The Real American Exceptionalism

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Reid Mukai

From Torture to Drone Assassination, How Washington Gave Itself a Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

By Alfred W. McCoy

“The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence. They have, in fact, shaped the neo-conservative view of presidential power that has become broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed, Schmitt has influenced American politics directly through his intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who, as an émigré professor at the University of Chicago, trained Bush administration architects of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky.

All that should be impressive enough for a discredited, long dead authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s dictum also became a philosophical foundation for the exercise of American global power in the quarter century that followed the end of the Cold War. Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power.

Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state. Created at the cost of more than a trillion dollars since 9/11, the purpose of this vast apparatus is to control a covert domain that is fast becoming the main arena for geopolitical contestation in the twenty-first century.

This should be (but seldom is considered) a jarring, disconcerting path for a country that, more than any other, nurtured the idea of, and wrote the rules for, an international community of nations governed by the rule of law. At the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899, the U.S. delegate, Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, pushed for the creation of a Permanent Court of Arbitration and persuaded Andrew Carnegie to build the monumental Peace Palace at The Hague as its home. At the Second Hague Conference in 1907, Secretary of State Elihu Root urged that future international conflicts be resolved by a court of professional jurists, an idea realized when the Permanent Court of International Justice was established in 1920.

After World War II, the U.S. used its triumph to help create the United Nations, push for the adoption of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and ratify the Geneva Conventions for humanitarian treatment in war. If you throw in other American-backed initiatives like the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank, you pretty much have the entire infrastructure of what we now casually call “the international community.”

Breaking the Rules

Not only did the U.S. play a crucial role in writing the new rules for that community, but it almost immediately began breaking them. After all, despite the rise of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, Washington was by then the world sovereign and so could decide which should be the exceptions to its own rules, particularly to the foundational principle for all this global governance: sovereignty. As it struggled to dominate the hundred new nations that started appearing right after the war, each one invested with an inviolable sovereignty, Washington needed a new means of projecting power beyond conventional diplomacy or military force. As a result, CIA covert operations became its way of intervening within a new world order where you couldn’t or at least shouldn’t intervene openly.

All of the exceptions that really matter spring from America’s decision to join what former spy John Le Carré called that “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards,” and embrace espionage in a big way after World War II. Until the creation of the CIA in 1947, the United States had been an innocent abroad in the world of intelligence. When General John J. Pershing led two million American troops to Europe during World War I, the U.S. had the only army on either side of the battle lines without an intelligence service. Even though Washington built a substantial security apparatus during that war, it was quickly scaled back by Republican conservatives during the 1920s. For decades, the impulse to cut or constrain such secret agencies remained robustly bipartisan, as when President Harry Truman abolished the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), right after World War II or when President Jimmy Carter fired 800 CIA covert operatives after the Vietnam War.

Yet by fits and starts, the covert domain inside the U.S. government has grown stealthily from the early twentieth century to this moment. It began with the formation of the FBI in 1908 and Military Intelligence in 1917. The Central Intelligence Agency followed after World War II along with most of the alphabet agencies that make up the present U.S. Intelligence Community, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and last but hardly least, in 2004, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Make no mistake: there is a clear correlation between state secrecy and the rule of law — as one grows, the other surely shrinks.

World Sovereign

America’s irrevocable entry into this covert netherworld came when President Truman deployed his new CIA to contain Soviet subversion in Europe. This was a continent then thick with spies of every stripe: failed fascists, aspirant communists, and everything in between. Introduced to spycraft by its British “cousins,” the CIA soon mastered it in part by establishing sub rosa ties to networks of ex-Nazi spies, Italian fascist operatives, and dozens of continental secret services.

As the world’s new sovereign, Washington used the CIA to enforce its chosen exceptions to the international rule of law, particularly to the core principle of sovereignty. During his two terms, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized 104 covert operations on four continents, focused largely on controlling the many new nations then emerging from centuries of colonialism. Eisenhower’s exceptions included blatant transgressions of national sovereignty such as turning northern Burma into an unwilling springboard for abortive invasions of China, arming regional revolts to partition Indonesia, and overthrowing elected governments in Guatemala and Iran. By the time Eisenhower left office in 1961, covert ops had acquired such a powerful mystique in Washington that President John F. Kennedy would authorize 163 of them in the three years that preceded his assassination.

As a senior CIA official posted to the Near East in the early 1950s put it, the Agency then saw every Muslim leader who was not pro-American as “a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action.” Applied on a global scale and not just to Muslims, this policy helped produce a distinct “reverse wave” in the global trend towards democracy from 1958 to 1975, as coups — most of them U.S.-sanctioned — allowed military men to seize power in more than three-dozen nations, representing a quarter of the world’s sovereign states.

The White House’s “exceptions” also produced a deeply contradictory U.S. attitude toward torture from the early years of the Cold War onward. Publicly, Washington’s opposition to torture was manifest in its advocacy of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the CIA began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of those same international conventions. After a decade of mind-control research, the CIA actually codified its new method of psychological torture in a secret instructional handbook, the “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual, which it then disseminated within the U.S. Intelligence Community and to allied security services worldwide.

Much of the torture that became synonymous with the era of authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s seems to have originated in U.S. training programs that provided sophisticated techniques, up-to-date equipment, and moral legitimacy for the practice. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA worked through the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development that sent American police advisers to developing nations. Established by President Kennedy in 1962, in just six years OPS grew into a global anti-communist operation with over 400 U.S. police advisers. By 1971, it had trained more than a million policemen in 47 nations, including 85,000 in South Vietnam and 100,000 in Brazil.

Concealed within this larger OPS effort, CIA interrogation training became synonymous with serious human rights abuses, particularly in Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay. Amnesty International documented widespread torture, usually by local police, in 24 of the 49 nations that had hosted OPS police-training teams. In tracking torturers across the globe, Amnesty seemed to be following the trail of CIA training programs. Significantly, torture began to recede when America again turned resolutely against the practice at the end of the Cold War.

The War on Terror

Although the CIA’s authority for assassination, covert intervention, surveillance, and torture was curtailed at the close of the Cold War, the terror attacks of September 2001 sparked an unprecedented expansion in the scale of the intelligence community and a corresponding resurgence in executive exceptions. The War on Terror’s voracious appetite for information produced, in its first decade, what the Washington Post branded a veritable “fourth branch” of the U.S. federal government with 854,000 vetted security officials, 263 security organizations, over 3,000 private and public intelligence agencies, and 33 new security complexes — all pumping out a total of 50,000 classified intelligence reports annually by 2010.

By that time, one of the newest members of the Intelligence Community, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, already had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget, and a massive nearly $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia — all aimed at coordinating the flood of surveillance data pouring in from drones, U-2 spy planes, Google Earth, and orbiting satellites.

According to documents whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked to the Washington Post, the U.S. spent $500 billion on its intelligence agencies in the dozen years after the 9/11 attacks, including annual appropriations in 2012 of $11 billion for the National Security Agency (NSA) and $15 billion for the CIA. If we add the $790 billion expended on the Department of Homeland Security to that $500 billion for overseas intelligence, then Washington had spent nearly $1.3 trillion to build a secret state-within-the-state of absolutely unprecedented size and power.

As this secret state swelled, the world’s sovereign decided that some extraordinary exceptions to civil liberties at home and sovereignty abroad were in order. The most glaring came with the CIA’s now-notorious renewed use of torture on suspected terrorists and its setting up of its own global network of private prisons, or “black sites,” beyond the reach of any court or legal authority. Along with piracy and slavery, the abolition of torture had long been a signature issue when it came to the international rule of law. So strong was this principle that the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously in 1984 to adopt the Convention Against Torture. When it came to ratifying it, however, Washington dithered on the subject until the end of the Cold War when it finally resumed its advocacy of international justice, participating in the World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in 1993 and, a year later, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

Even then, the sovereign decided to reserve some exceptions for his country alone. Only a year after President Bill Clinton signed the U.N. Convention, CIA agents started snatching terror suspects in the Balkans, some of them Egyptian nationals, and sending them to Cairo, where a torture-friendly autocracy could do whatever it wanted to them in its prisons. Former CIA director George Tenet later testified that, in the years before 9/11, the CIA shipped some 70 individuals to foreign countries without formal extradition — a process dubbed “extraordinary rendition” that had been explicitly banned under Article 3 of the U.N. Convention.

Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his staff wide-ranging secret orders to use torture, adding (in a vernacular version of Schmitt’s dictum),“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” In this spirit, the White House authorized the CIA to develop that global matrix of secret prisons, as well as an armada of planes for spiriting kidnapped terror suspects to them, and a network of allies who could help seize those suspects from sovereign states and levitate them into a supranational gulag of eight agency black sites from Thailand to Poland or into the crown jewel of the system, Guantánamo, thus eluding laws and treaties that remained grounded in territorially based concepts of sovereignty.

Once the CIA closed the black sites in 2008-2009, its collaborators in this global gulag began to feel the force of law for their crimes against humanity. Under pressure from the Council of Europe, Poland started an ongoing criminal investigation in 2008 into its security officers who had facilitated the CIA’s secret prison in the country’s northeast. In September 2012, Italy’s supreme court confirmed the convictions of 22 CIA agents for the illegal rendition of Egyptian exile Abu Omar from Milan to Cairo, and ordered a trial for Italy’s military intelligence chief on charges that sentenced him to 10 years in prison. In 2012, Scotland Yard opened a criminal investigation into MI6 agents who rendered Libyan dissidents to Colonel Gaddafi’s prisons for torture, and two years later the Court of Appeal allowed some of those Libyans to file a civil suit against MI6 for kidnapping and torture.

But not the CIA. Even after the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report documented the Agency’s abusive tortures in painstaking detail, there was no move for either criminal or civil sanctions against those who had ordered torture or those who had carried it out. In a strong editorial on December 21, 2014, the New York Times asked “whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity.” The answer, of course, was yes. Immunity for hirelings is one of the sovereign’s most important exceptions.

As President Bush finished his second term in 2008, an inquiry by the International Commission of Jurists found that the CIA’s mobilization of allied security agencies worldwide had done serious damage to the international rule of law. “The executive… should under no circumstance invoke a situation of crisis to deprive victims of human rights violations… of their… access to justice,” the Commission recommended after documenting the degradation of civil liberties in some 40 countries. “State secrecy and similar restrictions must not impede the right to an effective remedy for human rights violations.”

The Bush years also brought Washington’s most blatant repudiation of the rule of law. Once the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC) convened at The Hague in 2002, the Bush White House “un-signed” or “de-signed” the U.N. agreement creating the court and then mounted a sustained diplomatic effort to immunize U.S. military operations from its writ. This was an extraordinary abdication for the nation that had breathed the concept of an international tribunal into being.

The Sovereign’s Unbounded Domains

While Presidents Eisenhower and Bush decided on exceptions that violated national boundaries and international treaties, President Obama is exercising his exceptional prerogatives in the unbounded domains of aerospace and cyberspace.

Both are new, unregulated realms of military conflict beyond the rubric of international law and Washington believes it can use them as Archimedean levers for global dominion. Just as Britain once ruled from the seas and postwar America exercised its global reach via airpower, so Washington now sees aerospace and cyberspace as special realms for domination in the twenty-first century.

Under Obama, drones have grown from a tactical Band-Aid in Afghanistan into a strategic weapon for the exercise of global power. From 2009 to 2015, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force deployed a drone armada of over 200 Predators and Reapers, launching 413 strikes in Pakistan alone, killing as many as 3,800 people. Every Tuesday inside the White House Situation Room, as the New York Times reported in 2012, President Obama reviews a CIA drone “kill list” and stares at the faces of those who are targeted for possible assassination from the air. He then decides, without any legal procedure, who will live and who will die, even in the case of American citizens. Unlike other world leaders, this sovereign applies the ultimate exception across the Greater Middle East, parts of Africa, and elsewhere if he chooses.

This lethal success is the cutting edge of a top-secret Pentagon project that will, by 2020, deploy a triple-canopy space “shield” from stratosphere to exosphere, patrolled by Global Hawk and X-37B drones armed with agile missiles.

As Washington seeks to police a restless globe from sky and space, the world might well ask: How high is any nation’s sovereignty? After the successive failures of the Paris flight conference of 1910, the Hague Rules of Aerial Warfare of 1923, and Geneva’s Protocol I of 1977 to establish the extent of sovereign airspace or restrain aerial warfare, some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you can enforce it.

President Obama has also adopted the NSA’s vast surveillance system as a permanent weapon for the exercise of global power. At the broadest level, such surveillance complements Obama’s overall defense strategy, announced in 2012, of cutting conventional forces while preserving U.S. global power through a capacity for “a combined arms campaign across all domains: land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace.” In addition, it should be no surprise that, having pioneered the war-making possibilities of cyberspace, the president did not hesitate to launch the first cyberwar in history against Iran.

By the end of Obama’s first term, the NSA could sweep up billions of messages worldwide through its agile surveillance architecture. This included hundreds of access points for penetration of the Worldwide Web’s fiber optic cables; ancillary intercepts through special protocols and “backdoor” software flaws; supercomputers to crack the encryption of this digital torrent; and a massive data farm in Bluffdale, Utah, built at a cost of $2 billion to store yottabytes of purloined data.

Even after angry Silicon Valley executives protested that the NSA’s “backdoor” software surveillance threatened their multi-trillion-dollar industry, Obama called the combination of Internet information and supercomputers “a powerful tool.” He insisted that, as “the world’s only superpower,” the United States “cannot unilaterally disarm our intelligence agencies.” In other words, the sovereign cannot sanction any exceptions to his panoply of exceptions.

Revelations from Edward Snowden’s cache of leaked documents in late 2013 indicate that the NSA has conducted surveillance of leaders in some 122 nations worldwide, 35 of them closely, including Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff, former Mexican president Felipe Calderón, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. After her forceful protest, Obama agreed to exempt Merkel’s phone from future NSA surveillance, but reserved the right, as he put it, to continue to “gather information about the intentions of governments… around the world.” The sovereign declined to say which world leaders might be exempted from his omniscient gaze.

Can there be any question that, in the decades to come, Washington will continue to violate national sovereignty through old-style covert as well as open interventions, even as it insists on rejecting any international conventions that restrain its use of aerospace or cyberspace for unchecked force projection, anywhere, anytime? Extant laws or conventions that in any way check this power will be violated when the sovereign so decides. These are now the unwritten rules of the road for our planet. They represent the real American exceptionalism.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Torture & Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, among other works.

The ISIS Truth We Hide From

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Bob Hennelly

Source: WhoWhatWhy

Identifying Terrorist Enemy No. 1—the Islamic State militants—is easy now, after a spate of horrific videos of beheadings and burnings.

But what’s hard for Western governments and the mainstream media is figuring out the popularity of this terror group among young western Muslims. Why do these people choose to leave the relative comforts of home and take up arms with IS militants? It’s as if these young people are from another planet.

Even after President Obama’s three-day White House Summit on Violent Extremism, few establishment “experts” and commentators seem ready to consider one possible answer: that it is the extreme militarism of the U.S. and its allies that helped spawn IS, and al Qaeda before that.

On the PBS NewsHour se gment covering the White house confab, panelists were asked “why people are drawn to the kind of extremism we are seeing today?” The assembled pundits identified “local grievances” like “access to education and job opportunities” and faulted recruiting for “extreme ideology through books and social media.”

Yet there was no mention of U.S. drone strikes, prisoner rendition, torture, and the thousands of dead and wounded Muslim civilians. All of those factors have been exploited by ISIS and other violent groups to make their case that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam.

After several decades of self-proclaimed “nation building” and “exporting democracy” in the Middle East and its environs, the results are all too clear. There are shattered nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed states in Yemen, Libya and Syria, and more than a dozen African nations that the U.S. State Department concedes are under constant threat of attack by well-armed and organized terrorists.

Is it possible that what the U.S. has actually been doing in these hot spots is “terrorism building” and “exporting chaos”? Is this the awful truth the United States cannot bring itself to admit?

Massaging History

It would seem so, since instead of changing course, the U.S. is in the process of doubling down on its mistakes. How else to explain that the new GOP presidential hopeful, Jeb Bush, nonchalantly told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that “mistakes were made” in Iraq. He then proceeded to lay out his own plan for becoming the new global sheriff in town.

Here’s a jaw-dropping statement from that speech:

There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure. Using the intelligence capability that everybody embraced about weapons of mass destruction was not—turns out not to be accurate.

Watching his brother’s back, Jeb wove out of thin air a phony consensus that “everybody” signed on for the rationale for the Iraq war. That’s despite a vote in Congress in which 23 U.S. Senators and 133 House members opposed it.

You see, if “everybody” was wrong, then nobody was right. It should come as no surprise that Jeb’s team of policy wise men includes many Bush II veterans, among them the unrepentant Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz.

His Own Man, With an Old Plan

As much as Jeb Bush insists he is his own man, the audience in Chicago could hear echoes of his brother George’s cowboy-like approach. When Jeb was asked about how he would handle IS, he said he would develop a “global strategy” that would “tighten the noose” so he and the posse could “take them out.”

During Bush’s remarks, he took aim at the Obama administration for being too quick to disengage from the world and Iraq. He blamed Obama for creating a power vacuum that set the stage for the rise of IS and Iranian influence.

Yet an examination of President Obama’s new National Security Strategy, his proposed military budget and his request for his own War Powers re-authorization all indicate an administration that is prosecuting a global war on terror with unfettered latitude as to where and whom it targets.

Could it be that this “global war on terror,” whether it be the Bush 1.0 or Obama 2.0 version, may actually be what is proliferating the very thing it was aimed to eradicate?

One policy expert who dares to look deeper is Graham Fuller, a career CIA agent and analyst who was vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Fuller says it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that set the stage for IS. By creating an endemically corrupt central government in Baghdad, notes Fuller, the American occupation provided a focal point to unite disparate opposition groups. As for the high-profile effort to train a new Iraqi army, that “security” force collapsed the moment its U.S. handlers left. (In an odd twist to an already bizarre security meta-narrative, Fuller’s former son-in-law is the uncle of accused Boston Marathon Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.)

***

In linking Washington’s Middle Eastern policies to the rise of terrorist groups in the region, MIT professor Noam Chomsky takes it even further back. He says the roots start with the U.S. support of Iraq in its brutal war with Iran in the 1980s, and include the draconian economic sanctions that followed Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In Chomsky’s view, these sanctions punished Iraqi civilians while reinforcing Saddam’s dictatorial control.

In his 2006 book Devil’s Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, longtime Nation correspondent Robert Dreyfuss documents how the U.S., as early as the 1950s, backed the Muslim Brotherhood in exchange for help fighting communism.

Peace’s Deadliest Year

One way to justify failed policies is to pretend that they have worked as advertised. Nowhere was this disconnect between rhetoric and reality more on display than in President Obama’s updating this month of his National Security Strategy.

In presenting this new security game-plan, the president exhibited excessive confidence in declaring that the United States was heading “home” and “moving beyond” ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his mini-version of Bush’s infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ statement, he asserted that “the threat of catastrophic attacks” against the U.S. had “diminished.”

But even as the president describes a winding-down of combat operations, anything but peace is taking hold in those places.

The sectarian violence has resulted in record numbers of civilian deaths and injuries. The UN reported last month that more than 12,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014, the deadliest year for noncombatants since 2008. In Afghanistan, the UN Assistance Mission counted close to 3,200 civilians killed and more than 6,400 wounded, the deadliest year since America’s longest war started.

Providing a sharp contrast to the president’s own assertion that peace is almost at hand, he has sent troops back into Iraq. And just a few days ago, his new Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, said the U.S. might end up sticking around in Afghanistan after all.

What the Administration and a cheerleading media refuse to acknowledge is that the two U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, aimed at ending terrorist threats in the region, have done the exact opposite. They not only caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties but hardened the resolve of yet another generation to seek revenge against their perceived Western oppressors.

Bottom Line

While details of how the president plans to use his refreshed war powers are still vague, the price tag is not.

In the name of defending the country and fighting terrorism, the president’s proposed 2016 budget calls for adding $38 billion in regular defense spending and another $58 billion for so-called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” These expanded outlays would come on top of the more than half a trillion dollars the U.S. is already spending on the military.

Even under the sequester restrictions, says one specialist, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

“If you can’t protect the nation with $500 billion dollars,” then something is amiss, according to Veronique deRugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. She notes that even under the sequester restrictions, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

The failures are especially pronounced, says deRugy, when one takes into account that in the years since 9/11, Washington’s extra expenditures, labeled “emergency” war funding, have topped Pentagon budgets by tens of billions annually.

And so under presidents from both parties, who were supposedly ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, the “emergency” continues to spread.

US War on ISIS a Trojan Horse

Posted on March 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

In America’s coming war, don’t be surprised if everything in Syria is destroyed except ISIS.

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: Land Destroyer Report

In August of 2013, even as the words came out of US President Barack Obama’s mouth regarding an “impending” US military strike against the Syrian state, the impotence of American foreign policy loomed over him and those who wrote his speech for him like an insurmountable wall. So absurd was America’s attempt to once again use the canard of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify yet another military intervention, that many believed America’s proxy war in Syria had finally reached its end.

The counterstroke by Russia included Syria’s immediate and unconditional surrendering of its chemical weapons arsenal, and with that, so evaporated America’s casus belli.

Few would believe if one told them then, that in 2015, that same discredited US would be routinely bombing Syrian territory and poised to justify the raising of an entire army of terrorists to wage war within Syria’s borders, yet that is precisely what is happening. President Obama has announced plans to formally increase military force in Iraq and Syria “against ISIS,” but of course includes building up huge armies of “rebels” who by all other accounts are as bad as ISIS itself (not to mention prone to joining ISIS’ ranks by the thousands).

All it took for this miraculous turn in fortune was the creation of “ISIS,” and serial provocations committed by these Hollywood-style villains seemingly engineered to reinvigorate America’s justification to militarily intervene more directly in a war it itself started in Syria beginning in 2011.

ISIS could not be a more effective part of America’s plans to overthrow the Syrian government and destroy the Syrian state if it had an office at the Pentagon.

Having failed to achieve any of its objectives in Syria, it inexplicably “invaded” Iraq, affording the US military a means of “easing into” the conflict by first confronting ISIS in Iraq, then following them back across the border into Syria. When this scheme began to lose its impact on public perception, ISIS first started executing Western hostages including several Americans. When the US needed the French on board, ISIS executed a Frenchman. When the US needed greater support in Asia, two Japanese were beheaded. And just ahead of President Obama’s recent attempt to formally authorize the use of military force against “ISIS,” a Jordanian pilot was apparently burned to death in a cage in an unprecedented act of barbarity that shocked even the most apathetic.

The theatrics of ISIS parallel those seen in a Hollywood production. This doesn’t mean ISIS didn’t really burn to death a Jordanian pilot or behead scores of hostages. But it does mean that a tremendous amount of resources and planning were put into each murder, except apparently, the effect it would have of rallying the world behind the US and its otherwise hopelessly stalled efforts to overturn the government of Syria.

Could ISIS have built a set specifically to capture dramatic shots like a flame trail passing the camera on its way to the doomed Jordanian pilot, planned crane shots, provided matching uniforms for all the extras on their diabolical movie set, but failed to consider the target audience and how they would react to their production? Could they have, just by coincidence, given exactly what the United States needed to continue its war on Syria in 2015 when it otherwise had effectively failed in 2013?

The answer is obviously no. ISIS’s theatrics were designed specifically to accomplish this. ISIS itself is a fictional creation. In reality the legions of terrorists fighting across the Arab World under the flag of “ISIS” are the same Al Qaeda militants the US, Saudi Arabia and others in an utterly unholy axis have been backing, arming and exploiting in a variety of ways for decades.

Just as the “Islamic State” in Iraq was exposed as a fictional cover for what was also essentially Al Qaeda (as reported by the NYT in their article, “Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says“), ISIS too is just the latest and greatest re-visioning yet.

The fighters are real. Their atrocities are real. The notion that they’ve sprung out of the dunes of Syria and Iraq, picked their weapons from local date trees and have managed to wage war regionally against several collective armies is entirely fantasy. Required to maintain ISIS’ ranks would be billions in constant support. These are billions ISIS simply cannot account for from hostage ransoms and black market oil alone. The only source that could prop ISIS up for as long as it has allegedly existed and to the extent it allegedly exists, is a state or collection of states intentionally sponsoring the terrorist enterprise.

Those states are of course the chief benefactors of ISIS’ atrocities, and we can clearly see those benefactors are the US and its partners both in Europe and in the Middle East. The US would claim that the threat of ISIS necessitates them to intervene militarily in Syria (when lies about WMDs were flatly rejected by the American and international public). Of course, before the serial headline atrocities ISIS committed, the US attempted to sell this same lie but without affect. Now that sufficient blood has been split and the public sufficiently riled, the US is once again trying to move forward its agenda.

Don’t be surprised, if the US manages to succeed, that everything in Syria is left destroyed except for ISIS. A Hollywood villain this popular and effective is surely destined for a sequel in neighboring Iran or southern Russia, coincidentally where the US would like to create strife and carnage the most.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

ISIS 101: What’s really terrifying about this threat

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John Chuckman

Source: RINF

ISIS certainly is not what a great many people think that it is, if you judge what they think by what our corporate press proclaims incessantly.

Judging by what ISIS actually does and whom its acts benefit, its clandestine associates, and the testimony of some witnesses, ISIS is a complex intelligence operation. Its complexity reflects at least in part the fact that it serves the interests of several countries and that it has more than one objective. Its complexity reflects also the large effort to reinforce a false image with disinformation and staged events such as a video of a beheading which could not have been a beheading unless they’ve discovered a bloodless method until now unknown to science.

The subject of ISIS is not without brief glimmers of humor. The image of bands of men, swathed in Arabic robes and bumping their way around the desert in Japanese pick-up trucks with Kalashnikovs raised in the air for every picture has elements of Monty Python. The idea of modern, trained and well-armed military units turning and running from them resembles a war scene in a Laurel and Hardy comedy such as the one with Hardy stuck upside down in a WWI tank turret kicking his legs the whole time Laurel drives towards the German positions managing accidentally to round-up a whole trench-full of prisoners with some wire fencing that becomes snagged on the tank.

Despite the tiresome stupidities we see and hear about it, ISIS unquestionably does kill people and destroy things, that being its purpose, and there is no humor in that.

ISIS appears to have served several tasks so far. First, it frightened Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, out of office in Iraq, a man America and Israel grew very much to dislike owing simply to his good relations with Iran, one of the unintended consequences of America’s invasion of Iraq being expanded Iranian influence in the region. No doubt al-Maliki was terrified not so much by ISIS approaching in their pick-up trucks as he was by his own military’s tendency, as if on cue, to turn and run from ISIS, often leaving weapons behind. The message was clear: you won’t be protected.

Second, America’s highly selective “air war” against ISIS somehow manages to attack infrastructure targets inside Syria with the feeble excuse that they are facilities helping ISIS. We’ve seen what American bombing can do when it’s undertaken seriously, and somehow I have a hard time imaging the men in Japanese pick-ups lasting long when faced with what hit the Taleban in Afghanistan or Gadhafi’s forces in Libya. The air strikes are partly a show for the world – after all, how can America be seen not to be fighting such extremely well-advertised, super-violent terrorists, guys putting out videos regularly from a studio trailer they must haul around with one of their pick-up trucks? The air strikes’ main purpose appears to be a way of hurting Assad and assisting those fighting Syria’s army without coming into conflict with Russia, as they would with a large, direct campaign. They likely also punish elements of ISIS which have exceeded their brief and serve as a reminder to the rest of what could happen to them if they stray too far from their subsidized purpose once the war comes to an end.

Three, in some of the ground fighting in Iraq where we’ve read of Iraqi units fighting ISIS, the units are often Kurdish, and sometimes the press uses expressions like “Iraqi and Kurdish troops.” But the Kurdish region is still part of Iraq legally, although it has been given a good deal of autonomy by the central government. The Kurdish region of Iraq is the country’s prime oil-producing area, and in the estimation of many observers, an area both the United States and Israel would very much like to see severed from Iraq in the way Kosovo was severed from Serbia after America’s devastating air war there. This would not only permanently assure Iraq’s weakness, it would create a rather grateful and more willing oil supplier.

Where does ISIS get its technical equipment and the know-how to produce videos and run Internet sites? These are not qualities commonly found among fanatical fundamentalists anywhere; indeed most true radical fundamentalists tend to eschew technology. A supply of advice, technical assistance, and equipment comes from somewhere. Where does ISIS get the money for food, gasoline, clothes, ammunition, and Japanese pick-up trucks? And I wonder, did one of those wild-looking jihadi types just show up one day at an Iraqi car dealership and order a fleet of Japanese pick-ups? Were they delivered out on the desert or did a gang of jihadists march in, waving their Kalashnikovs, to drive them away?

The effort to destroy the Syrian government, whether by means of ISIS or anyone else, is warmly and generously supported by Saudi Arabia and its buddy Qatar – another oil-rich, absolute monarchy where political parties are banned – both these counties’ primary interest being the defence of their immensely privileged situations against creeping threats of all progressive developments such as equal human rights or democracy or indeed against revolt led by external forces. The payments we now know the Saudi royal family long made to Osama bin Laden before 9/11 were simply bribes to keep him and his anti-establishment work out of the country. They really didn’t care a lot about what the money bought elsewhere, but since 9/11 and its many Saudi connections – 15 of the perpetrators plus the past financing plus the many members of the royal family and bin Laden family secretly flown out by American officials at the time – the Saudi authorities were genuinely fearful of how America might respond and have become far more responsive to what America wants in the Middle East and now apply their money to such projects. What America wants in the Middle East is, invariably, what Israel wants, so there is now extensive, secret cooperation where once there was complete official hostility.

We have reports from plane-spotters in the region of daily flights of mysterious planes from Israel to Qatar. We have several eye-witness reports and photographs of supply bundles dropped from unknown planes into ISIS territory. Maybe ISIS has its own air force now? We know Turkey has served both as an entry point for countless terrorists into Syria and as a place of retreat and refuge when fighting with the Syrian army becomes too hot for them, the volumes of such activity having been too great to keep secret. We have reports of Turkish supply flights. A Jordanian official recently told a reporter that ISIS members were trained in 2012 by American instructors working at a secret base in Jordan.

If ISIS is what our corporate news pretends that it is – a fanatical Muslim extremist group that sprang suddenly from the desert sands much like Jack’s bean stalk – one blindingly obvious question is, why does it not attack Israel or Israeli interest? Isn’t that what one would expect from such a cast of characters? But it has not done so, undoubtedly because Israel is an important covert benefactor and supplier.

We might equally ask why ISIS has not attacked Saudi Arabia or its interests, for although the Saudi royal family officially professes a strict and conservative form of Islam, Wahhabism, in fact many of them are very worldly people who spend a good deal of time and money at the world’s great pleasure palaces. Perhaps even more damning for a genuine fanatical fundamentalist, the Saudis now often secretly cooperate and make plans with Israel where mutual interests exist.

No, there is something highly suspicious about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who avoid such interests while managing to brutally kill poor Syrian soldiers just doing their jobs along with the odd foreign journalist or aid worker who may just have seen something they shouldn’t have seen. Of course, we have Edward Snowden himself having described ISIS as an operation intended to protect Israel. Despite the fact that some news sources have said the interview in which this was revealed never took place, my instincts tell me it likely did. Snowden has never refuted it, and the news sources saying it did not are highly suspect on such a subject.

The way ISIS serves Israeli and American interests is by providing a focus point for extremists, attracting them from various parts of the world so that they can be recorded and kept track of. Also the tracks back to the various countries from which they come provide security services with leads to places where there might be some festering problems. In the meantime, ISIS serves the interest of helping to bring down President Assad, a goal dear to the hearts of Israelis. Please remember that black operations, even the ones about which we know, show little consideration for lives or property. Just think of Israel’s attack on an American spy ship in the Mediterranean during the Six Day War, its pilots knowingly shooting up and bombing for two hours the well-marked ship of its ally and benefactor, no explanation worth hearing ever having been offered.

Just read conservative mainline sources (pretty much a redundant pair of adjectives) about the harm Snowden has done: claims of everything from his revelations about American intelligence having served to help ISIS avoid detection (!) to his revelations having set up the United States for another 9/11! You might think intelligent people would be ashamed of making such asinine public statements, but, no, there are almost no limits to trying to discredit those revealing murderous, dark operations.

We’ve had many reports of officials in various countries, including Canada as I write, concerned about the odd individual or small group running off to join ISIS. Now why should that be a concern? A few flaky people going abroad just removes them from your country, something I should have thought was a complete gain from a security point of view. Even if they were ever to return in future, you would know exactly who they are. Where is the basis for serious concern? But the psychological advantages of noise and hype to scare people about obscure dangers and “lone wolves” and “home-grown terrorists” outweigh completely good sense and intelligence.

Finally, there are numerous reports that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (a nom de guerre, not his real name), the leader of ISIS, is a Western intelligence asset. What little we can learn about him makes that entirely plausible. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has said that the man is a Mossad agent, a claim supported supposedly by documents revealed by Edward Snowden. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is by all accounts a secretive man who speaks directly with few people, and even his birth place, given as Samarra, Iraq, is not sure. Records of his past, as those from his period of American captivity (always a great opportunity to “turn” someone to serving two interests), are not available. He was once reported killed but is still alive. He is said to have received intensive training from Mossad and the CIA, and some sources give his real name as Simon Elliot (or, Elliot Shimon), but few details can ever be certain in such dark operations.

The truly terrifying aspect of ISIS and other forces fighting with it in Syria is that the United States and Israel have approved and supported such wanton destruction in so beautiful and formerly-peaceful a place as Syria. Millions of lives destroyed and countless historic places damaged as though they were all nothing more than a few pieces moved on a geopolitical chessboard. I think it fair to describe that as the work of psychopaths.

Chicago’s Abu Ghraib

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

In April 2004, the world was shocked and horrified by the release of photographs of sadistic torture carried out by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Detainees at the prison, most of them locked up for opposing the US military occupation, were beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted and killed.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site explained that the crimes revealed in the photos and the psychology underlying them could be understood only in relation to the brutality of social relations in the United States, together with the dirty colonial aims of the war itself.

The WSWS further warned that “such a military, accompanied by a growing army of professional ‘civilian’ mercenaries, represents a danger not only to oppressed peoples in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere, but to the democratic rights of the population in the US.”

A decade later, this assessment has been fully borne out. On Tuesday, the Guardian newspaper revealed the existence of what it describes as a “black site” on the West Side of Chicago, where police detain, beat and torture prisoners, while keeping their whereabouts secret from their families and attorneys.

The newspaper writes: “The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.”

Among those detained at the facility was Brian Jacob Church, one of the “NATO 3” who were entrapped by Chicago police in 2012 in connection with protests against the US-led military alliance, which was meeting in Chicago.

Church was taken to the secret facility and handcuffed to a bench for 17 hours. Along with two other protestors, he was set up by police on terrorism charges and subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

Vic Suter, another participant in the protests, said that she was taken to the facility and interrogated while shackled to a bench for eighteen hours before she was allowed to see a lawyer.

The Guardian writes that detainees taken to the facility report having been beaten and otherwise tortured by police. In 2013, one detainee was found unconscious in an interview room at the facility. He later died.

On Thursday, the Intercept corroborated the Guardian’s account, interviewing another torture victim at the facility who was handcuffed across a bench and hit in the face and groin until he agreed to provide false testimony to police.

The revelations follow the report last week by the Guardian that Richard Zuley, one of the lead torturers at the Guantanamo detention center, used similar techniques to secure false confessions from murder suspects when he was a detective with the Chicago Police Department.

Chicago has a long history of police violence. It is also the political home of Barack Obama and has been run since 2011 by Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former White House chief of staff.

The Obama administration, far from repudiating the horrific and criminal actions of its predecessor, has deployed the apparatus of police violence ever more directly against the American people. A series of events has marked the increasingly open application within the borders of the United States of the murderous methods of the “war on terror” tested out and perfected in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.

· In September 2010, the Obama administration ordered raids on the homes of leaders of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in Minneapolis and Chicago on charges of “providing material support to terrorism.”

· In May 2012, Chicago police arrested the “NATO 3,” charging them with conspiracy to commit terrorism.

· In March 2013, US Attorney General Eric Holder declared that the president had the right to kill American citizens without a trial or any legal due process, including within the borders of the United States.

· Just one month later, in April 2013, the city of Boston was placed under de facto martial law following the Boston Marathon bombings, with residents told to “shelter in place” while armored vehicles and helicopters patrolled the streets and police carried out warrantless house-to-house searches.

· In June 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report entitled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.” The ACLU reported that the Defense Department had transferred $4.3 billion in military hardware, including armored vehicles, helicopters, and belt-fed machine guns, to local police departments.

· In August 2014, the authorities responded to protests against the police murder of unarmed teenager Michael Brown with a military/police crackdown. Hundreds of peaceful protesters were arrested, shot with rubber bullets or exposed to tear gas, and over a dozen members of the press were detained.

The Obama administration is presently seeking a new Authorization for Use of Military Force, nominally to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but with no geographical boundaries defined. On Wednesday, three Brooklyn residents were arrested in connection with this new war on ISIS, clearly raising the potential for this second “war on terror” to become an occasion for police-military operations within the US “homeland.”

These developments express the growing convergence of militarism abroad with the attack on democratic rights within the US. What ties these two processes together are the class interests of the financial aristocracy and the criminal methods it employs in the defense of its wealth and power.

In pursuit of these aims, the ruling class seeks to mobilize the most backward and reactionary sections of the population, including sadistic prison guards and fascist-minded police detectives. But the ultimate responsibility for these crimes rests with forces at the highest levels of the state.

It is worth recalling that late last year the Senate released a report implicating the Bush administration in a brutal torture regime carried out at Guantanamo and CIA “black site” torture centers throughout the world. Far from anyone being held accountable for these crimes, those who ordered and carried them out have defended their actions, while the Obama administration has sought to block any prosecution of those responsible.

The actions of the ruling class express the character of American capitalism, which is based on parasitism, fraud, criminality and an economic order in deep decline. The American ruling class has no response to the crisis of its system and the inevitable growth of social opposition other than violence and repression.

Total Mainstream Media Blackout of Chicago Secret ‘Black Site’ at Homan Square (By Nick Bernabe, Antimedia.org)

Obama Incites Bloodshed in Venezuela

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Nil Nikandrov

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The US special services together with their “assistants” from Canada and Great Britain tried again to stage a coup in Venezuela. In the middle of February, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said the national security services frustrated the plans of US embassy and put an end to its hostile actions. As a result, a number of people were arrested, including Venezuelan air force officers and activists of radical opposition. The subversive activities were guided by Western diplomatic missions. The names of those behind the plot are known but they cannot be brought to justice being protected by diplomatic immunity. The President said the plotters wanted to assassinate him. The United States embassy guaranteed that the perpetrators would be granted asylum in America.

The Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (El Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional – SEBIN) had been warned about the conspiracy preparations. A Super Tucano aircraft (a light, highly agile Brazilian aircraft designed principally for pilot training and counterinsurgency operations) used before for special operations by Academi (former Blackwater), an American private military company, was handed over to plotters in the United States. The plane had the insignia of Venezuelan air force. It was armed and prepared to make a flight from Columbia to the island of Curacao where a US forward operating location is stationed. The CIA-recruited pilots, who betrayed the Bolivarian regime and their home country, learned well which targets they had to strike: the presidential palace, the buildings of ministries of Defense and General Staff and TV company TeleSUR. Security agencies found caches of arms, the equipment to provide guidance to the target and a video footage showing air force officers and opposition leaders involved in the plot addressing people. The video footage was given in Miami to journalist Patricia Poleo, a fierce opponent of the current Venezuelan government. She was to make it go on air but the plan was thwarted. The video material got into the hands of SEBIN operatives.

The video showed the plotters with balaclavas on their heads announcing the beginning of insurgency in the armed forces and the establishment of interim government. It was prepared to be made public by El Nacional newspaper at the time of coup. Three key figures of the Venezuelan opposition – Leopoldo López, the mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, the leader of Voluntad Popular (People’s Will) and former member of parliament Maria Corina Machado signed and distributed a joint communique on February 11, just one day before the planned coup plot that President Nicolas Maduro denounced was to take place. All these people were known to be close to the United States. Entitled “The Call for a National Transition Agreement,” the statement calls for unification of Venezuelans behind a national plan aimed at supplanting the current socialist administration of President Nicolas Maduro. It says the country was going through hardships unparalleled in its history. It is the fault of regime that has been trying for sixteen years to impose a failed system. In the text the current government is described as a “failed” “corrupt” and “inefficient” regime, made up of an “elite of no more 100 people” who have pilfered public funds “which could have been used for the benefit of all”. It also states that Venezuela is on the brink of a “humanitarian crisis” whilst the Maduro government is “delegitimised” and in its “terminal phase”. It says nothing about the hard struggle against the United States trying to overthrow the regime fallen out of its favor. In the effort to achieve the goal, the US uses all any methods without hesitation, including economic sabotage, subversive activities against oil and energy sectors, never ending information war, organizing street protests in big cities and the use of local criminals and Columbian paramilitaries to destabilize the situation in the country. The list also includes artificially created shortages of food and basic consumer goods. The operations against Salvador Allende in Chile come to mind. The US uses the same dirty methods in Venezuela. Waiting in line has become a common occurrence in Venezuelan cities since 2013. Different prices in Columbian and Venezuelan shops are one of the reasons. Almost everything is smuggled to Columbia – from super cheap gas to corn meal and sugar. To some extent the military called by President Maduro to fight the cross border smuggling helped to control the situation.

According to the plotters’ plans, Maria Corina Machado was to head the new government. She has been patronized by former US President George Bush Jr. The Machado’s three minute meeting in the White House with the President of the United States in March 2005 attracted unusually high attention of pro-US media. Maria was painted as the most promising politician able to defeat President Hugo Chavez and become a Venezuelan President absolutely loyal to the United States. The revelations about the Machado’s ties with US intelligence services spoiled the plans. She was the founder, former vice president, and former president of the Venezuelan volunteer civil organization Sumate that used US-provided funds. When it was revealed that Machado got large sums of money from special services, she had to keep away from spotlight. Today the United States needs her again. She is ready to go to any length in an effort to overthrow Nicolas Maduro. Washington wants her to lead the country.

The planning has been done. A group of pro-US Latin American presidents is carrying out the mission. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, former Chilean President Sebastian Piñera and former Colombia President Andres Pastrana came to the country under the pretext of expressing their support for Leopoldo López. The real purpose was to see the real situation in the country. Nicolas Maduro never stood in their way. He only said that these people came to support ultra-right wing radicals who do not recognize the government and call for a bloody coup. Maduro warned that the visitors would have their hands soaked in blood if they hobnob with this kind of people.

Of those who signed the statement Machado is the only one who is still at large. A year ago Leopoldo López was put behind bars for inciting street protests resulting in dozens of victims. Antonio Ledezma was detained a few days ago charged with involvement in coup attempt. The conditions of detainment are not so tough; he can continue the struggle against the Bolivarian regime. Recently he sent a letter to media outlets calling for continuing protests and peaceful struggle against Nicolas Maduro to make the current President resign. In the letter he stuck rigidly to the constitution. It says “We must keep up the struggle in the street, in a civil manner with the constitution in our hands and with the truth in front of us” Ledezma wrote. “They [the government] have the weapons but we have the ideas to unite the Venezuelan people. Violence is a pointless vacuum that leads nowhere.” He wants no mercy and calls for solidarity to protect democratic values in Venezuela. He stands out among Venezuelan politicians for his aggressive style and vindictiveness. It is suggested that if the plotters won, he would have headed the Interior Ministry to cleanse the national politics from Bolivarians, Chavistas and other elements hostile to the United States.

After the leading plotters were arrested and their ties with special services and embassies of the United States, Canada and Great Britain were revealed, Nicolas Maduro could say with certainty that another coup attempt orchestrated by Washington was effectively foiled. The tension in the relationship with the United States remains. In December 2014, President Obama endorsed sanctions against top officials of Venezuela accused by Washington of human rights violations. Maduro warned Americans that arbitrary sanctions and other attempts to exert pressure would deteriorate the bilateral relationship even further. He said the United States tried to stage coups in Venezuela a number of times. The US interference into the internal affairs of other countries has become a constant factor to negatively affect the situation in the world.

Jen Psaki, the spokesperson for the United States Department of State, as usually rejected all the accusations of US involvement into the conspiracy to organize a coup in Venezuela. “Well, I think we’ve seen continued accusations, no question, that are false and baseless. And our view continues to be that political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful, and legal. We do not support a political transition in Venezuela by non-constitutional means. We’re not promoting unrest in Venezuela, nor are we attempting to undermine Venezuela’s economy or its government. And this is a continued effort – ongoing, because I do feel like we talk about these incidents once a week at least – about – of the Venezuelan Government to try to distract attention from the country’s economic and political problems and focus and try to distract and make these false accusations.”

Meanwhile, the investigation continues. Nicolas Maduro says Antonio Ledezma tried to abuse his position to organize a violent coup and destabilize the country. New arrests are to follow. The government of Venezuela is adamant in its desire to prevent the events unfolding according to a scenario worked out by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

Obama Failed his Coup in Venezuela (By Thierry Meyssan, Voltairenet.org)

US Aggression Against Venezuela (By Eva Golinger, Counterpunch.org)

Venezuela in the Crosshairs (By Coromoto Jaraba, IntrepidReport.com)

The Matrix Is Real and How It Will Change All Of Our Lives

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: King World News

Americans are the most manipulated people in history. Since 2008, the economy has been manipulated for the benefit of a few oversized banks “too big to fail.” US foreign policy has been manipulated to serve the hegemonic agenda of a handful of neoconservatives. These manipulations have undercut the consumer basis of the US economy and have pushed the American people into a conflict situation with Russia and China.

Lies, US Economic Collapse And Nuclear War

US economic collapse and nuclear war are the two most likely outcomes of Washington’s manipulations of the American people. Time and again, the American public has fallen for transparent lies and orchestrated events. 2015 is a decisive year. Will a credulous people cast off their gullibility, or will they be swept away by economic collapse and war?

There are reasons to believe that the government’s manipulations have overreached and are crossing the point of believability, even on the part of credulous Americans. Let’s review some of these manipulations — first, economic, and then foreign policy.

Unemployment Number Is Meaningless

On January 9, the US government told Americans that the unemployment rate had fallen to a comforting 5.6 percent, an indication that the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing was successful in restoring the US economy. A 5.6 percent rate of unemployment suggests that Americans have a reasonable chance of finding a job. Yet we know there are millions of discouraged workers who have given up looking for a job.

The explanation of this paradox is that the 5.6 percent unemployment rate (U.3) does not include unemployed people who have not looked for a job in the previous four weeks. These unemployed are called “discouraged workers.” If they have been discouraged for less than one year, they are counted in a seldom-reported measure of unemployment (U.6). This rate stands at 11.2 percent, twice as high as the unemployment rate stressed by government and financial media.

The 11.2 percent rate is an official measure, but it is not publicized because it indicates a dismal employment outlook 5.5 years after the 2008 recession was declared over, in June 2009. What kind of recovery is it when the unemployment rate remains at 11.2 percent years after the recession has officially ended?

The Great Lie Exposed

The story worsens. The 11.2 percent rate does not include the millions of unemployed long-term discouraged workers (those discouraged for more than one year). Prior to 1994, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics counted the long-term discouraged as unemployed, and the government of Canada still does. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to include the long-term discouraged. When the long- term discouraged are added to the U.6 measure, the rate of unemployment again doubles, to 23 percent.

In other words, the actual unemployment rate is actually four times higher than the comforting figure released January 9.

Inflation Rate Also Falls Victim

The government engages in similar deception with the inflation rate. If the price of an item in the index rises, a lower-priced item is substituted, thus eliminating inflation by substitution. Inflation also is eliminated by redefining a price rise as a quality improvement.

By undercounting inflation, the government reports price increases as real economic growth, denies cost-of-living increases to Social Security recipients, and justifies paying savers negative real interest rates. These manipulations provide banks with free money, thus boosting bank profits while encouraging the stock market with “good news.”

Americans who search for jobs without success know other Americans in the same situation. As time passes, they learn from experience that the unemployment rate cannot be low and falling when jobs are harder to find. People who shop for food and pay utility bills know inflation is far higher than the government reports. Experience and the passage of time make the government’s numbers less and less believable.

Global Financial Markets Manipulated

The financial markets also are manipulated. To protect the dollar from declining in value due to its overproduction, the Federal Reserve’s bullion bank agents drive down the price of gold and silver by dumping uncovered shorts in the futures market. Since 2011, we have had the extraordinary situation in which the prices of gold and silver have been driven down despite strong demand and constraints on supply — a result that can be achieved only by manipulation in the futures market.

The dollar’s value also is manipulated by foreign central banks in cooperation with Washington. The Japanese and European central banks print yen and euros to protect the dollar’s exchange value. If all major currencies also are being printed, the dollar cannot decline.

The government’s Plunge Protection Team can prevent major stock-market corrections by stepping in and purchasing S&P futures, thus preventing the market’s overvaluation from bursting the bubble.

These manipulations are apparent to experienced investors. Sooner or later, attentive Americans will realize that the government’s deceit is not limited to the marketplace, but extends into foreign policy.

Fooled Over And Over Into War

Ever since the Clinton regime’s demonizations of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Americans have been deceived into supporting expensive wars and foreign-policy positions that are not in their interest. Washington’s demonizations of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Iran and of Muslims generally have resulted in 14 years of wars in which seven or eight countries have been invaded, bombed and attacked with drones. Increasingly, people at home and abroad understand these wars and bombings are based on lies and deceptions.

The destruction of countries and the massive human hurt happened because the US government lied and deceived.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Assad did not use chemical weapons in Syria. Gaddafi did not issue Viagra to his troops to assist in the rape of Libyan women. Iran does not have a nuclear- weapons program.

Millions of Muslims have been killed, maimed and dislocated by these wars, and tens of thousands of American soldiers have been killed and physically or psychologically maimed. The destruction of countries and the massive human hurt happened because the US government lied and deceived.

The most extraordinary aspect of the Charlie Hebdo event is that the French cartoonists are being championed in the name of free speech. Yet the Anglo-American world does not have free speech. Free speech, if it involves criticism or exposure of the government, is being redefined as “domestic extremism.” Criticism of Washington now implies that the critic is hostile to the public, a possible extremist who must be deterred before he inflicts harm on innocents. As Glenn Greenwald noted, try satirizing Israelis in the manner that Charlie Hebdo satirized Muslims, and you will find out how little free speech there is. http://bit.ly/1xYF93V Free speech is used to demonize Washington’s hand-picked enemies. That’s about as far as it goes.

Washington Demonizing Russia

As 2014 drew to a close, Washington was at work demonizing Russia and its president. Russia no more invaded Ukraine than Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But despite years of experience with the government’s foreign-policy lies, polls show that more than 60 percent of the US population has fallen for Washington’s demonization of Russia.

We now have two decades of evidence that Washington uses demonization as a prelude to war. Russia and China, recognizing Washington’s intent to destabilize, have formed a strategic alliance. War with Russia and China would not be like war with Iraq and Libya, or drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan. Unlike Saddam Hussein and Iran, Russia and China do have weapons of mass destruction — plenty of them.

Whereas Americans are not subject to any meaningful retaliation from Washington’s wars against Muslims, Washington’s aggressive warlike policy toward Russia and China, ringing both countries with military bases while demonizing both with false charges, threatens the life of every American and every person on earth. A threat of this magnitude could pull Americans out of their insouciance and force them to confront the government over its dangerous manipulations of public opinion.

Governments successful with their deceptions end up overreaching. The Charlie Hebdo affair possibly is an overreach. The Paris shootings have many characteristics of a false-flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack associated with special forces; yet the suspects later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like they were two different sets of people.

Is This Really The Official Story?

Muslim terrorists are usually prepared to die in the attack; yet the two professionals who hit Charlie Hebdo so hard escaped. Their identities were established by the unprofessional and unlikely act of leaving their identification in the getaway car. This reminds me of the undamaged passport miraculously found among the ruins of the two World Trade Center towers. The incriminating passport was the only undamaged item in the entire ruins and was the basis for identifying the 9/11 alleged hijackers.

It is a plausible inference that the ID left in the getaway car was the ID of one of the two brothers later killed by police, from whom we will never hear anything, and not the ID of the professionals who attacked Charlie Hebdo. An important fact that supports this inference is the report that the third suspect in the attack, Hamyd Mourad, the alleged driver of the getaway car, when seeing his name circulating on social media as a suspect, realized the danger he was in and quickly turned himself in to police for protection against being murdered by security forces as a terrorist.

Hamyd Mourad says he has an ironclad alibi. If so, this makes him the despoiler of a false-flag attack. If that is the case, he is likely to be coerced or tortured into some sort of confession to support the official story. http://bit.ly/1Aai8pJ

Mainstream Media Clueless

The American and European media have ignored this important story. I googled Hamyd Mourad and all I found (January 12) was the main US and European media reporting that the third suspect had turned himself in. The news was reported in a fashion that gave credence to the accusation that the suspect who turned himself in was part of the attack. Not a single US mainstream media source reported that the alleged suspect turned himself in because he had an ironclad alibi. The list of sources that reported Mourad’s turning himself in to police report in a way that can be read as confirmation of his guilt.

Some merely reported it in a headline with no coverage in the report. The list of those I googled includes:

• The Washington Post (January 7, by Griff Witte and Anthony Faiola)

• Die Welt (Germany), “One suspect has turned himself in to police in connection with Wednesday’s massacre at the offices of Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo”

• ABC News (January 7), “Youngest suspect in Charlie Hebdo Attack turns himself in”

• CNN (January 8), “Citing sources, the Agence France Presse news agency reported that an 18-year- old suspect in the attack had surrendered to police.”

High-Ranking Police Official Suddenly Commits Suicide?

Another puzzle in the official story that remains unreported, according to my 6 p.m. Google search on January 12, is the alleged suicide of a high-ranking member of the French Judicial Police who had a lead role in the Charlie Hebdo investigation. For unknown reasons, a police official involved in the most important investigation of a lifetime decided to kill himself in his police office in the middle of the night while writing his report on his investigation. The alternative media reports it: http://bit.ly/1xc8W1W So did the UK Telegraph. But no suspicion is seen in the police official’s death, and as far as the US “presstitute” media is concerned, it did not happen. There are no reports, domestic or foreign, at the time of writing, about his death and whether his report has disappeared.

Media Cloaks The Lies And Crimes Of Government

As Gerald Celente has pointed out for years and as Patrick L. Smith writes in CounterPunch (Vol. 21, No. 10, 2014), the media serve as presstitutes. The media justify withholding information from the public on the basis of patriotism. Patriotism requires the media to support the government, not the truth. Patrick Smith quotes former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, who says in defense of the New York Times misleading the American people: “Journalists are Americans, too. I consider myself to be a patriot.” Of course, journalists lie to us because their careers are controlled by government and corporations dependent on government. Patriotism has little to do with it, but it serves as a cover. Patriotism is like “national security,” a cloak for the lies and crimes of government.

Life In The Matrix

Here we have it. The media lie to us because they are patriots. We believe the lies because we are patriots. More likely, the fact of the matter might be that both the media and the people are morally and spiritually corrupt.

In other words, we willfully live in The Matrix and are our own worst enemy.

Former CIA Official Lied in Boston Bombing Cover-Up

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: MadCowNews

Former top CIA official Graham Fuller lied in a press interview about his former son-in-law, Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of “The Brothers Tsarnaev,” Tamerlan, now dead, and Dzhokhar, soon to go on trial in Boston for allegedly planting a homemade pressure-cooker bomb packed with shrapnel near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

“A story on the Internet implying possible connections between Ruslan (Tsarni) and the Agency through me is absurd,” Fuller said in an Apr 27 2013 story headlined “Former CIA officer: ‘Absurd’ to link uncle of Boston suspects, Agency,” in Washington-D.C.-based Al-Monitor, which bills itself as the “Pulse of the Middle East.”

Fuller was responding to an exclusive report published here headlined “Was Boston Bombers ‘Uncle Ruslan’ with the CIA?”,which he and reporter Laura Rosen churlishly refused to credit, calling it merely a “story on the Internet” even as they labored to debunk it. Yet it was reported and re-published so widely in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror attack that Fuller felt compelled to respond.

Well, compelled to respond may be a little strong. Still, respond he did, in an interview which marshalled arguments to indicate questioning whether Ruslan Tsarni’s connection with the CIA had been through his famous former father-in-law were not just an exercise in futility. They were absurd.

Just to be clear, there is zero evidence to indicate either Uncle Ruslan Tsarni or the CIA hired the Tsarnaev Brothers to blow up Boston. There is, however, abundant evidence that elements of the U.S. Government have been playing footsie with Chechen terrorists, presumably to divert Russia from committing the kind of rash Neo-Communist Gangster stuff they’d be doing already unless we’re very very careful.

Here’s a troubling question: If it was blow-back from that campaign which blew up in Boston—throwing covert U.S. support at Chechen terrorists—do you think anyone in the U.S. Government is eager to let the American people in on that no-doubt classified-for-reasons-of-national-security secret?

Why, the very idea seems—to use Mr. Fuller’s word—absurd.

Uncle Ruslan meets ‘the boys’

In his interview, Graham Fuller admitted that a second bombshell disclosure in an exclusive Apr 26, 2013, report headlined Boston bombers’ uncle married daughter of top CIA official, also was true: The Tsarnaev Brothers’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, was his former son-in-law.

Tsarni was married to Graham Fuller’s daughter Samantha between 1994 and sometime near the dawn of the millenium, Fuller grudgingly admitted. Still, he insisted,without explanation, that suggestions that law enforcement should be checking to see if Ruslan Tsarni had “hooked up” with the CIA through Fuller were “absurd.”

It was an odd assertion. At the very moment he was making it, investigators with the FBI—who remained convinced the Tsarnaev Brothers had outside help and support—were in an intensive manhunt to find foreign connections to the case. Asking questions about links between Ruslan, the CIA, and the bombers would not be seen as out of bounds. Or would they?

Of course, statements by former top CIA officials should be taken with a large grain of salt. Double the salt allowance if the “former” official is still engaged in intrigue in Central Asia.

Hannibal crosses the Alps; Fuller fords his Rubicon

And that’s before discounting fstill further for being widely and infamously known as the man who convinced the Reagan Administration that it would be a neat idea to send a callow Marine Lt. Col. named Oliver North with a cake under one arm and some TOW missiles under the other to a meet-and-greet in Tehran with the Ayatollah.

But back to the body blows being thrown against the credibility of anyone with the temerity of reporting the obvious…

“Fuller retired from the agency almost a decade before the brief marriage,” sniffed Laura Rosen, the reporter selected to give him a sympathetic hearing.

“I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987,” Fuller offered helpfully, suggesting his Agency past had receded into the far reaches of recorded history, a dimly-remembered time located somewhere just this side of Hannibal crossing the Alps.

If Fuller retired, moved to Florida, and taken up golf while decked out in the vibrant hues of lime-green and canary-yellow sweater-slack combinations favored in the Florida golfing fraternity, he might have a point.

That was not, alas, how Fuller chose to spend his dwindling years. Even today he keeps stirring the pot in Central Asia, a long-time player in what previous generations called the Great Game.

He’s a consultant at Rand Corp; and he’s written a prodigious number of books with Great-Game-y titles: “Turkey & the Arab Spring;” “The Arab Shia’a;” “The Future of Political Islam;” “Turkey’s Kurdish Question;” “The Geopolitics of Islam & the West. “

Kazakh-style crony capitalism, illustrated

Ruslan Tsarni’s former father-in-law isn’t his only link to the CIA. There’s also his decades-long work history, discovered in a press release from a dodgy oil-related company with no assets and a ridiculous name whose President had been somehow lured away from a life-long career with Halliburton.

It reveals that Tsarni had worked in Central Asia for the Agency for International Development (USAID)—a U.S. Government Agency often used for cover by the CIA, including a two-year stint in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan during the “Wild West” days of the early 1990’s, when anything that wasn’t nailed down in that country was up for grabs.

At a time when vast natural resources and enormous fortunes were ‘in play’ during the economic free-for-all in the “Stans” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 24-year old Ruslan Tsarni was already a ‘player.’

Ruslan Tsarni is once again working (since 2010) working for USAID. Oddly enough, Russia, the country competing with the US for influence in the region, unceremoniously kicked USAID out of the country just months before the Boston Bombing terror attack, for, according to a Putin spokesmen, encouraging his political opposition.

Ruslan Tsarni & the Congress of Chechen International Organizations

In his interview with Laura Rosen, Fuller uncorked a whopper. Said Fuller,“Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I saw no particular involvement in politics [although] he did try to contact other Chechens around.”

Perhaps Fuller felt that no one would notice. Perhaps he felt immune to fact-checking, a sentiment common among Reagan-era CIA officials. But whatever his motivation, he has been caught in a provable lie. Ruslan Tsarni, as Fuller well knows, has been up to his neck in Central Asian political intrigue for decades.

On August 17,1995, while Ruslan Tsarni and Graham Fuller’s daughter Samantha were still virtual newlyweds, Tsarni incorporated a company in Maryland called the “Congress of Chechen International Organizations.”

Ruslan Tsarni was listed as the company’s resident agent. The group sent aid to Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, including thousands of pairs of combat boots, coordinating its efforts with another so-called “charity,” Benevolence International, designated “financiers of terrorism” by the Treasury Department before being shut down by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

The company’s listed address, 11114 Whisperwood Ln. Rockville MD., was the home address of former top CIA official s Graham Fuller.

Today, the home remains listed in his wife’s name.

“An impromptu press conference aired live on network television”

With worldwide attention on the upcoming trial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, what facts could possibly be being deliberately de-selected and hidden from view?

In “Long Mile Home” a book about the Boston Marathon Bombing by two Boston Globe reporters, everything they have to say about Ruslan Tsarni isn’t much:

“On the Friday morning after Tamerlan was killed, with police still hunting for Dzhokhar, investigators and reporters found their uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, a corporate attorney living outside Washington D.C.

When he emerged after speaking to FBI agents inside his home, he walked up to television cameras and reporters gathered outside looking for the latest in what had become the biggest story in the world. In an impromptu press conference aired live on network television, Tsarni offered condolences to the bombing victims, denounced his nephews, and ordered Dzhokhar to turn himself in.

Asked to explain what provoked the brothers to attack, Tsarni said, “Being losers. Hatred for those who were able to settles themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine. Anything else—anything to do with religion, with Islam –that’s a fraud. It’s a fake.”

Asked how he felt about the United States, Tsarni said, “I respect this country. I love this country.”

An opinion writer for the Washington Post called his words “inspiring,” and said his press conference was “a moment we all needed.”

The New Yorker said he “looked like he might hunt his nephew down himself.”

That’s it. That’s everything they wrote about Ruslan Tsarni. Nothing about his work overseas for USAID. Nothing about being the former son-in-law of a top CIA official, or about running an organization out of his house that was sending aid to Chechen terrorists. Most of all nothing about his being—at the same time he was calling his nephews “losers”— a guy involved, according to the London Telegraph, in the biggest bank fraud in history.

By anyone’s standards, that’s a lot not to report. The authors must be proud.

“Uncle” Ruslan Tsarni is the elephant in the living room

“News,” someone once wrote, “is selection.”

And selection is always based on an ideology and an agenda. Just something to remember the next time you’re reading, or watching, the ‘news.’

As jury selection proceeds in Boston in the upcoming trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the most pressing question about the attack remains one which is so obvious even Time Magazine is asking it: Did They Really Act On Their Own?

The logical place to start would be with Uncle Ruslan, who’s been married to the daughter of a former top CIA official who remains a”player” in Central Asia’s Great Game. But, of course, it ain’t gonna happen.

Whether by accident or design, Ruslan Tsarni played the same role in the aftermath of the Boston terror attack played after the 9/11 terror attack by Rudi Dekkers, manager of Mohamed Atta’s flight school in Venice. And just like Rudi Dekkers before him, his pronouncements were received uncritically.

The mainstream media fawned all over him. He was soon being called “Uncle Ruslan. He became the primary go-to source on the suspects, peddling his brief about the perfidy and all-around loser nature of his two nephews, one of whom, who he’d helped raise and bring to America, had just been killed in a hail of gunfire with police.

There were no tears for Uncle Ruslan. He was “protected,” and no doubt glad for it.

When Graham Fuller fibbed about Ruslan’s political activities, was it out of personal loyalty, or in support of a larger operation which had Ruslan Tsarni leading every 24-hour news cycle for more than a week during the biggest story of the year? Is there anyone in America who still thinks this happens by accident?

What does this say about the CIA’s ability to mold news coverage of a major event?

Already a valuable asset, Uncle Ruslan hadn’t even executed his most valuable task yet. Tsarni would soon be single-handedly responsible for leading the entire mainstream media of the Western World on a two-week long wild goose chase. Like a Pied Piper for the electronic age, he led the world away from whoever had actually punched the Tsarnaev Brothers ticket to jihad, towards something that didn’t even exist, “a chubby red-haired Armenian Muslim exorcist named Misha.”

Uncle Ruslan’s network for “international corruption”

When he was pontificating daily on live network television, why had no one thought to ask him about his contemporaneous involvement in what London newspapers had begun calling “the biggest bank fraud in history?”

That’s the other side, the well-connected oil executive-side, of Ruslan Tsarni, that remains hidden. When one reporter had the bad manners to ask him what he did, Tsarni got touchy, and would say only, “I work for a living.”

End-of-story,CIA-style.

Tsarni is implicated in an international criminal investigation that oddly enough also involves another name currently in the news: Britain’s Prince Andrew, who sold his run-down estate to a Kazakh billionaire banker-turned-fugitive looking for asylum in London who paid Andrew $10 million more than it was worth.

Before he left Almaty for a more exciting life in London, the banker, with Tsarni’s help, had made off with a cool six billion dollars. Six billion. With a “B.”

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