not, and the Kagame regime uses all kinds of bribery, subterfuge and threats to pull the wool over the eyes of tourists, researchers and other ‘guests.’ Many people in Rwanda are forced to spy, tattle and inform on others, or else face personal persecution or threats to their families.

Anyone who challenges the officially sanctioned narrative in Rwanda is branded, arrested, exiled, disappeared or — in the case of pesky American academics, like Dr. Christian Davenport, Dr. Alan Stam or Dr. Susan Thomson, who all asked too many questions of the ‘wrong’ kind — barred from Rwanda forever.

International Wars of Aggression

In 1981, Yoweri Museveni and his newly formed National Resistance Army (NRA) launched an invasion of the sovereign country of Uganda.  From 1980 to 1986, the NRA perpetrated massive war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Lowero Triangle and other areas in central and northern Uganda.  These atrocities were universally attributed — and are so attributed to this day — to the government forces, the Uganda National Liberation Army, commanded by then president Milton Obote. (See, for example,  “Notes On the Concealment of Genocide in Uganda,” A. Milton Obote, April 1990.)

The massive atrocities committed by the NRA set the stage for the rise of Joseph Kony, the Ugandan bogey man used by Museveni, Washington, London and Israel to facilitate a permanent state of insecurity in northern Uganda. Under permanent emergency, Museveni was able to justify the forcible displacement of millions of indigenous Acholi people and their internment into concentration camps. Museveni also authored a document attesting to genocidal intent against the Acholis.

One of the 27 guerrillas who took up arms alongside Yoweri Museveni in the illegal NRA invasion of Uganda was Paul Kagame, the future leader of the Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front, the Ugandan guerrilla army that illegally invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990.

Loyal to Museveni and his bloody guerrilla tactics, Kagame rose through the ranks to become Museveni’s director of military intelligence — a position for which his enemies now claim he was known as ‘the butcher.’

At the time of the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, Paul Kagame was being trained at the Pentagon’s General Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas (USA). Kagame returned and led the four year war that resulted in the deaths of perhaps several hundred thousand Hutu people between October 1990 and April 1994 alone.

A prima facie case can be made that each of the invasions of Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) constitute the supreme crime against humanity, that being the illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.

The United States, Britain and Israel were the strongest backers behind backed Museveni and Kagame in all three of these illegal wars of aggression.

Involved at the highest level in the RPA/F invasion of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 were United States intelligence agent Roger Winter and Israeli MOSSAD agent David Kimche.  U.S. defense attaches Lt. Colonel Thomas P. Odom and Richard Skow are two more U.S. military intelligence agents who have deep inside knowledge of the Pentagon- and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-backed invasions of both Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.

The U.S. House of Representative hearings by the Subcommittee on Africa of the Committee on International Relations reveal that the United States knew that the Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire were being massacred, and it makes clear some of who knew what, where it was happening, and when.

The “Official” Rwanda Genocide Narrative

Just as Yoweri Museveni and his backers conferred victor status on Museveni after the NRA victory in Uganda, and then charged the NRA’s victims and the Obote government with genocide, so too did Museveni and Paul Kagame and their backers confer savior status on Paul Kagame and accuse the Hutu victims of genocide.

The coalition multi-party coalition government of Juvenal Habyarimana was falsely branded with the genocide label as early as 1993.

Contrary to the official narrative that casts Hutus as killers and Tutsis as victims, the RPA/F plan included the sacrificing of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Given opportunities to negotiate a ceasefire, and even the unconditional surrender by the national army forces — Habyarimana’s Forces Armées Rwandaises or FAR — soon after the plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, the RPA/F chose to continue the war to achieve absolute military dominance.

The RPA/F leadership was comprised of elite English-speaking Tutsis from Uganda backed by Ugandan generals James Kazini and Salim Saleh, and by Yoweri Museveni himself. The elite RPA/F Tutsis — Major General Paul Kagame, General James Kabarebe, etc. — did not trust French-speaking Tutsis who had stayed behind in Rwanda after the Tutsi guerrilla attacks against the Hutu governments of the 1960′s and early 1970′s provoked retaliatory pogroms against Tutsi.

As the RPA/F invasion continued — prior to April 6, 1994 — Tutsis were also killed, both in revenge killings and because of RPA/F attacks. Claims that the Habyarimana government persecuted Tutsis are highly contested. Evidence suggests that Kagame and Museveni needed to play the ‘homeless and persecuted Tutsi refugee’ card to justify invading Rwanda.

After April 6, 1994, the minority Twa population also suffered massive loss of life in what should also be recognized as acts of genocide, at the very least.

“The continuation of the genocide of the Tutsis was a key part of the [RPA] victory strategy,” writes former Rwandan Patriotic Front official Jean-Marie Ndagijimana, in How General Paul Kagame Sacrificed the Tutsis.  “[A] ceasefire and a halt to the genocide risked strengthening his adversaries [Forces Armées Rwandaises] by freeing them from their police duties.  Furthermore, a halt to the massacres would have taken from Kagame the sole pretext on which he based his legitimacy.  The government [FAR] army had to be made to appear like a genocidal force the defeat of which no one would regret… Why stop the massacres when they were working to legitimize Kagame and weaken his adversaries?”

Here is how the typical U.S. news agency reporting on the Munyenyezi story story describes the Rwanda genocide.  “The genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994,” reads the commentator, in an ominous tone, in a local New Hampshire TV station video clip. “It lasted 100 days.  Up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militias and as many as 10,000 people were killed each day.  The Hutu were defeated three months later.”

However, the genocide against Tutsis during those 100 days of 1994 cannot be understood out of context, and the true context is never provided by the establishment media, by the U.S. or British governments, by Israel, or by the mercenaries working to clean the blood off the Kagame regime.

Former British prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian academic Gerald Kaplan, New Yorker magazine writer Philip Gourevitch, former USAID agent Timothy Longman, Somalian mouthpiece Rakiya Omaar, and Rwandan mouthpiece Tom Ndahiro are some of the most prominent propagandists whitewashing the Kagame regime.

Timothy Longman, now director of African Studies at Boston University, is the Rwanda genocide ‘expert’ that was brought in to testify against Beatrice Munyenyezi. Longman and Alison Des Forges co-authored the Human Rights Watch (HRW) book on Rwanda Leave None to Tell the Story, and both worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon; the 790 page tome did not mention a word about Beatrice Munyenyezi.

Kagame has also hired the Racepoint Group, a U.S. lobbying and public relations firm to “build a strong and sustained image campaign communicating the successes of Rwanda with key stakeholders in the political and financial elite communities” and “[o]ffset the negative and factually incorrect information of those parties with vested interests in mis-portraying Rwanda’s advancements.”

Racepoint’s campaign themes include “Rwanda’s Visionary Leader… highlighting President Kagame” and “The Rwandan Miracle: Healing of a Nation.” The company’s fees are listed as US$ 50,000 per month plus 2500 to 3500 pounds Sterling per month for “out of pocket expenses.”

The Pentagon Sacrifices Millions of Africans

The double presidential assassination of April 6, 1994 is defined as the trigger for the massive backlash of Tutsi killings by Hutu people. Since the war began in October 1990, more than 10 million people have died in Central Africa due to Pentagon backed insurgency, with the greatest numbers killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Jean-Marie Ndagijimana was the Rwandan Ambassador to Paris under the Habyarimana government from October 1990 to April 1994, before being removed from his post for speaking out against the mass killings of Tutsis and Hutus.

On 19 July 1994, Ndagajimana became Minister of Foreign Affairs in what was called the ‘Broad-Based National Unity Government’ led by Faustin Twagiramungu. In September 1994, he resigned and went into exile after the report by UNHCR investigator Robert Gersony confirmed that scores of thousands of Hutus were killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army between July and September 1994.

Robert Gersony was the UNHCR contractor whose report on RPA killings of Hutus was massively denounced at the time and later buried by the United Nations never to be seen again. Gersony went on to work for the UNHCR in northern Uganda and other places. Clearly, Gersony’s credentials stood the test, and his silence secured his future employment(s). Indeed, Robert Gersony went on to work for the USAID mission to Kampala, Uganda, where he produced a report detailing the persecution of Acholi people in Northern Uganda. (See, e.g.: The Anguish of Northern Uganda: Results of a Field-Based Assessment of the Civil Conflicts in Northern Uganda, Robert Gersony, USAID Mission to Kampala, 1997).

Jean-Marie Ndagajimana insists that the killings of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis between April 6 and July 1994 was organized, not spontaneous, but that there is no question that there was a double genocide. He claims Tutsis were systematically killed by militias in areas controlled by the interim government of Jean Kambanda, and that the RPA/F systematically killed Hutus in zones under its control.

Based on research for which they were eventually thrown out of Rwanda, U.S. academics Christian Davenport and Alan Stam insist that the numbers of Tutsis killed in Rwanda during the so-called 100 days could not have been as high as the official narrative claims, and that hundreds of thousands of Hutus were killed during this period and these comprise the difference between the official count of 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis and the actual count of hundreds of thousands less Tutsis.

Defense attorneys from the ICTR are adamant that the record shows that there was no systematic planification of genocide by the government of Juvenal Habyarimana or its immediate successors, the interim coalition government of Jean Kambanda.

The official Rwanda genocide narrative is founded upon the idea that the Habyarimana government was an extremist Hutu government — which is what extremist purveyors of the official narrative like Paul Kagame and his elite Tutsi collaborators would like people to believe.  The less aggressive assertion that the Habyarimana government was an exclusively Hutu government and was exclusive to Tutsi is also false.

From April 1992 to the middle of July 1993 there was a coalition government led by Prime Minister Dr. Dismas Nsengiyaremye. The members of the coalition represented a diverse political spectrum, including opposition party members from the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), Parti Liberal (PL), Parti Social Démocrate (PSD) and Parti Démocratique Chrêtien (PDC). There were also members from Habyarimana’s ruling party Mouvement Républicain National Pour la Démocratie et le Développement (MRND). Opposition parties had ten ministers in addition to the Prime Minister and the MRND had 10 ministers in addition to President Habyarimana. The prominent Tutsi official in this government was Landoald Ndasingwa from the Liberal Party.

From the middle of July 1993 to April 6, 1994, there was a coalition government led by Prime Minister Madam Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The members of the coalition government were from the MDR, PSD, PDC and MRND parties. The MDR party split into two factions after Agathe Uwilingiyimana was appointed Prime Minister by Juvenal Habyariama. PSD, PDC, PL split up later. Some factions were pro-RPF, others were pro-MRND. The pro-MRND factions were later labeled ‘Hutu Power.’ The label came from a speech made by Froduald Karamira, vice-president of the MDR during a public meeting called to condemn the October 1993 assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye of Burundi, the first Hutu elected president of Burundi. (From Karamira’s perspective power belonged to the winners of elections.)

In other words there was no ‘Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana.’ Habyariman had been forced by the international community to accept a coalition government, and if there were any extremists in the government, these were the opposition people who believed that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was bringing equality to Rwanda and was genuinely interested in either peace and/or good faith negotiations. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The ICTR acquitted the so-called ‘genocide masterminds’ of all conspiracy to commit genocide charges, but some were found guilty of ‘acts of genocide’ and other crimes against humanity. The ICTR trials have been politically motivated, one-sided productions, and not one Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front official or soldier has even been indicted.

The ICTR conviction of Hutu president Jean Kambanda, the former interim president during the 1994 genocide, on the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide was a complete sham: even proponents of the official Rwanda genocide narrative have confirmed that Kambanda was not afforded proper legal representation or anything close to a fair trial. (See, e.g., The Sacrifice of Jean Kambanda: A Comparative Analysis of the Right to Counsel in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the United States, with emphasis on Prosecutor v. Jean Kambanda, Kelly Xi Huei Lalith Ranasing, California Western School of Law, Summer 2004.)

The ICTR trials have persecuted and further dehumanized Hutu people, and they have dismissed and ignored every chance to explore the role of Paul Kagame and the RPA/F in provoking, prolonging and supporting the Tutsi genocide during the 100 days of 1994.

Meanwhile, in 2008 the high court in Spain issued indictments and international arrest warrants against the top 40 Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front officials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire). The court included Paul Kagame in its consideration of egregious crimes, but is prevented from indicting a sitting head of state.

Business is business: directors of Royal/Dutch Shell Corporation with President Paul Kagame in Kigali. Note: The photo on the right to the right and behind shows former President Pasteur Bizimungu, first president under the RPA/F regime, July 19, 1994 to March 23, 2000.

The RPA Genocide against the Hutu People

Beatrice Munyenyezi survived the invasion of Rwanda’s Byumba prefecture by the Ugandan troops calling themselves the Rwanda Patriotic Army in 1990. Munyenyezi then survived the next four years of RPA/F persecution and genocide that saw entire Hutu villages in Byumba razed, massacres of scores of thousands of mostly (but not only) Hutu people, and the internal displacement of some two million Hutus.

Forced into a life-and-death refugee existence inside Rwanda between October 1990 and April 1994, the displaced Hutu people fought back after the plane carrying the Hutu presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi, and other Rwandan high officials, was shot down over Kigali airport on April 6, 1994.

Beatrice Munyenyezi then survived the so-called ’100 days of genocide’ in Rwanda from April 6 to July 15, 1994. She fled Rwanda with family members on July 18, 1994, part of the massive exodus of millions of Rwandans, mostly innocent Hutu women and children to eastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo).

In Congo-Zaire, Munyenyezi survived the most ruthless and cold-blooded slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians by the RPA, Ugandan People’s Defense Forces and some lesser numbers of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and South African troops. The RPA-led genocide in Congo-Zaire began in August 1996 when the RPA shelled refugee camps in violation of international law.

In Goma, DRC, at this time, a western war correspondent photographed U.S. Special Forces machine-gunning unarmed refugee men, women and children in what he described as “one of the most horrible examples of mass atrocities I have ever seen.”

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had been stockpiling World Food Program provisions — that were denied to starving Hutu refugees — and these provisions were used to feed the invading RPA troops.

After the refugee camps were attacked, Beatrice Munyenyezi fled from Congo to Kenya at the advice of her brother, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, another U.S. citizen also being hunted by the Kagame regime and its political, military and economic partners.

In Tanzania and Kenya, Beatrice Munyenyezi survived RPF agents hunting refugees and assassinating dissidents, including former RPF official Seth Sendashonga, who was minister of the interior in Rwanda from 1994 to 1998.

Jean Marie Vianney Higiro is the real target of the Kagame regime’s persecution of Beatrice Munyenyezi: the regime has held a vendetta against Higiro since his refusal to accept a post in the Kagame terrorist government in July 1994. Higiro was evacuated from Rwanda by U.S. marines around April 8, 1994.

The security apparatus of the Kagame regime has been hunting refugees in Europe and in North America since 1994, and Rwandan dissidents have been assassinated in Europe and Africa.  The hunting down of Rwandan dissidents is backed by the U.S. Government, Britain and Israel to prop up their client regime: the dictatorship of Paul Kagame.

Rwanda provides a major base for the U.S. Department of Defense military occupation of Africa and for U.S. and allied intelligence and defense operations. While allied operations involve many NATO countries, Britain and Israel are the main intelligence and defense partners for the U.S. in Central Africa; Germany and Belgium are not far behind them.

There is no freedom of speech in Rwanda today. There is no freedom of press. There is no freedom to organize. There is no freedom of assembly. The Kagame regime continues to assassinate and disappear critics, journalists, former business associates, former military and former government officials.

On March 31, 2012, Kagame’s former Chief of Staff Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi in exile, announced that Paul Kagame was the instigator of the January 2001 assassination of Congolese president Laurent Desire Kabila. Former defense minister Theogene Rudasingwa is also the former RPF Secretary General and former Ambassador to Washington.

The most recent assassinations include several Rwandan journalists killed in Uganda earlier this year. Opposition candidate Victoire Ingabire remains imprisoned and subject to a political charade trial because she returned to Rwanda from Belgium and courageously proclaimed the heretical obvious: There was a genocide against Hutus as well as Tutsis.

In July 2010, the body of the deputy leader of the Democratic Green Party was found dumped by a river near the southern town of Butare. Opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, a Tutsi politician, was decapitated for his opposition to the Kagame regime.

The RPA/F government routinely rounds up numerous supposed supporters of opposition parties, and people have routinely been disappeared merely for showing some allegiance to the opposition Green Party or the PS-Imberakuri party.

“So many Tutsis are also suffering political repression,” says ‘Ignace,’ a high level Rwandan dissident who fears retaliation from the U.S. government for speaking out. “Tutsis who live in Rwanda are silent because they fear repression. Tutsis who live abroad in exile, like Theogene Rudasingwa and Gerald Gahima and General Kayumba Nyamwasa are also living in fear of assassination.”

Hutus throughout the country are subject to slavery conditions and millions of people — Hutus, Tutsis, Twa — outside the cliques of power are suffering extreme poverty. Most egregious, the RPA/F genocide against Hutu people continues: there is at present a campaign in Rwanda to forcibly sterilize Hutu males.

“The RPF’s reconstruction and reconciliation policies do not represent a sincere attempt to unify and reconcile Rwandans,” writes Dr. Susan Thomson. “Instead, it is a mechanism of state power that presents a self-serving version of history and manipulates the language of ethnicity to justify and maintain policies of exclusion and oppression of ethnic Hutu in maintaining the appearance of peace and security… In practice, the government approaches post-genocide justice through the maximal prosecution of all Hutu.”

A U.S. academic who worked in Rwanda and experienced the indoctrination camps run by the Kagame regime, Dr. Susan Thomson is persona non grata in Rwanda today. (And so is this correspondent.)

The Rwanda Genocide Tourism Industry

After the arrest of Beatrice Munyenyezi in 2010, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) traveled to Rwanda to gather evidence to support the charges against her.

It is unknown which, if any, of the U.S. prosecutors also traveled to Rwanda, but there were two investigative missions sent there for the Munyenyezi ‘discovery’. Because Beatrice Munyenyezi was indigent, both of her defense attorneys traveled to Rwanda all expenses paid by U.S. taxpayers; it is likely that the two primary U.S. prosecutors also traveled there.

While prosecutors John Capin and Aloke Chakravarthy may or may not have traveled to Rwanda, independent investigations in Rwanda are impossible. The U.S. government does not send unbiased investigators to Rwanda: it sends agents intent on collecting the information and documentation provided by their client regime to protect their client regime.

It is especially easy to manipulate tourists or students or researchers who arrive in Rwanda for their first visit to Africa. White people are taken to the genocide memorials and the shock of these staged-managed productions — all these Hutu and Tutsi skeletons piled up and labeled ‘Tutsi victims of genocide’ — strikes deep into the psyche of the spectator. People don’t arrive with clean slates: the mass media has deeply conditioned western news and entertainment consumers to see Africa through a racist and exploitative lens.

The viewing of skeletons and skulls in Rwanda has become a lucrative spectator sport and the conditioning by the white systems of power in western countries has created naive and racially conditioned spectators who are easily fooled. Once they have seen the ‘horrors’ of the genocide memorials the average white and even non-white western spectators (e.g. African Americans) are often horrified into a subconscious shock and disbelief where reason and common sense are no longer accessible.

Foreigners take the skeletons and skulls as the unassailable truth — it does not cross their minds that there might be some other interpretation of the art project they see before them. It doesn’t occur to people that the truth has been distilled down — essentialized — into piles of skeletons, or shoes, or scattered clothing, or machetes that no longer appropriately re-present the original circumstances and context.

However, the fact is that virtually everyone in Rwanda owns a machete. Ditto in Burundi, Congo and rural Tanzania. They are as common a personal item as a wallet or purse or ball point pen is to a western consumer. The entire machete narrative — Hutus butchering Tutsis in 100 days, blah, blah, blah — is deeply problematic, since the RPA routinely killed people with machetes both to disguise (normalize) the means of death such that the perpetrators and the victims could not be distinguished and so that the RPA narrative of ‘bloodthirsty Hutus killing Tutsis with machetes’ could easily be advanced. The RPA also wanted to save on bullets.

There is a genocide economy in Rwanda that serves foreign visitors who spend millions of dollars annually to travel to Rwanda, stay in fancy hotels, eat at restaurants, visit the mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s national parks, hire cars, and drivers, and interpreters, and purchase souvenirs — or ‘free trade’ coffee produced on lands stolen from the Hutu masses. There is a whole industry that revolves around the production and maintenance of the official Rwanda genocide story about Hutus killing Tutsis in 100 days of horror.

The U.S. government pays all the travel and per diem expenses of genocide ‘investigators’, and everything is covered at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Rwandan ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’ who are brought to the United States are also fully paid.

“This is genocide tourism,” says ‘Ignace’. “They are not investigative. They stay at fancy hotels, they visit some locations, they see the skeletons and skulls at ‘genocide memorials’, they meet President Kagame, and they are assigned government handlers who make sure they get what Kagame and people in Washington want. They drink a lot of wine and swim in the swimming pools. They don’t know anything about Rwanda and everything looks very romantic. Then they come back and accuse innocent people of genocide.”

Pentagon Satellite Photos Exposed

The existence of satellite reconnaissance photographs has not been revealed even during the 18 years of very high profile genocide trials held at the ICTR.

During his entire three-plus years in Rwanda from 1990 to November 1993, former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Robert Flatten’s requests for Pentagon-DIA spy satellite photographs showing the progress of the war in the Rwandan countryside were turned down — because of “clouds over Rwanda” they told him.

The authenticity of the satellite images has not been established and there is good reason to assume that the satellite images may be completely fraudulent.

Alternately, the satellite photos may have been produced during a different time period than is claimed by the prosecutors.

There is also substantial reason to believe that the satellite photographs may be exactly what the Pentagon described them as.

If Washington had the capability to monitor events from a satellite platform they certainly were doing so. And Washington had that capacity indeed.

In 1994, the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment was flying two older versions of the LANDSAT remote sensing satellite platforms in outer orbit. LANDSAT-4 and LANDSAT-5 had both exceeded their design lifetimes but were operational and had the capability to capture accurate and detailed imagery of what was happening in Rwanda during the 100 days of genocide.

There was also the NASA Space Shuttle.

One direct witness to events in Rwanda leading up the 1994 genocide was a researcher connected to a foreign NGO who knows something about satellite images collected over Rwanda but who has never gone public. Witness GOR-2 worked closely with the Juvenal Habyarimana regime prior to April 1994 and again closely with the new Kagame government after 1994.

Witness GOR-2 had regular contact with the Rwandan Ministry of Defense, the office of President Kagame, and with former RPA Secretary General Theogene Rudasingwa. According to GOR-2, there were NASA space shuttle flights over Zaire and Rwanda in April and September of 1994, on U.S. government-sponsored research under contract NAS7-1260.

The prosecutors in the Munyenyezi case are claiming that Munyenyezi was present at a road block just outside the Hotel Ihuriro in Butare. This hotel was probably destroyed by the RPA towards the end of June. It seems that the RPF took Butare after June coming from Burundi. Hotel Ihuriro was still standing on May 25, 1994, when Munyenyezi is accused of commanding Hutu extremists to kill Hutu men and rape Hutu women.

According to sources present at the Munyenyezi trial, the satellite pictures are taken over a time period and show clear changes from day to day. For example, the photos showed people and cars moving towards Burundi. “When they zoom in on a given location you can see the buildings, you can see people. It’s not a video, it’s a snapshot.”

“They first showed the hotel, which doesn’t exist any more. They tried to show that somehow there was a road block that [Munyenyezi] was at. The pictures were also supposed to show a mass grave a few feet from the hotel and another mass grave near the Episcopal church nearby The defense attorney was able to prove that there was no road block shown in the pictures, and there were no mass graves.”

While reputed to be photo-shopped photo, Congolese experts insist that this photo is authentic: Hyppolite Kanambe alias Joseph Kabila was a military officer attached to Paul Kagame during the 1996-1997 invasion and conquest of Congo-Zaire.

The Great Lakes Genocide Cover-up

The existence of satellite images raises questions about what the Pentagon knows and what they are hiding. For example, satellite imagery would clearly show the wreckage of the presidential plane crash site, and photos would show who was in control of the crash site immediately after the April 6 assassinations, and who controlled the site over the next weeks and months.

The United States has blocked every bona fide investigation into the double presidential assassinations since 1994. The Kagame regime has produced several reports (e.g., “Mucyo Report”), but these self-interested productions are easily discredited.

Former RPA/F official Theogene Rudasingwa claims that Paul Kagame and an elite RPA hit squad are behind the shooting down of the presidential plane, and thus the RPA sparked the genocide of Tutsis, knowing Tutsis would be massacred everywhere, and these claims are backed up by other former RPA/F soldiers.

It is important to mention that the U.S. was directly involved in the April-July events,” says ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black, “first by being implicated in shooting down the plane, then the presence of Colonel Vukovic in Kigali, just days before the shoot down, and the U.S. was supplying the RPF forces with men and materiel by airdropping them using C130 Hercules after April 6th. General Ndindiliyimana testified that the U.S. Air Force was airdropping men and weapons to the RPF and he was not challenged on this testimony. Also, the UN Rwanda Emegency Office was in reality completely staffed by US army officers and acted as the operational headquarters for the RPF.”

Satellite imagery would also show the locations, strengths and activities of RPA troops, government (FAR) troops and militias. It is well known that the RPA infiltrated the Interahamwe militias, and therefore RPA are believed to have controlled some road blocks, and it is very curious that no satellite photos have previously been produced to show where road blocks and bridges were occupied, and who occupied them.

Probably this is because the RPA was in control of areas like the Kagera National Park, and RPA were dumping dead Hutus (and some French speaking Tutsis) in the Kagera River. The infamous mythology about Tutsi bodies floating down the Kagera River is completely contradicted by the declassified memo from Mark Prutsalis of the NGO Refugees International.

In a May 17, 1994 situation report (“SITREP #10: Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania”) to Refugees International headquarters in Washington D.C., Mark Prutsalis described documented RPA atrocities on the Tanzania-Rwanda border. The document details gruesome and egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and the indiscriminate killing of both Hutus and Tutsi civilians by RPA soldiers.

For example:

“The following are excerpts from a UNHCR-Ngara protection report on border crossing points from an assessment made on 14 and 15 May:”

At RUSUMO commune, sector KIGARAMA, the RPF came and called for a ‘peace meeting’.  Those, who did not participate voluntarily, were forced to the meeting.  At the school people were tied together, three by three — men/women/children – and stabbed.  The bodies were put on trucks and thrown into the Kagera River, north of Rusumo Bridge…

At RUSUMO commune, sectors NYAMUGARI, GISENYI, NYARUBUJE, the RPF comes at 05h00 waiting for villagers to open their doors.  The villagers are caught and taken away to the river by trucks.  No one has returned.  Refugees from the area have seen people being tied together and thrown into the river.  It seems as if guns are used only if somebody tries to escape…

At RUSUMO commune, sector MUZAZA, village GASARABWAYI (4 kms from the river), the RPF launched several attacks on the village and its population.  On the 13.05 [May 13] 40 RPF soldiers came at 07h00.  They surrounded the village.  Villagers were gathered in houses, which were burned down.  An eyewitness saw 20 people being killed this way.  8 villagers were thrown into a latrine, and the latrine was filled with soil.  Asked by UNHCR field officer refugees said that the RPF did not care whether victims were Hutu or Tutsi villagers.

An IRC [International Rescue Committee] staff person wrote top their office,” the Refugees International SITREP concluded. “Things are getting very bad at the border here… Someone really needs to do something about all of the [RPA] killing and torture on the other [Rwanda] side. Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads.; the count is between 20 and 30 each 30 minutes.”

“The people of Rwanda have nowhere else to go and we cannot expect them to stay and be slaughtered in their homes,” Mark Prutsalis wrote. “This remote inaccessible part of Tanzania cannot continue to receive thousands of refugees per day. We will soon be overwhelmed here unless someone takes action to end the bloodshed, the atrocities, the massacres in Rwanda.”

The genocide against Tutsis and Hutus continued after 1994 and there has never been a U.S. investigation into the roles of the Pentagon, CIA and DIA in the cataclysms in Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.

Witness GOR-2 described how the RPA/F used the Volcanoes National Park as a military base to launch Congo-Zaire operations after 1994.

GOR-2 said that white soldiers driving tanks were seen inside the park heading to Zaire in September 1996. GOR-2 said that the United Nation’s IRIN report described this as U.S. soldiers going into Goma but that the IRIN report was quickly removed from the Internet. GOR-2 explained how the RPA?F would close the Volcanoes National Park for days at a time while involved in military operations and ‘clean-ups’: “The Rwandan Patriotic Army would just close the park for days at a time and we didn’t know what was going on in there.”

GOR-2 explained how the Volcanoes National Park was flooded with thousands of Rwandan refugees returning from Zaire after the U.S.-backed invasion by Kagame and Museveni forces in 1996, and that the park became an RPA ‘killing zone’.

“We had a massive clean-up operation to remove bodies in 1999,” GOR-2 said, “trying to get out all the dead bodies, and all the rags and pots and pans.”

GOR-2 was always in close personal contact with Major Richard Skow, the U.S. military attache’ from the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, and Robert E. Gribbon, the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda at the time.

GOR-2 described airborne remote sensing flyovers using a new state-of-the-art technology involving hyper-spectral analysis where flights were made over Rwanda and eastern Congo.

GOR-2 claims that some 22 CDs of raw data were delivered by Claire Richardson, the head of the Dian Fossey Gorrilla Fund, to Theogene Rudasingwa at the Rwandan Ministry of Defense.

GOR-2 said the flyovers were coordinated by the National Geographic Society and DFGF and were supposedly for gorilla conservation — habitat mapping — but were actually meant to locate mineral resources that the RPA could exploit.

Satellite imagery was almost certainly collected over the four years of warfare in Rwanda by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The NRO designs, builds and operates U.S. government spy satellites and coordinates the analysis of aerial surveillance and satellite imagery from several intelligence and military agencies, including the Defense Investigative Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Before April 6, 1994 the RPF occupied the large portions of the prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri: American satellite pictures may shed light on the destruction caused by the RPF offensive from 1990 to the 1993 ceasefire.

“I spent 3 months in the demilitarized zone resettling internally displaced people,” says another unnamed Rwandan genocide survivor GOR-3. “Based on what I saw, the RPF policy was to kill people, destroy buildings, destroy houses, destroy archives. Doors, iron sheets and corrugated metal covering the roofs of houses, furniture, toilets — everything had been removed and taken to Uganda to be sold. We need the pictures taken by the Pentagon to show the brutality of the RPA invasion and occupation.”

Hordes of NGO workers and humanitarian relief workers involved in millions of dollars of private profit come and go from Rwanda, always advertising their effectiveness in “peace” and “reconciliation” programs.

Tutsis and Hutus alike inside and outside Rwanda are increasingly speaking about military confrontation as more and more people become alienated and disaffected by the elite Tutsis in the Kagame regime.

Rwanda’s Ongoing Plunder of Congo

The U.S. Department of Defense also oversees and supports plunder and depopulation in the Eastern Congo, where Rwanda and Uganda maintain economic, political and military control.

Under the cover of military operations to capture and kill supposed Rwandan “genocidaires” in Congo (Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda) and supposed Ugandan terrorists (including Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army) western mining companies have been stripping and shipping Congolese minerals without oversight or regulation since the Pentagon-backed invasion of September 1996.

Canadian Banro Corporation is one of the most secretive corporations operating in Congo, and they have established and maintained their control through very tight relations with the Kagame regime. Banro has taken over thousands of hectares of South Kivu province by manipulating the local mwamis (chiefs), by bribing officials and by infiltrating officials onto power who are friendly to Banro and Kagame’s interests.

Banro describes its operations as ‘stable’ and ‘community-aligned’ but local human rights groups paint a very different picture, one of terrorism all over the region.  Banro’s security manager is from the private military company Erinys International, a British mercenary firm ‘registered’ in the British Virgin Islands.  Banro works exclusively with Erinys International, a firm that also operates in Iraq.

The areas around Banro concessions (e.g. Shabunda, Fizi, Walungu) have seen some of the worst bloodshed in all of the Congo, often perpetrated by Rwandan forces connected to Paul Kagame and then blamed on Congolese Mai Mai or the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

The Banro concessions can be seen in the map below, where total territory under Banro exploration is almost as big as the entire countries of Rwanda or Burundi.  This would not be possible without a close military and intelligence alliance between Banro and the Kagame government.

The video demonstrates that the United States is not a democracy, it is a bribeocracy, largely controlled by Zionists.  But citizens of other nations need not be complacent, for there is much evidence to suggest that the same pressures are being brought to bear on their politicians and officials to support Israel’s excesses, and an Internet search will reveal that the first ever European Jewish Parliament held its inaugural meeting early in February, 2012; something that the mainstream media seemed reluctant to publicise.

According to the accompanying report, the destruction of Palestinian olive trees by Jewish settlers -under the watchful eye of the Israeli occupation army – cost farmers over $500,000 in 2011. It isn’t only income that the settlers are targeting. They know the land is also a source of empowerment to millions of Palestinians. Their ultimate aim is to break the bond that has united the native inhabitants of Palestine since time immemorial.

But will they succeed?

Suheil Akram al-Masri, a 26-year-old political prisoner from Gaza, was hospitalized on March 2, just hours after his release. Al-Masri had reportedly fallen unconscious after 13 days of being on a hunger strike, in solidarity with female prisoner Hana Shalabi, who went on a hunger strike on February 12.

Hana’s story is troublingly typical. She has spent 25 months under what Israel calls ‘administrative detention,” a bizarre legal system that allows Israel to hold Palestinian political activists indefinitely without charge or trial. She was released in October 2011 as part of the prisoner exchange deal, only to be kidnapped again by soldiers a few months later.

Like Khader Adnan, who had recently ended the longest hunger strike ever staged by a Palestinian prisoner, Hana decided that enough was enough. Hundreds of Palestinians, including Hana’s aging father, joined in her quest for freedom and dignity.

Charlotte Kates, an activist with The National Lawyers Guild, wrote, “Imprisonment is a fact of life for Palestinians…There are no Palestinian families that have not been touched by the scourge of mass imprisonment as a mechanism of suppression.”

In the Israeli military there is an order that grants it “the authority to arrest and prosecute Palestinians from the West Bank for so-called ‘security’ offenses.” There are 2,500 such military orders, including one issued in August 1967, which deems any acts of influencing public opinion as “political incitement’”. Also prohibited is any activity that demonstrates sympathy for organizations deemed “illegal” by the military.

Palestinians are thus governed by laws without internationally recognizable legal frame of reference. There is no need to examine the Fourth Geneva Convention on prisoners, the rights of occupied nations or the forceful seizure of property. Israel is governed by its own absurd and inhumane logic.

It is this very logic that allows Israel to justify the detention of Gaza patients seeking medical treatment outside their besieged area – which lacks critical medical equipment and life-saving medicine. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) issued a statement on January 23, protesting an exceptionally disturbing practice that has been used by the Israeli military for many years: interrogating Palestinians seeking surgery in West Bank or Israeli hospitals.

Bassam Rehan, 25, from Jabaliya refugee camp, was a victim of this policy. He was detained as he tried to pass through the Erez crossing. PCHR was concerned that, like many before him, Rehan would be subject to torture, according to Maan News. “Targeting patients, exploiting their need for medical treatment at hospitals in Israel or the West Bank and blackmailing them constitute serious illegal actions,” PCHR’s statement read.

Such stories don’t begin or end here. But the continuation of this terrible and convoluted episode raises questions about the lack of will to bring the injustice to an end. It highlights our collective moral responsibility, even culpability, in allowing Israel to treat people – the natives of this ancient ‘holy land’ – in such a degrading way.

There is no point in counting on Barack Obama, Stephen Harper or David Cameron to exact justice for Palestinians. How could they, when their governments continue to facilitate and arm the occupation of Palestine, finance the illegal settlements, ensure the continuation of the siege on Gaza and block any attempt – even symbolic – to indict the unlawful, violent and Apartheid-like practices of the Israeli government?

To whom can ordinary Palestinians turn for justice? To whom can they appeal for their rights? And from whom should they expect solidarity?

One thing remains certain. Palestinians will continue to resist with or without an international awakening to their plight. The old man will try to replant a new olive grove. Suheil, Hana and Adnan will continue their quest for freedom. A whole new generation will carry on the torch from the previous one.

In the meanwhile, we, the silent multitudes, cannot afford to remain silent. Our silence only empowers Israel’s crimes and allows for the untold suffering of millions of people. It is time to redefine our relationship to the Palestinian struggle. We are not helpless outsiders; we are enablers of this moral travesty, and we can choose not to remain so.

Ordinary Palestinians need true solidarity, not sermons about violence and non-violence. They have utilized the latter for nearly a hundred years. They need us to morally divest from Israel, as opposed to standing halfway between the oppressed and the oppressor. They need us to overcome our tendencies towards intellectual elitism or any sense of moral ascendancy. They don’t need of us to play the role of the lecturer. They need us to truly listen, to comprehend and to act.

This is not a conflict concerning religion or politics. It is about rights, about people with history firmly rooted in their land. They need us to remember their names, their stories and their longing for justice and lasting peace. Suheil, Hana, Adnan and Bassam and millions of others need our voices of support.

Before we speak of ‘solutions’ to the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict,’ I believe that we must first resolve our own dilemma by divesting from an occupation that runs counter to any conception of true humanism.

Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Where do we stand in relation to this conflict? Are we on the side of the armed Brooklyn settler, and the US-armed Israeli soldier? Or are we on the side of the bearded old man holding tightly to his broken olive branches, conveying a profound mix of despair and hope?

The choice is yours. And the consequences of your choice could redefine history.

Catastrophe is just a kind of change, a quick transition to a new equilibrium — and didn’t America recently vote for change? The discontinuity that marks collapse is simply the point at which prevailing fallacies are reduced to absurdity by life. Yeats saw war and British dominion reduced to absurdity, and wrote The Second Coming to make sense of it. It strikes me as a very cheerful poem: the unborn sphinx, a precious little bundle of joy.

Collapse is the obverse of renewal. Gibbon’s magnum opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is equally the story of the rise of Europe in all its centripetal glory. At the close of Volume VI, modern Europe has taken shape. The collapse of the Soviet Warsaw Pact has freed several subject peoples. As nations unite, states naturally come and go. Peace requires self-determination, as the UN Charter tells us, and self-determination is advanced as states fail in gross or subtle ways. Sometimes a state loses its reason to exist, and deserves to collapse.

We in America have weathered the collapse of commercial and financial integrity, property rights, and government legitimacy in an orgy of elite looting. We’ve seen legal and Constitutional protections collapse in oligarchic repression. What of any value is left in our state? Life in America is already nasty and brutish, and short, by rich-world standards, at 78.3 years, a state of nature with institutional predators and human prey. The yammering fury of public discourse gets more insistent as it’s clearer that the centre cannot hold. Here in America, who will decide when it’s time to retire our failing state? And as state failures cascade and compound, how much suffering will result?

States fall apart in various ways but rights and rule of law limit the discomfort — at least in the civilized world. Developed countries can handle their fissiparous tendencies:

Scotland

Scotland plans a referendum on independence in the Autumn of 2014. Consultation with the Scottish public has begun. A final referendum bill and implementation plan is to be in place by the end of the year. The Scottish parliament considers the referendum bill for planned passage in October, subject to royal assent. The English government is mounting a bureaucratic defense in depth, maneuvering behind the scenes to rig the options, to strip Scotland of its natural resources, and to cultivate support for the half-measure of home rule. Partly in reaction to that heavy hand, the Scottish majority now backs independence.

Slovakia

When the Velvet Revolution displaced a crumbling Soviet client state, trouble started early on. The first Slovak cause célèbre was a bid to drop the word socialist from the country’s name. Then the revolutionary Civic Forum tore itself apart, sidelining pinkos to form the Civic Democrats. Slovaks jibbed at the misery of the economic shock treatment imposed by Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus. Co-prime ministers and power sharing failed to heal the growing rifts. The majority Czech party turned down proposals for a looser union modeled on the Maastricht Treaty, and in July 1992, the Slovak National Council resolved:

We, the democratically elected Slovak National Council, solemnly declare that the thousand years’ struggle of the Slovak nation for independence (“self-standing”) has been fulfilled.

In this historical moment, we declare the natural right of the Slovak nation for self-determination, as embodied by all international agreements and treaties about the right of nations for self-determination.

Recognizing the right of nations for self-determination, we declare, that we also want to freely create the way and form of national and state life, while respecting the rights of everybody, all citizens, nations, national minorities, ethnic groups, and the democratic humanist legacy of Europe and the world.

By this declaration, the Slovak National Council declares sovereignty of the Slovak Republic as a basis for a sovereign state of the Slovak nation.

Concisely ticking all the boxes, self-determination, rights, and rule of law, the Slovaks broke away. The Czechs let them go. Klaus and his Slovak counterpart negotiated terms and in less than six months, Parliament dissolved the federal state.

The Slovaks have not lost their independent spirit. Just this February an anti-corruption protest drew 15,000 citizens who lobbed bananas, eggs, bottles, firecrackers and a flowerpot over the fence of their Presidential Palace. They are an inspiration to us all.

Quebec

Quebeckers have been restive since at least 1837, when they rebelled as Lower Canada. In the 1960s Quebec spawned various independence movements encompassing a spectrum of tactics, from party politics and illegal nonviolence to violent rebellion. As proper leftists, they bombed the stock exchange, but rural rightists were on board too. They felt like Frantz Fanon was talking to them, and even if he wasn’t, Charles de Gaulle was, when he yelled, Vive le Québec libre! Technocratic dithering bought time.

In 1995, at the Royal Commission on the Future of Quebec, the Marxist-Leninists emptied the stands by proposing that Quebec declare its independence. The ensuing referendum barely kept Canada together. The movement seems to be in remission now, subsumed by recent immigrants and ambivalent indigenes.

Slovenia

When the end of Soviet-style multinational rule uncorked the immemorial hatreds of the Balkans, Slovenia saw what was coming and determined to get out. The Yugoslav government planned to assert control of Tito’s decentralized armed forces, but before it could happen the Slovenes secretly mobilized a home guard command structure. They got to work on a war plan and a Tienanmen-themed media strategy. In December of that year, 88 per cent of Slovenes voted to secede from Yugoslavia. The Slovene people were on their own — the US and its European satellites could see no point to self-determination, and for NATO, ethnic tensions promised exciting new threats to bomb.

When the Yugoslav People’s Army took over in Slovenia, they found that no soldiers reported to them: the chain of command now took its orders from the new Slovene capital, Ljubljana. The Slovenes sat their Yugoslav border guards down and tactfully put them out to pasture. A bewildered Yugoslav army invaded itself. The tentative Yugoslavian Blitzkrieg featured desertions, mass surrenders, and serendipitous mechanical breakdowns, and was aborted by the Serbs, who didn’t really care. Forty-four Yugoslavs and 18 Slovenes gave their lives.

Collapse is a continuum linking devolution, autonomy, secession, disintegration, internecine warfare, and forcible dismemberment. When the government is evil, it’s all good — that’s US foreign policy, in essence. America’s ruling class has helped most of the world dissolve its governments again and again. The US government showcased its foreign-interference skills in Greece, Italy, Iran, Guatemala, North Vietnam, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Also in Cambodia, Chile, Australia, Angola, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama.

Our government’s enthusiasm for therapeutic collapse runs afoul of international norms, particularly UN General Assembly A/RES/36/103: Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States.

The resolution points out that economic and political pressure tactics are subject to UN authority just as war is subject to UN authority, under Chapter VII. As required by the supreme law of our land, A/RES/36/103 limits national security policy to the two poles of self-defense or pacific settlement of disputes. The risky middle ground of graduated pressure requires the concurrence of the world, under UN rules.

UN Charter Article 39 reads:

The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Article 41 reads:

The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.

In the United States, economic or political sanctions without UN supervision are illegal under the supreme law of the land.

Yet the principle of non-interference, if applied, would paralyze US foreign policy. The US government would be lost without disruption, overthrow, armed intervention, subversion, occupation, destabilization, mercenaries, great-power confrontation, defamation, vilification, economic coercion, blockade, distortion of human rights, sabotage, or terror. The resolution rules out America’s favorite unilateral trick, use of transnational and multinational corporations as instruments of coercion. Our unilateral denial of the SWIFT banking network to Iran: illegal under US supreme law. US agents “striking at Egypt’s stability” with distorted selective claims of right: illegal, in the US as in Egypt.

When our Mideast puppet rulers began to collapse naturally, without us, the state’s urge to meddle swept away any notion of law. In Libya our government relied on traditional star-spangled carnage to topple the Libyan state, dispatching the CIA’s tame revolutionary, Khalifa Hifter. When routine interference failed, our government tried gun-running , direct reinforcements, and finally aerial bombardment in illegal support of civil war.

As soon as our government stubbed out its war in Libya, it lit another one in Syria.  Again, our subversion conformed with American tradition. We dusted off Kermit Roosevelt’s old plan, with its paramilitary insurgents, assassinations, coup de main, and sabotage.  Recognizing the growing importance of humanitarian law, our insurgents weaponized it, making up casualty numbers with whimsical abandon, posing executed soldiers in rubble as civilian victims of government bombardments. Our government fabricated crimes against humanity by cribbing old satellite photos, like term papers, right off the Internet.

But this time, when Uncle Sam offered to put the Syrian state out of its induced misery, the UN Charter tripped us up. Our government’s shaky grasp of the non-interference precept led Russia and China to cast unusual Security Council vetoes. Our great-power counterparts had been acting in accordance with UN reform principles, refraining from vetoes on votes involving human rights, but our fake atrocities and real slaughter were too much. Perhaps our Libyan mass-rape tall tale was the last straw. Like some greedy producer of action films who squeezes in one product placement too many, our spooks couldn’t resist the implausible propaganda flourish of Viagra as a rape aid.

Our government’s gotten away with it, so far. Libya’s a bestial bloodbath thanks to us. US proxies and paramilitaries are still gnawing like termites on Syrian society. Amateur revolutionaries in Congress are trying to cut Baluchistan loose from Pakistan. American bigwigs overtly support Kurdish terrorists in overthrowing the government of Iran, notwithstanding that’s a felony offense in the US.

There’s one slight adverse side-effect. Our spooks proved that you can topple a government anywhere — even here at home. Sauce for the Syrian or Libyan goose is sauce for the American gander. At some point a regional power or bloc will get tired of US spooks hiring traitors in their sovereign states, and decide to give our government a taste of its own medicine. After all, for every Ahmad Chalabi or Khalifa Hifter there must be a thousand dodgy Americans on the make, ready to fabricate intel, tug heartstrings, and organize resistance for the most treasonous designs. And why not? Everyone hates this government, patriots most of all. Public rage at pervasive state corruption and crime is barely contained by partisan divide-and-rule manipulation.

Caught red-handed throwing stones in front of its glass house, our police state is panicked to see its revolutionary social-justice weapons proliferating all the way back home. The National Defense Authorization Act is based on a world-view of a global state of siege with ubiquitous malefactors skulking behind every tree, striving to undermine and destroy America.  The see-no-evil gumshoes of the FBI, having slept through the greatest financial crime in history, are mobilizing the public to combat terrorists including beauty terrorists, home-improvement terrorists, and body-art terrorists.  The threat of accountability scares our government even more. The Defense Intelligence Agency fears “lone wolves” in its ranks, “radicalized” into complying with US supreme law such as the Geneva Conventions or Article 19.  The security state is even afraid of its old soldiers.

But as the Beltway death merchants know, one man’s existential threat is another man’s booming market. So in the spirit of traditional American FREE MONEY! seminars and infomercials, let us ask: If you as a domestic subversive want a piece of that foreign belligerent funding and training, how should you go about knocking over your tottering American kleptocracy?

First, let’s dispel the major misconceptions. There’s a lot of unhelpful nostalgia for the imagined golden age of the American Revolution. Our patriotic brainwashing seems to take hold when we try to face totalitarian encroachments by our state. The resulting historical conceit can take the sophisticated formulation of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who predicts that with one bad break, “…you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.” Or it can take the form of rattlesnake flags and silly buckskin costumes.

In fact, there is no going back. The American State Papers are as much use to you as the Dead Sea scrolls. They do not apply any more. They cannot help you with the forcible overthrow of the Government of the United States. Our state has set its founding documents aside. Besides, you do not need a war of independence. Independence is the last thing you want.

The key is to avail yourself of John L. Hargrove’s “web of living law.” Just leap and it will catch you like an acrobat’s net. Customary and conventional international law aligns the world with your self-determination goals.

This approach is particularly effective when the ruling regime is shown to hold those norms in contempt. The disgraceful failure of our state is amply documented in reviews by independent institutions of international repute: the Committee Against Torture, the Human Rights Committee, and the Human Rights Council. International law exposes domestic legal cover for impermissible state conduct. The scrutiny of the international community can void totalitarian enabling acts such as the PATRIOT Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, exacting escalating costs in national prestige and diplomatic influence. The US government’s client states become less malleable. Non-aligned states and autonomous blocs gain the moral high ground.

When it’s time to abolish the government, your declaration writes itself. No need for a founding genius to think it up de novo – you can cut and paste from universally-accepted boilerplate grounded in customary and conventional international law. Not so stirring, perhaps, but just as revolutionary in effect: in current doctrine, sovereignty is responsibility. An irresponsible state has forfeited its sovereignty and has no reason to exist. The world can and must step in.

By design, a state has to screw up pretty badly to flunk its sovereignty test. It has to be guilty of particular crimes:

- Of war crimes (Check. Fallujah, and dereliction of Afghan human security in breach of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention);

- Or genocide (Check. Cambodia, and attributable failure to prevent in Palestine);

- Or crimes against humanity (keeping the jackboot on the neck of the Gulf States while BP poisons them);

- Or ethnic cleansing (our government’s brutal cattle-drive response to Hurricane Katrina).

For a taste of modern emancipatory bumf, let’s slap together a pastiche of the World Summit Outcome Document; the UN Secretariat’s report, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect; some foundational international law that subordinates national security to human security and rights; and just to make the old soldiers sniffle and salute, snippets of the Declaration of Independence.

Declaration of Interdependence

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for peoples to demand their birthright of peace, dignity, and a better life in larger freedom, customary and conventional law require that they demonstrate their sovereignty in reclaiming it from an overreaching state.

We hold these principles to be universal and binding on any sovereign American state: the United Nations Charter, the International Bill of Human Rights, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to derogate core human rights and permit the most serious crimes, it is the urgent duty of nations and peoples to provide new guards for human security.

The Government of the United States (the State) has repudiated its duties under humanitarian law and human rights law. The State perpetuates an unlawful policy of official impunity with attacks on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court including threat of force. The State exploits human-rights treaty commitments as pretexts for aggression, and subverts concomitant domestic obligations with legislative obstruction and federalist neglect.

Respect for human rights is an essential element of responsible sovereignty. The State uses domestic law as a weapon against its population, abridging the peoples’ civil and political rights while conferring impunity on compliant elites. The judiciary refuses redress for violations of fundamental human rights, in breach of the supreme law of the land.

Failures of governance have imposed profound and deepening inequalities. Development has reversed, opening lasting fissures in the social and political fabric. Incapacitating social divisions and an exploitative doctrine of corporatist growth intensify contention for resources. State repression lets domestic tensions worsen with no peaceful resolution. Political leaders have made a deliberate and calculated choice to take advantage of social divisions and institutional failures, using sovereignty as a shield to inflict widespread and systematic violence with impunity. Political leaders and ruling factions suppress and subvert rights and rule of law with war propaganda and hate speech, indoctrinating the public at large along with critical actors in society including police, soldiers, the judiciary, and legislators. Our rulers undermine and attack self-correcting mechanisms that could discourage and derail the most serious crimes.

To prove this, let the facts be submitted for a candid world:

- Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention: Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture – United States of America, CAT/C/USA/CO/2, 18 May 2006;

- Universal Periodic Review of the United States of America, Friday, 5 November 2010;

- Human Rights Committee, Eighty-seventh session, 10-28 July 2006, Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant-United States of America, Concluding observations;

- Human Rights Committee: Consideration of Reports submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant – Fourth Report of the United States of America;¹

- Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention: Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture – United States of  America Fifth Periodic Report.²

In a mobilized military power with the privileges and unequal justice of permanent Security Council membership, this intensifying complex of repression and aggression constitutes a threat of paramount concern to the international community. The manifest failure of the state’s protective responsibilities have resulted in war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Accordingly, we the American peoples request international assistance and capacity building to avert still greater crimes and to restore human security.

We call for concerted international suasion, education, and assistance, reinforced by parallel and consistent diplomacy, including measures in conformity with UN Charter Article 41 or Rome Statute Article 13 (b). Those contemplating the incitement or perpetration of crimes and violations relating to the responsibility to protect must be made to understand both the costs of pursuing that path and the potential benefits of seeking peaceful reconciliation and development instead.

We call for dialogue, education and training on human rights and humanitarian law to inform national agendas for institutional reform. The international community must engage with the State and the public to support a culture of peace, and to realize the educational obligations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We call for international development assistance based on human rights as an alternative to exploitative regimes based on corporatist central planning, elite looting, trading in influence and abuse of function, coercive control of peoples’ natural wealth and resources, and private debt imposed for social control.

To curb our increasingly dangerous state, we the peoples of the United States urgently need external intervention to restore lost attributes of good governance: rule of law, a competent and independent judiciary, human rights, security sector reform, a robust civil society, an independent press, and a political culture that favors tolerance, dialogue and mobility. In a climate of violent state resistance to basic obligations, the international community must support civil society, assisting and protecting associations committed to human rights and rule of law.

The Government of the United States has compromised its sovereignty with domestic repression and crimes of concern to the international community. The peoples of America have lost control over their state, and cannot preserve peace and human security without the help of all the nations and the peoples of the world.

We, therefore, the assembled Representatives of the peoples of America do, solemnly publish and declare, that as Free and sovereign peoples, they have full Power to keep Peace, contract Alliances, protect human rights, and to carry out all other duties of sovereign states, subject to the free expression of the will of individual American electors in universal and equal suffrage. And for the support of this Declaration we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

It runs on a bit, in the gabby American way — it wouldn’t suit the taciturn Slovaks — but then the world might want to know exactly what to expect of American splittists or putschists, after the psychotic carnage of the country’s postwar history. If the wrong faction, or the wrong states, broke away leaving cooler heads behind, a spate of wars would surely ensue. Imagine Texas or Arizona breaking loose — or any state, led by the bloodthirsty nationalist ghouls of Harvard or Johns Hopkins. Nonetheless, things can’t go on this way, with the United States government as outsized as it is, and as murderous. The world knows this rogue state needs to be curbed or torn apart.

The thought has occurred to people here at home, and not just to crackpots and Dixie rednecks. Cold War statesman George F. Kennan daydreamed of breaking the US up. He worried that the USA’s huge scale would lead to overweening ambitions. He supported the affable insurgents of Sovereign Vermont. Near the end of his life Kennan wrote:

All power to Vermont in its effort to distinguish itself from the USA as a whole, and to pursue in its own way the cultivation of its own tradition.

And:

Such are at present the dominating trends in the U.S. that I can see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will be not only endangered but eventually destroyed in an endlessly prolonged association of the northern parts of New England with the remainder of what is now the U.S.A.

Needless to say, a declaration’s only the beginning. Vermont’s declaration got them nowhere. The next steps would depend on the government’s response. An ace hustler like Ahmad Chalabi would hold that detail back until he clinched the deal with foreign agents. To an entrepreneur of induced collapse, the declaration is just promotional material, a teaser for his limited-enrollment seminars in dismal chain hotels.

The seminars could be packed with practical tips for aspiring American Chalabis. The art of destabilizing police states is advancing at a rapid pace. The revolutionist’s body of knowledge incorporates US foreign-subversion practices.  The world learned a lot ousting America’s Mideast puppets.

In response to state repression, modern subversives have a broadening spectrum of options. As part of its Iran strategy, the Brookings Institution devised a handy manual for toppling governments with popular revolutions, insurgencies, or coups. Traditional forcible-overthrow tricks continue to be refined. The Afghans and Iraqis are continually devising ingenious new ways to discourage illegal military occupation. The classics continue to inspire new generations and new ideas.

The US military funds destabilization research, producing weapons that deserve to proliferate at home and abroad. At the technical institute founded by Gilded-age oligarchs Carnegie and Mellon, scholars have devised CONSTRUCT-O to pinpoint the weaknesses of socio-technical systems. CONSTRUCT-O suggests that horizontal organizations like the Occupy movement are harder to destabilize than our increasingly autocratic state. CONSTRUCT-O can measure the frustration of America’s secret police when they attack non-hierarchical groups like Occupy. Our government’s fixation on its chain of command produces befuddled apparatchiks who scurry around dissident encampments demanding, “take me to your leader.” Heel-clicking government bureaucrats cannot see why you can’t decapitate an acephalous collective.

In the US, the state’s heavy reliance on debt peonage opens new possibilities for collective action.  The debt-encumbered underclass has grown to become an overwhelming majority. Secured debt exceeds the value of pledged assets. Predatory lending now regulates access to human rights like health and education, and as these basic services deteriorate, the state permits increasingly coercive collection measures. Well-coordinated debt strikes could paralyze the economy as effectively as work stoppages once did. The government is determined to purge this approach from the institutions under its control, but collective action for debtors is bound to be integrated into nonviolent resistance.

All in all, it’s got boundless potential for Multi-Level Marketing: not just training subversives, but training trainers of subversives, and training trainers of trainers in infinite regress, like AMWAY with collapse instead of soap. Free Foreign Money for Regime Change!  The entrepreneurial genius that gives America its weapons and prisons and wars could paralyze America for peace. Find a need and meet it, as the hucksters say, that’s the key to success. So for any threatened nation that wants to get America’s maniacal rogue state under control, a diverse selection of subversive elements can be reached through a network of dead drops and cutouts near you. Ask for Spitball, that’s my secret agent code name.

But there’s no guarantee. It doesn’t always work. Tibet and Western Morocco continue to languish in subjection. Sometimes you cannot effect rebirth, and freedom fighters fail, however greedy or grandiose or brave. Sometimes the repressive regime is too far gone for salutary collapse. In an irrational state lost to unchecked exploitation, renewal may be impossible.

In Palestine, freedom will play out with the grim futility of classical tragic κατάδεσμος, as a curse redounding through the generations. Despite press coverage of Palestine’s UN membership bid as a climactic contretemps, Palestine is a state – an occupied state under systematic genocidal attack, but a state nonetheless. The Palestinian state has gained recognition from more than two thirds of the UN member states. When the US quashed the formality of UN membership, UNESCO accepted Palestine as a state. Palestinians completed a National Plan, backed by the mediating Quartet countries, to build institutions ready for statehood — except for what the government of Israel could obstruct.

But in the grip of what the ancients called a curse, old victims are made mad, destroying new victims. When the State of Israel carpet-bombed its frontiers with poisoned uranium weapons  ³,  unfavorable winds sterilized Israel’s population. Now the nation’s in a spiral toward extinction. The state’s Moslem victims are holding their own for now, multiplying against a tide of monstrous birth defects and stillbirths, but if autonomy improves development and education, fertility will quickly drop below critical levels, as it has among Israeli Jews. Within a generation, peace will come to a depopulated waste.

The corrupt and brutal government of the United States lies between world-standard governance ideals and barbarism, on a continuum from the rights and rule of law of the civilized world down to outcast concentration camps like Israel or North Korea. America’s direction of movement is easy to discern: we’ve gone far beyond the civilized pale. The American peoples can no longer rein in their fanatical police state alone. For security and protection they must have recourse to the outside world. We don’t yet know if our predator state has passed the point of no return. It may be the world can only watch in horror.

1. At this writing the Department of State has released its own report but no Committee review documentation.
2. US report due November 19, 2011; at this writing the Department of State has released no documentation.
3. Poisoned weapons are prohibited by Rome Statute Article 8 (2b) (xvii) and may constitute a crime against humanity

Last Sunday during an interview with NBC News, the president made it clear that “all options” regarding plans for a joint U.S.-Israeli attack “are on the table.” Far from distancing his government from the strident rhetoric emanating from Tel Aviv, Obama added that the administration is working “in lockstep” with Israel to “prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

Never mind that unlike Israel, which is estimated to possess upwards of 200 nuclear weapons, as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Iran is perfectly within its rights under international law to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Indeed in December 2003, the Islamic Republic signed an additional protocol authorizing IAEA inspectors to make intrusive, snap inspections of their nuclear facilities and have expressed a willingness to negotiate an end to the Western-manufactured “standoff.”

In our Orwellian Empire, however, “diplomacy” is a convenient cover — and political talking point — for war and regime change. “Again,” Obama told NBC News, “our goal is to resolve this diplomatically. That would be preferable. We’re not going to take options off the table, though.”

The president followed-up his threats on Monday when he signed an executive order freezing “all Iranian government and financial institutions’ assets that are under U.S. jurisdiction,” Bloomberg News reported.

According to the White House, Obama took the additional step towards cratering Iran’s economy and cited “‘deceptive practices’ of the Iranian central bank in hiding transactions of sanctioned parties and its failure to prevent money laundering, concluding that Iran activities pose an ‘unacceptable risk’ to the international financial system.”

If only Obama’s “neocon-lite” regime had taken similar measures to rein-in the fraudulent and patently “deceptive practices” of the big Western capitalist financial firms that continue to pose an “unacceptable risk” to the economic and social well-being of the global proletariat!

Nigel Kushner, the CEO of the London-based Whale Rock Legal told Bloomberg that “the practical impact is less important than the message it sends to Iran.” The analyst went on to say that the new executive order is “a declaration of economic warfare, to the extent that it’s not already been declared,” Bloomberg averred.

Accordingly, the asset freeze blocks “all property and interests in property belonging to the Iranian government, its central bank, and all Iranian financial institutions, even those that haven’t been designated for sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department,” and is one more sign that “hope and change” fraudsters in Washington have taken these steps as deliberate provocations.

This is spelled out quite clearly by neocon Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the oxymoronic Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has rightly been described as the successor organization of the infamous Project for the New American Century.

Last summer, an exposé of the organization by Eli Clifton at Think Progress revealed that FDD’s über-rich donors include individuals who, like Obama, march “in lockstep” with Israel’s Likud party.

According to Clifton’s research, FDD sugar daddies include: U.S. Healthcare CEO Leonard Abramson, the head of the Abramson Family Foundation ($822,000); Edgar M. and Charles Bronfman, heirs to the Seagram liquor fortune (($1,050,000); Home Depot cofounder Bernard Marcus ($600,000); mortgage backed securities “pioneer,” Lewis Rainieri ($350,000); “hedge fund mogul” Michael Steinhardt ($850,000) and Ameriquest owner and former Bush administration ambassador to the Netherlands, Roland Arnall ($1,802,000).

“Most of the major donors,” Clifton wrote, are active philanthropists to ‘pro-Israel’ causes both in the U.S. and internationally,” who “helped promote the ‘Bush doctrine’ which led to the invasion of Iraq” and are doing so today with the ginned-up crisis over Iran.

Dubowitz told Bloomberg that Obama’s new executive order was “the logical next step in the ‘administration’s economic war on the Iranian regime’.” He gloated that “freezing assets of Iran’s central bank and its government institutions, including the National Iranian Oil Company, makes them ‘subject to much tougher enforcement by the U.S. government and the global financial sector’.”

In response, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ramin Mehmanparast told Tehran Times Tuesday, that “the issue of sanctions pursued by Western countries and U.S. officials is not a new issue. The issue… is regarded as a hostile measure and indicates that officials of Western countries, particularly the Americans, have not yet come to know our great nation.”

“If illogical pressure and inhumane methods are used to hinder the progress of the country and to prevent it from achieving its rights,” Mehmanparast said “they (countries that impose sanctions) will definitely not receive a pleasant response from our nation.”

Military Build-Up Accelerates

War is not pursued by economic means alone, however.

On the military front, Navy Times reported last week that the “essence” of a massive war game carried out along the U.S. east coast, “Bold Alligator 2012″ was “planning, staging and getting them here–and not a few platoons, not a Marine Expeditionary Unit but an entire Marine Expeditionary Brigade that could number upwards of 14,500 Marines and sailors.”

According to the right-wing Israeli publication Debkafile, the “Bold Alligator” drill “is the largest amphibian exercise seen in the West for a decade, staged to simulate a potential Iranian invasion of an allied Persian Gulf country and a marine landing on the Iranian coast.”

As part of the exercise, three Marine Corps gunship carriers that practiced an amphibious landing and attacked a “hostile” mechanized enemy division which had “invaded its neighbor.”

Practicing alongside their U.S. counterparts, “French, British, Italian, Dutch, Australian and New Zealand military elements are integrated in the drill.”

Debkafile reported that “Bold Alligator” is “led by the USS Enterprise nuclear carrier with strike force alongside three amphibian helicopter carriers, the USS Wasp, the USS Boxer and the USS Kearsage.”

“On their decks,” the Israeli publication averred, “are 6,000 Marines, 25 fighter bombers and 65 strike and transport helicopters, mainly MV-22B Ospreys with their crews. Altogether 100 combat aircraft are involved.”

Coinciding with naval exercises currently underway in the Persian Gulf, when the “Bold Alligator” war games end, “the participants are to be shipped out to Persian Gulf positions opposite Iran. Altogether three American aircraft carrier strike groups, the French Charles de Gaulle carrier and four or five US Marines amphibian vessels will be posted there,” Debkafile’s military sources report.

As war drums beat louder, researcher Rick Rozoff at Stop NATO revealed that during a January 30 meeting, President Obama “met with his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili in the Oval Office at the White House for an unprecedented private meeting between the heads of state, a tête-à-tête initiated by Washington.”

Rozoff reports that:

Obama had summoned the ambitious and erratic Georgian leader to Washington to propose a quid pro quo: The use of Georgian territory for American attacks on Iran in exchange for the U.S. exercising its not inconsiderable influence in Georgia–with a population of only 4.7 million the third largest recipient of American foreign aid–to assist in securing Saakashvili’s reelection in next year’s presidential poll.

The move was denounced by former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, “who was overthrown by Saakashvili’s self-styled Rose Revolution in 2003,” a U.S.-financed “civil society coup” that installed an American-educated puppet in power in Tbilisi. Shevardnadze warned, “I don’t rule out that to retain the [presidential] chair Saakashvili may join a military campaign against Iran, which would become a catastrophe for our country.”

“Georgian analysts and opposition party leaders seconded Shevardnadze’s suspicions, specifying that the Saakashvili regime would provide air bases and hospitals, of which a veritable proliferation have appeared in recent months, for such a war effort.”

“A Georgian opposition analyst estimated that 30 new 20-bed hospitals and medical clinics were opened last December and that new air and naval sites are being built and modernized, military air fields in Vaziani, Marneuli and Batumi most ominously,” Rozoff wrote.

Similarly, The Jerusalem Post, citing a piece that appeared Saturday in The Times, reported that Azerbaijan, which shares a long border with Iran, “is teeming with Mossad agents working to collect intelligence on the happenings within the Islamic Republic.”

“This is ground zero for our intelligence work,” an anonymous Mossad intelligence operative told The Times. “Our presence here is quiet, but substantial. We have increased our presence in the past year, and it gets us very close to Iran. This is a wonderfully porous country.”

One might say, a “wonderfully porous country” for staging terror attacks, as NBC News revealed last week.

According to Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, “deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.”

That group the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, enjoys considerable support amongst Washington’s power elite as The Christian Science Monitor disclosed last summer.

Indeed, “a high-powered array of former top American officials,” from Rudy Giuliani to Howard Dean, “have been paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak in support of the MEK.”

While Obama administration officials have tried to distance the U.S. secret state from the Mossad’s assassination program, as Richard Silverstein noted on the left-wing Tikun Olam web site:

One aspect of this report, however, is misleading. The U.S. officials who confirm Mossad involvement in these plots carefully note that the U.S. is not participating. That, unfortunately is not quite true. The Bush administration allocated $400-million for this black ops war against Iran. A good portion of this is suspected of funding Israel’s efforts. So it is highly likely that we are the paymasters for this effort and our denials ring hollow.

But the Iranian terror cult’s connections to the CIA don’t stop there. In fact, “law enforcement officials have told NBC News that in 1994, the MEK made a pact with terrorist Ramzi Yousef a year after he masterminded the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City,” Engel and Windrem wrote.

According to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Yousef built an 11-pound bomb that MEK agents placed inside one of Shia Islam’s greatest shrines in Mashad, Iran, on June 20, 1994. At least 26 people, mostly women and children, were killed and 200 wounded in the attack.

Yousef, the nephew of reputed “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheik Mohammad, was the top bombmaker for Osama Bin Laden’s Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as Al Qaeda, who had a long history of close collaboration with the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency before “going off the reservation” in the early 1990s.

These connections, and links, to Western destabilization operations are hardly historical relics of Washington’s anticommunist jihad against the former Soviet Union, as Peter Dale Scott pointed out in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus last summer.

Scott noted that:

Americans have used al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993. There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after large numbers of Arab and other foreign mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air America.

And today, with foreign fighters flooding into Syria, including Libyan jihadist elements armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, it should hardly come as a shock that Al Qaeda’s “emir,” Ayman al-Zawahri, in a reprise of Islamist-backed efforts in alliance with the CIA in Afghanistan during the 1980s “urged Muslims in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan to come to the aid of Syrian rebels confronting Assad’s forces,” Reuters reported Sunday.

Western operations against Syria are viewed as a prelude to an all-out attack on Iran as Michel Chossudovsky and other analysts describe in a new series published by Global Research.

Indeed, U.S. war planners have presented regional military commanders with a target list that include “beyond Iran’s nuclear facilities, communications systems; air defense and missile sites; Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities; munitions storage facilities, including those for sea mines (remember the Strait of Hormuz); airfields and aircraft facilities; and ship and port facilities, including midget submarines, missile boats and minelayers,” The Washington Post disclosed.

“Aircraft employed,” the Post averred, “would include B-2 stealth and B-52 bombers, fighter-bombers and helicopters, along with ship-launched cruise missiles.”

In other words, Washington is contemplating a massive air and sea bombardment followed by a land invasion, as the “Bold Alligator 2012″ drill suggests, with the express purpose of forcing “regime change” in Tehran.

As analyst Peter Symonds pointed out in the World Socialist Web Site, “While the US and its allies insist that Iran must satisfy ‘international concerns’ about its nuclear programs, the demands for ‘clarification’ are endless.”

“IAEA inspectors visited Iran on January 29-31 and are due to return for further discussions later this month,” Symonds wrote. “No report has been released, but the US and international media nevertheless accused Tehran of ‘obfuscation’ and ‘time wasting’.”

Ominously, Haaretz reported that a new dossier “to be issued next month by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program is expected to be harsher than the last one, which the IAEA released in November.”

According to Haaretz, “the agency’s board of governors is scheduled to convene on March 5 in Vienna, the same day on which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to give a speech in Washington at a meeting of the annual policy conference of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.”

Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet with Obama where talks on the “international response” to the “threat from Tehran” will take center stage. Isn’t that a coincidence!

“The reality,” the World Socialist Web Site noted, “is that nothing short of complete capitulation to all Washington’s demands–not only on the nuclear issue, but its relations with the Syrian government and groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as its alleged ‘interference’ in Iraq and Afghanistan–would end the US build-up to war.”

“In short,” Symonds observed, “Washington is pressing for a regime in Tehran that bows to American economic and strategic interests in the Middle East and Central Asia on every significant issue.”

“For all the talk about ‘diplomacy’ and ‘sanctions,’ the World Socialist Web Site warned, “the US is recklessly setting course for a war with Iran that threatens to engulf the Middle East and spread internationally.”

The clock is ticking…

Think of the global economy (which exploits the resources of the land causing pollution etc) as the casino. Do people in Iraq, Africa, Papua New Guinea, Syria, etc etc etc really want an American (multinational) casino?

Sure, the pit boss will be an Iraqi (who gets paid handsomely) to provide of the image that the casino is a legitimate government, but the people know better.

Especially considering the casino is the nicest building in town (providing jobs!, they claim); yet the people keep getting poorer and the casino exploits all the local resources to exist.

Not only that, now that the casino controls the region, other foreign businesses enter casino-terrority knowing nothing about the original culture or land. And when people try to resist (push the casino out) the U.S. media calls them “terrorists” and promotes the idea that the pit boss is a democratic hero.

Sounds crazy, right? I’d agree.

This represents the map of Iraq before and after the point when you think history began. Contrary to popular belief, humanity exists all over Earth, not just in the United States…

from http://i.imgur.com/netTF.jpg

Answer: When he or she is an Israeli Mossad agent or asset.

In the case of the assassination of Iranian scientists, the Mossad’s assets are almost certainly members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) also known as The Peoples’ Mujahedin of Iran, which is committed to overthrowing the regime of the ruling mullahs. Many of its activists are based in Iraqi Kurdistan where Mossad has a substantial presence. It does the training there, selects the targets in Iran and provides the bombs and other weapons, and MKO members do the actual killing.

It’s reasonable to presume that Mossad is more comfortable operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan with Iranian MKO assets than it was when its own agents were posing as CIA officers to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization, to carry out assassinations and attacks on installations and facilities in Iran.

Some of the essence of that Israeli false flag operation has been revealed by Mark Perry in an article for Foreign Policy. His report is based on information he acquired about memos buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services which were written in the last years of President George “Dubya” Bush’s administration, plus conversations he had with two currently serving U.S. intelligence officials and four retired intelligence officers who worked for the CIA or monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.

According to Perry’s sources, one of whom has seen the memos, the Mossad agents who were posing as CIA agents to recruit Jundallah operatives had American passports and were “flush” with American dollars.

The memos tell the story of an investigation which debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah. The investigation apparently showed that the U.S. “had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah.”

The memos also gave details of CIA field reports on Mossad’s recruitment of Jundallah operatives, mainly in London and “under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials.”

Perry’s sources confessed to being “stunned by the brazenness of Mossad’s efforts.” And one of them said:

It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with. Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn about what we thought.

I take issue with the first part of that statement. What is really amazing is not what Mossad and almost of Israel’s political and military leaders think they can get away with, but what they KNOW they can get away with because of the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress on all matters relating to policy for the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel.

And that in turn is why, generally speaking, Israel’s leaders don’t give a damn about what American administrations think, They come and go but the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress is a permanent fixture. (In private conversation with General Moshe Dayan when he was Israel’s defence minister, I once summed up Israel’s unspeakable but implicit message to the governments of the world in the following way. “We know we shouldn’t have done this but we’ve done it because we also know there’s nothing you can do about it.” Dayan didn’t comment but the look on his face said something like, “You’re right but I’m not going to say so.”)

Though Israel doesn’t usually comment on reports about Mossad’s activities, a senior government spokesman described Perry’s account of Mossad agents posing as CIA agents as “absolute nonsense.” As I was reading the denial I used a Jimmy Carter expression: “BS” (Bull Shit).

After the latest assassination of an Iranian scientist, Rick Santorum, the right-wing religious joker in the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls, said this: “On occasions scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

A different view was offered by Jewish American journalist Richard Silverstein. For his weblog Tikun Olam he wrote this:

These are shameful acts by a shameful Israeli government exploiting Iranian terrorists for their own ends.  I find it disgusting that Israel can get away with such acts with impunity.

Disgusting it certainly is but there’s no mystery about why Israel can commit crimes including acts of naked state terrorism without fear of being called and held to account for them by the UN Security Council. When after the 1967 war it refused to label the Zionist state as the aggressor and require it to withdraw from the newly occupied Arab lands without conditions, it effectively created, at the insistence of the U.S., two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations – one set for all the nations of the world minus Israel and the other exclusively for Israel. That was the birth of the double standard which is the cancer at the heart of Western foreign policy.

Now let’s pause for a moment to imagine what the response would have been if Iranian agents or assets had assassinated an Israeli scientist (just one) in the Zionist state.

Led by America, Western governments would have bellowed their condemnation of the terrorism and pledged full support for all efforts to hunt the terrorists down and bring them to justice. And they would, of course, have blamed the government of Iran even if there was not one shred of evidence of its authorization. The assassination of an Israeli scientist might even have tipped the Washington decision-making balance in favour of the mad men who want the U.S. either to attack Iran or give Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu the green light to go, with or without nuclear tipped, bunker-busting bombs.

And Israel? How would it have responded? With or without a green light from President Obama it almost certainly would have bombed selected targets in Iran, even if doing so was likely to set the region on fire and do vast damage to Western interests in the region and the whole Muslim world. (As I note in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, in the chapter headed “The Liberty Affair – ‘Pure Murder’ on a ‘Great Day’,” the lesson of the cold-blooded Israeli attack on the American spy ship was that there is nothing the Zionist state might not do, to its friends as well as its enemies, in order to get its own way).

Now… At the risk of inviting a charge from some and perhaps many readers that I am naive in the extreme, I have to say I am inclined to the view that the Obama administration was telling the truth when it strongly denied any American complicity in the latest Israeli/MKO assassination. The New York Times put it this way:

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity… ‘The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,’ said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, categorically denying any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.

The NYT report then quoted Mrs. Clinton as saying this:

We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbours and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behaviour, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,

That in my opinion is code for something very like: “This administration is not completely mad. We know that an attack on Iran could have catastrophic consequences for the region and the world. Despite the mounting and awesome pressure we are under from Netanyahu and those who peddle his propaganda here in America, we know that the nuclear problem with Iran must be solved by jaw-jaw and not war-war.”

How catastrophic the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran could be for the region and the world has been put into words by Philip Giraldi, currently the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer. The scenario he presents under the headline “What War With Iran Might Look Like” takes us all the way to World War III.

So I believe NYT reporter Scott Shane was on the right track when he wrote that the statements by U.S. officials appeared to reflect serious concern about the (Israeli/MKO) assassinations of Iranian scientists because they could “backfire” and make Iran’s leaders less willing to talk. And, I add, more willing to give in to those forces in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards in particular, who might well be saying that Iran must possess nuclear weapons for deterrence.

My guess is that U.S. officials are also concerned by the possibility that more assassinations could provoke an Iranian response which would give Israel the pretext to attack. (It’s by no means impossible that the main purpose of the assassinations is to provoke an Iranian response to give Israel the pretext for an attack).

That brings me to my own speculation about what is really going on behind closed doors in the Obama administration. At executive level it is, I think, in a state of something close to total panic about what to do to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran if Netanyahu is not bluffing.

My reading of Obama’s latest turn of the sanctions screw on Iran is that it’s his way of not only putting more pressure on the ruling mullahs. It’s also his way of saying to Netanyahu something like, “Give me more time to solve the Iranian nuclear problem by all means other than war.”

Obama needs more time not only to try to get serious and substantive talks with Iran going but also to establish beyond any doubt whether Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities are a bluff (to put pressure on the U.S.) or not. In an article for Ha’aretz under the headline “Israel and U.S. at odds over timetables and red lines for Iran,” Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel wrote:

Do Barak and Netanyahu really intend to attack on their own, or is Israel only trying to prod the West into more decisive action? That is the million-dollar question.  It has been discussed intermittently for the past three years and it seems that Washington does not have a satisfactory answer to it.

In a few days time General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to arrive in Israel for talks with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Chief of Staff Lt. General Benny Gantz and other senior Israeli defense and intelligence officials.

Dempsey knows that when U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta met with Netanyahu and Barak last November, they refused to give him a commitment that Israel would not attack Iran without informing America of its intention to do so.

If I am right about the panic in the Obama administration, my guess is that Dempsey will try to obtain the commitment Panetta failed to get. What if Dempsey does not succeed?

My guess is that whatever he may say in public after his meetings, Dempsey will tell the Israelis in private that if they go to war with Iran they will be on their own. The U.S., I can almost hear him saying, will not become engaged except to defend its own national interests if and as necessary “because the American people, most of them, are tired of war.” He could add “and we don’t have the money to pay for it.”

An interesting question for the coming days is something like this: What if Dempsey returns to Washington without being able to give behind-closed-doors assurance that Israel (despite what it might continue to say to the contrary in public for propaganda purposes) will not go it alone with an attack Iran?

In theory there is a card President Obama could play. He could put Israel on public notice that if it attacked Iran and if as a consequence America’s own bests interests were harmed, the U.S. would have to rethink its relationship with the “Jewish state”. A statement to that effect would imply that the days of America’s unconditional support for Israel right or wrong could be coming to an end.

But that’s not a statement Obama could make this side of November’s presidential election. So if Netanyahu is not bluffing, and if he was determined to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before November’s election, there’s nothing Obama could do to stop him, even knowing that the end game could be, as Giraldi speculated, World War III.

My own view has always been that Netanyahu is bluffing to the extent that even he is not crazy enough to order an Israeli attack on Iran without a green light from the U.S. and American cover and participation,

I hope I am right. If I am, it could be that General Dempsey will return to Washington with the news Obama wants and needs – that without a green light from the U.S, Israel will not bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A miscalculation, or deliberate provocation by the West designed to maneuver the Iranians into “firing the first shot,” could have disastrous consequences far beyond the confines of the Persian Gulf.

That provocation wasn’t long in coming.

Despite an agreement reached by Iran with the P 5+1 group of nations (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany), to restart talks in Turkey over the nuclear issue, the CIA-Mossad-MEK terror campaign took a dark turn this week; a sign that the imperialist powers, spearheaded by the United States, aim to scupper negotiations even before they start.

On Tuesday, an Iranian university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a chemistry expert and director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was murdered after two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car.

Analyst Richard Silverstein wrote on the Tikun Olam web site Wednesday that “my own confidential Israeli source confirms today’s murder was the work of the Mossad and MEK, as have been a number of previous operations I’ve reported here.”

Silverstein averred that “the method recalls another series of assassinations that occurred of Fereidoun Abbassi Davani (who was seriously wounded) and his colleague Majid Shahriari (who was killed). Today’s killing occurred two years to the day after the assassination of another scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi.”

According to Fars News Agency, the blasts which killed Roshan “also wounded two other Iranian nationals in Seyed Khandan neighborhood in Northern Tehran.”

The scientist”s driver, Reza Qashqavi, who was severely injured in the blast, “died of his wounds in Resalat Hospital a few hours later,” Fars reported.

What makes Roshan’s murder especially troubling is that according to political analyst Seyyed Mohamed Marandi, the “IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] officials had met him [Ahmadi Roshan] earlier.”

Marandi charged that all of the Iranian scientists who had been targeted and then subsequently murdered in terrorist attacks “have had their names given by the IAEA to third parties,” Press TV reported.

“It is obvious that Western intelligence agencies are carrying out these attacks, or if the Israelis are carrying them out, it is with the knowledge of the Europeans and Americans. Because these agencies are very closely aligned to one another, they cooperate extensively, they exchange information,” Marandi said.

While no one has claimed authorship of the terrorist outrage, the Associated Press reported that IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz testified in closed session to the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that America’s proxy, Israel, was engaged in sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program through a series of “unnatural acts.”

“2012 is expected to be a critical year for Iran,” Gantz told the committee, citing “the confluence of efforts to advance the nuclear program, internal leadership changes, continued international pressure and things that happen to it unnaturally.”

Roshan was the fourth scientist killed in a series of assassinations since January 2010 and follows a series of attacks on defense and nuclear facilities.

In early November, a massive bomb blast at the sprawling Bid Ganeh missile base 25 miles west of Tehran killed upwards of 30 members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program.

Later that month, a huge explosion was reported at Iran’s uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. Though Iranian officials denied an attack took place, The Times reported that “satellite imagery … clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction.”

U.S. officials, as is their wont, responded in typical fashion–they blamed the victims.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said she had “no information one way or the other” about the scientist’s murder, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced Iran for their “provocative rhetoric” and issued a categorical denial that the U.S. was organizing terrorism inside the Islamic Republic.

However, in an interview with the Hebrew-language Ma’ariv daily, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said that “Washington is preparing to undertake any measure to thwart Iran’s nuclear program,” Xinhua reported.

“We’ve said and I say again that all options are open … President (Barack) Obama clearly and consistently says that he will do everything and resort to all necessary means to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and he means every word,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro’s statement, if not quite an open admission, is a sign of Washington’s boundless hypocrisy as it supposedly wages a so-called “War on Terror” while organizing terrorist attacks on governments it has targeted for regime change.

Iran, and China, Strike a Defiant Note

With a new round of economic sanctions targeting Iran’s ability to sell its oil on international markets signed into law by President Obama last week, and with the European Union threatening to do the same, it was unlikely that the Iranian government, or their principle trading partner, would sit idly by and allow the West to damage their respective economies.

Although The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “a senior U.S. intelligence official” said that “the goal of U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse,” the quote was quickly yanked from their web site.

The Post claimed the earlier account was “incorrectly reported” and that “an updated version clarifies the official’s remarks,” a fallacious climb-down that revealed far more than Washington intended to say the least!

The European Union announced that a meeting of foreign ministers would be held January 23, a week earlier than originally planned, to finalize an agreement on a comprehensive oil embargo.

While the EU and some Asian oil-buying nations are caving-in to Washington’s demands, America’s geopolitical rival and largest creditor, China, has rejected calls to put the squeeze on Tehran.

With U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in Beijing this week, the Washington Post reported that the former Kissinger Associates henchman in Obama’s cabinet “is expected to press China’s leaders to reduce the country’s oil imports from Iran.”

He is unlikely to find a receptive ear, however.

China’s vice foreign minister responsible for U.S. relations, Cui Tiankai, said on Monday that “the normal trade relations and energy cooperation between China and Iran have nothing to do with the nuclear issue. We should not mix issues of different natures, and China’s legitimate concerns and demands should be respected.”

Having blasted the new sanctions regime imposed last week, China, the third largest buyer of Iranian crude, said new restrictions would not affect business in the least.

The Associated Press reported that “about 11 percent of China’s oil imports in 2011 came from Iran, or about 560,000 barrels per day, a flow that increased in the latter half of the year, according to oil industry analysts Argus Media.”

“The daily average for November was 617,000 barrels,” AP reported, “close to a third of Iran’s total oil exports of 2.2 million barrels a day, Argus said,” a sign that China is hardly intimidated by U.S. threats.

Rejecting U.S. and European claims that normal business relations with the Islamic Republic provided financial support for its nuclear program, Cui declared that “argument does not hold water.”

“According to this logic,” the vice minister said, “if the Iranians have enough money to feed their population, then they have the ability to develop nuclear programs,” Cui told reporters. “If that is the case, should we also deny Iran the opportunity to feed its population?”

Cui’s pointed remark was an obvious jab at the U.S. sanctions regime which targeted Iraq for more than a decade prior to the 2003 invasion. Sanctions, which former UN official Dennis Halliday called “genocide” back in 1999, were estimated to have caused the death of upwards of 1.7. million people, including some 500,000 children, a “price” which former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said was “worth it.”

Undeterred by American threats, Press TV disclosed Sunday that “a senior Iranian lawmaker says the aim of the upcoming naval drills by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) is to prepare for the potential closure of the strategic Hormuz Strait.”

Iranian naval officials announced January 5 that they “would be holding a major military maneuver in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in February.”

“IRGC’s Naval Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said the drills, the seventh in a series of military exercises dubbed the Great Prophet, will be different compared to previous naval maneuvers held by the IRGC,” Press TV reported.

Pointedly, the deputy head of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Esmail Kowsari, said that “the military maneuver has been designed to prepare the armed forces for receiving the order to shut down the strait within the shortest time possible.”

The semiofficial Iranian news outlet also reported Sunday that the “Commander of Iran’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan announces plans to hold a massive military maneuver in the near future.”

“In line with the global developments and their own interests,” Pourdastan told Press TV, “Western countries are, today, using soft war [tactics] as the core of their strategy and it is [only] natural for us to have a defense [tactic] when the enemy starts a war.”

On Monday, Fars News Agency reported that IRGC Commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, reiterated his earlier warning that “any enemy move, even the slightest aggressions, against the Islamic Republic would be reciprocated with a destructive response and will endanger the interests of the aggressor all around the world.”

Mounting U.S.-NATO Threats

Iran’s announcement that they will hold new naval exercises, followed a report by The Daily Telegraph that the UK will deploy “the HMS Daring, a Type 45 destroyer,” and this “will send a significant message to the Iranians because of the firepower and world-beating technology carried by the warship.”

In November, The Guardian disclosed that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran.”

In a controlled leak, Ministry of Defence officials told The Guardian that “military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign.”

During the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Diego Garcia was used by the the U.S. Air Force as a launch pad for B-2 stealth bombers during the initial phase of Washington’s “shock and awe” campaign over Baghdad.

It now appears those contingency plans have moved off the drawing board with the deployment of the HMS Daring towards the Persian Gulf.

The Telegraph disclosed that the ship “has been fitted with new technology that will give it the ability to shoot down any missile in Iran’s armoury. The £1 billion destroyer, which will leave Portsmouth next Wednesday, also carries the world’s most sophisticated naval radar, capable of tracking multiple incoming threats from missiles to fighter jets.”

Defense Secretary Philip Hammond warned Iran that “any blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would be ‘illegal and unsuccessful’.”

According to the Telegraph, naval sources have said that “more British ships could be sent to the Gulf if required. The second Type 45, HMS Dauntless, will also be available to sail at short notice.”

As Global Research reported in December, the United States has significantly increased military aid to Israel in preparation for an all-out war with Iran and that “the Pentagon dispatched some 100 military personnel to Israel from US European Command (EUCOM) to assist Israel in setting up a new sophisticated X-band early warning radar system as part of a new and integrated air defense system.”

Although “casually heralded as ‘military aid,’” Michel Chossudovsky wrote, “the project consisted in strengthening the integration of Israel’s air defense system into that of the US, with the Pentagon rather than Israel calling the shots.”

In a new development, Russia Today reported last week that “thousands of American troops are being deployed to Israel, and Iranian officials believe that this is the latest and most blatant warning that the US will soon be attacking Tehran.”

“Under the Austere Challenge 12 drill scheduled for an undisclosed time during the next few weeks,” RT disclosed, “the Israeli military will together with America host the largest-ever joint missile drill by the two countries.”

An anonymous Israeli official told the Associated Press “the drill would test multiple Israeli and U.S. air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets. Israel has deployed the ‘Arrow’ system, jointly developed and funded with the U.S., designed to intercept Iranian missiles in the stratosphere, far from Israel.”

While U.S. and Israeli officials have called the drills “routine,” RT reported that “following the installation of American troops near Iran’s neighboring Strait of Hormuz and the reinforcing of nearby nations with US weapons, Tehran authorities are considering this not a test but the start of something much bigger.”

Iranian fears are fully justified.

With the United States and NATO ringing Iran with military bases and with the U.S. beefing-up arm sales to its regional allies, including recently announced plans to sell some $30 billion of advanced F-15SA war planes to Saudi Arabia and “bunker buster” bombs to the UAE, the stage is set for a confrontation.

In this context, the murder of an Iranian scientist just as a new round of talks were announced, is a clear sign that Washington is hell-bent on imposing its control over the Persian Gulf–through aggressive war–as part of long-standing plans to ensure imperial hegemony over the energy-rich regions of of Central Asia and the Middle East.

In spite of its claims to be concerned about the “protection” of civilians and the state of “human rights” in Syria, the Western press was more concerned with demonising the Syrian governmnent than the barbarians who carried out the savage terrorist attacks in Damascus.

Attacks of this kind have terrorized countries in the Middle East for decades and have generally been attributed to terrorist groups. Attacks targeting civilians tend to bear all the hallmarks of Al-Qaida, yet, in an act of obscene cynicism, the Western press attempted to lay the blame on the Syrian government for the attacks. Le Monde carried the headline: “Attentats a Damas. L’Opposition syrienne accusent le régime, qui accuse Al-Qaida.” The headline which translates as “Attacks in Damascus. The Syrian opposition accuses the regime, who accuses Al-Qaida.” Terrorist attacks in a given country normally imply an opposition to the government of that country, yet the ludicrous conspiracy theory of a government “inside-job” is given credence in the spin of the French daily’s headline, which prioritizes the claims of the Syrian opposition.

The terrorist attacks in Damascus massacred men, women and children. Bodies were ripped to pieces. Yet Western government and “human rights” organizations and the “independent” press refused to say what any decent human being would say: that these attacks were crimes against humanity and should be unequivocally condemned.

Conspiracy theory was also the order of the day in the editorial offices of Sky News, who gave much credence to the claims of the “opposition” that the Syrian government planted the bombs themselves.

Sky News was also convinced of a diabolical plot hatched by the Assad régime so as to discredit the “peaceful pro-democracy” groups who oppose the government. So, it seems conspiracy theory has finally invaded the pages of the mainstream media.

According to Wikipedia, the term conspiracy theory “is sometimes used to automatically dismiss claims that are deemed ridiculous, misconceived, paranoid, unfounded, outlandish or irrational.”

The idea that the Syrian government, which is facing all-out warfare from Western powers under the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine, is surely worthy of such adjectives as “ridiculous,” “misconceived,” “paranoid,” “unfounded,” “outlandish,” and “irrational.”

There is not a shred of evidence to support the paranoid and deranged conspiracy theory that claims the Syrian government was behind the attacks in Damascus. However, instead of sympathizing with the victims of these crimes against humanity, the Western media establishment prefers to promote wile conspiracy theories.

What has been proved, however, is that the so-called Syrian opposition are heavily armed; are targeting civilians and security forces and are backed by Western intelligence agencies.

While there is no evidence that the Syrian government is planting bombs on its own people, there is a plethora of evidence to show that the United States wants regime change in Damascus and is prepared to use all means necessary to achieve this.

Since the promulgation of the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 and the admission of general Wesley Clark to Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007 that Syria was to be one of seven countries slated for US-backed regime change, all the available evidence shows that Syria has long been an object of US military aggression.

In a time of year so often associated with peace and kindness, the Western political establishment and their public relations servants in the mass media and “human rights” organizations have shown yet again what scant regard they have for human lives.

The nefarious political agenda of the West’s most prestigious “human rights” organisations can be clearly seen from the deafening silence of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation of Human rights and their affiliates, as their dear peaceful “pro-democracy” activists blew Syrian citizens to pieces in Damascus.

Human rights discourse has provided a lethally effective camouflage for Western imperialist strategies in the Middle East since the outbreak of the US-backed people-power coups in Tunisia and Egypt this year.

Throughout nine months of incessant bombing of civilian targets in Libya, human rights groups such as the International Federation for Human Rights, inter alia, provided the justification for NATO’s mass terror campaign against the Libyan people.

Amnesty International only admitted a paucity of the crimes committed by the putschists of Benghazi, while maintaining a hysterical chorus of neo-colonial war-mongering against the legitimate Libyan Jamahirya, repeatedly pinning crimes committed by the NATO rebels on “Gaddafi’s forces”.

The unrelenting war-mongering of globalisation’s pious “human rights” groups over the past year should provide ample proof of François-Noël Babeuf’s prescient critique of the French revolution’s droit de l’homme doctrine and the subsequent critique of human rights ideology by Karl Marx.

In his famous essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx argued that the doctrine of human rights was a creation of the property-owning class or the bourgeoisie. Abstract human rights, Marx predicted, would be used to further the interests of the capitalist class.

The callous silence of so-called human rights groups in the wake of the crimes against humanity committed in Damascus on December 23rd coupled with the paranoid conspiracy theories of the corporate media are a damning indictment of what Oscar Spengler described as Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the decline of the West.

The Syrian Human Rights Network have warned the Syrian people of “mass grave” fabrications by NATO’s proxy terrorists which will be blamed as the crimes of the mass media’s new bogey-man President Baschar al-Assad.

The recourse to car-bomb terrorism by the Western-backed jihadists shows that the colour revolution strategy has been a total failure in Syria. The destabilisation of Syria is now likely to require even higher levels of mass media mendacity.

Fabricated stories of mass graves, death camps and mass killings have garnered public support for imperialist adventures in the past.

In April 1993, James Harff of the American PR firm Ruder and Finn boasted on French TV about how they managed to fool American Jews into supporting US “humanitarian” bombing in Yugoslavia stating:

At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations…. That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia…. By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The PR firms “tremendous coup” cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians and tore a multi-ethnic and tolerant society apart.

The media reductio ad Hitlerum process of Syria’s president Bashar Al-Assad is likely to intensify in the new year as humanitarian warfare and human-rightism spreads from North Africa to the borders of Russia and China.

In 2005, the relatives of nine Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.

On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.

While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.

According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:

Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report  keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential  data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.

In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the Rwandan genocide since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni’s forces.

On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.

Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni’s proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe — alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.

The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.

In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo’s interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo, under the leadership of these US-backed dictators, has continued to this day.

Contrary to its stated “peacekeeping” mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.

Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo.  Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and many companies run by the Blattner dynasty have profited astronomically from the pillaging of the Congolese people’s resources, as domestic warlords and Western elites enrich themselves while the local people starve.

Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.

Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a “Republic of the Volcanoes” controlled by Rwanda and populated with satellite US military bases.

Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.

In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .

According to  Snow:

U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be ‘grass roots non-government organizations’ — such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur — have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood.¹

In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.

Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno. It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.

Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and  insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are quick to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.

1. E-mail correspondence with Keith Harmon Snow

The arrest could not await an opportunity to persuade the FBI of the seriousness or sanity of the matter, Bloomberg said, as the evildoer had apparently packed a marijuana bong with Christmas lights and was prepared to attempt unspeakable acts imminently. Although the materials were intentionally defective, having been provided to the terrorist on Saturday by the NYPD, a careful analysis identified a greater than one percent likelihood of an attack on a local Home Depot store with which the terrorist had previously quarreled over malfunctioning plumbing materials and staff he accused of “not knowing their elbow pipes from their assigned aisles.”

Bloomberg revealed a plot that included packing Christmas Bombs with nails in hopes of nailing returning U.S. troops to crosses. The Mayor said he would be making public the records of attempted communications between the bomber and Muslim cleric Lex Luther, who may or may not have ever reciprocated the attempted communications. Asked what motivated the terrorist to act in this moment, Bloomberg indicated that a video may have been the catalyst. In what the Mayor referred to as a “super fast moving investigation” it was apparently not yet clear what this video consisted of. The District Attorney has subpoenaed Netflix records from October and all but promised an “October surprise”.

Bloomberg responded to a series of questions on the significance of the Lex Luther connection, explaining repeatedly that no fewer than 36 blogs have tied Luther to funding from George Soros, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and a plan to publicly ask His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia his views on beheading hippies and Socialists. Furthermore, Bloomberg explained, one of the top Mercedes diesel mechanics in Tribeca, an expert who has also blown up automobiles for NYPD film productions in preparation for hastily thrown together press conferences, has agreed to testify that Iran could develop nuclear weapons if left no clear alternative for actual survival.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly interrupted the flow of the press conference on Sunday to switch on a live video of a hypersonic flying bomb cruising on its way to a predetermined target. Kelly said he believed the target was Diana L. Taylor, a close acquaintance of Mayor Bloomberg. Kelly announced that New York would immediately be declaring war on Iran, which — he pointed out — hates us all for our freedoms.

Bloomberg interjected that, “Without me you would all be dead by now.”

Kelly followed up with, “If I can’t save you, nobody can.”

The press conference was repeated in every detail in Pig Latin with Bloomberg donning a Guantanamo prisoner’s orange outfit out of what he said was “solidarity with my left-leaning constituents.”

In the overland five trips I have made to Gaza since March, 2009, I have seen the disastrous effect of the brutal Israeli land and sea blockade has had on the Palestinian people.  I have seen the terrible level of destruction that the 2008-2009 Israeli attack wrecked on Gaza, in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22 day attack, 5,000 were wounded and 50,000 were made homeless.  I was on the Gaza Freedom March in 2009 and I was a passenger on the US Boat to Gaza, the “Audacity of Hope” that was forbidden from sailing June, 2011 by the Greek government on behalf of the Israeli government.

As one of two American citizens on the Gaza “Freedom Waves,” I represented hundreds of thousands of Americans who are challenging Israeli and US policies concerning Palestine.  We are using a variety of methods to let Israeli government officials know that international citizen activists are not going to stop challenging their policies.  Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions programs, international citizens who attempt to protect Palestinians as they farm, fish and go to school, students confronting Israeli officials as they speak around the world and flotillas and waves of boats are part of the international effort. I am very proud to be a part of this movement.

Passenger on the “Tahrir”

Passengers on the Canadian Boat to Gaza, the “Tahrir,” left Turkey in good spirits Wednesday, November 2, 2011 despite having its passenger list whittled down by the Turkish Port Authorities who allowed only 12 out of 35 passengers who had travelled to Turkey to get on the boat.  The Turks cited regulations that decreed that only 12 persons could be on a boat rated as a “pleasure craft” to depart Turkey for international waters, no matter that the vessel was rated for 50+ passengers. My fellow Americans Medea Benjamin, Robert Neiman, Paki Wieland, Tighe Barry and David Schermerhorn became our ground crew in Turkey when the passenger reduction was forced on us.  On the day we left the Turkish port of Fetiyah, they rented a third boat to attempt to transfer in international waters the 23 passengers who had not been allowed onto the boats in port.

Working with our sister ship, the “Saoirse”, from Ireland, we hit the high seas full throttle headed to Gaza continuing the previous flotillas efforts to end Israel’s illegal, immoral  naval blockade of Gaza, which, in combination with Israel’s land blockade, has made the 1.6 million people of Gaza, prisoners in a tiny land that is roughly 25 miles long and five miles wide.

Our team, on the Tahrir, consisted of five journalists, including Democracy Now’s Jihan Hafiz, six international delegates and the captain.  We bonded quickly and settled in to our various chores.  Captain George delegated crew duties, journalists set up their satellites and computer stations, cooks and medics tended to physical needs and everyone vied for computer time to reach out to the world.

Canadian Boat to Gaza organizers did an excellent job stocking the boat with food, water and medical supplies plus $30,000 of medical aid to be delivered in Gaza.   The next two days were filled with blogging, filming, battling seasickness, sleeping, eating, non-violent training and preparation for probable Israeli confrontation and imprisonment.

Arriving in Danger Zone in the Daylight

Getting into international waters without the Turkish Coast Guard turning us back was our first success.  In hopes of not being boarded by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during darkness, we slowed our speed so it would be daylight Friday morning, November 4, 2011, when we approached 100 nautical miles off Gaza’s shore and probable contact with the IDF.

Each hour brought us 10 miles closer to Gaza.  We were thankful to make it past the 70 mile mark where the Mavi Marmara was so brutally attacked in June, 2010.

Three Giant Warships Looming on the Horizon

A momentary excitement permeated the ship as the captain announced we were 50 miles offshore– until we saw the 3 giant warships looming on the horizon.

We got on the satellite phones and computers to get out our last messages.  I was on the phone with CNN and I remember them saying, “call me when something happens” and I said, “This is probably the last you’re going to hear from me as our communications will be cut….” and then they were.

17 Israeli Warships Surround and Force collision between Freedom Waves boats–Water Cannons blew out windows and almost sunk the Irish boat Saoirse

We were told by the Israeli Navy to change our course.  Organizers of both boats restated that we were sailing to “the goodness of humanity.”

Within a half an hour we were surrounded by 17 boats; gunboats, water cannon boats, zodiacs.

The IDF radioed that they wanted to inspect our boats, meanwhile two zodiacs were harassing the Saoirse by driving in circles around them, finally forcing the Irish boat to crash into the Tahrir causing damage to the Saoirse.

The Saoirse pulled away and was chased by the IDF commandos who proceeded to blow out their windows and fill the ship with water from the water cannons.  If the Saoirse’s auxiliary power had not kicked in, the boat would have sunk.

Meanwhile, the IDF blasted the Tahrir with water cannons.  Over bullhorns, IDF soldiers told us to go to the bow of the boat where they were hitting our boat with the most force with the water cannons. We tried to protect ourselves by staying behind the wheel house.

One passenger and a cameraman attempted to remain on the bow of the Tahrir but moved away as the commandoes jumped the rail.  Commandos snatched the camera and 25 masked commandos shoved their way on board screaming, “Shut Up! Sit Down,! Move! Get Up!,  Shut Up!, Move!”  over and over for the next half hour.

One Passenger Tasered by IDF

Two passengers stayed at the wheelhouse and one was tasered by the IDF commandos.  They were shoved out the wheelhouse and dragged to the benches where they were forced at gunpoint to sit.  Commandos continued to yell, “Sit! Shut up! Don’t move!”  Our male passengers were searched first with commandos pointing guns and tasers at them.  Everyone had to keep their empty hands visible at all times.

Computers, Cameras, Satellite Phones Taken

I asked if  we could go down below as it was getting dark and cold and they corralled us into the tiny galley room and “guarded” us  while other soldiers  searched our backpacks and suitcases and threw our computers, cameras,  and bags on the floor.  Computers, cameras and other electronics confiscated on the boat were never returned to us.

IDF Commandos Brainwashed into Committing Horrific, Illegal Actions

I felt sad and angry looking into the young masked eyes of the IDF soldiers who had been so successfully brainwashed into doing horrific, illegal acts for the Israeli government.  They pirated our ship, kidnapped us and tasered us and now many of them were asleep on the benches, every bit as tired as we were.

Strip Searched at Port of Ashdod

About three hours later we arrived at the Israeli port of Ashdod, where Israeli officials strip searched, demeaned and dehumanized us. However, nothing they did to us is comparable to what the Palestinians endure.

The officials in the Israeli Immigration and Deportation office processed us.  They told us that if we signed a document that stated we had entered Israel illegally, we would be deported the next day.  This was one of the many lies we were told by Israeli authorities. Another untruth that they told us was that after 72 hours we would be deported automatically.

Three Days in Israeli Prison

After processing at the port, we were separated again and taken in small groups to the Givon prison where once again we were strip searched.  Our packs pawed through by at least ten people and we were then handed a list of our possessions that they were going to keep.

Women’s Wing of the Prison

Five women including myself spent the next three days in our own wing of the prison.  We were locked in our cells, locked in the women’s section of the prison and then locked behind two more locked gates.  Still, the guards repeatedly counted us and checked to make sure we weren’t plotting an escape, as if we could dig our way out through the floors. Maybe they thought “the criminals” could break out with the flimsy toothbrushes we were given!  Again, only a small taste of what Gazans have felt for years.

No American Embassy Presence or Phone Call for Two Days

I didn’t get my phone call out, nor did we see any one from the American Embassy for two days, whereas a representative of the Irish Embassy to Israel met the Irish boat when they arrived at the Port of Ashdod.

When the American Embassy officials finally arrived at the prison, they recommended I sign the form saying I had entered Israel illegally.  I refused.

The Embassy officials did contact my family and continued to keep in touch with them during my stay in the Israeli prison.  However, the official later told me there wasn’t much the US Embassy could do since we were in Israel and Israel was calling the shots, despite the US giving $3 billion in military aid annually to Israel!

Inside the Prison

We were locked in our cells for hours on end and ended up having a sit down strike in the corridor demanding that we be allowed out of the cells more than once a day.  We were tormented all one night by an irate guard beating on our door and awakened many times a night so they could “count us.”  We were berated and treated like criminals the entire time.

Paying for My Own Deportation

Finally Monday night, November 7th, after almost 72 hours, the Israelis said I could “leave” if I paid for my own deportation air ticket.  I agreed so that I could get back to the U.S. and tell the story of the “Freedom Waves.”  I was taken to the notorious Ben Gurion Airport Detention Center with a fellow passenger, who flew out that night. I was locked up in the airport facility for another 14 hours until my flight left on Tuesday, November 8.

Israeli Defiance of International Law and Basic Human Decency

There is no surprise in Israel’s act of piracy in attacking two civilian boats in international waters trying to sail to Gaza, imprisoning the passengers, and stealing the cargo and personal possessions. This is yet another example of Israeli defiance of International Law and basic human decency.

In my interactions with the IDF commandos and the Israeli government officials at the Port of Ashdod, in the prison and at the airport, I was struck by the desensitized, robotic, inhumane behavior they displayed consistently—and, again, I only experienced a small taste of what Palestinians routinely face.

“Freedom Waves” to Freedom Riders

There’s another dangerous passage – this time over land – that’s about to set forth: On Tuesday, November 15th, Palestinian activists plan to board settler-only public buses in the West Bank and attempt to sit down and ride the bus, in the great tradition of the Freedom Riders that challenged segregation in the American South. These brave change-makers have called on the international community to stand in solidarity, and many actions are planned around the US where activists will protest Veolia, the French company that runs many of the settler buses and is the subject of an international boycott campaign.  If the Palestinian Freedom Riders are arrested and detained, it will be important for us to speak up and take action as well.

US Congress should be Investigated for giving $3 Billion in Military Aid Annually to Israel instead of Demanding that the State Department Investigate Citizen Activists

Because of this experience in trying to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, I am more resolved than ever to work to stop the US government allocation of military aid to Israel and policies supporting the Israeli government’s apartheid treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Some Congresspersons are now going after US citizens on the Gaza flotillas!

Who is part of a terrorist organization: International activists saying Israeli and U.S policies toward the Palestinians are unjust and illegal, or the US Congress?

I think the US Congress should be held accountable for the illegal and unlawful uses of the weaponry that the U.S. has provided to Israel – including the F-16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorous and dense inert metal explosive bombs that killed 1,400 Palestinians, wounded 5,000 and left 50,000 homeless during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09.

Instead, 13 Congresspersons want those of us who have challenged Israeli and US policies on Palestine investigated for terrorist links and have introduced House Resolution 3131 toward that end.

The legislation introduced in the United States Congress in October, 2011, by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Congressman Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), would require the State Department to “submit a report on whether any support organization that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization and any actions taken by the Department of State to express gratitude to the government of Greece for preventing the Gaza flotilla from setting sail in contravention of Israel’s legal blockade of Gaza, and for other purposes.”  Twelve other strong supporters of the Israel Occupation have signed onto the bill: Engel, Ros-Lehtinen, Sarbanes, Carter, Frelinghuysen, Young, Grimm, Diaz-Balart, Rothman, Roskam and Sires.  Coincidentally, these representatives, especially Ros-Lehtinen, receive big contributions of campaign funding from the right-wing Israel lobby.

Please call these Congresspersons at (202) 225-3121 and give them an earful.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

— Ephesians: 6:12

What a decade it has been for assassinations, liquidations, exterminations — for State terrorism led by the Land of the Free. Summary executions include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On 5th February 2003, General Colin Powell stated that he headed a deadly terrorist network within Iraq – just six weeks before the US headed a deadly terrorist network, in an illegal invasion, which entirely destroyed Iraq.

On 7th June 2006, at Hibhib, near Baquba, al-Zarqawi was killed by two five hundred-pound bombs, dropped by USAF F-16 jets, killing five others including his wife and child. Legality, trying in law those accused of wrong doing, is, seemingly, so yesterday.

President Saddam Hussein and some of his sovereign government were subject to a kangaroo Court, laughable had it not shamed and disgraced the word “legal” at every level.Then he was lynched.

Osama bin Laden’s alleged death, with still unaccounted for others, was another blot on legality and humanity, with his body seemingly summarily disposed of as shark food. Why observe religious and legal niceties when they may, in turn, preserve forensic, legal evidence?

Hilary Clinton and her partners in crime, were, of course, shown “watching” this gruesome slaying by illegal immigrants who had entered ally Pakistan without bothering to request permission for air space or passage. It then had to be admitted there was, in fact, no transmission from a video previously said to be screened from one of the assassins helmets. Hollywood meets Capitol Hill?

Subsequently this tasteless, part fictional scenario with Ms Clinton’s hand over her mouth, feigning personal “shock and awe” was, the gullible were informed, due to “an allergy.”

Her repellent performance on CBS shortly after Gaddafi’s death, assassination, execution, street dragging – early days for the exact sequence of another bloody illegality — was Madam Clinton for real. She near punched the air, roared with laughter and announced:

“We came, we saw, he died.”

“Did this have anything to do with your visit?” she was asked on 18th October.

“Nnn …” Then:  “I’m sure it did.”

During her brief trip she had stated: “We hope he [Col Gaddafi] can be captured or killed soon …”

Arguably, not since Madeleine Albright, when US Ambassador to the United Nations (“… avowed to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”) stated that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were:  “A hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it” (60 Minutes,12th May 1996) has such abhorrent, shaming filth been spewed over the air waves.

But then, the UN was the vehicle for the silent killing fields which were the strangulating thirteen year embargo on Iraq. the silence on thirteen years of illegal, unsanctioned bombing by the US/UK. Then this last March, they endorsed UNSCR 1973, which became the completely overt mass murders  of Libyans in a seven month (and ongoing) “humanitarian” blitzkrieg.

In the UK, the newspapers did their best to vie with Clinton’s sewer rhetoric. Seldom has a bloody, illegal, apparent summary execution, assassination of a Head of State, been more tastelessly lauded.

“Bullet in the Head – That’s for Lockerbie” (The Sun.) Apart from their excursion to the literary drainage pipes, the Sun apparently neither attended the trial nor have registered the deep legal concerns surrounding the Lockerbie verdict. “End of a Tyrant” trumpeted The Independent, of whom a little more is expected. “Tyrant Showed no Mercy, Shot by Rebels”, celebrated The Mirror. “Gaddafi’s Death: Key Moments”; MSN was in trash movie mode.

“Death of a Tyrant”, is the choice of many, with The Star perhaps managing to plunge to an all time journalistic depth with “Mad Dog Put Down.”

NATO’s depraved allies in the “New Libya” are — in defiance of all decency , and of any religion, especially Islam — displaying his body, and that of his son Mutassim (37) naked to the waist, in  freezers in a meat store in Misrata, inviting souvenir photographs.

It is a pitiless, shocking re-run of the display of the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, Qusay  and Uday, also summarily executed, rather than being treated in accordance with the law, as prisoners of war, along with Hussein’s fifteen year old grandson, courtesy US troops in Mosul, northern Iraq.

Islam is specific as to rituals for the deceased: “After the soul leaves the body, eyes must be closed” (Colonel Gaddafi’s were not for considerable time, according to pictures).  “When the soul is taken, the eyesight follows.”  The washing must follow specific procedure and then body fully covered, including the head and face. Necrophilic tourism is not an option — and bodes a sinister future if indicative of the values of those now seemingly holding power, legally or otherwise.

There may be worse to come. Seizing the illegal precedent which has been set by the disposal of Osama bin Laden’s bullet ridden remains, by the body snatching killers in Afghanistan, there is talk of burying Libya’s Head of State at sea. As bin Laden, it would get rid of the evidence. Dead men don’t talk of past deals, commitments, betrayals – and disappeared ones leave no forensic evidence of seemingly a murderering mob of NATO-facilitated thugs.

Will pressure for the body to be handed over to his tribe tempt another disgraceful act?  That Tribe has issued this statement:

We call on the UN, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Amnesty International, to force the [National] Transitional Council to hand over the martyrs’ bodies to our tribe in Sirte and to allow them to perform their burial ceremony in accordance with Islamic customs and rules.

Further pressure is building from the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur, is adament:

“The Geneva conventions are very clear that when prisoners are taken they may not be executed willfully and if that was the case then we are dealing with a war crime, something that should be tried”, he told Al Jazeera. (21st October 2011)

One eye witness allegations of Colonel Gaddafi’s death hardly seems to meet with Geneva Convention criteria:

  …  he was being beaten, kicked, with rifle butts, boots. He looked confused … he was saying ‘help me, help me’, but his voice was really strained, he was croaking. A few of us were around him, we thought we should get him somewhere we could question him about the others. But he was then taken away in a wave of people and then there were shots.

There are more similarities between Iraq and Libya. Two leaders who took over countries crippled by colonialism and turned them into thriving, largely well developed nations, with high quality free health care, education, living standards.

In threatened crisis, US Presidents and their Administrations cower in hidden bunkers deep in mountains, British Prime Ministers and their Cabinet, and ranking officials, are not renowned as front line operators either. Indeed, the speed with which the British and American Ambassadors and their staff  left Libya at the first sign of trouble was pathetic – and nationally humiliating.

Both Saddam and his sons said they would never leave their country and would die there. They did. Colonel Gaddafi did the same. Saddam faced out “Shock and Awe”; Gaddafi, 26,000 NATO sorties and over 9,600 strike missions in seven months, 68 strikes, seemingly, round Sirte on the day he was killed near there. Whatever their failings, their courage was towering.

Saddam lost his sons and grandchild and never saw his surviving family before he died. Gaddafi lost three grandchildren and three sons, and a fourth died with him. After the deaths, the Western media sneered because he failed to appear on the air waves for a few days.

However, the rats are crawling back on to the deck of the remains of the ship. On 21st October, Britain’s replacement Defence Minister – his predecessor got in to a little local difficulty – Phillip Hammond, announced that the UK had presented a license to drill for oil request to the National Transitional Council, far less than twenty four hours after the announcement of Gaddafi’s death.

Further:

Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get involved in the reconstruction of Libya.

I would expect British companies, even British sales directors, (to be) packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the reconstruction of that country as soon as they  can”, he said. (Independent, 22nd October 2011.)

When the US Ambassador, Gene Cretz, ran the Stars and Stripes up over the American Embassy in Tripoli, at its re-opening ceremony on 22nd September, he remarked: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libya’s natural resources.”

There have been many reports of Predator drones over Libya these last seven months. Seems there may be even more predators on the ground.

On Sunday 23rd October, 2011, the non-elected insurgents (sorry, National Transitional Council) are to declare Libya’s “liberation.”

The day marks the centenary of an Italian pilot becoming the first to use aircraft in war, taking off from Libya to observe Turkish troops in the Turko-Italian war on 23rd October 1911.

Ironically it also marks the first meeting of the UN General Assembly — 23rd October 1946 — a body which has strayed so far from its fine, stated aspirations.

*****

UPDATE:  As I finish this, it is being announced that Colonel Gaddafi’s body will be returned to his family for burial. It is indeed, if disgustingly belatedly so, incumbent upon the “authorities” to do so. We will see.

On October 4, much more carefully-worked out than the previous vote on Libya in March 17, though in nature same as viciously deceptive, limitlessly greedy, unimaginably hypocritical and racist as before, the UN Security Council Resolution on Syria which had been also cunningly but forcibly pushed upon by US-led NATO powers was, however, thwarted down this time.

China and Russia justifiably used their veto powers to oppose another Libya-type of US/Western military intervention against another non-Western sovereign nation, this time, Syria.

But China and Russia did not use their veto powers then in March, even if they seemed to have known the US-led NATO’s hidden agenda with regard to the vote on UNSC Resolution 1973 on Libya.

At any rate, under any circumstances and no matter what had happened to their strategic considerations then in March, China and Russia didn’t oppose the Libyan resolution but instead “abstained” from that fatal UNSC vote.

Their hardly-explicable, logically-unpersuasive and, as many have argued, “morally-unjustified ” position on Libya has, as it’s been repeatedly warned, become a convenient pretext, tool and justification for another US-led NATO military intervention in a “sovereign nation’s internal affairs.”

The position China and Russia took last March seemed to have been respectfully criticized by many in the world. Also the decision seemed to have caused a considerable amount of quite worrisome reactions from around the globe.

According to most recent media reports, even then Russian Prime Minister Putin was reportedly also concerned and seemed to have differed from the position of his President. Many, probably including Putin, might have questioned with concerns, confusions and reservations particularly from many third world nations if the March decision could be strategically recoverable in the foreseeable future.

It seems, with another strategically important and maybe in a way even more extremely crucial October 4th’s decision at UNSC vote on Syria, at some corners around the world people cautiously predict the failed March decision could be possibly redeemed in a way, if the two permanent members of UN Security Council could play a more proactive, preventive and, if necessary, assertive, as they did this time, role to discourage, deter and eventually stop the US-led NATO’s another deceptive military intervention.

While the whole world seems to have helplessly, regrettably, miserably witnessed the US-led NATO’s continued (UNDISPUTEDLY!) “crimes against peace,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” for over 6 months now, the Western powers seemed to have undoubtedly, knowingly and willfully violated the March 17 UNSC resolution on Libya.

Throughout the entire Libyan ordeal, the seemingly desperate colonial powers have arbitrarily justified their indiscriminate criminal bombings (both sorties from air and strikes from sea) against Libya’s both military and civilian targets with that infamous UNSC Resolution 1973.

However, under the disguised pretexts of so-called “no-fly-zone” and “protection of civilians,” after more than six months of nonstop NATO bombings and killings, in other words, the state-sponsored terrorist attacks against innocent Libyan population including a numerous number of civilian population, what sort of any constructive outcome might have been resulted after all?

A seemingly apparent answer seems as in the following: Complete destructions of Libya’s total social infrastructures (i.e., EVERYTHING!); ongoing genocidal civilian massacres till this very day (the October 9th) in areas like Sirte; repetitions of vicious racist killings of black Africans; dirty gangster-style lootings of Libya’s sovereign wealth (just like the cowboy bank robberies!); and partial military occupation against an independent, resource-rich, particularly oil-rich and socialist Libya.

Are they not?

About a two dozen independent webmedia outlets around the globe like the 4th Media (China), the Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia), CounterPunch (US), the Global Research (Canada), nsnbc (Britain), Voltairenet.org (France), Net News Global (Germany), the Mathaba (Hong Kong, London), including several Russian mainstream media outlets such as Russia Today (RT) TV, Pravda.ru and also even as in the most recent Wikileaks’ reports, have faithfully and tirelessly reported news, news analyses and breaking stories on Libya quite different from the most global, particularly Western mainstream media reports.

According to those independent media reports around the world, it’s been UNDISPUTEDLY for sure that the US-led NATO powers have clandestinely and continuously organized, operated and even coordinated throughout the illegal land invasion against Libya by employing those recruited Al Qaeda terrorists, hired mercenaries/thugs and other disgruntled Islamic fundamentalists and extremists at forefront.

Of course, as well- and -broadly exposed now through those global independent and some mainstream media outlets, too, NATO had already deployed their own military personnel through secret missions well ahead of the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions last February. These revelations have been publicized even by several Western mainstream media such as the Guardian in Britain.

According to these sources, the American, British and French “special operation forces” and their intelligence agencies like CIA, M15 and DGSE, in addition to financial, media (specifically Saudi-owned Al Arabia and Qatar-owned Al Jazeera) and military personal assistances from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other puppet Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, have all physically landed in Libyan soil well before the March 19 NATO bombings.

Presumably now as the whole world seems very much aware of, the US-led NATO’s evil, greedy and hypocritical agenda through the colonial powers’ typical “divide and conquer” strategy, mainly through the world scale of media deception against the whole global population was to occupy Libya, as simple as it is, in order for them to control not only the Libyan wealth but also the entire African continent’s, beginning with the North Africa and Middle East region.

In this US-led NATO’s extremely deceptive Libya strategy, by way of ”media war” or “information war” or even the “war propaganda” through the global scale of constant mass deception, as many like F. William Engdahl have argued (See his most recent article, “Washington targeting China’s Achilles heel“), China seems the main and the real strategic target.

Their hidden but already much-revealed agenda of imperial conquest through military invasion, devastating destructions, genocidal massacres, lootings, robberies and colonial occupation seem absolutely constitute, according to the definitions of Nuremberg Principles VI, the “crimes against peace,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity.”

However, as briefly mentioned above, the US-led NATO has arbitrarily claimed their military actions (such as bomings, killings, and all sorts of indiscriminate destructions) are justified by/with those ill-famous and disgustingly despicable pretexts such as the so-called “no-fly-zone” and “protection of civilians” under the mandate of UNSC Resolution 1973.

But, in reality, after more than 6 months, the number of indiscriminate bombings NATO has committed against innocent Libyan population has reached up to now “25,097 Sorties and 9,335 Strike Missions” (as of October 8, 2011, check here for more information from the Stop NATO website).

See the following Wikipedia information which may partially show some numbers of Libya’s civilian casualties. Even if its information could be also hardly unbiased from Western media lies, deceptions, false witnesses and fabrications on the true Libyan situation, it seems still I believe worthy to share this with our readers:

… Estimates of deaths in the 2011 Libyan civil war vary with figures from 2,000 to 30,000 given between March 2 and September 8. … Deaths caused by Coalition forces: The Libyan official sources claimed that at least between 64 and 90 people were killed during the bombardments on the first two days of the U.N. intervention and another 150 had been wounded. The Vatican news agency confirmed that in Tripoli alone, at least 40 civilians died as a result of the bombing campaign. According to the Libyan Health office, the airstrikes killed 1,108 civilians and wounded 4,500 by July 13. (Emphasis added. Wikipedia)

Again, as noted already, the UNSC Resolution 1973 on Libya, with the pretexts of so-called “no-fly-zone” and “protection of civilians,” has been undoubtedly violated for the justification of US-led NATO’s indiscriminate bombings everywhere, particulalry the entire Libyan social infrastructures including civilian targets such as hospitals, schools, nurseries, and so on.

Let’s look at the following Nuremberg Principles VI’s definitions in regard to the above-mentioned three distinctive crimes below:
Principle VI states,

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Today, however, the UNSC Resolution 1973 is still being used to justify for NATO bombers to continue its criminal bombings against areas like Sirte, Wani Balid and other places wherever there are Libyan population who continue to resist NATO’s aggressions and are ready to die for their dignity, independence and right to self-determination.

Therefore it’s been genuinely, with great relief and appreciation, much praised and in a way globally celebrated when the above-mentioned strategic failure last March wasn’t repeated this time in October.

For the sake of the future humanity, the world’s great majority population seems to have appreciatively applauded and do sincerely regard, with due respect, great relief and even with some hope, the two nations’ strategic vote on Syria as a historic and courageous decision.

Many hope it could be strategically, with firmness, assertiveness and decisiveness, further utilized for a greater goodness, so that the international community of peace and justice and equality, encouraged by and together with those five BRICS nations, could deter at least and/or stop at best the imperial powers’ seemingly uncontroable madness of their ugliest pursuit of conquering the world.

In light of moral, political and global responsibilities for a better future of the entire humanity, it seems those five BRICS member nations, particularly China and Russia do need international community’s undeterred support and solidarity in order for them to take a crucial leadership role to stop and refuse the return of the old colonial dark days.

It was the US, British and French who seemed not happy at all on the October 4th with the result of Syria vote. According to a CNN report, the hawkish warmonger U.S. Ambassador to UN Susan Rice, like the other notoriously hawkish warmonger Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the United States, was “outraged.” She said the following, according to the same report: “This [October UN Security] Council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security.”

She used the language like the following: “An urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security.” Alas! The poor Rice! Or how badly unstable, like some sort of schizophrenic symptoms, her state of moral conscience is at the moment? When she said the above-quoted statement, she seemed to be apparently completely out of balance or normalcy. Or she seemed not to understand who’s saying what at all. She neither seemed did understand what that “urgent moral challenge” might mean. What on earth after all the one who said the “growing threat to regional peace and security” was the US Ambassador to UN?! Alas!

The neocon-like Ambassador Rice, like the former Secretary of State Condi Rice during Bush presidency and her present NATO colleagues to UN, seems fail to understand what those languages and words she herself murmured may mean, while the great majority populations around the globe seem have no problem to understand what they really meant quite easily with a normal, ordinary sense of moral conscience.

Look also how desperate, hurried, disarrayed the US-led NATO forces and their de facto puppet rebel organization the NTC are! According to a AP report from Sirte on October 9, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox, too, present at the site of the failed attempt to occupy a Gadhafi stronghold, seemed to make a hollow statement when he tried to urge the NATO mercenaries to bring Sirte under NATO control. However, as a matter of fact, they’ve miserably failed to do so for more than six weeks even after their another hollow claim, the so-called “Tripoli fall.”

That’s the very reason why his empty “pledge to keep up NATO airstrikes even after Sirte fall” sounded helplessly hollow as well.

He also said “the international military action would continue as long as the remnants of the regime pose a risk to the people of Libya.”

Exactly same as Ambassador Rice, it seems the British Secretary of Defense, too, must have been suffered with some sort of similar mental illness as she does. Whose “military action” is that the so-called the “international military action” he’s talking about? Isn’t the US, British, and French “military action”? There is no such thing such as the “international military action” other than theirs alone, right? Isn’t it?

Who are the “remnants” who he said “pose a risk to the people of Libya?” The Libyan people “pose a risk to the people of Libya” themselves? What is this? As already mentioned, is he also mentally unstable? After he and his other NATO colleagues have miserably failed to complete their hidden but well-known mission for more than six months now, it seems their psychological, mental health condition must have been very much deteriorated. Otherwise how come could ever he make that type of so abnormal, strange, illogical public statement in a press conference?

That’s totally a nonsense! Who’d after all “pose a risk to the people of Libya”? Is it not the US-led NATO aggressors who’ve endlessly “posed” the gravest “risk to the people of” not only Libya but also Syria, Iran, Algeria, DPRK (North Korea), Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen and so on and so on? Who are the aggressors after all? Is the US-led NATO not the aggressor?

Listen now what he said here: “’We have a message for those who are still fighting for Gadhafi that the game is over, you have been rejected by the people of Libya,’ he told reporters Saturday in Tripoli before flying to Misrata.”

What? “The game is over”? Whose game is over? What? “Rejected by the people of Libya”? Who are the ones being really “rejected by the people of Libya” now? Then what about the people, apparently the majority population of 6 million Libyan population who are still fighting to resist in order to stop and “reject” the US-led NATO powers? Who are the ones miserably failed and lost the genocidal war against a sovereign nation now for more than six months, even with their over 35,000 times of continued bombings day and night from air and sea since March 19 when they began their imperial bombings?

As The Washington Post reported last month, the “commingling” of CIA officers, JSOC paramilitary troops and contractors “occupy an expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations” where “congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely get a comprehensive view.”

Or any “view” at all, which is precisely what the CIA and Pentagon have long desired; an oversight-free zone where American policymakers operate, as Dick Cheney infamously put it, on the “dark side,” a position fully-embraced by the “hope and change” administration of Barack Obama.

Awlaki’s state-sponsored killing, like the May 2 murder of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, resurfaces many unanswered questions concerning the 9/11 attacks, the so-called trigger for America’s global “War on Terror.”

But before turning to those issues, it is necessary to take a detour and examine administration actions; specifically the deliberations undertaken by Obama’s national security team which culminated in Awlaki’s death.

White House “Death Panel”

Unlike the fantasies of the corporate-controlled Tea Party who charged during the run-up to the White House sell-out of health care reform that the administration would create “death panels” to deny care to the elderly, it has since emerged that Team Obama has stood-up the authentic article.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama’s Justice Department “wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting” of Awlaki. The Post reports that the memorandum “was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi.”

That memorandum, according to The New York Times, was drafted in June 2010, some six months after Awlaki had been placed on the White House hit list, by Office of Legal Counsel attorneys “David Barron and Martin Lederman.”

Both former OLC lawyers are prominent “liberals” from prestigious universities; Barron at Harvard and Lederman at Georgetown University.

Ironically enough, in several scholarly articles they had railed against the previous administration’s adaptation of the “Unitary Executive Theory” promulgated by “torture memo” authors Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

Under Bush, OLC opinions were used to justify everything from warrantless wiretapping, the domestic deployment of the military to arrest Americans, to the torture and indefinite detention of “terrorist” suspects at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag and CIA “black sites.”

This, of course, begs the question: if Awlaki’s murder was “legal,” why then was the authorization to do so reached in camera by officials following a deliberative process which can’t be shared with the public because of “national security”?

The answer should be chilling and shocking to all Americans: because the nucleus of a death squad state recalling those stood up in Chile and Argentina during the “dirty war” period of the 1970s may now exist.

Reuters disclosed that Americans “are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.”

“There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel,” reporter Mark Hosenball wrote, “which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council. … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”

According to Reuters, “targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC ‘principals,’ meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval.”

A “former official” told Hosenball that “one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to ‘protect’ the president,” i.e., provide Obama legal cover under the thin veneer afforded by “plausible deniability.”

McClatchy News reported that “broadly speaking” White House orders to kill Awlaki were based on claims that “the nation’s inherent right of self-defense [is] recognized under international law.” However, “international law also imposes limits: Targeted killing is banned except to protect against ‘concrete, specific and imminent’ danger.”

And although the administration now claims that Awlaki was targeted for death because “his role in AQAP had gone ‘from inspirational to operational’,” Reuters disclosed that “officials acknowledge that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.”

In fact, the White House has failed to provide any proof whatsoever that Awlaki posed an “imminent danger” to the United States, although there is considerable evidence that he was on the radar of U.S. and allied secret state intelligence agencies for more than a decade, had close ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers and could have been picked up and indicted at any time.

Instead, federal law enforcement officials gave Awlaki a green light to leave the United States, unlike thousands of innocent Muslim-Americans swept-up and detained by the FBI in the post-9/11 hysteria that followed the attacks.

A “former military intelligence officer who worked with special operations troops to hunt down high-value terrorism targets,” told the right-wing Washington Times: “I think it’s pretty easy to understand why they didn’t take him alive. Would you want to deal with the hassle of trying to put him on trial, an American citizen that has gotten so much press for being the target of a CIA kill order? That would be a nightmare. The ACLU would be crawling all over the Justice Department for due process in an American court.”

That about sums up the dominant mindset of an Empire in sharp decline: the rule of law and due process for criminal suspects reduced to a “hassle.”

Slouching Towards Dictatorship

Obama’s national security team justified whacking Awlaki, as with their earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, by referencing the Bush-era Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), hastily passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“A decade later,” McClatchy reported, “the Obama administration contends that this wartime authority remains even if it’s evolved for reasons the administration won’t fully elucidate.”

The relevant section of AUFM reads: “IN GENERAL — That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” (emphasis added)

Readers will undoubtedly note that in passing the resolution, Congress not only ceded its authority to declare war to the Executive Branch but also planted the seeds of the administration’s preemptive war doctrines along with an unprecedented expansion of its domestic surveillance powers.

More pertinently is the reason why the administration “won’t fully elucidate” how the Bush-era AUMF “evolved” chiefly due to the fact that secret annexes now exist which authorize the killing of Americans, not only in Yemen or other “War on Terror” fronts, but right here in the United States itself?

After all, it’s not beyond the Obama administration to play fast and loose with the truth or hide repressive policies under layers of top secret presidential “findings” or a multitude of CIA and Pentagon black programs, as did the previous Bush government.

Recall that during the run-up to the reauthorization of three expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil libertarians decried the use of secret legal memos justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during “national security” investigations.

Recall too, that the Obama administration, as The New York Times disclosed in June, handed the FBI “significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”

These “news rules,” the Times averred, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”

It gets worse.

Last month, The New York Times revealed that the FBI “is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped.”

Under these new standards, the Bureau may deem someone a “known or suspected terrorist,” not based on evidence gathered through a criminal investigation, but solely if officials have “particularized derogatory information,” including that derived from First Amendment protected activities, to support to support an individuals’ watch listing or placement on a “no-fly” list.

One administration wag, speaking on condition of anonymity because to do otherwise would reveal “closely held deliberations within the administration,” but did so anyway because this was clearly a sanctioned leak to stenographer Peter Finn, told The Washington Post that “what constitutes due process in [the Awlaki case] is a due process in war.”

“The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi,” Finn wrote, “or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

We now know, thanks to Reuters, that authorization came from a White House death panel, an extra-constitutional committee of anonymous officials operating outside the rule of law.

As we have seen since Barack Obama took office, as under the previous Bush government, the Constitution is a meaningless scrap of paper with some words on it, duly trotted out on national holidays only to be cast aside in practice; that is, when it isn’t used as a rhetorical hammer against assorted “new Hitlers” or geopolitical rivals whose resources corporate America seek to “liberate.”

Dead Men Tell No Tales

As toxic to democratic norms and the rule of law as the Awlaki affair clearly is, there are underlying parapolitical themes surrounding his murder which strengthen suspicions that what took place in Yemen on September 30 is more than just another story about an overt power grab by the Executive Branch.

While the government and media continue to cover-up the role played by the CIA and other secret state agencies in alleged intelligence “failures” leading up to the 9/11 attacks, evidence suggests that the Awlaki killing, as with last May’s murder of former bête noire and on-again, off-again ally, Osama Bin Laden, may have been a “clean-up” operation designed to remove inconvenient witnesses with knowledge of Agency involvement in the plot.

As Antifascist Calling reported nearly two years ago in the wake of the aborted 2009 bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day over Detroit, a plot for which Awlaki was accused of orchestrating, though evidence can’t be supplied because it’s “secret,” The Washington Post disclosed that Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar and Hani Hanjour who “had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church.”

In a series of 2010 articles (here, here, here and here), I reported on the stark parallels between September 11 and the Flight 253 affair.

And as with the 2001 attacks we were told “changed everything,” far from being a failure to “connect the dots,” intelligence and law enforcement officials possessed sufficient information that should have prevented accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk.

And while Awlaki wasn’t given a free pass by the administration in that botched attack, earlier government failures to apprehend him certainly set the stage.

According to History Commons, “shortly before the [FBI] investigation [into Awlaki's alleged ties to the now-shuttered Holy Land Foundation] is closed,” in 2000, Awlaki “is beginning to associate with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar shortly before the investigation ends.”

“For instance,” History Commons avers, “on February 4, one month before the FBI investigation is closed, al-Awlaki talks on the telephone four times with hijacker associate [and suspected Saudi intelligence agent] Omar al-Bayoumi.”

“The 9/11 Commission will later speculate that these calls are related to Alhazmi and Almihdhar, since al-Bayoumi is helping them that day, and that Alhazmi or Almihdhar may even have been using al-Bayoumi’s phone at the time. Al-Bayoumi had also been the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation in 1999.”

Keep in mind that at least two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, figure prominently in recent revelations by researcher Kevin Fenton, the author of Disconnecting the Dots.

In a recent conversation with Boiling Frogs Post’s Sibel Edmonds and Peter B. Collins, Fenton said that during the course of his investigation, drawn from the Congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report, and the CIA’s still-redacted Inspector General’s report, he discovered that the CIA had deliberately withheld information from the FBI that the future hijackers had entered the United States with multiple entry visas issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Even though the Agency had identified the pair as international terrorists who attended a 2000 Al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia where they and others, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Khallad Bin Attash, one of the principle architects of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, planned the assault on the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks, they kept this from the FBI, information that could have led straight to the heart of Al-Qaeda’s “planes operation.”

Fenton provides substantial evidence that the CIA’s Alec Station Director Richard Blee and deputy, Tom Wilshire, concealed intelligence from investigators, concluding this “information was intentionally omitted in order to allow an al-Qaeda attack to go forward against the United States.”

As part of this continuing cover-up, Awlaki’s ties to the 9/11 hijackers were far more extensive than secret state officials have led us to believe.

In fact, although the Obama administration has justified killing Awlaki with false claims that he was AQAP’s “external operations” chief, his role before 9/11 was substantially more significant from an investigatory perspective: that of a “fixer,” first in San Diego where he assisted Saudi spook Omar al-Bayoumi in “settling” Alhazmi and Almihdhar, and later in Falls Church, Virginia, where he did the same for Hani Hanjour.

In 2002, Newsweek revealed that “some federal investigators suspect that al-Bayoumi could have been an advance man for the 9-11 hijackers, sent by Al Qaeda to assist the plot that ultimately claimed 3,000 lives.”

“Two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar,” Newsweek disclosed, “al-Bayoumi’s wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

Payments arrived “in the form of cashier’s checks, purchased from Washington’s Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family.”

With startling similarities to the Awlaki case, ten days after the attacks, al-Bayoumi is picked up by British authorities in London, where he had relocated in July 2001, at the request of the FBI. Although his phone calls, bank accounts and associations are scrutinized, the Bureau claim they found no connections to terrorism.

The Washington Post will report that by 2002 the FBI had concluded, the same year Awlaki leaves the U.S., “that no evidence could be found of any organized domestic effort to aid the hijackers.”

Recall that new information linking some members of the Saudi royal family and its intelligence apparatus to the attacks has recently surfaced. Last month, The Miami Herald revealed that two weeks before the kamikaze assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Saudi family “abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter–and an open safe in a master bedroom.”

Investigative reporters Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen learned that “law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights–including leader Mohamed Atta–in discoveries never before revealed to the public.”

“Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil,” Summers and Christensen wrote, “new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.”

In a follow-up piece that significantly advanced the story, researcher Russ Baker reported on the WhoWhatWhy web site “that those alleged confederates were closely tied to influential members of the Saudi ruling elite.”

Building on information first disclosed by the Herald, Baker, the author of Family of Secrets, reports that this “now-revealed link” between those who consorted with the hijackers in Florida “and the highest ranks of the Saudi establishment, reopens questions about the White House’s controversial approval for multiple charter flights allowing Saudi nationals to depart the U.S., beginning about 48 hours after the attacks, without the passengers being interviewed by law enforcement–despite the identification of the majority of the hijackers as Saudis.”

Is there a pattern between the hands-off treatment afforded well-connected Saudis and Anwar al-Awlaki’s casual, and inexplicable, flight from the United States?

“After 9/11″ History Commons points out, “the FBI will question al-Awlaki, and he will admit to meeting with Alhazmi several times, but say he does not remember what they discussed. He will not claim to remember Almihdhar at all.” Other accounts suggest that the relationship was much closer.

“The 9/11 Congressional Inquiry,” History Commons avers, “claim that Alhazmi and Almihdhar ‘were closely affiliated with [al-Awlaki] who reportedly served as their spiritual adviser during their time in San Diego. … Several persons informed the FBI after September 11 that this imam had closed-door meetings in San Diego with Almihdhar, Alhazmi, and another individual, whom al-Bayoumi had asked to help the hijackers’.”

“Around August 2000,” History Commons reports, “al-Awlaki resigns as imam and travels to unknown ‘various countries.’ In early 2001, he will be appointed the imam to a much larger mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. During this time frame, Alhazmi, Almihdhar, and fellow hijacker Hani Hanjour will move to Virginia and attend al-Awlaki’s mosque there.”

Anecdotally, in 2003 Newsweek reports: “Lincoln Higgie, an antiques dealer who lived across the street from the mosque where Aulaqi used to lead prayer, told Newsweek that he distinctly recalls the imam knocking on his door in the first week of August 2001 to tell him he was leaving for Kuwait. ‘He came over before he left and told me that something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of the country when it happened,’ recalls Higgie.”

The antiques dealer later told The New York Times, that when he learned that Awlaki would be permanently leaving San Diego, “he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area–and got a strange response.” Higgie said, “‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you’ll find out why’.”

Although the FBI suspected Awlaki “had some connection with the 9/11 plot,” authorities claim there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him, nor can he be deported because he’s an American citizen. And when the Bureau hatched an ill-conceived plan to arrest him on an obscure charge of “transporting prostitutes across state lines,” that plan collapsed when Awlaki left the U.S. in March 2002.

“But on October 10, 2002,” History Commons reports, “he makes a surprise return to the U.S.” Although his name is on a terrorist watch list and he is detained by Customs’ officials when he lands in New York, they are informed by the FBI that “his name was taken off the watch list just the day before. He is released after only three hours.”

“Throughout 2002,” History Commons informs us, Awlaki is the “subject of an active Customs investigation into money laundering called Operation Greenquest, but he is not arrested for this either, or for the earlier contemplated prostitution charges. At the time, the FBI is fighting Greenquest, and Customs officials will later accuse the FBI of sabotaging Greenquest investigations.”

Awlaki again leaves the U.S., this time for good. Although the FBI admits they were “very interested” in Awlaki, they fail to stop him leaving the country. One FBI source told U.S. News and World Report, “We don’t know how he got out.”

Inexplicably however, it was not until 2008 that secret state officials concluded that Awlaki was an Al-Qaeda operative! This beggars belief, and raises the question as to why he was allowed to leave in the first place. It certainly can’t be for lack of evidence or that when Awlaki set-up shop, first in London and finally in Yemen, he is continually under surveillance by British, Yemeni and American intelligence agencies.

Although interviewed four times by the FBI after September 11, the Bureau concluded, according to The New York Times, that Awlaki’s “contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random.”

Other investigators, however, disagreed. “One detective,” the Times reported, whose name has been scrubbed from 9/11 Commission files, told staff that he believed Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” At the time of the Flight 253 affair, I wrote that “despite, or possibly because of these dubious connections he was allowed to leave the country.”

In fact, the curious disinterest exhibited by authorities in bringing Awlaki to ground following September 11, were neither “errors in judgement” nor “mistakes” by overtaxed investigators but are rather, a modus operandi which suggests that Awlaki and others were part of a CIA domestic operation which allowed the 9/11 plot to go forward.

Nothing in what I have written above should be construed as justification for the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. The available evidence indicates that Awlaki could have been arrested multiple times. At the least serious end of the criminal justice spectrum he could have been charged with providing “material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” to whit, Al-Qaeda, and legally taken out of circulation.

That he wasn’t and continued to operate freely as a propagandist, despite substantial corroboration from multiple law enforcement sources that he was a key figure in the pre-9/11 domestic support network, suggests that Awlaki may have been a double agent, albeit one who had decidedly gone “off the reservation.”

Awlaki’s handling by authorities raise serious questions about just how extensive U.S. support for Al-Qaeda was prior to, and possibly even after the September 11 attacks, particularly in resource-rich global hot-spots.

As numerous journalists and researchers have painstakingly documented, Al-Qaeda, allied terrorist outfits and international narco-trafficking networks have a long, sordid history of supporting U.S. covert operations that targeted America’s geopolitical rivals even as Bin Laden’s far-flung organization plotted to attack the United States itself.

In this light, Awlaki’s “targeted killing” as with the earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, may be part of a larger CIA/Pentagon operation to remove inconvenient participants and witnesses from the scene who might have a thing or two to say about the crimes and intrigues hatched by the imperialist Empire.

After all, dead men tell no tales…

But law and morality are not the same thing.

Whether lawyers serving the powerful can twist laws drafted by the powerful to serve the interests of power has absolutely no bearing on the morality of death-by-president. Indeed, when a single individual has the power to unilaterally decide who lives or dies, whether that’s permissible under some tortured reading of the Constitution and international law may not be irrelevant, but it isn’t exactly the most pertinent question.

What we ought to be talking about is whether murdering people with unmanned Predator drones based on evidence that will never see the light of day is, regardless of the target’s nationality, morally right or morally reprehensible. For those in the anti-murder camp, the answer is easy — and more relevant than whether a murder was in accordance with clause five of subsection B of the International Code on State-Sanctioned Killing.

After all, the law is crafted by the powerful to serve their interests, meaning that debating the legality of a politician blowing up anyone in the world they choose is to debate on the terms set by power. Give a team of White House lawyers enough time, and they no doubt could come up with a superficially compelling case for why the president can end life as we know it based on his inherent powers as commander-in-chief. While such an argument may be fatally flawed morally speaking, when it comes to the law, who’s really going to say they’re wrong?

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, recall, was a blatant war of aggression, the “supreme international crime,” in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Even Richard Perle, one of the chief architects of that war, admitted as much. And what has come of it? Dick Cheney goes on book tours while Bradley Manning, who instead of committing war crimes actually exposed them, rots in prison.

Such is the morality of the law: If you’re powerful enough, you’re immune, but if you’re weak, you’re prosecuted. Members of the Obama administration, then, must love the debate over the legality of their actions. It’s one they can win even if they lose.

And yet, liberal discussion is dominated by talk of the legality, not the morality, of the U.S. government murdering people without charge or trial. Instead of right and wrong, liberals narrowly debate whether the president can legally order hits on alleged terrorists who happen to be U.S. citizens. An American passport, it seems, makes the man.

How to Make Wrong Right: Call It a “War”

Taking their cue from President Obama, many on the left have come to accept the “war on terror” paradigm they rejected back when that guy from Texas was president. And that little three-letter word, “war,” lowers an already pitifully low bar for when the state may legally take human life and, by extension, raises the threshold at which good bleeding-hearts ought to let their humanity kick in. It may be wrong for a mere citizen or policeman to take out a family of four as part of a quest for vengeance against a killer, but in war that’s just “collateral damage.” It sucks that 41 innocent Yemenis had to die as part of the U.S. government’s quest to kill folks like Awlaki, but don’t get yourself too worked up about it.

It’s certainly not illegal, after all.

By focusing on the mundane rather than the moral case for or against state-sanctioned murder, progressive commentators can sleep well at night despite having a bumper sticker for a killer on their car, their consciences soothed by legalistic rationalizations for extinguishing human life that they’d never accept from a friend or family member. Some even cheer death as long as it’s carried out by the state — and a fellow Democrat.

A writer for The Washington Monthly, for instance, reacted to the assassination of Awlaki — and another American, Samir Khan, and some other foreigners whose lives aren’t even worth acknowledging — with admirably partisan enthusiasm, saying he looked “forward to conservatives explaining to the public why all of this is evidence of weakness under the Obama presidency.” The liberal Center for American progress likewise took former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton to task for trying “his hardest to downplay the significance” of the killing and not heaping praise on Our Leader.

Never mind what actual experts say — Yemeni Post editor Hakim al-Masmari told al-Jazeera Awlaki’s death “will not be a blow to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from any perspective . . . because [he] did not have any real role in [the group]” — we have a ritualistic celebration of death to attend to, Mr. Bolton. This is supposed to be a happy occasion!

Even those who aren’t outright cheering the glorious new age of America extrajudicially killing Americans are more or less excusing murder with the disinterested musings of a bureaucrat. A writer for the progressive website AlterNet, for instance, reacted to the assassination by asking “Was the al-Awlaki Killing Legal?” Answer: “I don’t know — the question hinges on facts I don’t claim to possess.” Don’t worry about the rightness of killing someone based on secret evidence and a self-serving reading of the law, dear reader; ponder whether that secret evidence against the executed comports with a plausible reading of the law.

The Right to Life: Dependent on a Passport

A commentator at Mother Jones, meanwhile, reacted to the killing by declaring he was none too concerned with whether “Awlaki in particular deserved to die.” Ho hum. Just another dead guy in the war on terror. Rather — and this is more than some on the left could muster — he was troubled by the “precedent by which a U.S. president can secretly order the death of an American citizen unchecked by any outside process.” The same writer, gainfully employed at a leading liberal publication, enthusiastically cheered the premeditated killing of an unarmed non-American a few months ago, the difference being the passport held by the man being murdered.

And that pretty much sums up the state of mainstream liberalism in America these days. Even if they don’t particularly care for it, those who rightly called George W. Bush a war criminal express no moral outrage over a Democratic president’s killing of anyone he chooses; it certainly doesn’t make him a bad guy unworthy of re-election. Instead, the killings are debated in dull legal terms, if at all. And not even Obama’s more strident liberal critics question the murder of foreigners, which is at worst a “counterproductive” policy, not an evil one.

This, again, isn’t to say the law is irrelevant, or that those who prefer legalistic or utilitarian arguments against state-sponsored murder shouldn’t be welcome in decent society. Governments make rules for the rest of us to follow, so when they blatantly violate those laws, they deserve to be called on it. No question.

But the debate over the legality of extrajudicial executions is based on the terms of debate set by the executioners, which risks making murder a respectable — or banal — enterprise, acceptable to liberal sensibilities so long as one cites the proper subsections and files the appropriate paperwork on time. And the debate over the laws governing state-sponsored murder threatens to obscure the more important question of what is right.

What Is the Law?

What’s legally permissible, remember, is not the same as what’s morally permissible: Owning human beings was once the unchallenged law of the land, while those who helped fugitive slaves — not those who brutalized them — found themselves locked away in prison cells. A Southern plantation owner could win any legal challenge to his ownership of slaves by citing a dozen federal and state statutes. That didn’t make it right. And while some abolitionists did adopt legal arguments against slavery, they never forgot their most potent case against the infamous institution: the moral one.

Forget the law. Does any person, whether a saint or a statesman, have the moral right to unilaterally take the life of another? Is it just or wise to invest in one fallible human being, or even a group of them, the power to kill and the ability to do so without so much as a rubber-stamp conviction in a military tribunal — and without fear of so much as a harsh word from establishment liberal humanitarians? The answer, I’d argue, is unambiguous: no. Allowing one man or woman the right to be judge, jury, and executioner is a recipe for totalitarianism, one that eviscerates all other human rights and the moral fiber of those who would be a party to it.

Back when slavery was as legal and respectable as blowing up Pakistani tribesmen with Predator drones is now, author and dissident Henry David Thoreau published an essay on the duty of civil disobedience in which he noted that, in fact, “Law never made a man a whit more just.” Indeed, “by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

Right now, too many Americans — pundits especially — have an undue respect for statutes and precedents, leading even those on the left to speak of things such as the “laws of war,” as odd a turn of phrase as the “rules of rape.” And it’s making them agents of injustice.