TBR News May 8, 2017

May 08 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. May 8, 2017: “Banking establishments, the major Western controlling entities, viewed the French elections with considerable alarm.

LePen would have re instituted the franc, dissing the euro, and this, coupled with the Brexit would have been a disaster for them.

Globalization has become very unpopular in many populations and coupled with obvious violence concerning the flood of immigrants, is something that needs to be controlled, not thrown into the fire.

Getting a pure establishment banker elected to the French Presidency is a great relief and this will be reflected in the controlled public media but the volcanoes are still boiling just below the surface and frantic attempts to ignore them will certainly fail.”

 

Table of Contents

  • ‘Very essence of establishment’: Macron’s reformer image questioned in view of govt & EU links
  • The Day of the Censors: It’s coming …
  • Six Ways the New York Times Could Genuinely Make Its Op-Ed Page More Representative of America
  • SECRECY NEWS
  • Oklahoma Governor Signs Anti-Protest Law Imposing Huge Fines on “Conspirator” Organizations
  • Myths and Legends Created to Excuse and Confuse
  • Banks planning to move 9,000 jobs from Britain because of Brexit
  • The CIA has a long history of helping to kill leaders around the world
  • Official Murders for Fun and Profit

 ‘Very essence of establishment’: Macron’s reformer image questioned in view of govt & EU links

May 8, 2017

RT

France’s newly elected leader, Emmanuel Macron, represents the European establishment fearful of a popular revolt, former MI5 intelligence officer Anne Machon tells RT, as many analysts appeared to be skeptical the former Socialist minister could bring change.

“Former US President Barack Obama endorsed Macron, the EU endorsed Macron. They were very frightened about another popular revolt against the establishment. Macron is very establishment: the elitist universities in France, the fact that he was [France’s] Economy Minister,” Machon said, further listing the facts showing Macron’s actual affiliation.

According to the former British intelligence officer, the fact that his En Marche! political movement “that came from nowhere within one year” looks very much “an establishment stitch-up.”

“The western global elites wanted to make sure that EU continues. That there is a status quo,” she added.

Steven Woolfe, a British barrister and independent politician, told RT he believes that Macron is next on the list of European politicians masquerading as fighters against the establishment.

“Macron is the essence of the European establishment. If you look at the way from [former UK PM] Tony Blair to [Greek PM Alexis] Tsipras, [former Italian PM Matteo] Renzi, Macron is simply another one of those characters,” Woolfe says.

Woolfe notes that Macron was the Economy Minister serving under the Socialist government of Francois Hollande from 2014-16. He stepped down last year and created his En Marche! movement to join the presidential race.

“[Macron] worked in international finance and banking, he is someone who has great links to the establishment media in France. And as long as he is supporting the EU, as long as he never changes what is happening in Europe, then he is the man that was put in place,” Woolfe says.

Janice Atkinson, an independent member of the European Parliament, also pointed out that  Macron is “backed by EU, backed by globalists, backed by the bankers.”

Woolfe believes that, in reality, people “are fed up with globalization, with open borders, with globalists and bankers who are running our systems.”

Jean Bricmont, Belgian philosopher of science and a political commentator, believes that Macron is going to follow the policy of his predecessor.“Macron is going to make the same foreign policy as Hollande, only worse, so it will be more [orientation] on Washington – whether he would get along with Trump, it’s a separate question – but it would be very anti-Russian, he would probably want to arm rebels in Syria,” he said.

Bricmont said that the French electoral commission had instructed media not to report on the recent leaks about Macron. A massive trove of internal documents from Macron’s campaign was leaked by unknown hackers on Friday evening. Macron’s En Marche! movement said they were the “victims of a hacking attack.”

“When there was an inquiry about Fillon, which in principle should have been secret, it was leaked to the press and the press used it. Fillon was a candidate, who could have beaten Macron but he was totally destroyed by these affairs,” he said.

The hacking of the Emmanuelle Macron team’s emails “in a certain sense could have helped” the centrist candidate in the vote, Professor Bruno Drweski, from the National Institute of Languages and Eastern Civilizations, told RT.

He pointed out that the attack happened “very late” in the election and failed to reveal any compromising details about the candidate.

“It’s difficult to know exactly what did happen, but it confirms that [the Macron team] need an atmosphere of conspiracy… to make something popular because they have no program, no concrete proposals,” Drweski said.

Macron may face a problem if he cannot secure a majority in the French legislative elections that are to be held in June 2017, Guy Mettan, Executive Director of the Swiss Press Club, believes.

“He is a candidate of the establishment… But I think that difficulties will come with the next step of legislative elections for Macron and his supporters. Even if he has won tonight, now he has to convince all the French people to vote for him. And it is not yet won now,” he said.

He noted that French voters are “completely divided” into five parties, supporting five presidential candidates – En Marche! (Macron), National Front (Marine Le Pen), La France Insoumise (Jean-Luc Mélenchon), Republicans (Francois Fillon) and Socialists (Benoît Hamon).

“I think it will be quite impossible to get a majority in the next parliament. So France will be very divided. It’s not possible in four weeks to make a majority in the next parliament,” Mettan said.

The Day of the Censors: It’s coming …

by Justin Raimondo

May 8, 2017

AntiWar

It’s “sensitive” to tell the truth these days. It can get you in trouble. It can get you censored. And that’s exactly what the Establishment is aiming for: total and complete censorship of the Internet, whether done by corporate titans or by governments. And who are the biggest, most vocal advocates of censorship today? It’s the “liberals.” After all, corporate Twitter is hardly a bastion of reactionary thought. Backed up by a phalanx of liberal academics, who have been turning out reams of “research” designed to show that right-wing “extremists” are spreading “hate” and ‘misinformation” over the Internet, the paladins of American liberalism have now become the Mrs. Grundys of the cybernetic age.

This illiberal liberalism has been trending for a while, but it spiked with the 2016 presidential election, when the anti-“fake news” campaign hit the media. Supposedly broadcast by Russian “bots” – automated social media accounts – information deemed damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and labeled “misinformation,” was held responsible for the Democratic nominee’s surprising defeat. The publication by WikiLeaks of the DNC files and John Podesta’s embarrassing emails brought cries by liberals for the media to refrain from covering the story. And the WikiLeaks revelations gave birth to an entire mini-industry, which purports to show that the whole thing was a Russian plot to elect Donald Trump – a conclusion endorsed by our intelligence agencies without making any real evidence public.

Now the same thing has happened with the French election, where rightist Marine Le Pen faced off with centrist neo-liberal (and winner) Emmanuel Macron. Hours before a mandatory ban on campaigning went into effect, what is apparently the entire content of the Macron campaign’s email cache was published online, along with allegations of a secret Cayman Islands bank account, charges of tax evasion, and an email from a prominent campaign official ending with the slogan (in French) “F—k the people.”

The response to this has been ferocious, with threats by the French government to prosecute anyone who so much as mentions the data dump, and accusations that – of course! – it’s all a Russian Plot. There’s Cyrillic metadata as well as the actual name of a Russian computer expert in that metadata, which, far from being evidence of a sinister Russian conspiracy, probably means someone is trying to implicate the Russians. Who, after all, would leave such a painfully obvious clue?

The New York Times reported Macron-gate as a right-wing conspiracy originating in America, with “far right activists” conducting “Twitter raids” – an insidious sounding phrase that apparently means only the fact that they were spreading information the Times disapproves of. The Macron campaign denounced this as an example of “democratic destabilization,” another fancy phrase for engaging in unapproved speech. Among the acts of “democratic destabilization” committed against Macron were “portraying him as a 21st-century equivalent of Marie Antoinette, the out-of-touch last queen of France.”

Oh please – are we to be spared nothing?!

“’They tried to bombard French Twitter with memes favorable to Le Pen,’ said Padraic Ryan, a project coordinator at Storyful, an online marketing company that tracks social media activity around news events. ‘The campaigns are showing an increasing level of sophistication and coordination.’”

“Bombard,” “destabilize” – another favorite is “weaponize” – these word choices are meant to characterize online activity as somehow violent. But what are we really talking about here? Speech! Words! Words that these defenders of “democracy” would rather not hear – and clearly want to stamp out.

A group that calls itself “Data for Democracy”was busy “tracking” the Internet during the French election, with particular emphasis on Twitter, and saw a conspiracy of “far right activists” in the US trying to somehow magically throw the election to Le Pen “just like we observed in the US presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK.” The authors put particular emphasis on “bots” – automated accounts – which are supposedly sinister evidence of foreign government involvement, but which any teenager with rudimentary Internet facility can create. According to Data for Democracy, the allegations behind “Macron-gate” are “disinformation,” while no such appellation is given to memes that are anti-Le Pen. Not that anyone has had time to investigate the Macron-gate allegations, or even to read all the many thousands of emails liberated from Macron’s servers – but, hey, what are you, some kind of “far right activist”?

Data for Democracy bemoans the fact that Le Pen accused Macron of having a secret tax haven, and that

“Macron has had to answer for this claim in interviews, much like Barack Obama had to answer questions about his birth certificate and Hillary Clinton about her email server.”

So the tax haven accusation is the equivalent of birtherism, and so is the known fact that Mrs. Clinton had a private email server while Secretary of State, a violation of the law and a security problem.

Of course, none of this would amount to anything other than partisan boilerplate until we get to the real aims of these “Data for Democracy” “researchers”:

“So what do we do? … demand that  the platforms who enable the spread of disinformation and hate online be held accountable.

“The web is ours. Democracy is ours. It’s time we took them both back.”

“The webs is ours” – but what exactly does this mean? You have to follow the link to find out what “taking it back” means, and it isn’t pretty.

The link takes you to a piece by University of Maryland instructor Kris Shaffer, who writes:

“Imagine a world where hate sites couldn’t do any of these things…

  • embed content from YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter
  • violate mainstream media outlets’ copyright privileges without legal action
  • make money off of ads from Google, Facebook, or other mainstream companies
  • list podcasts in the iTunes database
  • post content to social media
  • have site content appear on Facebook or Twitter via their Open Graph/Twitter Cards services (with pictures, highlighted headlines, etc., all of which boost traffic) … or even at all
  • appear in Google search results.”

That is, imagine a world run by “Data for Democracy” and other illiberal liberals, who get to censor any site they deem a “hate site.” Imagine a world where the Internet is no longer free, where government and corporate power combine to determine what you may see, and how you may see it. Imagine a censored Internet.

The real danger here is that this same methodology is being utilized by the US government to measure the degree of “Russian influence” on the last election: it came up prominently in the House Intelligence Committee hearings on the subject, and you can be sure that we’ll soon be seeing proposed “counter-measures” to be implemented in the sacred name of “national security.”

In short, there are influential groups of people – in government, in academia, and especially in the news media, which wants to nip its “illegitimate” competition in the bud – who are pushing for censorship of the Internet. They want to prevent any more Brexits, any more Donald Trumps, any more populist uprisings against the Establishment – and they’re doing it in true Orwellian fashion, in the name of preserving “democracy.”

These people are worse than mere hypocrites: they’re a danger to the free society. They’re closet totalitarians who like to portray themselves as “liberals” – according to the Bizarro World definition, that is.

The Internet is the biggest threat to the Establishment since the invention of the printing press. That’s why they want to neuter it, harness it, and banish people like me from it. That’s why my tweets are labeled “sensitive”: and maybe someday soon, you won’t be able to see them at all.

They’d love to get rid of Antiwar.com. We’ve been a thorn in their side ever since our founding, over twenty years ago. For all that time we’ve been exposing their lies, and telling our growing audience the truth about American foreign policy – and they don’t like it one bit.

Six Ways the New York Times Could Genuinely Make Its Op-Ed Page More Representative of America

May 8 2017

by Zaid Jilani

The Intercept

The New York Times defended hiring former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens — a writer who has promoted climate denial and bigotry against Arabs — by insisting that it is seeking diversity of thought.

Public Editor Liz Spayd responded to readers’ complaints about Stephens by writing that the Times is looking “to include a wider range of views, not just on the Opinion pages but in its news columns.”

But hiring another prominent writer whose ideology hems close to that of the nation’s elites — in this case, fossil fuel corporations who are polluting the world and advocates of Western military might — is hardly adding intellectual diversity to the pages of the Times.

Here are six categories of writers who would truly broaden and diversify the op-ed pages of the NYT:

  1. Bernie Sanders backers: Bernie Sanders is the nation’s most popular sitting politician, but the Times doesn’t employ a single columnist who was vocally supportive of his bid for president. It could change that by hiring some of his prominent backers: philosopher Cornel West, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander, labor organizer Jonathan Tasini, and former Nevada Assemblywoman and organizer Lucy Flores could all make strong additions.
  2. Donald Trump supporters: Although the Times has numerous conservative columnists, none of them were open partisans of President Trump — whose approval ratings among Republican voters remains high. The Times could fix this by hiring some of the more thoughtful Trump backers, or at least writers who have documented his appeal. For instance, there is Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who admires Trump’s powers of persuasion and correctly predicted that he would be elected. It could also hire the Washington Examiner’s Saleno Zito, who has crisscrossed the country talking to Trump’s supporters, and who has done more than most journalists to document his appeal to the grassroots.
  3. Young people: There seems to be a rule that a newspapers’ op-ed pages can’t include anyone under 40, even as editors lament that no young people read them. The Times could break real ground by hiring talented millennial writers like the Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig or Demos’s Sean McElwee. The Times could also go even younger, including the voices of Americans who are rarely heard: high-schoolers. They could hire a regular teenage columnist, or even have students across the country share a regular column — rotating who is chosen to write by racial, gender, class, and other demographics.
  4. Arab and Muslim Americans: The Middle East and Islam are frequent topics of New York Times columns, but the paper employs zero Arab or Muslim regular op-ed columnists to write these pieces. This is particularly galling in the face of the Stephens hire, whose reductive writing about the Middle East includes diatribes about the “disease of the Arab mind” and a “Palestinian blood fetish.” It could fix this by employing, for instance, prolific religion professor Reza Aslan or activist Linda Sarsour.
  5. Opponents of militarism: The NYT op-ed page is home to Thomas Friedman, who once proudly described the message of the Iraq war as the following: “Well, suck. on. this. That…was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia….We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.” The paper’s op-ed pages lack skeptics of military intervention, but the Times could rectify that by hiring any number of talented writers: The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison, Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt, or the Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko would all be good picks.
  6. Scientists and environmentalists: If the Times thinks it’s a good idea to hire someone who questions climate science, it might be a good idea to hire someone who actually studies and practices it to balance him out. They could hire, for instance, leading climatologist James Hansen or environmental lawyer Erin Brockovich.

So let’s take the Times at its word. They want a broader range of opinions on their op-ed page, but can’t seem to make much progress on their own. So let’s send them these suggestions — or any other ideas to truly open the windows there and let in some fresh air.

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 34

May 8, 2017

NUMBER OF FOIA REQUESTS REACHES RECORD HIGH

Federal government agencies received more Freedom of Information Act requests last year than ever before, the Justice Department reported last week, reflecting a steadily growing demand for access to government information.

Nearly 790,000 FOIA requests were received in FY 2016, an increase of more than 10% from the year before. The majority of requests were submitted to the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, Veterans Affairs, and the National Archives.

Approximately 760,000 requests were processed throughout the year (including denials, and administrative or procedural closures). Requests were fully granted in 23.1% of the the cases, and partially granted in 36.8% of them.

The total estimated cost of implementing the FOIA in 2016 was more than $500 million. Fees collected from requesters recovered less than 1% of that amount, the DOJ report said. See Summary of Fiscal Year 2016 Annual FOIA Reports Published, DOJ Office of Information Policy, May 3.

Almost everyone involved with the FOIA — requesters as well as agencies — seems to be dissatisfied with the way the process works. It can be excruciatingly slow, with response times often counted in years. Decisions to withhold information frequently appear arbitrary, excessive or otherwise inappropriate. The system is inequitable, as super-users who file hundreds or thousands of requests (and those who are able and willing to litigate their requests in court) consume disproportionate amounts of government resources, putting more occasional requesters at a disadvantage. And so on.

These are mostly complaints that the FOIA has failed to live up to expectations.

A deeper criticism would be that the FOIA process as it currently exists is not simply inadequate, it is positively counterproductive.

“FOIA not only fails to deliver on ostensible goals such as participatory policymaking, equal access to information, and full agency disclosure, but also has evolved to subvert some of these goals as well as other public law values,” writes David E. Pozen of Columbia Law School in a blistering new critique.

FOIA “systematically skews the production of information toward commercial interests and facilitates powerful antiregulatory agendas. The inadequacies of FOIA’s original design have been exacerbated by external developments, including the decline of the traditional news media and the rise of hyper-adversarial watchdog groups on the right. Our veneration of FOIA has blinded us to the politics of FOIA.”

“The most promising path forward,” he suggests, “involves displacing FOIA requests as the lynchpin of transparency policy and shoring up alternative strategies, above all affirmative disclosure frameworks that release information in the absence of a request.”

Counterexamples and counterarguments will likely occur to many readers of his article, though the author has anticipated many of those. One possible conclusion that might emerge from Pozen’s thoughtful critique is that while FOIA is still needed to pursue contested areas where government is reluctant to disclose information, it is poorly suited to serve as the primary foundation or anchor of open government.

See Freedom of Information Beyond the Freedom of Information Act by David E. Pozen, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 165, pp. 1097-1158, 2017.

TRUMP OBJECTS TO LEGISLATED LIMITS ON SECRECY

In the new Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017 (section 8009), Congress mandated that no new, highly classified special access programs may be created without 30 day advance notice to the congressional defense committees.

But in signing the bill into law last Friday, President Trump said he would not be bound by that restriction.

“Although I expect to be able to provide the advance notice contemplated by section 8009 in most situations as a matter of comity, situations may arise in which I must act promptly while protecting certain extraordinarily sensitive national security information. In these situations, I will treat these sections in a manner consistent with my constitutional authorities, including as Commander in Chief,” he wrote in a May 5 signing statement.

More generally, Trump suggested that his power to classify national security information is altogether independent of Congress. “The President’s authority to classify and control access to information bearing on the national security flows from the Constitution and does not depend upon a legislative grant of authority,” he wrote.

This is a paraphrase of language in the 1988 US Supreme Court opinion in Department of the Navy v. Egan (The President’s “authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security… flows primarily from this Constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”)

But left unsaid in President Trump’s signing statement was that the Supreme Court has also held that Congress could modify existing classification procedures or create its own secrecy system.

Thus, in EPA v. Mink (1973), the Supreme Court stated: “Congress could certainly have provided that the Executive Branch adopt new [classification] procedures, or it could have established its own procedures — subject only to whatever limitations the Executive privilege may be held to impose upon such congressional ordering.”

And, as noted by Jennifer Elsea, Congress has in fact legislated a classification regime for nuclear weapons-related information in the Atomic Energy Act.

So the newly legislated notification requirements concerning special access programs appear to be well within the constitutional authority and power of Congress.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2017 was incorporated into the Consolidated Appropriations Act as “Division N” and enacted into law.

President Trump’s reservations about various provisions in the new appropriations act were presented in the first signing statement issued by the current Administration (h/t Charlie Savage).

NOTES ON LOS ALAMOS, 1953

A previously unpublished account of life in the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in the early 1950s describes a community determined to achieve, and to present, a semblance of conventional suburban life. It was circulated last month by Los Alamos historian Roger A. Meade.

“In 1954 an unknown author drafted a report, reprinted below, describing the Laboratory and the community as they existed in late 1953,” Meade wrote. “This report, perhaps intended to be crafted into a public relations document, is valuable because it gives us an autobiographical look at Los Alamos during the first half of the 1950s.”

“First-time visitors to Los Alamos often come with a preconceived notion that the will find something awesome and abnormal about the Los Alamos community,” the report says. “They leave, however, with the feeling of having visited an interesting but a perfectly ‘normal’ American community.”

“Los Alamos has fourteen churches representing nearly all denominations. Land for church buildings is available on 99-year leases at a nominal fee.”

“Los Alamos offers a wide selection of cultural and recreational activities. Presentations are made regularly in the commodious Civic Auditorium by such groups as the Civic Orchestra, the Concert Association, the Little Theatre, the Film Society, and the Los Alamos Concert Band. There are frequent lectures and forums; many distinguished speakers have appeared at the Civic Auditorium. Two motion picture theaters have continuous daily showings.”

See Notes on Los Alamos, Report No. LA-UR-17-22764, published April 5, 2017.

 Oklahoma Governor Signs Anti-Protest Law Imposing Huge Fines on “Conspirator” Organizations

May 6 2017

by Alleen Brown

The Intercept

A statute aimed at suppressing protests against oil and gas pipelines has been signed into law in Oklahoma, as a related bill advances through the state legislature. The two bills are part of a nationwide trend in anti-protest laws meant to significantly increase legal penalties for civil disobedience. The Oklahoma law signed this week is unique, however, in its broad targeting of groups “conspiring” with protesters accused of trespassing. It takes aim at environmental organizations Republicans have blamed for anti-pipeline protests that have become costly for local governments.

The statute Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin approved Wednesday was rushed into immediate effect under a provision that declared the situation “an emergency.” It will dramatically increase penalties against protesters who trespass on property containing a “critical infrastructure facility.”

Under the newly signed trespassing law individuals will face a felony and a minimum $10,000 fine if a court determines they entered property intending to damage, vandalize, deface, “impede or inhibit operations of the facility.” Should the trespasser actually succeed in “tampering” with the infrastructure, they face a $100,000 fine or 10 years of imprisonment.

Significantly, the statute also implicates any organization “found to be a conspirator” with the trespasser, threatening collaborator groups with a fine “ten times” that imposed on the intruder — as much as $1 million in cases involving damage.

A section of the law defining “critical infrastructure” includes various types of fossil fuel facilities. Oklahoma is a center of the oil and gas industry and home of the self-styled “Pipeline Crossroads of the World” in Cushing. The state has seen a dramatic increase in earthquakes since the nation’s fracking boom began, as companies began pumping wastewater produced from hydraulic fracturing underground. The Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association is a supporter of the legislation.

A second bill, passed by the Oklahoma House of Representatives Thursday, would permit “vicarious liability” for groups that “compensate” protesters accused of trespassing. The bill’s author reportedly called it a response to the Dakota Access pipeline protests, aimed directly at organizers fighting to stop the Diamond pipeline, a project of Valero and All American Pipeline that would transport oil from Oklahoma to Tennessee. Protests against the pipeline have already begun and construction is scheduled for completion before the end of the year.

The trope of the “professional protester” has long been a talking point for those who disagree with participants’ politics. It was used widely this year by Republicans frustrated by a series of anti-Trump protests after his election and inauguration. It was also used against demonstrators involved in massive actions in defiance of the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota, which were violently repressed by police. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is seeking $38 million in compensation from the federal government for costs associated with the police response and with cleaning up resistance camps whose residents were evicted in February.

According to Public Radio Tulsa, Democrat Rep. Cory Williams demanded to know the definition of “compensation” under the liability bill. “Is it a check? Is it money? Is it staying at somebody’s house?” he asked.

“That would be for the courts to decide,” replied Rep. Mark McBride, the bill’s author.

Doug Parr has represented numerous environmental activists in Oklahoma protest cases. In an interview with The Intercept the attorney noted the liability bill’s loose wording. “Say they lock themselves to a piece of construction equipment, and a claim can be made that there were damages from that trespass,” Parr said. “Does this statute create a civil action for a pipeline company to then go after a person or organization that posted bond or helped pay for a lawyer for that civil disobedience?”

Parr noted that under the new trespassing law a violation as minor as spray-painting a message on an oil facility could plausibly lead to $100,000 in fines if a court determined it was “defacing equipment.”

And he said the law amplifies risks for groups that organize protest actions, who can’t always account for the diversity of tactics used by attendees. “Suppose an organization decides they want to support a perfectly legal, no civil disobedience, action,” he said. “Somebody in that crowd, who has come to the protest at the request of that organization, then jumps the fence and runs in there and spray-paints on a storage tank, ‘This equipment causes earthquakes. Shut it down.’ … These statutes could be used to attack that organization and impose financial liability on them.”

Johnson Bridgwater, head of the Oklahoma chapter of the Sierra Club, which opposes the Diamond pipeline, noted that the club has an official policy against participation in civil disobedience. (Its board suspended the rule in 2013 before executive director Michael Brune was arrested in a protest calling for then-President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline.) However, he said, “We don’t necessarily know everyone who’s attending the events,” adding, “There is a strong and real fear that this could be used as an attempt to crush a group or a chapter of Sierra Club unfairly.”

Bold Oklahoma is part of a coalition attempting to halt the Diamond pipeline’s construction. Asked whether the group supports direct action, director Mekasi Camp Horinek replied, “We stand behind the people, and if people choose to do that, we’re going to stand behind them in that choice, but that’s always an individual choice. There’s nobody that’s going to tell somebody else to do something illegal or put their bodies or their families in harm’s way.”

Horinek traveled to North Dakota and was arrested with others opposing the Dakota Access pipeline. “That’s exactly what they were saying about me, that I was an out-of-state, paid protester, because I worked for an environmental organization,” he said. “I don’t think that when we’re talking about life, not only the life of our children and the life of our brothers and sisters, but when we’re talking about life itself, all living things on the planet, that state borders are going to deter or stop anybody from going to try to protect a body of water.”

“I’m an enrolled member of the Ponca Nation, and we were forcefully removed to the state of Oklahoma in 1876,” he said. Before that, his tribe relied on the Missouri River, the body of water Standing Rock tribal members sought to protect by blocking the oil pipeline. “I was there first as a father, as a son, as a brother. Secondly I was there as a Ponca tribal member, protecting the Missouri River. Last but not least, I was representing the Bold organization that I work for.”

As of April 2, Common Dreams counted 19 anti-protest bills across the United States. Bills in Colorado, North Dakota, and South Dakota were directly aimed at activists attempting to block oil and gas infrastructure. Other laws, in places like Minnesota, responded to protests in 2015 and 2016 that blocked roads and highways after police killings of black men and women in various cities.

Bridgwater said his biggest concern is reserved for citizens who might think twice before attending a protest. “We see all of these bills as nothing more than corporate America being fearful of how successful the Standing Rock protests were.”

Myths and Legends Created to Excuse and Confuse

May 8, 2017

by Harry von Johnston PhD

Whenever an indicent occurs that distrupts the mass of the public, trust it, the government hacks will at once begin to create myths and interesting fictions which are designed to draw public attention away from sensitive areas and into harmless byways.

Forinstance, there is are the 9/11 attacks by the Saudis.

This is a subject that will be with us for years and will certainly grow in the telling. The WTC buildings collapsed  solely for a number of rational, provable reasons but the following the Suudi attack, all manner of “expert” opinions erupted into the public like some kind of a tropical skin disease and a great army of conspiracy idiots left the stale fictions surrounding the Kennedy assassination and gratefully rush to embrace the new religion, a religion that had the exciting suggestions of “plasmoid clouds.” “Ex-Soviet controlled rockets,” “’Nano thermite explosives planted in  both buildings,” and on and on.

The frightened public soon was to discover that brilliant, fearless reporters and daring bloggers exposed  the Real Truth behind the 911 disaster. We were subjected to the Plasmoid Clouds, The Chinese/Bulgarian Guided Missiles, The ex-Soviet Scientists working with the CIA, and Mossad and the Illuminati.

And then, adding insult to injury, we learned about the dread Nano Thermite! Yes, more “experts” (as always, unidentified) found traces of this explosive all over the streets after the WTC building collapsed! Of course not a word was ever mentioned about this shocking fact for eight years but why let that bother the seekers after truth?

What about the self-sacrificing US Army Special Forces who actually went inside the buildings, acting on orders from Laura Bush the Freemasons and their controllers, the Illuminati (who were working with the Mossad at the time),  and blew the Twin Towers, and themselves, up? And the acres of foreign rocket engine parts strewed all over New York’s streets, or huge lakes of molten steel found by unidentified “rescue workers” in the cellars of the WTC? God, will these disillusions never end?

Here we have reassurance that all is not lost after all. At one point, all America was waiting for a stunning report on how Nicolas Tesla’s Z-Ray, controlled by former KGB officers stationed on Planet X,  actually brought down the two buildings,  as well as the Pentagon!

Two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into these buildings, setting fires that weakened the structure, causing the weight of the building above the point of impact to collapse down on itself.

There is absolutely no mystery at all about this.

Stories about rockets, explosives and other matters are entertaining and keep some people occupied but neither I nor most structural engineers I know believe any of these burgeoning urban legends for a nanosecond.

Next, I suppose, the killings at Coulmbine High School will be blamed on trained dwarves, members of the Mossad, killer robots, the Skull and Bones Society of Yale, the Teamsters, ABC News or the Mormon Church.

The public has lost confidence in their government and when that happens, all kind of rumor, theory and legends grow up like fungus in the woods after a long rain.

Those with a technical bent, endlessly postulate on the melting point of steel, the heat of burning jet fuel, the exact size of entrance holes in buildings and on and on. In the end, we have entertaining theory but no practice.

The same thing has become evident in the post mortem stories about the Kennedy assassination. Mongolian dwarves, the KGB, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA and a dozen other entities are absolutely believed by this or that thrilled discoverer to have committed the deed.

Government stupidity, coupled with deliberate disinformation, which is always with us, contributed to the growth of legend over the years until the underbrush is so thick that it could hide a wooly mammoth and sixteen university professors.

It always seems that high-level individuals, privy top the Inner Circle Secrets, have solemnly warned a brilliant and insightful blogger that this or that sinister incident has occurred. Of course like the story of a plasmoid cloud destroying the WTC, the names of these powerful and mysterious sources are never revealed. Our own impeccable sources absolutely verify that the entire business is the work of dimwits but also that powerful forces are now at work to prevent Americans from reading the Real Truth. Among these stories are the SEA tsunami/Tesla bomb release, and the thrilling recent revelation that the head White House gardener was secretly indicted in Chicago for assassinating the Easter Bunny and Laura Bush’s cat with a new and deadly laser ray invented by the sinister Dr. Melbourne Fong, head of the Hidden Hand. There is also the recently revealed plot to put deadly Ricin poison on DoD toilet paper that has all of official Washington a-twitter.

The collapses of the Twin Towers generated seismic disturbances that were recorded by a half-dozen seismic recording stations within a 20-mile radius of Manhattan. Numerous websites have repeated an erroneous interpretation of the seismic recordings as evidence that bombs in the basements of the towers severed the core columns at the onsets of the collapses. One source of this error is an article by former American Free Press reporter Christopher Bollyn, reprinted in Serendipity.

To the contrary, there was nothing strange about the seismic spikes recorded by the Palisades station. As the video and photographic evidence shows, the towers exploded into expanding clouds of rubble that were about 400 feet from top to bottom by the time they reached the ground. Those rubble clouds contained virtually all of the mass of towers — thousands of tons of rubble falling from as high as 1000 feet. That could certainly be expected to produce pronounced seismic waves.

In fact the seismic evidence from the Palisades station comports well with the sequence of destruction evident in photographs and videos: each tower was consumed by a wave of destruction that started near the crash zone and moved downward as it generated an expanding cloud of rubble. It took about ten seconds for the bottom of this cloud to reach the ground and another eight seconds for its top to reach the ground. Likewise the seismic records show small disturbances lasting for about ten seconds, followed by large spikes lasting for about eight seconds.

There appears to be no basis for the claim that the large spikes preceded the collapses, nor that the energy indicated by those spikes was more than could be accounted for by the approximately 110 megawatt-hours of gravitational energy stored in the elevated mass of each tower. And there is strong evidence contradicting the idea that the seismic spikes indicated underground explosions including:

  • There is no support in the large body of photographic and video collapse evidence for the idea of powerful explosions in the towers’ basements at the onset of the collapses. Instead they show waves of destruction proceeding methodically downward from the crash zones to the ground.
  • Underground explosions would have produced strong P waves, but the seismic stations registered only strong S waves. P waves oscillate horizontally — parallel to the direction of travel; whereas S waves oscillate vertically — perpendicular to the direction of travel.

An analysis of the timeline of the North Tower collapse on the 9-11 Research site corroborates the idea that the large seismic spikes were produced by rubble reaching the ground.

If a group of people placed explosive charges in the basements of the twin towers, why did the buildings begin to collapse downward from the points of impact? Fables about great conspiracies make amusing reading but in reality, such massive plots, involving as they would, hundreds of people, would be exposed almost immediately by dissatisfied or horror-stricken participants.

In future studies of induced mass delusions, we will discuss the demonization of both Russia and Donald Trump for political gain and economic profit, the damage to the international banking industry by BREXIT, Israel’s needs, oil and Mid-East politics, growing domestic controls and punishments and far more.

 Banks planning to move 9,000 jobs from Britain because of Brexit

May 8, 2017

by Anjuli Davies and Andrew MacAskill

Reuters

LONDON-The largest global banks in London plan to move about 9,000 jobs to the continent in the next two years, public statements and information from sources shows, as the exodus of finance jobs starts to take shape.

Last week Standard Chartered (STAN.L) and JPMorgan (JPM.N) were the latest global banks to outline plans for their European operations after Brexit. They are among a growing number of lenders pushing ahead with plans to move operations from London.

Goldman Sachs (GS.N) chief executive Lloyd Blankfein said in an interview on Friday that London’s growth as a financial center could “stall” as a result of the upheaval caused by Brexit.

Thirteen major banks including Goldman Sachs, UBS (UBSG.S), and Citigroup (C.N) have given an indication of how they would bulk up their operations in Europe to secure market access to the European Union’s single market when Britain leaves the bloc.

Talks with financial authorities in Europe have been underway for several months, but banks are increasingly firming up plans to move staff and operations.

“It’s full speed ahead. We are in full motion with our contingency planning,” said the head of investment banking at one global bank in London. “There’s no waiting.”

Although the moves would represent about 2 percent of London’s finance jobs, Britain’s tax revenues could be hit if it loses rich taxpayers working in financial services.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies – a think tank focused on budget issues – said in a report on Thursday the rest of the population will have to pay more if top earners move.

The exact number of jobs to leave will depend on the deal the British government strikes with the EU. Some politicians say bankers have exaggerated the threat to the economy from Brexit.

The plans of large banks such as Credit Suisse and Bank of America and many smaller banks are still unknown.

Frankfurt and Dublin are emerging as the biggest winners from the relocation plans. Six of the 13 banks favor opening a new office or moving the bulk their operations to Frankfurt. Three of the banks will look to expand in Dublin.

Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) said on Apr. 26 up to 4,000 UK jobs could be moved to Frankfurt and other locations in the EU as a result of Brexit – the largest potential move of any bank.

JPMorgan last week announced plans to move hundreds of roles to three European cities in the next two years. This is still significantly lower than the 4,000 figure JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon first estimated before the vote.

Estimates for possible finance-related job losses from Brexit are on a broad range from 4,000 to 232,000, according to separate reports by Oliver Wyman and Ernst & Young.

Banks are treading carefully, enacting two-stage contingency plans, to avoid losing nervous London-based staff as they work out how many jobs will have to eventually move.

This suggests that the numbers could potentially rise further depending on what deal is eventually negotiated between the EU and Britain.

This first phase involves small numbers to make sure the requisite licenses, technology and infrastructure are in place, while the next will depend on the longer term strategy of a bank’s European business.

The Bank of England has given finance companies until July 14 to set out their plans.

One senior bank executive at a large British bank said forcing companies to make a plan makes it more likely that they will follow through.

“It is an unintended consequence, but the more and more preparation you do the more likely you are to execute those plans,” the executive said.

HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver said this week that the bank’s previous estimate that around 1000 staff would move to Paris following Britain’s vote to leave the EU, was based on a ‘hard Brexit’ scenario.

Most banks are working on the assumption that this is the most likely outcome of the separation talks and would involve losing access to the single market with no special financial services deal and no transition period.

(Editing by Anna Willard)

 The CIA has a long history of helping to kill leaders around the world

US intelligence agency has since 1945 succeeded in deposing or killing a string of leaders, but was forced to cut back after a Senate investigation in the 1970s

May 5, 2017

by Ewen MacAskill

The Guardian

Some of the most notorious of the CIA’s operations to kill world leaders were those targeting the late Cuban president, Fidel Castro. Attempts ranged from snipers to imaginative plots worthy of spy movie fantasies, such as the famous exploding cigars and a poison-lined scuba-diving suit.

But although the CIA attempts proved fruitless in the case of Castro, the US intelligence agency has since 1945 succeeded in deposing or killing a string of leaders elsewhere around the world – either directly or, more often, using sympathetic local military, locally hired criminals or pliant dissidents.

According to North Korea’s ministry of state security, the CIA has not abandoned its old ways. In a statement on Friday, it accused that the CIA and South Korea’s intelligence service of being behind an alleged recent an assassination attempt on its leader Kim Jong-un.

The attempt, according to the ministry, involved “the use of biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance” and the advantage of this was it “does not require access to the target (as) their lethal results will appear after six or 12 months”.

The person directly responsible was allegedly a North Korean working for the foreign intelligence agencies.

A CIA spokesman refused to comment on the allegations.

But although such a claim cannot be dismissed as totally outlandish – given the long list of US involvement in coups and assassinations worldwide – the agency was forced to cut back on such killings after a US Senate investigation in the 1970s exposed the scale of its operations.

Following the investigation, then president Gerald Ford signed in 1976 an executive order stating: “No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire in, political assassination.”

The executive order was partly out of embarrassment at the role of the CIA being publicly exposed – but also an acceptance by the federal government that US-inspired coups and assassinations often turned out to be counterproductive.

In spite of this, the US never totally abandoned the strategy, simply changing the terminology from assassination to targeted killings, from aerial bombing of presidents to drone attacks on alleged terrorist leaders. Aerial bomb attempts on leaders included Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Earlier well-documented episodes include Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, judged by the US to be too close to close to Russia. In 1960, the CIA sent a scientist to kill him with a lethal virus, though this became unnecessary when he was removed from office in 1960 by other means.

Other leaders targeted for assassination in the 1960s included the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, president Sukarno of Indonesia and president Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

In 1973, the CIA helped organise the overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, deemed to be too left wing: he died on the day of the coup.

The alleged North Korean plot sounds crude. But intelligence agencies still resort to crude methods. The alleged North Korean plot recalls the assassination of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. A British inquest concluded he had been killed by the Russian intelligence agency using polonium hidden in a teapot.

The US has developed much more sophisticated methods than polonium in a tea pot, especially in the fields of electronic and cyber warfare. A leaked document obtained by WikiLeaks and released earlier this year showed the CIA in October 2014 looking at hacking into car control systems. That ability could potentially allow an agent to stage a car crash.

Recent failed North Korean missile attempts – as well as major setbacks in Iran’s nuclear programme – have been blamed on direct or indirect planting of viruses in their computer systems.

It is a long way from the crude, albeit imaginative and eventually doomed, methods employed against Castro. The US admitted to eight assassination attempts on Castro, though the Cuban put the figure much higher, with one estimate in the hundreds. Castro said: “If surviving assassinations were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”

Official Murders for Fun and Profit

May 8, 2017

by Phillip Kushner

The US media responded predictably to the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, echoing the then- bellicose threats of the Bush administration against Syria and amplifying unsubstantiated charges that the regime in Damascus was the author of the killing.

Leading the pack was the Washington Post, which editorialized at the time that “The despicable murder of Mr. Hariri benefits no one outside the rogue regime in Damascus—and the world should respond accordingly.”

The editorial acknowledged that the “crudeness of the killing and the denials by the government of Bashar Assad will cause some to wonder whether it has been framed for a crime it may have desired but did not commit.” But the Post hastened to assure its readers that the assassination was “the panicked act of a cornered tyrant,” terrified by the forced march to democracy which Washington has supposedly initiated in the Middle East with the recent elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories.

“Crude” is the appropriate designation for the Post’s arguments, which amount to nothing more than war propaganda. The newspaper’s charges are both unsupported and nonsensical. Their transparent purpose—much like the stories about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction”—is to promote the policy of aggression which the Bush, and subsequent  administrations have been persuing  in the Middle East.

The Post’s brief against Damascus is based on the well-known detective’s maxim: to discover who committed a crime, ask the question, “Who benefits?” (Que bono?) Washington’s newspaper of record asks the question in order to supply its predetermined answer: “the rogue regime in Damascus.”

But precisely how has Syria benefited from the murder? Its immediate concrete consequences are mass demonstrations organized by anti-Syrian political forces in Lebanon demanding that Damascus withdraw its troops from the country, a ratcheting up of Washington’s threats of anti-Syrian military aggression, and the prospect of Lebanon descending into civil war.

That the assassination of Hariri would produce such consequences—all of them extremely threatening to the Syrian government of Bashar Assad—was hardly unforeseeable. Whatever else may be said about the Baathist regime in Damascus, it is committed to its own survival and its leaders are not insane.

What of the acknowledged doubt—summarily dismissed by the Post—that the Syrian regime is being “framed” for a crime it did not commit? Curiously, the newspaper gives no indication of who might be responsible for such a frame-up. Here, however, the question of “who benefits” is definitely worth pursuing.

The powers that most clearly stood to advance their strategic aims by having Hariri assassinated and blaming the crime on Syria are the US and Israel. Among those who play the game of speculating who organized the car bombing in Beirut, the smart money is undoubtedly on Washington and Tel Aviv.

Under pressure from Washington, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1559, demanding that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon. This political fact sheds light on the decision of the White House, before the blood on Beirut’s streets had dried , to issue a statement blaming Damascus. This entirely unsupported charge was followed by instructions to Washington’s ambassador to slap the Syrian regime with a demarche and leave the country.

In the midst of Washington’s provocative moves against Syria, for which the killing of Hariri supposedly provided justification, then- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared, with consummate cynicism, that the US was making no presumptions as to the authors of the crime. “We’re not laying blame,” she said, “It has to be investigated.”

The US media went beyond adopting an uncritical attitude to the US response, treating the bellicose statements of the Bush administration as though they constituted, in and of themselves, some kind of proof of Syrian culpability. “US Seems Sure of the Hand of Syria,” read the headline in the New York Times. NBC’s Middle East correspondent wrote that the recall of the US ambassador represented “the first indication that the US knows something about Syrian involvement in the assassination attempt.”

It indicated nothing of the kind. Rather, it suggested that Washington was prepared in advance to seize upon Hariri’s death as a pretext for escalating its threats against Damascus.

The Bush, and subsequent, administrations have in place extensive plans for military action against Syria. Unable to  completely crush the resistance in Iraq—and unwilling to acknowledge that it is a manifestation of popular hostility to the US occupation—the Pentagon  long accused the Syrian regime of harboring a “command-and-control” center of Iraqi Baathists that is supposedly masterminding the attacks on US forces. Also, Israel is furious with Syria because she allowed Russian shipments of deadly, long-range rockets to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, rockets obviously intended for an attack on Israel. The logic of the failed US colonial venture in Iraq, far from Bush’s fanciful talk of burgeoning democracy throughout the Middle East, has led to new wars of conquest against any and all regimes that fail to collaborate with Washington.

Various Middle East “security” experts have been quoted in the media describing Syria as “low-hanging fruit” in Washington’s military pursuit of hegemony in the region. The regime is viewed as isolated and vulnerable.

Washington also had hoped to use the assassination to pursue French support for US strategic aims in the Middle East. France, the former colonial power in Lebanon, has its own fish to fry, and joined the US in supporting the UN resolution demanding a Syrian troop withdrawal. Secretary of State Rice urged closer collaboration in her visit to Paris , calling for an end to the divisions provoked by the US war in Iraq.

The maneuvers against Syria manifest as well the unprecedented coordination of US and Israeli policy in the region. Damascus is a primary target because it has provided sanctuary to Palestinian groups that have opposed Israel, including the Islamist organization Hamas. It has also failed to curb the growing influence of the Lebanese Shiite movement, Hezbollah, which forced Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon after 20 years of occupation. It is hoped in both Washington and Tel Aviv that either forcing Syrian troops out of Lebanon or carrying out “regime change” in Damascus will undermine Hezbollah’s position and open the door for renewed Israeli control on both sides of its northern border.

Tel Aviv calculates that the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon or the toppling of the Baathist regime in Damascus could bring to power a Lebanese government more amenable to Israeli demands. In particular, both want Lebanon to grant citizenship to the estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees inside that country, a move that would effectively abrogate their right—never recognized by Israel—to return to the homes from which they were expelled in the course of the creation and expansion of the Zionist state.

The timing of the assassination, barely a week after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced their truce in Egypt, is noteworthy. It is quite possible that any limited concessions the Israeli regime might have been compelled to make as part of the “peace process” with the Palestinians would be repaid by Washington giving the green light for Israeli provocations and military actions against Syria.

US officials tied to Israel planned attack on Syria

The killing of Hariri  set the stage for the implementation of plans for US aggression against Syria that have long been nurtured by a group within the US administration that is closely tied to Israel and the right-wing Likud bloc, in particular. Prominent among them was David Wurmser, then Vice President Dick Cheney’s adviser on the Middle East. Wurmser played a leading role in the creation of a Pentagon intelligence unit that sought to fabricate a case for linking the Iraqi regime with Al Qaeda in the months leading up to the US invasion.

In 1996, Wurmser co-authored a report drafted for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, entitled “A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” It called for a repudiation of the “land for peace” formula that had served as the basis for Middle East peace negotiations, in favor of a plan to “roll back” regional adversaries. It advocated the overthrow of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and recommended Israeli strikes against “Syrian targets in Lebanon” and within Syria itself.

The co-authors of the report included Douglas Feith, the current undersecretary for policy at the US Defense Department, and Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

In 2000, Wurmser helped draft a document entitled “Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon: the US Role?” It called for a confrontation with the regime in Damascus, which it accused of developing “weapons of mass destruction.” Among those signing the document were Feith and Perle, as well as Elliott Abrams, Bush’s chief advisor on the Middle East, who was recently appointed deputy national security advisor.

This document urged the use of US military force, claiming that the 1991 Persian Gulf War had proven that Washington “can act to defend its interests and principles without the specter of huge casualties.” It continued: “But this opportunity may not wait, for as weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities spread, the risks of such action will rapidly grow. If there is to be decisive action, it will have to be sooner rather than later.”

If one asks the question, “Who benefits?” the answer is clear. The destabilization of Lebanon, the mobilization of the US-backed opposition to the pro-Syrian government in Beirut, and the vilification of Damascus all serve to advance US and Israeli strategic plans long in the making.

It is not just a question of motive, however. Israel has a long history of utilizing assassination as an instrument of state policy. The Israeli regime has not infrequently carried out acts of terror and blamed them on its enemies.

Among the more infamous examples was the so-called Lavon Affair, in which the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad organized a covert network inside Egypt which launched a series of bombing attacks in 1953. The targets included US diplomatic facilities, and the attackers left behind phony evidence implicating anti-American Arabs. The aim was to disrupt US ties to Egypt.

In its long history of assassinations of Palestinian leaders, many of them carried out in Beirut, the Israeli regime has routinely attempted to implicate rival Palestinian factions.

Car bomb killings in Beirut are a regular part of Mossad’s repertoire. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, such bombings were a fact of daily life, and many of them were attributed to Israel.

Among other  killings is that of Elie Hobeika, an ex-Lebanese cabinet minister and former Christian warlord, in January 2002. He was killed along with three bodyguards by a remote-controlled car bomb on a Beirut street. Hobeika, who participated in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1982, had announced just days earlier that he was prepared to testify on the role played by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the killings.

Subsequently, a Lebanese magistrate indicted five Arabs who were said to be working for Mossad in connection with a plot to assassinate Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. At least one of the defendants testified that Mossad had organized the Hobeika assassination.

In May 2002, Mossad carried out the assassination of Mohammed Jihad Jibril, the son of Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer commented cynically at the time, “Not everything that blows up in Beirut has a connection with the State of Israel.”

In August 2003, Ali Hassan Saleh, a leader of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Beirut. Israel denied any knowledge of the killing, but it was seen throughout Lebanon as a Mossad operation.

Since 2002, Mossad has been headed by Meir Dagan, who formerly commanded the Israeli occupation zone in Lebanon. Sharon reportedly gave Dagan a mandate to revive the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad.

Washington has itself revived the methods of “murder incorporated” that were historically associated with the CIA, boasting of assassinations of alleged Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen and elsewhere.

While the Washington Post and other US media outlets always echo the economic oligarchy and the White House in denouncing Syria as a “rogue regime” guilty of the Hariri assassination, the two governments responsible for the great bulk of the killing and political murders in the Middle East are Israel and the United States.

In contrast to the jingoist propaganda of the American press, it is worth noting the editorial comment published Wednesday by the Daily Star, the Beirut English-language daily, dealing with the broader political implications of the assassination.

“The fact that within just hours of the murder five distinct parties were singled out as possible culprits—Israel, Syria, Lebanese regime partisans, mafia-style gangs, and anti-Saudi, anti-US Islamist terrorists—also points to the wider dilemma that disfigures Lebanese and Arab political culture in general: the resort to murderous and destabilizing violence as a chronic option for those who vie for power,” the newspaper stated. It continued, “That madness has now been even more deeply institutionalized and anchored in the modern history of the region due to the impact of the American-British invasion of Iraq and the new wave of violence it has spurred.”

The murder of Rafiq Hariri constitutes a brutal warning that the US war in Iraq is only the beginning of a far broader campaign of military aggression aimed at crushing resistance to US and Israeli domination. This escalating militarism is creating the conditions for a conflagration throughout the Middle East that could allow Russia to gain powerful influence and in the end, by coupling Middle Eastern oil production with their own, put the United States in a most unwelcome economic position.

 

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