The Forgotten Past Will Always be Repeated

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Fantina

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So said George Santayana.

It is difficult today to look at many, many situations in the world and not see some of the worst events in history being repeated, especially as they relate to racism and genocide. Has the world forgotten Nazi atrocities against Jews, Gypsies, intellectuals and others? Do we not remember the horrific U.S. bombing of two Japanese cities? Are Churchill’s colonial atrocities no longer worth considering?

We will review some of the most egregious events unfolding in front of us today.

Israel: This racist, apartheid state, which, for over 70 years has brutally oppressed the Palestinian people, this year declared itself the nation-state of the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people. Yet 25% of people who live within the borders of the Zionist entity are not Jewish. And despite marginalizing fully one-quarter of its residents, and relegating them to second-class citizen status, government spokespeople have the nerve to proclaim Israel as a democracy.

And what international outrage does this bring? Despite flagrant and constant violations of international law, not to mention common human decency, most of the countries of the world either ignore it all, or issue gentle rebukes, at best. And the world’s media seldom reports on it.

Myanmar: For several years now, the repression and expulsion of the Rohingya people has been ongoing government policy. A United Nations study of August 2018 found evidence of widespread violations of human rights. As of that date, nearly three-quarters of a million Rohingya people have had to flee their homeland due to the brutal persecution they have experienced. The U.N. study stated that military abuses of the Rohingyas “undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.” Yet, like Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinians, this gets little press in North America.

India: Earlier this year, the government of India revoked Article 370 in the constitution that allowed occupied Kashmir some limited autonomy. Since that time, tens of thousands of Indian troops have stormed into Kashmir, communications with the outside world have been cut, and news media personal are forbidden from entering. The death toll from this recent repression is unknown. Government officials have publicly announced plans to colonize Kashmir using the same model of land confiscation and illegal settlement construction that Israel has used for decades against Palestine. Again, one listens in vain for international opposition to these crimes against humanity.

Additionally, India has now passed a law easing the path for citizenship for many refugees, but making immigration by Muslims more difficult. This has caused widespread protest demonstration throughout India, which are being met with police violence.

Saudi Arabia: That nation’s brutal onslaught against the people of Yemen continues, with the Yemeni death toll in the thousands and constantly rising. A bill passed by the U.S. Congress to prevent the U.S. from selling more weaponry to Saudi Arabia (the largest buyer of weapons from the U.S.) for use in Yemen was vetoed by President Donald Trump, thus enabling the continued slaughter of the Yemenis.

United States: Undergirding all this is the United States. That nation provides huge amounts of financial support to apartheid Israel, as well as protecting it from the legitimate consequences of its action on the international stage. Government spokespeople talk of ‘monitoring’ the situation in Myanmar, and have been mainly silent about India.

But the U.S. remains busy: its decades-long sanctions against Cuba remain. Following some easing of restrictions during the administration of President Barack Obama, Trump has re-issued them all. His sanctions against Iran, in violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and international law are causing great hardship for the people there. The U.S. supports the overthrow of the governments of Venezuela, issuing cruel sanctions against that country, and Syria, going so far as to actually arm, equip and train anti-government terrorist groups in the country, where, due largely to U.S. interference, hundreds of thousands of people have died, and hundreds of thousands more have been injured and left homeless. U.S. brutality toward the Yemenis has been mentioned above. The U.S. was involved in the recent overthrow of the Bolivian government.

Yet as recently as this week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proclaimed that the U.S. supports the right of people everywhere to self-determination. He said this when announcing additional sanctions against Iran, the irony of it certainly being lost on him and Trump. Self-determination is all well and good in the eyes of the U.S. government, as long as certain conditions are met: the form of government the people select must not be socialist; it must be a government that will do the U.S.’s bidding; it must not be a government that thinks its country’s natural resources are its own; it must not question or oppose Israel in any way, and it must not put its people before U.S. corporate profits. It must, in all ways and at all times, be willing to do its part to satisfy the U.S.’s geo-political goals.

As we look at the results of forgetting, or not learning from, history, we should ask an important question: When similar behaviors, perpetrated by German, Italian and English leaders happened before, what was the result? Additional questions arise: Did Germany succeed in annexing its neighbors? Were Italy and England successful in achieving their political goals? No, the result of such behaviors was a war whose devastation exceeded anything that can be imagined. And it brought the United States into its role as a super-power, which has been detrimental for much of the world.

The U.S. has never been interested in human rights or international law. Those in power in that country have only coveted riches, and have been, and are, willing to obtain them in any way possible, regardless of how much blood must flow. And that blood can be of innocent men, women and children in a far-off country, or of its own citizens who it sends to war. It will attempt, however futilely, to order the world to its liking. And as people protest, all possible efforts will be made to crush them.

One thing the U.S. and many other nations have failed to learn is that people will only be able to tolerate the thwarting of their legitimate aspirations for a limited amount of time: they will not allow it to go on forever. Working to genuinely assist them will make more friends and allies, and ultimately be far more beneficial for the world than opposing them and oppressing them ever will.

Until the U.S. and other powerful nations learn this vital lesson, the suffering they cause will be unending.

The American Empire Will Fall, Not America Itself

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Credit: JOEL PETT

By Gunnar Olson

Source: Land Destroyer

The collapse of an entire nation is as spectacular as it is rare. For a nation to simply cease to exist it must suffer such absolute defeat across the entire spectrum of what constitutes a nation; economically, militarily, culturally, socially and politically.

What is much more common is a transition from existing, prevailing socioeconomic, political and military orders to new ones driven by new, emerging special interests. It can happen quickly and violently, or take place as a long-term process with ups and downs and both constructive and destructive processes intertwining.

For the United States, a massive nation with the third largest population on the planet, the largest military and still currently the largest economy, for it to suffer such full-spectrum defeat is impossible.

What is not impossible is for the small handful of special interests currently directing US policy foreign and domestic, to find itself displaced by a new order consisting of entirely different kinds of special interests and, hopefully, special interests that better reflect the best interests of the United States as a whole and function more sustainably among the nations of the world rather than hovering above them.

It is a process that is already ongoing.

America’s Prevailing Order is Fading

The current special interests driving US foreign and domestic policy are centered around Wall Street and Washington and represent an increasingly unrealistic, unsustainable, archaic network based on traditional banking, energy and manufacturing monopolies.

Many of the tools used by these special interests to maintain and expand their power and influence including mass media, extensive lobbying, networks dedicated to political subversion abroad and political distractions at home find themselves increasingly ineffective as both the American people and nations around the globe become increasingly familiar with them and as they begin developing effective countermeasures.

While US special interests dedicate a seemingly immense amount of time countering “Russian” or “Chinese” “propaganda,” it is primarily alternative media from the United States and its partner nations that have done the most to expose and diminish the unwarranted influence wielded from Wall Street and Washington. Wikileaks is a prime example of this.

As America’s elite and their networks weaken, alternatives continue to grow stronger.

An unsustainable socioeconomic and political model, coupled with equally unsustainable military campaigns abroad along with a political and media strategy that is no longer even remotely convincing even to casual observers demarks what is an irreversible decline of America’s current, prevailing order.

America’s Elite Face Challenges from Within as Well as From Abroad

The topic of Chinese corporations out-competing long-established US monopolies has become an increasingly common topic across global media. It is indeed this process that has precipitated the seemingly pointless and futile US-led trade war against China, a futile exercise that seems to only highlight the decline of America’s established elite rather than address it.

Corporations like Huawei, despite facing serious setbacks owed to US sanctions and efforts to undermine them, still move forward, while their US competitors continue to struggle. This is because despite setbacks, Huawei is built upon a solid foundation of business and economic fundamentals, while its American counterparts, despite their initial advantages owed to a lack of competition, have neglected and continue to neglect such fundamentals.

But Chinese corporations aren’t the only challengers America’s established elite face.

Within the US itself some of the most innovative and disruptive companies in the world are cropping up, challenging not only foreign competition but also long-established monopolies based in the US.

Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla is a perfect example of this. Its breakneck pace of innovation, high-profile successes and the disruptive impact it is having on traditional car manufacturing is setting back the American car industry first and foremost. It also poses a serious threat to the petroleum-centric energy model the US has adopted and propagated globally for over a century.

American car manufacturing monopolies have spent decades developing a model of planned obsolescence and marketing gimmicks as a stand-in for genuine consumer value and innovation. The industry has become a means of simply making as much money as possible and to increase profits each year, with “making cars” merely the means through which this money and the influence it buys is being accumulated.

Tesla has for years now been growing both in terms of business and in terms of sociopolitical influence. US car manufacturing monopolies have attempted to ape the most superficial aspects of Tesla’s appeal, but have entirely failed to examine or replicate the substance that drives the new company’s success.

Just as the US elite have attempted to use what could be described as “dirty tricks” rather than direct competition to deal with competitors like Huawei abroad, similar “dirty tricks” have been employed against disruptive companies within the US itself like Tesla. Attempts by faux-unions to complicate Tesla’s US-based factories are one example of this.

US-based aerospace manufacturer SpaceX is another example of an American-bred competitor directly challenging (and threatening) long-established US monopolies, in this case aerospace monopolies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

SpaceX is not only driving aerospace innovation forward at breakneck speeds, it is driving down the overall cost of access to space at the same time. It is doing this at such impressive rates that established aerospace monopolies like Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop, even with their immense lobbying networks, are unable to dissuade SpaceX customers (including the US government itself) from purchasing rides on its rockets.

Bloated monopolies who have become overly reliant on maintaining profits through lobbying and political games have little means to overhaul their massive organizations in the face of real competition as it emerges. Because of this, the prevailing order driving US policy faces an insurmountable obstacle that already appears to have resulted in terminal decline and displacement.

Those doing the displacing stand to assume the position at the levers of American power and influence, with an opportunity to set an entirely new course into the future that will have a fundamental impact on both the American nation and its people, and the nations of the world it will interact with.

America’s New Order May Seek Genuine Competition and Collaboration

Tesla and SpaceX are prominent examples, but by no means the only examples of the ongoing transition that is increasingly evident within America. There are emerging innovations and companies threatening virtually every area America’s current elite dominate. From the alternative media targeting the deeply rooted corporate media of America, to a growing movement of local organic farmers chipping away at America’s massive agricultural monopolies, there are already many tangible examples of a transition taking place; a positive transition that those interested in truly addressing the negative aspects of America’s current role globally can invest in or contribute toward.

In what is perhaps a hopeful sign of the new America that might emerge as this process continues forward is the fact that emerging disruptors like Tesla are not afraid of collaborating with other nations, seeking to simply do business rather than construct a global spanning network aimed at dominating others. Tesla’s massive Gigafactory going into operation in Shanghai, China takes place as the US attempts to sever China’s access to the economic benefits of doing business with the US for purely political and hegemonic purposes.

Despite the apparent hostilities between the US and nations like Russia and China, the consensus in nations targeted by America’s current prevailing order is one of simply wanting to do business on equal terms. Whatever hostility may exist is reserved not for America as a nation or as a people, but toward the handful of special interests obstructing constructive competition and collaboration between these nations and the US.

In the near to intermediate future, this process will continue to resemble a bitter struggle as US special interests attempt to maintain their grip on power, fighting against inevitable decline and displacement, and against competitors both abroad and within the US itself.

Beyond that, there is a hopeful future where the US finds itself a constructive member of a multipolar world, constructively competing against and collaborating with nations rather than attempting to assert itself over them.

Because of this, it is important for nations and peoples to refrain from unnecessary, broad hostilities and to instead patiently weather current efforts emanating from Wall Street and Washington. It is important to establish ties and relations with US interests genuinely interested in true competition and collaboration and who represent America’s future, and to distinguish them from deeply rooted US interests that represent America’s abusive past and and are responsible for America’s current decline.

The foreign policies of Moscow, Beijing and even of many emerging and developing nations may seem overly passive or appeasing, but around the capitals of the world many are aware of the transition taking place in America and are attempting to position themselves advantageously for the fall of the American Empire so they can do business with those who assume the levers of power in America once it does.

Political Collapse: The Center Cannot Hold

Posted on December 19, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Kirkpatrick Sale

Source: CounterPunch

Have you noticed? From Hong Kong to Baghdad, Paris to Tehran, 2019 is shaping up to be, as the New York Times dubbed it, “the year of the protest.” Violent—and often deadly—anti-government protests are breaking out throughout the world in an unprecedented fashion, in rich countries as well as poor, as people everywhere are expressing their anger at corrupt, inefficient, brutal, and unresponsive regimes.

But what isn’t so much in the news is worse—worse enough that they don’t want to tell you. At the moment, there are no less than 65 countries are now fighting wars—there are only 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, so that’s a third of the world. These are wars with modern weapons, organized troops, and serious casualties—five of them, like Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, with 10,000 or more deaths a year, another 15 with more than 1,000 a year—all of them causing disruptions and disintegrations of all normal political and economic systems, leaving no attacked nation in a condition to protect and provide for its citizens. From 2015 to 2019 more state-based conflicts were engaged in than at any time since World War II, with an estimated 1 million deaths in all.

In addition, there are at least 638 other conflicts between various insurgent and separatist militias, armed drug bands, and terrorist organizations, increasing each year as states fail or collapse completely.

What has made the wars and internal disputes even more egregious as the years go on is that chaotic weather has a direct effect on how societies function. Agriculture, of course, is impacted by higher temperatures, lack of rain, droughts, and wildfires, and crops have failed in many places over the last five years, including North and Central Africa, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, northern China, northern Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Central America, and even parts of North America. The collapse of Syria, for example, and subsequent civil wars were made more devastating if not directly caused by the drought of 2006-2011, in which 75 per cent of the farms failed and 85 per cent of the livestock died. And an official United Nations report in 2019, by 100 experts from 52 countries, warned that things will only get worse, with the world’s land and water resources exploited at “unprecedented rates,” threatening “the ability of humanity to feed itself.”

One obvious consequence, beyond death, famine, disease and starvation, is, as the U.N. report’s lead author says, “a massive pressure for migration,” a desperate attempt to find some refuge and relief when homes have been destroyed and families are uprooted. According to the United Nations, in what I regard as a certain undercount, in 2019 there were 272 million migrants worldwide, up from 258 million in 2017, with the weather in 2019 causing more refugees even than warfare. (The unprecedented crisis at the U.S. southern border in 2019 is only one manifestation of the porous and chaotic collapse of boundaries across the Americas, Africa, and most of Asia.) And meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2018 estimated that more than 100,000 people are simply “missing,” a figure it admits “represents only a fraction” of those who are unaccounted for by any government or organization.

Given the turmoil over wars and immigration threats, it is not surprising that half the world is without coherent government.

Organizations that track these things say that of the 174 covered nations, 76 are in various stages of collapse—that would be 43 per cent—and that excludes a dozen smaller nations that are locked into autocracy and poverty. These include seven completely failed states—Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and Venezuela—and another seven that are on the edge—Guinea, Haiti, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Chad, and the Sudan—plus 19 that are in an “alert” category, meaning that some but not all government functions have failed, 15 in Africa and 4 in Asia.

In other words, many political systems in the world have effectively collapsed, people are dispossessed and without governments, and almost everywhere else, including the U.S. and Europe, governments are severely strained and political rifts abound. The vote for Brexit in the U.K., the election of Donald Trump (and the subsequent attempts to overturn it), the turmoil that erupted in December 2018 in France and Belgium, the continued protests in Poland were all examples of the population of developed nations coming to see that the attempt to establish capitalist-led democracies in an internationalist arrangement of benefit to corporate and banking interests just was not working, and a rising segment of what were called “deplorables” in America did not want any longer to be powerless, manipulated, and disdained. These turmoils also demonstrated that the established powers in these countries, especially the U.S. and Britain, resisted all of these attempts to change the status quo and in effect ignored or tried to thwart the popular will (cf. the “impeachment” farce)—the developed world’s form of the failed state. Those fissures have widened as the years have worn on, and as one astute observer, James Kunstler, put it in 2019, “The West is enduring paroxysms of political uproar and disenchantment.”

And here’s something weird that sums it all up. It is the opinion of two recent political scientists that “the state system seems to be failing all over the world,” and they have proposed a new study called “archy” to examine how to grow, maintain, and fund states so as to avert their collapse. No better evidence of the seriousness of the world’s “uproar and disenchantment” can there be when academics need to create a discipline to overcome it.

Yeats summed it up some years ago: “The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Kirkpatrick Sale’s new book The Collapse of 2020 will be published in January.

Our Vanishing World: Birds

Posted on December 18, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Illustration by Luke Seitz

By Robert J. Burrowes

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds. The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous ornithologist, naturalist and painter John James Audubon:

‘I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose… Before sunset I reached Louisville, distance from Hardensburgh fifty-five miles. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession.’ See ‘Passenger Pigeon’.

So numerous was this bird that, in the nineteenth century, the passenger pigeon was one of the most abundant birds on Earth.

In 1914 it was extinct.

While new settlements kept reducing the bird’s habitat, more importantly, it was literally hunted from the sky. Shot for its meat.

So I have two questions for you? When is the last time that you saw a flock of birds so vast that ‘the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse’? And when did you last see a flock of just 20 birds?

Sobering to ponder, isn’t it?

The origin of birds

Birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic and in the 65 million years since the extinction of the rest of the dinosaurs, this ancestral lineage diversified into the major groups of birds alive today. See ‘The origin of birds’.

Because they did not exist during the first five mass extinction events on Earth, birds have been spared the widespread extinctions suffered by those species that did exist in earlier eras.

Extinctions of birds in prehistory and history

Nevertheless, the fossil record tells us of the existence of prehistoric birds that became extinct before the Late Quaternary (that is, the past half to one million years) and thus occurred in the absence of significant human interference – see ‘List of fossil bird genera’ – while various sources tell us of both prehistoric and historic bird species, including flightless megafauna birds, that became extinct between 40,000 BCE and 1500 AD and ‘was coincident with the expansion of Homo sapiens beyond Africa and Eurasia, and in most cases, anthropogenic factors played a crucial part in their extinction, be it through hunting, introduced predators or habitat alteration’. See ‘List of Late Quaternary prehistoric bird species’.

Of course, there is an even wider range of evidence of bird extinctions since 1500. See ‘List of recently extinct bird species’. Most notably perhaps, given the symbolism it has since acquired, the dodo, a flightless bird of Mauritius, was driven to extinction by 1681 but not before it was carefully drawn. See ‘Dodo’.

How many bird species are there on Earth now?

While one recent estimate – see ‘Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity’ – indicates that Earth may be the home to one trillion species (the vast bulk of which are microorganisms such as bacteria, archaea and microscopic fungi), of which only an estimated 8.7 million species fall into the usual and simpler categories of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles, the most recent research conducted by George F. Barrowclough, Joel Cracraft, John Klicka and Robert M. Zink and published in 2016 indicated that there are just 18,043 species of birds worldwide. See ‘How Many Kinds of Birds Are There and Why Does It Matter?’

Somewhat controversially – see ‘New Study Doubles the World’s Number of Bird Species By Redefining “Species”’ – this figure is nearly twice as many as previously thought because the study focused on ‘hidden’ avian diversity: birds that look similar to one another or were thought to interbreed but are actually different species. In any case, whether there are just 10,000 species of birds, 11,000+ as estimated by the recognized international authority BirdLife International – see ‘Introducing the IUCN Red List’ – or even18,000, just like other species of life on Earth, birds are now under siege in a way they have never been before.

Killing birds in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

More than 100 years have passed since the passenger pigeon became extinct. However, while one might have hoped that humans had become more adept at nurturing populations of birds, the reality is that we are continuing to drive bird populations to extinction. Moreover, we are now doing this with breathtaking efficiency, slaughtering birds by the millions in ever-shortening timeframes.

As a result, the fate of the passenger pigeon has been replicated many times over with a vast number of bird species passing through the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s eight preliminary categories – Not Evaluated, Data Deficient, Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct in the Wild – before reaching the ninth and final category: Extinct. See ‘IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria’. At the moment, the ‘IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’ identifies 14% of remaining bird species as ‘threatened with extinction’. Also see ‘Introducing the IUCN Red List’.

Of course, this ongoing assault on birds is well documented in the scientific literature, along with descriptions of long-standing causes as well as those that are more recent.

In recently published research on the status of birds in North America, Dr. Kenneth V. Rosenberg led an international team of scientists from seven institutions in analyzing the population trends of 529 bird species on the North American continent. Their study quantified, for the first time, the total decline in bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada: a loss of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds, with devastating losses among birds in every biome, since 1970. Moreover, their research revealed that ‘declines are not restricted to rare and threatened species – those once considered common and widespread are also diminished’. See ‘Decline of the North American avifauna’ and ‘Vanishing: More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years’.

Like scholars researching dramatic declines and extinctions of other species, such as insects, Rosenberg and his colleagues stress that their results have ‘major implications for ecosystem integrity, the conservation of wildlife more broadly, and policies associated with the protection of birds and native ecosystems on which they depend’. While species extinctions ‘have defined the global biodiversity crisis’, extinction ‘begins with loss in abundance of individuals that can result in compositional and functional changes of ecosystems’. Hence, the staggering loss of bird abundance ‘signals an urgent need to address threats to avert future avifaunal collapse and associated loss of ecosystem integrity, function, and services’. See ‘Decline of the North American avifauna’.

In more blunt language ‘the most comprehensive inventory ever done for North American birds, points to ecosystems in disarray because of habitat loss and other factors that have yet to be pinned down’. See ‘Billions of North American birds have vanished’. And, yet more bluntly: ‘The scale of loss portrayed in the [Rosenberg et.al.] study is unlike anything recorded in modern natural history.’ See ‘Vanishing: More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years’.

Even more importantly, however, pointing out that the study results ‘transcend the world of birds’, Rosenberg explained that ‘These bird losses are a strong signal that our human-altered landscapes are losing their ability to support birdlife’ and ‘that is an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.’ See ‘Vanishing: More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years’.

Is North America alone in its decimation of bird populations? Far from it. Other research and data have revealed that ‘farmland birds in Europe have declined by over 50 per cent collectively in the last 30 or 40 years’ according to Professor Richard Gregory, head of species monitoring and research at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in the UK where, according to Martin Harper, director of conservation at the RSPB, ‘Our beleaguered farmland birds have declined by 56 per cent between 1970 and 2015 along with declines in other wildlife linked to changes in agricultural practices, including the use of pesticides’.

And, Professor Romain Julliard, a conservation biologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History, confessed his ‘shock’ when the latest research revealed that France has lost one-third of its birds in the past 15 years in what is being labeled a ‘dramatic collapse’ and ‘ecological catastrophe’ particularly because the decline has accelerated dramatically in recent years. See ‘“Shocking” decline in birds across Europe due to pesticide use, say scientists’.

In Germany, bird populations are vanishing with scientists using words like ‘decimated’ and ‘collapse’ to describe the enormity of the problem. In a recent study of government data, the German environmental organization Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) estimated ‘that more than 25 million birds [15% of the country’s total bird population] disappeared from Germany over the past 12 years’. See ‘Über zwölf Millionen Vogelbrutpaare weniger in Deutschland’, ‘Insect and bird populations declining dramatically in Germany’ and ‘“Decimated”: Germany’s birds disappear as insect abundance plummets 76%’. But why?

While habitat destruction and other factors played roles, scientists have also long linked pesticide use to insect decline – a reasonable assumption given that killing insects is the purpose of pesticides – and research clearly demonstrates that pesticides are killing more than target insects. For instance, a 2008 study demonstrated low but persistent levels of a common neonicotinoid pesticide in aquatic ecosystems can kill off or reduce the growth of insects (such as mosquitoes) that have an acquatic phase. See ‘Acute and Chronic Toxicity of Imidacloprid to the Aquatic Invertebrates Chironomus tentans and Hyalella azteca under Constant- and Pulse-Exposure Conditions’ and ‘“Decimated”: Germany’s birds disappear as insect abundance plummets 76%’.

In essence, the problem is that killing the insects is tantamount to killing the birds that feed on them.

Another recent study came to the same conclusion. The study, conducted in the Lake Constance area in southern Germany, found that the population of six of the most common birds had ‘declined massively’. According to Hans-Guenther Bauer of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Biology: ‘These are truly shocking figures, especially when you consider that the decline in birds began decades before our first data collection in 1980.’ Why is it happening? According to Bauer, a key reason for the decline is the loss of food. ‘This confirms what we have long suspected. The death of insects caused by humans has a massive impact on our birds.’ To stem the tide of losses, scientists are calling for a rethink in agricultural and forestry policy including ‘drastic restrictions on insecticides and herbicides in agriculture, forestry, public areas and private gardens’ and significantly less fertilization. See ‘Scientists fear “collapse” of bird populations in Germany’.

As is the case elsewhere around the world, birds in Africa also face a wide variety of threats, the most significant of which are habitat fragmentation, degradation and destruction as well as direct impacts including hunting and trapping (mainly for meat and trafficking). See ‘Multiple threats are driving threatened birds towards extinction in Africa’.

But nowhere is safe with the killing of migratory birds in China – see ‘Market trade is fuelling the killing of migratory birds in Northern China ’ – and various factors adversely impacting penguins in Antarctica – see ‘Climate-driven reductions in krill abundance have caused Adélie penguin declines’ – just two more of many examples that could be cited.

Illegal hunting and trapping of birds

According to Birdlife International, the organization responsible for monitoring the welfare of birds for the IUCN’s Red List, ‘The illegal killing and taking of wild birds remains a major threat on a global scale’ with recent examples including the illegal poisoning of vultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, the illegal shooting of raptors in Europe and North America, the illegal trapping of passerines (perching birds) in Asia and the illegal capture for the bird trade in South America.

For example, based on extensive research over many years in relation to bird killing during migratory flights across the Mediterranean and through Northern and Central Europe and the Caucasus, BirdLife International has compiled a series of reports. These reports document massive illegal killing of birds, often in ways that constitute torture, and totaling in excess of 25 million birds annually, including birds of species that are threatened with extinction. For recent reports, see ‘The Killing 2.0: A View to a Kill’, ‘Assessing the scope and scale of illegal killing and taking of birds in the Mediterranean, and establishing a basis for systematic monitoring’ and ‘Review of illegal killing and taking of birds in Northern and Central Europe and the Caucasus’. For a more detailed scientific report on this issue, see ‘Preliminary assessment of the scope and scale of illegal killing and taking of birds in the Mediterranean’.

But if you would simply prefer to be revolted, then watch BirdLife’s one minute video: ‘Help us STOP illegal #birdkilling’. Or read a straightforward account of how ‘innocent’ human behaviours can be deadly for birds, in this case by ‘vacuuming’ millions of sleeping birds into oblivion each year during olive harvesting at night. See ‘Millions of Birds Killed by Nighttime Harvesting in Mediterranean’.

Unfortunately, if you think the descriptions and video of birdkilling above are bad, you won’t be impressed with the sheer insanity that militarized humans can display: ‘The Farmagusta area of Cyprus comes out as the worst place for illegally killing birds in the Mediterranean, while the British Territory in Cyprus is also affected, with the Dhekelia UK military base seeing hundreds of thousands of birds killed each autumn. The Ministry of Defence has started a programme to remove illegally planted trees and shrubs in the area, which trappers use for cover and to lure birds in.’ See ‘Millions of Birds Killed in the Mediterranean’. So, instead of ordering soldiers to stop shooting birds while using a combination of education and law enforcement measures to prevent civilians doing so, they removed ‘illegally planted trees and shrubs’!

Wild Bird trafficking

Another major killer of birds is the wildlife trade. Birds are often killed as a ‘byproduct’ of the trade in exotic birds, most of which is illegal, but which is a multi-billion dollar a year industry along with human, weapons, currency and drug trafficking. Equally importantly, however, once traded, birds no longer form part of their original habitat and hence they are lost as contributing and breeding members of that ecosystem. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), species listed in Appendix I of the Convention are considered to be threatened with extinction and are not allowed to be traded commercially. There are currently 161 bird species on Appendix I. However, birds included on Appendix II are allowed to enter international trade ‘under specific controlled circumstances’; there are 1,300 bird species on this appendix. See ‘Wild Bird Trade and CITES’ and ‘CITES Appendices I, II and III’.

In theory, state parties are obliged to develop national legislation effectively implementing the obligations of the Convention including setting sustainable quotas for Appendix II species. But I am sure that you can imagine how well this regime works given the incredibly profitable wildlife trafficking industry, in which birds are a crucial component. In fact, ‘one third (3,337) of living bird species [that is, 2,000 species more than those that are “legal”] have been recorded as traded internationally for the pet trade and other purposes’. Of these species, 266 (that is, 8% of those internationally traded) are considered globally threatened. See ‘The Red List Index for internationally traded bird species shows their deterioration in status’.

And if the domestic trade in birds is taken into account as well, then ‘Nearly 4,000 bird species involving several million individuals annually are subject to domestic or international trade with finches, weavers, parrots and raptors being some of the most heavily affected groups.’ See ‘Wild Bird Trade and CITES’.

For a candid account of bird trafficking at its origin which describes the fate of macaw chicks being stolen from their forest nests in Ecuador, see ‘Wildlife Trafficking’.

Seabirds

In relation to seabirds, one recent study found that the global population of these birds declined by 70% between 1950 and 2010 as a result of a multiplicity of threats. These threats included ‘entanglement in fishing gear, overfishing of food sources, climate change, pollution, disturbance, direct exploitation, development, energy production, and introduced species (predators such as rats and cats introduced to breeding islands that were historically free of land-based predators)’. See ‘Population Trend of the World’s Monitored Seabirds, 1950-2010’.

Another study concluded just recently, was ‘the first objective quantitative assessment of the threats to all 359 species of seabirds’ and identified the main threats to their survival while outlining priority actions for their conservation. Using the standardized ‘Threats Classification Scheme’ developed for the IUCN Red List to objectively assess threats to each species, a team of ten scientists identified the top three threats to seabirds – in terms of number of species affected and average impact – to be as follows: invasive alien species (particularly rats and cats) which affected 165 species across all of the most threatened groups; bycatch in fisheries which ‘only’ affected 100 species but with the greatest average impact; and the climate catastrophe which affected 96 species. ‘Overfishing, hunting/trapping and disturbance were also identified as major threats to seabirds.’ The study emphasized that 70% of seabirds, especially those that are globally threatened, face multiple threats. For the three most threatened groups of seabirds – albatrosses, petrels and penguins – it is essential to tackle both terrestrial and marine threats to reverse declines. See ‘Threats to seabirds: A global assessment’.

In addition, however, another problem that has been getting insufficient attention is the result of the expanding impacts of the rapidly increasing levels of ocean acidification, ocean warming, ocean carbon flows and ocean plastics. Taken in isolation each of these changes clearly has negative consequences for the ocean. All these shifts taken together, however, result in a rapid and serious decline in ocean health and this, in turn, adversely impacts all species dependent on the ocean, including seabirds. Moreover, on top of these problems is the issue of oxygen availability given that oxygen in the air or water is of paramount importance to most living organisms. As the recently released report ‘Ocean deoxygenation: Everyone’s problem. Causes, impacts, consequences and solutions’ describes in some detail, oxygen levels are currently declining across the ocean.

But to graphically illustrate just one of the threats to seabirds, consider the impact of our chronic overfishing which is depleting the oceans of fish. In November 2019, thousands of short-tailed shearwater birds migrating from Alaska were washed up dead on Sydney’s iconic beaches in Australia. Moreover, thousands more shearwaters died out at sea in clear confirmation of the incredible fish shortages in the Pacific Ocean. After spending the summer in Alaska, the shearwaters were migrating back to southern Australia to breed: a 14,000km trip over the Pacific that requires the birds to be at full strength.

Unfortunately, vast numbers died due to lack of food because the krill and other fish they feed on have vanished. But if you think the problem only occurred along or at the end of their journey, in fact there had been ‘a series of catastrophic die-offs’ before and shortly after the birds departed to head south with thousands of shearwaters (along with puffins, murres and auklets too) lying dead from starvation on the beaches of Alaska and on Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula back in mid-year as well. The overall ‘large die-off’ pattern has been repeating since 2015 with little knowledge of the full extent of the crisis because millions of the birds ‘die at sea’. See ‘Fish all gone!… Millions of small sea birds died since 2015’.

Tragically though, as touched on above, an ocean emptied of fish is not the only hazard that seabirds have no choice but to attempt to navigate. An ocean full of plastic – with concentrations up to 580,000 pieces per square kilometer – is also deceiving many seabirds into attempting to eat pieces of plastic and this only complicates efforts by seabirds to get adequate nutrition. See ‘Threat of plastic pollution to seabirds is global, pervasive, and increasing’ and ‘Nearly Every Seabird on Earth Is Eating Plastic’. This is graphically illustrated in this photo of a dead albatross – see ‘Laysan Albatrosses’ Plastic Problem’ – although, tragically, plastic is not the only non-food item that is consumed by and is killing these majestic birds, with an abandoned US military base on Midway Atoll – where 65% of the global albatross population breeds – playing a vital role too. See ‘Study shows lead-based paint is poisoning albatross chicks at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge’.

But why do seabirds eat plastic instead of correctly identifying food? Well, one recent research project provided ‘the first evidence that, in addition to looking like food, plastic debris may also confuse seabirds that hunt by smell’. See ‘Marine plastic debris emits a keystone infochemical for olfactory foraging seabirds’ and ‘The oceans are full of plastic, but why do seabirds eat it?’

Other threats to birds

Another threat faced by birds in the nuclear age is the outcome of the radioactive contamination of the Earth in many places. For example, while there are ‘severe reductions in species richness and density’ in the regions surrounding the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear catastrophes, surviving birds display a wide range of deformities and dysfunctionalities, notably including impaired brain development as reflected by head volume with its negative implications for cognitive ability and hence viability. See ‘Chernobyl Birds Have Smaller Brains’ and ‘Bird populations near Fukushima are more diminished than expected’.

Yet another threat to birds is posed by the deployment of 5G. ‘Typical effects of radiation from cellular communication antennas on resident, breeding, and migratory birds [include] site abandonment, feather deformation, locomotion problems, weight loss, weakness, reduced survivorship and death.’ Moreover, it can ‘blot out a bird’s perception of the earth’s field, causing the bird to fly in the wrong direction, and also disrupt a bird’s internal clock based on the sun’s changing position’. See ‘5G to Kill the Birds, Bees and Your Loved Ones?’ and ‘Western Insanity and 5G Electromagnetic Radiation’.

Finally, without elaboration, vast numbers of birds are also killed each year by warfare and other military activities – see, for example, ‘The impact of the 1991 Gulf War oil spill on bird populations in the northern Arabian Gulf – a review’ – by industrial activity and accidents – see, for example, ‘Effects of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on Birds: Comparisons of Pre- and Post-spill Surveys in Prince William Sound, Alaska’ – by road and air traffic, the spread of certain avian diseases to previously unaffected species – see ‘Avian diseases are spreading to impact hitherto unaffected populations’ – wind turbines, cats, windows and communication towers, with 7 million birds losing their lives each year in the United States alone to the ‘web-like traps of wire and metal’ used for communication. See ‘Communication Towers Are Death Traps for Threatened Bird Species’. Other birds are now being killed in response to conflict generated between birds. See ‘Climate Change Leading to Fatal Bird Conflicts’. And, of course, ‘domesticated’ birds such as chickens and turkeys are farmed and consumed in prodigiously huge quantities, including for Christmas.

Sadly, too, millions of birds of many species are imprisoned in cages as ‘pets’ denied the freedom that all humans crave for themselves.

So, in essence, if you were a bird, here is a survival strategy that should work. Only live in a habitat that will not be impacted, in any way, by human beings and their activities. That is, don’t live on Earth.

Saving the birds

Given the vast range of threats posed to birdlife by humans – see a straightforward summary of ‘The greatest threats facing Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas today’ which doesn’t mention all threats and those that are emerging – it is clearly going to take a monumental effort on many fronts to contain the killing of birds and avert the ongoing extinction of bird species on Earth.

And, unless you are naive enough to believe that elite-controlled governments or international organizations and processes are going to do something that is actually effective – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – then it is up to us to make the difference. Of course, we can do a few things that are specific to saving birds but the bulk of what must happen is really about saving the biosphere (which includes birds) generally. The biosphere is, after all, one deeply-interconnected living entity.

This is why, according to some biologists, laws that focus on the protection of rare species miss the big picture. Joel Cracraft, for example, argues that ‘We’re losing the battle because we’re fighting over single endangered species’. Species protection tends to focus on charismatic species – beautiful birds and mammals – and doesn’t value rare ecosystems or collections of species. See ‘New Study Doubles the World’s Number of Bird Species By Redefining “Species”’. Nor does it value the biosphere as a whole.

Still, some superlative efforts have been made on behalf of birds. For example, you can read some inspirational success stories by BirdLife International: ‘10 vital bird habitats saved through conservation action’.

And for one man’s initiative 120 years ago that is having ongoing impact, see ‘How one man changed a Christmas tradition forever – to save birds’.

So you can, of course, support the efforts of Birdlife International and the local, national and other organizations like it. See ‘Welcome to BirdLife’s Globally Threatened Bird Forums’ and, for example, ‘Stop Wildlife Trafficking’.

Separately from initiatives that focus specifically on birds, if you wish to fight powerfully to save Earth’s biosphere consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’ which outlines a simple program to systematically reduce your consumption and increase your local self-reliance over a period of years. Among many other beneficial environmental outcomes, this will reduce the ongoing destruction of bird habitat to produce the products we all consume.

But given the fear-driven violent parenting and education models that drive all violence in our world and which, among a multitude of other adverse outcomes, generates the addiction of most people in industrialized countries to the over-consumption that is destroying Earth’s biosphere – see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ – then consider addressing this directly starting with yourself – see ‘Putting Feelings First’ – and by reviewing your relationship with children. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. For fuller explanations, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

If you wish to campaign strategically to defend birds against particular threats, such as the climate catastrophe, military violence or the deployment of 5G, for example, consider joining those campaigning to halt these and other threats as well. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy which already includes a comprehensive list of strategic goals necessary to achieve these outcomes in two key contexts in ‘Strategic Aims’.

But, whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of fearfully begging elites to act on your behalf as, for example, the antiwar and climate movements are doing (with climate ‘activists’ marginalized at the latest COP25 gathering in Madrid). If we do not focus our efforts on engaging all people who are powerful enough to do so to respond strategically, then we will fail. And our failure will not only be the result of the elite refusing to take the requisite action despite your entreaties but also because the elite, as a group, is powerless to make sufficient difference: only a massive response from the wider population can produce the outcome we now need. For explanations of this, see ‘Why Activists Fail’, ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’ and ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’.

Moreover, in those cases where corrupt or even electorally unresponsive governments are leading the destruction of the biosphere – by supporting, sponsoring and/or engaging in environmentally destructive practices – it might be necessary to remove these governments as part of the effort. See Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

You might also consider joining the global network of people resisting violence in all contexts, including against the biosphere, by signing the online pledge of ‘The People ’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World ’.

Or, if none of the above options appeal or they seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Do all these options sound unpalatable? Prefer something requiring less commitment? You can, if you like, do as most sources suggest: nothing (or its many tokenistic equivalents). I admit that the options I offer are for those powerful enough to comprehend and act on the truth. Why? Because there is so little time left and I have no interest in deceiving people or treating them as unintelligent and powerless. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ and ‘Doomsday by 2021?’

Conclusion

Birds are being killed with ruthless efficiency by human beings and their activities all over the world. Obviously, this is an unmitigated tragedy for Earth’s birds, the biosphere as a whole and those humans who love life generally. But what are the practical implications of this ongoing bird killing for us?

Well just as the death of one canary in a coal mine warned miners about their dangerous environment, the mass death of birds is yet another warning that we are destroying the planetary biosphere.

However, in this case, we are not treating the canary’s death as a warning and, even if we were, it does not mean that we can escape because there is nowhere else to go.

In short, if we don’t save the birds, we won’t save ourselves.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

As The OPCW Is Accused Of False Reporting U.S. Propaganda Jumps To Its Help

Posted on December 12, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Source: Moon of Alabama

An international organization published two false reports and got caught in the act. But as the false reports are in the U.S. interests a U.S. sponsored propaganda organization is send out to muddle the issue. As that effort comes under fire the New York Times jumps in to give the cover-up effort some extra help.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) manufactured a pretext for war by suppressing its own scientists’ research:

OPCW emails and documents were leaked and whistleblowers came forward to speak with journalists and international lawyers. Veteran journalist Jonathan Steele, who has spoken with the whistleblowers, wrote an excellent piece on the issues. In the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens picked up the issue and moved it forward.

Under U.S. pressure the OPCW management modified or suppressed the findings of its own scientists to make it look as if the Syrian government had been responsible for the alleged chemical incident in April 2018 in Douma.

The public attention to the OPCW’s fakery lead to the questioning of other assertions the OPCW had previously made. With the OPCW under fire someone had to come to its help.

To save the propaganda value of the OPCW reports the U.S. financed Bellingcat propaganda organization jumped in to save the OPCW’s bacon. Bellingcat founder “suck my balls” Elliot Higgins claimed that the OPCW reports satisfied the concerns the OPCW scientist had voiced.

That assertion is now further propagated by a New York Times piece which, under the pretense of reporting about open source analysis, boosts Bellingcat and its defense of the OPCW:

The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014, he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
…
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.

It seems that the New York Times forgot to mention an important monetary source for Bellingcat. Here is a current screenshot of Bellingcat’s About page:

Porticus, Adessium, Pax for Peace and the Postcode Lottery are all Dutch organizations. Then there is the notorious Soros organization the New York Times mentioned. But why did the NYT forgot to tell its readers that Bellingcat is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy which itself is to nearly 100% funded by the U.S. government?

Could that be because the NED, which spends U.S.government money on more than 1.600 U.S. government paid Non-Government Organizations, is a Trojan horse, a cover for the CIA?

Spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years.
…
What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.
…
“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

The fact that the NED is doing the CIA’s work is likely the reason why the NYT puff piece about Bellingcat forgets to mention its payments and also why it jumps to Bellingcat’s and the OPCW’s help:

Some journalists and activists hostile to what they characterize as Bellingcat’s pro-Western narratives have criticized some of its coverage of the war in Syria.At issue is an April 7, 2018, attack on Douma, Syria. Bellingcat reported, based on an analysis of six open-source videos, that it was “highly likely” that Douma civilians had died because of chemical weapons. In March, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reported that there were “reasonable grounds” to say that chemical weapons had been used in the attack.

Critics of Bellingcat have pointed to an email from an investigator with the organization, saying that it raised questions about the findings. WikiLeaks published the email on Nov. 23. In a response, Bellingcat defended its reporting, saying the final report on Douma from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reflected the concerns of the investigator whose email was published by WikiLeaks.

By playing video games Elliot Higgins learned to identify chemical attacks in dubious video sequences published by terrorist affiliates. If true it is an admirable capability. Still his assertion that the OPCW report “reflected the concerns of the investigator” who criticized it is, as Caitlin Johnstone demonstrates, utterly false:

Bellingcat simply ignores this absolutely central aspect of the email, as well as the whistleblower’s point about the symptoms of victims not matching chlorine gas poisoning.

“In this case the confidence in the identity of chlorine or any choking agent is drawn into question precisely because of the inconsistency with the reported and observed symptoms,” the whistleblower writes in the email. “The inconsistency was not only noted by the [Fact Finding Mission] team but strongly noted by three toxicologists with expertise in exposure to [Chemical Weapons] agents.”

Bellingcat says nothing about these revelations in the email, and says nothing about the fact that the OPCW excluded them from both its Interim Report in July 2018 and its Final Report in March 2019, the latter of which actually asserted the exact opposite saying there was “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

Bellingcat completely ignores all of these points, …

In its defense of the OPCW report Bellingcat wrote:

[A] comparison of the points raised in the letter against the final Douma report makes it amply clear that the OPCW not only addressed these points, but even changed the conclusion of an earlier report to reflect the concerns of said employee.

Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens did not concur with that paragraph:

Apart from the words ‘a’, and ‘the’, everything in the above paragraph is, to put it politely, mistaken. Bellingcat have been so anxious to trash the leak from the OPCW that they have (as many did when the attack was first released) rushed to judgment without waiting for the facts. More is known by the whistleblowers of the OPCW than has yet been released …

Caitlin and Peter should play more video games. I have read in the NYT that they are the true path to learning and to the factual assessment of alleged chemical attacks.

On April 7 2018 terrorists of the Jaish al Islam group ruled in Douma. They killed 40 civilians. The bodies were shown in videos along with chlorine gas canisters to pretend that the Syrian government had killed those people. The OPCW’s fact finding team analyzed the evidence and found that the canisters had not been dropped from the air but were manually placed. The symptoms the victims showed were inconsistent with a chlorine attack and chlorinated substances were only found in extremely low concentrations. There were absolutely no “reasonable grounds” to say that chemical weapons had been used in the attack.

But the OPCW management, under U.S. pressure and despite the protests by its own scientists, put out a report that said the opposite. As the manipulation came to light the U.S. funded Bellingcat made a perfunctory attempt to muddle the issue. Thus another propaganda organization, the New York Times, had to jump in to save Bellingcat and the false OPCW claims.

It is not going to help. There will soon be more evidence that the OPCW management published two false reports on Douma, and likely even more on other issues. There will be a public recognition that the OPCW has failed.

Establishment media’s mass deception

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Stephen Lendman

Source: Intrepid Report

On major geopolitical and other issues, mass deception overrides truth and full disclosure in establishment media print editions and daily broadcasts—wealth, power and privileged interests served over peace, equity and justice.

The NYT is Exhibit A. Its Friday edition featured Iran-bashing disinformation, saying the following: “Iran has used the continuing chaos in Iraq to build up a hidden arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles in Iraq [sic], part of a widening effort to try to intimidate the Middle East and assert its power [sic]”—citing unnamed US intelligence and Pentagon officials,” adding that the US built up “its military presence in the Middle East to counter emerging threats to American interests [sic], including attacks on oil tankers and facilities that intelligence officials have blamed on Iran [sic].”

Iranian missiles “pose a threat to American allies and partners in the region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and could endanger American troops…”

Fact: Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi debunk phony claims about IRGC missiles in Iraq, saying that the accusations are “false, meaningless and ludicrous. What has been raised and published by some infamous cells and certain media about the transfer of Iranian missiles to Iraq is a nonsensical statement and sheer lie.”

They’re all about maliciously vilifying Iran to create a nonexistent threat, wanting its Iranian relations with neighboring countries undermined.

Iranian military advisors are in Iraq and Syria at the behest of their governments, Tehran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani earlier explained—adding that they’re there to help combat US-supported terrorism.

The US and its key allies are “the main creators and sponsors of takfiri terrorists,” he earlier stressed.

Fact: Iran was falsely blamed earlier for attacks on regional oil tankers and facilities it had nothing to do with—no evidence suggesting otherwise. The incidents were false flags staged to wrongfully blame Iran for what happened.

Fact: Iran threatens no other countries. Claims otherwise are bald-faced Big Lies, part of establishment media supported US propaganda.

Fact: The US and its imperial allies threaten humanity. Needing enemies to unjustifiably justify its imperial agenda, they’re invented because no real ones exist—none since WW II ended.

Fact: Iran’s nuclear program has no military component, never did in a nation abhorring these weapons, wanting them eliminated everywhere.

Fact: Iranian defense spending is solely for self-defense, its legal right under international law. It’s ruling authorities haven’t attacked another nation in centuries—what US-dominated NATO and Israel do repeatedly, their hostile actions supported by the Times and other establishment media.

Instead of reporting “all the news that’s fit to print,” Times’ editions feature managed news misinformation and disinformation.

Times and other establishment media columnists are what famed journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) called “prostitutes of the press.”

They’re propagandists, scam artists and charlatans—paid to lie, distort, misinform, and blame victims for US high crimes committed against them, while supporting monied interests over popular ones.

In his latest disinformation piece, Times columnist David Brooks “cheer[ed] (predatory) capitalism, now and forever,” adding, “I came to realize that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out… It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.”

Fact: Diogenes called education “the foundation of every state.” Horace Mann said: “The common [public] school (socialized education) is the greatest discovery ever made by man”—calling it the “great equalizer” that was “common” to all.

In 1862, the Morrill Act established land-grant public colleges and universities on a tuition-free basis.

For the next century, many US state and other public colleges and universities charged no or nominal tuition and other fees to attend—socialized higher education, affordable to millions that worked as intended.

Attending today entraps millions of students into debt bondage because of exorbitantly higher education costs—at a time when career opportunities are a shadow of what they were post-WW II

Fact: New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society program helped millions of Americans avoid poverty—social programs that worked, eroding and disappearing today.

FDR’s Great Depression social programs built or renovated 700,000 miles of roads, 7,800 bridges, 45,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 1,000 airfields, and other infrastructure projects—including much of Chicago’s lakefront.

Fact: The post-WW II (GI Bill) Servicemen’s Readjustment Act provided college or vocational education for 7.8 million returning vets.

Fact: Another 2.4 million got VA-backed low-interest, no down payment home loans at a time when their average cost was under $5,000—letting millions of families afford them.

Studies later showed the GI Bill was one of America’s soundest investments. It paid for itself seven times over. It also helped millions readjust successfully to civilian life.

The State University of New York (SUNY) system, the nation’s largest, was tuition-free until 1963. The University of California system had free tuition until the 1980s.

Today, SUNY tuition, room, board and fees are around $14,000 annually. At UCLA, it’s around $34,000 annually for state residents, at UC Berkeley over $36,000, for non-state residents about $63,000 annually.

Facilitating free or low-cost higher education and home ownership in the US post-WW II with VA-backed low-interest loans helped created post-war prosperity.

In the 1940s and 50s, strong unions and well-paid factory jobs elevated millions of Americans to middle-class status, what’s fast eroding today.

The economy then grew annually at around 3.5%. By 1960, blue-collar workers were the biggest buyers of many luxury goods and services, including homes and autos.

Socialism works as intended when unobstructed by foreign interference. Under Hugo Chavez, Venezuela was Latin America’s fastest growing economy.

The country prospered until devastated by US economic terrorism, harming the nation and its people.

According to the Times’ resident neocon Bret Stephens, “NATO is full of freeloaders [sic],” falsely adding the alliance is “how we defend the free world. Europe without American protection is a continental disaster waiting to happen.”

Fact: US-dominated NATO threatens world peace and humanity’s survival. After Soviet Russia dissolved in December 1991, NATO became an alliance for aggression, not deterrence, its current US-controlled mission.

As long as NATO exists, endless US-led wars will continue, world peace and stability remaining unattainable—the ominous threat of nuclear war by accident or design possible.

Impeachment hearing opens with Democratic Party blast against Russia

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

The House Judiciary Committee opened its first formal hearing on the impeachment of President Trump Wednesday with a statement by committee chairman Jerrold Nadler that confirmed the right-wing character of the Democratic campaign.

Nadler openly declared that the effort to impeach Trump for withholding military aid from Ukraine was a continuation of the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections in support of Trump.

He first recounted Trump’s withholding of military aid to browbeat Ukraine into opening an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, an action that Trump hoped would benefit him in the 2020 election. Nadler then said, “Of course, this is not the first time that President Trump has engaged in this pattern of conduct.”

He continued: “In 2016, the Russian government engaged in a sweeping and systematic campaign of interference in our elections. In the words of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, ‘the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.’ The President welcomed that interference.”

In invoking the bogus claims of massive Russian intervention in the 2016 elections—and raising the even less credible suggestion that Ukraine’s actions could play a major role in the 2020 elections—Nadler revealed the essential falsehood that underlies the entire Democratic impeachment campaign over Ukraine.

The United States is not the victim of global efforts to subvert its electoral processes. The reality is just the opposite. The US government is the most active and aggressive saboteur and manipulator of democratic processes all over the world, routinely intervening to ensure that pro-American regimes are placed in power. Its intelligence agencies regularly organize political overturns, up to and including bloody military coups, in those cases where the people of a targeted country vote the “wrong” way, from the perspective of Washington.

Ukraine is one of the most prominent recent examples of this, as the CIA and State Department backed a right-wing coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, viewed as too sympathetic to Moscow. US agencies financed and mobilized ultra-right and neo-Nazi forces who spearheaded the uprising that drove Yanukovych into exile in 2014. Since then, the US and its NATO allies have been preparing feverishly for a war with Russia in which Ukraine would serve as a key battlefront, even though such a conflict would bring with it the danger of nuclear conflict.

The Judiciary Committee’s opening hearing took testimony from a panel of four law school professors on the legal and constitutional requirements for a legitimate impeachment proceeding. This was an effort to mimic the initial hearings that began impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon in 1973-74 and Bill Clinton in 1998-99.

The three professors chosen by the Democratic majority all testified that Trump’s actions constituted impeachable offenses. Each cited historical instances to demonstrate that those who drafted the US Constitution were deeply concerned about the possibility of foreign intervention into US elections, particularly as it related to the election of the president, the chief executive of the new government.

Citing these 230-year-old concerns of a small and newly independent country, in a world dominated by powerful foreign empires, only underscores the contradiction with today’s power realities. The United States is the most powerful imperialist nation. It is Ukraine that has been the target of a two-decades-long campaign of subversion and manipulation by Washington, aimed at transforming the country into a base of operations directed against Russia.

As several witnesses in the previous round of hearings held by the House Intelligence Committee asserted—and as reiterated in the Democrats’ 300-page impeachment report released Tuesday—the United States’ client regime in Kiev is already engaged in a “hot war” with Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.

The campaign to transform Ukraine into a US subject state and military staging ground against Russia, on which the CIA, State Department and Pentagon have expended more than $10 billion, was threatened by Trump’s withholding of military aid. It was this action that sparked the retaliatory “whistleblower” complaint by a CIA officer formerly assigned to the White House, which then became the pretext for the launching of the impeachment inquiry.

Again and again, throughout the eight-hour hearing, Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee returned to the theme of alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections and the ongoing US military-diplomatic operations directed against Moscow.

Eric Swalwell of California, for example, declared, “We’re here because of this photo,” while having a photograph displayed on a huge television screen showing President Volodymyr Zelensky dressed in combat gear in eastern Ukraine, where he stood on the “front line against Russia.” Swalwell added that the US was aiding Zelensky to fight Russia “so that we don’t have to fight them here,” as though Russian soldiers were about to parachute onto the streets of Washington DC.

The anti-Russian hysteria was combined with claims that Trump’s conduct in relation to Ukraine bore comparison to Watergate. One of the legal witnesses, Noah Feldman of Harvard University Law School, flatly stated, “Richard Nixon sent burglars to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. This president just made a direct phone call to the president of a foreign country asking for his intervention in our election.”

Another witness, Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina Law School, went even further, declaring in his opening statement that Trump’s conduct was far worse than Nixon’s in Watergate—because Nixon used American operatives against his political rivals, while Trump resorted to foreign ones.

These comparisons collapse as soon as one considers the stark difference between the current political crisis and the situation that led to Nixon’s resignation in Watergate, as well as the crisis that shook the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. In both these cases, the president engaged in criminal conduct in order to pursue unpopular and illegal wars—in Nixon’s case, the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; in Reagan’s case, the “contra” war against Nicaragua.

It was the massive popular opposition to these imperialist wars that led the president in each case to resort to criminal actions. Nixon approved the formation of the “plumbers” unit of ex-CIA agents to spy on his political opponents and collect information by illegal methods, including, ultimately, the burglarizing of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex.

Reagan authorized his National Security Council, with Lt. Col. Oliver North taking the lead, to organize the sale of weapons to Iran to obtain funds that could be routed to the “contra” forces engaged in CIA-backed terrorist attacks in Nicaragua, in direct violation of the Boland Amendment, which prohibited such aid.

In the case of Ukraine, it is not Trump but his Democratic opponents who are demanding a more aggressive pursuit of illegal and militaristic foreign policy objectives, including the arming of the regime set up in the Ukraine by the CIA-backed “Maidan Revolution” of 2014. In this, the Democrats are acting as political attorneys for the CIA, Pentagon and State Department, as was made clear in the parade of national-security officials who defied Trump’s orders and testified before the House Intelligence Committee.

This embrace of the CIA-backed overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine makes nonsense of the Democrats’ claims that their concern in bringing charges against Trump is to defend democracy in America.

There would be no lack of grounds for a legitimate political indictment of Trump on charges of anti-democratic criminal actions: the forced separation of parents and children by his border Gestapo, the illegal diversion of congressionally appropriated funds to build the border wall, the “Muslim ban” on travelers from targeted countries, or Trump’s incessant appeals to racist and fascist forces.

The Democrats choose not to raise these issues because their invocations of democracy are entirely false and hypocritical. Trump’s drive towards fascism cannot and will not be fought by appealing to the CIA and State Department. These are merely two different roads to the same end: the establishment of an authoritarian regime in America.

The hypocrisy of the Democrats is demonstrated in the choice of the witness who led off the impeachment hearing. Professor Noah Feldman is not just a Harvard Law School professor. He has a long and noxious record as an apologist for American imperialist intervention, most notably serving in 2003 as a political adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council, the provisional administration set up after the US invasion.

After helping the Bush administration set up its puppet regime in Iraq at the onset of an imperialist war that has cost the lives of more than a million people and set in train a series of catastrophes in the Middle East, Feldman is hardly in a position to posture as an expert on the defense of democratic rights and constitutional processes.

Similarly, Pamela Karlan from Stanford University Law School, the second legal expert to testify, served in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice in 2014-2015, at a time when this agency was spearheading the attack on Edward Snowden and Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes and mass surveillance, and when Chelsea Manning was serving a 35-year prison term for her leaks of classified information detailing these crimes.

New OPCW Leak Further Vindicates Skeptics Of Establishment Syria Narrative

Posted on November 28, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

On the sixth of July last year, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) released its interim report on its findings regarding an alleged poison gas attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018. The incident, which resulted in dozens of civilian casualties, was blamed on the Syrian government by the US, UK and France, who launched retaliatory airstrikes on multiple targets in that nation.

The interim report claimed that “various chlorinated organic chemicals were found” in different locations on the scene, but strangely said nothing about the levels at which those chemicals were found. The Moon of Alabama blog highlighted this suspicious exclusion on the day the report came out, noting that levels are absolutely essential in determining chemical weapons use when you’re talking about compounds which are found virtually everywhere at some level in any industrialized region.

“The preliminary OPCW report says nothing about the concentrations in which these substances were found,” MoA observed. “Without knowing the concentrations, which may be extremely low, one can not come to further conclusion.”

“The ‘various chlorinated organic chemicals’ are unsurprising,” MoA wrote. “Chlorine is widely used for water purification and cleaning and ‘chlorinated organic chemicals’ will be found in any household.”

A new addition to the body of leaks which have been hemorrhaging from the OPCW shows that such skepticism was indeed entirely warranted. A leaked email sent shortly before the interim report was published reveals that the chlorinated organic chemicals which OPCW investigators found on the scene were as low as one or two parts-per-billion, meaning, just as Moon of Alabama speculated last year, that they were found at trace quantities you’d expect to find in any industrialized area.

RELEASE: Secret internal e-mail from OPCW whistleblower, a member of the fact-finding mission sent to Douma, Syria, after the alleged chemical attack in April last year, accusing OPCW management of doctoring report on the incident and distorting facts. https://t.co/ndK4sRikNk

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 24, 2019

The leaked email, which has been published by WikiLeaks and several other outlets, was sent by an unnamed OPCW investigator to the OPCW’s then-cabinet chief Bob Fairweather, outright accusing OPCW leadership of misleading the public with the information it was omitting from the report it was drafting. Those who’ve been following this scandal closely may remember Fairweather as the man who journalist Jonathan Steele recently reported was responsible for calling investigators into his office to be intimidated by unknown officials from the United States government.

The email was sent to Fairweather on June 22nd, laden with pointed words and phrases like “misrepresents the facts”, “selectively omitting”, “highly misleading”, “disingenuous”, “inaccurate”, and “a major deviation from the original report.” Less than two weeks later, on July the fourth, the investigators were reportedly called into Fairweather’s office for a disturbing meeting with US officials which deeply rattled them.

“On July 4 there was another intervention,” Steele’s report reads. “Fairweather, the chef de cabinet, invited several members of the drafting team to his office. There they found three US officials who were cursorily introduced without making clear which US agencies they represented. The Americans told them emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors left Fairweather’s office, feeling that the invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.”

It’s worth noting at this time that the US government already has a known and established history of leveraging the ostensibly neutral and international OPCW to conform to its preexisting military agendas.

Good background on todays leak: https://t.co/VkQSZGT6ec

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 24, 2019

Fairweather’s intimidation ploy appears to have been a response to comments made in the email, and probably other similar internal objections made by other investigators at that time. The email reads as follows (transcript and parenthetical annotations made by Daily Mail):

Dear Bob,

I wish to express, as a member of the FFM (Fact Finding Mission) team that conducted the investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April, my gravest concern at the redacted version of the FFM report, which I understand was at the behest of the ODG. (Office of the Director General). After reading this modified report, which incidentally no other team member who deployed into Douma has had the opportunity to do, I was struck by how much it misrepresents the facts. Many of the facts and observations outlined in the full version are inextricably interconnected and, by selectively omitting certain ones, an unintended bias has been introduced into the report, undermining its credibility. In other cases, some crucial facts that have remained in the redacted version have morphed into something quite different to what was initially drafted. If I may, I will outline some specific aspects to the redacted report that are particularly worrisome.

The statement in paragraph 8.3 of the final conclusions ‘The team has sufficient evidence at this time to determine that chlorine, or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical, was likely released from cylinders’, is highly misleading and not supported by the facts. The only evidence available at this moment is that some samples collected at Locations 2 and 4 were in contact with one or more chemicals that contain a reactive chlorine atom. Such chemicals could include molecular chlorine, phosgene, cyanogen chloride, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen chloride or sodium hypochlorite (the major ingredient of household chlorine-based bleach). Purposely singling out chlorine gas as one of the possibilities is disingenuous. It is also worth noting that the term ‘reactive chlorine-containing chemical’ used in the redacted report is, in fact, inaccurate. It actually describes a reactive chemical that contains chlorine which itself (the chlorine) is not necessarily reactive e.g. chlorophenol. The original report uses the more accurate term ‘a chemical containing reactive chlorine’.

The redacted report states that the gas was likely released from the cylinders (in Locations 2 and 4). The original report purposely emphasised the fact that, although the cylinders might have been the source of the suspected chemical release, there was insufficient evidence to affirm this. It is possible the error was simply a typo. This is a major deviation from the original report.

Paragraph 8.2 states that ‘based on the high levels of various chlorinated organic derivatives, […] detected in environmental samples’. Describing the levels as ‘high’ likely overstates the extent of levels of chlorinated organic derivatives detected. They were, in most cases, present only in parts per billion range, as low as 1-2 ppb, which is essentially trace quantities.

The original report discusses in detail the inconsistency between the victims’ symptoms, as reported by witnesses and seen in video recordings. Omitting this section of the report (including the Epidemiology which has been removed in its entirety) has a serious negative impact on the report as this section is inextricably linked to the chemical agent identified. It either supports or detracts from the confidence in the identity of any possible chemical. In this case the confidence in the identity of chlorine or any choking agent is drawn into question precisely because of the inconsistency with the reported and observed symptoms. The inconsistency was not only noted by the FFM team but strongly noted by three toxicologists with expertise in exposure to CW (Chemical Weapons) agents.

The original report has extensive sections regarding the placement of the cylinders at both locations as well as the relative damage caused to the impact points, compared to that caused to the cylinders suspected of being the sources of the toxic chemical. These sections are essentially absent from the redacted report. This information was important in assessing the likelihood of the ‘presence’ of toxic chemicals versus the ‘use’ of toxic chemicals.

A feature of this investigation and report was the robust and extensive scientific basis for sampling plans and analysing the data collected. A comprehensive bibliography of peer-reviewed scientific literature was attached to support and enhance the credibility of the work of the mission. This has unfortunately been omitted from the redacted report.

By singling out chlorine above other equally plausible substances containing reactive chlorine and presenting it as a fact in isolation creates, I believe, a level of partiality that would negatively impact on the perceived credibility of the report, and by extension that of the Organisation. I am requesting that the fact-finding report be released in its entirety as I fear that this redacted version no longer reflects the work of the team. The original report contains facts and observations that are all equally valid. The fact that inconsistencies are highlighted or observations not fully understood does not justify their omission. The inconsistencies and observations are based on the evidence and data collected. Further information in the future may help resolve them but the facts as they stand at present will not alter and need to be reported.

If the redacted version is to be released, I respectfully request to attach my differing observations, in accordance with the spirit of paragraph 62 of part II of the Verification Annex of the CWC.

Yours sincerely

Today’s @OPCW final report on 7 April 2018 attack in Douma confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of @OPCW’s work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime’s CW attacks on its own population. https://t.co/cXXJTCiZI7

— UK Delegation to the OPCW (@UK_OPCW) March 1, 2019

The OPCW’s final report published March of this year continued the pattern of crucial omissions even more egregiously than the interim report.

“Regarding the alleged use of toxic chemicals as a weapon in Douma, the evaluation and analysis of all the above-referenced information gathered by the FFM provide reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon has taken place on 7 April 2018,” the final report claims. “This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

Again, the information complained about in the leaked email remained omitted.

This is really important. Why aren’t we talking about it?

"We may have just discovered a major piece of the puzzle explaining how seemingly independent international organizations help deceive us into consenting to wars and regime change interventionism around the world." https://t.co/yH8mfU9eBC

— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) May 17, 2019

The unfolding scandal about the US and its allies once again deceiving the world about yet another military intervention in yet another Middle Eastern nation is a major story, and hardly anyone’s been on top of it.

Back when I published an article about the first OPCW whistleblower this past May it was shared by actress Susan Sarandon on Twitter, who captioned it with the question, “This is really important. Why aren’t we talking about it?” Click on the tweet and read through the comments if you want to see the platoon of blue-checkmarked narrative managers who converged on her post telling her I’m a crazed conspiracy theorist who mustn’t be listened to. I got this story right, and everyone who’s been ignoring it or dismissing it has made an ass of themselves.

So congratulations to me. Congratulations to Moon of Alabama for getting this story right from day one. Congratulations to Piers Robinson, Tim Hayward, and the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media who published the first OPCW leak back in May of this year in the face of numerous obnoxious smear pieces from the mainstream media. Congratulations to Jimmy Dore, Aaron Maté and the handful of other alternative media figures who’ve been keeping this story alive while all the “reputable” mainstream news outlets tried to let it die.

We were right, they were wrong. Maybe going forward people should listen to us a bit more and listen to them a bit less.

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