United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the double veto a “travesty”. Then Clinton duly incited “friends of democratic Syria” to keep working for regime change, which was the object of the resolution. The copyright for this idea is held by the liberator of Libya, neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said Paris was already working to create a NATOGCC “Friends of the Syrian People Group” in charge of implementing the Arab League’s regime change plan.

Right on cue, Paris puppet Burhan Ghalyun, the head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) – the opposition umbrella group – also summoned these countries “friendly to the Syrian people”. Everybody knows who they are; the US, Britain, France, Israel and GCC members Qatar and Saudi Arabia. With “friends” like these, the “Syrian people” certainly don’t need enemies.

Those ‘disgusting’ BRICS

United States ambassador to the UN Susan Rice – a top cheerleader of R2P, also known as humanitarian bombing – called the double veto “disgusting”.

Even the venerable stones of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus know that only Washington has the right to wield veto power at the UN – overwhelmingly to protect the state of Israel’s right to kill Palestinian men, women and children with tanks and shelling without bothering about pesky UN resolutions.¹

Russia, vocally – and China, silently – had been adamant for weeks; forget about a UN resolution for regime change in Syria, or worse yet, opening the doors for a Libya-style NATO humanitarian bombing.

Russia has its own geopolitical reasons to consider Syria a red line; Syria hosts Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean, in the port of Tartus; and Syria buys Russian weapons. But, in fact, all the five BRICS – plus the overwhelmingly majority of the developing world – are in synch; forget about regime change-enabling UN resolutions, promoted by the usual suspect Western trio US-Britain-France and – the summit of hypocrisy – devised by the “democratic” House of Saud and Qatar.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be in Damascus this Tuesday to meet with President Bashar al-Assad and discuss a serious plan to try to end the bloodshed. Lavrov has calmly explained the reasons for the Russian veto.

He had sent Russian amendments to the draft resolution directly to Clinton; “The rationality and objectivity of these amendments should not cause anyone’s doubt.” But to no avail; the resolution remained “unilateral” – demanding nothing from Syrian anti-government armed groups. Lavrov stressed, “No president with self-respect, no matter how treated, will agree to surrender inhabited localities to armed extremists without resistance.” Imagine if Homs was in Texas.

Still, the SNC now holds Moscow and Beijing “responsible for the escalating acts of killing and genocide”, and facilitators of a “license to kill”. Lavrov is imperturbable; “We have repeatedly said that we are not protecting Assad but international law. The prerogative of the UN Security Council does not envision interference in internal processes.”

Homs: Who’s killing whom?

Syria’s UN ambassador Bashar Ja’afari strongly denied the opposition’s accusation of regime forces bombing the Khadiliya neighborhood in Homs with tanks and artillery and killing over 200 people – arguing that “no sensible person” would launch such an attack the night before the UN Security Council was discussing a resolution. Without any preliminary investigation, France called it a “massacre” and a “crime against humanity”. Like France’s performance during the Algerian war?

To understand what’s at stake, it’s crucial to keep in mind who’s defecting from the Syrian army. Syria’s top military – also members of the Ba’ath Party – are almost all Alawis, the folk Shi’ite sect (10% of the overall population). They are not defecting.

The defectors are overwhelmingly Sunni troops (70% of the overall population); they are forming militias, Libya-style, heavily infiltrated by mercenaries weaponized by the GCC, and fighting government troops. The government’s response has been to target the neighborhoods where the families of these defectors live. The center of Homs nowadays is controlled by the rebels.

So what’s really happening on the ground in Homs? Here are sections from a crucial e-mail sent by a trusted Syrian Christian source:

Many Syrians are ecstatic about the double veto but Homs is very worrying. The opposition spread news about a massacre just before the vote and they quoted numbers in the hundreds … unbelievably quoted by all news channels (all based on “activists”) without any verification, only to bring the number down to something like 33 later. They never showed any bombing or taking people under rubble or any injured people … just clean-bodied men with their hands and feet tied up and shot mostly once and only in their underwear. Whatever the Syrian government has in its arsenal it seems there are very intelligent bombs that can strip and tie up people then shoot them in the head!!

The thing that we know fully well is that there are no army presence in Homs. My parents left the city then came back Saturday morning on the day of the alleged massacre and there was nothing. They usually call a hotline (115) and ask if the roads are safe and security operator will tell you to come to Homs or not. This time they told them to come and indeed there was nothing to be seen or heard. This of course doesn’t mean that most of the city and particularly the old city is under the control of the gunmen. Our old neighborhood where I grew up (the Christian Bustan al-Diwan) was completely taken over by the gunmen. YouTube videos show how the FSA cleared the army roadblock in the previous neighborhood (Bab al-Dreib) and then proceeded to destroy the one guarding our neighborhood.

People in my neighborhood did not complain of any major harassment or problem, however the “revolutionaries” did indeed break into a couple of homes that their people left either days earlier or at the time, also into a school, Homs Newspaper (operated by the Orthodox church for more than 100 years) and a few other restaurants but no other complaints. I mean, considering what these FSA do to Alawites, then the Christians are really getting very fair treatment so far.

What many believe now is that the bodies shown tied up and shot in Khalidiya and which are alleged to be “men, women and children” killed by a bombardment of the Syrian army were nothing but kidnapped Syrian soldiers. Add to them kidnapped Alawites who were not liberated (or actually exchanged). When the FSA kidnap some people, Alawites started to kidnap in return to exchange the prisoners. This doesn’t always work and some people who weren’t “exchanged for” turned up dead in Khalidiya.

All in all up to this point there really isn’t any offensive by the Syrian army on the city. The rebels continue to attack other checkpoints. People are completely in the dark as to what the government is thinking regarding Homs. It’s devastating for me to see my neighborhood become another battleground and many of my friends leaving.

All this dovetails with an explanation by fine journalist Nir Rosen, author of the indispensable Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World; Homs is essentially a question of rebels seizing government checkpoints – and government forces shelling a few neighborhoods with mortars. According to Rosen:

There was no fighting in Homs, just shelling from these safe locations (from the point of view of the regime), suggesting they are unable to actually attack Khalidiya with regime fighters … No opposition fighters were killed in the attack. And up to 130 people in Khaldiyeh were killed and 800 wounded (like I said not fighters). Now that’s a lot of people but if you were watching the news … you would think that Homs was destroyed while in fact this attack can also be seen as a sign of the regime’s weakness in the city.

Compare this with my Syrian source worried that “people are completely in the dark as to what the government is thinking regarding Homs”.

Imagine an armed insurrection in a mid-sized city in the US; the whole world saw how peaceful Occupy Wall Street was dealt with by billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. The “disgusting” BRICS have made it clear; there will be no NATOGCC humanitarian bombing of Syria. But NATOGCC may be succeeding in its plan B: to plunge Syria into civil war.

• First published at Asia Times.

1. Here’s a partial summary of US vetoes at the UN

Essentially, the GCC created an Arab League group to monitor what’s going on in Syria. The Syrian National Council – based in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries Turkey and France – enthusiastically supported it. It’s telling that Syria’s neighbor Lebanon did not.

When the over 160 monitors, after one month of enquiries, issued their report … surprise! The report did not follow the official GCC line – which is that the “evil” Bashar al-Assad government is indiscriminately, and unilaterally, killing its own people, and so regime change is in order.

The Arab League’s Ministerial Committee had approved the report, with four votes in favor (Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and GCC member Oman) and only one against; guess who, Qatar – which is now presiding the Arab League because the emirate bought their (rotating) turn from the Palestinian Authority.

So the report was either ignored (by Western corporate media) or mercilessly destroyed – by Arab media, virtually all of it financed by either the House of Saud or Qatar. It was not even discussed – because it was prevented by the GCC from being translated from Arabic into English and published in the Arab League’s website.

Until it was leaked. Here it is, in full.

The report is adamant. There was no organized, lethal repression by the Syrian government against peaceful protesters. Instead, the report points to shady armed gangs as responsible for hundreds of deaths among Syrian civilians, and over one thousand among the Syrian army, using lethal tactics such as bombing of civilian buses, bombing of trains carrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and bombing of bridges and pipelines.

Once again, the official NATOGCC version of Syria is of a popular uprising smashed by bullets and tanks. Instead, BRICS members Russia and China, and large swathes of the developing world see it as the Syrian government fighting heavily armed foreign mercenaries. The report largely confirms these suspicions.

The Syrian National Council is essentially a Muslim Brotherhood outfit affiliated with both the House of Saud and Qatar – with an uneasy Israel quietly supporting it in the background. Legitimacy is not exactly its cup of green tea. As for the Free Syrian Army, it does have its defectors, and well-meaning opponents of the Assad regime, but most of all is infested with these foreign mercenaries weaponized by the GCC, especially Salafist gangs.

Still NATOGCC, blocked from applying in Syria its one-size-fits-all model of promoting “democracy” by bombing a country and getting rid of the proverbial evil dictator, won’t be deterred. GCC leaders House of Saud and Qatar bluntly dismissed their own report and went straight to the meat of the matter; impose a NATOGCC regime change via the UN Security Council.

So the current “Arab-led drive to secure a peaceful end to the 10-month crackdown” in Syria at the UN is no less than a crude regime change drive. Usual suspects Washington, London and Paris have been forced to fall over themselves to assure the real international community this is not another mandate for NATO bombing – a la Libya. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as “a path for a political transition that would preserve Syria’s unity and institutions”.

But BRICS members Russia and China see it for what it is. Another BRICS member – India – alongside Pakistan and South Africa, have all raised serious objections to the NATOGCC-peddled draft UN resolution.

There won’t be another Libya-style no fly zone; after all the Assad regime is not exactly deploying Migs against civilians. A UN regime change resolution will be blocked – again – by Russia and China. Even NATOGCC is in disarray, as each block of players – Washington, Ankara, and the House of Saud-Doha duo – has a different long-term geopolitical agenda. Not to mention crucial Syrian neighbor and trading partner Iraq; Baghdad is on the record against any regime change scheme.

So here’s a suggestion to the House of Saud and Qatar; since you’re so seduced by the prospect of “democracy” in Syria, why don’t you use all your American weaponry and invade in the dead of night – like you did to Bahrain – and execute regime change by yourselves?

•  First published at Asia Times.

Speaking Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the Russian and Chinese veto a “travesty,” while labeling the Security Council “neutered.”  American Ambassador Susan Rice, meanwhile, stated that she was “disgusted” by the veto.

On NBC Nightly News (2/4/12), Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell called the Security Council vote “just a terrible day for the United Nations and diplomacy.”  (“Diplomacy” in Washington speak, we see, entails strictly toeing the U.S. line.)

Not content with merely condemning the Security Council, the U.S. also began to plot an alternative means for intervention.

Secretary of State Clinton reassured that the U.S. would work with the Arab League to continue applying “immense pressure” on Syria, while adding pointblank that, “Assad must go.”  President Obama added much the same on Saturday, arguing that Mr. Assad had “lost all legitimacy to rule.”  (Apparently, the revealed targeting of funeral mourners in the C.I.A.’s drone campaign does not constitute the grounds on which one loses legitimacy.)

Such rhetoric, one will recall, mirrors that which presaged the NATO orchestrated demise of Gaddafi.  Of little surprise, then, that the Mossad connected Debkafile reported over the weekend that in the face of growing Russian resistance to foreign intervention, “The United States, the Europeans and the Gulf Arabs are likely to redouble their efforts to unseat Bashar Assad.”  And as if summoned on cue, the proverbial hawk Joseph Lieberman emerged on Sunday to float the idea of providing direct military support to the Free Syrian Army.

But as their plans to turn Syria into Libya 2.0 were initially impeded over the weekend, the pouting Washington elite quickly pivoted, directing their bitter ire towards a long favorite foe: Russia.

In the immediate wake of the Security Council vote, Ambassador Rise preceded to openly berate Russia on the Council floor for continuing to supply arms to the Syria government.  As she later told CNN, Russia and China “will have any future blood spilt on their hands.”  (Ms. Rice has no qualms with the blood spilt in U.S. client states like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and so on.  Nor, needless to say, does the U.S. have any reservations about Israeli apartheid.)

Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, on the other hand, argued on Monday, ahead of his Tuesday visit to Damascus, that such outbursts sounded “indecent and perhaps on the verge of hysterical.”  So much for that U.S.-Russia “reset.”

Of course, always eager to parrot the official U.S. line, the American media also quickly cast its scorn toward Russia.

As New York Times imperial messenger Thomas Friedman wrote (2/4/12), “The more Putin throws his support behind the murderous dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the more he looks like a person buying a round-trip ticket on the Titanic — after it has already hit the iceberg.”  (Friedman is the same man who, as President Bush searched into Putin’s very soul, encouraged his readers to “keep routin’ for Putin.”)

Yet amidst all this public sulking at its U.N. rebuff, the U.S. was ultimately able to extract a measure of revenge for Russia’s diplomatic intransigence.  For as massive protests broke out onto the streets in Russia on Saturday, the U.S. press pounced.

As NBC Nightly News (2/4/12) eagerly reported, a hundred thousand hit the streets of Moscow on Saturday calling for the “end of Putin’s rule.”

While on CBS Evening News (2/4/12), Elizabeth Palmer reported from Russia on the “tens of thousands protesting against Putin and a legacy of corruption.”

And as the Washington Post adoringly wrote on the protests (2/4/12): “The temperature was below zero, which only made the crowd more joyful as well as forceful, as if mere weather could prevent them from showing their disdain for Putin.”

Completely omitted from the network news broadcasts (in addition to many stalwart liberal sources, such as Democracy Now!), was the fact that tens of thousands also turned out in support of Putin.  For as the Los Angeles Times (2/4/12) critically noted, Putin continues to enjoy more than 50 percent support within the country, “especially among the working class outside Moscow.”

Yet unwilling to acknowledge (or perhaps unable to comprehend) that people would actually be willing to hit the streets on their own volition to support Putin, the American press posited ulterior motives.

Typical of the discrediting of the pro-Putin protesters, the Washington Post wrote:

The post office brought in busloads of its workers for the counter-rally, and teachers were recruited from points nearby.

One who chose not to show up was Yulia Konstantinova, a math teacher who turned down a request from her principal and joined the anti-Putin Bolotnaya march instead. “We’re sick and tired of pretending everything is fine,” she said. “It’s not true.”

Predictably enough, as the American press dutifully reported on the political division in Russia, and swooned over those voicing their dissent with Putin, it employed a universal blackout of coordinated protests in dozens of U.S. cities called in opposition to American policy towards Iran.  A bit hard to furnish war, I suppose, if one reveals any degree of popular discord.

But with the U.S. now openly lusting not only for Damascus, but Tehran as well, one ought to expect the blackout of internal U.S. dissent to continue.  Moreover, the swift and coordinated discrediting campaign levied against Russia for bucking Washington assures that the U.S. power elite remains firmly fixated on its anticipated imperial spoils.  Any and all obstacles will simply not be tolerated.  American imperial ambitions do not die easily.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

— George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950)

For anyone in two minds about what is really going on in Syria, and whether President Assad, hailed a decade ago as “A Modern Day Attaturk”, has become the latest megalomaniacal despot to whose people a US-led posse of nations must deliver “freedom” with weapons of mass, home, people, nation and livelihood destruction, here is a salutary tale from modern history.

Have the more recent saber-rattlings against Syria* been based on US-UK government papers only discovered in 2003, and since air-brushed (or erroneously omitted) from even BBC timelines on that country?

In late 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, Matthew Jones, a Reader in International History at London’s Royal Holloway College, discovered “frighteningly frank” documents — 1957 plans between then UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and then President Dwight Eisenhower endorsing: “a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion (of Syria) by Syria’s pro-western neighbours.”

At the heart of the plan was the assassination of the perceived power behind then President Shukri al-Quwatli. Those targeted were Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, Head of Military Intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, Chief of Syrian General Staff: and Khalid Bakdash, who headed the Syrian Communist Party.

The document was drawn up in Washington in September of 1957:

In order to facilitate the action of liberative (sic) forces, reduce the capabilities of the regime to organize and direct its military actions … to bring about the desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals.

Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention, and in the light of circumstances existing at the time.

In light of President Assad’s current allegations of foreign forces, interventions and cross-border incursions, this document contains some fascinating, salutary phrases:

Once a political decision has been reached to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria, CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main (sic) incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals.

Incidents should not be concentrated in Damascus … care should be taken to avoid causing key leaders of the Syrian regime to take additional personal protection measures.

Further, a “necessary degree of fear … frontier incidents and (staged) border clashes”, would “provide a pretext for intervention” by Iraq and Jordan – then still under British mandate.

Syria was to be “made to appear as sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments … the CIA and SIS should use … capabilitites in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

Incursions into Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon would involve “sabotage, national conspiracies, and various strong arms activities”, were, advised the document, to be blamed on Damascus.

In late December 2011 an opposition “Syria National Council” was announced, to “liberate the country”.  Representatives met with Hilary Clinton. There now seems to be a US – endorsed “Syrian Revolutionary Council.”

The Eisenhower-Macmillan plan was for funding of the “Free Syria Committee” and “arming of political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities”, within Syria.

CIA-MI6 planned fomenting internal uprisings and replacing the Ba’ath Communist-leaning government with a Western, user-friendly one. Expecting this to be met by public hostility, they planned to “probably need to rely first on repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power.”

The document was signed off in both London and Washington. It was, wrote Macmillan in his diary, “a most formidable report” — a report which was “withheld even from British Chiefs of Staff …”

Washington and Whitehall had become concerned at Syria’s increasingly pro-Soviet, rather than pro-Western sympathies, and the Ba’ath (Pan Arab) and Communist party alliance, also largely allied within the Syrian army.

However, even political concerns were trumped by Syria then controlling a main pipeline from the Western bonanza of Iraq’s oil fields in those pre-Saddam Hussein days.

Briefly put, in 1957 Syria allied with Moscow (which included an agreement for military and economic aid) also recognized China – and then as now, the then Soviet Union warned the West against intervening in Syria.

Syria is unchanged as an independent minded country, and the loyalties remain. It broadly continues to be the cradle of the Pan Arab ideal of Ba’athism, standing alone since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In 1957, this independent mindedness caused Loy Henderson, a Senior State Department official, to say that “the present regime in Syria had to go …”

Ultimately, the plan was not used since British mandate or not, neighbouring countries refused to play. However, the project overtly bears striking similarity to the reality of events over the last decade in Syria – and the region.

In a near 1957 re-run, Britain’s Foreign Minister, William Hague has said President Assad “will feel emboldened” by the UN Russia-China vote in Syria’s favour.

Hilary (“We came, we saw, he died”) Clinton, has called for “friends of a democratic Syria”, to unite and rally against the Assad government:

“We need to work together to send them a clear message: you cannot hold back the future at the point of a gun”, said the woman filmed purportedly watching the extrajudicial, illegal assassination of who may be, or may be not, Osma Bin Laden and others –but certainly people were murdered by US illegal invaders at the point of lots of guns.

Supremely ironically, she was speaking in Munich (5 February) historically “the birth place of the Nazi party.”

The Russia-China veto at the UN on actions against Syria has been condemned by the US, varyingly as “disgusting”, ‘shameful”, “deplorable”, “a travesty.”

Eye opening is the list of US vetoes to be found here. Jaw dropping double standards can only be wondered at (again.).

Perhaps the bottom line is that in 1957, Iraq’s oil was at the top of the agenda, of which Syria held an important key. Today, it is Iran’s, and as Michel Chossudovsky notes so succinctly: “The road to Tehran is through Damascus.”

*  2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012.

Such an award could be called the Lebon Prize (reversing Nobel).

If there was such an award, the statements of European and American leaders in the immediate aftermath of Russia and China’s veto of the Security Council resolution to end the killing in Syria suggest two most obvious nominees for it.

One is William Hague, Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

In the House of Commons he pronounced Bashar al-Assad’s regime to be “doomed” because there is “no way it can recover its credibility.” That may very well be the case in the long term, but in my view that Hague statement was somewhat naive at the time he made it. For its short to mid-term survival at the time of writing, and unless visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is seeking to engineer Bashar al-Assad’s departure from office in a face-saving way that will protect Russia’s interests, the Syrian regime doesn’t need credibility in the outside world. It needs only enough weapons and the will to go on killing its own people. (That said there can be no doubt that Bashar al-Assad and/or his Alawite generals took the Russian and Chinese vetoes as a green light to escalate the killing. Also to be noted is that Bashar al-Assad was not the only Arab leader to draw a particular conclusion from Mubarak’s downfall. “If our people take to the streets demanding regime change, shoot them!”)

But the particular Hague statement that prompts my suggestion that he be nominated for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy was this one. By exercising their veto “Russia and China have placed themselves on the wrong side of Arab and international opinion.”

The obvious implication is that it’s not good politics and policy to be on the wrong side of that opinion. Really? Then how do we explain the fact that all the governments of the Western world, led by America, are on the wrong side of it because of their support for the Zionist state of Israel right or wrong – unending occupation, on-going ethnic cleansing and all? There is a one-word answer. Hypocrisy.

The second most obvious nominee for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy is Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN. In condemning the Russian and Chinese vetoes, she said, “For months this Council has been held hostage by a couple of members.”

Given that for the Security Council has been held hostage for decades by American vetoes to protect Israel from being called to account for its crimes, that Rice statement is – what I can say without resorting to use of the “F” word? – hypocrisy most naked and taken to its highest level

No doubt readers will have other suggestions, probably many, for nominations for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy.

Hague also condemned China and Russia for “betraying the Syrian people”. It apparently doesn’t matter that the British and all other Western governments have been betraying the Palestinians for decades. There really is no end and no limit to the hypocrisy.

1. The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway, while the other prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. Baruch Aba Shalev, author of a book on the Nobel Prize, has said “the Nobel Prize has come to be regarded as the best-known and most prestigious award available

The settlements cover over 42% of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), not counting the Jordon valley, which they are taking over

Estimates of colonisation vary from the 42% reported by Chomsky and BT Salem to that of Human Rights Watch who, at 60%, set the figure even higher.

Around half a million ‘settlers’, more accurately, colonisers, now squat upon Palestinian soil, huddled within walled encampments upon stolen land, branded blue and white. Noisily perching upon hilltops, rooms with a view, or flourishing in verdant valleys, these settlements creep shamefully throughout the West Bank and the sacred city Jerusalem, East, West North South; The City of Peace.

Former President Jimmy Carter stated:

The occupation & confiscation of Palestinian land that doesn’t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonisation of that land, and the connecting up of those isolated but multiple settlements, (there are some 200), with each other by high-ways on which Palestinians can’t travel and where quite often cannot even cross. The persecution of the Palestinians under the occupation [by the Israelis] is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation

Inside the West Bank, Outside the Law

The building of one single settlement is illegal. This is a fact, a fact well known, a fact Israel signs up to and a fact in International Law.

Article 49 of The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 to which Israel is a signatory (1949) and has ratified (1951) and Mother-ship USA is a High Contracting Party, which “aims at protecting the civilian persons in enemy hands, notably those residing in occupied territories” and “explicitly prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory” [Emphasis mine].

The Geneva conventions agreed and adopted after the Second World War are “one of the major sources of international humanitarian law and are binding [emphasis mine] upon [the] 189 signatory states”, meaning you can’t simply ignore them. As a party to the Geneva Conventions, the United States is obligated “to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.” [Emphasis mine] Israel and the USA, two of those bound – some feel gagged and bound would serve well — by the conventions, failed to attend a conference in December 2001 in Geneva, concerning the application of international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territories; a scandalous absence by the two key ‘players’ or ‘builders’ – not of peace, but builders of conflict, separation walls and Israeli housing condos.

Notwithstanding this ban, almost half-a-million Jewish Israelis with Israeli government support have moved into settlements it has constructed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and formally annexed occupied territory in East Jerusalem, a move not recognized by any other government in the world.¹

The settlers are living illegally, often violently, supported by all manner of subsidies from the Knesset, “which entitles them to a number of benefits: in housing, by enabling settlers to purchase quality, inexpensive apartments, with an automatic grant of a subsidized mortgage; wide-ranging benefits in education, such as free education from age three, extended school days, free transportation to schools, and higher teachers’ salaries; for industry and agriculture, by grants and subsidies, and indemnification for the taxes imposed on their produce by the European Union; in taxation, by imposing taxes significantly lower than in communities inside the Green Line, and by providing larger balancing grants to the settlements, to aid in covering deficits.”

These subsidies are little more than bribes, all thanks to Mother Goose USA. Chomsky points out:

We’re [USA] paying for it [settlement building, subsidies, security], stop paying for it, stop supporting it, stop subsidising. Stop allowing the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to remain in the territories. The setters are subsidized to stay there [the OPT], if the subsidies are withdrawn, they [settlers] will have to face the fact that they are not the ‘Lords of the Land’ they will then go back to Israel.

Israel, however, disregards, with impunity, the many and various binding agreements, such is the arrogance of the aggressor. Tzipi Livni, when serving as Israel’s foreign minister, declared:  “I’m a lawyer and I’m against the law, international law in particular”. Norman Finlkestein commenting ”She had good reason for saying that because under international law Israel loses, on Jerusalem, on the West Bank and Gaza, on settlements and right of return for refugees”  There is a rising light of freedom and unity throughout the World, Miss Livni.  It glints from the cleansing sword of justice, law, International, National.

Israel is supported, sustained and supplied, in words, arms and deed by the US. During 2011, the U.S. provided Israel with at least $8.2 million per day in “military aid” alone. The One who rides shotgun above any treatise, convention and/or nation, Big American Brother, allows [Israel] to dissent, encourages violation of international law, and leads by example. One has only to recall the International Court of Justice judgment against the USA in 1984, when the ICJ found in favour of Nicaragua. As Noam Chomsky puts it:

America was condemned by the World Court for, what they called unlawful use of force for political ends, another word for International terrorism. Tens of thousands of people [were] killed [and] the country ruined perhaps beyond recovery. The ICJ ordered the US to terminate their crimes and pay substantial reparations.²

The US ignored the court and continued unabated, in fact, escalating the terror.  It seems international laws apply to some but not to others, ‘Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you’. Good idea unless it’s Israel or their Godfather in, and of, arms, America.

In February 2011 the USA vetoed a proposed United Nations Security Council Resolution calling upon Israel ‘to end illegal policies that promote settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem’ (HRW). In so doing they undermined international law and gave the green, or should we say the blue and white light, to their Middle East proxy, to continue committing criminal acts, by expanding the settlement building, the colonisation within, and of, the West Bank to include East Jerusalem.

In the UN report (UNSCIIPA), the concerns of the General Assembly are made plain.

Despite the repeated calls from the international community and the illegality of settlements, the State of Israel is continuing to expand settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in violation of its international legal obligations [emphasis mine].

The report continues:

Israel is in violation of international humanitarian law, relevant United Nations resolutions, agreements reached between the parties and obligations under the Quartet road map.

The Clash

Clashes between settlers living illegally upon the West Bank, a line drawn in the 1967 sand – walled and fenced – and Palestinians in their homes, upon their land, inside their schools and mosques, are growing, intensifying and escalating. The UN report makes clear how serious the problem is “Many of these incidents have been overtly violent acts targeting Palestinian individuals and communities with live ammunition, destruction and denial of access to property, physical assault and the throwing of stones. Some incidents have led to the killing and injury of Palestinians”.

According to Defence for Children International (DCI) ‘there has been a sharp increase in settler violence incidents against children. As of May 2011, DCI documented 19 cases of violence against children involving settlers, two of them fatal’.

Two cases of murder, murder of two innocent children at the hands of the colonisers.

We find in the UN report (UNSCIIPA) the following:

From September 2010 to May 2011, 5 deaths (including three children) and more than 270 cases of injury of Palestinians by Israeli settlers were recorded, lack of accountability for Israeli settlers persists. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) not only failed to protect Palestinians, there are documented instances of their direct involvement in violence perpetrated against Palestinians.

Noam Chomsky says:

“We [USA] now have in the OPT a neo-colonial army, the IDF, to control the population.”

The following shocking examples of settler violence as monitored by the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) are given in the UN report.  They are illustrative of the violence that Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israeli settlers, and are simply some of the loudest in a crowd of screaming atrocities committed by Israeli colonists against Palestinian men, women and children, their places of worship and of education. So here they are, to the shame of the “settlers”.

On 7 March 2011, a group of at least 12 settlers from the “outpost” of Esh Kodesh in the northern West Bank attacked Palestinians from the adjacent village of Qusra. Three of the settlers were armed with a handgun and two rifles while the rest were carrying baseball bats and metal bars. One of the settlers had a dog. The settlers hurled stones at the Palestinians and fired guns in the air, before physically assaulting the Palestinians. Israel Defence Forces soldiers reached the scene 30 to 45 minutes later, but the Israel Defence Forces personnel acted only in support of the settlers. One of the Palestinians was shot in his left wrist by a settler. An Israel Defence Forces soldier shot another victim in the leg from a distance of some 30 metres. Once on the ground the same Israel Defence Forces soldier shot him again from close range in the other leg. While trying to flee, the victim was hit in the leg and kicked in the face by a settler with a wooden stick, in the presence of the Israel Defence Forces soldier who had just shot him. An Israel Defence Forces soldier hit another Palestinian in the head with the butt of his rifle. Once the victim fell on the ground, a settler and the Israel Defence Forces soldier started kicking him.

On 27 January 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin. Footage of the killing captured by a security camera appeared in various media. On 15 February 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian from the village of Jalud south of Nablus, which is surrounded by six Israeli settlements and “outposts”, was shot in his stomach

Settler violence [According to the UN is not random criminal activity; in most cases, it is ideology-driven, organized violence, the goal of which is to assert settler dominance over an area.

The Israeli methodology of suppression, control and terror is organised and systematic ‘policies and practices’ as the UN calls them, the settlement building, land theft (UN diplomatically, calls it ‘confiscation’), ‘zoning’ – a term invoking images of social, ethnic and racial manipulation, or cleansing. Add to this Eviction from their own land and the barbaric practice of house or home demolitions and you have a witches brew of control, victimisation and criminality, which has cast a toxic cloak over the lives of Palestinians and a shadow over history.

In their Sites

Sites for settlements, like everything else the occupying Israeli force undertakes, are chosen with care, on hilltops overlooking valleys, Palestinians, and Bedouins. A demographic dot to dot, one colony merges with another, the dots connected, a line is formed. The line, a triangle; the triangle, a star; six armed and driven hard into the freshly watered Palestinian earth, to flutter in full intimidation, as the settlers sit high above the valley and the law, eagle-eyeing the Palestinians upon their homeland. And from that height settlers establishing new lows “dump raw sewage down the hillside, contaminating the well[s] and making it unusable for agriculture and drinking”.³

Duel Lives

Two parallel ways of life exist within the West Bank, a controlled, unjust, frightening existence for Palestinians living behind walls of servitude upon their homeland, and a comfortable, flourishing life within their tree lined encampments for the settlers. Palm trees and gardens bursting with colour create a theme park image of artificial beauty upon a battleground of injustice and hate.  Defence for Children International states:

Over 90% of settler violence incidents that are investigated by Israeli authorities are closed without any charges being filed. There is a dual system of law operating in the West Bank. The settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, with all the rights of a democratic state guaranteed to them. Palestinians, on the other hand are governed by a series of military orders within a military system, which deprives them of the rights guaranteed to their Israeli settler neighbours. This dual system of law discriminates against Palestinians.

A ‘dual system’ indeed.

Human Rights Watch recently documented Israel’s two-tier system for the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish populations in the 60% of the West Bank area that Israel controls, and in East Jerusalem. Israeli policies deliberately withhold basic services from Palestinians, causing tremendous hardships by preventing, and punishing the construction of homes and infrastructure for their communities, while providing generous financial benefits and infrastructure for Jewish settlements. Such differential treatment lacks any security rationale, but is meted out on the prohibited basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin

A two tier system of injustice, cruelty and control, If they could, they would bottle sunlight and ration its use. They have turned day to night, and in the darkness of division, violence and hate they march, out of step with the men and women of goodwill that would bring peace and harmony to the land, out of pace with the winds of change that are sweeping humanity towards peace and unity, out of sync with the destiny of the nations to live safely side by side as enshrined in International Law.

A ‘dual system’, where a settler shoots and kills with impunity, an innocent Palestinian, as in the case of the 18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin”; a system which allows a six year old child on his way to the neighbourhood shop for his grandfather to be ‘detained’ by the Israeli army, “they kept the child in detention for four hours at a nearby police station (to Al-Esawiyya town), and interrogated him in an attempt to intimidate him in to giving them names of youth who hurled stones at the soldiers”.  Said  Mohammad Ali Dirbas after the ‘kidnapping’: “The Police tried to terrify me, but they can’t scare me, they must leave our land.”

The UN concludes its comprehensive  report (UNSCIIPA) with six clearly articulated recommendations. All recommendations should be applied forthwith. The two most prescient measures are:

1. The Government of Israel should bring its policies and practices into compliance with its international legal obligations and its commitments in the Road Map, as well as the repeated calls of the international community to immediately cease the transfer of its civilian population into occupied territory and to completely freeze all settlement activities in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and to immediately dismantle all “outposts”.

2. The Government of Israel should take all necessary measures to prevent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Enough! Enough of the injustice, violence and fear.  Let International Law be done and let the Palestinian people live in peace in a country that is rightly their home.

1. Human Rights Watch (HRW) February 2011
2. Noam Chomsky. 9-11 Seven Stories. Seven Stories Press, New York, 2002
3. Doris Norrito, Rebuilding a Wall, Stone by Stone, IMEMC,  20 December 2011

Most American politicians actually despise the UN. While the Security Council is directed or tamed by the US veto (often to shield the US and its close ally Israel from any criticism), other UN bodies are not as easily intimidated. When the UN education and science agency, UNESCO, accepted Palestine’s bid for full membership last October, following a democratic vote by its members, the US could do little to stall the process. Still, it immediately cut funding to the agency (about 20 percent of its total budget).

The move was devoid of any humanitarian considerations. The UNESCO provides vital services to underprivileged communities all over the world, including the United States. Yet, State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, insisted on sugarcoating what was an entirely injudicious political act. “Today’s vote by the member states of UNESCO to admit Palestine as member is regrettable, premature and undermines our shared goal of a comprehensive just and lasting peace in the Middle East,” said Nuland (CNN, October 31).

The fact is, there has been much sabre-rattling in the US Congress targeting the UN. The campaign, led by Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, is threatening the UN with all sorts of punishment if the organization does not cease its criticism of Israel and tighten the noose around Iran. Naturally, the UN is not meeting the expectations of Ros-Lehtinen and her peers. It happens to be a body that represents the interests of all its member states. Some US politicians, however, see the world through the distorted logic of former president George W. Bush: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

The late British author and humanitarian doctor, Theodore MacDonald, showed that the US actually has a love-hate relationship with the UN. In his final book, Preserving the United Nations; Our Best Hope for Mediating Human Rights, MacDonald reveals a strange reality: that the US and its allies labor to undermine the UN, while also using it to further their own military, political and economic objectives. Expectedly, successive US governments had mastered the art of political manipulation at the UN. When successfully co-opted to accommodate US military designs, the UN suddenly becomes true to its mission – per Washington’s account, of course. However, when US pressures failed to yield a unified front against Iraq in late 2002, President Bush asked in his first address to the United Nations, on September 12, 2002: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”

The Bush years were rife with such ultimatums – to the UN and the whole world. However, a similar attitude continues to define the administration of Barack Obama. The US latest assault on the UN is now happening under the guise of reforms, but no ‘reforms’ are possible without first creating the needed polarization aimed at pushing for an American agenda. Joe Torsella, the US Deputy Ambassador for Management and Reform of the United Nation, spoke of the latest US efforts at reining in the 47-nation Geneva-based Human Rights Council. “The US will work to forge a new coalition at the UN in New York, a kind of ‘credibility caucus’ to promote truly competitive elections, rigorous application of membership criteria, and other reforms aimed at keeping the worst offenders on the sidelines,” he said (Reuters, Jan 20).

UNHRC is an outspoken critic of human rights violations. As of late, the organization has been particularity vocal regarding the rights violations underway in Syria. It is also very critical of Israel and its one-sided wars and human rights violations in Gaza and the rest of the occupied territories. For years, the US has conspired to undercut, intimidate and silence this criticism.

The Reuters report on the US latest push for the supposed reforms states: “Council members include China, Russia and other countries where rights groups say abuses are commonplace.” To offset the seeming inconsistency – between UNHRC mission and its members’ records – the US, according to Torsella, wants to “hold Human Rights Council members to the same standard of truly free and fair elections that the U.N. promotes around the world, and insist on the highest standards of integrity for the Council and all its members.” Viewed without context, it is a noble endeavor indeed. However, it becomes a tainted statement when one considers that the US status at the UN has been achieved through the least democratic of all means: a disproportionate political power (the veto) and money (used for arm-twisting).

Attempting to curb and contain the UN, as opposed to punishing and boycotting the international body, is basically what sets Democrats apart from Republicans. Unlike Republicans, “the other side of the debate (mostly Democrats) believes that achieving these reforms requires strong American leadership – and strong leadership is demonstrated by paying dues on time and in full. You can call this side ‘constructive engagement,’” wrote Mark Leon Goldberg in the UN Dispatch (January 20). Practically, both approaches are aimed at achieving similar outcomes: realizing US policies, rewarding allies and punishing foes – even at the expense of the noble mission once championed by the UN over 65 years ago.

While the latest push for ‘reforms’ is being hailed by Washington’s media cheerleaders, no honest commentator could possibly believe the US campaign against UNESCO. UNHRC and the UN as a whole represents a genuine democratic endeavor. In fact, the truly urgent reforms required right now are ones that aim at correcting what MacDonald described in his book as the UN’s “foundational defects”.

MacDonald counseled for immediate addressing of the “issue of permanent membership and the use of the veto”. He also recommended the granting of greater power to the General Assembly and eliminating the “imposed use of the US dollar” in mediating UN transitional affairs. MacDonald’s guidelines for reforms are comprehensive, and rely on the concept of equality, guided by humanitarian and moral urgencies.

The same can hardly be said of Washington’s latest UN intrigues and shady politics.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind:

Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states:

The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency:

The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.

On January 12, 2010:

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital.

On November 29, 2010:

Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.

The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011:

Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.

…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.

Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…

This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

The UNSC resolution regarding Libya was based on the alleged need to protect the civilian population from the government forces. UNSC resolution 1973 invoked the responsibility to protect and voted to establish a no-fly zone over Libya with “to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya…”

Next in the Imperialist Crosshairs

After the collective might of NATO, its Arab League (a league of dictators) allies, and Libyan insurgents attacked and defeated the government of Libya, that the focus next turn to Syria was unsurprising. The intended United States remapping of the Middle East is hardly a secret.¹

Yet corporate newspapers around the world naively report. In the Philippine press ran an article titled, “Foreign monitors fuel Syrian protests.”² The Syrian government was described as using violence to quell the protests.

And how did the various governments in the United States disperse the 99% occupations if not by police force? Ask Scott Olsen, a peacefully protesting veteran of the US attack on Iraq, who suffered a fractured skull and brain swelling after being hit by a projectile allegedly courtesy of the Oakland police. Or try asking ex-marine Kayvan Sabehgi who suffered a ruptured spleen in an apparently unprovoked beating by an Oakland police. It seems violent put-downs of dissent occurs in Syria as well as the US.

On the next page of the Philippine newspaper was another article, “US finalizes deal to sell F-15s to Saudi Arabia,” thereby “boosting the military strength of a key US ally in the Middle East…”³ Is it not hypocritical for the US to back the removal of one dictatorship while militarily supporting another dictatorship?

The Syrian president, Bashar Assad, rules without electoral consent. Assad is undeniably, therefore, a dictator. Assad is now promising a new constitution which will go to a referendum before Syrians. If so, it is a step — slow in coming — toward more legitimate rule.

So is Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, so is Al Khalifa in Bahrain, and these regimes are committing human rights violations that arguably dwarf those allegedly committed by the Assad regime. The mere facts that there are other non-elected regimes in the world and that their human rights abuses might exceed those of Syria, does not mitigate the alleged human rights abuses of the Syrian regime. It does, however, glaringly reveal the flagrant hypocrisy of western regimes that criticize Syria’s regime while remaining mute on their own abuses and the self-same abuses of their allied states. It should seriously call into question western motives toward Syria, and it should also call into question the human rights fidelity of western states.

Does a dictatorship imply that a government is totalitarian or otherwise despotic? Can a dictatorship not be benign or even beneficial? Does being a so-called democracy through having won an election denote a government devoted to the common good? While empowering people with a right to choose their government is preferable, what is important is not any supposed legitimacy that electoral success (it is nugatory to talk about “democratic credentials” without clearly defining what democracy is) confers upon a party forming a government but rather how that government serves the masses.

There is a presumption that because the US, Canada, and other western nations have an election that these states are, consequently, democratic. However, is the mere holding of an election, no matter what the terms and conditions of the election, sufficient to define a state as a democracy? Does it matter that the capitalist parties are laden with money and smothered with media coverage while atypical capitalist or non-capitalist parties and candidates are short-changed on campaign funds and ignored or derided by the corporate media? Can this, therefore, be declared a democracy and have validity?

Requisite Conditions for Humanitarian Intervention

People are dying in Syria. Who is behind the killing is subject to disagreement. Do I trust the Syrian media? No. Do I trust the western states and their media?⁴ Would you after the spool of lies that led to the destruction of Iraq — a matter since shunted to the margins by the corporate media? Tellingly, almost all informed people know by now that there were no weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq when the US attacked on that pretext.

All moral-thinking humans would desire that other humans be protected from human rights abuses, killings, oppression, etc. Consequently, were it possible to intervene — morally — on behalf of other humans, then the inclination would be in favour of doing so. But how does one intervene morally?

1. There must be a clear-cut, demonstrable need for outside intervention to protect a citizenry.To be clear-cut, it must be demonstrated that insurgents are not backed or supported by outside agencies. In other words, an insurgency must be completely domestic. When belligerent outside agents are involved, this would rule out an outside intervention. Were this principle in effect, there would have been no outside attack on Libya, as the insurgents were clearly backed by NATO and probably CIA and other agencies.

2. Who determines this clear-cut, demonstrable need? Obviously, it must not be determined by a partial organization; therefore, the United Nations Security Council is ruled out as arbiter (unless all parties to a dispute agree to the UNSC fulfilling such a role).

Why is the UNSC a disreputable intervener or arbiter? The UN has too many examples of debacles, or in some cases, outright capitulation to imperialist powers. One need look no further than the UN debacles in Haiti, where MINUSTAH prevents a Haitian resistance to the coup sponsored by the US, Canada, and France⁵ or to the crimes committed by UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.⁶ There was the UN authorization of military force in the Korean War, the UN involvement in Iraq following the US aggression in 2003 (casting a pallor of legitimacy to the invasion), and also the devastation wrought on Libya — enabled by a UNSC resolution.

3. Enemy states must be precluded from participating directly or indirectly in a humanitarian intervention. Collaborators with an insurgency must be prevented from participating in any humanitarian intervention.

Who may intervene if a government is unable to rule or establish safe rule over a citizenry?⁷ If a government is unable to establish safety for its citizens, then it must be permitted to call upon outside intervention of its own choosing.

Where history reveals that certain states have wreaked colonialist or imperialist violence against other peoples, this would prima facie eliminate such a state as a disinterested player in events transpiring in a former victim. For example, based on their history of colonialism and imperialism, France, Britain, the US, and Israel have no moral authority, whatsoever, to pontificate about strife or lack of democracy in Syria.

The old aphorism, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” is prudent in cases of purportedly humanitarian intervention.

Some further questions to ascertain the true intentions of states posing to intervene on humanitarian grounds:

a) What is that state’s own behavior toward the state accused of human rights violations or blocking democracy?

b) What is that state’s own domestic history – especially current history — vis-a-vis human rights and democracy?

c) Apply the Israel test. How does the state respond to the Israeli occupation, dispossession, racism, and slow-motion genocide carried out against Palestinians?

How is it that recent events in other states, states that are opposed to Zionism, are immediately placed at the top of the queue for so-called humanitarian intervention when the Palestinians have been languishing for decades under Israeli occupation: routinely suffering discrimination, racism, massacres, and being denied democracy?⁸

Does Syria even approach within light years to the crimes of Israel?

4. States may not intervene in the affairs of another state without the imprimatur of the state’s own people. Therefore, dictatorships like Qatar, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia would not be permitted involvement in regime-changing actions such as was carried out in Libya. Since the regimes serve without genuine electoral consent, the support of the citizenry cannot be implied.

The paucity of democratic credentials would preclude Israeli involvement anywhere since a democracy is right of all people in a state.⁹

5. Social justice/humanitarianism demands that longer-standing and more pernicious violations be dealt with first. The decades-old Zionist occupations of Palestine, the Golan Heights in Syria, and Sheba’a Farms in Lebanon have long demanded just settlement.

6. An intervention must not be imposed militarily. As pointed out in the preamble to the UN Charter, war is a scourge bringing untold sorrow from which succeeding generations of humanity must be saved.

7. International law must apply equally to all states. States must adhere equally to stipulations of the UN, stipulations which must be applied equally. The preamble to the UN Charter affirms equality of states: “the equal rights of … nations large and small.”

The UN, in theory and practice, should be a world organization that respects the sovereignty of all member states equally.

Before it embarks upon extemporaneous exploits, it needs to rigorously develop this principle of sovereign equality. However, the mere fact that there are five permanent, veto-wielding members of the UNSC is proof positive that the UN is an institution wherein all members are not equal. In fact, the equality is such that the approximately 200-member UN General Assembly has less power than the the 15-member UNSC. This is clearly minority rule.

If one country is permitted (without censure or penalty) to flout ethically valid UNSC resolutions, then all member states – in accordance with sovereign equality of all states¹⁰ – must be accorded equal measure to react to UN resolutions without censure or penalty.

If the UN cannot abide by its own Charter and regulations in a principled and legal manner, then what moral or authoritative stature does it appeal to?

If there is a sovereign equality of states, how can Iran be sanctioned for development of its uranium enrichment technology¹¹ (within the bounds of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it must be emphasized¹² ) without the same sanctions being placed on DPRK, Israel, India, Pakistan – or for that matter US, China, USSR, UK, France since they are in longstanding contravention of the NPT.¹³ Does the NPT supersede every state’s inalienable right to self-defense? When faced with a nuclear weaponized enemy what defense is there? Either all states have the right to a nuclear deterrent or none do. Arguably and logically, if every state had a nuclear deterrent, then war would be a very losing prospect for all sides. War would truly be a tactic of the mad.

Dealing with Strife in Syria

What if it is the genuine mass demand of the citizenry to remove its government, the government having lost all legitimacy?¹⁴

How should progressives react to reports out of Syria? How should progressives react to governments labeled as dictatorships — after all, democracy is a principle embraced by progressives? Progressives should simply call for full democracy and call for it everywhere.

Progressives should call for non-interference by outside agents in the affairs of another state, especially military or other belligerent interference. This does not mitigate criticism of human rights violations by rogue regimes in rogue states.

Progressives should call for the case of Syria to be treated with equal concern, deliberation, and urgency with outstanding cases everywhere — for example, in Bahrain, Yemen, Haiti, US, Canada, Aotearoa, Australia.

It must also be clearly articulated why Syria suddenly became a more pressing case than, for example, the plight of the Palestinians who have suffered under Israeli occupation-oppression, who endure racism and discrimination on a 24-hour basis, and who have endured decades of expulsion as Nakba refugees.

Why can the Sunni ruling minority trample upon Shi’a rights in Bahrain without nary a finger lifted in the UN?

Why is Syria suddenly at the top of the regime-change list?

Over and over again Muammar Gaddafi was demonized as a dictator by the West and western media and stooges within the Arab League. I saw little compelling evidence for the slur of “dictator” being used against Gaddafi. Libya presented itself as a participatory democracy, relatively independent of western capitalist shackles, with the highest standard of living on the African continent. Even if Gaddafi were a dictator (of which I am skeptical¹⁵ ), there is nothing to prevent a dictator from being benign. What is preferable: a war-mongering Barack Obama (indirectly responsible for killing families in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and standing by while Israel commits crimes against humanity in Palestine) militarily siding with an insurgency or the Libyan government fighting the insurgency to preserve freedom from imperialist-Zionist control? If indeed Libyan forces were slaughtering civilians, then the civilians should be protected. The question remains how to protect and who should protect the civilians?

There are varying accounts that emerged from Libya and now Syria. Who to believe? Is it really a difficult question? Does the US and its corporate media have a milligram of credibility? Did the US have any moral right to topple the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran and install the dictatorship of the Shah? Did the US have any moral right to split Korea and attack the North? Did the US have any moral right to attack Viet Nam to split the country and install its puppet in the South? Did the US have any moral right to depose the elected government in Haiti and send the president Jean Bertrand Aristide into exile?¹⁶ One could carry on ad nauseam back to the formation of the US on the lands of its Original Peoples. So where do the pronouncements of the US derive credibility given the historical train of its propaganda and disinformation and the stenography of its fourth estate?

The raison d’être of the UN is purportedly to protect the world from the scourge of war. How does the US play into that noble UN goal? William Blum describes the US as anything but a peace-monger in his Rogue State.¹⁷ How can anyone support peaceful intentions on the part of the US? Even Colin Powell has said the US doesn’t do peace treaties. “We won’t do nonaggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature.”¹⁸

What is not called for is for progressives to do nothing (although doing nothing is sometimes the best strategy), but rather act according to principles and end-goals of progressivism. Burying the globe deeper in hyperempire is not laying a foundation for social justice in the world.

By all means progressives should support protection of peoples everywhere, but they should not get duped by the rhetoric of hyperempire. Progressives should also eschew a false dichotomy being imposed on them. Humanitarian intervention does not necessitate it be carried out by imperialists. Where cases are presented as an urgent call for humanitarian intervention, progressives must not feel pressured to choose between two wrongs. Reject all wrongs and accept what is right and just. In the case of Syria, reject Bashar’s unchallenged grip on political power¹⁹ (and apply this principle everywhere equally), but also reject – even more fervently – imperialists seeking to impose their own puppet in Syria.

Tune out the false declamations of the corporate media. The recent lessons of Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan still reverberate loudly in the independent media.

1. Ex-US intelligence officer Ralph Peters has written of a scheme for redrawing of the borders of the Middle East and farther afield. See Kim Petersen, “A Bloody Border Project: Zionist-Imperialist Dogma from the Armed Forces Journal,” Dissident Voice, 5 June 2007.
2. AP, “Foreign monitors fuel Syrian protests,” Philippine Star, 31 December 2010, A17.
3. AP, “US finalizes deal to sell F-15s to Saudi Arabia,” Philippine Star, 31 December 2010, A-18.
4. In his speech in Damascus on 10 January 2012, Assad charged a widespread media attempt to push Syria into “state of self-collapse…” Assad also charged that western media has doctored an interview with him, but that he had an original copy to refute it. Shades of the disproven (See Juan Cole, “Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist And, “We don’t Want Your Stinking War!” Informed Comment, 3 May 2006) but still serially repeated media disinformation campaign against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
5. Yves Engler, “UN: Putting a Value on Haitian Life,”Dissident Voice, 13 September 2011. Seth Donnelly, “UN ‘Peacekeeping’ Soldiers Launch Brutal Attack on Haitian Street Vendors,” Dissident Voice, 26 April 2008.
6. Stephen Lendman, “UN Peacekeepers Complicit in Sex Trade,” Dissident Voice, 23 October 2010.
7. As an anarchist, I do not accept that one group of citizens be granted rule over the masses of society. The masses must be included in the decision-making of society.
8. See Amira Hass, “Palestinians are heroes, braving Israeli dictatorship,” Haaretz, December 2012. “The head is the head of the demos, the Israeli-Jewish people, who by the democratic process send governments to be the dictator over the Palestinians…

   The Israeli dictatorship is the art of the double standard (Palestinians cannot build on their agricultural land so as not to impair rural zoning, but the state can legalize a Jewish outpost on Palestinian agricultural land). It is the champion of self-righteousness and arrogance (‘the only democracy’), and holds an advanced degree in hypocrisy (‘ready to return to negotiations any time’ ).”

9. See Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken, “The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy,” Haaretz, 25 November 2011.
10. Article 2 states: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”
11. See United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747.
12. The NPT clearly states in Article IV (1): “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.”
13. Article VI states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
14. This begs the question of which governments do have legitimacy and by what grounds such governments claim such legitimacy. I submit that the governments in the US, Canada, and other western countries can lay claim to legitimacy under the present conditions of so-called democracy.
15. “How can you call someone a dictator leader who overthrew a corrupt monarchy, modernized the country, won the highest HDI in Africa, and applied a direct democracy system of government?” … “Gaddafi is not president or prime minister of Libya, but the media wants him to resign a post which does not exist.” See Antonio Cesar Oliveira, “Who is Muammar Gaddafi?” Dissident Voice, 3 March 2011.
16. For a history of pretexts see Kim Petersen, “Grasping at Straws: Searching for a War Pretext,” Dissident Voice, 4 March 2003.
17. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).
18. Quoted in Steven R. Weisman, “U.S. Weighs Reward if North Korea Scraps Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, 13 August 2003.
19. I state this admittedly simplistically because Syria is under continuous threat from Israel and imperialists, and this necessitates maintaining a government free from enemy influence.

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti.  The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti.  Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?”

Here are seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go.

One.  The largest single recipient of US earthquake money was the US government.  The same holds true for donations by other countries.

Right after the earthquake, the US allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops.  The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in some cases even indirectly, to Haiti.  They documented in January 2010 that thirty three cents of each of these US dollars for Haiti was actually given directly back to the US to reimburse ourselves for sending in our military.  Forty two cents of each dollar went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the Children, the UN World Food Program and the Pan American Health Organization.  Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their government.

The overall $1.6 billion allocated for relief by the US was spent much the same way according to an August 2010 report by the US Congressional Research Office: $655 million was reimbursed to the Department of Defense; $220 million to Department of Health and Human Services to provide grants to individual US states to cover services for Haitian evacuees; $350 million to USAID disaster assistance; $150 million to the US Department of Agriculture for emergency food assistance; $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration fees, and so on.

International assistance followed the same pattern.  The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the $2.4 billion in humanitarian funding, 34 percent was provided back to the donor’s own civil and military entities for disaster response, 28 percent was given to UN agencies and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) for specific UN projects, 26 percent was given to private contractors and other NGOs, 6 percent was provided as in-kind services to recipients, 5 percent to the international and national Red Cross societies, 1 percent was provided to the government of Haiti, four tenths of one percent of the funds went to Haitian NGOs.

Two.  Only 1 percent of the money went to the Haitian government.

Less than a penny of each dollar of US aid went to the government of Haiti, according to the Associated Press.   The same is true with other international donors.  The Haitian government was completely bypassed in the relief effort by the US and the international community.

Three.   Extremely little went to Haitian companies or Haitian non-governmental organizations.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research, the absolute best source for accurate information on this issue, analyzed all the 1490 contracts awarded by the US government after the January 2010 earthquake until April 2011 and found only 23 contracts went to Haitian companies.  Overall the US had awarded $194 million to contractors, $4.8 million to the 23 Haitian companies, about 2.5 percent of the total.  On the other hand, contractors from the Washington DC area received $76 million or 39.4 percent of the total.  As noted above, the UN documented that only four tenths of one percent of international aid went to Haitian NGOs.

In fact, Haitians had a hard time even getting into international aid meetings.  Refugees International reported that locals were having a hard time even getting access to the international aid operational meetings inside the UN compound.  “Haitian groups are either unaware of the meetings, do not have proper photo-ID passes for entry, or do not have the staff capacity to spend long hours at the compound.”  Others reported that most of these international aid coordination meetings were not even being translated into Creole, the language of the majority of the people of Haiti!

Four.  A large percentage of the money went to international aid agencies, and big well connected non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The American Red Cross received over $486 million in donations for Haiti.  It says two-thirds of the money has been contracted to relief and recovery efforts, though specific details are difficult to come by.  The CEO of American Red Cross has a salary of over $500,000 per year.

Look at the $8.6 million joint contract between the US Agency for International Development (USAID) with the private company CHF for debris removal in Port au Prince. CHF is a politically well-connected international development company with an annual budget of over $200 million whose CEO was paid $451,813 in 2009. CHF’s connection to Republicans and Democrats is illustrated by its board secretary, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, a partner with the Livingston Group LLC.  The Livingston Group is headed by the former Republican Speaker-designate for the 106th Congress, Bob Livingston, doing lobbying and government relations.  Ms. Fitz-Pegado, who apparently works the other side of the aisle, was appointed by President Clinton to serve in the Department of Commerce and served as a member of the foreign policy expert advisor team on the Obama for President Campaign.  CHF “works in Haiti out of two spacious mansions in Port au Prince and maintains a fleet of brand new vehicles” according to Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone, in an excellent article by Janet Reitman, reported on another earthquake contract, a $1.5 million contract to the NY based consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors.  The article found Dalberg’s team “had never lived overseas, didn’t have any disaster experience or background in urban planning… never carried out any program activities on the ground…” and only one of them spoke French.  USAID reviewed their work and found that “it became clear that these people may not have even gotten out of their SUVs.”

Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced a fundraising venture for Haiti on January 16, 2010.  As of October 2011, the fund had received $54 million in donations.  It has partnered with several Haitian and international organizations.  Though most of its work appears to be admirable, it has donated $2 million to the construction of a Haitian $29 million for-profit luxury hotel.

“The NGOs still have something to respond to about their accountability, because there is a lot of cash out there,” according to Nigel Fisher, the UN’s chief humanitarian officer in Haiti.  “What about the $1.5 to $2 billion that the Red Cross and NGOs got from ordinary people, and matched by governments?  What’s happened to that?  And that’s where it’s very difficult to trace those funds.”

Five.  Some money went to for profit companies whose business is disasters.

Less than a month after the quake hit, the US Ambassador Kenneth Merten sent a cable titled “THE GOLD RUSH IS ON” as part of his situation report to Washington.  In this February 1, 2010 document, made public by The Nation, Haiti Liberte and Wikileaks, Ambassador Merten reported the President of Haiti met with former General Wesley Clark for a sales presentation for  a Miami-based company that builds foam core houses.

Capitalizing on the disaster, Lewis Lucke, a high ranking USAID relief coordinator, met twice in his USAID capacity with the Haitian Prime Minister immediately after the quake.  He then quit the agency and was hired for $30,000 a month by a Florida corporation Ashbritt (known already for its big no bid Katrina grants) and a prosperous Haitian partner to lobby for disaster contracts.  Locke said “it became clear to us that if it was handled correctly the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity…”Ashbritt and its Haitian partner were soon granted a $10 million no bid contract.  Lucke said he was instrumental in securing another $10 million contract from the World Bank and another smaller one from CHF International before their relationship ended.

Six.  A fair amount of the pledged money has never been actually put up.

The international community decided it was not going to allow the Haiti government to direct the relief and recovery funds and insisted that two institutions be set up to approve plans and spending for the reconstruction funds going to Haiti.  The first was the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and the second is the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF).

In March 2010, UN countries pledged $5.3 billion over two years and a total of $9.9 billion over three years in a conference March 2010.  The money was to be deposited with the World Bank and distributed by the IHRC.  The IHRC was co-chaired by Bill Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister.  By July 2010, Bill Clinton reported only 10 percent of the pledges had been given to the IHRC.

Seven.  A lot of the money which was put up has not yet been spent.

Nearly two years after the quake, less than 1 percent of the $412 million in US funds specifically allocated for infrastructure reconstruction activities in Haiti had been spent by USAID and the US State Department and only 12 percent has even been obligated according to a November 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The performance of the two international commissions, the IHRC and the HRF has also been poor.  The Miami Herald noted that as of July 2011, the $3.2 billion in projects approved by the IHRC only five had been completed for a total of $84 million.  The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which was severely criticized by Haitians and others from its beginning, has been effectively suspended since its mandate ended at the end of October 2011.  The Haiti Reconstruction Fund was set up to work in tandem with the IHRC, so while its partner is suspended, it is not clear how it can move forward.

What to do

The effort so far has not been based on a respectful partnership between Haitians and the international community.   The actions of the donor countries and the NGOs and international agencies have not been transparent so that Haitians or others can track the money and see how it has been spent.  Without transparency and a respectful partnership the Haitian people cannot hold anyone accountable for what has happened in their country.  That has to change.

The UN Special Envoy to Haiti suggests the generous instincts of people around the world must be channeled by international actors and institutions in a way that assists in the creation of a “robust public sector and a healthy private sector.”  Instead of giving the money to intermediaries, funds should be directed as much as possible to Haitian public and private institutions.  A “Haiti First” policy could strengthen public systems, promote accountability, and create jobs and build skills among the Haitian people.

Respect, transparency and accountability are the building blocks for human rights.  Haitians deserve to know where the money has gone, what the plans are for the money still left, and to be partners in the decision-making for what is to come.

After all, these are the people who will be solving the problems when the post-earthquake relief money is gone.

- the homelands of a number of the world’s nations;

- the productivity and reliability of global agriculture; and,

- likely more of the world’s biodiversity, and faster than in any other period in geological history.

Maybe there are physical forces making disaster inevitable, or maybe what is happening is within the control of human free will, but the window of opportunity for the latter is rapidly closing.  Hopefully it is not entirely shut yet.

Global warming may be lethal, but it is still only one of Earth’s  illnesses.  A debt-ridden, overpopulated, hungry and warring humanity is shredding the biosphere, home to billions of beautiful and innocent creatures like the family of mergansers you see, and at the same time facing “peak everything,” with fossil fuels at the top of the list, along with many of the minerals essential for agriculture and high technology.¹  Our erstwhile governments and most of the seven billion, or if you prefer, the 99%, are sitting in a stupor as if paralyzed.

Some, last spring’s Middle Eastern protesters and the Occupiers around the world in recent months, were awoken by a Middle Eastern fruit vendor who immolated himself. This appeal is made by one of the seven billion, from a tiny American town not far from the home of Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau, explaining why he went to jail rather than pay his head tax to support the Mexican-American War, wrote, “It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.”  That was also the message of the fruit vendor who sacrificed his life for us all.  There is very little evidence that the world’s governments are willing or capable of taking decisive action, so it is up to us, the 99%, or however many of us are willing, to “leaven the lump” and bring back the world from the precipice.

This article will argue that we the people, and more specifically those of us who call ourselves “green,” are losing the battle to stop global warming, and many other battles largely because we all, or at least too many of us, have been indoctrinated to forget:

- Mr. Thoreau’s other reminder, that ‘The government  is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will”;

- what “conservationists” understood before Earth Day 1970, that every environmental problem has its roots in “too many people using too much stuff”;

- what Thoreau and Gandhi and many others have taught us — that relinquishment of material wants is empowerment, not self-sacrifice; and,

- the foremost teaching of religion and spiritualism and ethics for at least four millennia — the Golden Rule.

We are all guilty.  So we need to resolve now to reinstate those principles in our personal lives and the life of society, not tomorrow but today.  It’s a tall order, but, in fact, we are coming so close to destroying civilization and the earth, that only a rethinking of fundamental values will save us.

What is more difficult to understand than that we have been losing the battles against environmental and human injustice is that the people  of the Baby Boom, now in power around the world, or at least in the United States, grew up in the shadow of a great man, John Kennedy, who said, “Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.”² We believed him then, and indeed it seems self-evident, doesn’t it? So we can believe him now. Yet most of us sit as if paralyzed.

On the global warming front in particular, the test case for survival of the Earth, all the talk and agreements and campaigns since the eighties have not even created a “blip” in the seemingly inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, never deviating in the slightest from a course followed for half a century.³

If the cacophony since the eighties has resulted in any progress, it is not apparent in the physical world, is it?  There are those who say that the talk alone is a sign of progress, and they may be right.  But not for Mama Nature.

Look what’s happened in the last few weeks.  This is what you already know if you’ve been paying attention.

1. International Energy Agency (IEA) scientists, the ones the world pays to know, announced that we have about five years (that’s until 2016, just around the corner) to put a stop to increased greenhouse-gas emissions before global warming gets completely out of control.  Their reasoning was economic.  When you build a power plant or tar sands oil pipeline or widget-manufacturing facility, you expect to pay for the investment out of the sale of electricity or tar sands oil or widgets.  So the construction locks everyone in to producing the widgets or oil or electricity, and if that causes CO2 emissions, the economics make it much harder to cut the emissions than before the construction happened.

Five years from now the expenditures will have been made that lock us into emissions that will cause more than 2 degrees C of warming.  The time to halt the emissions is now, not after many costly new  CO2-generating plants and pipelines have been built, which must somehow be paid for.  “The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, says. “If we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.” ⁴  Forever!

2. The IEA scientists also announced that global warming is happening much faster than expected; and unless practices and policies change very rapidly, global warming could easily be 3 degrees C by 2050, 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) by 2100.  The politicians had made an official finding at Copenhagen that anything more than a 2-degree warming, any time sooner than the end of the century, would have unacceptable environmental and economic impacts. Three times the warming by century’s end or 50% more in less than half the time?

We’re in trouble.  The unacceptable is becoming the inevitable.  It’s getting so warm in the arctic that (a) the ice is rapidly disappearing, which causes more sunlight to be absorbed and less reflected, which in turn means the earth heating up rapidly just because of that regardless of how how much more CO2 we put into the sky, and (b) methane is bubbling up  from under where the ice used to be and from formerly frozen peat – LOTS of methane, which is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful. than CO2 on a 100-year average basis, and even several times worse than that on an immediate short-term basis  The methane emissions will just keep coming faster, and like the missing ice, they’ll create their own global warming without regard to CO2.

3. There was also agreement at Copenhagen  for the protection of the more vulnerable countries that will be annihilated by rising seas, the 2-degree ceiling should be reconsidered no later than 2015 to be possibly lowered to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

4. As the politicians were about to fly into Durban on highly-polluting planes to talk about global warming, it was announced that 2010 had seen a 5.6% increase in world CO2 emissions, the largest gross increase in human history.  And that’s with the Kyoto protocols in effect as much as they have ever been.  The problem is, of course, that China and the US, the biggest emitters, don’t have to do anything at all under Kyoto, and Europe, which at least gives lip service to it, uses paper emissions trading said by some to be 90% fraudulent. ⁵

5. The politicians flew into Durban knowing that:

-  Kyoto is hardly working at all and in particular that under Kyoto we just saw the largest increase in CO2 emissions in history;

-  we’ve got five years to put into effect something that will halt further commitments to emissions increases;

- they had promised to reconvene in 2015 to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees to protect the more vulnerable nations; and,

- warming is now happening much more and much sooner than the maximum they had declared acceptable at Copenhagen.

6.  What was their Kyoto protocols response?

- they agreed to extend Kyoto, due to lapse next year;

- they agreed to try to come up with a new plan in 2020, already four years after the scientists say it will be too late, five years after they had promised to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees, and thirty years after Kyoto; and,

- they declared a victory and went home for the holidays.

7.  As soon as the folks in Durban announced the extension of Kyoto, Canada announced it was going to walk out of the treaty.  Bad medicine.  Why? Because Canadian tar sands oil is just as polluting as conventional oil when it is consumed, but more polluting in the refining process and the greater source of emissions for tar sands oil is where it’s gotten out of the ground rather than where it is ultimately used.  Tar sands oil will:

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is produced in Canada, where the emissions will be completely uncontrolled with Canada out of the treaty; and,

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is consumed – in the US if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, or elsewhere via a Pacific Coast pipeline if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built.

There are those who say that if the pipeline is built, the battle to halt global warming is lost forever, and they are likely right. ⁶  The same is true by the same logic, of course, if the pipeline is not built but the oil is sent elsewhere.

2010 was a bad year for CO2 emissions?  You ain’t seen nothin’.

8. In the meantime,  the government and industry have been busy working to bring Canadian tar sands oil into the US, for all the world as if we should never cease burning oil.  Back in Washington, thanks to 350.org and William Mckibben surrounding the White House with protesters, President Obama said he would postpone approval of the pipeline until there had been further environmental studies done.  Good!   Of course, if the pipeline is blocked, the oil will likely go out to the Pacific Coast by a much more environmentally damaging pipeline route, and will be used elsewhere.⁷  Oh well, at least the US won’t be blamed for the inevitable massive increases in emissions, even if Mama Nature can’t tell the difference. So 350.org declared a victory and the protesters went home for the holidays.

9. And then there is “fracked” shale gas, an immense new source of natural gas, which will become its own immense new source of greenhouse gas emissions.  Anyone who cares about global warming knows that the only thing to do with new fossil fuels is to leave them in the ground at least until there is a global warming treaty, and not make investments in their exploitation that will have to be repaid through their sale. “Fracking”, even if it could be done “cleanly”, is for economic reasons, one more pound of nails in the earth’s coffin.

10. Last but perhaps more appropriately first, the UN recently admitted for the first time that its projected world population of 9 billion by mid-century, already more than can be fed sustainably under any plausible scenario without corresponding increases in fossil fuel consumption, is going to keep spiraling upward to over 10 billion by the end of the century.  The farther we go in that direction, the more locked in we will be to impossibly destructive CO2 emissions, not to mention impossibly destructive losses of remaining forest lands.  As was pointed out years ago, the really “inconvenient truth” about global warming is that uncontrolled population growth means uncontrolled global warming.⁸

Of course, we should have known that our efforts at Durban would fail.  The politicians flew to Copenhagen, accomplished very little, declared victory and went home.  With both the United States and China refusing to commit to anything legally binding, the possibility of meeting the 2 degree ceiling is receding into fantasy-land.  Talks began before 1990, and now the earliest we could even hope for a treaty binding on the largest emitters is more than 30 years later. And the biosphere hangs in the balance.

To this writer what is more difficult to understand about the present state of affairs is this.  We greens will have been hard at work over thirty years trying to convince the governments to do the only thing that can be done about global warming: at this point to tell us to stop putting so much CO2 in the air.  What we have to show for it is thirty years of steadily increasing emissions with no end in sight.  If we fail to get the governments to order us to stop polluting, what stops us from doing it ourselves without orders?  However difficult that may be, what more realistic alternatives do we have, and why does there seem to be resistance to the idea?

The mainstream environmental groups are very vague about who will, in fact, have to stop polluting, and how much, but the truth is that to reach the goals we assert to be needed, we will have to decrease our driving radically, decrease our consumption of electricity radically, decrease our consumption of home heating fuels radically, etc. How much? Probably at least 80% because in the thirty years between Kyoto and our next meeting date, huge volumes of CO2 will have been added to the atmosphere, making additional heating for the next century inevitable.

You and I have to make those cuts or leave an almost unlivable earth to our descendants, yet we go on using whatever fossil fuels are available as if there were no concerns, making small efforts like purchase of hybrid vehicles, which fail to show up on the chart.  “Alternatives” (e.g., solar electricity, biofuels, “hybrids,” etc.) are there, but they appear at this point to be too little, too late.  And when environmentalists talk about decreasing emissions, there are always two fundamental approaches – conservation (e.g., drive less) or efficiency (e.g., fuel efficiency standards).  We hear proposals for the latter, (which have not been shown to be sufficient soon enough, not to mention that they are fleeting at best because they will be negated by population increases), but not proposals for the former.

Forty years ago, it was gospel that the root causes underlying almost all deterioration of the environment were “too many people using too much stuff.”  The fundamental solutions, then, were fewer people using less stuff. For close to four decades, however, the mainline environmental organizations have had a conspiracy of silence about the “too many people” part.  And when it comes to “stuff,” there is a lot of talk about “sustainable alternatives” (clean energy, hybrid vehicles, etc.) but very little talk about “less stuff” –- before Earth Day we called ourselves “conservationists,” but now the major environmental groups hardly talk about conservation at all.  It’s as if the former “conservationists” have acquired a conspiracy of silence about conservation itself as well as population.

From people who saw the root cause as “too many people using too much stuff,”  mainstream professional environmentalists have become folks who won’t say there are too many people and won’t say they use too much stuff.  Of course, the GDP is measured by how many people there are and how much “stuff” they create in monetary terms, so “too many people using too much stuff” is almost the same thing as too high a GDP. Admitting that in today’s world is trouble, so we seek “sustainable growth”.

As has been observed, “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.  In the global warming context the weakness of the “alternatives” approach (which is also the “sustainable growth” approach) is self-evident.  You build a car with greater fuel efficiency, and that just allows more driving or a larger population of drivers.  The amount of fuel used has to be addressed head-on, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in active programs among the mainline environmental groups.  No wonder we lose.  This blindness shows up directly when it comes to global warming — a refusal to talk about people actually using less of what generates greenhouse emissions.  We don’t want to talk about conservation, yet expect the government to impose it.  Huh?

The primary stumbling block to implementation of the Copenhagen goals was that both the United States and China refused to make any legally binding commitment at all.  When this writer reviewed Copenhagen from his personal point of view⁹, he pointed out that there was little on the horizon that would make the outcome different in future attempts to reach an accord, and said (I’ll repeat verbatim because the facts above only demonstrate that what was apparently true then is unquestionably true now, two years deeper into the hole. For the reader’s convenience, endnotes and inter-lineations are provided for further clarification.)

We are left with the two largest GHG emitters, the United States and China, unwilling to commit to binding goals for reduction. All the while, there’s little hope that the public can introduce any sort of meaningful change in this situation. At the same time, the rest, the signers of the Kyoto accords, increased their emissions when the protocols called for decreases. So much for governments.

All considered, we have lost twenty years [now 31, since the parties at Durban postponed further discussions until 2020] for bringing about meaningful climate change mitigation and we have little time left because every year that the atmospheric CO2 load increases, there is even a lesser chance that the dangerous processes can be reversed. Meanwhile, we clearly face governments in the hands of corporations and corporations blind to any need that could adversely affect the next quarterly report. Are these conditions going to change in the few years we have? It is unlikely. The concerned public has thus far proved incapable of accomplishing meaningful governmental and corporate programs to halt global warming, so how can we have confidence except in more of the same until time runs out?

Is it hopeless? Apparently so if we are going to depend on the governments and the corporations. Yet in taking that position, we are putting aside an “inconvenient truth” – inconvenient because we might rather put responsibility on irresistible forces out there in the universe than on ourselves.

The inconvenient truth is that there are few, if any, human CO2 emissions not the result of our own individual and collective consumer decisions. There are our direct uses of fossil fuels for transportation and home heating, there is the electricity we consume that is generated by burning fossil fuels or, more recently, biofuels and biomass. There is the energy consumed in production and transport of our food and consumer products. Why?  The catalogue is, in fact, the same catalogue that would have to be dealt with under a global treaty!

So, in fact, we the people, in the United States and all over the world, have no need to wait until we are forced by government programs to take the steps necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. We can do what we’ve been waiting for the governments and corporations to do, and because they are doing nothing, we no longer have any alternative except to make the changes ourselves.

Are we so childish that we can do nothing except whine that we haven’t been told what to do when the future of the earth, the future of humanity, depends upon action? Maybe the answer is yes. I don’t know what you will do, and I don’t know what I will do. Yet if we do not want to be responsible, individually and collectively for the horrors to come, then we must, individually and collectively, say no to any more greenhouse emissions than the scientists say are safe.

Henry Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi taught us that our needs are much less than our wants and that we can peacefully bring down governments and corporations by refusing to accept their measures of our needs.

Thoreau is widely viewed as the originator of civil disobedience as a moral and civic duty, especially in all societies aspiring to democracy. He believed that the Mexican-American war was immoral, yet he found himself requested to pay a head tax to finance the war.  So he said no, and went to jail. We shall never know how far he would have taken the experiment, because his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, over his objection, paid the tax and got him released.

In explaining why he viewed refusal to pay the tax as his duty, he said:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.¹⁰

Obviously we have not wiped our hands of global warming when we buy the fuels or the electricity or consumer goods and not only create  emissions but finance our opponents as Thoreau’s head tax financed the war.  We will not, by ourselves, have stopped global warming, but the example will be seen, and our willingness to make sacrifices for reductions in emissions will for the first time be unquestionable.

As Thoreau explained:

It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing.

Rather, if substantial numbers of people refuse to pay the profiteers  or to engage in throwing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will demonstrate their sincerity in a manner that cannot be accomplished by just asking the government to do something.  We shall, hopefully, “leaven the whole lump,” and, ideally, slow the growth of demand for products destroying the earth.  There will be less profit in building the power plants and pipelines about to lock us into failure, and we can sleep better in the knowledge that we “washed our hands off it”. Besides, nothing else that has been suggested will work.

The core teaching of “Civil Disobedience” is, as Martin Luther King saw it, “Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”  As consumers and users and financial contributors to the makers of the pollutants that are destroying the earth, its biodiversity, and its agricultural productivity for millions of years to come, we must demonstrate our opposition with noncooperation.  Why?    Because:

- it is a moral duty;

- it will “leaven the whole lump”; and,

- nothing else is working at all.

Another important part of Thoreau’s teachings is his examination of our ability and responsibility to reduce our material consumption to the core at which we can carry on our lives as principled members of the community without either imposing on others, depriving ourselves of freedom or violating our own moral beliefs.  That is Walden, which forces us to understand that consumerism locks us out from living our lives with integrity and freedom.  It’s a message essential for giving up the material “needs” for which we are destroying the earth.

Gandhi’s self-imposed poverty gives us the same message — that abandonment of material needs is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.  It’s a view, of course, that is anathema to the global corporations that control our lives through the culture of materialism. Without that understanding, it is unlikely that Americans can voluntarily relinquish their “rights” to a standard of living Russia’s President Putin and undoubtedly millions or billions of others have rightly called parasitism.  As long as Americans maintain that view, they are playing with the danger that the world will quickly and painfully take away the material “rights” they enjoy at everyone else’s expense –- “rights” that will soon be gone in any event as “peak everything” imposes itself on us. To fail to make a virtue of a necessity is the height of folly.

Remember Gandhi’s spinning wheel?  It was a simple declaration of independence from British capitalism, a statement that India could do without the capitalists. “Mahatma Gandhi Album: the Man and the Wheel,”  To the extent we liberate ourselves from the causes of global warming, so will we also liberate ourselves from the corporations of Wall Street which act in arrogant confidence that we are ever their dependents and ever in debt to them.  If we step away from the shiny things they produce, they will have no power over us, so it is time to do it in small ways and large.

 It is time to stop waiting for governments to act as we expected them to act at Kyoto long ago and at Copenhagen [more than two years ago and at Durban most recently].

At this point, exclusively focusing on government action is little more than avoidance of the inconvenient truth of our individual and collective responsibility. So we must get on with the show — convincing and helping ourselves, convincing and helping our neighbors, convincing and helping humanity to reduce CO2 emissions by all means within our power to reach the goals and timelines the scientists are telling us we must meet. We must do it with the good will and generosity so lacking in Copenhagen because our “leaders” showed us in Copenhagen [and Durban] that the needed changes assuredly will not happen otherwise.

There is a little catch. The fundamental rule of social behavior, raised to a pinnacle by “free-market” economics, has been for generations, in the words of 1952 U.S. Progressive Party Presidential nominee Vincent Hallinan, “Fuck you Jack, I got mine!” That is unnatural and unsustainable.

Every major religious text, back at least as far as the Egyptian Book of the Dead [four millenia ago], has taught us in substance, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

For specific wording of the rule in twenty of the world’s religions, see  ”Universality of the Golden Rule“. The rule explicitly dictates behavior towards all things living among the Jains, Native Americans, and Nigerian Yoruba, and this writer submits, implicitly does so among others. It is hard to see how a universally accepted rule of behavior can be, as asserted by our colleagues in the corporate world, genetically impossible, and it is, of course, a necessary rule for survival among the hunter-gatherer tribes from which we descend.

The corporate anti-Christ has tried to tell us otherwise for centuries.  That is hardly surprising, because it is increasingly coming to be understood that the structure of large corporations, indeed probably all large integrated organizations, regardless of stated mission, automatically draws to the top, psychopaths, people who, generally through factors of nature and nurture beyond their control, lack the ability to empathize.¹¹

Look where it has gotten us.

There are reasons why the free market rule has repeatedly brought down the US economy, destroyed the Copenhagen and Kyoto efforts and will make our efforts to stop global warming, with or without the aid of the governments, an impossibility. No other rule than that taught by universal religion will work to leave a world to future living beings in which they can actually survive and thrive.

We certainly have our work cut out for us, but we have no choice. And the governments and corporations are welcome to join us all if they see fit. If the offenders find themselves boycotted, they should not be surprised. So think about this message, start saying no to carbon, along with unnecessary consumption of goods and services. Instead, share the vision for a low carbon footprint with your neighbors, friends, other associates, congregations, nonprofit organizations, everyone. Then ever so nicely, ask them to get with the program post haste, because the responsibility is now with us.

We the seven billion are well-meaning folks on the whole, but with all due respect we are also all the right hand men and women of Wall Street.  Want to bankrupt the global corporations, one or all?  Just stop consuming what they sell, and stop producing future consumers.  It’s that simple, and within decades it will in any event be forced upon us by the limits to growth.  It’s all about “too many people using too much stuff,” so if we fail to do now what the limits to growth will force us to do tomorrow, future generations, if they survive, will pay dearly. We allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated by the corporate psychopaths into believing that we are like them, constitutionally unable to care for our fellow beings.  That’s not us, or wasn’t until they took over control of our minds and our religions.  Things might be different if we decided to “occupy” ourselves without abandoning the occupation of Wall Street, and having done so, to implement the Golden Rule, the central teaching of every major religion on earth, and the principle that conservation is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.

Think of these things, please, but with humor and good will, as you honor in your own way the religious and spiritual holidays.   And to be effective, the nonprofits need to change course too, and stop knocking their heads against walls that will remain unmoved until we all change our ways.

1. Vernon, 2007, “Peak Minerals,” Oil Drum Europe,  There appears to be considerable uncertainty as to the supplies of key minerals, which have not been studied in nearly the detail of oil, so this writer will not vouch for the current accuracy of Vernon’s work.
2. American University Speech, June 13, 1963.
3. Farley, The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming, Monthly Review
4. “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose forever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change,” Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent Guardian, Wednesday 9 November 2011 05.01 EST
5. “Carbon offsets have already run out of credit,“, and Carbon Trade Watch, which reports, “Carbon trading schemes are awash with paper “reductions” that do not correspond to actual reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in the real world, and this is a systematic problem.”
6. Why? because of tar sands oil’s “EROEI” (energy recovered over energy in.)  When the energy recovered in extracting a fuel from the ground is less than the energy needed to extract it (ie EROEI < 1) , getting it out is pretty much worthless, and when EROEI is only a little over 1 (as when you pull 4 barrels of oil out of the ground but burn the equivalent of  three of them to get them), you’ve already expended several times the net recovery to get there, which means the oil from tar sands has already caused more CO2 emissions before it even reaches the refinery than it or conventional oil causes after it’s burnt.  Really bad medicine.   Additionally, meeting recognized scientifically-established goals for reduction of CO2 emissions requires using less than the total reserves of “conventional” oil and gas.  Once development of “unconventional” sources (tar sands oil, shale oil, deep sea oil and “fracked” shale gas) are initiated in full scale, it will become virtually impossible to halt their use, since the investors will fight to retrieve their investments.
7. Pipeline and Tanker Transport Trouble: New report shows the impact to British Columbia’s communities, rivers and Pacific coastline from tar sands oil   December 12, 2011 RELEASE: Another Tar Sands Pipeline Postponed in Major Victory for First Nations and Ecological Internet, Tar Sands, Tankers & Pipelines.
8. Diane Francis, “The Real Inconvenient Truth“, and “Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?”, one of many discussions of the need to maintain growth of fossil fuels to maintain growth of food production.
9. Copenhagen Failed Us. What Do We Do Next?
10. Civil Disobedience – Part 1 of 3
11. Brian Basham Thursday, 29 December 2011″Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They Are Still Occupying Positions of Power.”  Basham cites some of the recent peer-reviewed academic literature on the subject

Unfortunately, this year the United States’ treatment of migrants has been dismal.  Nearly 400,000 people have been deported, often without adequate due process. Anti-immigrant and xenophobic laws have been passed in state legislatures of Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina, and Utah.  The US has increased fear and isolation in our migrant communities.

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (DOJ), to its credit, made public the findings of its investigation, initiated in March 2009, into civil rights violations in Arizona by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MSCO) headed by the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The investigation uncovered what many local advocates have suspected for years: that Sheriff Arpaio and his subordinates engaged in a pattern and practice of racial profiling against Latinos and also unlawful retaliation against individuals critical of the Sheriff’s policies.

Shortly after the DOJ’s findings became public, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ended its agreement allowing certain Maricopa County deputies to act as immigration agents on behalf of the federal government, a step community leaders have demanded for years.  These agreements with local law enforcement, called 287(g) agreements, are authorized by Congress under section 287(g) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act to allow local police to act as immigration officers.  In ending the agreement with Maricopa, DHS acknowledges that abuse of authority will occur when law enforcement agencies, especially those like Arpaio’s, get in the immigration business.

However, while DOJ’s investigation and DHS’ suspension of the 287(g) agreement with Maricopa are steps forward, a hugely problematic situation remains.  DHS continues to have a relationship with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office through another program, Secure Communities, the federal deportation dragnet program, which will continue its legacy of mass deportations and destruction of communities.

Through Secure Communities, local law enforcement agencies automatically provide immigration authorities fingerprint information for every person arrested. After comparing the fingerprint information with its own databases, ICE can either try to deport the person or store the information in a massive database for future use. Secure Communities is already used in 1882 jurisdictions and 44 states, even in places where local officials and organizers have asked not to have any part in the program and in jurisdictions with human rights records as horrific as Maricopa County.

Think about the consequences of such a widespread program. With Secure Communities, immigration agencies automatically learn the identity of any non-citizen in the custody of local police and can initiate deportation. This is the case even if the arrest was illegal and even if the charges are dropped or never prosecuted.

Secure Communities Through a Human Rights Lens:

First, a central norm in human rights is proportionality: the punishment must fit the crime. With Secure Communities, we have witnessed record deportations and detentions, often for minor offenses where the criminal courts don’t even seek jail time.

Second, even though human rights standards require freedom from all forms of discrimination, Secure Communities is plagued with racial and ethnic profiling. Anti-immigrant jurisdictions use it to hide illegal and race-based arrests, and the federal government allows places like Maricopa County, Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans, places with well documented histories of racial profiling and abusive cops, to use Secure Communities without meaningful oversight.

Third, human rights principles require full and fair hearings and urge release from detention over incarceration, but in localities with Secure Communities, immigration holds prevent release of thousands of non-citizens at the expense of local jailers and with the consequence of coercing criminal pleas and deportation.

Fourth, human rights treaties provide special protections to women, children and victims of violence, but Secure Communities is criticized for placing trafficking and domestic violence survivors at risk of removal.

Fifth, a common thread in human rights is the idea of engagement. A government should listen and engage with the people it represents and allow us to have a real voice in setting policy. But Secure Communities, despite heavy resistance and requests by states and localities to end the program, has been forced on us.  Even though the people and officials of places like San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Arlington, and entire states such as New York, Illinois and Massachusetts have said they don’t want anything to do with Secure Communities, it’s being implemented anyway.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has the honor and privilege of representing one of the national leaders in the movement towards immigrant justice – the National Day Laborer Organizing Network – in a lawsuit against federal agencies for information about Secure Communities. Through this lawsuit we have uncovered literally thousands of pages of internal documents that expose a record of the federal government’s deceit and misrepresentation.  These documents have been used in a national campaign to uncover the truth behind police and ICE collaborations. Advocates around the country have questioned the government’s policy, educated local police and state officials and created a groundswell of resistance against merging the criminal and immigration systems.

Secure Communities is now a symbol of government dishonesty and deception. The Obama administration was not transparent with Congress about Secure Communities’ true purpose when it asked for over $2 billion for the program; it tricked state and local officials into believing they could limit or opt out of the program; and worst of all the government sold untruths to the public to get this program launched at any cost.

Kofi Annan, former Secretary-general of the United Nations, once said: “Human rights are what reason requires and conscience demands. They are us and we are them. Human rights are rights that any person has as a human being. We are all human beings; we are all deserving of human rights. One cannot be true without the other.”

The United States has failed to recognize the universality of human rights for migrants, rights we are all entitled to just because we are human.

As we begin a new year, let’s take a step forward toward recognizing the fundamental human rights of all people. The United States must change course. DHS should recognize the complete failure of programs like Secure Communities that put local police at the center of immigration enforcement.  Terminate them immediately, especially in cities with open DOJ investigations or historic records of police misconduct, and start to honor our commitment to human rights for migrants.

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

In fact, the ethnic cleansing commenced the very next morning when the 75,000 Arab citizens of Haifa were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly by the terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, and the Haganah, the regular militia under David Ben Gurion. The Jewish settlers who had arrived during the previous decade had built their homes higher up the mountain and thus occupied a higher topographical space. From the superior height, they could snipe at the villagers at will. They began doing this while the Jewish troops rolled barrels of burning oil down their roads and then ignited them. When the terrified residents came out to try to extinguish the rivers of fire, they were sprayed with machine gun fire. Another technique was to deliver cars filled with explosives to Arab garages to be repaired, and then to detonate the cars in the garages.

On its website, the official historian of the Palmach (a special unit of the Haganah) states, “The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.”

This was the beginning of the ethnic cleansing and occurred six months before the first regular soldier from a surrounding Arab state entered Palestine, which was on May 15, 1948.

I remind you that the Deir Yassin massacre occurred on April 9, 1948, and also that by May 15, all of the major cities of Palestine had been cleansed of Arabs and about one half of the 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinian refugees has been ethnically cleansed.

This was the beginning of the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from Haifa and from Palestine. The ending for Haifa’s Arabs came on Passover evening of April 21, when the British commander, Stockwell, called four Arab community leaders in to this office to inform them that the British army would be evacuating the city and advised the Arabs that they could not be protected. As Ilan Pappe puts it:

Previous correspondence between them and Stockwell shows that that they trusted him as the keeper of law and order in the city. The British officer now advised them that it would be better for their people to leave the city, where they and most of their families had lived and worked ever since the mid-eighteenth century, when Haifa came to prominence as a modern town. (Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,  p 94)

Pappe continues:

[I]t was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmel Brigade … who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: “Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.”

When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometers where thousands of Haifa’s defenseless Palestinians were still residing, the shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse. In panic they headed towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or boat to take them away from the city. As soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their houses. …

In the early hours of dawn on 22 April, the people began streaming to the harbor. As the streets in that part of the city were already overcrowded with people seeking escape, the Arab community’s self-appointed leadership tried to instill some order in the chaotic scene. Loudspeakers could be heard, urging the people to gather in the old marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter there until an orderly evacuation by sea could be organized. ‘the Jews had occupied Stanton road and are on their way’, the loudspeakers blared.

The Carmeli Brigade’s war book, chronicling its action in the war, shows little compunction about what followed thereafter. The brigade’s officers, aware that people had been advised to gather near the port’s gate, ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port – where the Rothchild Hospital stands today – and to bombard the gathering crowds below. The plan was to make sure the people would have no second thoughts, and to guarantee that the flight would be in one direction only. Once the Palestinians were gathered in the marketplace – an architectural gem dating back to the Ottoman period, covered with white arched canopies, but destroyed beyond recognition after the creation of the State of Israel – they were an easy target for the Jewish marksmen.

Haifa’s market was less than one hundred yards from what was then the main gate to the port. When the shelling began, this was the natural destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians. The crowd now broke in the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate. Scores of people stormed the boats that were moored there, and began to flee the city. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors, published recently. Here is one of them:

Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers. (Pappe p 96)

Thus it was  Jews who pushed the Palestinians in to the sea, and not vice versa.

In March of 1948, a month earlier than the events described above, the so-called ‘Plan D’ or ‘Plan Dilet’, as a further crystallization of Plans A, B and C, was finalized by David Ben Gurion, and those who were continually in consultation with him, and distributed to the Haganah commanders. This document was a blueprint for the destruction of Arab villages and expulsion of its residents, within the 78% of Palestine coveted by Ben Gurion, not the 55% apportioned to the Jewish state by the UN General Assembly. By this time 30 Arab villages had been either destroyed or depopulated. By the year’s end, 531 Arab villages would be destroyed, and 11 Arab neighborhoods in urban areas.

One revealing paragraph of this document states:

These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those populations centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.

Between the time that Israel declared itself a state in May of 1948 and the summer of 2005, Israel killed 50,000 Palestinians, according to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe, writing in Foreign Policy, in the summer of 2005. And since October of 2000, Israel has killed 6430 Palestinians, according to the web site, If Americans Knew. The latter figure averages to about 2 Palestinians killed per day by Israel (1.932, by my calculation.)

According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, Israel has destroyed 34,000 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967, and, in the same period, about 800,000 olive and citrus trees in the west Bank and Gaza resulting in a loss to the Palestinian economy of $55 million, according to a recent estimate by the international humanitarian relief agency Oxfam. And in Israel’s winter assault on Gaza in 2009, Israel destroyed between 4 and 5,000 homes and either damaged destroyed as many as 50,000. Many Gaza families spent the winter of 2010 living in caves dug out of the rubble of their destroyed homes because the area is under siege with building material not allow to enter.

Because of the siege of Gaza, babies are frequently born with anemia because their mothers are not getting enough nutrition and because of the lack of food allowed into Gaza and because of the destruction of agricultural areas inside Gaza. The stunting of growth because of the lack of nutrition of Gaza’s children is prevalent, and I have seen this figure put at 14%.

Israel, a state which had never clearly defined its boundaries, invites Jews from all over the world to immigrate to Israel and expand it ranks, along with its boundaries into Arab lands.

One thing is certain: Israel is not the victim, as it is constantly screaming, but the victimizer.

2. How many candidates are running and who are the major candidates?
Eleven candidates will run for President. The major candidates include the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, longtime opposition figure Etienne Tshisekedi, former President of Parliament, Vital Kamhere, current President of the Senate and former Prime Minister in the Mobutu Regime, Leon Kengo Wa Dundo.

3. How many people are registered to vote?
The Independent National Electoral Commission registered 32.5 million people to vote in the November 28th elections.

4. Is the presidential elections the only vote to take place?
No, both the presidential and legislative elections will take place on November 28th. Regarding the Legislative elections, 500 seats are up for grabs and over 19,000 candidates have registered to run for the 500 seats.

5. Will the elections actually take place on the designated date of November 28th?
Although a number of Congolese and international NGOs say that the logistics are not in place for the elections, all indications are that the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) will hold the elections on November 28th. The President of the CENI, Daniel Ngoy claims that everything will be fully in place by November 25th in preparation for the vote on November 28th.

6. Many news reports indicate that violence will occur during the elections, is this true?
Almost all indications are that the elections will in fact be violent. During the registration period and since the beginning of the electoral campaign violent clashes have occurred primarily between President Joseph Kabila’s party (PPRD) supporters and the main opposition party supporters (Etienne Tshisekedi’s UDPS). Appeals for a peaceful elections have been made by the religious community, local and international NGOs, the European Union, African Union and the United Nations but violence appears to be certain. The United Nations recently published a report that documented 200 cases of election-related violence.

7. What are some of the logistical challenges faced by the election organizers?
Congo has limited paved roads, therefore most travel from East to West or North to South has to be done by air. The elections require 62,000 polling stations, 180,000 ballot boxes and 64 million ballots, therefore an enormous air lift campaign is required to distribute the ballot boxes and ballots. As soon as China and South Africa complete the printing of the ballots and the construction of the ballot boxes they have to be distributed throughout the country. The first ballot boxes arrived on the week of November 7th, which is well behind the schedule of 2006.

8. Mostly bad news have been reported about the elections, is there any good news?
Yes, there is good news. The fact that the leadership of the country is being contested democratically and that a nationwide consensus exists whereby elections is the legitimate avenue through which leaders will be determined is good news for a country that has experienced decades of dictatorship and conflict. In addition, civil society is fully engaged in making the elections as peaceful and non-violent as possible. They are educating the local population and have issued several reports calling on the political leaders to be responsible in their conduct of their campaigns.

9. When will the election results be announced?
The provisional results for the presidential elections will be announced on December 6th and the final results on December 20th. Regarding the legislative elections, the results are scheduled to be announced on January 13th.

10. We are told this year’s election is Congo’s third democratic one, when did Congo have its first elections?
Congo had its first elections in May 1960, where it elected its first Prime Minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba. Unfortunately, he was overthrown by the United States (Read Chief of Station, Congo by Larry Devlin of the CIA for detailed description of Lumumba’s overthrow by the U.S.) in collaboration with Congolese sycophants within weeks of being inaugurated and later assassinated on January 17, 1961. The Congo has not been the same since, it quickly descended into Chaos and later ruled by US-backed dictator Joseph Desire Mobutu for over 30 years. The second election, held in 2006 was won by Joseph Kabila who is running for a second term this year.

Election Background

Common Cause UK On October 28, 2011 the election campaign began in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Presidential and Legislative elections will take place on November 28, 2011. Although the electoral campaign officially began on October 28th, for all intents and purposes, the election maneuvering began in January 2011 when President Joseph Kabila and the presidential majority in the Congolese Parliament amended the Congolese constitution. The change in the Constitution called for the Presidential elections to be contested in one round instead of two. Before the amendment, in order to win the presidency, the candidate had to win a majority of the votes. If no candidate acquired a majority in the first round of the elections, there would be a runoff between the two top candidates. Now that the Constitution is amended, there is only one round and whoever wins the highest percentage of the votes will become President. Theoretically, someone can become president with as little as ten percent of the votes.

The constitutional change has shaped the electoral landscape for the past ten months. On November 28, 11 candidates will vie for the presidency and over 18,000 candidates will compete for 500 Parliamentary seats.

Due to the constitutional change by President Kabila and his presidential majority, the onus has been placed on the opposition to unify behind a single candidate so that the opposition vote is not divided among several candidates. Due to the vacuous nature of Congo’s political elite, a consensus candidate has not been selected, therefore President Kabila goes into the November 28th elections with a greater chance of victory.

Thus far the campaign period has been contentious and violent. The main clashes have occurred between the main opposition party, UDPS, led by veteran politician Etienne Tshisekedi and the adherents of President Kabila’s party, PPRD. The specter of violence during the elections has risen to a point where the electoral commission has called upon the international Criminal Court to monitor the electoral process.

A persistent area of concern is the logistics of the elections and the potential of a delay in the polls. The Congo is infamous for its lack of infrastructure (particularly roads and rail). Therefore, it is a logistical nightmare to distribute 180,000 ballot boxes and 64 million ballots from China and South Africa respectively. Once in country, it is the job of the United Nations to distribute them throughout the nation. It was only during the first week of November that the first shipment arrived. The Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) claims that all the polling stations will be equipped and ready to go by November 25th. Many local and international observers have called for a delay in the polls to assure that all logistical challenges are worked out. President Kabila, the head of the CENI, Daniel Ngoy Mulunda and Etienne Tshisekedi have all called for the elections to be held on the designated date, November 28, 2011.

A delay in the polls risks triggering a constitutional crisis. According to the Congolese constitution, a new government must be installed by December 6th. Should this deadline be missed, it opens up the political arena for greater uncertainty. The leading opposition figure, Etienne Tshisekedi, has vowed not to recognize the current government as the legitimate caretaker of the nation if a President is not elected and installed by December 6th. Congolese civil society, the United Nations and International NGOs have called for a delay in the vote and a contingency plan in case the elections do not take place on November 28th.

As they examine the regional chessboard and the formidable array of forces aligned against them, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran must face, simultaneously, superpower Washington, bomb-happy North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, nuclear power Israel, all Sunni Arab absolute monarchies, and even Sunni-majority, secular Turkey.

Meanwhile, on their side, the Islamic Republic can only count on Moscow. Not as bad a hand as it may seem.

Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world — while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated.

Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident, Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system — one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot — in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.

From Moscow’s — as well as Tehran’s — perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.

Yet key lateral moves by the West are already on. Diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times Online that the former Libyan “rebels” — now trying to come up with a credible government — have already given the go-ahead for NATO to build a sprawling military base in Cyrenaica.

NATO has no final say in such matters. This is decided by the boss — the Pentagon — interested in emboldening Africom in coordination with NATO. As many as 20,000 boots are expected to be deployed on the ground in Libya — at least 12,000 of them Europeans. They will be responsible for Libya’s “internal security”, but also be on alert for possible, further military campaigns targeted at — who else — Syria and Iran.

Bring those Shi’ites down

As much as the latest “coalition of the willing” — which by the way repeats the Libya model — is against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, it also represents a Christian/Sunni war against Shi’ites, be they the Alawite minority in Syria or the Shi’ite majorities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

This is part and parcel of the “strategic opportunity” identified by the powerful Israel lobby in Washington; if we strike against the Damascus-Tehran link, we deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That, ideologues believe, can now be sold to world public opinion under the cover of the former Arab Spring — now “Arab Winter” after a metamorphosis, before “Arab Summer”, into the Arab counter-revolution).

As Tehran sees it, what’s really going on regarding Syria is a “humanitarian” cover for a complex anti-Shi’ite and anti-Iran operation.

The road map is already clear. A fractious, unrepresentative Syrian National Council — Libya-style — is already in place. Same for a heavily armed Sunni “insurgency” crisscrossing the borders in Lebanon and Turkey. Sanctions are already essentially hurting the Syrian middle class. A relentless, international campaign of vilification of the Assad regime has been deployed. And psy ops abound, with the aim of seducing sections of the Syrian army to defect (it’s not working).

A report¹ by a Qatar-based researcher for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) even comes close to admitting that the self-described “Free Syria Army” is basically a bunch of hardcore Islamists, plus a few genuine army defectors, but mostly radicalized Muslim Brotherhood bought, paid for and weaponized by the US, Israel, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. There’s nothing “pro-democracy” about this lot – as incessantly sold by Western corporate and Saudi-owned media.

As for the National Council, based in Washington and London and sprinkled with the usual dodgy exiles, its program calls for governing Syria alongside the same military that has been — a la the Egyptian military junta — shooting civilian protesters. Makes one think that the only sensible solution would be for the people in Syria to topple the police state Assad regime, while being vehemently against the dodgy Syrian National Council.

This year’s model (dictator)

Then there’s the usually misguided and misinformed West, which believes that the Arab League, now no more than a puppet of US foreign policy, is siding with the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people. Angry Arab blogger As’ad Abu Khalil is correct when he says that after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, “the League is now an extension of the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]“.

The GCC is in fact the Gulf Counter-revolution Club. Their favorite sport is to privilege “model” dictators — starting with themselves, but also including Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen and the little kings of Jordan and Morocco, who will be annexed to the GCC because they wish they were in the Persian Gulf (geography dictates they aren’t). On the other hand, the GCC abhors “bad” dictators — the snuffed-out Muammar Gaddafi and Assad, who not by accident are from secular republics.

The House of Saud, Jordan and rising Qatar are more than comfortable doing the US’s and Israel’s bidding. The House of Saud — the GCC’s top dog — invaded Bahrain with 1,500 troops to smash pro-democracy protests very much like the ones in Egypt and Syria. The House of Saud helped the ruling, Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in 70% Shi’ite Bahrain to conduct widespread torture; Bahrainis confirm that everyone tortured was forced to confess direct links with “evil” Tehran.

In Egypt, the House of Saud supported Mubarak even after he was deposed. Now it supports — with over US$4 billion so far — a military junta that basically wants to keep power, unchecked, over a “democratic” facade.

The House of Saud couldn’t possibly coexist with a successful, democratic Egypt. Anyone believing the House of Saud’s claim to defend human rights and democracy in the Middle East should check into an asylum.

The Arab League — also a House of Saud extension — gave a green card to NATO to bomb a member state. It suspended Syria on November 12 — as it had done with Libya on February 22 — because, unlike in Libya, US and European designs in the United Nations Security Council were duly vetoed by Russia and China.

Welcome to a “new” Arab League where if you don’t prostrate in front of the GCC altar, you’re condemned to regime change.

Worshipping the GCC can’t compare to worshipping the Pentagon and NATO. Jordan and Morocco are members of NATO’s Mediterranean dialogue, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are members of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. In addition, Jordan and the UAE are the only Arabic Troop Contributing Nations for NATO in Afghanistan.

Ivo Daalder, the Obama administration’s ambassador to NATO, has already ordered Libya to enter the Mediterranean Dialogue, alongside Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania and Israel. And early this month he told the Atlantic Council what’s needed for an attack on Syria; an “urgent necessity” (such as giving the impression Assad is going to raze Homs to the ground); “regional support” (that will come in a flash from the GCC/Arab League); and a UN mandate (it won’t happen, as Russia and China had made it clear).

So one may expect exactly that from the “coalition of the willing”; some black ops blamed on the Assad regime; immediate support from GCC/Arab League; and probably unilateral action, because via the UN is a no-no.

The Greater Middle East dream

No wonder some sound minds in Damascus, watching the tea leaves, decided to take some action. Damascus did send secret couriers to sound out Washington’s mood. The price to be left alone; to cut all ties with Tehran, for good. The Assad regime was left wondering what would they get in return.

The Alawites, roughly 12% of the population and members of the ruling elite, won’t desert the Assad regime. Christians and Druze expect only the worst from a possible, hardcore, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated new order. Same for a crucial neighbor, the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad.

Russia knows that if the current Libyan model is reproduced in Syria — and with Lebanon already under a de facto NATO blockade — the Mediterranean will indeed become that dream, a NATO lake, which is code for total US control.

Moscow also sees that in the US-conceived Greater Middle East — and talk about “great”, spanning from Mauritania to Kazakhstan — the only countries that are not linked with NATO through myriad “partnerships” are, apart from Syria: Lebanon, Eritrea, Sudan and Iran.

As for the Pentagon, the name of the game is “repositioning”. As in if you leave Iraq you go somewhere else in the “arc of instability”, preferably the Gulf. There are 40,000 US troops already in the Gulf — 23,000 of them in Kuwait. A secret army for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency is being trained by former Blackwater, “repositioned” as Xe, in the UAE. A NATO of the Gulf is being born. NATOGCC, anyone?

When the US neo-conservatives ruled the universe — that was only a few years ago — the motto was “Real men go to Tehran”. An update is in order. Call it “Real men go to Tehran via Damascus only if they have the balls to stare down Moscow”.

1. See “Revolutionary road: Among the Syrian opposition.”

I feel the duty to convey to those taking the trouble to read these Reflections the opinion that all of us, with no exception, are obliged to create awareness about the risks that humankind are running in an inexorable manner, towards a final and total catastrophe as the consequence of irresponsible decisions made by politicians who fate, rather than talent or merit, has placed the destiny of humankind in their hands.

Whether they are citizens of their country or not, whether they are followers of some religious belief or unbelievers, no human being in their right mind would agree that their children or closest kin should perish precipitously or as victims of atrocious and torturous misery.

On the heels of the repugnant crimes that are being increasingly committed by NATO under the aegis of the United States and the wealthiest countries in Europe, the gaze of the world focused on the G-20 meeting where the profound economic crisis affecting every nation today should have been analyzed. International opinion, especially in Europe, was awaiting an answer for the profound economic crisis that, with its serious social and even climatic implications, is threatening every inhabitant on the planet. At that meeting, it was being decided whether the Euro would be able to be kept as the common currency for most of Europe and even whether some of the countries would be able to remain in the community.

There was no answer or solution of any kind for the most serious problems of the world economy despite the efforts of China, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and other emerging economies, anxious to cooperate with the rest of the world in the search for solutions for the serious economic problems affecting them.

What was unusual was that just when NATO concluded the Libyan operation – after the air attack that injured the constitutional head of that country, destroyed the vehicle carrying him and leaving him at the mercy of the empire’s mercenaries who murdered him and exhibited his body as a war trophy, violating Muslim customs and traditions – the IAEA, a UN body and an institution that ought to stand for world peace, released the political, money-driven and sectarian report putting the world on the brink of war with the use of nuclear weapons that the Yankee empire, in alliance with Great Britain and Israel, has been meticulously preparing against Iran.

After the veni, vidi, vici of the famous Roman emperor more than two thousand years ago, translated to “I came, I saw and he died” broadcast for public opinion by an important television network as soon as the death of Gaddafi had been learned of, there are more than enough words to describe US policy.

Now what is important is the need to create clear awareness in the peoples about the abyss towards which humankind is being led. Twice our Revolution lived through dramatic dangers: in October of 1962, the most critical of all where humankind was on the brink of nuclear holocaust; and in mid-1987 when our forces were facing racist South African troops armed with nuclear weapons that the Israelis had helped them create.

The Shah of Iran also collaborated, along with Israel, with the racist and fascist South African regime.

What is the UN? An organization driven by the United States before the end of World War II. That nation, whose territory was considerably far away from the theatre of war, had incredibly increased its wealth; it accumulated 80% of the world’s gold and under the leadership of Roosevelt, a sincere anti-fascist, it promoted the development of the nuclear weapon that Truman, his successor, a mediocre oligarch, did not hesitate in using against the defenceless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The world’s gold monopoly in United States’ power and the prestige of Roosevelt handed the US the Bretton Woods agreement, assigning it the role of issuing the dollar as the only currency to be used for decades in world trade, with no limiting factor other that it’s being backed by the gold metal.

At the end of that war, the US was also the only country possessing the nuclear weapon, a privilege it did not hesitate in transmitting to its allies and members in the Security Council: Great Britain and France, the two most important colonial powers in the world at that time.

Truman had not even informed the USSR one single word about the atomic weapon before using it. China, at that time governed by Nationalist General Chiang Kai-shek, a pro-Yankee oligarch, could not be excluded from that Security Council.

The USSR, seriously stricken by the war, destruction and the loss of more than 20 million of its sons and daughters in the Nazi invasion, dedicated considerable economic, scientific and human resources to bring its nuclear capacity up to par with that of the United States. Four years later, in 1949, it tested its first nuclear weapon: the H-bomb in 1953; and in 1955 its first megaton bomb. France had its first nuclear weapon in 1960.

There were only three countries that had the nuclear bomb in 1957 when the UN, under the aegis of the Yankees, created the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA). Does anybody think that US instrument did anything to warn the world about the terrible dangers to which it would expose human society when Israel, unconditional US and NATO ally, located in the very heartland of the world’s most important oil and gas reserves, would become a dangerous and aggressive nuclear power?

Its forces, cooperating with colonial British and French troops, attacked Port Said when Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, French property; this forced the Soviet premier to send an ultimatum demanding the ceasing of that aggression that the European allies of the US had no alternative other than to attack.

• To be continued tomorrow.

There was an act of aggression and the national leaders, including Gaddafi, were killed. He was not killed on a battlefield. NATO security services helped abduct the national leader. He was tortured and shot and treated worse than the Nazi did in their time. Libya was destroyed as a sovereign state.

The Belarusian president went on to denounce the role of the UN in tolerating what he described as NATO’s vandalism in Libya:

We can view the situation extremely negatively only. How can we evaluate NATO actions in Libya? As a violation of the mandate of the UN Security Council. I am not exaggerating this mindless and mad Security Council. I am not exaggerating their role and the role of the United Nations Organizations. The latter has evolved into some kind of cover-up. See or yourself: Iraq, Afghanistan, an entire Arabic curve. Why has UN failed to prevent all of it?

President Lukashenko, whose government has long been on the list of US regime change targets, also told reporters that preparations were underway to strengthen the country’s defense, through the creation of new territorial military units drawn from the civilian population.

We have created the territorial units. This is cheaper than having a professional army, and we will be training our people. In a year they will make perfect troops.They are ordinary people who have civil professions and jobs. These troops are deployed only in wartime. In peacetime, they train.

They must protect their own property, in addition to the family and land. These people are very well-trained, among them there are a lot of military people.

The Belarusian government has announced the creation of a new citizen army of up to 120 thousand people. President Lukashenko told reporters in Grodno: “If we ever have to be at war, we are men, we have to protect our homes, families, our land. It is our duty.”

This is the first time since the Second World War that the people of Belarus have experienced a threat to their security and the threat is coming once again from the West.

Belarus is perhaps more qualified than any other country to make allusions to Nazism. The worst atrocities of the Second World War were carried out in Belarus by the German Wehrmacht. In fact, the resistance of the Belarusian people against their Nazi hoards was so heroic, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR voted in favour of a proposal to include the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic as a separate seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations after the Second World War.

The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic became the showpiece of the USSR, becoming the strongest and most prosperous of all the socialist republics in the Soviet Union.

The country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko, has been described by some as a typical ‘Homo sovieticus.’ A former state farm director, Lukashenko was the only member of the BBSR to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Lukashenko came to power in 1994 after gaining the people’s trust through his performance at the head of a national anti-corruption committee.

The past 16 years of Lukashenko’s presidency have seen steady economic growth, rising wages and full employment. The socially-oriented economy of Belarus maintains close links with other countries resisting the dictates of the New World Order such as Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and, until recently, Libya.

Belarus has one of the lowest rates of inequality in the world, spends up to 6 percent of GDP on education and scientific research. Education and health care are free.

Needless to say, Lukashenko’s determination to serve the interests of his own people over the interests of Western finance capitalists has resulted in a sustained and unrelenting campaign of lies, calumny and defamation from the global corporate media empires.

The United States, Belarus and “human rights”

Lukashenko’s popularity in Belarus has long been the target of a heavily funded opposition from within the country, composed of so-called ‘civil society’ activists and ‘journalists’ funded by the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States, an organisation which works closely with the CIA to overthrow foreign governments who are not subservient to US interests.

The United States and the European Union have spent millions of tax-payer’s money on installing a subservient leader in Minsk compliant with their economic interests in the country. As a European official was once reported to have said, “Belarus is the one country left where there is still something to grab.”

After the Al Qaeda attacks in New York 2001, the meaning of those events quickly became apparent to the government of Belarus. At a conference entitled ‘Axis of Evil: Belarus-the missing link’ November 2002 Senator John McCain, referring to Belarusian trade agreements with Iraq, declared: “Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus cannot long survive in a world where the United States and Russia enjoy a strategic partnership and the United States is serious about its commitment to end outlaw regimes whose conduct threatens us.” McCain went on to say, “September 11th opened our eyes to the status of Belarus as a national security threat.”

In 2004 the United States passed the Belarus Democracy Act which mandated direct US interference in the internal affairs of Belarus in order to promote ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. This imperialist legislation was followed by a resolution presented to the UN condemning Belarus for ‘human rights’ violations.

However, the Belarusian government responded promptly through the United Nations. In the 59th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Belarusian permanent representative to the UN Andre Dapkiunas presented a resolution entitled: ‘Situation of Democracy and Human Rights in the United States of America.’ The Belarusian draft resolution condemned the fraudulent US elections of 2000, the fact that residents of Washington cannot elect representatives to the US congress, the death penalty for juveniles and the mentally ill, unlawful detention of terrorism suspects and widespread torture.

This resolution by Belarus was particularly embarrassing for the US government as it forced the world’s leaders to face up to US hypocrisy concerning crimes against humanity. The United States passed legislation one year later, finally putting an end to the death penalty for teenagers under 18. The other human rights violations documented in the Belarusian UN draft resolution continue to be committed by the United States.¹

The Great Conspiracy against the Republic of Belarus

On December 19th 2010, youth groups trained and funded by the US, Germany and Poland attempted to enter parliament buildings in Minsk, after Western backed candidates failed to make any significant impact among Belarusian voters.

In January 2011 the Belarusian state security agency( KGB), released documents seized from the protestors, which revealed the extent wholescale interference by German and Polish intelligence officials in the internal affairs of Belarus. The report ‘Background of a Conspiracy’ published in the Minsk Times, proved that many of the youths used by Western intelligence in the riots had been trained in far-right training camps in the Ukraine.

Others youths had been brought across the border from Russia. The declassified documents showed how Western intelligence agents, working through various NGOS, smuggled money in suitcases across the Belarus border to opposition activists.

Western intelligence agencies had two strategic plans to overthrow the Belarusian government.

1) Get as many as 100,000 people out on to the streets of Minsk in a mass rally and storm the parliament.
2) If they failed to get the desired numbers to join the rally, the parliament buildings would be attacked with iron bars in order to provoke the police. The media would then blame the police for the ‘violent crackdown’ and the EU would be given an excuse to condemn the ‘rigged elections’ and impose sanctions.

The report points out that the international press reporters at the December riots did not make any attempt to cover the elections. They simply arrived to join the pre-planned rally in October Square.

The Western backed putschists were to give their backing to the poet Vladimir Nekliaev. The declassified KGB documents reveals the reasons behind the West’s endorsement of Nekliaev:

V.Nekliaev is a representative of the so-called intelligensia. He possesses a certain charisma, has not been participating in the domestic political affairs for a long time. The public does not associate him with the image of a radical opposition member, he is better known as a poet.

His weaknesses can also be of use to us. In his past he was virtually an alcoholic (the illness of many artists). Our experts conclude that it creates conditions for forming a super idea in him of being superior, of being destined for a higher mission. We also possess essential incriminatory evidence against him, which enables us to give him additional stimulation at any stage of the project.

We believe it expedient to use the proposed candidature as the major one to represent the campaign. The earlier proposed candidate can be promoted along as a backup plan.

This document gives us a unique insight into the operational methodologies of Western intelligence agencies. Nekliaev was to become a Belarusian Vaclav Havel or Boris Yeltsin. His weaknesses as a leader would be useful to the West as it would be far easier to control him. Nekliaev was to be the Belararusian version of Mahmoud Jabril, a weak and feckless puppet of Western interests.

Nekliaev’s Western puppet masters also had ‘incriminatory evidence’ against him, which would enable them to blackmail him should he decide to favour the interests of his country over those of Western capital.

The declassified documents also reveal a sophisticated campaign of defamation and lies against the president of Belarus. Rumours and outrageous lies were to be spread and leaked to the Western press. Lies concerning the health of the president, lies about his private life, lies about foreign bank accounts, lies about the imminent resignation of the president, etc.

The section concerning the rumour campaign against the Belarusian president makes for interesting reading and is worth reproducing in full as it reveals the highly co-ordinated activities of Western intelligence-funded colour revolutionaries:

One of the components of the support campaign for the candidate of national confidence should be deliberate production of stimuli for the dissemination of rumours. Rumours are to be regarded as information passed on by means of informal communication and having a virus-like dissemination pattern. The ideal platform for such campaign is the Internet, especially various social networks, blogs, Twitter (Internet social network).

A well-run rumour campaign forces the authorities to continually look for excuses, which helps create the so-called presumption of guilt and evokes greater mistrust towards the government in the general public.

One of the basic rumours to be supported throughout the campaign should be the rumour of Lukashenko’s possible resignation. Its purpose to assure the general public and the elite of the very possibility of such resignation.

Suggested rumour cycles:

The personality of Lukashenko and his family, the rumors about the president undermine his personal position and destroy the image of a strong, brave and resolute man.

Here are the main directions and goals of the “background campaign”:

- The poor health of Lukashenko and members of his family.
- Lukashenko gets treatment abroad and spends a lot of money on it.
- Lukashenko’s money is deposited in foreign banks. This fact should be emphasised, and sums should be constantly increased.
Economy. Rumors of economic problems must countervail the information that the country has been barely affected by the crisis.

The following rumors are also effective:

- Every day brings more and more unemployed, new unemployed people are expected.
- The country is being sold out on the cheap, clandestine privatization of enterprises is going on at full speed. Officials sell state property to the Arabs and the Chinese for bribes.
- The government has not fulfilled the IMF requirements, and credits should be repaid ahead of schedule.
The safety of large public projects is questioned.
- The nuclear power plant to be constructed will use a Chinese reactor that can be prone to explosion.
- The nuclear reactor at the nuclear power plant is, in fact, future missiles, and a platform for nuclear blackmail …

The rumour mongering about Libya perpetrated by the corporate media shows striking similiarities to colour revolution methodologies used against Belarus. After the outbreak of violence in Bengazi, we were told by the mass media that Gadhafi had left Libya for Venezuela. To quote again from the document seized from the Belarusian opposition.

One of the basic rumours to be supported throughout the campaign should be the rumour of Lukashenko’s possible resignation. Its purpose to assure the general public and the elite of the very possibility of such resignation.

The false reports of Gaddafi’s resignation in Libya were intended to encourage the uprising by making the protestors believe that they had already won the battle for power. These lies were soon followed by reports that Gadhafi had given orders to bomb protestors. However, the Russian military, who were monitoring Libya from space, subsequently confirmed that no bombing of civilians took place.

In the lead up to the Libyan war the Associated press spread more rumours and lies about Belarus.

Hugh Griffiths of the Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute has claimed, “An Ilyushin Il-76 (plane) flew to Libya on February 15 from Baranovichi, a huge former Soviet weapon storage (area) now controlled by the Belarus government.”

The accusations were vehemently denied by the Belarusian government. Speaking to the Belarusian Telegraph Agency. Belarusian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Savinykh told reporters:

It has been established that the UN official [Jose del Prado] told the American journalist that he had no information and therefore could not confirm the presence of any Belarusian mercenaries in Libya. The fact can be deemed proof that The Associated Press is a hired propaganda outlet and tool.

Savinykh politely noted the propensity of Western journalists to “effortlessly step over the conventional democratic standards when it is convenient to them and in line with the interests of their sponsors.”

Given the fact that Belarus is a target of US-sponsored regime change, one can only suspect that the media rumours were intended to serve as a warning to Minsk of what it will face if it refuses to bow down before the empire.

Libya, Belarus and the mindless and mad Security Council

In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 2009 Muammar Al Gadhafi pointed out that the Security Council of the United Nations is in violation of article 2 of the United Nations Charter. Article 2 of the UN charter states that all states are equal, yet how can that be the case when a hand full of the world’s powers can decide the fate of all the other nations through the UN Security Council?

Gaddafi went on to claim that the Security Council should only be empowered to implement decisions taken by the General Assembly.

Colonel Gaddafi also criticised the Iraq war, which was in flagrant violation of the UN charter. The Libyan leader reminded all present that the United Nations was supposed “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” yet there have been over 65 wars since the UN’s inception in 1945s, wars waged by the few member states of the Security Council.

Furthermore, Colonel Gaddafi pointed out that the UN charter stipulates that all members of the United Nations are obligated to come to the aid of any state that finds itself under attack.

The leaders of British and the United States left the UN chamber before Gaddafi’s speech.

Today, Libya lies in ruins. What was once a peaceful and prosperous country, the only economic, social and political success story in Africa, has been bombed into the stone age, thanks to NATO and , in particular, the phony leftists who supported the racist and fascist hoards from Benghazi as they slaughtered every man, woman and child in their midst.

Belarus knows that the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation and the whores of the military industrial media complex will do their utmost to inflict the same punishment on their beloved country. A founding member of the United Nations, Belarus is keenly aware of the danger posed to humanity by the corruption of the United Nations organizations by Euro-Atlantic war-mongering criminals.

Former SS Oberstgrupperfuhrer Paul Hauser once revealed that the foreign units of the Nazi SS were the precursors of NATO.² NATO’s Bliztkrieg on Libya has certainly proved him right. Now a peaceful, prosperous and highly civilized nation in the East of Europe prepares to defend itself against whatever terrorism NATO has in store for it. A nation to whom we all owe a debt for its heroic defeat of Nazism during World War Two now faces its contemporary heirs. As in the past, the defense of Belarus will be the ultimate defense of all free citizens of the world.

1. Parker, Stewart (2007) The Last Soviet Republic, Trafford Publishing, p 141.
2. Barker, A.J (1982) Waffen SS at War Ian Allen Ltd, 24-25.

You write (“A View from the Villa,” 29/10/11): “I was very much against the US wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and very much in favor of the NATO campaigns in Kosovo and Libya. For me, the starting point of every analysis is what the people concerned want and need, and only after that do I wonder how the international schema applies to them.”

Setting the determination of whether your criteria apply to Libya aside, let’s look at a country about which your expertise is better. Since the people of the West Bank want the occupiers, your people, out, you would of course be very much in favor of NATO bombing all Israeli forces, armored vehicles, ammunition depots and command centers in the West Bank. And of course, you would be very much in favor of NATO bombing portions of the illegal settlements in the West Bank that are determined to be secret IOF centers and certainly would support strafing of illegal settlers who attack citizens in their olive groves and settlers who uproot or burn olive trees. And certainly you would support NATO F-16 attacks on bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestine citizens’ homes as well.

“Maybe you in particular should do something to stop this homegrown madness, and if you are already doing something then maybe you should do more?” — Ken O’ Keefe

And since the people of the West Bank and Gaza oppose the Israeli Air Force’s control of their airspace, you would emphatically support complete destruction of the Israeli Air Force by NATO and the implementation of a no-fly zone over West Bank and Gaza. Then, of course, the Qataris and the French could fly ammunition into the West Bank and Gaza, and NATO special forces could provide training to the Palestinians for the eventual invasion of Ariel, Betar Illit, Maale Adumim, Modi’in Illit, the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, and all the other 116 illegal settlements and 100 illegal outpost settlements in the West Bank–which of course would only be possible by NATO bombing clearing the way.

You write: “Also, I have never quite understood the dogma which seems to answer all questions: “it’s all about oil”. Gaddafi sold his oil on the world market, and so will his successors, on the same terms. International oil corporations are all the same to me. Is there much of a difference between the Russian Gazprom and the American Esso?”

More research would show:

1) The American oil companies left last year because Gaddafi was demanding extra payments to compensate for payments made to Lockerbie victim’s relatives and the damage done by the sanctions for the supposed bombing of Pan Am 103. With a Pro-American government put in power only because of NATO’s bombs, those companies will be back, and terms will be far more favorable for the European countries. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio explain it clearly in Murdoch’s WSJ.

2) “Gaddafi [had] progressively impeded the interests of U.S. and Western oil companies by demanding a greater share of profits and other concessions, to the point where some of those corporations were deciding that it may no longer be profitable or worthwhile to drill for oil there. But now, in a pure coincidence, there is hope on the horizon for these Western oil companies, thanks to the war profoundly humanitarian action being waged by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and his nation’s closest Western allies.”

3) The U.S. wanted to block Eni S.p.A., the Rome-based oil giant which is Italy’s largest corporation and one in which the Italian government holds a 30 percent stake, from acting as “stalking horse” for Gazprom. “Specifically at issue was an Eni deal that would have given Gazprom access to Libyan oil and would have had Eni help Gazprom build a pipeline across the Black Sea. This project would have competed with a similar project backed by the U.S. government that would have connected gas fields in the Caspian region directly to Europe, bypassing Russia and Gazprom…. Eni [is] the largest player in Libya’s oil sector, and Scaroni [Eni CEO Paolo Scaroni] publicly voiced concern that U.S.-led efforts to oust strongman Moammar Gadhafi weren’t in Italy’s interest.”

With all the work you do on Israel and Palestine, you missed this film. The Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no Evidence, directed by Julien Teil, shows how figures made up by the Libyan League for Human Rights whose members were in the National Transitional Council were not verified and then were used as justification for war. (Alternatively, watch it here: Part 1 and Part 2.)

French filmmaker Julien Teil’s film, lays out very clearly the truth behind the mountain of lies manipulated by NATO to justify its attack on Libya. In the film, the director of the Swiss-based Libyan League for Human Rights, Soliman Bouchuiguir, emerges as the key individual who initiated the UN action against Libya.

In February of this year, the Libyan League, along with the US Government-funded National Endowment for Democracy and 70 other NGOs, sent the initial petition to the UN for the suspension of Libya from the UN Human Rights Council. The petition was based on Bouchuiguir’s claims alone that some 6,000 had been killed by Gaddafi’s regime. Bouchuiguir provided the UN with lurid tales of Gaddafi’s “scorched earth policy” and his militia’s “massive attacks against civilians.” These acts are “crimes against humanity,” he testified to the UN.

On May 31, Bouchuiguir’s NGO reported a staggering 18,000 murdered, 46,000 wounded, 28,000 missing, 1,600 rapes, and 150,000 refugees at the hands of the Gaddafi regime. Asked in the film where he got his figures, he replied that he got them from the National Transitional Council — the rebels!

It was this petition and Bouchuiguir’s claims that were the basis for everything that was to come, culminating in the NATO destruction of Libya and today’s bloody murder of Gaddafi and his entourage. The United Nations did not investigate Bouchuiguir’s claims before they were used by the UN Security Council to bolster their efforts to pass UN Security Council Resolution 1973, opening the door to NATO bombs.

Looking further at your essay. You write: “My God, how much a people must hate its ruler if they treat him like that!”

Uri, if this President or that President was in the midst of a group of certain sectors of the population of their own particular country, he would receive the same end that Gaddafi did from the rebels.