Category Archives: war

The Mysterious Death of an Artist Whose Drawings Were Too Revealing

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Editor’s note: Today marks the birthday of artist Mark Lombardi (born in 1951) and is also the day after the 16th anniversary of his suicide or murder. To learn more about Lombardi’s life, art and the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death, please take a moment to listen to the Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast and/or read the transcript.

A story of banking, organized crime, intelligence, petrodollars and politics…all seen through the lens of innovative Art.

By Jeff Schechtman

Source: WhoWhatWhy.org

Patricia Goldstone’s INTERLOCK is the first biography to explore the life and suspicious death of Mark Lombardi,  a controversial artist whose drawings walked the line between art and information — and revealed the incestous connections between banking, organized crime, politicians, the FBI and the CIA.

His work highlighted such subjects as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Iran-Contra affair, the World Finance Corporation, and the relationship between George W. Bush and Harken Energy Corporation. The mystery of  Lombardi’s alleged suicide has yet to be resolved. On March 22, 2000, he was found hanged. Friends find it suspicious because Lombardi was on the the cusp of achieving the recognition that would crown his career.

Goldstone talks to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about the full scope of Lombardi’s life and work.

For a look at some of Lombardi’s dangerously revealing and possibly fatal work, go here, and here.

http://www.whowhatwhy.org/files/goldstonewwwfinalrevised.mp3

Complete Text Transcript of Audio Podcast:

JEFF SCHECHTMAN:  Welcome back to radio who-what-why. I’m Jeff Schechtman. In March of 2000 the acclaimed conceptual artist, Mark Lombardi, was found hanged in his New York apartment. It was ruled a suicide but Mark Lombardi was no ordinary artist. His work, ‘Interlocks’ as they were called, art was also information shining light on the Vatican, the Mafia, the Bushes, international financiers, and the CIA. In the words of his biographer Patricia Goldstone, his death transformed itself into the ultimate piece of conceptual art. In fact, after his death, Lombardi’s work drew the attention of the most influential art museums in the world as well as the FBI and the CIA.  Patricia Goldstone has been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a bureau chief for Cablevision. She has written for the Washington Post, Maclean’s and The Economist Intelligence Unit. She’s an award-winning playwright and she’s just completed Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. It is my pleasure to welcome Patricia Goldstone here to radio who-what-why.

PATRICIA GOLDSTONE:  Thank you for having me on the show.

JEFF S.:  Great to have you here. First of all, who was Mark Lombardi? It’s not a name that a lot of people instantly recognize.

PATRICIA G.:  That’s quite true. Mark was a conceptual artist, as you said, which means he essentially drew ideas and not water lilies. Some people considered him to be the first great artist of the 21st century. He is unique in the art world because he used interlocks to create his art. Now interlocks are basically a form of flowchart tracing overly cozy relationships between boards of directors. And they’re common in accounting and in some forms of litigation, but they’re very, very unusual in the art world. Mark used interlocks to draw what amounts to a continual visual history of the interconnections between intelligence and organized crime and corporations and governments in the shadow banking industry that we’ve heard so much about since 2007. He was particularly fascinated in tracing things like money laundering and tax evasion. He was actually way ahead of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in releasing a very wide swath of extremely uncomfortable information to the public. What he created was a form of visual wiki-leaks. His own life is actually the missing strand and several of the shadowy visual narratives that make up his work. He died, as you said, a very mysterious death.

JEFF S.:  Talk little bit about how Mark first got interested in the shadowy world that he would come to depict in all of these interlocks.

PATRICIA G.:  Well, Mark’s research skills were well known in the Houston art world which was very progressive in its politics, at least at that time, through major patrons like the de Menils, who were the heirs to the Schlumberger fortune and the owners of the world-famous de Menil collection and the Rothko Chapel where Mark was married.  Sissy Farenthold, a very prominent Texas politician who once ran for president of the United States, was on the board of the Rothko Chapel and she met Mark at a gathering around 1986. Farenthold introduced Mark to an informal investigative salon of young people, in her words, who included a number of lawyers and investigative journalists and prosecutors etc. She also introduced him to Bill White who was changing our Bath former business partner. White was engaged in a long-running series of lawsuits at the time so that the group was digging into interconnections of the Texas Savings and Loan scandals and the Iran Contra funding network. So Mark was tasked to draw out these interconnections in a readable way.

JEFF S.:  To what extent was Lombardi simply creating this conceptual art, creating these interlocks from what was the assumed knowledge of the time, as opposed to doing additional work, additional research, to try and find connections that didn’t exist out there, in the popular press for example?

PATRICIA G.:  That’s a very good question. Mark was actually very methodical and systematic. He worked very much like the way a historian works. He learned about the flow of hot money largely through published material by well-respected academics and journals. His library, which I ran through in the course of researching the book, consisted of hundreds of books on the financial debacle he drew, which he rigorously boiled down to bullet points of essentially academically and dictated information which he compiled in thousands of 3 x 5 index cards. He would arrange these in a narrative design on the floor next to the drawing he was composing, much like a film director uses a storyboard. But as I explained in the book, at that time he was given a very large stash of internal memos and other primary documents by one of the participants in the scandals. These are documents that were never previously published and would be a prize of any serious historian. At the time I discovered that he was taught how to do interlocks by the lawyer who deposed Richard Shelby who was one of the major middlemen in the Iran Contra scandal and in DCI. So his research was quite professionally grounded,

JEFF S.:  Who was it that originally recruited Mark to really start doing this political work in Houston?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, I would say it was Farenthold. And you know, he was already rather motivated personally to do it according to a note I found in his files which was apparently written by him. He had a personal run in with the Bushes and it was hard to put this story together because nobody really wanted to talk about it, not even Mark. But according to what I pieced together, Mark moved down to Houston straight out of Syracuse University to work as a curator at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, which was a very important job for such a young man. He was hired to do that by Jim Harithas who was the director of the museum and Mark’s college teacher and mentor. And from what I understood from a number of sources under pressure from the board, Harithas terminated him after a famous impromtu bread fight at a major art opening which turned into a major brawl when certain of the eminent guests, who were perhaps inflamed by alcohol, the naughty nature of the proceedings started ripping apart the installation and throwing it around. And a couple of unidentified artists sailed into the melee and started punching up the guests. Now Mark never spoke about this incident again and in fact his ex-wife told me that as the reason for his firing was introduced into a conversation he would actually get up and leave the room. But in his personal files I found this note which looks like it was written by him and it reads “In the late 1970s,” – which is when this incident occurred – “I was working as an organizer of art exhibitions in the Houston area. First International Bank, which was George HW Bush’s bank, barged into the scene at about this time effectively vetoing my participation in a large number of projects.” And Mark said in this note, which is an addendum to the journalism that he was attempting, that he embarked on his research as a form of revenge.

JEFF S.:  Was there anybody specifically, a specific individual that he had had a run-in with from the Bush family that really precipitated this?

PATRICIA G.:  No, again, this is shared conjecture on my part. From the way the note is put together, from the sounds of this, the Bushes might’ve been present at this gathering.

JEFF S.: What happened to all of Mark’s file cards after his death?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, all of them is kind of a subjective number. Because I was told by one major collector of his work that there were as many as 40,000 file cards. And this collector had access to his studio. But what is  archived at the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island, the number is about 14,000 cards, a considerably smaller number and when I went to use the cards, all but four on the financial activities of the Bushes, on whom he focused much of his attention, were missing. That really did strike me as extremely odd. I asked the chief archivist if they had archived the Bush material elsewhere, if I had missed it, and she couldn’t answer the question. She referred me to the security department instead.

JEFF S.:  To what extent was his interest in these things driven by a desire to continue to uncover new stuff or really to continue to uncover new areas to expand his art and create more interesting interlocks essentially?

PATRICIA G.:  I think that Mark was primarily an artist. I think in many ways he can be considered the heir to Marcel Duchamp who was the founder of Dada, one of the most important of the early 20th century art movements. Now Duchamp created his revolutionary art out of ordinary objects like the famous Urinal. Mark took another kind of ordinary object, the interlock, and he used it to pursue that to produce his main track of thought: how the political influence that he was essentially tracing took shape in flows of hot money. And those flows continually expanded and pooled together over the period of years that he was tracing them. So yes, he was constantly expanding his artwork. In fact, he linked all of his drawings together to form one continual drawing he called ‘the one continual drawing in my head’.

JEFF S.:  To what degree did accuracy matter to Mark?

PATRICIA G.:  A great deal. A great deal, as I said. He worked like a historian and the file cards are amazing because they are very much like what an academic would use in compiling the bibliography and index of a 600- page work. So I think he was very, very scrupulous in his research and he relied on primarily unpublished material but by academics and journalists.

JEFF S.:  How was he seen in the art world, his early work,  and as his work progressed?

PATRICIA G:  He was a late bloomer. He turned out his initial body of work at white-hot speed in the mid 1990s when he was already in his 40s. And he garnered quite a bit of attention with this one body of drawings.  He had a solo exhibit in Houston. And the amazing thing about these drawings was that they answered a lot of the questions that John Kerry’s Senate Investigating Committee on BCCI which was winding down at about the same time that Mark was turning out his work, he answered questions that if you read the Kerry committee report they said they didn’t have the time or the resources to pursue. And he was this artist sitting on the floor of a tiny studio in Houston pursuing them.

JEFF S.:  How did the subjects of these pieces of art, those that he really reflected in this interlocking aspect of crime and as you say, ‘hot money’, how did they react to what he was doing?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, with some discomfort, as you might expect. I was told a story by one of my interviews that  one of Neil Bush’s friends came to Mark’s first solo show in Houston and he was looking at a painting on the wall. It was the Silverado painting in which Neil figures and he remarked to someone “Well, I’m going to have to tell Neil that he is represented here.”

JEFF S.:  Talk a little bit about the evolution of his work. How did it progress? How were some his later works and later interlocks different from the early ones?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, the work became much more complex as he progressed because it all interconnected. So the genesis of his work really was a huge bank called BCCI that some people may not remember. It was a bank that billed itself as Bank of America for the Third World but in fact it was the CIA’s first global money laundry and BCCI was very connected to the subprime crises of the 1970s and 1980s and it was officially closed down in the 1990s. But Mark really developed all of his drawings from his initial two boxes of research into BCCI and ended up in this immense continuum of drawings that makes up  his work tracing the genesis of BCCI all the way back to a trove of stolen World War II plunder.

JEFF S.:  Talk about the FBI and the CIA and their interest in Mark’s work.

PATRICIA G.:  Well, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Research actually all had to study Mark’s work in the wake of 9/11 which wasn’t really made public until my book came out. They were  looking for clues for two terrorist social networks. That’s a subject Mark covered in some of his drawings and also for traffic analysis tools which is kind of a funny story because although the NSA, which also studied Mark’s work, may be very good at collecting data on all of us but are not terrific in analyzing it. And when they feed it into a main computer, the visualization tends to come out looking like what they call ‘house of spagetti’. But Mark’s work is actually used in the computer science world to study traffic analysis because he spaced his players in a particular way that makes them very easy to read and sort of aesthetically pleasing and directs the eye in  certain ways.

JEFF S.:  Tell us a little bit about Mark’s personality . What was he like?

PATRICIA G.:  He was a fascinating person. He was a  workingclass guy from Syracuse, New York, who had nothing more than a bachelors in fine arts. And he was intensely ambitious, untrained in finance or anything like that but very, very quick intuitively. And his talent as an artist was to be able to apprehend a lot of visual information all at once and to get at the big picture that lies below the surface of things. I suppose many people would call him obsessive. People have tended to use Aspergers as an explanation for his ability to focus very intensely for a very long period of time. I don’t think that that is quite fair or true. Mark was very charming, very funny, exuberant, impish, intensely attractive to women, and very good socially when he wanted to be. And very good verbally. He was a shrewd communicator and a cunning player of the art game who never quite revealed what he was really up to. I mean nobody in the art world, for example, had a clue that he had actually created his work out of interlocks.

JEFF S.:  Talk about what happened in March of 2000.

PATRICIA G.:  Mark was in the process of opening a very important show at one of the iconic exhibition spaces in New York and everything seemed to be going beautifully for him. He was getting attention, he was getting a great deal of critical acclaim that people were lining up to buy his work, he was making money which had always been an issue for him. His personal life was a bit rocky but that was not unusual. He had recently broken up with a girlfriend depending on whom you talk to and I heard many, many different renditions of this story and in the course of interviewing over 80 people who knew him for over a 50 year period. Depending on whom you talk to he was either happy about that or unhappy about that but he was certainly seeing other women at the time. So he had had a suspicious flood in his studio about three weeks before the show opened. His masterwork, which was the third version of his BCCI series, was very badly water damaged, and this drawing is remarkable because he actually strung all of his previous drawings together on a series of timelines so that you can see exactly how all the scandals from the 1970s onwards sort of add up to this one huge scandal which is BCCI. That painting was almost, almost destroyed but it does remain readable today. So Mark re-created it in a mad workspace. He reconstructed the whole drawing in the space of about four days and some people say that the strain of doing that drove him into a suicidal depression. I don’t quite buy that because he did open the show very successfully with the drawing that he had re-created and people told me that he was quite happy with that drawing. Regardless, about three weeks later he was found hanged in his studio. And the police reports which I got hold of in the beginning of my research, were rather sketchy. A lot of things didn’t ring true. The time of death was never established, for one. Establishing death by hanging is a controversial area of forensic pathology, and the police based their very hasty verdict of death by suicide on the testimony of one witness who appeared increasingly unreliable during the interview process. I actually did track down the two cops who found him , one of whom was a rookie at the time, still very disturbed by the experience. He was a policeman who actually pushed open the transom which is how they got into Mark’s studio and there was Mark staring him straight in the face because he didn’t hang from a sprinkler pipe and he had an open bottle of champagne suspended beside him. Till today I have never really seen anyone take a drink on the way out.

JEFF S.:  Talk about the flood. What is it that made it suspicious? What do we know about that?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, it was a sprinkler flood. And a lot of rumor and conjecture exist in the art world about Mark’s suicide/death/murder. But one artist told me what sounded like a rather implausible story that he had tried to hang himself earlier, at the time of this flood from one of the sprinkler pipes, and that his weight is what broke the pipe and that’s what caused the flood. That’s actually very difficult for that kind of a factor to trigger a flood. I mean sprinkler pipes go off because of fire or they can go off because of a sharp blow applied to a pipe from an upstairs apartment to the gage, to the gage on the pipe line or to apply heat to that gage, that can trigger a flood in the downstairs apartment but someone hanging himself, no, not very likely.

JEFF S.:  Talk a little bit about whether or not there was any history of depression or mental illness or anything else with respect to him.

PATRICIA G.:  No, there was no critical history of depression. In retrospect certain members of Mark’s family told me that they felt he was depressed. However, his mother, who was really the closest person to call me before she died – she died in 2012 – she told me that she had talked to him a couple of days before he was found and he said he was absolutely jubilant at the success his work had brought him and at the prospect of moving in with his girlfriend. So, you know, a lot of this doesn’t compute.

JEFF S.:  The police report after his death, and all the investigation was, as you talk about it, a bit sketchy. Talk about that and was that normal at the time in terms of police procedure or was that unusual?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, the circumstances surrounding his death were really quite strange. He had no clinical history of depression and his mother to whom he was closest and to whom he spoke almost daily, told me that he had told her that he was actually very happy a couple of weeks, a couple of days rather, before he died. And I believe that because Mark was quite single-mindedly ambitious and he was getting the success that he had worked for, for decades by this time, to achieve. He may have been unhappy at the breakup of a relationship but he was extremely attractive to women and extremely attracted to women, and in fact he was seeing somebody else at the time. So I actually began my research by getting hold of the police report through a friend of mine in the homicide division in New York, and there were a lot of things that didn’t ring quite true. A time of death was never established for one thing and that’s very important in this kind of investigation and standard procedure and establishing death by hanging is a controversial area in forensic pathology. That and the fact that the police based their very hasty verdict of death by suicide to close the case today on the testimony of one witness who appeared increasingly unreliable during the interview process. I actually ended up tracking down the two cops who found him. One of them who was a rooky at the time and showed signs of doubt; that and the other pillar, that there are other pillars of evidence which was the absence of signs of struggle and the fact that the door was securely locked from the inside are also questionable as I explained in my book. But the exact nature of what’s in the drawing which can cause any number of people to want him dead.

JEFF S.:  Is there anything in the drawings, all of them, that was what we would classify, I suppose, is original material? One of the things you’ve talked about is that in many ways he worked based upon academic reports, in journalism, and in all the material that he could get his hands on, and he was graded at bringing all of this together in these interlocks. But was there anything in this material that was revealing of anything that hadn’t been revealed anywhere else?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, I did find in his files a large cache of internal memos and other primary documents from James R Bath Company Highway and some of these connections come up in in the George W. Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stevens drawing which was of interest to the FBI after Mark’s death.

JEFF S.:   Did the FBI ever do anything with any of that to your knowledge?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, it might be known that the FBI went to the Whitney after Mark died to look at one of his big BCCI drawings but the FBI was really interested in the relationship between how bin Mahfouz was anchored to the Saudi Royals and certain Islamic charities in Virginia that were allegedly funding Al Qaeda and that the FBI ended up raiding in 2002. And there are some clues to those interconnections in the Lombardi and the George W. Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stephens drawing which focuses on Bush’s oil companies. Now bin Mahfouz allegedly bankrolled Arbusto which was one of George W. Bush’s companies through James Bath who represented Saudi business interests in America; and one of the documents I did find in Mark’s files was a copy of the 1976 trust agreement between James Bath  and Salem bin Laden who was Osama’s older brother and died in a crash a few years later. bin Mahfouz was also allegedly the real owner of that aircraft leasing company Skyways. Now interestingly, bin Mahfouz himself doesn’t actually appear in this drawing. However, Salem bin Laden and also Abdullah Taka Bakhsh who was a major Harken shareholder and CEO of a Halliburton subsidiary who had close ties to bin Mahfouz does appear as a central hub or connection along with James Bath and so does Fox’s representative on the Harken board, an influential business name, who opened the 2000 Republican national convention with the Muslim benediction on Bush’s behalf and later successfully protested the FBI raid on the Virginia charities in a private meeting with Bush’s treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill.

JEFF S.:  If not suicide, where does your speculation, or where can speculation lead in terms of the cause of Mark’s death?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, I have to point out that Mark was actually pretty equal opportunity in his finger-pointing. He did focus a lot of attention on the Bushes for the reasons I go into in the book and he did die during the presidential election in which at least one of his drawings might have had an impact.  That he did a number of important drawings that focused attention on the Clintons and knowing a little group of Indonesians  and the Riady family who were the sources of Chinese influence peddling during the Clinton administration. Also Mark Rich who is famously connected to the Clintons was one of the key middlemen that hooked Mark’s drawings together as is Jackson Stephens who funded both the Bush and the Clinton campaign, so you know overall Mark was really more like a social scientist and political partisan and that I believed his overwhelming interest was in getting this whole financial system done on paper for everyone to see. And in fact, he had reportedly been threatened in the late 1990s. He got a call from someone telling him to back off investigating the five major New York Times families who were the subject of a preparatory sketch he had been working on. He mentioned it to a Williamsburg publication and it was repeated after his death by a German freelance journalist. So there are a lot of names in these drawings. One of them told me that he wouldn’t know a Lombardi drawing from a Mona Lisa.

JEFF S.:  In the material that you’ve uncovered since in your investigation and your work on this, does it lead anyplace in particular?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, you know I have to be careful to point out that I don’t have anything like the smoking gun, that I don’t have the power to pin people and I have many, many different stories from almost everyone I talked to on this subject. But the heft of circumstantial evidence makes me feel that at the minimum a lot more questions should have been asked at the time of his death.

JEFF S.:  And is your conclusion that didn’t really suicide just seem the most unlikely scenario?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, it’s not my impression of Mark as a human being. He was tremendously vital and totally committed to his work. They said he was getting where he wanted to go and he was quite ebullient really, as a person, very high energy. Now of course, you know, I didn’t know the man and it’s always possible for certain personality types to be very volatile and from what people told me he was particularly, when he had been drinking, but no, it doesn’t stack up with where he was going in his life at the time. Because he was really on the verge of very major success.

JEFF S.:  Is there any evidence that he was on to something or that he had made a connection, or that his research had taken him somewhere that was new and heretofore undiscovered?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, that’s an interesting question. One of his drawings, one of his late drawings is called George

Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stephens and the drawing focuses on relationships that apparently – my source for this was a rather particular intelligence newsletter that came out in March of 2000­ ­­- said that the Bush campaign might run into trouble over the Bush relationship with Khaled bin Mahfouz who was anchored to the Saudi royals and very much a presence in Houston. This drawing that Mark had done focused on that relationship.

JEFF S.:  What was the interest like in his work after his death?

PATRICIA G.:  Well, his prices took off, certainly. One of his larger drawings recently went up for sale at one of the most prominent art galleries in the country priced at $450,000. He’s been quite avidly collected. The Whitney  has a major holding of his works, the Museum of  Modern Art has a major holding of his work. A number of eminent computer scientists collect his works. There’s  Robert in Germany who I think owns four of the drawings. Robert, whom I interviewed, is engaged in trying to convert Mark’s drawings into hypertext, stringtext, which means you click on the name and it pulls up the whole history. Through the drawings of the problems he told me he had had in completing this, was that some of the drawings are not available to view because they are in private collections.

JEFF S.:  is there any work that disappeared after his death that anybody is aware of?

PATRICIA G.:  The George Bush Harken Energy drawing did migrate to Germany for quite a number of years but it’s back in the United States now. Some people that I interviewed said they felt that drawings had disappeared from his studio but his studio was not actually very well secured. But it’s after his death and impossible to substantiate that.

JEFF S.:  Patricia Goldstone: the book is Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. Patricia, thanks so much for spending time with us here on radio who-what-why.

PATRICIA:  Oh, thank you for having me on the show.

JEFF S.: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on radio who-what-why. I hope you’ll join us next week for another radio who-what-why podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share it and help other people find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to who-what-why.org/donate

 

Related article:  Mark Lombardi: Global (Conspiracy) Network by Uri Dowbenko

 

Exposing the Libyan Agenda: A Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails

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By Ellen Brown

Source: Web of Debt

Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.

The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.

But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”

US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”

Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model throughout Africa.

But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country. Today the situation is so dire that President Obama has asked his advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya, and the Defense Department is reportedly standing ready with “the full spectrum of military operations required.”

The Secretary of State’s victory lap was indeed premature, if what we’re talking about is the officially stated goal of humanitarian intervention. But her newly-released emails reveal another agenda behind the Libyan war; and this one, it seems, was achieved.

Mission Accomplished?

Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, nearly a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton aide who gained notoriety when he testified against Monica Lewinsky. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads in part:

Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

In a “source comment,” the original declassified email adds:

According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:

  1. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,
  2. Increase French influence in North Africa,
  3. Improve his internal political situation in France,
  4. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
  5. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa

Conspicuously absent is any mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil.

Other explosive confirmations in the newly-published emails are detailed by investigative journalist Robert Parry. They include admissions of rebel war crimes, of special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, and of Al Qaeda embedded in the US-backed opposition. Key propaganda themes for violent intervention are acknowledged to be mere rumors. Parry suggests they may have originated with Blumenthal himself. They include the bizarre claim that Qaddafi had a “rape policy” involving passing Viagra out to his troops, a charge later raised by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in a UN presentation. Parry asks rhetorically:

So do you think it would it be easier for the Obama administration to rally American support behind this “regime change” by explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya’s wealth and maintain French neocolonial influence over Africa – or would Americans respond better to propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent children? Bingo!

Toppling the Global Financial Scheme

Qaddafi’s threatened attempt to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by Western interests. In 2011, Sarkozy reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat to the financial security of the world. How could this tiny country of six million people pose such a threat? First some background.

It is banks, not governments, that create most of the money in Western economies, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged. This has been going on for centuries, through the process called “fractional reserve” lending. Originally, the reserves were in gold.  In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt replaced gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold remained the reserve currency internationally.

In 1944, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to unify this bank-created money system globally. An IMF ruling said that no paper money could have gold backing. A money supply created privately as debt at interest requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF. The loans came with strings attached, including “structural adjustment” policies involving austerity measures and privatization of public assets.

After 1944, the US dollar traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no longer able to maintain the dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal with OPEC to “back” the dollar with oil, creating the “petro-dollar.”  Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be deposited in Wall Street and other international banks.

In 2001, dissatisfied with the shrinking value of the dollars that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein broke the pact and sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly followed, accompanied by widespread destruction of the country.

In Libya, Qaddafi also broke the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency.

As these developments are detailed by blogger Denise Rhyne:

For decades, Libya and other African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold standard.  Libya’s al-Qadhafi and other heads of African States had wanted an independent, pan-African, “hard currency.”

Under al-Qadhafi’s leadership, African nations had convened at least twice for monetary unification.  The countries discussed the possibility of using the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only possible money to buy African oil.

Until the recent US/NATO invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL).  The Libyan bank was 100% state owned and independent.  Foreigners had to go through the CBL to do business with Libya.  The Central Bank of Libya issued the dinar, using the country’s 143.8 tons of gold.

Libya’s Qadhafi (African Union 2009 Chair) conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one gold currency (United States of Africa).  In 2004, a pan-African Parliament (53 nations) laid plans for the African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by 2023.

African oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for oil/gas.

Showing What Is Possible

Qaddafi had done more than organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial independence could be achieved. His greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank.

That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO not only bombed the pipeline but finished off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary to repair it. Crippling a civilian irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population hardly looks like humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor Maximilian Forte put it in his heavily researched book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa:

[T]he goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US.

Mystery Solved

Hillary Clinton’s emails shed light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy Journal in 2011:

This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences. I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising.

It was all highly suspicious, but as Alex Newman concluded in a November 2011 article:

Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow . . . may never be known for certain – at least not publicly.

There the matter would have remained – suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and corruption – but for the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of global banking, money and oil.

Errata: Sidney Blumenthal is not an attorney, as originally stated in this article. When he earned notoriety as Bill Clinton’s defender against Monica Lewinsky, it was as special adviser for the Clintons.

__________________

Ellen Brown is an attorney and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com. Listen to “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown” on PRN.FM.

 

Related Podcast:  Progressive Commentary Hour – 03.15.16 James and Joanne Moriarty on the real motives behind the 2011 invasion of Libya.

Hillary Clinton Breaks the Irony Meter

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By Kevin Carson

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

At the March 9 Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton had this to say about competitor Bernie Sanders’s favorable comments on Castro’s Cuba and the Sandinista regime in the ’80s:  “if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions…, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.” This, coming from a former Secretary of State who backed a right-wing coup in Honduras and proudly name-drops Henry Kissinger — Henry Kissinger! — as a close friend and mentor, is the kind of thing the Onion can’t compete with.

If Kissinger was known for anything in his years as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, it was installing dictators who oppressed, disappeared and imprisoned people. He oversaw a wave of coups that swept South America in the late ’60s and ’70s, installing right-wing military regimes that tortured, murdered or disappeared dissidents by the thousands, and where a common fate for labor and peasant activists was to be found in a ditch with their faces hacked off. Under Kissinger the U.S. actively supported Operation Condor — the program by which these South American dictators used torture and murder to suppress opposition — with military aid and technical assistance. He gave the green light to Indonesia’s genocidal invasion of East Timor.

Clinton has a long history of close personal friendship with this monster, and indeed touts herself as something of a protege. According to both Hillary and Bill, Kissinger praised her for running the State Department better than anybody in decades. And well might he praise her, because she’s followed in his footsteps in many ways. As Secretary of State, she oversaw the sale of millions of dollars worth of arms to despotic regimes that oppressed, disappeared and imprisoned people for expressing their opinions — many of which regimes were also large donors to the Clinton Foundation. And while we’re on the subject of people being murdered and disappeared, how about Berta Caceres — an activist murdered by the right-wing Honduran regime whose seizure of power Clinton backed in 2009?

As senator, Clinton voted to authorize George Bush’s criminal war of aggression on Iraq, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths since 2003. She says now it was “a mistake.” It was a mistake all right. She mistakenly believed the vote would make her more viable as a future presidential candidate. She mistakenly predicted the way the political winds would be blowing when she decided to run for president.

And don’t forget Clinton’s support for the Obama administration’s indiscriminate use of drones for extrajudicial killing. Many of the victims were civilians, and hundreds of them were actually children.

If you add it all up, Hillary Clinton still isn’t quite the war criminal her old friend and mentor Henry Kissinger is. Those are some big, bloody shoes to fill. But if she’s elected she’ll grow into them.

The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the Politicians, by the Military, for the Corporations

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy… But I knew it wasn’t a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head… The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.” ― Historian Howard Zinn

America is at a crossroads.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age—the age of authoritarianism. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

Don’t believe me?

Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself. The landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.

The Executive Branch: Whether it’s the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, the systematic surveillance of journalists and regular citizens, the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, or the occupation of Afghanistan, Barack Obama has surpassed his predecessors in terms of his abuse of the Constitution and the rule of law. President Obama, like many of his predecessors, has routinely disregarded the Constitution when it has suited his purposes, operating largely above the law and behind a veil of secrecy, executive orders and specious legal justifications. Rest assured that no matter who wins this next presidential election, very little will change. The policies of the American police state will continue.

The Legislative Branch:  It is not overstating matters to say that Congress may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America. Abuses of office run the gamut from elected representatives neglecting their constituencies to engaging in self-serving practices, including the misuse of eminent domain, earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracting in return for personal gain and campaign contributions, having inappropriate ties to lobbyist groups and incorrectly or incompletely disclosing financial information. Pork barrel spending, hastily passed legislation, partisan bickering, a skewed work ethic, graft and moral turpitude have all contributed to the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with congressional leadership. No wonder 86 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

The Judicial Branch: The Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the United States Supreme Court have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

Shadow Government: America’s next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He or she will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. Referred to as the Deep State, this shadow government is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

Law Enforcement: By and large the term “law enforcement” encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, local police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace but now extensions of the military, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. In the latest move to insulate police from charges of misconduct, Virginia lawmakers are considering legislation to keep police officers’ names secret, ostensibly creating secret police forces.

A Suspect Surveillance Society: Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write. By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do. By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Consequently, in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”

Military Empire: America’s endless global wars and burgeoning military empire—funded by taxpayer dollars—have depleted our resources, over-extended our military and increased our similarities to the Roman Empire and its eventual demise. The U.S. now operates approximately 800 military bases in foreign countries around the globe at an annual cost of at least $156 billion. The consequences of financing a global military presence are dire. In fact, David Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., believes there are “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that contributed to the fall of Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

That brings me to the final and most important factor in bringing about America’s shift into authoritarianism: “we the people.” We are the government. Thus, if the government has become a tyrannical agency, it is because we have allowed it to happen, either through our inaction or our blind trust.

Essentially, there are four camps of thought among the citizenry when it comes to holding the government accountable. Which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government—or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time.

In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing, despite the government’s repeated failures in this department. In the second camp are those who not only don’t trust the government but think the government is out to get them. In the third camp are those who see government neither as an angel nor a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound “down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.”

Then there’s the fourth camp, comprised of individuals who pay little to no attention to the workings of government, so much so that they barely vote, let alone know who’s in office. Easily entertained, easily distracted, easily led, these are the ones who make the government’s job far easier than it should be.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of the presidential candidates, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good evangelism that passes for religion today. What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms.

The powers-that-be want us to remain divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

The only distinction that matters anymore is where you stand in the American police state. In other words, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.

Colonialism and Imperialism: Two Most Deadly Forms of Terrorism

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By Andre Vltchek

Source: Dissident Voice

Terrorism has many forms and many faces, but the most terrible of them is cold cruelty.

We are asked to believe that terrorists consist of dirty lunatics, running around with bombs, machine guns and explosive belts. That’s how we are told to imagine them.

Many of them are bearded; almost all are “foreign looking”, non-white, non-Western. In summary they are wife beaters, child rapists and Greek and Roman statue destroyers.

Actually, during the Cold War, there were some white looking “terrorists” – the left-wingers belonging to several revolutionary cells, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. But only now we are learning that the terrorist acts attributed to them were actually committed by the Empire, by several European right-wing governments and intelligence services. You remember, the NATO countries were blowing up those trains inside the tunnels, or bombing entire train stations…

It “had to be done”, in order to discredit the Left, just to make sure that people would not become so irresponsible as to vote for the Communists or true Socialists.

There were also several Latin American ‘terror’ groups – the revolutionary movements fighting for freedom and against oppression, mainly against Western colonialism. They had to be contained, liquidated, and if they held power, overthrown.

But terrorists became really popular in the West only after the Soviet Union and the Communist Block were destroyed through thousands of economic, military and propaganda means, and the West suddenly felt too exposed, so alone without anyone to fight. Somehow it felt that it needed to justify its monstrous oppressive acts in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

It needed a new “mighty”, really mighty, enemy to rationalize its astronomical military and intelligence budgets. It was not good enough to face a few hundred ‘freaks’ somewhere inside the Colombian jungle or in Northern Ireland or Corsica. There had to be something really huge, something matching that ‘evil’ Soviet “threat”.

Oh how missed that threat was, suddenly! Just a threat of course; not the danger of egalitarian and internationalist ideals…

And so the West linked terrorism with Islam, which is one of the greatest cultures on earth, with 1.6 billion followers. Islam is big and mighty enough, to scare the shit out of the middle class housewives in some Western suburb! And on top of that, it had to be contained anyway, as it was essentially too socialist and too peaceful.

At that time in history, all great secular and socialist leaders of Muslim countries, (like in Iran, Indonesia and Egypt), were overthrown by the West, their legacy spat on, or they were simply banned.

But that was not enough for the West!

In order to make Islam a worthy enemy, the Empire had to first radicalize and pervert countless Muslim movements and organizations, then create the new ones, consequently training, arming and financing them, so they could really look frightening enough.

There is of course one more important reason why “terrorism”, particularly Muslim “terrorism”, is so essential for the survival of Western doctrines, exceptionalism and global dictatorship: it justifies the West’s notion of absolute cultural and moral superiority.

This is how it works:

For centuries, the West has been behaving like a mad bloodthirsty monster. Despite the self-glorifying propaganda being spread by Western media outlets all over the world, it was becoming common knowledge that the Empire was raping, murdering and plundering in virtually all corners of the Globe. A few more decades and the world would see the West exclusively as a sinister and toxic disease. Such a scenario had to be prevented by all means!

And so the ideologues and propagandists of the Empire came up with a new and brilliant formula: Let’s create something that looks and behaves even worse than we do, and then we could trumpet that we are still actually the most reasonable and tolerant culture on earth!

And let’s make a real pirouette: let’s fight our own creation – let’s fight it in the name of freedom and democracy!”

This is how the new generation; the new breed of “terrorist” was born. And it lives! It is alive and well! It is multiplying like Capek’s Salamanders.

*****Western terrorism is not really discussed, although its most extreme and violent forms are battering the world relentlessly and have for a long time, with hundreds of millions of victims piling up everywhere.

Even the legionnaires and gladiators of the Empire, like the Mujaheddin, Al-Qaida, or ISIS, can never come close to the savagery that has been demonstrated time and again by their British, French, Belgian, German or US masters. Of course they are trying very hard to match their gurus and bread-givers, but they are just not capable of their violence and brutality.

It takes “Western culture” to butcher some 10 million people in just one single geographic area, in almost one go!

*****So what is real terrorism, and how could ISIS and others follow its lead? They say that ISIS is decapitating their victims. Bad enough. But who is their teacher?

For centuries, the empires of Europe were murdering, torturing, raping and mutilating people on all continents of the world. Those who were not doing so directly, were “investing” into colonialist expeditions, or sending its people to join genocidal battalions.

King Leopold II and his cohorts managed to exterminate around 10 million people of Western and Central Africa, in what is now known as the Congo. He was hunting people down like animals, forcing them to work on his rubber plantations. If he thought that they were not filling up his coffers fast enough, he did not hesitate to chop off their hands, or burn entire village populations inside their huts, alive.

10 million victims vanished. 10 million! And it did not take place in some distant past, in the “dark ages”, but in the 20th century, under the rule of so-called constitutional monarchy, and self-proclaimed democracy. How does it compare with the terrorism that is ruling over the territories occupied by ISIS? Let’s compare numbers and brutality level!

And the Democratic Republic of Congo has, since 1995, lost again close to 10 million people in a horrid orgy of terror, unleashed by the West’s proxies, Rwanda and Uganda (see the trailer to my film “Rwanda Gambit”).

Germans performed holocausts in South-Western Africa, in what is now Namibia. The Herero tribe was exterminated, or at least close to 90% of it was. People were first kicked out from their land and from their homes, and driven into the desert. If they survived, the German pre-Nazi expeditions followed, using bullets and other forms of mass killing. Medical experiments on humans were performed, to prove the superiority of the Germanic nation and the white race.

These were just innocent civilians; people whose only crime was that they were not white, and were sitting on land occupied and violated by the Europeans.

The Taliban never came close to this, or even ISIS!

To this day, the Namibian government is demanding the return of countless heads severed from its people: heads that were cut off and then sent to the University of Freiburg and several hospitals in Berlin, for medical experiments.

Just imagine, ISIS chopping thousands of European heads, in order to perform medical experiments aiming to demonstrate the superiority of the Arab race. It would be absolutely unthinkable!

Local people were terrorized in virtually all colonies grabbed by Europe, something that I have described in detail in my latest 840-page book “Exposing Lies of the Empire”.

What about the Brits and their famines, which they were using as population control and intimidation tactics in India! In Bengal at least 5 million died in 1943 alone, 5.5 million in 1876-78, 5 million in 1896-97, to name just a few terrorist acts committed by the British Empire against a defenseless population forced to live under its horrid and oppressive terrorist regime!

What I have mentioned above are just 3 short chapters from the long history of Western terrorism. An entire encyclopedia could be compiled on the topic.

But all this sits far from Western consciousness. European and North American masses prefer not to know anything about the past and the present. As far as they are concerned, they rule the world because they are free, bright and hard working. Not because for centuries their countries have plundered and murdered, and above all terrorized the world forcing it into submission.

The elites know everything, of course. And the more they know, the more they put that knowledge to work.

Terrorist trade and experience are passed on from Western masters to their new Muslim recruits.

The Mujahideen, Al-Qaida, ISIS – on closer examination, their tactics of intimidation and terrorization are not original at all. They are built on imperialist and colonialist practices of the West.

News about this, or even about the terror that has been inflicted on the Planet by the West, is meticulously censored. You would never see them on the programs broadcast by the BBC, or read about them in mainstream newspapers and magazines.

On the other hand, the violence and ruthlessness of the client terrorist organizations are constantly highlighted. They are covered in their tiniest detail, repeated, and “analyzed”.

Everybody is furious, horrified! The UN is “deeply concerned”, Western governments are “outraged”, and the Western public “has had enough – it does not want immigrants from those terrible countries that are breeding terrorism and violence”.

The West “simply has to get involved”. And here comes the War on Terror.

It is a war against the West’s own Frankenstein. It is a war that is never meant to be won. Because if it is won, god forbid, there would have to be peace, and peace means cutting defense budgets and also dealing with the real problems of our Planet.

Peace would mean the West looking at its own past. It would mean thinking about justice and rearranging the entire power structures of the Planet. And that can never be allowed.

And so the West is “playing” war games; it is “fighting” its own recruits (or pretending to fight them), while innocent people are dying.

No part of the world, except the West, would be able to invent and unleash something so vile and barbaric as ISIS or Al-Nusra!

Look closer at the strategy of these group-implants: it has no roots in Muslim culture whatsoever. But it is fully inspired by the Western philosophy of colonialist terrorism: “If you don’t fully embrace our dogmas and religion, then we will cut off your head, slash your throat, rape your entire family or burn your village or city to the ground. We will destroy your grand cultural heritage as we did in South America 500 years ago, and in so many other places.”

And so on and so on! It would really require great discipline not to see the connections!

*****In 2006 I was visiting my friend, a former President of Indonesia, and a great progressive Muslim leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, (known in Indonesia as “Gus Dur”). Our meeting was held at the headquarters of his massive Muslim body Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). At that time the NU was the biggest Muslim organization in the world.

We were discussing capitalism and how it was destroying and corrupting Indonesia. Gus Dur was a “closet socialist”, and that was one of the main reasons why the servile pro-Western Indonesian “elites” and the military deposed him out of the Presidency in 2001.

When we touched on the topic of “terrorism”, he suddenly declared in his typically soft, hardly audible voice: “I know who blew up the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. It was done by our own intelligence services, in order to justify the increase in their budget, as well as aid that they have been receiving from abroad.”

Of course, the Indonesian army, intelligence services and police consist of a special breed of humans. For several decades, since 1965, they have been brutally terrorizing their own population, when the pro-Western coup toppled the progressive President Sukarno and brought to power a fascist military clique, backed by the predominantly Christian business gang. This terror took between 2-3 million lives in Indonesia itself, as well as in East Timor and (until now) in occupied and thoroughly plundered Papua.

3 genocides in only 5 decades!

The Indonesian coup was one of the greatest terrorist acts in the history of mankind. The rivers were clogged with corpses and changed their color to red.

Why? So that capitalism would survive and Western mining companies could have their booty, at the expense of a completely ruined Indonesian nation. So the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) would not be able to win elections, democratically.

But in the West, those 1965 intensive massacres planned by the Empire were never described as “terrorism”. Blowing up a hotel or a pub always is however, especially if they are frequented by Western clientele.

Now Indonesia has its own groups of “terrorists”. They returned from Afghanistan where they fought on behalf of the West against the Soviet Union. They are returning from the Middle East now. The recent attacks in Jakarta could be just a foreplay, a well-planned beginning of something much bigger, maybe an opening of the new “front” of toy soldiers of the Empire in Southeast Asia.

For the West and its planners – the more chaos the better.

Had Abdurrahman Wahid been allowed to stay as the President of Indonesia, there would, most likely, have been no terrorism. His country would have undergone socialist reforms, instituted social justice, rehabilitated Communists and embraced secularism.

In socially balanced societies, terrorism does not thrive.

That would be unacceptable to the Empire. That would mean – back to Sukarno’s day! The most populous Muslim nation on earth cannot be allowed to go its own way, to aim for socialism, and to annihilate terrorist cells.

It has to be at the edge. It has to be ready to be used as a pawn. It has to be scared and scary! And so it is.

*****The games the West is playing are complex and elaborate. They are murky and nihilist. They are so destructive and brutal that even the sharpest analysts are often questioning their own eyes and judgments: “Could all this be really happening?”

The brief answer is: “Yes it can. Yes it is, for many long decades and centuries.”

Historically, terrorism is a native Western weapon. It was utilized freely by people like Lloyd George, a British PM, who refused to sign the agreement banning aerial bombardment of civilians, using unshakeable British logic: “We reserve the right to bomb those niggers.” Or Winston Churchill who was in favor of gassing the ‘lower grade’ of races, like Kurds and Arabs.

That is why, when some outsider, a country like Russia, gets involved, launching its genuine war against terrorist groups, the entire West is consumed by panic. Russia is spoiling their entire game! It is ruining a beautifully crafted neo-colonialist equilibrium.

Just look how lovely everything is: after killing hundreds of millions all over the Globe, the West is now standing as the self-proclaimed champion of human rights and freedom. It is still terrorizing the world, plundering it, fully controlling it – but it is being accepted as the supreme leader, a benevolent advisor, and the only trustworthy part of the world.

And almost nobody is laughing.

Because everyone is scared!

Its brutal legions in the Middle East and Africa are destabilizing entire countries, their origins are easily traceable, but almost no one is daring to do such tracing. Some of those who have tried – died.

The more frightening these invented, manufactured and implanted terrorist monsters, the more beautiful the West looks. It is all gimmicks. It has roots in advertisement, and in hundreds of years of propaganda apparatus.

The West then pretends to fight those deep forces of darkness. It uses powerful, “righteous” language, which has clear bases in Christian fundamentalist dogma.

An entire mythology is unleashed; it feels like Wagner’s “Ring”.

The terrorists represent evil, not the enormous expenditure from the coffers of the US State Department, the European Union and NATO. They are more evil than the Devil himself!

And the West, riding on the white horse, slightly pissed on wine but always in good humor, is portrayed as both a victim and the main adversary of those satanic terrorist groups.

It is one incredible show. It is one terrible farce. Look underneath the horseman’s mask: look at those exposed teeth; that deadly grin! Look at his red eyes, full of greed, lust and cruelty.

And let us never forget: colonialism and imperialism are two most deadly forms of terrorism. And these are still the two main weapons of that horseman who is choking the world!

André Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker, and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest book is Exposing Lies of the Empire. He also wrote, with Noam Chomsky, On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter. Read other articles by Andre.

Saturday Matinee: Casshern

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“Casshern” (2004) is a live-action adaptation of the anime of the same name written and directed by Kazuaki Kiriya. The story takes place during a period after a 50 year war in which a resistance movement regularly clashes with the military. When scientist Azuma’s soldier son Tetsuya is killed in battle, Azuma uses his research to bring him back to life. After learning the truth about supposed terrorists he was once ordered to kill, Tetsuya fights against the military with the aid of a prototype cyborg suit. The film is notable for strikingly anime-like special effects and action set pieces, atmospheric score, and poignant conclusion with a clearly pacifist message.

Watch the full movie with English subtitles here.

The glorification of Antonin Scalia

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By Tom Carter

Source: WSWS.org

The sickening tributes across the official US political and media spectrum to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 79, are a barometer of the putrefaction of American democracy.

The universal deference towards Scalia from what passes for the “liberal” faction of the establishment is particularly repulsive. The statements of the Democratic presidential candidates, the supposed “socialist” Bernie Sanders no less than Hillary Clinton—echoing similarly sycophantic drivel from the likes of the New York Times—are monuments to political cowardice.

One would say these people lack the courage of their convictions if they had any convictions to lack!

They have sprung into action to join their Republican counterparts in hailing Scalia as a towering figure in American jurisprudence. Virtually every description of the deceased justice includes the words “brilliant” and “intellectual.” One is reminded of the programmed acclamation of Sergeant Raymond Shaw recited by his brainwashed fellow soldiers in the film The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Sanders took time off from his hollow calls for a “political revolution” to demonstrate his political obeisance to the ruling class, declaring, “While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court.”

Clinton praised Scalia as “a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to the bench.”

President Obama called Scalia a “towering legal figure.” The New York Times’ Ross Douthat hailed Scalia for “putting originalist principle above a partisan conservatism,” and for his “combination of brilliance, eloquence, and good timing.”

No one dares say what needs to be said. The object of their veneration was a black-robed thug and sadist who used his position on the bench to attack the basic civil liberties laid down in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights—separation of church and state; due process; protection from arbitrary arrest, search and seizure; the right to trial by jury; protection from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to vote.

His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.

In one case last year, Scalia argued that a police officer did not use “deadly force” when he climbed onto an overpass and used an assault rifle to kill an unarmed man fleeing in a car. According to Scalia’s reasoning, it was not deadly force because the officer claimed to have been aiming at the car, not the person in the car.

Perhaps the most infamous example of this method—absurdly described in the media as “constitutional originalism”—was the 2000 Supreme Court decision Scalia engineered to halt the counting of votes in Florida and hand the White House to the loser of the election, Republican candidate George W. Bush.

The 5-4 decision to steal the election all but acknowledged its own speciousness when it declared that the justifications it advanced could not be applied to any future cases. In his separate concurring opinion, Scalia declared that the Constitution did not give the people the right to elect the president.

At the time of the theft of the 2000 elections, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the counting of votes, and the acceptance of that ruling by the Democrats and the entire political establishment, demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency for democratic rights within the American ruling class. The reaction to Scalia’s death is a measure of the further erosion of democratic sentiment in the ruling elite.

Scalia personified the decay of bourgeois democracy in the United States over a protracted period of time. Appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, he flourished and exerted increasing influence in the decades of political reaction, militarism and Wall Street criminality that ensued, continuing without a hitch under Obama. Not only in the anti-democratic substance of his rulings, but also in his methods and bearing, he embodied the promotion by the ruling elite of backwardness, prejudice and outright cruelty.

He was corrupt and made no bones about his corruption, proudly voting to remove limits on corporate bribes in elections and flaunting his private outings with Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was a party in a case before the court. He was a bully, making a practice of baiting and harassing lawyers who came before him.

Throughout his career, Scalia consistently advocated positions that can only be described as barbarous and fascistic. Fittingly, his last judicial act was to deny a stay of execution. He was a figure who relished the power and trappings of the state, openly defending torture and internment camps.

Scalia worked tirelessly to break down constitutional and democratic limits on state power, infiltrating fascistic doctrines into Supreme Court jurisprudence. His theory of executive power, according to which the American president has unlimited and unreviewable powers for the duration of the “war on terror,” resurrects Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” doctrine in all but name.

Scalia’s mere presence on the court testified to the advanced decay of American democracy. That decay is linked, on the one hand, to the extreme growth of social inequality, accompanied by the rampant parasitism and criminality of the ruling class, and on the other hand to unending war, which has its domestic reflection in the build up of the repressive state apparatus that Scalia championed.

The bitterness of the disputes over his replacement is a reflection of the importance of his role in American politics over three decades during which the political establishment shifted violently to the right.

The deference shown to such a figure from all quarters of the political establishment should be taken as a warning by the working class. The ruling elite fears above all the growth of social opposition and class struggle. It exalts the legacy of Scalia because it is preparing police state methods to defend its power and property against an insurgent working class.

 

Related Article: Scalia’s Black Beemer by Greg Palast

The Popular Myth of Democracy in America

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: SteveLendmanBlog

No nation in world history promised more and delivered less to its citizens and people worldwide. None more greatly threatens world peace – putting humanity’s survival up for grabs like never before.

None did more harm to more people globally over a longer duration. None matches the menace it represents – a presstitute media supported fascist gangster state willing to risk destroying planet earth to own it, run by a bipartisan criminal class.

From inception, America was always run by the people who own it, as first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay explained.

John Adams believed power belonged exclusively to the rich, well-born and able. Today it’s about monied interests in charge – deciding who holds all top positions in government, elected and appointed.

People have no say whatever. Ignore electoral politics, intended solely to deceive – manipulating people to believe new bums are more worthy than current ones.

Voting is a waste of time, accomplishing nothing. Duopoly power rules.

America is a one-party state with two wings, indistinguishable from each other on issues mattering most – militantly pro-war, pro-business, anti-populist no matter what names and faces hold top positions.

Police state laws enforced by powerful security forces at the federal, state and local levels assure wealth and privilege interests are exclusively served at the expense of public welfare.

Elections are farcical, exercises in theater, not democracy. Candidates for the nation’s top offices are cardboard cutouts of each other, distinguishable only by their disingenuous rhetoric – promises made, forgotten and broken once in office.

The public interest be damned. People are used, not served, deceived to believe politicians represent them.

Embedded power runs America, politicians serving entrenched interests exclusively, chosen for that reason. Ordinary people thinking their enfranchisement matters are living in a fantasy world.

Government of, by and for the people is the grandest of grand hoaxes. Media scoundrels perpetuate the myth with all the familiar slogans and high-minded posturing.

Jimmy Carter was right last summer calling America an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery…a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

Republicans and Democrats operate by the same corrupted standards. “(U)nlimited) money” serves their interests at the expense of constituents they represent.

America’s system is too debauched to fix. It’s too late for tinkering around the edges.

A complete makeover is needed – a popular revolution, replacing oligarchy with grassroots democracy for the first time in the nation’s history, freed from money control.

Today is the most perilous time in world history. We have a choice.

Accept the status quo, its endless wars, oligarch control over the greater good, unprecedented wealth disparity between rich and all others, along with harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers and risk of potential humanity destroying nuclear war – or refuse any longer to tolerate a system responsible for so much harm and misery to so many people worldwide.

Survival depends on choosing wisely. What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind do you want your children to inherit?

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.