Honduras 100 Days of Resistance Pt1-Video

Fault Lines’ Avi Lewis reports on polarization and power in the Americas- watch video

Honduras 100 Days of Resistance- Part 2- Video

Fault Lines’ Avi Lewis reports on polarization and power in the Americas- Watch Video

UK/USA made use of Uzbek torture- Video

Former Brit ambsdr Craig Murray says UK and USA sent prisoners to Uzbek to be tortured-watch video

D’Escoto: “The UN has failed”

Outgoing General Assembly prez says most powerful are to blame for UN failure to address war and poverty  watch The Real News

D’Escoto Pt.2: On Palestine and the UN

Outgoing General Assembly prez tells niece, after UN inaction on Gaza, “I feel like I’m in a cesspool” wach The Real News

D’Escoto on the US in the age of Obama

Americans need the courage to form a “new mindset”  watch The Real News

Media Distortion: Killing Innocent Afghan Civilians to “Save Our Troops”

 the U.S/NATO presence in Afghanistan is not about peace-keeping but rather about a foreign occupation; and those fighting such occupation are neither terrorists nor insurgents but rather the resistance (though maybe not our preferred type of resistance). A strange thing happened during the last twenty years: any force opposing U.S. geo-political designs around the world is now labeled terrorist. As Mike Davis so tellingly pointed out, the car bomb or suicide-bomber is the air force of the poor.[4] The Axis armies of mid-twentieth century were never labeled terrorist. You see this war is as much about words, meanings, images and information as it is about IED’s and GPS-guided bombs.

Those who write of Obama that “when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush” demonstrate the same willful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton – and Tony Blair…Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses…(Bush press spokesman) Scott McClellan has called “complicit enablers” – journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a “good war”, the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber. [17]  read on

Obama Sets Up Killer Drone Raid over Pakistan Despite Civilian Deaths

By Sherwood Ross

Global Research, October 20, 2009

Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to reliable reports. The drone is a remotely controlled, unmanned aircraft. “Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the October 26th The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.” Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports. In fact, the first two strikes took place on Jan. 23, the President’s third day in office and the second of these hit the wrong house, that of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one just five years of age. At any time, the C.I.A. apparently has “multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets,” the magazine reports. So many Predators and its more heavily armed companion, the Reaper, are being purchased that defense manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, of Poway, Calif., can hardly make them fast enough. The Air Force is said to possess 200. Mayer writes, “the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.” Today, Mayer writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.” And according to Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center, nobody in the government calls it assassination. “Not only would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did,” Solis is quoted as saying. David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare authority who co-authored a study for the Center for New American Security, of Washington, D.C., has suggested the drone attacks have backfired. As he told The New Yorker, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.” And because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, Mayer writes, “there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.” The New Yorker further reports the Obama Administration has also expanded the sphere of authorized drone assaults in Afghanistan. An August Senate Foreign Relations Committee report said the Pentagon’s list of approved terrorist targets held 367 names and included some 50 Afghan drug lords “who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban,” Mayer reports. She quotes the Senate report as stating, “There is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al Qaeda.” It is the military’s version of the drone assaults that operates in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the C.I.A.’s drones hunt terror suspects in countries where U.S. troops are not based and is “aimed at terror suspects around the world,” Mayer writes. The C.I.A. effort was launched by Obama’s predecessor, and a former aide to President George W. Bush says Obama has left nearly all the key personnel in place. Running the C.I.A. program is a team of operators that handle Predator flights off runways in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once aloft, the Predators are passed over to controllers at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., who maneuver joysticks and monitor events from a live video feed from the drone’s camera. The magazine article reports the government plans to commission “hundreds more” of the drones, including “new generations of tiny ‘nano’ drones, which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.” Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and other major dailies. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global Research The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com  www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com © Copyright Sherwood Ross, Global Research, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=15745

© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007

Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth

We are the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US in partnership with NATO and Israel has launched a global military adventure which, in a very real sense, threatens the future of humanity.

At this critical juncture in our history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama constitutes an unmitigated tool of propaganda and distortion, which unreservedly supports the Pentagon’s “Long War”:  “A War without Borders” in the true sense of the word, characterised by the Worlwide deployment of US military might. 

Apart from the diplomatic rhetoric, there has been no meaningful reversal of US foreign policy in relation to the George W. Bush presidency, which might have remotely justified the granting of the Nobel Prize to Obama. In fact quite the opposite. The Obama military agenda has sought to extend the war into new frontiers. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, the Obama war agenda has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than that formulated by the NeoCons.

Since the very outset of the Obama presidency, this global military project has become increasingly pervasive, with the reinforcement of US military presence in all major regions of the World  and the development of new advanced weapons systems on an unprecdented scale. 

Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama provides legitimacy to the illegal practices of war, to the military occupation of foreign lands, to the relentless killings of civilians in the name of “democracy”. read article

Ellsberg: From Vietnam to Afghanistan-Video

NO VICTORY LIES AHEAD IN AFGHANISTAN, American troops no less than hundreds of thousands will achieve any kind of success!

watch The Real News

US-NATO Using Military Might To Control World Energy Resources

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s 2009 Year Book documented that international military expenditures for 2008 reached $1.464 trillion. The denomination in dollars is germane as the United States accounted for 41.5 percent of the world total.

Earlier this month the Congressional Research Service in the U.S. reported that American weapons sales abroad reached $37.8 billion, or 68.4 percent of all global arms transactions. The next largest weapons supplier was Italy at $3.7 billion, less than one-tenth the U.S. amount. Russia was third at $3.5 billion. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, however, asserted that Germany had superseded Britain and France and become the world’s third largest weapons exporter. 

Western nations in general and the U.S. overwhelmingly among them dominate the global arms market.

21st century weaponry is daily more technologically advanced, more linked with computer networks and satellite communications, and progressively approaching a blurring of conventional and strategic, terrestrial and space-based capabilities.

And in the U.S. and allied nations the notion of so-called preemptive warfare has advanced precariously to include cyber and satellite attacks that can cripple a targeted nation’s communications, control and air defense centers, thus rendering it both helpless and toothless: Not able to fend off attacks and unable to retaliate against or even forestall them with a secure deterrent force.

The vast preponderance of American and other NATO states’ arms are sold to nations neither in North America and Europe nor on their peripheries.

They are sold to nations like Saudi Arabia, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Egypt, Taiwan, South Korea, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Kuwait, the Philippines, Morocco and other Western client states and military outposts far removed from the much-vaunted Euro-Atlantic space.

The weapons along with the military technicians, trainers and advisers that inevitably accompany them are spread throughout nations in geostrategically vital areas of the world, near large oil and natural gas reserves and astride key shipping lanes and choke points. In many instances Western-fueled arms buildups are accelerating in nations bordering Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. Geopolitics in its most transparent, cynical and brutal manifestation   read more

Robert Fisk’s World: Everyone seems to be agreeing with Bin Laden these days

Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president’s critics – indeed, for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan – are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.

 

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates – once more the Secretary of Defence – and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military “surges” appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address “the American people” this week. “You are waging a hopeless and losing war,” he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. “The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby.” There was no more talk of Obama as a “house Negro” although it was his “weakness”, bin Laden contended, that prevented him from closing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, Muslim fighters wold wear down the US-led coalition in Afghanistan “like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed”. Funny, that. It’s exactly what bin Laden told me personally in Afghanistan – four years before 9/11 and the start of America’s 2001 adventure south of the Amu Darya river... read on

There’s Virtually Zero Percent Chance of There Ever Being a Real Afghan Army — So What’s the Pentagon Talking About?

In Washington, calls are increasing, especially among anxious Democrats, for the president to commit to training ever more Afghan troops and police rather thansending in more American troops. Huge numbers for imagined future Afghan army and police forces are now bandied about in Congress and the media — though no one stops to wonder what Afghanistan, the fourth poorest country on the planet, might actually be like with a combined security force of 400,000. Not a “democracy,” you can put your top dollar on that. And with a gross national product of only $23 billion(a striking percentage of which comes from the drug trade) and an annual government budget of only about $600 million, it’s not one that could faintly maintain such a force either. Put bluntly, if U.S. officials were capable of building such a force, a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule for Iraq would kick in and we, the American taxpayers, would own it for all eternity.

[...] On the other hand, not to worry. As Ann Jones makes clear in her revelatory piece below, the odds on such an Afghan force ever being built must be passingly close to nil. Such a program is no more likely to be successful than the massively expensive Afghan aid and reconstruction program has been.

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans — Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.  read on

CIA Torturers Running Scared

by Ray McGovern

For the CIA supervisors and operatives responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost; that is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder mean it when they say no one is above the law – and if they don’t fall victim to brazen intimidation.

Unable to prevent Holder from starting an investigation of torture and other war crimes that implicate CIA officials past and present, those same CIA officials, together with what those in the intelligence trade call “agents of influence” in the media, are pulling out all the stops to quash the Justice Department’s preliminary investigation.

In what should be seen as a bizarre twist, seven CIA directors — including three who are themselves implicated in planning and conducting torture and assassination — have asked the President to call off Holder.

Please, tell me how could the whole thing be more transparent    read on

Troops ransack Afghan hospital: Swedish charity

Global Research, September 8, 2009

AFP - 2009-09-07

A Swedish charity has claimed that foreign troops entered its hospital in Afghanistan, smashed doors and tied up staff and patients’ relatives, violating agreements between aid workers and the military. The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA) said troops entered the hospital in Shaniz, in Wardak province south of Kabul, late on Wednesday “without giving any reason or justification”. “They searched all rooms, even bathrooms, male and female wards,” the SCA said in a statement on its website, quoting country director Anders Fange. “Rooms that were locked were forcefully entered and the doors of the malnutrition ward and the ultrasound ward were broken by force to gain entry. “Upon entering the hospital they tied up four employees and two family members of patients at the hospital. SCA staff as well as patients, even those in beds, were forced out of rooms (and) wards throughout the search,” it said. Describing the incident as unacceptable, the SCA said the military action was “a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict”. It said it also breached civil-military agreements between non-governmental organisations and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which along with the US has more than 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan. The incident lasted two hours, after which the troops “issued verbal orders” that any patient who might be an insurgent must be reported to coalition forces. An ISAF spokesman said an investigation had been launched but no information would be available until it was completed. The SCA has been operating in Afghanistan since the 1980s, working in 16 provinces mostly in the east, in education, health and disability. News of the incident comes after a NATO air strike in the northern province of Kunduz early on Friday that officials have said killed or injured 90 people. That incident reignited anger among ordinary Afghans about what can be heavy-handed tactics by foreign troops fighting a resurgent Taliban militia that have refined their tactics and are killing record numbers of international soliders.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global Research The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com  www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com © Copyright , AFP, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=15109

© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007

Escalation of the Afghan War? US-NATO Target Russia, China and Iran

The United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are expanding their nearly eight-year war in Afghanistan both in scope, with deadly drone missile attacks inside Pakistan, and in intensity, with daily reports of more NATO states’ troops slated for deployment and calls for as many as 45,000 American troops in addition to the 68,000 already in the nation and scheduled to be there shortly.

The NATO bombing in Kunduz province on September 4 may well prove to be the worst atrocity yet perpetrated by Western forces against Afghan civilians and close to 20 U.S and NATO troops have been killed so far this month, with over 300 dead this year compared to 294 for all of 2008.

The scale and gravity of the conflict can no longer be denied even by Western media and government officials and the war in South Asia occupies the center stage of world attention for the first time in almost eight years.

The various rationales used by Washington and Brussels to launch, to continue and to escalate the war – short-lived and successive, forgotten and reinvented, transparently insincere and frequently mutually exclusive – have been exposed as fraudulent and none of the identified objectives have been achieved or are likely ever to be so. Osama bin Laden and Omar Mullah have not been captured or killed. Taliban is stronger than at any time since their overthrow eight years ago last month, even – though the name Taliban seems to mean fairly much whatever the West intends it to at any given moment – gaining hitherto unimagined control over the country’s northern provinces.

Opium cultivation and exports, virtually non-existent at the time of the 2001 invasion, are now at record levels, with Afghanistan the world’s largest narcotics producer and exporter.

The Afghan-Pakistani border has not been secured and NATO supply convoys are regularly seized and set on fire on the Pakistani side. Pakistani military offensives have killed hundreds if not thousands on the other side of the border and have displaced over two million civilians in the Swat District and adjoining areas of the North-West Frontier Province.

Yet far from acknowledging that the war, America’s longest since the debacle in Vietnam and NATO’s first ground war and first conflict in Asia, has been a signal failure, U.S. and NATO leaders are clamoring for more troops in addition to the 100,000 already on the ground in Afghanistan and are preparing the public in the fifty nations contributing to that number for a war that will last decades. And still without the guarantee of a successful resolution.

But the West’s South Asian war is a fiasco only if judged by what Washington and Brussels have claimed their objectives were and are. Viewed from a broader geopolitical and strategic military perspective matters may be otherwise. read on

Enduring Freedom until 2050

By Pepe Escobar 

 [...] The US and its NATO allies will do – and spend – whatever it takes to implant military bases on the doorstep of both Russia and China and – Allah only knows – get their Trans-Afghan Pakistan gas pipeline on track. 

From November 2001 to December 2008, the Bush administration burned $179 billion in Afghanistan, while NATO burned $102 billion. Former NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the West would keep troops in Central Asia for 25 years. He was corrected by the British army’s chief of general staff, General David Richards: it will be 40 years. Expect the “evil”, fit Taliban – immune to global warming – to be fighting Enduring Freedom by 2050. 

read article

Afghanistan by the numbers

By Tom Engelhardt 

[..] While Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we’ve been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation. 

Imagine for a moment, as you read this post, what might have  happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money – US$228 billion and rising fast – the same “civilian surges”, the same planning, thought and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home. Imagine, for a moment, when you read about the multi-millions going into further construction at Bagram Air Base, or to the mercenary company that provides “Lord of the Flies” hire-a-gun guards for American diplomats in massive super-embassies, or about the half-a-billion dollars sunk into a corrupt and fraudulent Afghan election, what a similar investment in our own country might have meant. 

Ask yourself: Wouldn’t the US have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort, and planning had gone towards “nation-building” in America? Or do you really think we’re safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7%, an underemployment rate of 16.8%, and a record 25.5% teen unemployment rate, with soaring health-care costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures, and in debtup to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist outfit that may number in the low hundreds or at most thousands, that, by allaccounts, isn’t now even based in Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling into broken states like Somalia or well functioning cities like Hamburg. READ ON

Fifty questions on 9/11 by Pepe Escobar

 

It’s September 11 all over again – eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The “global war on terror” is still on, renamed “overseas contingency operations” by the Barack Obama administration. Obama’s “new strategy” – a war escalation – is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. “Al-Qaeda” remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 – the neo-cons’ “new Pearl Harbor” – remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.  It’s useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites’ political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, hasThe following questions, some multi-part – and most totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission – are just the tip of the immense 9/11 iceberg:. Now read fifty questions

 

GMO Scandal: The Long Term Effects of Genetically Modified Food on Humans

Scientific Tests Must Be Approved by Industry First

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, July 29, 2009

One of the great mysteries surrounding the spread of GMO plants around the world since the first commercial crops were released in the early 1990’s in the USA and Argentina has been the absence of independent scientific studies of possible long-term effects of a diet of GMO plants on humans or even rats. Now it has come to light the real reason. The GMO agribusiness companies like Monsanto, BASF, Pioneer, Syngenta and others prohibit independent research. 

 

An editorial in the respected American scientific monthly magazine, Scientific American, August 2009 reveals the shocking and alarming reality behind the proliferation of GMO products throughout the food chain of the planet since 1994. There are no independent scientific studies published in any reputed scientific journal in the world for one simple reason. It is impossible to independently verify that GMO crops such as Monsanto Roundup Ready Soybeans or MON8110 GMO maize perform as the company claims, or that, as the company also claims, that they have no harmful side effects because the GMO companies forbid such tests!

 

That’s right. As a precondition to buy seeds, either to plant for crops or to use in research study, Monsanto and the gene giant companies must first sign an End User Agreement with the company. For the past decade, the period when the greatest proliferation of GMO seeds in agriculture has taken place, Monsanto, Pioneer (DuPont) and Syngenta require anyone buying their GMO seeds to sign an agreement that explicitly forbids that the seeds be used for any independent research. Scientists are prohibited from testing a seed to explore under what conditions it flourishes or even fails. They cannot compare any characteristics of the GMO seed with any other GMO or non-GMO seeds from another company. Most alarming, they are prohibited from examining whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended side-effects either in the environment or in animals or humans.

 

The only research which is permitted to be published in reputable scientific peer-reviewed journals are studies which have been pre-approved by Monsanto and the other industry GMO firms.

 

The entire process by which GMO seeds have been approved in the United States, beginning with the proclamation by then President George H.W. Bush in 1992, on request of Monsanto, that no special Government tests of safety for GMO seeds would be conducted because they were deemed by the President to be “substantially equivalent” to non-GMO seeds, has been riddled with special interest corruption. Former attorneys for Monsanto were appointed responsible in EPA and FDA for rules governing GMO seeds as but one example and no Government tests of GMO seed safety to date have been carried out. All tests are provided to the US Government on GMO safety or performance by the companies themselves such as Monsanto. Little wonder that GMO sounds to positive and that Monsanto and others can falsely claim GMO is the “solution to world hunger.”

 

In the United States a group of twenty four leading university corn insect scientists have written to the US Government Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demanding the EPA  force a change to the company censorship practice. It is as if Chevrolet or Tata Motors or Fiat tried to censor comparative crash tests of their cars in Consumer Reports or a comparable consumer publication because they did not like the test results. Only this deals with the human and animal food chain. The scientists rightly argue to EPA that food safety and environment protection “depend on making plant products available to regular scientific scrutiny.” We should think twice before we eat that next box of American breakfast cereal if the corn used is GMO .

F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be contacted via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Iran/China and the New Silk Road-Pepe Escobar revisits the New Great Game, Part 4

After 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the Chinese leadership was more than ready to counteract the US advancement in Eurasia – and turn it on its head. In the second part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes what’s at stake at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and what really matters for emerging global power China and regional power Iran: the Asian Energy Security Grid and the re-emergence of the fabled Silk Road, now as a vehicle for energy security as well as trade…WATCH

Blum’s Anti-Empire Report: No change under Obama

If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA’s hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don’t know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it’s an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it….. READ ON

LIST OF U.S. GOVERNMENT ASSASSINATION PLOTS POST WWII

The U.S. bombing of Iraq, June 26, 1993, in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi plot to assassinate former president George Bush, “was essential,” said President Clinton, “to send a message to those who engage in state-sponsored terrorism … and to affirm the expectation of civilized behavior among nations.” *

Following is a list of prominent foreign individuals whose assassination (or planning for same) the United States has been involved in since the end of the Second World War. The list does not include several assassinations in various parts of the world carried out by anti-Castro Cubans employed by the CIA and headquartered in the United States.

1949 – Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader

1950s – CIA/Neo-Nazi hit list of more than 200 political figures in West Germany 
to be “put out of the way” in the event of a Soviet invasion

1950s – Chou En-lai, Prime minister of China, several attempts on his life

1950s, 1962 – Sukarno, President of Indonesia

1951 – Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea

1953 – Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran

1950s (mid) – Claro M. Recto, Philippines opposition leader

1955 – Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India

1957 – Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt

1959, 1963, 1969 – Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia

1960 – Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, leader of Iraq

1950s-70s – José Figueres, President of Costa Rica, two attempts on his life

1961 – Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, leader of Haiti

1961 – Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo (Zaire)

1961 – Gen. Rafael Trujillo, leader of Dominican Republic

1963 – Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam

1960s-70s – Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, many attempts on his life

1960s – Raúl Castro, high official in government of Cuba

1965 – Francisco Caamaño, Dominican Republic opposition leader

1965-6 – Charles de Gaulle, President of France

1967 – Che Guevara, Cuban leader

1970 – Salvador Allende, President of Chile

1970 – Gen. Rene Schneider, Commander-in-Chief of Army, Chile

1970s, 1981 – General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama

1972 – General Manuel Noriega, Chief of Panama Intelligence

1975 – Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire

1976 – Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica

1980-1986 – Muammar Qaddafi, leader of Libya, several plots and attempts upon his life

1982 – Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran

1983 – Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, Moroccan Army commander

1983 – Miguel d’Escoto, Foreign Minister of Nicaragua

1984 – The nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate

1985 – Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanese Shiite leader (80 people killed in the attempt)

1991 – Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq

1993 – Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia

1998, 2001-2 – Osama bin Laden, leading Islamic militant

1999 – Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia

2002 – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Afghan Islamic leader and warlord

2003 – Saddam Hussein and his two sons

* Washington Post, June 27, 1993

Taken from  Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
by William Blum, email: bblum6@aol.com

USA attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected. (See Addenda below, 2)

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to
overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War.

When a range of years is given, the effort to overthrow was
not necessarily an active operation each year of the period.

* = successful ouster of a government
China 1949, 1950s
Albania 1949-53
East Germany 1950s
Iran 1953  *
Guatemala 1954  *
Costa Rica mid-1950s
Syria 1956-7
Egypt 1957
Indonesia 1957-8
British Guiana 1953-64  *
Iraq 1963  *
North Vietnam 1945-73
Cambodia 1955-70  *
Laos 1958-60  *
Ecuador 1960-63  *
Congo 1960  *
France 1965
Brazil 1962-64  *
Dominican Republic 1963  *
Cuba 1959 to present
Bolivia 1964  *
Indonesia 1965  *
Ghana 1966  *
Chile 1964-73  *
Greece 1967  *
Costa Rica 1970-71
Bolivia 1971  *
Australia 1973-75  *
Angola 1975, 1980s
Zaire 1975
Portugal 1974-76  *
Jamaica 1976-80  *
Seychelles 1979-81
Chad 1981-82  *
Grenada 1983  *
South Yemen 1982-84
Suriname 1982-84
Fiji 1987  *
Libya 1980s
Nicaragua 1981-90  *
Panama 1989  *
Bulgaria 1990  *
Albania 1991  *
Iraq 1991
Afghanistan 1980s  *
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1999
Ecuador 2000  *
Afghanistan 2001  *
Venezuela 2002  *
Iraq 2003  *

Arctic: Canada Leads NATO Confrontation With Russia

Continuing the pattern by top Canadian federal officials over the past year of issuing blunt and bravado statements aimed at Russia over the Arctic, on August 1 Defence Minister Peter MacKay was paraphrased as “warn[ing] Russia that Canuck fighter jets will scramble to meet any unauthorized aircraft” as a mainstream Canadian news agency less than delicately phrased it, and thundered that “Canadian fighter jets would scramble to ‘meet’ any Russian aircraft ‘approaching’ Canada’s airspace.” [1]

MacKay said that “We’re going to protect our sovereign territory,” [2] though transparently the message was directed solely against Russia, which in no manner endangers Canada’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and not the United States, which does.

In another account of MacKay’s comments, this time indicating that he was speaking in response to a report that Russia plans to drop a small detachment of paratroopers almost a year from now in a part of the Arctic it has internationally recognized rights to, the defence chief was quoted as saying “We have scrambled F-18 jets in the past, and they’ll always be there to meet them.” [3] 

He appears to have grabbed what passes in Ottawa as a rhetorical flourish from the wrong context, however, that of “protecting Canadian airspace” from Russian long-range bombers flying in international airspace in a fashion that doesn’t violate either Canada’s territory or any treaty or law. Though the same report concedes that “MacKay said there have been no recent intrusions of Russian bombers.” [4]

MacKay’s latest saber rattling is fully in keeping with a string of comparable diatribes from the trio of Canada’s prime, defence and foreign ministers going back a year to the five-day war between Georgia and Russia, revealingly enough.

Last August Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused Russia of reverting to a “Soviet-era mentality” and the next month MacKay followed suit with “When we see a Russian Bear [Tupolev Tu-95] approaching Canadian air space, we meet them with an F-18.” It’s now been nearly a year of Canada’s defence minister threatening Russia with F-18s, multirole fighter jets produced by Chicago-based Boeing. MacKay brandishing US warplanes is proper to the circumstances as he is also reflecting and representing American and NATO designs on the Arctic and against Russian claims and interests there.
  
This February Barack Obama paid his first visit outside the United States as president of the country, visiting Ottawa and Prime Minister Harper. The latter’s government chose that occasion to stage a contrived stunt that in a more serious situation would have signaled a lead-up to war or that could have precipitated one. Canada scrambled warplanes over the Arctic Ocean to intercept and turn back Russian bombers engaged in what since 2007 have been routine flights in neutral airspace.  

With the newly inaugurated American president present to guarantee maximum attention in the world media, the Canadian prime minister said, “We will defend our airspace, we also have obligations of continental defence with the United States. We will fulfil those obligations to defend our continental airspace, and we will defend our sovereignty and we will respond every time the Russians make any kind of intrusion on the sovereignty in Canada’s Arctic.” [5]

The Russian planes in question in no manner intruded into Canadian airspace and as such didn’t threaten the nation’s “sovereignty.”

That Harper highlighted “obligations of continental defence with the United States” in reference to the visit of the US president and some fantastical “threat” posed by a Russian bomber several thousand kilometers away from the Canadian capital where Obama was at the time perhaps was intended to both prove Ottawa’s value to its southern neighbor – after all, Harper and MacKay postured as having saved the American head of state from a fictitious Russian bombing run – and to demonstrate that as “continental defence” is a reciprocal affair the world superpower stood behind it in any future confrontation with Russia.

The third member of Canada’s bellicose triumvirate, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon, who while addressing Russia in March stated “Let’s be perfectly clear here. Canada will not be bullied,” at the end of this June referred to Canada as both an Arctic and an energy “superpower.”

A Canadian newswire service at the time wrote that “Downplaying Russia’s recent ‘jockeying’ for position in the emerging polar oil rush, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has declared Canada an ‘Arctic superpower.’” [6]...READ

Iran/Russia – a deadly embrace Pt.1-Real News Video

The Bush administration has tried everything to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia – to no avail. The Obama administration now has to deal with some pretty established facts on the ground. In the first part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes the implications of the complex relationship between close allies Iran and Russia, articulated on three fronts: nuclear, energy security and weapons...WATCH

Iran/Russia – a deadly embrace Pt.2-Real News Video

The Bush administration has tried everything to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia – to no avail. The Obama administration now has to deal with some pretty established facts on the ground. In the first part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes the implications of the complex relationship between close allies Iran and Russia, articulated in three fronts: nuclear, energy security and weapons….WATCH

Iran/China and the New Silk Road-Real News Video

After 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the Chinese leadership was more than ready to counteract the US advancement in Eurasia – and turn it on its head. In the second part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes what’s at stake at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and what really matters for emerging global power China and regional power Iran: the Asian Energy Security Grid and the re-emergence of the fabled Silk Road, now as a vehicle for energy security as well as trade.

Pepe Escobar revisits the New Great Game, Part 3…WATCH

Canada: New political powers to quarantine, invoke other measures, may be tested in flu outbreak

Canada: New political powers to quarantine, invoke other measures, may be tested in flu outbreak –The top health official can now quarantine the ill, interview anyone who has been in contact with a sick person and do anything else that could help prevent the spread of a virus. 02 Aug 2009 A resurgence of swine flu anticipated this fall could test new provincial powers that include being able to place sick people under quarantine in their homes and shut down schools. If Arlene King, Ontario’s chief medical health officer, believes people’s health is at risk, she has the power to “investigate the situation and take such action as he or she considers appropriate to prevent, eliminate or decrease the risk.” That could include closing schools, isolating the ill and forcing others to undergo medical exams. British Columbia brought in a new public health act last year which was described as giving health officials “stronger powers to protect the public against communicable diseases such as pandemic influenza.” Under the new act, the province can order vaccinations or examinations and quarantine people. Health officials can also enforce the act using peace officers, warrants and even court orders. READ

Obama’s Empire

Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility – and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and “given” to the US by another of the war’s victors.

Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon’s claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world’s people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations’ missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: “When soldiers come, war comes.” On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.

As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of “foreign aid” for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers’ local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers’ violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbours imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.

[,,,] The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on “force protection”, in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become “defence staging posts” or “forward operating locations” rather than military bases. Regulating documents become “visiting forces agreements”, not “status of forces agreements”, or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases. READ REPORT

Iran: Which side are you on continued…

 

 Okay, the battle on the ‘left’ concerning who to support in Iran appears to come down to the following:

On the one hand we appear to have those who say that the mass demonstrations are solely the result of the West’s attempts to undermine and overthrow the existing regime, utilizing a ‘colour revolution’ similar to those used in the Ukraine and Georgia. And there can be no doubt that Western intelligence agencies are up to their necks in destabilization strategies (see below). If this is indeed true the question to ask is: Have Western agencies fomented or exploited the opposition and to what degree has it been a success as measured by the mass demonstrations and by elements of the Left supporting the demonstrations?

On the other side as it were, are those who say there is no foreign intervention, the mass movement is wholly indigenous and reflects growing opposition to the theocracy, or at the very least Western machinations are only incidental to the situation. A good example of this approach is advocated by Hamid Dabashi in his essay ‘Left is wrong on Iran’ where he says,

‘The US Congress, prompted by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee), pro-war vigilantes lurking in the halls of power in Washington DC, and Israeli warlords and their propaganda machinery in the US, are all excited about the events in Iran and are doing their damnedest to turn them to their advantage. The left, indeed, has reason to worry. But having principled positions on geopolitics is one thing, being blind and deaf to a massive social movement is something entirely different, as being impervious to the flagrant charlatanism of an upstart demagogue like Ahmadinejad. The sign and the task of a progressive and agile intelligence is to hold on to core principles and seek to incorporate mass social uprising into its modus operandi. My concern here is not with that retrograde strand in the North American or Western European left that is siding with Ahmadinejad and against the masses of millions of Iranians daring the draconian security apparatus of the Islamic Republic.’ — ‘Left is wrong on Iran’

The problem with this approach is that reduces the issues down to a one-dimensional ‘for or against’ analysis, for although some on the left are supporting Ahmadinejad, this is not the be all and end all of the debate. I for one, see the situation as more complex than either supporting or opposing Ahmadinejad, after all the ‘official opposition’ led by Musavi is exploiting the situation every bit as much as Ahmadinejad is, tapping into the discontent felt by many, especially the secular (Westernized?) strand of Iranian society. And it would be foolish let alone naive to assume that Western support for Musavi is predicated on the West’s desire for democracy to break out in Iran. READ ON

VIDEO-Afghanistan: US up to its ears in trouble-Margolis: The US is not just fighting the Taliban, they are fighting the Pashtun people

Watch this Real News video

The Truth about Flu Shots

On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it had declared “Level 6″ pandemic emergency with regard to the “swine flu.” Shortly thereafter, on cue, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that we should expect mass vaccination in this country to begin as early as September, 2009. We have been covering the development of the global pandemic preparedness machinery in The IO since June, 1998. It is our belief that this machine has been in motion since March 28, 2009 and will not be stopped; that the global influenza pandemic the CDC and WHO have been predicting (planning) for at least a decade will be declared—whether people are pandemically sick and dying or not—and the global mass vaccination campaign for which they have been preparing since the 1970s swine flu fiasco will commence—soon. It is absolutely crucial that you share the following information with your friends, family and both elected and appointed bureaucrats within your community.  read on

US Transfers South American Death Squads To South Asia – Honduras: 20th Century Coup Targets 21st Century Latin American Independence or if you prefer-The Pentagon’s 21st Century Counterinsurgency Wars: Latin America and South Asia

[...] Entire US military units have been transported directly from Iraq to Afghanistan or had deployments slated for the first switched to the second in recent months, including 4,500 airborne troops. The US escalation has been supplemented by boosts in the number of soldiers, armor, attack helicopters and warplanes deployed or scheduled for deployment by NATO allies. Germany is soon to have the 4,500-troop maximum currently allowed by parliamentary restrictions, along with Tornado warplanes, Marder tanks and AWACS; Italy is sending more troops, helicopters and drones; Turkey may dispatch an additional 1,000 soldiers; Romania has been tapped for over 1,000 troops; Britain, which has lost 191 soldiers, its highest combat fatalities since the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, recently revealed it was deploying yet more troops, Chinook and Merlin helicopters and Predator drones.

In mid-June outgoing NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer pledged between 8,000 and 10,000 troops for the war, adding to nearly 65,000 already under NATO command in Afghanistan .

US and NATO drones, planes and helicopters now routinely violate the airspace of neighboring Pakistan , usually with deadly consequences.

On July 27 NATO and the Pentagon activated a new global Strategic Airlift Capability in Papa, Hungary – described in the local press as “the biggest NATO project in 40 years” [2]

For the occasion the first C-17 Globemaster III transport plane, “used for rapid strategic airlift of troops and cargo to main operating bases or forward operating base anywhere in the world,” [3] arrived at the base where “Soldiers, combat vehicles…will be flown on the heavy transport planes, primarily to remote countries, even amid warlike conditions.” [4] Afgahnistan will be their chief destination.

Troops, arms and equipment are pouring into Afghanistan from all parts of the world. US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder has just recruited more New Zealand special forces; Armenia announced that it may send its first troops under NATO Partnership for Peace obligations to join those from its Caucasus neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan; South Korea has been pressured to return military forces withdrawn in 2007 as part of a hostage release deal; Japanese government officials have recently spoken of deploying soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan even while armed hostilities rage, a violation of the nation’s constitution; the army of Mongolia, wedged between Russia and China, “which has not seen major combat since assisting the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945″ will soon deploy troops as part of its “third neighbor” policy “to reach out to allies other than China and Russia” and “cement its alliance with the United States and secure grants and aid….Mongolia’s deployment will mark its largest military presence in Afghanistan since the age of Genghis Khan….” [5]

On July 28, the world’s newest nation, diminutive Montenegro (population 650,000), announced that it was assigning an initial 40 troops to NATO for the war. On the same day it was reported that fellow Balkan nation Albania, inducted into NATO in March, will double its contingent and CBS News reported that US Green Beret-trained Colombian commandos were headed to Afghanistan to apply their brutal counterinsurgency methods in South Asia.

There will soon officially be military units from fifty or more nations serving under NATO command in Afghanistan – including what is left of alleged neutral nations in Europe ( Austria , Finland , Ireland , Sweden and Switzerland ) – from four continents and the Middle East . Never before in history have soldiers from so many nations served under a common military structure in a single war theater. Afghanistan is the training and testing ground for an embryonic world army.  read on..

Vaccine May Be More Dangerous Than Swine Flu

[...] This virus continues to be an enigma for virologists. In the April 30, 2009 issue of Nature, a virologist was quoted as saying,“Where the hell it got all these genes from we don’t know.” Extensive analysis of the virus found that it contained the original 1918 H1N1 flu virus, the avian flu virus (bird flu), and two new H3N2 virus genes from Eurasia. Debate continues over the possibility that swine flu is a genetically engineered virus.

 

Naturally, vaccine manufacturers have been in a competitive battle to produce the first vaccine. The main contenders have been Baxter Pharmaceuticals and Novartis Pharmaceuticals, the latter of which recently acquired the scandal-ridden Chiron vaccine company. Both of these companies have had agreements with the World Health Organization to produce a pandemic vaccine.

 

The Baxter vaccine, called Celvapan, has had fast track approval. It uses a new vero cell technology, which utilizes cultured cells from the African green monkey. This same animal tissue transmits a number of vaccine-contaminating viruses, including the HIV virus.

 

The Baxter company has been associated with two deadly scandals. The first event occurred in 2006 when hemophiliac components were contaminated with HIV virus and injected in tens of thousands of people, including thousands of children. Baxter continued to release the HIV contaminated vaccine even after the contamination was known.

 

The second event occurred recently when it was discovered that Baxter had released a seasonal flu vaccine containing the bird flu virus, which would have produced a real world pandemic, to 18 countries. Fortunately, astute lab workers in the Czech Republic discovered the deadly combination and blew the whistle before a worldwide disaster was unleashed.

 

Despite these two deadly events, WHO maintains an agreement with Baxter Pharmaceuticals to produce the world’s pandemic vaccine.

 

Novartis, the second contender, also has an agreement with WHO for a pandemic vaccine. Novartis appears to have won the contract, since their vaccine is near completion. What is terrifying is that these pandemic vaccines contain ingredients, called immune adjuvants that a number of studies have shown cause devastating autoimmune disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and lupus.

 

Animal studies using this adjuvant have found them to be deadly. A study using 14 guinea pigs found that when they were injected with the special adjuvant, only one animal survived. A repeat of the study found the same deadly outcome.

 

So, what is this deadly ingredient? It is called squalene, a type of oil. The Chiron company, maker of the deadly anthrax vaccine, makes an adjuvant called MF-59 which contains an ingredient of serious concern–squalene. A number of studies have shown that squalene can trigger all of the above-mentioned autoimmune diseases when injected.

 

The MF-59 adjuvant has been used in several vaccines. These vaccines, including tetanus and diphtheria, are the same vaccines frequently associated with adverse reactions.

 

I reviewed a number of studies on this adjuvant and found something quite interesting. Several studies done on human test subjects found MF-59 to be a very safe immune adjuvant. But when I checked to see who did these studies, I found—to no surprise—that they were done by the Novartis Pharmaceutical Company and Chiron Pharmaceutical Company, which have merged. They were all published in “prestigious” medical journals. Also, to no surprise, a great number of studies done by independent laboratories and research institutions all found a strong link between MF-59 and autoimmune disease  read article

Shame on Canada, Coup Supporter

For the first time in decades, the world’s eyes are on Honduras, a tiny country many Canadians know for those little stickers on exported bananas and the surplus of coffee it floods onto the global market each year. The world is less aware of the ongoing role that the Canadian government and Canadian mining companies play in pushing many Hondurans further into poverty.  read more

Honduran Violence, U.S. Aid Test Obama’s Global Image

From ofamerica.wordpress.com:

[.....] The Obama Administration has chosen to respond to the crisis in a manner that will signify little to millions watching the bloodshed taking place in Honduras; While nobody in the hemisphere wants the return of the actions of the Bush era, many already believe that the Obama Administration’s inactions mean that the “new” or fundamental “change” Obama promised during his also widely-viewed Summit of the Americas speech last April adds up to little more than this: more militarismo, but with a smile.

For example, rather than officially declare and denounce the Honduras putsch as a “coup”, which would, among other things, trigger a cutoff of military and other aid, the Obama Administration has instead chosen the symbolic act of suspending joint military operations.

In a region where U.S. military aid, U.S. military training and U.S. political support for dictatorships responsible for killing, torturing and disappearing millions are at the heart of why Obama needed urgently to signal a “new” U.S. policy, Obama’s continued “Si Se Puede” (Yes We Can) to continued military aid for such human rights violation-plagued governments as those of Colombia,Mexico and Honduras will only tarnish his and the U.S.’ image in the region.

The President’s inability or unwillingness to call for an immediate suspension of U.S. military aid is already raising questions about the motives and role of Obama Administration operatives likeHugo Llorens, the current U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

From 2002-2003 – the year many in Latin America condemned the attempted military coup in Venezuela – Llorens was the Director of Andean Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC).

Llorens was charged with advising then President Bush and his National Security Advisor on issues pertaining to Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. Although Llorens and the Obama Administration do not recognize the current government, they did, apparently, know that the coup in Honduras was going to take place.

That the Obama Administration knew of the coup and did not cutoff aid immediately after it took place, makes its claims that it tried to “stop” the coup seem naive, at best.

That the Administration may not cutoff aid even after coup-appointed Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez described President Obama as “ese negrito que no sabe nada de nada” (that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing) is to add political insult to tragic injury before a hemispheric audience; That Obama may not cutoff military aid even after Sunday’s increased bloodshed adds even graver injury to that insult.  read more

Full Spectrum Dominance-video interview on “The Real News”

Full Spectrum Dominance, is Pentagonese for the basic military doctrine in the era of the post-Cold War, since 1990. The idea is that the United States’ military power projection will control the oceans, control the land areas of this planet, will control space, outer space and cyberspace—in other words, control everything on the face of the earth. And the idea of totalitarian democracy, one of the weapons in the Pentagon arsenal has been and is very much so today the idea of fomenting various RAND Corporation techniques for internal destabilization and regime change. Some people call them the “color revolutions”, such as you had in Ukraine in 2004 or in the Republic of Georgia. You had an attempt on that in Moldova, a country where most people in the West never even could find on a map. But you’ve had these attempts to destabilize. And there’s a pattern to this in the entire post-Cold War period. And the idea is, for the Pentagon, for the Washington military-industry complex, the Cold War never ended. The objective is to, as Brzezinski said in his 1997 book The Grande Chess Game, the objective of United States power projection is to prevent the cohesion of economic powers throughout Eurasia, that is, Russia, China, the Central Asian countries, the Middle East oil-producing countries, that would have enough raw material resources, enough population, enough scientific know-how to be independent of the domination of the United States. And that would essentially mean the end of the American hegemony of the post-1945 era. So totalitarian democracy is the Pentagon template for creating pseudo-democratic revolutions, quote-unquote “democratic” in the sense that the Greek oligarchs used the term “democracy” as a mob rule against their opponents, inciting the mobs to topple their rivals. And what in fact is created, as you see in the case of Georgia under Saakashvili, the darling boy of Washington after 2004, here you have a thug who’s every bit as dictatorial as Shevardnadze was, this post-communist president of Georgia, but he’s Washington’s thug, he’s Washington’s dictator. And that’s the template of totalitarian democracy: to create this full-spectrum dominance.  WATCH VIDEO

No sign Iran seeks nuclear arms: new IAEA head

Global Research, July 6, 2009

Reuters - 2009-07-03

The incoming head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday he did not see any hard evidence Iran was trying to gain the ability to develop nuclear arms.  “I don’t see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this,” Yukiya Amano told Reuters in his first direct comment on Iran’s atomic program since his election, when asked whether he believed Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons capability. Current International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said last month it was his “gut feeling”Iran was seeking the ability to produce nuclear arms, if it desired, as an “insurance policy” against perceived threats. “I’m not going to be a “soft” Director-General or a “tough” Director-General,” Amano told Reuters, when asked how he would approach Iran and Syria, both subject to stalled IAEA probes. Amano, a veteran Japanese diplomat, won over the agency’s member states on Friday, including developing countries which had tried to thwart his bid for the politically-sensitive post. Amano is regarded as a reserved technocrat who would de-politicize the IAEA helm after 12 years of direction by ElBaradei, an outspoken Nobel Peace laureate. He retires in November. Diplomats say the IAEA cannot afford weak leadership or a governing body polarized between nuclear “have” and “have not” nations at a time of danger to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Amano was only narrowly elected as Director-General on Thursday, but the win was sealed by acclamation at a closed-door meeting of the IAEA’s 146 members on Friday. INDEPENDENCE “The Director-General of the agency is an independent person. I will continue to be independent from any group, any region,” Amano told reporters after the meeting. Amano got the strongest backing from Western states keen for the IAEA to toughen steps against the spread of nuclear arms. But his rise has worried developing nations who see the non-proliferation maxim being used as an excuse to deny them a fair share of nuclear know-how. Iran has exploited such tensions, winning sympathy in the developing world, by arguing that to stop uranium enrichment as major world powers demand would violate its sovereignty, stunt its energy development and perpetuate inequality. The enrichment process can be configured to produce fuel either for nuclear power plants or weapons. Iraninsists its programme is only aimed at producing nuclear power. To produce a nuclear weapon Iran would have to adjust its enrichment plant to yield bomb-ready nuclear fuel and miniaturize the material to fit into a warhead — steps that could take from six months to a year or more, analysts say. It would also have to kick out IAEA inspectors and leave the NPT. Amano told reporters he would do his utmost to implement IAEA safeguard agreements in Iran and Syria. He also said there was hope for future agency work in North Korea, which told IAEA inspectors to leave in April and which has since carried out a nuclear test. It fired four short-range missiles on Thursday. “I expect sincerely that (six-party diplomatic) talks will resume because only dialogue is the way for a solution,” Amano said. “Upon the decision of…talks, I expect that the IAEA will be able to play an important role in the verification of nuclear issues in North Korea.”

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The Mousavi campaign in Iran and the lessons of past “color revolutions”

The political movement of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, named the “Green Wave” due to its campaign color, has striking parallels with the US-backed “color revolutions” in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

Like the campaigns to bring to power pro-US regimes in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004), the campaign around Mousavi has been backed by powerful sections of the Iranian establishment and supported by Washington, the US media and the European powers. As in Tehran, better-off layers of the urban middle classes dominated the large opposition protests in Tbilisi and Kiev.

In the absence of a socialist alternative, the masses of Iranian workers and poor voted for the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has built a base of support among them by adopting a populist persona, denouncing corruption within the clerical elite, and providing a measure of social welfare assistance. The working class remained aloof from the anti-Ahmadinejad protests, seeing nothing to support in the pro-market policies of Mousavi.

As with the opposition movement headed by Mousavi, the opposition movements in Georgia and Ukraine styled themselves as democratic, while promoting pro-market economic policies and the opening of the countries to Western investment.

Mousavi is a longstanding figure within the existing regime and is a proven defender of the interests of the Iranian bourgeoisie. Considered a protégé of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, Mousavi was prime minister from 1981 to 1989, overseeing the suppression of left-wing movements and presiding over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the devastating war with Iraq.

Mousavi’s 2009 presidential campaign and the subsequent protests were backed by sections of Iran’s business and religious elite, such as former president and billionaire Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former president Mohammad Khatami.

To the extent that students and others sincerely opposed to the repressive Ahmadinejad regime became involved in the “green revolution” demonstrations, they were channeled behind a section of the Iranian ruling class. It is critical for Iranian workers and youth to make a political assessment of the experiences of the international working class, especially in those countries where pro-US governments have been brought to power under the guise of a democratic revolution.

Georgia

 

The “Rose Revolution” in Georgia saw a pro-US faction of the country’s ruling elite break away from the then-president, Eduard Shevardnadze, to assume the leadership of a supposedly democratic opposition.

A former top Stalinist bureaucrat and the Soviet Union’s foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, Shevardnadze… read on

Iraq: A failed imperialist venture

By Haroon Siddiqui

Global Research, July 4, 2009

The Star - 2009-07-02

American troops were not welcomed with flowers in Iraq but their departure from cities and towns has been. Iraqis celebrated National Sovereignty Day Tuesday as U.S. troops were yanked out of populated centres and put into remote bases. In time, even that hidden presence will begin to grate on the Iraqis, just as a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia had spurred Osama bin Laden and others. Yet this limited troop pullout is being hailed as a triumph. One is reminded of Richard Nixon’s 1973 boast of “peace with honour” in Vietnam. The 1973 Paris treaty that led to the U.S. troop withdrawal was a face-saving formula. In Iraq, too, the U.S. has little choice but to get out. Not only did the Iraqi invasion and occupation prove the limits of military power, it also exposed how incapable America has become at nation-building. Its postwar incompetence was stunning. America plunged Iraq into chaos, shattered the infrastructure and destroyed the society, reducing human beings to their basest instincts. They turned on each other and found safety only in family, tribe, clan and sect. Shiites and Sunnis, who had lived together for ages, ethnically cleansed each other’s neighbourhoods, which to this day remain separated by barricades, walls and checkpoints. Having unleashed the forces that put Iraq’s three main communities at war with each other, the U.S. toyed with the idea of dividing the country into the Kurdish north, a Sunni centre and a Shiite south, much like the British had divided India in two in 1947. Having created the chaos, violence and jihadism, the U.S. said, in colonial fashion, it had to stay to curb the chaos, violence and jihadism. Having crippled the state, it had no choice but to prolong the occupation until the natives were ready to govern themselves. Iraq exhausted America more than the 1917-32 British invasion and occupation sapped the British. It also created killing fields on a vast scale. Yet Iraqis have been brushed out of the American narrative – Iraq is free of Saddam Hussein, it is democratic, it is stabilized, it is this and it is that. There’s nary a mention of how many Iraqis are dead (between 100,000 and 1.2 million, depending on who’s counting), how many maimed (not known), how many displaced (4 million), and how many tortured with Saddam-like methods in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (not known). Besides the damage to U.S. credibility, and not just in the Muslim world, the Iraq adventure empowered Iran far more than the U.S. would ever acknowledge. Finally, the quest for oil may also turn out to be a mirage. This week, Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, a U of T graduate, put development rights up for international bidding. No more no-bid contracts for U.S. firms, unlike under the Bush-Cheney domain. Nor did George W. and Dick get what they wanted out of the Status of Forces Agreement. Passed by the Iraqi parliament last fall, it stipulates that all U.S. troops must be out by Dec. 31, 2011. No U.S. military operation can be carried out without Iraqi consent (a provision Hamid Karzai can only dream of). Iraqi soil cannot be used by the U.S. to launch a war on any neighbour (Iran). Iraq is the imperial adventure that both Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff, one a neo-con hawk and the other a liberal hawk, fully backed. A monumental failure in judgment, their common stance was, and remains, an affront to the collective will of Canadians.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global Research The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com  www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com © Copyright Haroon Siddiqui , The Star, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14231

© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007

Corrupt election campaign unfolds in US-occupied Afghanistan

By James Cogan

Global Research, July 3, 2009

Amid the chorus of denunciations in US and European ruling circles over the alleged theft of the Iranian elections, the Obama administration and its NATO allies are presiding over an election campaign in Afghanistan that is as corrupt as it is illegitimate.   The campaign for the August 20 presidential election officially began last month with 41 registered candidates, but it is little more than political theatre. The result has effectively been decided by previous US policy, sordid factional deals between a number of Afghan powerbrokers and an electoral system that facilitates vote rigging and voter intimidation.   The government created by the US invasion was based on giving control over various regions of the country to the ethnic Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Pashtun warlords who collaborated with the overthrow of the Taliban. Hamid Karzai, a representative of the pro-monarchist Popalzai branch of the Pashtun Durrani tribe, was installed as a figurehead president in 2002. Real authority, however, has been exercised by the US and NATO forces and the regional powerbrokers.   The result has been what US intelligence agencies described last year as “rampant corruption”. David Davis, a conservative British politician, observed after a fact-finding tour to Afghanistan that the country “appears to have been run for the financial benefit of 20 families… who are old-time warlords and faction leaders responsible for past atrocities”.   Ministers, governors and military commanders sell contracts and positions to the highest bidder. Police and public servants openly demand pay-offs and bribes. Numerous figures within the state apparatus are believed to be involved in Afghanistan’s vast illegal trade in opium and heroin, including Karzai’s brother, who controls areas of Kandahar province. Large amounts of international aid and so-called reconstruction funds have vanished into the pockets of government officials and local tribal leaders.   As the war dragged on and the consensus emerged during last year’s US elections that more American troops would have to be sent, there were indications that US policymakers were considering installing a more authoritative figure than Karzai as the head of their puppet regime.   Despite faithfully serving US interests, the Afghan president had at times angered the US military by mildly criticising the slaughter of civilians with air strikes and other operations. More importantly, he had not emerged as a respected figure among any significant section of the Afghan people. Instead, his general subservience to a brutal foreign military occupation and the corruption of his government had contributed to popular support for the Taliban and other insurgent movements.   The dilemma facing the US/NATO occupation in the lead-up to the Afghan elections, however, is that no-one among the list of potential alternative presidents has any more credibility than Karzai. They are either warlords guilty of human rights abuses or individuals who are viewed as even more open agents of the US government.   A poll conducted by the right-wing International Republican Institute found that just 31 percent of the respondents intended to vote for Karzai, compared with over 50 percent in the 2005 elections. His closest challenger however, former foreign minister Abdullah, polled only 7 percent. The third-placed contender registered barely 3 percent.   Senior New York Times foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins, who has covered the Afghan war since 2001, commented last month: “Some American officials express resignation that they may be stuck with him [Karzai] for the next five years. Indeed, the Obama administration appears to have begun preparing for that prospect.”   With at least the implicit consent of the Obama White House, Karzai has struck alliances with various warlords who can guarantee he wins the vote in the regions under their control.   His nominee for the post of first vice president is Mohammad Qasim Fahim, whose ethnic Tajik movement lords over much of north-eastern Afghanistan and whose militiamen make up a large proportion of the Afghan army. A 2005 Human Rights Watch report named Fahim as one of the commanders who ordered the “intentional killing of civilians, beating of civilians, abductions based on ethnicity, looting and forced labour” during the 1990s Afghan civil war.   Karzai has re-nominated Karim Khalili for the post of second vice president, in order to secure the support of ethnic Hazara powerbrokers in the central provinces of Afghanistan. Khalili, who commanded Hazara militias during the civil war, is also suspected of ordering atrocities against ethnic Pashtun civilians.   In the main provinces of the Pashtun south—large areas of which are actually controlled by Taliban insurgents—Karzai has secured the backing of some key pro-occupation powerbrokers.   In Kandahar, his family and tribal loyalists have influence. In Helmand, the former governor, suspected drug baron and Karzai ally Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, still retains considerable authority. In the south eastern province of Nangarhar, Pashtun warlord and governor Gul Agha Sherzai, a man with a bloody history in the 1990s when he was in control of Kandahar, has also endorsed Karzai. Earlier this year, Gul was touted in US ruling circles as a possible alternative president.   In the Uzbek-populated areas of northern Afghanistan, Karzai is relying on one of the country’s most despotic figures to deliver votes: Abdul Rashid Dostum. During Afghanistan’s tortured 30 years of war, Dostum served in the Soviet occupation forces and backed the pro-Moscow Najibullah government before switching sides. He joined with the US-backed Islamist militias that overthrew Najibullah, then was part of the fierce factional rivalry for power in Kabul before the Taliban finally took control.   By 2001, Dostum was part of the US-backed Northern Alliance that overthrew the Taliban regime. His militia and American special forces committed one of the worst war crimes of the Afghanistan invasion. Following the capture of the city of Kunduz in November 2001, they sealed hundreds of Taliban prisoners inside shipping containers and left them to die in blistering heat.   Karzai will not only benefit from his alliances with the warlords, but his ability to use the state apparatus to assist his campaign. In the last election in 2005, he blatantly awarded development projects to areas where he needed to consolidate support. The state-owned media gave him biased coverage and 75 percent of air time.   If these factors are not sufficient to guarantee Karzai’s victory, there is ample opportunity for wholesale fraud. A report this month by the International Crisis Group (ICG) pointed to the scale on which it may take place. Over 17 million voting cards have been issued in a country where half the population of 30 million is under the voting age, vast areas are under the control of the Taliban and women are culturally pressured not to participate.   In other words, a large number of people are likely to hold multiple cards. In the eastern province of Nuristan, for example, which has an estimated adult population of 130,000 and a large Taliban presence, there are 443,000 registered voters. The adult population of approximately 130,000 in the Tajik province of Panjshir has spawned 190,000 registered voters.   Tens of thousands of women are believed to have been registered to vote via their husbands or male relatives. The men will use the women’s cards to cast additional votes, with the knowledge and acquiescence of local ballot officials. According to the ICG, the female turnout in Paktika province in the 2005 elections was so “unbelievably high” that the figures were never officially released.   On February 1, Barack Obama remarked in an interview that the US could not “rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy”. An accurate and honest statement would have been that his administration’s only concern is that the Afghan government is subservient to American imperialist interests.   In the final analysis, the August 20 elections in Afghanistan are being held only to sustain the fiction in the US and NATO countries that the war has some noble agenda, not the predatory motive of geo-political control over strategic territory in resource-rich Central Asia. The result will have no credibility or legitimacy.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.  To become a Member of Global Research The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com  www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com © Copyright James Cogan, World Socialist Web Site, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14211

© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007

Giving Honduras the Haiti Treatment

WITH THE OVERTHROW OF PRESIDENT MANUEL ZELAYA, Honduras has fallen under military rule of the kind that dominated the Central American nation from 1963 to 1981. The man named by Honduras’s Congress to serve out the remainder of Zelaya’s term, Robert Micheletti, will of course claim that civilians are still in charge. But when soldiers oust a sitting president and decide who his successor will be, it is the soldiers that rule.

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Two hundred soldiers came in the night to overpower President Zelaya’s guard, and bundle him off for a flight to Costa Rica. The kidnapping was somewhat reminiscent of the seizure of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, by U.S. troops back in February, 2004.  The United States claimed it was saving Aristide from death at the hands of gunmen armed and organized by…the United States. Aristide was sent to the French-dominated Central African Republic.

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After the military put Honduran President Zelaya on a plane to Costa Rica, they claimed he had signed a letter of resignation. That’s the same lie told by organizers of the U.S.-backed coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, back in 2002. Chavez returned to power with the help some elements of the military and hundreds of thousands of his supporters in the streets  read article

The US and the Honduran coup

Revelations of US complicity with Honduran coup leaders comes at an inopportune time for Washington. It is waging a campaign to weaken or topple Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrapping itself in invocations of democracy and alleging that Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 election in Iran.

The administration is relying on the US media to limit the political damage resulting from its role in the Honduran coup and the exposure of its hypocrisy in relation to the Iranian elections. In contrast to the media’s coverage of Iran, there have been few breathless reports, amateur videos or Twitter feeds coming from Tegucigalpa.

The US role in Honduras must be appraised in the historical context of Washington’s violent and oppressive relations with Central America and its longstanding ties to the most reactionary forces in the region. As political and economic tensions mount, the big landowning and corporate interests and the US-trained officer corps in America’s traditional “back yard” fear the effects of populist appeals against US imperialism by left-nationalist figures like Chávez and Zelaya.

During the debate over Honduras’ joining ALBA, anti-Zelaya Honduran deputy Marta Lorena Alvarado attacked Chávez and warned, “We are allowing a man with a strange ideology to make his way into our population and into our manner of seeing Honduras’ history.”

Considering just the post-World War II period, the US and Honduran ruling elites have collaborated in huge crimes against the Central American masses. In the US-engineered 1954 coup against Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, Honduras served as a base and training camp for a CIA “rebel force” on Guatemala’s southern border. The US intervention in Guatemala would ultimately provoke a series of civil wars prosecuted by US-backed anti-communist death squads, lasting over 30 years and claiming 200,000 lives, according to US figures.

In 1963, Honduran President Ramón Villeda was overthrown by military officers led by General Oswaldo López Arellano. US President John F. Kennedy then decided to end US adherence to the Betancourt doctrine, which held that the US should not recognize extra-constitutional governments. López Arellano called elections in 1971 but lost. He regained power through another coup in 1972.

The US responded to the 1979 overthrow of the Somoza family in neighboring Nicaragua by setting up the anti-communist Contra insurgency, which it funded in violation of US laws banning aid to the Contras. Based in Honduras, the Contras fought a war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas that lasted until 1987, costing 60,000 casualties and displacing 250,000 people.

Seen in the context of Honduras’ historical role as a center of US-backed counterrevolution, the ouster of Zelaya constitutes a sharp warning to the working class in the Americas. Prompted by concern over the political ramifications of Zelaya’s links to Venezuela, a US-backed coup in Honduras could well be the signal for a broader regional campaign by US imperialism against Venezuela and allied regimes throughout the continent.  read more

Color Revolutions, Old and New

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, July 1, 2009

In his new book, “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order,” F. William Engdahl explained a new form of US covert warfare – first played out in Belgrade, Serbia in 2000. What appeared to be “a spontaneous and genuine political ‘movement,’ (in fact) was the product of techniques” developed in America over decades.

In the 1990s, RAND Corporation strategists developed the concept of “swarming” to explain “communication patterns and movement of” bees and other insects which they applied to military conflict by other means. More on this below.

In Belgrade, key organizations were involved, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and National Democratic Institute. Posing as independent NGOS, they’re, in fact, US-funded organizations charged with disruptively subverting democracy and instigating regime changes through non-violent strikes, mass street protests, major media agitprop, and whatever else it takes short of military conflict.

Engdahl cited Washington Post writer Michael Dobbs’ first-hand account of how the Clinton administration engineered Slobodan Milosevic’s removal after he survived the 1990s Balkan wars, 78 days of NATO bombing in 1999, and major street uprisings against him. A $41 million campaign was run out of American ambassador Richard Miles’ office. It involved “US-funded consultants” handling everything, including popularity polls, “training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count.”

Thousands of spray paint cans were used “by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia,” and throughout the country around 2.5 million stickers featured the slogan “Gotov Je,” meaning “He’s Finished.”

Preparations included opposition leader training in nonviolent resistance techniques at a Budapest, Hungary seminar – on matters like “organiz(ing) strike(s), communicat(ing) with symbols….overcom(ing) fear, (and) undermin(ing) the authority of a dictatorial regime.” US experts were in charge, incorporating RAND Corporation “swarming” concepts.

GPS satellite images were used to direct “spontaneous hit-and-run protests (able to) elude the police or military. Meanwhile, CNN (was) carefully pre-positioned to project images around the world of these youthful non-violent ‘protesters.’ ” Especially new was the use of the Internet, including “chat rooms, instant messaging, and blog sites” as well as cell phone verbal and SMS text-messaging, technologies only available since the mid-1990s.

Milosevic was deposed by a successful high-tech coup that became “the hallmark of the US Defense policies under (Rumsfeld) at the Pentagon.” It became the civilian counterpart to his “Revolution in Military Affairs” doctrine using “highly mobile, weaponized small groups directed by ‘real time’ intelligence and communications.”

Belgrade was the prototype for Washington-instigated color revolutions to follow. Some worked. Others failed. A brief account of several follows below.

read article

The Honduran coup: another US destabilization operation

Since Sunday, a tense standoff has continued between the army and pro-Zelaya demonstrators outside the presidential palace. On Monday there were reports of tear gas attacks on demonstrators.

Zelaya has vowed to return to power, and the coup has been condemned by the US, the European Union, the OAS, the United Nations and the leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Colombia and other countries allied with the Zelaya regime, who met Sunday night in Managua.

Chavez has, justifiably, cast the coup as an overt threat to his regime. He has charged the US with complicity, alleging involvement by Otto Reich, a long-time anti-Castro operative and favorite of anti-Castro exiles in Miami. Reich played a key role as a Reagan administration State Department official in the Iran-Contra conspiracy, in which Reagan authorized secret funding for the anti-Sandinista Contras, in violation of the Boland amendment which had been passed by Congress banning US aid to the Contra death squads.

Reich was one of a number of Iran-Contra veterans who were appointed to government posts in the administration of George W. Bush, serving as assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs.

The US used southern Honduras as the base of operations for its proxy war in the 1980s against the left nationalist, Cuban-allied regime in neighboring Nicaragua.

There are parallels in the Honduran events to the abortive 2002 US-backed coup against Venezuela’s Chavez. The current US ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, undoubtedly played a significant role in that failed attempt to oust an elected Latin American president.

In 2002 and 2003, Llorens served as the director of Andean affairs on the Bush administration’s National Security Council (NSC). In that post, he was the principal adviser to the president and the NSC on issues relating to Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.

Otto Reich was also implicated in the 2002 coup attempt. He met with Venezuelan opposition figures in the run-up to the attempted ouster of Chavez.

Reich is currently a board member of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, better known as the School of the Americas, located in Fort Benning, Georgia. Among the tens of thousands of Latin American military officers—and death squad leaders—who have been trained at the School of the Americas are two of the leaders of Sunday’s coup in Honduras, Army General Romeo Vasquez and Air Force General Luis Javier Prince Suazo.

Another graduate of the School of the Americas was Policarpo Paz Garcia, who ruled Honduras in 1980-82. Paz Garcia launched Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in Latin America.

Commenting on the calculations of the Obama administration, behind the official disapproval of the Honduran coup and the pro-democracy rhetoric, the intelligence web site Statfor on Monday noted that the US could exert irresistible pressure on Honduras to restore Zelaya to power, since the US provides the market for 70 percent of the country’s exports. “However,’” Stratfor wrote, “the aim of economic pressure would be for [interim President] Micheletti to make moves to support democracy, and open elections—such as those already scheduled for November 29—would easily appease the United States.”

The Washington Post reported that John Negroponte, the long-time US State Department official, said that Clinton’s remarks “appeared to reflect US reluctance to see Zelaya returned unconditionally to power.” The newspaper quoted Negroponte as saying, “I think she wants to preserve some leverage to get Zelaya to back down from his insistence on a referendum.”

Negroponte knows whereof he speaks. He was US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s and virtually ran the US proxy war against Nicaragua that was based in Honduras.

It appears that the Obama administration is involved in an operation aimed at either permanently removing Zelaya or negotiating a return to power under conditions where his government would be weakened and its policies shifted in favor of US interests. This, in turn, would further US efforts to destabilize Chavez in Venezuela and shift the balance of power throughout Latin America.

The Obama administration has, however, learned something from the disastrous failure of the Bush administration’s botched coup against Chavez seven years ago. It is seeking to conceal its real aims behind formal opposition to the coup in Honduras and a public posture of fidelity to democratic elections.

Moreover, the US is in no position to openly support a coup in Honduras or maintain a public stance of neutrality under conditions in which it is waging a propaganda war and destabilization campaign in Iran based on allegations that the regime headed by President Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 election.

An unmistakable indicator of the real attitude of the Obama administration to the events in Honduras is the response of the US media. The media, led by the New York Times, immediately embraced the claims of the Iranian opposition that the election had been rigged and a coup had been carried out, without presenting any concrete evidence to support the allegations. It provided nonstop coverage of antigovernment demonstrations, and proclaimed the dissident faction of the clerical regime to be heading a “green revolution” for democracy.

In contrast, the US media has provided only minimal coverage of a real coup in Honduras. It has barely reported the police-state measures, arrests and beatings carried out by the Honduran military, and treated the anti-coup protests with utter indifference. On Monday evening, the events in Honduras were relegated to a mere mention on all three network news broadcasts, well behind the death of Michael Jackson.

What accounts for this stark contrast? The simple fact that the US government opposes the victor in the Iranian election and supports those who ousted Zelaya in Honduras. read article

Journalists Briefly Detained By Troops In Honduras

 Journalists Briefly Detained By Troops In Honduras 30 Jun 2009 Honduran troops detained seven international journalists covering the aftermath of a military coup Monday, freeing them unhurt a short time later. The government also took at least two television stations off the air and interrupted the broadcasts of others. At least 10 soldiers, most with rifles drawn, arrived at the hotel where journalists from The Associated Press and the Venezuela-based television network Telesur were staying and unplugged their editing equipment in an apparent attempt to stop their coverage of protests in support of deposed President Manuel Zelaya. One of the Telesur journalists was speaking on a telephone at the time of the detention, and AP’s Nicolas Garcia saw a soldier lightly slapping her hand so she would hang up. [See, in a *rightwing* coup, US media wh*res add words such as 'lightly' to describe physical force and 'briefly' to detainment. If this was *Iran,* we'd hear that the journalists were imprisoned for six centuries and the AP journalist had her skull bashed in rather than her hand getting 'lightly slapped.' BTW, where are the insipid little green Tweets about this coup and the wall-to-wall Faux News coverage of same? --LRP]

Oil and the Iraq “withdrawal”

By James Cogan

Global Research, June 30, 2009

World Socialist Web Site

It is fitting that today’s deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s cities coincides with a meeting in Baghdad to auction off some of the country’s largest oil fields to companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and British Petroleum. It is a reminder of the real motives for the 2003 invasion and in whose interests over one million Iraqis and 4,634 American and other Western troops have been killed. The Iraq war was, and continues to be, an imperialist war waged by the American ruling elite for control of oil and geo-strategic advantage.   The contracts will facilitate the first large-scale exploitation of Iraq’s energy resources by US and other transnationals since the country’s oil industry was nationalised in 1972. On offer are 20-year rights over six fields that hold more than five billion barrels of easily and cheaply extractable oil. In the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where foreign companies are already operating, the Norwegian firm DNO is now producing so-called “sweet oil” from a relatively small field at Tawke, at a cost of less than $2 a barrel.   In an apt analogy, Larry Goldstein of the US-based Energy Policy Research Foundation told the New York Times last week: “Asking why oil companies are interested in Iraq is like asking why robbers rob banks—because that’s where the money is.” Iraq’s total oil reserves are estimated to be at least 115 billion barrels. Its reserves of natural gas are at least 3.36 billion cubic metres.   Millions of people around the world understood in 2003 that the claims of the Bush administration and its international allies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism were threadbare lies promulgated to justify the plunder of the country’s oil wealth. The claim by the Obama White House that it is continuing the occupation to consolidate “Iraqi democracy” is also a lie.   The war driven by the decline of US global power and growing class tensions within the United States itself. The American capitalist elite believed that military domination in the Persian Gulf would give them access to lucrative resources, as well as a powerful lever against their main European and Asian rivals, who depend upon the region for critical supplies of energy. The militarist agitation surrounding the war was used to smother public disquiet and divert discontent away from the economic inequality that wracks American society.   It has taken more than six years of carnage—far longer than any pro-war analyst would have predicted—to establish the conditions where major corporations feel sufficiently confident to begin making substantial investments in Iraq’s oil industry. Iraqi resistance to the US invasion had first to be drowned in blood and the population reduced to a state of terror and insecurity.   The war has produced a litany of crimes, from the torture policy at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, to the destruction of cities such as Fallujah and the attack on densely populated suburbs like Sadr City; to the unleashing of Shiite death squads to depopulate the centres of Sunni resistance in Baghdad.   The country has been economically ruined. Unemployment and underemployment stand at between 30 and 50 percent. At least seven million people live on less than $2 a day, and malnutrition and disease are rampant.   The Shiite fundamentalist-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presides over the misery of the population in exchange for US backing. It now has a bloated US-equipped military and police apparatus of over 630,000 armed men.   The repression of the Iraqi masses was the basis for the withdrawal timetable that was agreed to by the Bush administration in last year’s Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). US forces are deemed no longer needed to perform the frontline operations against what remains of the anti-occupation insurgency. Instead, units of the Iraqi army are to take over those tasks.   The bulk of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq have been pulled back to heavily fortified camps on the outskirts of the cities, or to the massive air bases that have been built at places such as Balad and Tallil. The SOFA permits them to remain until December 2011, by which time new arrangements for the long-term presence of US forces will have been worked out.   American commanders, while outwardly optimistic, have not been able to hide their apprehension over the withdrawal from the cities. To shore up the Iraqi army, some 10,000 US troops are currently embedded as “trainers” in its ranks—a number that will increase to over 50,000 over the coming months. Baghdad’s western suburbs have been creatively categorised as “outside” the urban area. Aircraft, helicopter gunships, artillery and rapid response units are on constant standby to assist Iraqi forces when needed.   The concerns are not only that insurgent groups will take advantage of the US withdrawal to regroup in Iraq’s cities and resume significant resistance to both the Maliki government and American troops. Both Washington and its puppet government are worried that the social plight of the Iraqi working class and popular opposition to the concessions Maliki is making to US imperialism and foreign capital could give rise to large-scale protests and unrest.   The Obama administration is acutely conscious that a large majority of Iraqis bitterly opposes the US presence in the country. Behind the scenes, it is reportedly pressuring Maliki to abandon a promise to hold a referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement, knowing that it would be overwhelming rejected.   There are also sharp disputes between the rival Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions of the Iraqi ruling elite over the allocation of oil revenues and other sources of wealth. The most explosive tensions centre on the insistence of the Kurdish autonomous region that it get control of the northern oilfields around the city of Kirkuk—two of which are among the six fields being offered for contract in this week’s auction.   The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) last week denounced the auction as “unconstitutional” and warned that companies are “ill-advised” to enter into any contract in Kirkuk to which the KRG is not also a party. The outbreak of an ethnic civil war in the north cannot be ruled out, nor can US military operations to suppress such a development.   US imperialism faces a debacle of its own making in Iraq. Amidst the meltdown of economic activity internationally, and the escalation of the US war in Afghanistan and its proxy war in Pakistan, a large proportion of the American military is still tied down by the conflict in Iraq and there is no end in sight. The Obama administration is nevertheless committed to continuing the occupation and realising the predatory objectives of the invasion—in which oil has always loomed large.

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Obama Moves to Fund Iranian Dissidents.Despite Claims of Not Meddling, US to Send $20 Million to Opposition

By Jason Ditz

By Jason Ditz

Global Research, June 26, 2009

Antiwar.com

Despite President Barack Obama’s persistent claims that the United States is not meddling in the post-election furore in Iran, the administration is moving forward with plans to subsidize Iranian dissident groups to the tune of $20 million in the form of USAID grants. The program is not new, and the solicitation for the grant applications actually came under the Bush Administration. But with the deadline for submissions just four days away, the administration has a convenient excuse to subsidize opposition and dissident groups under the guise of promoting “the rule of law” in Iran. The White House and the State Department both defended the program, insisting it did not run counter to the administration’s pretense of neutrality. The administration declined to provide details of exactly which opposition figures it had been funding, however, citing “security concerns.” There is considerable criticism for this program, not just from the perspective of getting the US involved in the internal affairs of Iran, but also for the taint it places on various opposition groups and NGOs, whether they received any of the grant money or not.

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Jeremy R. Hammond: Has the U.S. Played a Role in Fomenting Unrest During Iran’s Election? Any knowledgeable observer would say yes, but that’s not the version you’ll hear on the US media.

One might be tempted to argue that the strategy for regime change implemented under the Bush administration that including funding for propaganda, support for Iranian dissident groups, and backing for anti-regime militants and terrorists has changed under the new administration of President Barack Obama. There is no evidence, many have pointed out, of U.S. meddling in the Iranian election.

 

But then, neither is there any clear indication that Obama ever revoked the policy strategy implemented under Bush. The most likely scenario is that Obama has put the military option favored by some in the Bush administration on the back burner in favor of other means to carry out a change of regime in Iran.

 

Whatever the case may be, given the record of U.S. interference in the state affairs of Iran and clear policy of regime change, it certainly seems possible, even likely, that the U.S. had a significant role to play in helping to bring about the recent turmoil in an effort to undermine the government of the Islamic Republic. read article