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Yes, Professor Barber, of the University of Maryland and Rutgers, was a mentor to Seif Gadhafi and the only American on the board of Gadhafi Charities Foundation, that paid out retribution to the families of the victims of Lockerbie, among other projects. Barber promotes democracy and democratic institutions and believed that Saif was to help usher Libya into the modern world and assist in the peaceful transition of the country from one controlled by Gadhafi to an open society. I worked with Barber in successfully convincing the Gadhafis and the US Ambassador to Libya to support the repatriation of the US sailors killed in the battle of Tripoli in 1804, but the revolution erupted before that could be accomplished.

Thanks for calling attention to his work as those who read him will certainly be more enlightened than reading the rants and raves of lunatics.

Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber - The Atlantic

Barber broke off his association with Gadhafi in an oped piece in the NYTs when Saif sided with his father after the revolution began.Yes, Saif is a Gaddafi. But there's still a real reformer inside | Benjamin Barber | Comment is free | The Guardian

Benjamin R. Barber: Why Libya Will Not Be Democratic

Another American university professor, Gene Sharp, wrote about bringing democracy to dictatorships peacefully (Google from Dictator to Democracy to read them yourself) that were used during the popular uprising in Egypt.

From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation - Gene Sharp - Google Books

If the ideas of these men were followed, the Libyan revolution could have been avoided and democracy and an open society introduced through peaceful education rather than violent revolution.

As JFK said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

Of course you would have known all of this if you had read by blogs Remember the Intrepid, which I began in 2008 and traces the history of US-Libyan relations back to the founding of the US Navy to fight Barbary Pirates at Tripoli to today - where you can read about the new US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens -

Remember the Intrepid

And my blog on the Arab Spring revolutions, which I began in February 2011 when I recognized that the region wide revolt was a real democratic revolution and deep political event that was worth studying -

Revolutionary Program

Rather than learn something from history however, change his opinions when shown to be wrong, and support the on going revolution against dictators and tyranny, Steven calls me an immoral, pro-slavery, colonial imperialist who drinks tea with dictators and propagandists.

Ha, and Russ Baker says I am nieve.

BK

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BILL POSTING AGAINST SOMEONE WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE IS IMMORAL YOUR COMMENT INDICATES YOU KNEW OF THIS MODERATED COPYING AND POSTING. THUS YOU ARE IMMORAL.

THAT YOU HAVE TEA WITH DICTATORS AND EVIL PROPAGANDISTS IS WHAT IMMORAL PEOPLE DO. ONE FOLLOWS THE OTHER. AT BEST YOU ARE A .........................

The Useful Idiot

The 4th Media

Friday, Jan 13, 2012

http://axisoflogic.c...cle_64190.shtml

Editor's Note: We bring this article back for those who may have missed it first time around. Axis of Logic Editor, Paul Richard Harris republished it first on December 27, 2011. - LMB

dupe - n. 1. An easily deceived person. 2. A person who functions as the tool of another person or power. tr.v. duped, dup·ing, dupes To deceive (an unwary person).

In January of 2011, we were told that “spontaneous,” “indigenous” uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East in what was hailed as the “Arab Spring.” It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but “spontaneous,” or “indigenous.” In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:

“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

“The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department."

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous foundations, organizations, and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. As we will see, preparations for the “Arab Spring” and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in February 2011′s “The Middle East & then the World,” began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first “fist” was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

The Timeline – 2008-2010 Preparing the Battlefield

December 3-5, 2008: Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

Serbia’s “Otpor,” a model for future US-backed color revolutions.

Foreign Policy Magazine would report in their article, “Revoluton U,” that CANVAS assisted protesters in the “Rose Revolution” of Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma), all across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as with activists in North Korea, and 50 other countries.

2009: In a US State Department funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Libery (RFE/RL) article titled, “Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe to The Middle East,” it was stated, “Popovic then exported his nonviolent methods, helping train the activists who spearheaded Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. And now, Popovic is deploying his new organization, called Canvas, even farther afield — assisting the pro-democracy activists who recently brought down despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.”

Activists from Iran, Belarus, and North Korea were also confirmed by RFE/RL as having received training from CANVAS. The RFE/RL article places the activists’ meeting with CANVAS sometime during 2009.

February 2010: The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei.April 6 members would even be arrested while awaiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring.”

Clearly then, unrest was long planned, with activists from Tunisia and Egypt on record receiving training and support from abroad, so that they could return to their home nations and sow unrest in a region-wide coordinated campaign.

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm this, when US State Department’s Michael Posner stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course, is the “Arab Spring.”

The Timeline – 2011 Year of the Dupe

January 16, 2011: Al Arabiya News reported in their article, “Tunisian exiled reformist to head back home,” that Moncef Marzouki was returning to Tunisia (from Paris) amidst the chaos sown by US State Department trained, supported, and equipped mobs who were “triggered” by the convenient release of US State Department cables via Wikileaks. Quite clearly, considering the training Tunisian opposition groups received long before the cables were released, the Wikileaks cables were merely used as a planned rhetorical justification for long ago premeditated foreign-funded sedition. Since then, Wikileaks has been employed in an identical manner everywhere from Egypt to Libya, and even as far flung as Thailand.

Moncef Marzouki, it would turn out, was founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

A “call for solidarity” by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) mentions by name each and every group constituting the Tunisian opposition during the “uprising” in January 2011 as “FIDH member organisations.” These include Marzouki’s “Tunisian League for Human Rights,” the “Tunisian Association of Democratic Women,” and the “National Council for Liberties in Tunisia,” or CNLT. FIDH, acting as an international nexus for various foreign-funded organizations carrying out sedition worldwide under the guise of “human rights,” is itself fully funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’ Open Society, and many others with clearly compromised affiliations.

January 28, 2011: After a warning by journalist/activist Dr. Webster Tarply of World Crisis Radio, the alternative media began looking closer at the unrest in Egypt which began shortly after Tunisia’s growing crisis. In “All is not what it seems in Egyptian Clashes,” it was noted that protest leader Mohammed ElBaradei was in fact a devoted agent of the West, with a long standing membership within the Wall Street/London funded International Crisis Group (ICG) along side “senior Israeli officials” including the current Israeli President Shimon Peres, the current Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. The ICG also includes senior American bankers and geopolitical manipulatorsincluding George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Armitage, Samuel Berger, and Wesley Clark.

ElBaradei’s ties to the West go much deeper than merely play-acting within the ineffectual, genocide-enabling UN. He is also a member of the corporate-financier funded International Crisis Group.

Ironically, Western media outlets insisted ElBaradei was both anti-American and strongly anti-Israeli in a rouse best described a year earlier in March 2010 in the Council On Foreign Relations’ paper, Foreign Affairs’ article “Is ElBaradei Egypt’s Hero?”:

“Further, Egypt’s close relationship with the United States has become a critical and negative factor in Egyptian politics. The opposition has used these ties to delegitimize the regime, while the government has engaged in its own displays of anti-Americanism to insulate itself from such charges. If ElBaradei actually has a reasonable chance of fostering political reform in Egypt, then U.S. policymakers would best serve his cause by not acting strongly. Somewhat paradoxically, ElBaradei’s chilly relationship with the United States as IAEA chief only advances U.S. interests now. “

The most recent manifestation of this came when Israel farcically called ElBaradei an “Iranian agent.” This latest performance further illustrates the immense level of duplicity with which world events are being manipulated.

February 17, 2011: The London-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage” to match the US-destabilization rhetoric used in Tunisia and Egypt. The NFSL has been backed by the CIA-MI6 since the 80′s and had made multiple attempts to overthrow Qaddafi’s government with both terrorist attacks and armed insurrection.

Please note the “EnoughGaddafi.com” signs. EnoughGaddafi.com’s webmaster is listed on the US State Department’s Movements.org as the “Twitter” to follow.

February 18, 2011: In the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s ousting, it was revealed that the Open Society Institute supported the NGOs involved in the drafting Egypt’s new constitution. These “civil society” groups include the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information openly funded by the Open Society Institute and the Neo-Con lined NED funded Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. It appears that while the International Crisis Group was turning out the strategy, and their trustee ElBaradei leading the mobs into the streets, it is the vast array of US supported NGOs which were working out and implementing the details on the ground.

February 21, 2011: An interview with Ibrahim Sahad of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on ABC Australia, featured every talking point covered by the mainstream corporate media from previous weeks regarding Libya, all with the White House and Washington Monument looming over him in the background. He made calls for a no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi was strafing “unarmed protesters” with warplanes.

March 2011′s “US Libyan Policy: Zero Legitimacy,” noted the clearly heavily armed, western-backed insurgency that was still being disingenuously portrayed by Western media as “peaceful protests.”

February 28, 2011: “Destroying Libya” stated:

While Libyan opposition leader Ibrahim Sahad leads the rhetorical charge from Washington D.C., his National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on the ground is armed to the teeth, as it has been throughout its 20 year history of attempted CIA backed rebellions against Qaddafi. In 1984, the NFSL tried to overthrow Qaddafi in a failed armed coup. The Daily Globe and Mail also recently confirmed that the NFSL along with the Libyan National Army, both under Sahad’s new National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO), had both “attempted coups and assassinations against Col. Gadhafi in the 1980s.”

Already at this point, both British and US representatives were admitting Libyan rebels were indeed heavily armed, and instead of condemning the violence, openly called for additional weapons and military support to be provided.

March 17, 2011: The UN decided to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to save the globalist-backed rebellion sputtering in failure and bordering on a “Bay of Pigs” disaster. Canadian, US, French, Arab, and UK jets were already reported to be preparing for the operation.

March 24, 2011: Unrest had already begun in Syria, as NATO began bombing Libya while Egypt and Tunisia had already fallen into political and economic chaos. In “Globalists Hit in Syria,” the opposition is closely examined and documented to be once again a creation of Western-backed opposition groups.

Much of the “evidence” of Syria’s unrest was being filtered through organizations such as the London-based Syrian Human-Rights Committee whose hearsay statements posted on its website were cited by corporate news media in outlandish reports of violence that also include “activists say” after each allegation. The “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” also London-based, is now the exclusive source cited by corporate-media reports regarding Syria.

March 26, 2011: In Egypt, signs of a counterrevolution and the first signs of weakness in ElBaradei’s chances to be installed as president began to show. Mobs pelted ElBaradei with rocks calling him “an American agent.” Wikileaks would again come to the aid of US interests and try to reintroduce the “anti-Western” image ElBaradei had been hamfisted in portraying.

The “barrier of legitimacy” is broken: a mob shouts “American agent”

March 28, 2011: Fortune-500 funded Brookings Institution’s “Libya’s Test of the New International Order” is reported on - exposing the war as not one of a “humanitarian” nature, but one aimed explicitly at establishing an international order and the primacy of international law.

Red = US-backed destabilization, Blue = US occupying/stationed. China’s oil and sea access to the Middle East and Africa are being or have already been cut. A similar strategy of isolation was used on Japan just before the onset of World War II.

April 17, 2011: Syria’s unrest yields widespread arson as well as reports of gunmen targeting both protesters and state security forces in a bid to escalate violence. In, “Globalist War Machine Fixates on Syria,” the “Libyan Precedent” is already being cited by US and French politicians as justification to use force against Syria. A later article, “Color Revolution’s Mystery Gunmen,” establishes a historical context within which to view the current violence in Syria and the fact that it is provocateurs sowing much of the violence.

April 21, 2011: Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko announces that his nation is now also under covert attack by Western forces to foster an “Arab Spring-style” insurrection. In, “Besieging Belarus,” documented ties between Belarus opposition members and the same Western organizations and institutions fueling the Arab Spring are illustrated.

April 22, 2011: John McCain touches down in Benghazi, Libya and consorts with verified terrorists who were fresh back from Iraq and Afghanistan, killing US troops. A West Point report would later confirm (.pdf from West Point’s CTC can be found here) with absolute certainty that the region from which the Libyan rebellion began was also the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s (LIFG) center of operations. It would also expose the fact that LIFG were in fact long-time affiliates of Al Qaeda with LIFG members occupying the highest levels of leadership within the terrorist organization.

Ultimate act of treason: McCain calls for recognition and extra-legal support for the very men who had killed US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By denying “Al-Qaeda” a base in Iraq, but handing them the entire nation of Libya, he has brought American foreign policy to a new level of surrealism.

May, 2011: In “Libya at Any Cost,” the conflict in Libya was reported to be escalating, including NATO attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and the targeted killings of several of his family members including several of his grandchildren.

“America’s Arab Deception” attempted to review the past several months of engineered chaos blowing through Northern Africa and the Middle East, while it was noted in, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” that the National Endowment for Democracy already began its first round of self-aggrandizing, and passing out awards to several of the dupes and collaborators that made its campaign of carnage throughout the Arab World a reality.

June, 2011: In “Arab Spring brings Corporate Locust,” the true agenda behind Egypt’s, and indeed the entire “Arab Spring’s” unrest became apparent as US representatives gave Fortune 500 executives a tour of destabilized Egypt and Tunisia in an effort to promote economic liberaliztion and privatization. John McCain and John Kerry led the tour and had co-sponsored bills to promote what would essentially be the meshing of Egypt and Tunisia’s economy into the Wall Street/London international order.

McCain (left) and Kerry (right) gesticulate as they explain their paymaster’s agenda within the confines of an Egyptian Coca-Cola factory. This is part of their latest trip surveying the effects of their US-funded opposition overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s government.

In late June, France would admit to violating the terms of UN resolution 1973, and arming Libyan rebels.

July, 2011: The African Union would wholly reject the International Criminal Court’s mandate against Libya, exposing the severe illegitimacy with which it operates. Ties to corporate-financier funded organizations are revealed in “It’s Official: International Criminal Court has ZERO Mandate,” as well as the tenuous nature of the ICC’s claims against Libya’s Qaddafi. It would later be confirmed by members of Libya’s “human rights” community that indeed they, in collaboration with the rebel leaders, fabricated the numbers supplied to both the UN and the ICC, and that no verified or documented evidence of Qaddafi’s “atrocities” were produced.

In Thailand, another long-running US-backed color revolution finally yielded results and saw the return of Wall Street proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra’s political party to power. Various mouthpieces of the global elite, including the Council on Foreign Relations itself, gave stern warnings to Thailand’s establishment to accept the tenuous results of the July election or face isolation and other consequences. Another Southeast Asian country, Malaysia would also see color revolution take to their streets – this time in Malaysia by the yellow-clad, NED-funded Bersih movement.

Thaksin Shinawatra, a long time servant of the global elite, since before even becoming Thailand’s prime minister in 2001, reports to the CFR in New York City on the eve of the 2006 military coup that ousted him from power. He has now returned to power in Thailand via a proxy political party led by his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. Securing the votes of only 35% of eligible voters puts on full display how tenuous his support really is within a nation he claims stands entirely behind him.

August, 2011: By August, even the corporate-media began admitting that Syria’s opposition was “mostly unarmed,” or in other words, armed. The opposition was starting to be more clearly defined as armed ethnic groups and armed militants of the Muslim Brotherhood.

By late August, NATO began a coordinated attack on Tripoli, Libya, involving an elaborate psychological-operation that claimed to have eliminated or captured the entire Qaddafi family in a single day. The following day, Saif Al-Qaddafi would turn up alive and well, and free, while leading fierce fighting that would carry on until October and result in NATO leveling the cities of Bani Walid and Sirte in particular, into piles of rubble. It had become entirely clear that NATO was providing air support not for democracy-loving freedom fighters, but for hardcore terrorists who were carrying out a systematic campaign of genocide and reprisals throughout the country.

Libya’s rebels are far from motivated by democratic aspirations. Their grievances lie along ethnic, not political divides. “Gaddafi supporters” is the euphemism being used by the global corporate-media in describing the generally darker skinned and African tribes and who are bearing the brunt of NATO-backed rebel atrocities.

September, 2011: Sensing victory in Libya, corporate-financier funded think-tanks began preparing for the rebuilding and despoiling of the Libyan economy. In “Globalists to Rebuild Libya,” NATO’s Atlantic Council wrote a report detailing just how they would go about doing this.

Also as Libya’s violence spiraled out of control and atrocities carried out by the rebels and their NATO backers became more obscene, it became clear how fraudulent the “War on Terror” was. In “Libyan Rebels Listed by US State Department as Terrorists,” it is illustrated how NATO members were guilty of anti-terrorist laws for providing material support for listed terrorist organizations.

A screenshot taken directly from the US State Department website showing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) clearly listed as a foreign terrorist organization. This is important, as US Code prohibits providing material support to listed terrorist organizations. With revelations of Al Qaeda and LIFG fighters leading the Libyan rebellion with NATO-members’ full military, financial, and diplomatic support, attempts are being made to plea ignorance as to the true nature of the rebels. Listed below LIFG, is MEK, an Iraqi/Iranian group also being armed and supported by the US.

September also saw real humanitarian catastrophe unfold in Uganda, where a British corporation sanctioned genocide to clear land they had “leased” from the Ugandan government. Thus illustrates how the cause of “humanitarian concerns” is called on only when it serves Wall Street and London’s interests, and otherwise ignored when it involves verifiable genocide carried out in the pursuit of furthering their wealth and power.

John McCain would land once again in Libya, this time in Tripoli to celebrate the destruction of the country and shake hands once again with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that delivered Qaddafi’s Libya into the hands of the Wall Street/London elite.

It’s all smiles and laughs in Tripoli as McCain, a chief proponent and driving force behind the US intervention in Libya, literally glorifies Al Qaeda’s exploits in the now ruined nation. Miles away, the very rebels he was praising are purposefully starving the civilian population of Sirte in an effort to break their will, while they and NATO indiscriminately use heavy weapons aimed at crowded city centers.

October 2011: While Tunisia and Egypt had fallen, and Libya too being seized by proxy forces fueled by the West, the Obama administration began withdrawing troops from Iraq. This suspicious withdrawal when otherwise the rest of the Middle East was under US proxy assault raised serious suspicions that an escalation, not retreat was to follow.

Rhetoric for war with Iran had been steadily increasing and the beginning of what looked like a covert war was being fought inside and along Iran’s borders. A disastrous ploy of framing Iran for the alleged planned assassination of a Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. fell apart when Iranians linked the plot to US-backed terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

MEK. Admittedly a terrorist organization, listed by the US State Department as being such, it is fully funded, armed, and backed by the United States, based in France and US-occupied Iraq, and allowed to conduct terrorist operations against the Iranian people. The “War on Terror” is a fraud.

It is more than likely that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would simply provide the US “plausible deniability” for an Israeli airstrike on Iran.

November 2011: Syria’s “peaceful protesters” who had been all along fully armed and attempting to stoke a Libyan-style civil war, were finally acknowledge as such by the corporate-media and more importantly by the corporate-funded think-tanks that supply them with their talking points. In “IISS: Syria’s Opposition is Armed,” it is states that a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies by Senior Fellow for Regional Security at IISS-Middle East, Emile Hokayem openly admitted that Syria’s opposition was armed and prepared to drag Syria’s violence into even bloodier depths.

Also in November, Wall Street and London’s assault on Libya came full circle with the installation of Abdurrahim el-Keib as prime minister. El-Keib who spent decades in exile in the US, was formally employed by the Petroleum Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE and sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France’s Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

And so begins the farce that is Western “democracy.” One corporate puppet Mahmoud Jibril , steps down, another, Abdurrahim el-Keib, takes his place. In reality, it is NATO-states and their corporate sponsors that now determine Libya’s fate. Pictured above, el-Keib poses with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the unelected, NATO-backed “National Transitional Council.”

Joining el-Keib would be US-funded activist, Moncef Marzouki, named Tunisia’s president. Marzouki’s organization, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, was a US National Endowment for Democracy and Open Society-funded International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) member organization. Marzouki, who spent two decades in exile in Paris, France, was also founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

US NED-funded activist leader Moncef Marzouki after spending two decades in Paris, helps foist the facade of “democracy” onto the Tunisian people. Of course, he, or someone of equal servitude to the West was going to become “President.” In 1993 Noam Chomsky would concisely describe the work of NED as ”an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures.” In other words, those fighting in the “Arab Spring” did so for gilded tyranny.

In Egypt, in late November, a second “revolution” began unfolding on the streets. In reality it was the same Western-backed forces led by ElBaradei and the emerging Mamdouh Hamza, against Egyptian military forces that seemed to have gone back on whatever arrangements they made with the West after the fall of Mubarak.

The UN, in another attempt to escalate foreign intervention in Syria, would release a UN Human Rights Council report regarding Syrian “crimes against humanity” which was actually co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council,which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

The report itself contained no verifiable evidence, but rather hearsay accounts recorded in Geneva by alleged “victims” “witnesses,” and “defectors,” put forth by “all interested persons and organizations.” In other words, it was an open invitation for Syria’s enemies to paint whatever image of the ruling government they pleased.

December 2011: With Tunisia and Libya fully run by Western proxies, Egypt and Syria still mired in chaos, and with globalists calling for war on Iran, the “Arab Spring” was nearly complete. However, the “Arab Spring” was only the first leg of a grander strategy to encircle Russia and China. In December, the campaigns to move in on Russia and China would begin in earnest.

The “String of Pearls:” China’s oil lifeline is to be cut by the destabilization and regimes changes being made throughout Africa and the Middle East. Along the “String” the US has been destabilizing nations from Pakistan to Myanmar, from Malaysia to Thailand, to disrupt and contain China’s emergence as a regional power.

Hillary Clinton, in Foreign Policy Magazine would pen, “America’s Pacific Century,” a declaration of imperial intent for American “leadership” in Asia for the next 100 years. From “Hillary Clinton and the New American (Pacific) Century:

“Upon reading Clinton’s declaration of intent for American leadership into the next century, readers may recall the similarly named, ranting “Project for a New American Century” signed off on by some of America’s most notorious Neo-Conservatives, which almost verbatim made the same case now made by Clinton. In fact, America’s evolving confrontation with China, marked acutely by Obama’s announcement of a permanent US military presence in Australia just this week, is torn directly from the pages of decades old blueprints drawn up by corporate-financier funded think-tanks that truly rule America and its destiny.

As reported in June, 2011′s “Collapsing China,” as far back as 1997 there was talk about developing an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place amongst the “international order.” Just as in these 1997 talking-points where author and notorious Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan described the necessity of using America’s Asian “allies” as part of this containment strategy, Clinton goes through a list of regional relationships the US is trying to cultivate to maintain “American leadership” in Asia.

For example, the recently reinstalled Wall Street proxy regime in Thailand led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, has received reassurances by Clinton herself just this week stating that, “it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed.” As reported in-depth in “CONFIRMED: Thailand’s “Pro-Democracy” Movement Working for US,” Thaksin Shinawatra and his political regime have had long standing, well documented ties to Wall Street and London. The US backing of puppet-regimes like Thaksin, installing them into power, and keeping them there is central to projecting power throughout Asia and keeping China subordinate, or as Kagan put it in his 1997 report, these proxy regimes will have China “play Gulliver to Southeast Asia’s Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.”"

In Myanmar (Burma) “democracy icon” Aung San Suu Kyi, whose entire movement is a creation of Wall Street and London, received Hillary Clinton as well as Thailand’s proxy-PM Yingluck Shinawatra in a globalist show of support designating her as the de facto leader and point of contact within the Southeast Asian country. Clinton’s visit coincided with a successful campaign led by US NGOs to oust Chinese interests in the nation that resulted in the halting of a dam that was to provide electricity, revenue, flood control and irrigation for the people of Myanmar.

The Myitsone Dam, on its way to being the 15th largest in the world until construction was halted in September

Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street and London attacked more directly, attempting to interfere with Russian elections in December and resulting in several street protests led by overtly linked NED, Soros, and Rothschild operatives. NED-funded NGO “Golos” played a key role in portraying the elections as “rigged” and constituted America’s extraterritorial meddling in Russia’s sovereign affairs.

NATO’s creeping encirclement of Russia has now been combined with another round of “color revolution” destabilizations in Belarus and now in Russia itself.

A concerted effort by the corporate-media to misrepresent the unrest in Russia was pointed out in, “Russian Protests: Western Media Lies ,” illustrating just how coordinated the overarching global destabilization being carried out actually is. In “Wall Street Vs. Russia,” it was concluded:

“It is quite clear that the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and even the US State Department whose new foreign affairs advisory board is full of think-tanks representing overt corporate-financier interests, are not interested in “democracy,” “human rights,” or “freedom” in Russia, but rather removing the Kremlin out of the way, and reestablishing the parasitic feeding on the Russian people and its economy they enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

In late December it would be confirmed that the same Al Qaeda militants that ravaged Libya with NATO’s aid, were on their way to Syria to help overthrow the Assad government. LIFG leader Abdel Hakim Belhaj was confirmed to be on the Syrian border preparing troops of the so-called “Free Syrian Army.”

This wasn’t the only recent example of the West operating in tandem with listed terrorist groups. It was also reported in, “EXPOSED: US Troops Guarded Terrorist Camp in Iraq,” that the US has been guarding a terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq training camp inside Iraq with US troops and is planning to relocated them, possibly in a freshly abandoned US military base in Iraq while D.C. lobbyists work feverishly to have them de-listed, armed, and sent to conduct terrorist operations in Iran. Shocking comments are made in the Brookings Institution’s report, “Which Path to Persia?” where US policy experts conspire to use the terrorist organization against the government of Iran. In essence, corporate-funded policy makers have transformed the US into a state-sponsor of terror.

Conclusion

The year 2011 was surely the year of the dupe. Youth enamored with lofty, naive notions of “freedom” sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces. In Egypt the nation is teetering on the edge of being fully integrated into the Wall Street/London international order, while a big-oil representative is enjoying his new position as prime minister of Libya. In Tunisia a life-long stooge of Western machinations is now president, and an alarming campaign of NATO-backed violence and terrorism is gripping Syria.

With the encirclement of Russia and China, these dupes have witlessly brought the world to the edge of World War III, and clearly done nothing at all to improve their own state of being. As their nations fall under the control of increasing Western influence, the resources once used to placate them and defend their nationalism will now be diverted into the bottomless maw of the parasitic banking combines that are currently destroying both North America and Europe.

February’s “The Middle East & then the World” is well worth reading again – to see how far we’ve come over the last year since it was written, and what is left for the globalists to do. As the globalists come ever closer to China and Russia’s doorsteps the stakes will continue to rise and the placid spectating Americans and Europeans have enjoyed this year will forever be lost.

Finally, consider what was written in one of the last articles of this year, “The End Game Approaches:”

“Complacency will kill, apathy is complicity: as the elitist-engineered “Arab Spring” reaches its conclusion, we stand on the precipice of being meshed into an inescapable, corporate-fascist, scientific planetary regime…. the End Game approaches.

Now more than ever, “we the people” must steel ourselves against this immense corporate-fascist empire as it sprawls death, destruction, and domination, militarily and economically, across the planet. We must, our very survival depends on it, boycott and replace entirely the corporate-financier interests that drive this dark, expansive agenda. It has been literally spawned of our apathy, complicity, and ignorance, fueled by us – the very source of corporate fascism’s power – and it must be our activism, resistance, and intellect that brings it to an end.

As far fetched as it may sound, every Pepsi we swig, every day we decide to drink beer and tune into our corporate-sponsored bread and circus, be it the modern day chariot races of NASCAR or the gladiatorial contests of the NFL, we bring inescapable eternal servitude to a corporate-fascist scientific dictatorship one step closer.

It is now “do or die” – unlike in the past, mankind now possesses the technology to render the vast majority of the population intellectually inferior through mass medication, food poisoning, GMO crops that rot our bodies and minds from the inside-out, and the martial means of eliminating vast swaths of the population permanently. Not only is this a possibility, it is a reality the global elite have conspired over at great length through texts like Ecoscience penned by current White House science adviser John Holdren and former White House science adviser Paul Ehrlich who openly talk about mass, involuntary medication to forcibly sterilize the population, reduce our numbers and confine us within what they literally call a “planetary regime.” The End Game approaches.”

Let us not “hope” next year fairs better for free humanity. Let us with our two hands, our will, and our capable intellects ensure that it is better. The decision is not that of our “leaders” or “representatives,” it is the decision of each and every one of us and what it is we do with our time, our money, our resources, our energy, and to where we pay our attention – each and every day. Let us define where it is we want our destiny to take us, and start taking one step at a time to get there.

Let us wait no longer for “saviors,” but rather look in the mirror and realize, God, the Universe, or whatever higher power you believe in, has already endowed you with everything you need, in your heart, your mind, and within your hands to prevail in whatever noble pursuit you, or “we the people” choose.

Source URL http://axisoflogic.c...cle_64190.shtml

Edited by Steven Gaal
Posted

Well, this Dupe did what nobody else on this forum did, I will wager a bet with anyone, and that is read The Useful Idiot rant and rave about those dupes who don't recognize the Arab Spring for what it really is - neo-colonial western imperialism, and while I was apparently duped by Mohammid Bouazi and the Baltimore Warzone Biker and Italian Jew who fought with the Libyan rebels.

And Steve, how come I always explain how and why I have developed my opinions on Libya and the Arab Spring while you just post some socialist Russian or globalist garbage, some without even an author's name attached, as nobody would want to admit writing such crap.

It's quite apparent that Steve can't articulate his own opinions and must post mouthpiece junk.

How can you and whoever believes this stuff use the New York Times article - of April 2011 "US Groups Help Nurture Arab Uprisings" if you believe they are Mockingbird controlled mouthpieces?

Which way is it, can we believe them or not?

Maybe sometimes and maybe not, hea?

BK

Posted (edited)

KELLY // you just post some socialist Russian or globalist garbage, some without even an author's name attached, as nobody would want to admit writing such crap. // END KELLY

??????????????? NO BILL, NAME AT TWICE GIVEN URL........at top/bottom of article.

URL GIVEN TWICE,TWICE Bill Kelly IMMORAL and poor reader/researcher

Source URL http://axisoflogic.c...cle_64190.shtml

#############################################################

http://www.libertyroundtable.com/columnists/tony-cartalucci/

Tony Cartalucci is a geopolitical researcher and writer based in Bangkok, Thailand. His work aims at covering world events from a Southeast Asian perspective as well as promoting self-sufficiency as one of the keys to true freedom.

Articles by Tony Cartalucci

Website(s):

Land Destroyer Report

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/

========================

•Hillary Clinton Must Resign (Op-ed)

•US Agents of Subversion Deride Russian NGO Bill

•BOMBSHELL: Defected Syrian Ambassador Admits Role in Killing US Troops

•Latest Syria “Massacre” – Goebbelsesque Propaganda

•False Flag Alert: US Claims Syria “Moving Nerve Gas Out of Storage”

•Solving Syria (and more) at the Root of the Problem

•HRW Report on “Syrian Torture” Nonsensical, Hypocritical

•If the US Loses Syria, the US Loses its Empire

•The Libyan Election Farce

•Kofi Annan: International Community Has Failed Syria

•Propagandists Sell “Vigilante” Solution for Syria

•NATO Member Turkey Harboring Terrorist Army

•NATO Loses Plane Violating Syrian Airspace

•US Struggles to Install Proxy “Brotherhood” in Egypt

•CONFIRMED: US CIA Arming Terrorists in Syria

#################################

KELLY // And Steve, how come I always explain how and why I have developed my opinions on Libya and the Arab Spring while you just post some socialist Russian or globalist garbage,

// END KELLY

Bill when I point out continual lies,outsiders, theft,murder,torture and exploitation from a so called

" indigenous liberating force", it should be understood that contrasts with the stated goal of democracy,equanimity and fairness. But yes, an immoral man may not 'understand' that. At the old Dellarosa site was a page showing the phone book of David Ferrie showing the phone exchange # of Thomas H. Karamessines written in. Thomas H. Karamessines first cover assignment was at the Greece embassy......did anyone say ,"Greek Mechanics ???" The CIA is all over the Arab Spring. Bill Kelly cant be a JFK researcher for real. Can a good fruit come from the bad CIA tree ?? I dont think so,but the fake CIA / JFK researcher Bill Kelly thinks so.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ THIS LINK COULD HELP YOU OUT (click read more at bottom)

http://mycatbirdseat.com/2012/02/dr-james-petras-imperialism-the-anti-imperialism-of-the-fools/

++++++++++++++++++++

Edited by Steven Gaal
Posted

Steven,

There are no indications in the forum records that anyone moved any post of yours. Perhaps you should apologise to Bill for calling him "immoral".

Posted

BLACK HISTORY SECTION > Africa Unite thread > posts #110 EVAN BURTON

POST # 111 Steven Gaal

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BURTON # 110

Steven,

There are no indications in the forum records that anyone moved any post of yours. Perhaps you should apologise to Bill for calling him "immoral".

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

GAAL #110

HOW DID POST # 97 of THIS THREAD GET FROM CONSPIRACY SECTION TO THIS SECTION ++ I DIDNT DO IT ++ ONLY SIMKIN OR MODERATOR COULD ++ ITS NOT A CUT AND PASTE + ITS A MOVED POST ++ EVAN BURTON , HOW WAS THAT DONE ??????????? FROM BILL KELLY'S REPLY HE SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN ON THE ARRANGED MOVEMENT. I only found the moved post by accident. In my GMO food post the copied article needed to contact authors of said article to use article. So to notify them I wanted URL of Big site ,not just the URL Conspiracy section on my favorite list. I thus went to the larger ED Forum front menu list (copied url for email) and then just looking I scrolled down. Well I saw a Bill Kelly post and the words Africa Unite, I clicked it. AND LO and behold my Conspiracy post was moved (not copied and pasted) and Bill Kelly had posted against it. I didnt do it,thus someone on your side of the fence did it. PLEASE EXPLAIN ???????????????????????? POSTING AGAINST SOMEONE WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE AT THIS FORUM IS IMMORAL.

Posted (edited)

I was not privy to any re-posting. I am interested in documenting the origin and history of the Arab Spring regional revolution and will continue to read any reference you think I should be aware of, though I put little weight in anything that includes the repetitive use of the words "Western colonialists," "imperialists," "globalists" or "Zionists."

Africa should unite behind the Arab Spring revolutions and kick out all of the dictators who think they own nations and can pass the power to their sons, amass all the wealth, control the industries and order their armies to kill their own people, and instead, they should build schools for girls who will take over and lead Africa and the Middle East out of the morass.

"We made many mistakes....We believed that those governments which were friendly to us and hostile to Communists were therefore good governments – and we believed that we could make unpopular policies acceptable through our own propaganda programs." - JFK

The counter-dictator revolutionary motto: "Jayenak, jayenak"—"We are coming to get you"

And after Assad is gone and Syria belongs to its diverse multicultural people once again, the revolution will revisit Bahrain and Yeman and then move on to Saudi Arabia and back to Iran until all the tyrants are gone.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK

BK

Revolutionary Program

PS - I know Steven won't read the sane and sober words of the official US Policy in Libya and Africa and the Middle East, as I read the hogwash that he posts, but I hope some others will read it and understand that the renegade CIA that killed JFK and ran dictatorial coups is no longer in control, and that the USA has shifted its policy and support from the friendly dictators to the people and citizens of these countries, to do what they want.

Much of this change in policy is due to the beliefs and efforts of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and to some extent the new US Ambassador to Libya, Mr. Chris Stevens.

Here's what former Ambassador Cretz had to say after reestablishing the US government relations with Libya:

Honoring Women in an Age of Participation

http://libya.usembas...ne_030712a.html

By Ambassador Gene Cretz, U.S. Ambassador to Libya

Secretary Clinton has noted that “What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and learn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations will flourish.” These words have particular relevance as we celebrate International Women’s Day around the world and as we continue to make strides for women’s progress.

On December 10, 2011, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three extraordinary women who have led the fight for human rights and democracy in their home countries – President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen. Their achievement signifies recognition on the world stage of the essential role that women must play in the hard work of building peace and sustainable communities in the 21st century.

In December, President Obama released the first-ever U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, charting a roadmap for how the United States will accelerate and institutionalize efforts across the government to advance women's participation in preventing conflict and keeping peace. This initiative represents a fundamental change in how the United States will approach its diplomatic, military, and development-based support to women in areas of conflict, by ensuring that their perspectives and considerations of gender are woven into the fabric of how the United States approaches peace processes, conflict prevention, the protection of civilians, and humanitarian assistance.

This International Women’s Day, Secretary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama will host the 6th annual International Women of Courage Awards, honoring 10 remarkable women from around the world, including Libyan awardee Hana El Hebshi. These women have shown exceptional bravery and leadership in advocating for women's rights and empowerment, often at great personal risk. Their stories represent just a few of the emerging leaders found in every corner of the world.

Yet, as we rightfully honor achievements, we must also be reminded that International Women’s Day is an opportunity to renew the call for action, investment, and commitment to women's equality. We are at a moment of historic opportunity. Secretary Clinton has referred to this era as “the Participation Age.” This is a time where every individual, regardless of gender or other characteristics, is poised to be a contributing and valued member of their society.

Around the world, we are witnessing examples of the Participation Age. This is particularly the case in Libya, where people stood up to a dictator and claimed their rights as citizens. Libyan women played a key role in the revolution and continue as active participants in Libya’s robust civil society community and in Libyan politics. One in particular, Hana El Hebshi, is being honored in Washington, D.C. today for her courage displayed during the revolution. She worked, often at risk to her own safety, to get information out to the world about the crimes committed by the former regime against the Libyan people. We expect Hana and the hundreds and thousands of Libyan women just like her to fully participate in Libya’s first elections, as voters and as candidates, and to help shape the new government and new society taking shape in Libya.

Women are a cornerstone of America’s foreign policy because the simple fact is that no country can hope to move ahead if it is leaving half of its people behind. Women and girls drive our economies. They build peace and prosperity. Investing in women means investing in global economic progress, political stability, and greater prosperity for everyone, the world over. As we honor them today, let us renew our resolve to work for the cause of equality each and every day of the year.

Remarks by Ambassador Gene Cretz “Inta Liby Hoor” Award Ceremony

http://libya.usembas.../ne-022612.html

Sunday, February 26, 2012, 6:00-8:00 p.m. Farhaty Hall, Tripoli, Libya

Al Salamu Alikum, my dear Libyan friends. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks to the tremendous creativity young Libyans have demonstrated, we gather today to celebrate another milestone in this new age of media freedom in Libya.

A little over a year ago, my Public Affairs team suggested hosting a short film festival to promote freedom of expression in Libya. As a true believer in freedom of creativity, a movie fan, and a very optimistic man, I enthusiastically supported the idea. Unfortunately, the former regime disagreed with our plans, and would not permit the project to proceed. Shortly thereafter, we suspended U.S. operations in Tripoli; ironically, because Qadhafi could not tolerate the free thoughts and ideas of the Libyan people.

This past year, Libyans demonstrated courage, bravery, and heroism, overcoming 40 years of enforced silence with a deafening roar. Libya’s freedom stands in stark contrast to the oppression ongoing in Syria; we join Libyans in standing with the Syrian people in their protest against tyranny. You liberated your country, and as a result, we Americans are welcome again in Libya. For this we thank you. We will do our utmost to support the exercise of freedom of expression in this new Libya.

I am truly honored to be here today to award some great artists, in cooperation with our partner Libya One TV. I have seen the videos and I am impressed with the quality of work submitted, and by the sentiment and purpose behind the messages in the films. You have shown a great deal of talent and creativity, leaving no doubt about the ability of media to convey a powerful message.

As Ambassador of the United States of America, I am committed to supporting Libya’s right to develop a modern society that enshrines basic human rights for all Libyans – men and women; young and old; east, west, north, and south.

The projects represented this evening were created by individuals and teams across Libya. Libya is truly a country united by men and women who value their freedom of expression and who have demonstrated their commitment to this value through their art.

I thank you again for being here today. I have one final message to each and every single one of you, please always remember “Inta Liby Hoor.”

http://libya.usembas.../ne_040312.html

Free Media Center Opening

On Sunday April 1, 2012 the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Gene A. Cretz, and five members of a U.S. Congressional delegation attended and spoke at the official opening of The Freedom Center for Media and Cultural Excellence (FMC), a Libyan non-governmental organization (NGO) formed in December 2011 in Tripoli, Libya. Over 75 members of Libyan civil society, representing over 30 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), educators and the media attended and enjoyed the positive exchange of ideas and enhanced outreach and networking opportunities. Many members of the Tripoli Local Tripoli Council and the National Transition Council (NTC) participated in the event, including the Deputy Chairman of the Tripoli Council, Dr. Sadet A. Al Badri, and Mr. Mahammed Harezi, the spokesman for the NTC, both of whom commended the efforts of the Libyan people to build a new democratic society.

The primary aim of the FMC, headed by Mr. Hussam Zagaar, is to contribute to the development of an independent media and civil society, through programs geared toward strengthening the local media and civil society organizations, and enhancing public awareness and involvement in the Libyan political process and promotion of culture.

The U.S. Ambassador praised the Center’s work, noting that “a free, independent and professional media is essential to any democratic society.” Congressmen David Drier and David Price, co-chairs of the House Democracy Partnership, referenced the bipartisan nature of their delegation, and emphasized the importance of all aspects of Libyan society working together during this l period to ensure a smooth transition to a democratically elected government.

Since December, the U.S. government, through the Agency for International Development (USAID), has supported The Free Media Center with training materials, supplies and furniture, and has worked with the Center to support programs that will contribute to an independent and professional media and an involved citizenry. The goal of the Free Media Center is to help add transparency, ensure the spread of accurate and timely information, encourage debate and provide a voice for Libyan citizens to express their views and concerns.

http://libya.usembas.../ne_030712.html

Winner of International Women of Courage Award

"Congratulations to Ms. Hana El-Hebshi (Numidia) on winning this year's prestigious International Women of Courage Award. Ms. El-Hebshi is honored by the U.S. Department of State for her portraying courage and bravery in fighting for the cause of freedom of expression during the Libyan revolution.

Ms. El-Hebshi will receive her award tomorrow in an official ceremony hosted by the Secretary of State, Madame Hillary Rodham Clinton. The ceremony will also feature the special appearance of the First Lady, Ms. Michelle Obama. Ms. El-Hebshi was also offered a ten-day workshop on women's leadership and will have the chance to visit five cities in the United States of America".

http://libya.usembas.../ne_053112.html

Statement by A/S Posner during Press Conference

Ministry of Defense- Tripoli, Libya May 31, 2012 – 18:00 local time

Today we concluded a very successful human rights dialogue with the Libyan government. Our two days of discussions covered a range of important issues, including the upcoming parliamentary elections, detention policies and practices, freedom of expression, and issues relating to accountability and reconciliation. I want to thank Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdul-Aziz for hosting these meetings, and for his thoughtful engagement in these discussions.

Libya is at a key moment in its democratic transition. In several weeks, Libyans will go to the polls to elect a national congress, the first open elections in more than four decades. And there are other positive signs, including the emergence of a dynamic civil society, several of whose leaders we met yesterday. Libyans are increasingly exercising their freedoms of speech, press, assembly and association. And there are growing demands for greater official transparency and accountability.

But this more open environment also has pushed longstanding local conflicts and tensions to the fore. In places like Sabha and Kufra, violent clashes have left scores dead and hundreds more wounded. In these and other places, the government has yet to gain effective control over armed brigades, some of whom continue to contribute to a climate of insecurity and who hold several thousand people in detention in conditions that do not meet international standards.

Our discussions of these and other sensitive issues with Libyan officials were frank and respectful, practical and forward-looking. I came away from these discussions, and from my meetings with those outside of government, with a sense of hope and renewed commitment to stand by the Libyan government and people as they work to build a better future and overcome the tragic legacy of the Qadhafi years.

Edited by William Kelly
Posted (edited)

Renegade CIA stopped ??? NO USA imperialism today ???

History shows U.S. viciously attacks—not supports—real revolutions

Bill Kelly stop drinking the London School of Economics tea. They have drugged you.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The CIA & Drugs

http://ciadrugs.home...es/outline.html

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Kosovo "Freedom Fighters" Financed by Drug Money, CIA

http://www.monitor.n.../klacontra.html

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CIA, Heroin Still Rule Day in Afghanistan

http://www.rawa.org/...fghanistan.html

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CIA Black Sites And Operations In Somalia (Jeremy Scahill )

http://www.thenation.com/article/161936/cias-secret-sites-somalia

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/21/997081/-INTERVIEW-Jeremy-Scahill-On-Uncovering-CIA-Black-Sites-In-Somalia

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

US Sponsored "Institutional Coup" in Paraguay: Back to the CIA's "Good Old Days"

by Wayne Madsen

http://www.globalres...xt=va&aid=31905

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Libya 360°THE SLOW AND SILENT GENOCIDE THE US IS CONDUCTING IN HAITI

July 19, 2012 by Alexandra Valiente

http://libya360.word...cting-in-haiti/

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The US-Al Qaeda Alliance: Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya. Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.

U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.

In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse for intervention.

But there have been other interventions in which Americans have used al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993. There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after large numbers of Arab and other foreign mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air America. (The three, all once detailed from the Pentagon to the CIA, were Richard Secord, Harry Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn.)2 This was an ad hoc marriage of convenience: the mujahedin got to defend Muslims against Russian influence in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, while the Americans got a new president who opened up the oilfields of Baku to western oil companies.

The pattern of U.S. collaboration with Muslim fundamentalists against more secular enemies is not new. It dates back to at least 1953, when the CIA recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and also began to cooperate with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in 2011 we see a more complex marriage of convenience between US and al-Qaeda elements: one which repeats a pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo in 1997-98. In those countries America responded to a local conflict in the name of a humanitarian intervention to restrain the side committing atrocities. But in all three cases both sides committed atrocities, and American intervention in fact favored the side allied with al-Qaeda.

The cause of intervention was fostered in all three cases by blatant manipulation and falsification of the facts. What a historian has noted of the Bosnian conflict was true also of Kosovo and is being echoed today in Libya: though attacks were “perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike,” the pattern in western media was “that killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of non-Muslims were not.”4 Reports of mass rapes in the thousands proved to be wildly exaggerated: a French journalist “uncovered only four women willing to back up the story.”5 Meanwhile in 1994 the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) traveled to Bosnia and fervently endorsed the case for intervention in Bosnia; in 2011 February BHL traveled to Benghazi and reprised his interventionist role for Libya.6

In all of the countries mentioned above, furthermore, there are signs that some American and/or western intelligence groups were collaborating with al-Qaeda elements from the outset of conflict, before the atrocities cited as a reason for intervention.. This suggests that there were deeper reasons for America’s interventions including the desire of western oil companies to exploit the petroleum reserves of Libya (as in Iraq) without having to deal with a troublesome and powerful strong man, or their desire to create a strategic oil pipeline across the Balkans (in Kosovo).7

That the U.S. would support al-Qaeda in terrorist atrocities runs wholly counter to impressions created by the U.S. media. Yet this on-going unholy alliance resurrects and builds on the alliance underlying Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1978-79 strategy of provocation in Afghanistan, at a time when he was President Carter’s National Security Adviser.

In those years Brzezinski did not hesitate to play the terrorist card against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s intelligence service) to work with the Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”9

CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of using terrorists against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence Service) to their client Afghan extremists like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar (today one of America’s enemies in Afghanistan). But in 1986, “Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin.”10 CIA aid now reached their support Office of Services in Peshawar, headed by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, and by Osama bin Laden. The al-Kifah Center, a U.S. recruitment office for their so-called Arab-Afghan foreign legion (the future al Qaeda), was set up in the al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn.11

It is important to recall Brzezinski’s and Casey’s use of terrorists today. For in Libya, as earlier in Kosovo and Bosnia, there are alarming signs that America has continued to underwrite Islamist terrorism as a means to dismantle socialist or quasi-socialist nations not previously in its orbit: first the USSR, then Yugoslavia, today Libya. As I have written elsewhere, Gaddafi was using the wealth of Libya, the only Mediterranean nation still armed by Russia and independent of the NATO orbit, to impose more and more difficult terms for western oil companies, and to make the whole of Africa more independent of Europe and America.12

Support for the mujahedin included collusion in law-breaking, at a heavy cost. In the second part of this essay, I will show how government protection of key figures in the Brooklyn al-Kifah Center left some of them free, even after they were known to have committed crimes, to engage in further terrorist acts in the United States -- such as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Libya

The NATO intervention in Libya has been presented as a humanitarian campaign. But it is not: both factions have been committing atrocities. Thanks in part to the efforts of the well-connected p.r. firm the Harbour Group, working on behalf of the Benghazi opposition’s National Transitional Council [NTC], Americans have heard many more press accounts of atrocities by pro-Gaddafi forces in Libya than by the Benghazi opposition.13 But in fact, as the London Daily Telegraph reported,

Under rebel control, Benghazi residents are terrorized, many "too frightened to drive through the dark streets at night, fearing a shakedown or worse at the proliferating checkpoints."

Moreover, about 1.5 million black African migrant workers feel trapped under suspicion of supporting the wrong side. Numbers of them have been attacked, some hunted down, dragged from apartments, beaten and killed. So-called "revolutionaries" and "freedom fighters" are, in fact, rampaging gunmen committing atrocities airbrushed from mainstream reports, unwilling to reveal the new Libya if Gaddafi is deposed.14

Thomas Mountain concurs that “Since the rebellion in Benghazi broke out several hundred Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian and Eritrean guest workers have been robbed and murdered by racist rebel militias, a fact well hidden by the international media.”15 Such reports have continued. Recently, Human Rights Watch accused the rebels of killing Gaddafi supporters who were just civilians and looting, burning and ransacking pro-Gaddafi supporters' houses and areas.16

Americans and Europeans are still less likely to learn from their media that among the groups in the Benghazi transitional coalition, certainly the most battle-seasoned, are veterans of the Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG). The importance of the LIFG contingent in the TNC has been downplayed in a recent issue of the International Business Times:

The LIFG is a radical Islamic group which has been fighting small scale guerrilla warfare against Gaddafi for almost a decade. Much of the LIFG leadership came from soldiers who fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, as part of the Mujahedeen. Since the beginning of the uprising reports said that some of the LIFG has joined the TNC rebel movement on the ground, and many accused the fighters of having links to Al-Qaeda, which the LIFG has since denied.

Previously however, the LIFG had stated that its ultimate goal is to install an Islamic state inside Libya, which given the fact that many of its fighters are now on the side of the TNC is quite worrying. However as the LIFG is reported to have a fighting force of no more than a few thousand men, it is believed it will not be able to cause much trouble within the opposition.17

It remains to be seen whether a victorious TNC would be able to contain the Islamist aspirations of the ruthless jihadist veterans in their ranks.

There are those who fear that, from their years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the battle-hardened LIFG, although probably not dominant in the Benghazi coalition today, will come to enjoy more influence if Benghazi ever gets to distribute the spoils of victory. In February 2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that "one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. security in Iraq] is from smaller international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida links. They include ... the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group."18 In 2007 a West Point study reported on “the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda, which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qaeda on November 3, 2007."19

Although Britain and the US were well aware of the West Point assessment of the hard-core LIFG in the Benghazi TNC coalition, their special forces nevertheless secretly backed the Benghazi TNC, even before the launch of NATO air support:

The bombing of the country came as it was revealed that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces – and more are on standby….

In total it is understood that just under 250 UK special forces soldiers and their support have been in Libya since before the launch of air strikes to enforce the no-fly zone against Gaddafi’s forces.20

There are also reports that U.S. Special Forces were also sent into Libya on February 23 and 24, 2011, almost a month before the commencement of NATO bombing.21

UK support for the fundamentalist LIFG was in fact at least a decade old:

Fierce clashes between [Qadhafi's] security forces and Islamist guerrillas erupted in Benghazi in September 1995, leaving dozens killed on both sides. After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally declared its existence in a communiqué calling Qadhafi's government "an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty" and declaring its overthrow to be "the foremost duty after faith in God." This and future LIFG communiqués were issued by Libyan Afghans who had been granted political asylum in Britain.... The involvement of the British government in the LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the subject of immense controversy. LIFG's next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-MI5 officer David Shayler.22

David Shayler’s detailed account has been challenged, but many other sources reveal that UK support for Libyan jihadists long antedates the present conflict.23

Even more ominous for the future than the nationalistic LIFG may be the fighters from the more internationalist Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) who have seized the opportunity presented by the war to enter the conflict, and equip themselves from Gaddafi’s looted armories.24 AQIM presents a special concern because of recent reports that, like other al Qaeda associates from Afghanistan to Kosovo, it is increasingly financed by payoffs from regional drug traffickers.25

In short, the NATO campaign in Libya is in support of a coalition in which the future status of present and former al-Qaeda allies is likely to be strengthened.26 And western forces have been secretly supporting them from the outset.

The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Bosnia

Similarly, Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were presented as humanitarian. But both sides had committed atrocities in those conflicts; Like the western media, Washington downplayed the Muslim atrocities because of its other interests.

Most Americans are aware that Clinton dispatched U.S. forces to Bosnia to enforce the Dayton peace accords after a well-publicized Serbian atrocity: the massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica. Thanks to a vigorous campaign by the p.r. firm Ruder Finn, Americans heard a great deal about the Srebrenica massacre, but far less about the beheadings and other atrocities by Muslims that preceded and helped account for it.

A major reason for the Serb attack on Srebrenica was to deal with the armed attacks mounted from that base on nearby villages: “intelligence sources said it was that harassment which precipitated the Serb attack on the 1,500 Muslim defenders inside the enclave.”27 General Philippe Morillon, commander of the UN troops in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993, testified to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) that Muslim forces based in Srebrenica had “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region”28 According to Prof. John Schindler,

Between May and December 1992, Muslim forces repeatedly attacked Serb villages around Srebrenica, killing and torturing civilians; some were mutilated and burned alive. Even pro-Sarajevo accounts concede that Muslim forces in Srebrenica…murdered over 1,300 Serbs…and had “ethnically cleansed a vast area.29

Former U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith later admitted in an interview that the U.S. administration was aware of “small numbers of atrocities” being committed by the foreign mujahedin in Bosnia, but dismissed the atrocities as “in the scheme of things not a big issue.”30

Other sources reveal that Washington gave a tacit green light to Croatia’s arming and augmentation of the Muslim presence in Srebrenica.31 Soon C-130 Hercules planes. some but not all of them Iranian, were dropping arms to the Muslims, in violation of the international arms embargo which the U.S. officially respected. More Arab-Afghan mujahedin arrived as well. Many of the airdrops and some of the mujahedin were at Tuzla, 70 kilometers from Srebrenica.32

According to The Spectator (London), the Pentagon was using other countries such as Turkey and Iran in this flow of arms and warriors:

From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of Mujahideen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. …. As part of the Dutch government’s inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University compiled a report entitled ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’, published in April 2002. In it he details the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to assist Bosnia’s Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine agencies’ of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups that included Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia — airlifts with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.33

Cees Wiebes’ detailed account, based on years of research, documents both the case for American responsibility and the vigorous American denials of it:

At 17.45 on 10 February 1995, the Norwegian Captain Ivan Moldestad, a Norwegian helicopter detachment (NorAir) pilot, stood in the doorway of his temporary accommodation just outside Tuzla. It was dark, and suddenly he heard the sound of the propellers of an approaching transport aircraft; it was unmistakably a four engine Hercules C-130. Moldestad noticed that the Hercules was being escorted by two jet fighters, but could not tell their precise type in the darkness. There were other sightings of this secretive night-time flight to Tuzla Air Base (TAB). A sentry who was on guard duty outside the Norwegian medical UN unit in Tuzla also heard and saw the lights of the Hercules and the accompanying jet fighters. Other UN observers, making use of night vision equipment, also saw the cargo aircraft and the fighter planes concerned. The reports were immediately forwarded to the NATO Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Vicenza and the UNPF Deny Flight Cell in Naples. When Moldestad phoned Vicenza, he was told that there was nothing in the air that night, and that he must be mistaken. When Moldestad persisted, the connection was broken.

The secretive C-130 cargo aircraft flights and night-time arms drops on Tuzla caused great agitation within UNPROFOR and the international community in February and March 1995. When asked, a British general responded with great certainty to the question of the origin of the secret supplies via TAB: ‘They were American arms deliveries. No doubt about that. And American private companies were involved in these deliveries.’ This was no surprising answer, because this general had access to intelligence gathered by a unit of the British Special Air Services (SAS) in Tuzla. The aircraft had come within range of this unit’s special night vision equipment, and the British saw them land. It was a confirmation that a clandestine American operation had taken place in which arms, ammunition and military communication equipment were supplied to the ABiH. These night-time operations led to much consternation within the UN and NATO, and were the subject of countless speculations.34

Wiebes reports the possibility that the C-130s, some of which were said to have taken off from a US Air Force base in Germany, were actually controlled by Turkish authorities.35 But U.S. involvement was detected in the elaborate cover-up, from the fact that US AWACS aircraft, which should have provided a record of the secret flights, were either withdrawn from duty at the relevant times, or manned with US crews.36

A summary of Wiebes’ exhaustive report was published in the Guardian:

The Dutch report reveals how the Pentagon formed a secret alliance with Islamist groups in an Iran-Contra-style operation.

US, Turkish and Iranian intelligence groups worked with the Islamists in what the Dutch report calls the "Croatian pipeline". Arms bought by Iran and Turkey and financed by Saudi Arabia were flown into Croatia initially by the official Iranian airline, Iran Air, and later in a fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.

The report says that mojahedin fighters were also flown in, and that the US was "very closely involved" in the operation which was in flagrant breach of the embargo. British secret services obtained documents proving that Iran also arranged deliveries of arms directly to Bosnia, it says.

The operation was promoted by the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, which was cautious about using Islamist groups as a conduit for arms, and about breaching the embargo. When the CIA tried to place its own people on the ground in Bosnia, the agents were threatened by the mojahedin fighters and the Iranians who were training them.

The UN relied on American intelligence to monitor the embargo, a dependency which allowed Washington to manipulate it at will.37

Meanwhile the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which in the 1980s had supported the “Arab-Afghans” fighting in Afghanistan, turned its attentions to Bosnia.

Al-Kifah’s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in Bosnia….Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves….The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.38

One of the trainers at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New Jersey.39 In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Crown Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.40

About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, today the leader of al Qaeda, came to America to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed, a U.S. double agent and veteran of U.S. Army Special Forces who had been the top trainer at the Al-Kifah mosque.41 Almost certainly al-Zawahiri’s fund-raising was in support of the mujahedin in Bosnia, reportedly his chief concern at the time. (“The Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 1993, Mr. bin Laden had appointed Sheik Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda's second-in-command, to direct his operations in the Balkans.”)42

Wiebes’ detailed report and the news stories based on it corroborated earlier charges made in 1997 by Sir Alfred Sherman, top adviser to Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the influential rightwing nationalist Centre for Policy Studies, that “The U.S. encouraged and facilitated the dispatch of arms to the Moslems via Iran and Eastern Europe -- a fact which was denied in Washington at the time in face of overwhelming evidence.”43 This was part of his case that

The war in Bosnia was America's war in every sense of the word. The US administration helped start it, kept it going, and prevented its early end. Indeed all the indications are that it intends to continue the war in the near future, as soon as its Moslem proteges are fully armed and trained.

Specifically, Sherman charged that in 1992 Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had instructed Warren Zimmerman, U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, to persuade Bosnian President Izetbegovic to renege on his agreement to preserve Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian unity, and instead accept American aid for an independent Bosnian state.44

The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Kosovo

This raises the disturbing question: were some Americans willing to ignore the atrocities of the al-Kifah mujahideen in Bosnia in exchange for mujahideen assistance in NATO’s successive wars dismantling Yugoslavia, the last surviving socialist republic in Europe? One thing is clear: Sir Alfred Sherman’s prediction in 1997 that America “intends to continue the war in the near future” soon proved accurate, when in 1999 American support for al-Qaeda’s allies in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led to a controversial NATO bombing campaign.

As was widely reported at the time, the KLA was supported both by the networks of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and also by the traffic in Afghan heroin:

Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden -- who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.45

According to former DEA agent Michael Levine, the decision of Clinton to back the KLA dismayed his DEA contacts who knew it to be a major drug-trafficking organization.46 As Ralf Mutschke of Interpol testified to Congress,

In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden. Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Djihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict. [This is almost certainly Zaiman or Mohammed al-Zawahiri, one of the brothers of Ayman al-Zawahiri.] In 1998, the KLA was described as a key player in the drugs for arms business in 1998, "helping to transport 2 billion USD worth of drugs annually into Western Europe". The KLA and other Albanian groups seem to utilize a sophisticated network of accounts and companies to process funds. In 1998, Germany froze two bank accounts belonging to the "United Kosova" organization after it had been discovered that several hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into those accounts by a convicted Kosovar Albanian drug trafficker.47

According to the London Sunday Times, the KLA’s background did not deter the US from training and strengthening it:

American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.

When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.48

According to former U.S. Army Captain David Hackworth, later Newsweek's contributing editor for defense, former US military officers in the private U.S. military contractor MPRI (Military Professional Resources Incorporated) not only trained KLA personnel, but even fought alongside them.49 This reinforced earlier reports that MPRI personnel had also been involved in training Croatians at the time of the illicit Croatian arms pipeline to Bosnia.50

After Kosovo, Sherman repeated his warnings against “expanding American hegemony”, exercised through NATO with varying degrees of partnership and subordination of other players. …. The process commenced with the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia, led by Germany and acquiesced in by the other European Union members and the United States (1991). It progressed with sanctions against Serbia for attempting to help the western Serbs (1992). In Bosnia America's early involvement sparked off civil war (the Zimmerman Visit to Izetbegovic, in the aftermath of the Lisbon Agreement), and it eventually matured into the bombing campaign of 1999 and the occupation of Kosovo.51

Others suspected that America’s involvement was motivated by its desire to see a new Trans-Balkan pipeline and a new U.S. military base in the Balkans to defend it. Although such critics were initially ridiculed, both predictions soon proved true. The U.S.-registered AMBO corporation, headed by former BP executive Ted Ferguson, began construction of a pipeline from Albania to Macedonia in 2007.52 And nearby is a semi-permanent U.S. Army base, Camp Bondsteel, that can hold up to 7000 soldiers.

In 2007, President George W. Bush created a new United States Africa Command, U.S. AFRICOM. But its HQ at present is in Stuttgart, Germany. This has led to speculation on the Internet that America has its eyes on Libya’s international airport, which the U.S. Air Force had operated as Wheelus Air Force Base until its ouster in 1970.

II. From the First WTC Bombing to 9/11: The Domestic U.S. Fallout from Collusion with Terrorists

The fact that Americans have had repeated recourse to al-Qaeda Islamists as assets in their expansive projects does not constitute proof that there is any long-term systematic strategy to do so, still less that there is a secret alliance.

I believe rather that America is suffering from a malignant condition of military power run amok – power which, like a malignant cancer, tends to reproduce itself at times in ways counterproductive to larger goals. Those who are appointed to manage this vast power become inured to using any available assets, in order to sustain a sociodynamic of global intervention that they are, ironically, powerless to challenge or turn around. The few dissenters who try to do so are predictably sidelined or even ejected from the heights of power, as not being “on the team.”

Those in Washington who decided to assist terrorists and drug traffickers seem not to have considered such “externalities” as the domestic consequences from official dealings with criminal terrorist networks that are global in scope. Yet the consequences were and are real, for the Islamist terrorists that were protected by the US in their subversion of order in Kosovo and other countries were soon being protected inside the US as well. As former DEA agent Michael Levine reported of the KLA-linked drug networks, “These guys have a network that's active on the streets of this country.... They're the worst elements of society that you can imagine, and now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they're politically protected.”53

In other words, Kosovars were now enjoying the de facto protection in their U.S. drug trafficking that had earlier been enjoyed by the CIA’s Chinese, Cuban, Italian, Thai, and other ethnic assets dating from the 1940s.54

Mother Jones reported in 2000, after the NATO bombing in support of the KLA that Afghan heroin, much of it distributed by Kosovar Albanians, now accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in America -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier.55 Meanwhile in Europe, it was estimated that “Kosovo Albanians control 40% of Europe's heroin.”56 In addition there is a near universal consensus that the outcome of the war in Bosnia left al-Qaeda’s jihadists much more strongly entrenched in the Balkans than they had been earlier. In the words of Professor John Schindler, Bosnia, “the most pro-Western society in the umma [Muslim world],” was “converted into a Jihadistan through domestic deceit, violent conflict, and misguided international intervention.”57

It is too soon to predict with confidence what will be the domestic fallout or “blowback” from NATO’s empowerment of Islamists by creating chaos in Libya. But the domestic consequences of similar U.S. interventions in the past are indisputable, and have contributed to major acts of terrorism in this country.

American protection for the Al-Kifah mujahedin support base in Brooklyn led to interference in domestic U.S. law enforcement. This enabled mujahedin recruits at al-Kifah to plot and/or engage in a number of domestic and foreign terrorist attacks on America. These attacks include the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the so-called “New York landmarks plot” of 1995, and the Embassy attacks of 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania. Involved in all of these events were terrorists who should have been rounded up earlier because of crimes already committed, but were allowed to stay free.

Central to all of these attacks was the role of Ali Mohamed, the former U.S. Special Forces double agent at al-Kifah, and his trainees. Ali Mohamed, despite being on a State Department Watch List, had come to America around 1984, on what an FBI consultant has called “a visa program controlled by the CIA.”58 So did the “blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of al-Kifah; Rahman was issued two visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan.”59

Ali Mohamed trained al-Kifah recruits in guerrilla tactics near Brooklyn. This operation was considered so sensitive that the New York police and the FBI later protected two of the recruits from arrest, when they murdered the Jewish extremist Meir Kahane. Instead, the New York Police called the third assassin (El Sayyid Nosair) a “lone deranged gunman,” and released the other two (Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh) from detention. This enabled Abouhalima and Salameh, along with another Ali Mohamed trainee (Nidal Ayyad) to take part three years later in the first (1993) bombing of the World Trade Center.60

Prosecutors protected Ali Mohamed again in the 1994-95 “Landmarks” trial, when Omar Abdul Rahman and some of Mohamed’s trainees were convicted of conspiring to blow up New York buildings. In that case the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, named Ali Mohamed as an unindicted co-conspirator, yet allowed him to remain free. When the defense issued a subpoena for Mohamed to appear in court, the prosecutor intervened to avoid Mohamed’s having to testify.61

Ali Mohamed was well aware of his protected status, and used it in early 1993 to obtain his release when detained by the RCMP at Vancouver Airport. As this episode has so ignored in the US press, I will quote the account of it in Canada’s premier newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail:

The RCMP had their hands on one of the key insiders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, but he was released after he had Mounties call his handler at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ali Mohamed, a Californian of Egyptian origin who is believed to be the highest ranking al-Qaeda member to have landed in Canada, was working with U.S. counterterrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993. Mr. Mohamed now is in a U.S. prison.

"The people of the RCMP told me by midnight that I can go now," Mr. Mohamed — who confessed in the United States to being a close bin Laden associate — wrote at the time in an affidavit shown Wednesday to The Globe and Mail.

The incident happened after customs agents at Vancouver International Airport detained Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus via Frankfurt, after they found him carrying two forged Saudi passports.

Mr. Mohamed, who was waiting to pick him up at the airport, inquired of the police about his friend's detention. That made the RCMP curious about Mr. Mohamed, but he dispelled their suspicions by telling them he was a collaborator with the FBI.62

The Globe and Mail story makes it clear that in 1993 Mohamed already had a handler at the FBI, to whom the RCMP deferred. Patrick Fitzgerald, in his statement to the 9/11 Commission, gave a quite different story: that Mohamed, after returning from Nairobi in 1994, applied for a job “as an FBI translator.”63 The difference is vital: because the FBI told the RCMP to release Mohamed, he was then able to travel to Nairobi and plan for bombing the U.S. Embassy there.

According to author Peter Lance, by 2007 Fitzgerald had enough evidence to arrest and indict Mohamed, but did not. Instead he interviewed Mohamed in California, along with an FBI agent, Jack Cloonan. After the interview Fitzgerald chose not to arrest Mohamed, but instead to tap his phone and bug his computer. Lance asks a very relevant question: did Fitzgerald fear that ”any indictment of al Qaeda’s chief spy would rip the lid off years of gross negligence by three of America’s top intelligence agencies”?64

One month after the Embassy bombings, Ali Mohamed was finally arrested, on September 10, 1998. Yet when Fitzgerald handed down thirteen indictments two months later, Mohamed’s name was not among them. Instead Fitzgerald again allowed him to avoid cross-examination in court by accepting a plea bargain, the terms of which are still partly unknown. Specifically we do not know the term of Mohamed’s sentence: that page of his court appearance transcript (p. 17) is filed under seal.65

As part of the plea bargain, Mohamed told the court that at the personal request of bin Laden, he did surveillance on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, “took pictures, drew diagrams, and wrote a report” which he personally delivered to bin Laden in the Sudan.66 Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who negotiated the plea bargain, testified at length about Mohamed to the 9/11 Commission, who concluded in their Report (p. 68) that Mohamed “led” the embassy bombing operation. Ironically, the Embassy bombing is the official reason today why Zawahiri (like bin Laden before him) is wanted by the FBI, with a $25 million bounty on his head.

But the American public has been denied the right to learn about Ali Mohamed’s involvement in other terrorist events. Particularly relevant would be his involvement in 9/11. As his FBI handler Cloonan later reported, Mohamed explained to him that he personally trained the accused hijackers in how to seize planes:

He [had] conducted training for al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane. He ran practical exercises in Pakistan and he said, “This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [word blacked out] and put it in your carry-on luggage.” They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. “This is how you position yourself,” he said. “I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.” He wrote the whole thing out.67

Conclusion

At present America is in the midst of an unprecedented budget crisis, brought on in large part by its multiple wars. Nevertheless it is also on the point of several further interventions: in Yemen, Somalia, possibly Syria or Iran (where the CIA is said to be in contact with the drug-trafficking al-Qaeda offshoot Jundallah),68 and most assuredly in Libya.

Only the American public can stop them. But in order for the people to rise up and cry Stop! there must first be a better understanding of the dark alliances underlying America’s alleged humanitarian interventions.

This awareness may increase when Americans finally realize that there is domestic blowback from assisting terrorists as well. The long elaborate dance between Mohamed and his Justice Department overseers makes it clear that the handling of terrorists for corrupt purposes corrupts the handlers as well as the terrorists. Eventually both the handlers and the handled become in effect co-conspirators, with secrets about their collusion both parties need to conceal.

Until the public takes notice, that concealment of collusion will continue. And as long as it continues, we will continue to be denied the truth about what collusions underlay 9/11.

Worse, we are likely to see more terrorist attacks, at home as well as abroad, along with more illegal, costly, and unnecessary wars.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Peter Dale Scott is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Articles on related subjects

• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents

• Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods

• Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System

• Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?

• Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States

Notes

1 Cf. Telegraph (London), “Defence Cuts in Doubt over Libya, Says Military Adviser,“ April 7, 2011, “The Libyan crisis has raised doubts about the Coalition’s defence review and could force ministers to reverse cuts including the scrapping of Britain’s Harrier jump jets, a senior military adviser has said,” (link).

2 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-65.

3 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 44-45; citing Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 109-11; Saïd Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 60-61; Miles Copeland, The Game Player, 149-54. Cf. Ian Johnson, “Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood,” New York Review of Books, February 5, 2011.

4 John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad, 71, 81. According to Schindler, “CNN repeatedly showed images of ‘dead Muslims’ killed by Serbs that were actually Serbs murdered by Muslims” (92).

5 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 91.

6 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 179-80; Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2011. In 1994 BHL presented Bosnian leader Izetbegovich to French President Mitterand; in 2011 BHL arranged for three Benghazi leaders to meet French President Sarkozy. Cf. “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” Radio France Internationale, June 2, 2011, “Libya’s rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) is ready to recognise Israel, according to French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who says he has passed the message on to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” (link).

7 For Big Oil’s complaints with Gaddafi, see Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.

8 Scott, Road to 9/11, 77; citing Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 16), 16.

9 Scott, Road to 9/11, 72-75; quoting from "Les Révélations d'un Ancien Conseilleur de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes...’" Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris], January 15-21, 1998: “B[rzezinski]: [On Jul 3, 1979] I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

10 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, 129. According to the Spanish author Robert Montoya, the idea originated in the elite Safari Club that had been created by French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches in 1976, bringing together other intelligence chiefs such as General Akhtar Abdur Rahman of ISI in Pakistan and Kamal Adham of Saudi Arabia (Roberto Montoya, El Mundo [Madrid], February 16, 2003).

11 Scott, Road to 9/11, 139-40; citing Steven Emerson, American Jihad, 131-32.

12 Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.

13 “PR firm helps Libyan rebels to campaign for support from US,” The Hill.com, April 12, 2011.

14 Rob Crilly, Daily Telegraph (London), March 23, 2011; quoted in Stephen Lendman, “Planned Regime Change in Libya,” SteveLendmanBlog, March 28, 2011. Cf. Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011.

15 Morris Herman, “Rebel Militias Include the Human Traffickers of Benghazi,” Foreign Policy Journal, July 28, 2011, quoting Thomas C. Mountain.

16 Anissa Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.

17 Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.

18 Center for Defense Information, “In the Spotlight: The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),” January 18, 2005. That the LIFG is pursuing its own goals may explain the rebel seizure of anti-air force missiles from captured Gaddafi armories: these missiles, useless against Gaddafi (who no longer has an air force) are apparently being shipped out of Libya for sale or use elsewhere (New York Times, July 15, 2011).

19 December 2007 West Point Study, quoted in Webster Tarpley, “The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops in Iraq,” Tarpley.net, March 24, 2011.

20 Daily Mail (London), March 25, 2001, link; cited in Lendman; “Planned Regime Change in Libya.”

21 Akhtar Jamal, “US UK, French forces land in Libya,” Pakistan Observer, February 2011.

22 Gary Gambill, "The Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Jamestown Foundation," Terrorism Monitor, May 5, 2005; citing Al-Hayat (London), 20 October 1995 [“communiqué”]; "The Shayler affair: The spooks, the Colonel and the jailed whistle-blower," The Observer (London), 9 August 1998; Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La Verite interdite (Bin Ladin: The Forbidden Truth). Cf. also Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair (Book Guild Publishing, 2005) [shayler].

23 E.g. Washington Post, October 7, 2001: “Over the years, some dissidents suspected by foreign governments of involvement in terrorist acts have been protected by the British government for one reason or another from deportation or extradition.... In the past, terrorism experts say, Britain benefited significantly from its willingness to extend at least conditional hospitality to a wide range of Arab dissidents and opposition figures .... Mustafa Alani, a terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, a London think tank, said [Anas] al-Liby was probably left in legal limbo by the British government, allowing him to be used or discarded as circumstances permitted.”

24 “Sahelian Concern Deepens over Libya, AQIM,” Sahel Blog, May 2, 2011. According to the Los Angeles Times, AQIM vowed on February 24, 2011 to “do whatever we can” to help the rebel cause. (Ken Dilanian, “US Finds no Firm Al Qaeda Presence in Libya Rebellion,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011). Cf. “Libya rebels not anti-West, but Qaeda a worry-group,” Reuters, March 29, 2011; “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011.

25 Andre Lesage, “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011, 6. Cf. “Rogue planes flying drugs across Atlantic; Al-Qaeda Links;,” National Post, January 14, 2014; “Latin drug lords find allies in African Islamists,” Washington Times, November 17, 2009.

26 A story in the New York Times (“Exiled Islamists Watch Rebellion Unfold at Home,”

July 19, 2011) reports that KIFG members of the TNC “have renounced Al Qaeda.” But it supplies no independent evidence that their politics have changed.

27 Michael Evans, "Muslim soldiers 'failed to defend town from Serbs,'" Times (London), July 14, 1995.

28 Richard Palmer. “What Really Happened in Bosnia,” theTrumpet.com, July 12, 2011.

29 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 87; quoting from Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, 79.

30 John Rosenthal, “The Other Crimes of Bosnia,” BigPeace.com, June 2, 2011; summarizing interview of Galbraith by J.M. Berger, “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia.Arms Trafficking.”

31 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 182-83; “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia Arms Trafficking”; Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992 1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 166-69.

32 “Allies and Lies,” BBC OnLine, June 22, 2001; Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 183. Also present at Tuzla was an American who introduced himself as “Major Guy Sands,” and who claimed to have been a ten-year veteran of the Vietnam War. Cf. a Swedish report from Tuzla, of an American there who made no secret of his Special Forces background (Brendan O'Shea, Crisis at Bihac: Bosnia’s Bloody Battlefield [stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998], p. 159). For reports of foreign mujahedin in or near Tuzla, see Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 74, 155, 164.

33 Brendan O’Neill, “How We Trained al-Qa’eda,” Spectator (London), September 13, 2003.

34 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 177.

35 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 187, 196; citing Cameron Spence, All Necessary Measures, 99-104.

36 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 184, 197.

37 “US used Islamists to arm Bosnians,” Guardian, April 22, 2002. Contrast the very different claim by Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, 140: “The U.S. also blocked Iranian and al Qaeda influence in the country [bosnia].”

38 Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993. Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 121-22.

39 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.

40 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149.

41 Lawrence Wright: “Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen's Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.” For more about Ali Mohamed, and specifically how the FBI once told the RCMP not to detain him (this freeing Mohamed to plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya), see Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 147-60.

42 Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 2001.

43 Sir Alfred Sherman, Speech at International Conference, America’s Intervention in the Balkans, February 28-March 2, 1997. html

44 Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 74: Izetbegovic “decided to scrap the initiative, with the apparent encouragement of Warren Zimmermann [sic].” (Cf. 109-10). Zimmerman has denied that he so persuaded Izetbegovic, writing in a letter to the New York Times “that he had urged Izetbegovic to ‘stick by his commitments,’” (Steven L. Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 114).

45 Washington Times, May 4, 1999. Frank Viviano, “Drugs Paying for Conflict in Europe,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1994: “Narcotics smuggling has become a prime source of financing for civil wars already under way -- or rapidly brewing -- in southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, according to a report issued here this week. “The report, by the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, or Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, identifies belligerents in the former Yugoslav republics and Turkey as key players in the region's accelerating drugs-for-arms traffic. “Albanian nationalists in ethnically tense Macedonia and the Serbian province of Kosovo have built a vast heroin network, leading from the opium fields of Pakistan to black-market arms dealers in Switzerland, which transports up to $2 billion worth of the drug annually into the heart of Europe, the report says. More than 500 Kosovo or Macedonian Albanians are in prison in Switzerland for drug- or arms-trafficking offenses, and more than 1,000 others are under indictment.”

46 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.

47 Ralf Mutschke, testimony to Committee on the Judiciary, December 13, 2000.

48 Sunday Times (London), March 12, 2000: “Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter stages of the conflict, had established American contacts through his work in the Croatian army, which had been modernised with the help of Military Professional Resources Inc, an American company specialising in military training and procurement. This company's personnel were in Kosovo, along with others from a similar company, Dyncorps [sic], that helped in the American-backed programme for the Bosnian army.”

49 David Hackworth, “Wanted: Guns for Hire,” Hackworth.com, July 9, 2001. Cf. James R. Davis, Fortune’s Warriors: Private Armies and the New World Order, 112; P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 219.

50 Wiebes, Intelligence and the war in Bosnia 1992 – 1995, 190; Observer, November 5, 1995. J.M. Berger reports from declassified documents that MPRI’s contract with Bosnia was arranged via a private company headed by neocon Richard Perle: “Controversial neocon philosopher Richard Perle led an obscure nongovernmental organization tasked with hiring a private company to run the U.S. State Department's "Train and Equip" program in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996.

Perle's group, the "Acquisition Support Institute," hired Military Professional Resources Inc., essentially a professional mercenary company nearly as controversial as Perle himself. It's not at all clear what or whom is responsible for the Institute, or why a "non-governmental, non-profit organization" would be responsible for selecting the recipient of a massive State Department contract on one of the most sensitive issues of the day.

Equipped with a collection of retired military officers, MPRI set itself up as a virtual extension of the U.S. government in both Croatia and Bosnia, as documented in an extensive set of Freedom of Information Act documents I will be publishing over the next several weeks.

MPRI operatives were given the run of the country -- receiving payments and arms from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Muslim countries, which underwrote operations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

In many cases, these payments were brokered directly by the State Department. In some instances, funds and arms were routed into Bosnia without State's explicit approval but often with its knowledge, as documented in the newly declassified records. Unauthorized assistance appears to have come from Pakistan, UAE and Turkey, among others.” (Richard Perle, MPRI and Bosnian Arms Shipments,” Intelwire, February 7, 2007).

51 Sir Alfred Sherman, “The Empire for the New Millenium?” The Centre for Peace in Balkans, May 22, 2000.

52 Cf. the cynical comments of the Swiss analytical group Zeit-Fragen: (Current Concerns, “Where’s the 8th Corridor?” September/October 2001): “By creating a trouble spot in Kosovo the USA is able to control Albania and with it the planned AMBO pipeline…. The USA is showing a conspicuous interest in controlling these strategic transport corridor links in the Balkans. They prohibited a project scheduled to be constructed through Serbia, and they offered Rumania 100 million dollars to move the route of the planned SEEL pipeline (South Eastern European Line) further north, to Hungary. The Italian firm ENI had planned this pipeline project using existing pipeline infrastructure in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The USA bombarded the Yugoslavian section of this infrastructure with remarkable doggedness.”

53 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.

54 For details, see Scott, American War Machine, 84, 123, 151, etc.; Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 167.

55 Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000. Clinton at the same time mounted a vigorous campaign against Colombian heroin, increasing the demand for Afghan heroin. As Klebnikov noted, “some White House officials fear Kosovar heroin could replace the Colombian supply. ‘Even if we were to eliminate all the heroin production in Colombia, by no means do we think there would be no more heroin coming into the United States,’ says Bob Agresti of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. ‘Look at the numbers. Colombia accounts for only six percent of the world's heroin. Southwest Asia produces 75 percent.’"

56 Patrick Graham, “Drug Wars: Kosovo’s New Battle,” National Post, April 13, 2000.

57 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 324. Cf. Cristopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate (New York: Praeger, 2007).

58 Scott, Road to 9/11, 152-53; citing Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117; Boston Globe, February 3, 1995, “Figure Cited in Terrorism Case Said to Enter U.S. with CIA Help.”

59 Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 67; cf. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117.

60 Scott, Road to 9/11, 154-56, 160. Cf. Robert L. Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheikh,” Village Voice, March 30, 1993: “As Jack Blum, investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, put it: "One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the Mujahadeen. And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war.”

61 Scott, Road to 9/11, 156-57; citing J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed: An Intelwire Sourcebook, 235-36.

62 Estanislao Oziewicz and Tu Thanh Ha, “Canada freed top al-Qaeda operative,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 22, 2001. A Lexis-Nexis search for “Ali Mohamed” + Vancouver yields no relevant entries.

63 Patrick Fitzgerald, Testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Twelfth Public Hearing, June 16, 2004.

64 Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 274-77.

65 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S (7) 98 Cr. 1023, October 20, 2000, link, 17; in J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed, 294.

66 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S(7) 98 Cr. 1023, 27; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 304.

67 FBI agent Jack Cloonan, summarizing a post-9/11 interview with Ali Mohamed, in William F. Jasper, “Unleashing a Terrorist,” New American, November 26, 2007. Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 382.

68 Paul Joseph Watson, “U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA-Funded Jundullah Terror Group,” NOW Observer, October 20, 2009.

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Apartheid never died in South Africa. It inspired a world order upheld by force and illusion

19 September 2012

The murder of 34 miners by the South African police, most of them shot in the back, puts paid to the illusion of post-apartheid democracy and illuminates the new worldwide apartheid of which South Africa is both an historic and contemporary model.

In 1894, long before the infamous Afrikaans word foretold "separate development" for the majority people of South Africa, an Englishman, Cecil John Rhodes, oversaw the Glen Grey Act in what was then the Cape Colony. This was designed to force blacks from agriculture into an army of cheap labour, principally for the mining of newly discovered gold and other precious minerals. As a result of this social Darwinism, Rhodes' own De Beers company quickly developed into a world monopoly, making him fabulously rich. In keeping with liberalism in Britain and the United States, he was celebrated as a philanthropist supporting high-minded causes.

Today, the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University is prized among liberal elites. Successful Rhodes scholars must demonstrate "moral force of character" and "sympathy for and protection of the weak, and unselfishness, kindliness and fellowship". The former president Bill Clinton is one, General Wesley Clark, who led the Nato attack on Yugoslavia, is another. The wall known as apartheid was built for the benefit of the few, not least the most ambitious of the bourgeoisie.

This was something of a taboo during the years of racial apartheid. South Africans of British descent could indulge an apparent opposition to the Boers' obsession with race, and their contempt for the Boers themselves, while providing the facades behind which an inhumane system guaranteed privileges based on race and, more importantly, on class.

The new black elite in South Africa, whose numbers and influence had been growing steadily during the latter racial apartheid years, understood the part they would play following "liberation". Their "historic mission", wrote Frantz Fanon in his prescient classic The Wretched of the Earth, "has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism rampant though camouflaged".

This applied to leading figures in the African National Congress, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, now a corporate multi-millionaire, who negotiated a power-sharing "deal" with the regime of de F.W. Klerk, and Nelson Mandela himself, whose devotion to an "historic compromise" meant that freedom for the majority from poverty and inequity was a freedom too far. This became clear as early as 1985 when a group of South African industrialists led by Gavin Reilly, chairman of the Anglo-American mining company, met prominent ANC officials in Zambia and both sides agreed, in effect, that racial apartheid would be replaced by economic apartheid, known as the "free market".

Secret meetings subsequently took place in a stately home in England, Mells Park House, at which a future president of liberated South Africa, Tabo Mbeki, supped malt whisky with the heads of corporations that had shored up racial apartheid. The British giant Consolidated Goldfields supplied the venue and the whisky. The aim was to divide the "moderates" - the likes of Mbeki and Mandela - from an increasingly revolutionary multitude in the townships who evoked memories of uprisings following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and at Soweto in 1976 - without ANC help.

Once Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the ANC's "unbreakable promise" to take over monopoly capital was seldom heard again. On his triumphant tour of the US, Mandela said in New York: "The ANC will re-introduce the market to South Africa." When I interviewed Mandela in 1997 - he was then president - and reminded him of the unbreakable promise, I was told in no uncertain terms that "the policy of the ANC is privatisation".

Enveloped in the hot air of corporate-speak, the Mandela and Mbeki governments took their cues from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. While the gap between the majority living beneath tin roofs without running water and the newly wealthy black elite in their gated estates became a chasm, finance minister Trevor Manuel was lauded in Washington for his "macro-economic achievements". South Africa, noted George Soros in 2001, had been delivered into "the hands of international capital".

Shortly before the massacre of miners employed for a pittance in a dangerous, British-registered platinum mine, the erosion of South Africa's economic independence was demonstrated when the ANC government of Jacob Zuma stopped importing 42 per cent of its oil from Iran under intense pressure from Washington. The price of petrol has already risen sharply, further impoverishing people.

This economic apartheid is now replicated across the world as poor countries comply with the demands of western "interests" as opposed to their own. The arrival of China as a contender for the resources of Africa, though without the economic and military threats of America, has provided further excuse for American military expansion, and the possibility of world war, as demonstrated by President Barack Obama's recent arms and military budget of $737.5 billion, the biggest ever. The first African-American president of the land of slavery presides over a perpetual war economy, mass unemployment and abandoned civil liberties: a system that has no objection to black or brown people as long as they serve the right class. Those who do not comply are likely to be incarcerated.

This is the South African and American way, of which Obama, son of Africa, is the embodiment. Liberal hysteria that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is more extreme than Obama is no more than a familiar promotion of "lesser evilism" and changes nothing. Ironically, the election of Romney to the White House is likely to reawaken mass dissent in the US, whose demise is Obama's singular achievement.

Although Mandela and Obama cannot be compared - one is a figure of personal strength and courage, the other a pseudo political creation -- the illusion that both beckoned a new world of social justice is similar. It belongs to a grand illusion that relegates all human endeavour to a material value, and confuses media with information and military conquest with humanitarian purpose. Only when we surrender these fantasies shall we begin to end apartheid across the world.

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Cecil Rhodes : http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15331

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South African's goldmines beset by simmering resentment

For 150 years, the mines have divided rich and poor. Now the conflict looks as if it could blow up any time

David Smith in Carletonville

Carletonville-miners-stri-010.jpg

Striking gold miners under the watch of police officers in Carletonville, South Africa. Photograph: Gallo Images/Getty Images

Down the mine there is pain, oppression and the cold fear of never coming back. But worst of all, said rock driller Mbuzi Mokwane, is the day he gets his pay cheque. "My pay day is the most miserable day for me. At least during the week I'm working. But on the day you're given a pay slip that says 4,000 rand [£300], you start calculating your outgoings and you can go crazy. There is daylight robbery in the mines."

Mokwane works at Blyvooruitzicht near Carletonville in western Gauteng ("place of gold" in Sesotho) province, a place where workers go underground every day fearing it could be their last; where they complain of low pay, bad food and overcrowded single sex hostels; where they say they are still treated like animals by their white bosses. Their simmering resentment could seemingly blow at any moment.

South Africa's mines are the frontline in an increasingly ferocious battle over greed, inequality and economic liberation. The sight of angry workers confronting police with sticks and clubs has become a defining one. Strikes are raging above the country's vast reserves of platinum, gold and, this week, coal.

On Wednesday, AngloGold Ashanti admitted that most of its 35,000 workers had downed tools in an illegal strike. At the same time industrial action continued at Gold Fields and Anglo American Platinum, whose Rustenburg mines are reporting less than 20% attendance. Many are spurred by last month's uprising at Marikana, when 46 people died before rock drillers won a wage rise.

Eighteen years after the end of racial apartheid, workers' patience is all but exhausted. Julius Malema, the fireband politician, has told them: "They have been stealing this gold from you. Now it's your turn."

An industry that has divided rich and poor for nearly 150 years, scarred by exploitation and violence, is facing an existential crisis. These are the world's deepest mines and there were 123 deaths last year; this week AngloGold Ashanti announced that a mud rush had killed a shaft timberman who had served the company for 33 years. The incidence of tuberculosis in the mines is up to six times higher than in the general population.

Rock drillers have been described as a skilled elite among miners. But Mokwane, 33, told of the hardships his job entails once the cage snaps shut at Blyvooruitzicht.

"To me this work is like some form of torture. You always think, 'Am I going to come out alive, am I going to die?' If the rocks fall on you, you will be seriously injured or killed. It's very dangerous because in most cases we get to the working point and discover it's not safe, but we are told to work. We are afraid because it's not safe and anything could happen at any time."

When the men are drilling, he continued, they are inside a crevice 1.5 metres high so cannot stand upright. They must get on their knees or squat. "The challenge is that once you start drilling you have to balance the machine. It is shaking and taking energy from you."

"The other problem is smoke that comes out of the machine. You can't put on a nosemask because it easily gets wet. So you just have to breathe the smoke. There also difficulties when it gets too hot, like you are losing breath. When you ask the bosses for permission to go outside for fresh air, they say no, so you can hardly breathe."

Last November, he recalled, his worst fears were realised when a colleague working close to him was "totally buried by rocks". He survived but is confined to a wheelchair. "To this day," Mokwane said bitterly, "he has not been compensated for his injuries."

Racial politics are not left above ground, according to Mokwane. "The white bosses don't respect us; they only respect each other. Sometimes the conditions are not safe but they don't listen. The bad thing is that even our own black bosses are treating us like the white bosses do."

Like many men here, Mokwane sends more than half his salary to his impoverished family living far away, in his case the rural village of Mqanduli in Eastern Cape province. Mokwane's wife, three children, mother and three siblings are all depending on him to pay for their food, shelter and school fees. He misses his loved ones "constantly" but can only go back at Christmas and Easter.

Home for the rest of the year is within the mining compound. A visitor to his shared hostel room is assailed by the thick air and smell of stale sweat, cracked floor tiles, filthy walls and power sockets, windows covered with old newspapers, uninviting communal kitchen, empty beer bottles stacked in the corner and battered lockers daubed with red spray paint that are meant to hold all a man's possessions.

"There's nothing that makes me happy staying in this room," Mokwane reflected. "The way we live here is just like we're animals."

Others start smoking drugs and, if you start complaining, they say, 'It's not your home.'"

Food is supplied by the mine company but does not go down well. Mokwane said: "In the morning you're given a cup of tea and a quarter loaf. Sometimes you find the bread is long expired and so hard you can't eat it. Our lunch is also not good. In most cases they just give us food cooked the previous day. The rice is so overcooked it is like pap [maize porridge].

"If you try to complain, they say find your own alternative. Sometimes we try to take these complaints through the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers), but there is no change."

Last week he and his colleagues told the union they are demanding a monthly wage of 12,500 rand (£938), like their counterparts in Marikana. "If they don't come back with it, we will put down our tools. My opinion is that all miners in the whole country should go on strike, then start negotiating. No one should go to work until our demands are met. What's happening here shows that the bosses are very cruel. We were recently told the workers would share a 2m rand bonus; but I only got a black bag worth 20 rand (£1.50) in the shop."

Mokwane's room-mate, Vuyisa Maqundweni, 26, was lounging in a battered plastic chair, a cap pulled down tight on his head. He feels like a prisoner. "There's nothing I can do in privacy but the situation is that I have no choice. I come back very tired and I need to rest, but others come in drunk and making noise so I cannot."

Maqundweni says he sends 3,000 rand of his monthly 4,000 rand salary to his wife, small child, mother and other extended family members in Eastern Cape. He believes the yawning chasm between haves and have-nots can no longer go unchallenged.

"The most painful thing is knowing these companies make billions from what we do but they just give us 4,000 rand. This makes me very angry because I know the money is there and they won't pay us. They should give us an increment before people start fighting and dying. If we don't get an increase it's likely people will do what happened in Marikana. They got a big increase but we still get 4,000 rand. How can people in Marikana get paid more than we do?"

There is widespread disaffection with the NUM, which is aligned to the governing African National Congress (ANC). Maqundweni said: "They are not helping us at all and we think most of them are crooks. They are the cause of us not getting an increase because they no longer respect our interests. The ANC and NUM are working together to make sure we don't get what we want."

Other miners expressed similar disgruntlement. All were migrant labourers driven from Eastern Cape or Lesotho by unemployment and poverty. They complained about meagre wages, hazardous working conditions, stale or overcooked food and hostel rooms often containing eight men in bunkbeds. They viewed Marikana as a watershed in the fraught contract between capitalist and worker and expressed a collapse of trust in the NUM and ANC.

Michael Molomo, 42, a driller whose right arm bears the scar of a rock fall, sometimes starts his shift at 3am and might not emerge until 3pm or 7pm. He says he is paid 4,000 rand and it is not enough to support his wife and eight children. "Every time I think of them, I miss them so much, but there's nothing I can do."

"The drilling is in a closed space that doesn't allow you to breathe freely. You can't stand up and you feel pains in your knees."

Nomawule, from Lusikisiki in Eastern Cape, says he earns 5,300 rand (£397) per month. "People always say, 'The money is not enough,' but, if I look at the work I do and the money I get, it's definitely not enough. It makes me very angry that the bosses are getting so much money and giving us so little. I'm not saying we should get equal pay to the mine bosses but we should get something reasonable."

The wage makes it difficult to support his wife and 10 children, whom he can only visit twice a year. "Even as I speak now, I'm really missing my family but the situation is that I have to gather money to go home."

Living in the compound offers little solace. "It's a boring situation.

Of course there is electricity and we appreciate that, but the fact you have one bed on top of another is not good. It's still like apartheid where people are not treated as human beings. My wife cannot even come here to stay the night."

He added: "My collegues and I have a miserable life. I think the only solution to our problem of better wages is a national strike throughout the country. If all miners can put down their tools, I think people would listen and realise we're serious."

The Guardian contacted Village Main Reef, owner of Mokwane's Blyvooruitzicht mine, with a list of the miners' concerns. Cheryl Walton, a spokesperson for the company, responded: "I believe that some of these allegations have been raised by employees through the collective bargaining structures and are being addressed by mine management."

She said: "The allegations which haven't been raised before can unfortunately not be addressed through the media. Since Village took over the mine on 1 June 2012, we have engaged openly with all stakeholders of Blyvoor about legacy issues and challenges facing the company and threatening its future."

In The Road to Wigan Pier 75 years ago, George Orwell observed: "More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins."

Today, South Africa, rated the most unequal society in the world, stands accused of the same wilful ignorance towards the "poor drudges underground" who make lives of privilege possible. Charles Abrahams, a lawyer representing 3,000 former miners suffering lung diseases, said: "The same divide exists. The middle class have got absolutely no idea of what the ordinary life of a miner is on any single day."

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The real invasion of Africa is not news and a licence to lie is Hollywood's gift

31 January 2013

A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media.

The invasion has almost nothing to do with "Islamism", and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a "menacing arc" of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus "red menace" of a worldwide communist conspiracy.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Last year, Africom staged Operation African Endeavor, with the armed forces of 34 African nations taking part, commanded by the US military. Africom's "soldier to soldier" doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's black colonial elite whose "historic mission", warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of "a capitalism rampant though camouflaged".

A striking example is the eastern Congo, a treasure trove of strategic minerals, controlled by an atrocious rebel group known as the M23, which in turn is run by Uganda and Rwanda, the proxies of Washington.

Long planned as a "mission" for Nato, not to mention the ever-zealous French, whose colonial lost causes remain on permanent standby, the war on Africa became urgent in 2011 when the Arab world appeared to be liberating itself from the Mubaraks and other clients of Washington and Europe. The hysteria this caused in imperial capitals cannot be exaggerated. Nato bombers were dispatched not to Tunis or Cairo but Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi ruled over Africa's largest oil reserves. With the Libyan city of Sirte reduced to rubble, the British SAS directed the "rebel" militias in what has since been exposed as a racist bloodbath.

The indigenous people of the Sahara, the Tuareg, whose Berber fighters Gaddafi had protected, fled home across Algeria to Mali, where the Tuareg have been claiming a separate state since the 1960s. As the ever watchful Patrick Cockburn points out, it is this local dispute, not al-Qaida, that the West fears most in northwest Africa... "poor though the Tuareg may be, they are often living on top of great reserves of oil, gas, uranium and other valuable minerals".

Almost certainly the consequence of a French/US attack on Mali on 13 January, a siege at a gas complex in Algeria ended bloodily, inspiring a 9/11 moment in David Cameron. The former Carlton TV PR man raged about a "global threat" requiring "decades" of western violence. He meant implantation of the west's business plan for Africa, together with the rape of multi-ethnic Syria and the conquest of independent Iran.

Cameron has now ordered British troops to Mali, and sent an RAF drone, while his verbose military chief, General Sir David Richards, has addressed "a very clear message to jihadists worldwide: don't dangle and tangle with us. We will deal with it robustly" - exactly what jihadists want to hear. The trail of blood of British army terror victims, all Muslims, their "systemic" torture cases currently heading to court, add necessary irony to the general's words. I once experienced Sir David's "robust" ways when I asked him if he had read the courageous Afghan feminist Malalai Joya's description of the barbaric behaviour of westerners and their clients in her country. "You are an apologist for the Taliban" was his reply. (He later apologised).

These bleak comedians are straight out of Evelyn Waugh and allow us to feel the bracing breeze of history and hypocrisy. The "Islamic terrorism" that is their excuse for the enduring theft of Africa's riches was all but invented by them. There is no longer any excuse to swallow the BBC/CNN line and not know the truth. Read Mark Curtis's Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam (Serpent's Tail) or John Cooley's Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press) or The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski (HarperCollins) who was midwife to the birth of modern fundamentalist terror. In effect, the mujahedin of al-Qaida and the Taliban were created by the CIA, its Pakistani equivalent, the Inter-Services Intelligence, and Britain's MI6.

Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, describes a secret presidential directive in 1979 that began what became the current "war on terror". For 17 years, the US deliberately cultivated, bank-rolled, armed and brainwashed jihadi extremists that "steeped a generation in violence". Code-named Operation Cyclone, this was the "great game" to bring down the Soviet Union but brought down the Twin Towers.

Since then, the news that intelligent, educated people both dispense and ingest has become a kind of Disney journalism, fortified, as ever, by Hollywood's licence to lie, and lie. There is the coming Dreamworks movie on WikiLeaks, a fabrication inspired by a book of perfidious title-tattle by two enriched Guardian journalists; and there is Zero Dark Thirty, which promotes torture and murder, directed by the Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, the Leni Riefenstahl of our time, promoting her master's voice as did the Fuhrer's pet film-maker. Such is the one-way mirror through which we barely glimpse what power does in our name.

  • 4 weeks later...
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Vol. 77/No. 9 March 11, 2013

Bringing Cuban Revolution to life

for workers in the US and worldwide

‘Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own’

presented by editor at international book fair event in Havana

(feature article)

Below are remarks made by Mary-Alice Waters during a panel discussion of Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own at the 2013 Havana International Book Fair. An article on the Feb. 18 meeting starts on the front page. Waters is the editor of the new Pathfinder Press title and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.

The panel included Gustavo Chui and Harry Villegas (widely known by his nom de guerre, “Pombo”), both brigadier generals in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), and Jorge Sutil, a member of the National Bureau of the Union of Young Communists (UJC). Martín Koppel, who was responsible for the preparation of the book in Spanish, chaired the meeting.

Waters’ remarks are © 2013 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS

I want to speak primarily about the importance of this book—Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own—for the political work today of communists in the United States and other countries outside of Cuba.

Today’s spreading international capitalist crisis of production and trade imploded first in the financial sphere with great force more than five years ago. It is still in its earliest stages. This ongoing world contraction in the output of human labor was not exceptional in capitalist history, nor was it unanticipated, even if its timing was not predictable.

It is not the product of “mistaken” fiscal or monetary policies by one or another capitalist government, as some would like us to believe. Nor of “excesses” and “greed.” No, it is the product of the lawful workings of capital itself—including its inevitable “excesses” and “greed.” What still lies ahead of us as their crisis deepens are decades of economic and social convulsions, deepening interimperialist conflicts, and expanding “open-ended” colonial wars. That is not something we can prevent.

Much more important for us, however, we are also at the very beginning of what will soon become decades of growing, sharpening resistance by working people the world over to the consequencesof this crisis imposed on us.

And we need those decades, because it is only in the course of such battles that the working class can acquire the experience and consciousness necessary to transform itself and produce the communist leadership that does not exist today—a leadership capable of doing what the working people of Cuba opened for our hemisphere more than half a century ago.

Link in proletarian continuity

It is the Cuban Revolution that today provides the living link in the continuity of the working class back to the early years of the victorious 1917 October Revolution—back to the 1871 Paris Commune, to the revolutions of 1848, the Communist Manifesto and the birth of the modern workers movement.

And that is why Cuba and Angola, the book we are discussing today, is so important.

It brings the example of the Cuban Revolution to life for working people, for youth, whose eyes are becoming more open to seeing that example in all its rich detail than at any time in the last sixty years. More open because of their own experiences.

And please, let me say that again. It is the most important thing I want to say. We know from experiences as part of the working class that working people in the United States are more open to learning about and considering the example of the Cuban Revolution than at any time since the opening shots at Moncada.1

That is not ahead of us. It has already happened.

Crisis for working people

According to one recent survey, nearly 25 percent of workers in the United States have found themselves unemployed at some point since the capitalist crisis accelerated five years ago. Four out of five—80 percent!—know someone in their circle of family and friends who lost a job.

If the official unemployment figures have declined a few percentage points, it is in part because millions of what the bosses’ government calls “discouraged workers” have simply stopped looking for work and are no longer counted in the most widely cited statistics. The majority of those who have found work again took cuts in pay, often drastic ones.

Millions of working-class families have lost their homes, their life savings, and access to health care (a loss that the “reforms” of the current administration will magnify, not diminish).

Most important, perhaps, a substantial majority, more than sixty percent—and rising—no longer believe their financial condition will improve in coming years.

Economic and social blows of this magnitude—an actual contraction in the size of the labor force—do not go unregistered in the consciousness of millions. And that is where real politics begin, as Lenin reminded us. With the actions of millions.

Response in working class

I cite a few of these statistics to underscore one simple point. Many people ask us, “Why is nothing happening in face of this crisis and its consequences?” Our answer is that a great deal is happening, and in fact has already happened.

But unless you are part of the working class—and a particularly alert part—you won’t see it yet. You’re outside the class—or outside their gestating class consciousness—so you don’t hear about what’s happening from workers discussing among ourselves. And it doesn’t get reported in the bourgeois media; they are tone deaf to it.

But the broader manifestations in the streets of these changes in consciousness will come—as they did in the 1930s—with the beginning of a cyclical economic recovery, even if short-lived, that gives workers more confidence that the relationship of forces has shifted in our favor, that we have more leverage to put up a fight.

One of the ways we know what has already changed is the response we get from fellow workers as we go door to door in working-class neighborhoods, talking with whoever comes to the door about how their lives have been affected the last few years. A measure of the thirst for explanations of what’s happening, of the desire to talk about what history teaches us and what working people can do to fight back effectively, is the nearly 3,500 subscriptions to our newspaper, the Militant, sold over several weeks last fall, going house to house, apartment to apartment in working-class neighborhoods.

It is a level of response we haven’t gotten in decades. And those subscriptions were combined with workers buying hundreds of books, serious books like those you find at Pathfinder’s stand here at the Havana book fair—Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes; Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs;and The Cuban Five, Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free.

And now we are selling Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own in the same way—yes, door to door in working-class neighborhoods. And workers are buying it with interest.

We know from our own concrete experiences there is no better way to introduce working people and youth in the US to the Cuban Revolution. Books like Cuba and Angola and The Cuban Five help them see what a socialist revolution truly is, why it is necessary, and how ordinary human beings are transformed as we fight not only for ourselves but for others as well.

René González expressed this eloquently in the firsthand account of his internationalist mission in Angola in 1977-79, included in full in these pages, when he wrote, “The Angolan experience taught me that the most beautiful works are accomplished by imperfect men, each one of us a brief burst of energy in history.”

Book on Cuban Revolution

Martín has already described how Cuba and Angola brings together in a single book many different levels of experience and looks at the same historic events from multiple perspectives—from the heaviest leadership responsibilities and broadest historical sweep provided by Fidel [Castro], Raúl [Castro], and Nelson Mandela; to the insights of four generals of the FAR who were frontline officers of Cuba’s “revolutionary army of the people,” as Raúl called it, leading the battle here and in Africa (that includes Gen. Chui, who is on the platform here today); to the youngest volunteers like Gerardo [Hernández], Fernando [González], and René [González], who vividly describe how their lives were transformed by what Raúl referred to as Angola’s “school of life and struggle.”2

I want to stress only two points.

Cuba and Angola is not a book about Angola. We don’t pretend to write in any detailed way about the heroic struggle of the Angolan people during the first liberation war against Portugal. Nor of the second liberation war waged to push back and defeat the invasion by the apartheid regime of South Africa and its imperialist backers in Washington.

This is a book about Cuba and the Cuban Revolution, as told by Cubans who were on the front lines of “Cuba’s greatest internationalist feat ever,” to use Fidel’s words.

It is a book about the ways in which the proletarian internationalism of the Cuban people—both those who served in Angola and those who were on the front lines here, including their families and loved ones—strengthened the alliance of workers and small farmers that has always been the bedrock of the revolution, and made possible the advances consolidated in the 1980s through the rectification process.3

Raúl expressed it well in May 1991 on the day the victorious battle flag of Operation Carlota was returned to Cuba: “When we face new and unexpected challenges,” he said, “we will always be able to recall the epic of Angola with gratitude, because without Angola we would not be as strong as we are today.”

Nor would any of us, anywhere.

Without the years of the internationalist effort in Angola, without the rectification campaign by the Cuban people, the daunting weight of the “new and unexpected challenges” of the Special Period that had already begun by the time the last Cuban troops returned from Angola in 1991 would have been infinitely greater. The creative energies and endurance of Cuba’s toilers would have been even more harshly tested.

The victorious battle of Cuito Cuanavale, to use that symbolic milepost singled out by Nelson Mandela, not only changed the history of southern Africa. It changed the history of Cuba as well.

And, without fear of perjury, we can testify it changed the future for revolutionaries in North America too.

Twenty-five years have passed since that historic moment, however, and much of this great epic is now unknown to new generations that have come, and will be coming, onto the front lines of battle from the United States, to Cuba, to Africa.

Martín and I saw this firsthand a few years ago in Equatorial Guinea when, at the invitation of the National University of Equatorial Guinea and then Cuban ambassador there, Víctor Dreke—who is also with us today—we took part in the first ever book fair in that country. Every book we had by Nelson Mandela and every book by Thomas Sankara, leaders not only of the people of Africa but of working people the world over, flew off the table as fast as they could be taken out of the boxes. To many young people there, most not even yet born when the apartheid regime fell to the revolutionary upsurge of the South African people, this was history they knew little of but longed to make their own.

Cuba and Angola aims to be a small contribution to filling the void of books that tell this story and encouraging those who took part in those epic battles to make that history known.

Five Cuban revolutionaries

Finally, I want to draw attention to sections of Cuba and Angola that tell the stories of the internationalist missions of Gerardo, Fernando, and René. In their own words they describe how they were molded by that combat experience and transformed for life. We see how they became the men they are today, the finest products of the Cuban Revolution.

Their accounts show how decisive Cuba’s internationalist mission in Angola was in producing an entire generation of leaders of the revolution among whom the Cuban Five stand as an example to the world.

Fernando’s account is available here in Cuba and Angola for the first time. And while the accounts by and about Gerardo and René have been published here in Cuba before, they are little known abroad.

The inclusion of their stories means that for us this book becomes one more weapon we can wield in the battle to win freedom for the Five. There is no better way to introduce Ramón, Antonio, René, Fernando, and Gerardo to new generations of working people young and old who are themselves beginning to be transformed by the initial skirmishes of the class battles that are on the horizon.

There is no better way to answer, “Who are the Cuban Five?”

There is no better way to show that “yes, there is an alternative,” there is a way forward for working people in today’s increasingly crisis-ridden world.

The Cuban Revolution has given us that example. And for that we thank you.

1. On July 26, 1953, some 160 combatants under Fidel Castro’s command assaulted the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba, opening the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista that culminated in the January 1, 1959, victory of the Cuban Revolution.

2. Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, and René González are three of the five Cuban revolutionaries serving draconian sentences in the US federal prison system on trumped-up espionage and murder conspiracy charges. The worldwide fight for their freedom has been covered extensively by the Militant for more than 14 years.

3. The rectification process was the political course initiated by the Cuban revolutionary leadership in 1986. It marked a turn away from copying the stifling anti-working-class political and economic polices long entrenched in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The disintegration of these regimes in 1991 led to the rapid loss of 85 percent of Cuba’s foreign trade and precipitated a deep economic, social and political crisis referred to in Cuba as the Special Period.

Related articles:

‘Cuban Revolution strengthened by internationalist mission in Angola’

Posted

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Vol. 77/No. 9 March 11, 2013

(front page)

‘Cuban Revolution strengthened by

internationalist mission in Angola’

havana09.jpgMilitant/Tom Baumann Panel at launching of Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own, Havana book fair, Feb. 18. From right: Jorge Sutil, Union of Young Communists leader; Mary-Alice Waters, book’s editor; Martín Koppel, chair; Cuban generals Harry Villegas and Gustavo Chui.

BY JONATHAN SILBERMAN

AND RÓGER CALERO

HAVANA—The Cuban Revolution “came out victorious and strengthened” from the 1975-1991 internationalist mission in Angola, said Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas at a Feb. 18 event here launching Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own.

The new book is published by Pathfinder Press in English and Spanish. It tells the story of how Cuba’s working people and their revolutionary leadership responded to the request by the government of Angola, which had just won its independence from Portugal, for help in defeating a U.S.-backed invasion by South Africa’s white-supremacist regime. More than 425,000 Cuban volunteers took part in that nearly 16-year-long internationalist mission, whose victory assured Angola’s sovereignty, won Namibia’s independence, and hastened the collapse of apartheid in South Africa.

The event was one of dozens of book presentations, roundtable discussions, and literature and poetry readings related to Angola during the Havana International Book Fair here February 14-24. Angola was the country honored this year at this huge annual cultural festival.

Along with Villegas, other speakers at the Cuba and Angola event were Brig. Gen. Gustavo Chui (both Villegas and Chui were frontline officers in the battles fought in Angola); Jorge Sutil, a member of the national leadership of the Union of Young Communists (UJC); and Mary-Alice Waters, the book’s editor and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. The meeting was chaired by Martín Koppel, who was responsible for the preparation of the book in Spanish.

Among the 80 people attending were numerous other Cuban internationalists who had served in Angola or other African countries. One was Víctor Dreke, second in command in the 1965 mission led by Che Guevara in the Congo. The next year Dreke led the first column of Cuban combatants who joined those battling Portuguese colonial rule in Guinea-Bissau. He is today executive vice president of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.

Also participating were leadership delegations from the Union of Young Communists and of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples, including its president, Kenia Serrano. The audience also included a number of young people, some whose parents served in Angola.

Cuba and Angola, Waters said, brings the example of the Cuban Revolution to life for working people and youth around the world. Today, in face of the spreading international capitalist crisis of production and trade, she said, workers and farmers in the U.S. and elsewhere “are becoming more open to seeing that example in all its rich detail than at any time in the last 60 years. More open because of their own experiences.” (See Waters’ remarks on page 8.)

The contribution made by Cuban internationalists in Angola “was not a favor to others,” said UJC National Bureau member Sutil, citing the book’s introduction. “Also at stake was the Cuban Revolution itself and the strength of its proletarian core.” Sutil is responsible for the communist youth organization’s work among young workers, farmers and soldiers.

He recalled how, as a child growing up in a sugar-mill town in Camagüey province, the activities sending off internationalist volunteers to Angola and welcoming them home had a deep impact on him.

Among the young Cubans “whose lives were transformed as they fought shoulder to shoulder with the people of Angola,” Sutil said, were Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, and René González—“three of our five heroes and brothers who are unjustly locked up in the prisons of the empire.”

Sutil singled out an observation by Fidel Castro from a 1975 speech in the book: “A man’s attitude to war depends on his cultural level and political development.” That statement, Sutil told the meeting, underscores the importance of the UJC’s work to advance the political understanding of young combatants in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces today.

Fighting for Angola’s independence

Brig. Gen. Chui spoke about Fidel Castro’s leadership as commander-in-chief of the Cuban troops during the initial battles in Angola in late 1975. South African and other pro-imperialist forces were rapidly advancing on Luanda, the capital, seeking to install Angolan groups beholden to them as the government before Portugal’s rulers surrendered their nearly 500-year-long colonial domination on Nov. 11, 1975, and Angola became independent.

In response, explained Chui, hundreds and later thousands of Cuban volunteers crossed the Atlantic Ocean, in old Britannia turboprops and converted passenger and cargo ships. An interview with Chui is contained in the new book.

Chui said he and other officers in the Havana headquarters of the Cuban general staff of the mission initially “had doubts we’d be able to save Angola. Our commander-in-chief would always tell us not to be daunted, that we were going to win the war. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God! Our commander has gone mad!’”

But Fidel was right, Chui said. They did win. And Castro’s strategic vision, confidence in the combatants and the Cuban and Angolan people, and day-to-day involvement directing troop operations made a decisive difference.

The main speaker at the Cuba and Angola event was Brig. Gen. Villegas, who like Chui was a Rebel Army combatant in the revolutionary war that brought down Cuba’s U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959. Known here as Pombo, his nom de guerre, Villegas served in internationalist combat missions led by Che Guevara in the Congo in 1965 and Bolivia in 1966-67. He volunteered for multiple missions in Angola, serving during the war’s decisive final period as liaison with the high command in Cuba. (Major excerpts from Villegas’ and Chui’s talks will be featured in a coming issue.)

Decisive role of Cuban leadership

Cuba’s combat mission in Angola, Villegas said, drew on previous internationalist actions in Africa. It began in early 1963 with aid to the national liberation movement against French colonialism in Algeria, “where we sent doctors before we sent soldiers,” he said. “Our cooperation in Africa really began in Algeria.”

Villegas pointed to the Cuban volunteers who had fought together with anti-imperialist forces in the Congo and then in Guinea-Bissau’s independence war against Portuguese colonialism. The anti-colonial victory in Guinea-Bissau in September 1974 helped accelerate the end of the Portuguese empire in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and finally in Angola, Pombo noted.

He outlined the political-military strategy of Cuba’s revolutionary leadership that led to victory in Angola—13 years after the beginning of the mission—when the South African army launched a second major invasion. That assault ended in March 1988 with the crushing defeat of Pretoria’s military forces in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

“We weren’t going to let Angolan forces be defeated at the hands of the South Africans,” said Villegas.

The Cuban leadership was determined never to risk a single life needlessly, Villegas emphasized—never to initiate a combat in which they didn’t have the forces necessary to win.

He concluded by quoting a 1991 speech by Raúl Castro—then minister of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and today Cuba’s president—that appears in Cuba and Angola. When the Cuban people “face new and unexpected challenges,” Castro said, “we will always be able to recall the epic of Angola with gratitude, because without Angola we would not be as strong as we are today.”

Over the course of the book fair and related events, more than 500 copies of Cuba and Angola were sold or distributed.

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Venezuela backs unity with Africa against imperialism

Monday, March 4, 2013

By Ryan Mallett-Outtrim

Leaders of the developing world made renewed calls for greater solidarity and opposition to Western imperialism at the third Africa-South America Summit (ASA), despite some criticism of the role of Brazil in Africa.

Over February 20-23, 66 African and South American countries took part in the Summit, held in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea.

In an open letter read by Venezuelan foreign minister Elias Jaua, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced Western intervention in Libya and Mali, and urged the building of a “true pole of power” in the global South.

“It’s not by luck or chance … [that] since the [previous ASA] the African continent has been the victim of multiple interventions and attacks by Western powers,” wrote Chavez.

He said, “all interventionist activity by NATO” in Africa furthers a neocolonial agenda to divide the global South and subject developing nations to “relationship of enslaved dependence” to the West.

The socialist president also urged for “an authentic and permanent link” between nations of the two continents, emphasising the need for mutually beneficial sustainable development.

Specifically, Chavez asked African states to further engage with Latin American initiatives to promote regional integration, such as Petrosur, the Bank of the South and the University of the Peoples of the South.

These three initiatives are aimed at developing South-South cooperation. Petrosur aimsto facilitate more efficient and equitable hydrocarbon trade. The Bank of the South is intended to provide capital for social programs and infrastructure, and the University of the Peoples of the South provides free tertiary education to selected students from developing nations.

Ecuador’s foreign minister Ricardo Patino also said the limited cooperation between Africa and South America was the legacy of European colonialism, but “there’s so much we can offer each other, and not only in terms of commerce”.

One of the few South American heads of state to attend the ASA was Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who told the Summit: “The developing world is evolving and becoming an important part of the global economy. Most of the developing countries are part of ASA, which is going through economic transformation at breathtaking speed.”

Rousseff also criticised the role of the West, and organisations such as the United Nations and international financial institutions. She described the current lack of representation of any African or South American states on the UN Security Council (UNSC) as “not sustainable”.

“A reform of the UN is urgent,” she said. “A reform of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank is also urgent to ensure that they work more in sync with the needs of the developing countries.”

Since the first ASA in 2006, trade between Africa and South America has risen by over 75%. US$26 billion of trade is between African states and Brazil, accounting for over 70% of the total value of trade between the two continents.

However, one of Brazil’s largest investments in Africa has been sugar cane plantations to produce ethanol biofuel, a practice that has been criticised by environmental groups.

Friends of the Earth biofuels expert Adrian Bebb told Bloomberg in 2010 that, “n a [developing] country that suffers persistent hunger, using millions of hectares of agricultural land to grow crops to power European cars is immoral and perverse”.

Critics say the expansion of the biofuel industry in Africa is likely to exacerbate hunger.

Timothy Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School told the NY Times that competition between using arable land for biofuels or food production is inevitable.

Chavez has previously criticised the biofuel industry for using food that could feed the hungry to produce energy. Chavez's letter discussed the importance of responsible environmental resource management, but made no mention of the Brazilian investment in ethanol.

From GLW issue 956

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Edited by John Dolva
  • 1 year later...
Posted (edited)

South African leader calls
for increased solidarity with Cuba

Benson Ngqentsu, Brian Bunting District Secretary of the South African Communist Party, called on the progressive forces in his country to support the international solidarity with Cuba, according to Prensa Latina.

This crusade of international solidarity in defence of the Cuban Revolution must ensure a concrete impact on the working class internationally and also in Washington, Ngqentsu said.

The political leader explained that his country will never forget the support of Cubans in the struggle for the freedom of many countries in Africa, especially in the fight against apartheid.

The support of Cubans in the 1980s forced the apartheid regime to realize that the white minority government was over and that negotiation for a democratic transition was inevitable, he reaffirmed.

He further stated that the international campaign for the freedom of the Cuban Five and the end of the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba, which has caused losses of over a trillion dollars, represent a significant advance towards an international socialist order. (Taken from Cuba sí)

Cuban solidarity and internationalist efforts praised in Angola

angola-7.jpg

LUANDA.—Cuba pays a high price today for defending its independence and continuing its solidarity and internationalist work, Juliao Mateus Paulo Dino Ma­trosse, secretary-general of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) Party stated.

Dino Matrosse made such statements to the press in Luanda, in the context of recently declassified documents which reveled that former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry A. Kissinger, formulated secret plans to launch air strikes on Cuba in 1976, in response to having sent a military contingent to Angola.

According to PL, Dino Matrosse stated that, “Cuba continues to be punished for its international efforts and for defending the rights of its people, its independence and those countries also fighting for their freedom.”

He recalled that Cuba’s decision to support the MPLA led to a “solid and indestructible” history of friendship and fraternity, emphasizing that the country “stood in solidarity with the noble cause of the Angolan people, giving their full support even with the loss of men in the field. This friendship has become indestructible and is continually strengthened.”

The documents, belonging to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, were declassified following a request from a group of U.S. researchers from the National Security Archives and were published October 1 in the New York Times.

The material reveals that Kissinger convened a group of senior U.S. officials to work on possible retaliatory measures against Cuba for deploying military forces to Angola, following a request from the country’s government.

The New York Times revealed that the officials outlined plans to attack ports and military installations in Cuba, including a plan to send marine battalions to the United States Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, illegally occupied by the U.S. since 1902.

The plan concocted by the former Secretary of State, during President Gerald Ford’s term in office, suggested the use of dozens of combat aircrafts and the mining of Cuban ports.

Imperialism and the Ebola Catastrophe

"The present [Ebola] epidemic is exceptionally large, not primarily because of biologic characteristics of the virus, but in part because of the attributes of the affected populations, the condition of the health systems, and because control efforts have been insufficient to halt the spread of infection."

—Dr. Christopher Dye, director of strategy, World Health Organization

ebola3.jpg
Ebola (tomado fototeca Granma)

In the understated words of a health professional, this is a diagnosis, not just of the Ebola catastrophe, but of the failure of capitalism as a world system. Thousands have died and millions are at risk because the social conditions in the affected countries, long oppressed and exploited by the imperialist powers, have made adequate treatment of the outbreak impossible.

Ebola is a well-understood disease, spread only through direct contact with bodily fluids, and almost self-limiting in isolated rural areas because it usually kills victims before they can transmit the virus to many other people. The cumulative death toll from all previous outbreaks of Ebola was barely 2,500 people—a number exceeded in only three months by the current outbreak.

The epidemic began in rural Guinea before spreading to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. In Liberia, for the first time, Ebola became an urban and not a rural phenomenon, and the capital Monrovia is the first large city to experience such an outbreak, with terrible consequences.

In all three countries, the local health care systems have collapsed under the impact of the epidemic. In Sierra Leone, for example, the country’s only large children’s hospital has been forced to close after a child was diagnosed as suffering from Ebola. In Liberia, there are only a few hundred treatment beds available, meaning that most victims stay home and are cared for by family members, who then become infected.

These three countries are among the poorest in the world, ranking 161st (Sierra Leone), 176th (Guinea) and 181st (Liberia) in per capita GDP according to the 2013 World Bank listing (185 countries total). The combined health care spending of the three countries is only $900 million, a pitiful $45 per head.

Their people live in misery, but the countries themselves are rich in natural resources that have been ruthlessly exploited by major corporations and the imperialist powers that enforce their interests.

Liberia (founded by freed American slaves, and a de facto US colony) has vast resources of iron ore and palm oil, and Firestone (now Bridgestone) has operated the world’s largest rubber plantation there since 1926. Sierra Leone, a former British colony, is a top-ten diamond producer, with large reserves of rutile, a titanium-based ore. Guinea, a former French colony, has iron ore, diamonds, uranium, gold and an astonishing half of the world’s total reserves of bauxite, from which aluminum is derived. The Australian-Canadian firm Rio Tinto Alcan and Dadco Alumina of Germany dominate bauxite extraction in Guinea.

In the past three decades, all three countries have been ravaged by civil wars, coups and ethnic massacres, with their ruling elites fighting to control sources of raw materials to sell to the giant Western corporations amid increasingly difficult economic conditions on the world market. The imperialist powers directly intervened, with British and UN troops occupying Sierra Leone and the US Marines landing in Liberia.

It was the combined effect of decades of imperialist exploitation and intervention, exacerbated by the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008, which created the conditions for the present health catastrophe. When the Ebola virus made its way out of isolated jungle areas where the borders of the three countries come together, the resistance of the social organism to the epidemic was as weak as the resistance of the individual human organism to the attack of the virus.

A worst-case estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forecasts 1.4 million cases by the end of January. With a 70 percent mortality rate, the Ebola outbreak could account for nearly a million deaths by early 2015. Moreover, as a new report published in the New England Journal of Medicine warns, the transformed role of the Ebola virus means that it could "become endemic among the human population of West Africa, a prospect that has never previously been contemplated." In other words, Ebola could become a permanent feature of West Africa, with incalculable consequences for social and economic life throughout the region.

Against that backdrop, Thursday’s session of the United Nations General Assembly, devoted to the Ebola crisis, was a further demonstration that there will be no serious response from the major powers.

So far there has been a tiny influx of aid from the wealthy countries, the mobilization of a few hundred dedicated volunteer doctors and nurses—many now dead or withdrawn for fear of infection—and, inevitably, the Obama administration’s decision to send thousands of troops.

These soldiers have no expertise in Ebola and their only contact with the local population is likely to be shooting down victims and their panic-stricken families demanding treatment. Washington’s major concern is that the epidemic could destabilize its political stooges like Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and threaten the profit interests of major corporations.

President Obama, in his third address to the UN in three days, admitted the failure of the world response: "We are not moving fast enough. We are not doing enough … people are not putting in the kinds of resources that are necessary to put a stop to this epidemic."

The combined total of all aid donations to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea barely tops $1 billion, and that is pledges, not actual deliveries of supplies, equipment and healthcare personnel. Contrast that to the billions made available by the imperialist powers, and their allies among the Gulf monarchies, for the new war in Syria and Iraq, let alone the hundreds of billions squandered on wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan and the trillions made available for the bailout of the banks and other financial institutions in the 2008 crash.

From the standpoint of world imperialism, the value of this region lies in the mineral wealth under the ground. The lives of the human beings who inhabit the territory are entirely secondary. As the epidemic spreads, the local people will be regarded more as an obstacle than a labor force, and their extermination will begin to be regarded as a necessary cost of doing business.

Taken from http://www.globalresearch.ca/imperialism-and-the-ebola-catastrophe/5404405

Heroes dressed in white

Leticia Martínez Hernández

That evening, two people were celebrating their birthdays. I don’t know how old they were, and right then it didn’t seem to matter, given that in a few moments they would be setting off to perhaps the last place anyone would want to go. On the tarmac of José Martí International Airport they boarded the IL-96 plane which would take them directly to Sierra Leone.

Those two people were Dr. Eldys Rodríguez and Dr. Roberto Ponce, who just before making their way to the plane received “happy birthday” greetings from hundreds of Cuban healthcare professionals. These same professionals had immediately said yes when they were asked if they would travel to Africa. How could they have refused, given that since the first time they had sat down for a class at the faculty of medicine, they were taught to cherish the gift of saving lives.

Dr. Rodríguez had just hugged his family. He had reassured them. “They know I have to go. This is a historic moment which I have to live. Right now, with the plane ready to leave, I am full of happiness, nostalgia, sentiment for my Revolution, determination to push forwards, to prevent this illness from spreading, to prevent it from reaching my country. This is another of life’s tests, on the day of my birthday; it must be a good sign.”

I hope you don’t mind me asking but, are you scared?

“No, only cautious”, he responded, smiling.

Standing next to him is Dr. Roberto Ponce, a tall and confident man, who has also dedicated his life to medicine. He specializes in Comprehensive Family Medicine, and is an intensive care nurse, with a diploma in Intensive Care, and a masters in Medical Sciences. Sierra Leone will certainly boast the best specialists to help fight Ebola.

I suspected that Ponce had been part of more than one heroic endeavor. And I was right. “I was in Sri Lanka, when the tsunami hit in 2004; and from 2005 to 2007 I worked in Lesoto in southern Africa. So this is my third mission.” Now about to return to the continent of Africa, he acknowledges that “this mission will be difficult.” But he looks calm. The preparation he has received in the previous weeks has equipped him with all the necessary precautionary tools. Surprisingly he has another confession:

“Illnesses don’t scare me, I am more afraid of that plane over there.” I try to weigh up these men, heroes in the flesh, with glorious accomplishments, and others still to be realized, with memories, joys and fears; men who have decided, despite the risks, to dedicate their lives to others.

Cuban President Raúl Castro Ruz shook hands with each of them before they boarded the plane; wishing them a safe journey and swift return; telling them to take care of themselves and offering words of encouragement. In response they asked him to trust in the Brigade; and give the Comandante en Jefe an embrace on their part; some stood firm before the Army General; others with their hands on their hearts…

That was how Cuba bid farewell to the team of 165 internationalist collaborators, consisting of 63 doctors and 102 nurses from across the country, with more than 15 years practical experience and of which 81 % had served on previous international missions.

They said goodbye to the homeland for a while, reaffirming the unquestionable fact that Cuba doesn’t give what it has left over, but the best of what it has, its most precious commodity: its sons, its heroes in white coats.

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I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Havana. November 7, 2014

Ebola and hunger on the
African continent

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has aggravated the food situation in the region, principally in Guinea-Conakry, Liberia and Sierra Leona, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

ebola-hambre.jpg

The Institute emphasized that the shortage of food will lead to thousands of more deaths among those infected with Ebola, and called on the international community to join forces to assure adequate nutrition for the ill, as well as others who have limited access to food.

The three countries most impacted by the epidemic are among the world’s poorest, and prices of agricultural products have sky-rocketed, since farmers and agricultural workers are abandoning the area.

The World Bank has estimated that, if the Ebola virus continues to spread, the epidemic could cost West Africa more than 32 billion dollars, by the end of 2015.

The IFPRI is insisting that, in order to prevent future suffering when the epidemic is controlled, essential social measures and policies to support agriculture must be implemented.

"Investing in the vulnerable population’s nutrition and health could reduce the mortality rate of illnesses such as Ebola, since the level of nutrition and infection are closely related," the Institute emphasizes.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme, and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), have stepped up and ensured access to basic foods for some 1.3 million people and 90,000 rural families in the three affected countries.

Nevertheless, the IFPRI describes prospects for the coming harvest season as alarming, given the limited workforce available, warning that the food security of thousands of people is at risk.

Other international organizations have noted the severity of measures implemented to contain the epidemic, which have made access to food difficult for a large part of the population, while the closing of schools in Sierra Leone has kept children away from nutritional support programs upon which many depend.

Likewise, restrictions on the consumption of wild game - the presumed initial source of Ebola - has eliminated a traditional source of protein in the local diet.

While it is now necessary to direct international funds toward controlling and eradicating Ebola in West Africa, thought must be given to solving long-standing problems in the most affected countries.

To date, Ebola has caused 5,000 deaths among the approximately 10,000 infected, according to recent reports from the World Health Organization, which has had a serious impact on the production and distribution of food in the worst-hit countries.

Currently, five new cases of Ebola are identified every hour, according to the non governmental organization Save the Children. The rate at which the virus is spreading has been called "terrifying" and endangers all sectors of the economy in these nations. (PL)

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Edited by John Dolva

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