Clash of oligarchs shakes Ukrainian regime

Bill Van Auken

Early Wednesday morning, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that he had sacked Igor Kolomoisky as governor of the eastern industrial region of Dnepropetrovsk.

The action came in the midst of an escalating confrontation between the two billionaire oligarchs over the control of two of Ukraine’s most profitable enterprises. This dispute threatened to spiral into armed clashes after paramilitary forces loyal to Kolomoisky, clad in camouflage and carrying automatic weapons, stormed the headquarters of the two firms, the Ukrainian oil company Ukrnafta and the oil pipeline firm Ukrtransnafta.

The armed takeovers followed actions by the government to wrest the management of the two companies from Kolomoisky’s control. While both firms were majority state-owned, Kolomoisky had sizable minority holdings—42 percent in the case of Ukrnafta—and manipulated their management to serve his own profit interests. In tandem with the firing of Kolomoisky as governor, Poroshenko signed into law legislation that allowed the government to exercise its majority vote and reassert control.

Kolomoisky, like the rest of the Ukrainian oligarchs, enriched himself through the so-called “dirty privatization” following the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union. Energy companies, manufacturing industries and virtually every other facet of the former state-run economy were taken for a fraction of their value and in many cases seized by armed thugs acting on behalf of Kolomoisky and other rising oligarchs.

This layer is the principal social base of the Poroshenko government, just as it was of the government of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a US-backed and fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev little more than a year ago. It was the turn by the predominant factions in the ruling oligarchy against him and toward subordination to the US and the European Union that sealed Yanukovych’s fate.

Kolomoisky is widely seen as one of the major winners in the coup, using it to assert increased control over the state apparatus and to further enrich himself. A significant number of legislators in the Verkhovna Rada, or national parliament, came to office with his backing.

One of them, Andrei Denisenko, made a show Monday of resigning from Poroshenko’s Bloc, denouncing the “ongoing deterioration of the democratic regime into authoritarian.” He further charged that Poroshenko had cut a secret deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to fire Kolomoisky as Dnepropetrovsk governor. Three other legislators followed his lead in breaking from the ruling coalition.

There were reports in Kiev that the US ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, intervened in the crisis to mediate between the rival oligarchs, coming down on the side of Poroshenko.

It is scarcely likely, however, that this is the end of the matter. Kolomoisky, who owns Ukraine’s largest bank and main television channel, along with major industrial interests in the Dnepropetrovsk region, has also financed right-wing and fascistic militias that have constituted the main fighting force of the Kiev regime in seeking to suppress a separatist movement in the eastern Donbass region.

One of these outfits, the Azov battalion, fights under a swastika-like banner and has been implicated in war crimes against the civilian population in eastern Ukraine. The Dnepro and Aydar battalions, also backed by Kolomoisky, have been involved in similar crimes.

There were unconfirmed reports that Kolomoisky had ordered 2,000 militiamen to head to Kiev, while Poroshenko had sent two battalions of National Guard troops to keep order in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city. On Monday, Poroshenko declared that no governor in Ukraine would be allowed to maintain “pocket armed forces.”

Further contributing to the atmosphere of crisis in Kiev, the government Wednesday had two members of Poroshenko’s cabinet arrested and hauled away in handcuffs on charges of corruption during a nationally televised cabinet meeting, just hours after Kolomoisky’s dismissal.

Arrested before the TV cameras were Sergiy Bochkovsky, director of Ukraine’s state emergencies service, and his deputy, Vasyl Stoyetsky. They were charged in an alleged kickback scheme involving overpayment for fuel for government vehicles.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk hailed the arrests as evidence of the government’s commitment to fighting corruption, as demanded by the international lending agencies that are keeping Kiev afloat. “This will happen to everyone who breaks the law and sneers at the Ukrainian state,” Yatsenyuk said.

The arrests were no doubt a further settling of scores within the universally corrupt Ukrainian oligarchy and its regime. Just last week, the former chairman of the Ukrainian State Financial Inspection, Nikolai Gordienko, issued a report charging Yatsenyuk with covering up state corruption involving billions of dollars. A draft resolution has been submitted to parliament calling for a special commission to be formed to investigate the activities of the prime minister, whose meteoric rise was sponsored by two of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs, Dmytro Firtash and Viktor Pinchuk.

The bitter internecine struggles erupting within the government brought to power by the February 2014 US-backed coup only serve to underscore that for all of the Western propaganda about the new regime representing a triumph of “democracy” and “freedom,” it has only effected a redistribution of wealth and power among a clique of rival oligarchs. The sharpening of the struggles between them is driven by the increasingly desperate economic crisis confronting Ukraine and, hence, the shrinking of the pool of wealth from which they can steal.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) earlier this month approved a $17.5 billion emergency bailout for the Ukrainian regime, part of a four-year, $40 billion package. While the great bulk of this money will go into the coffers of Ukraine’s creditors—and the pockets of its oligarchs—the plan and the austerity measures that it demands spell ruin for the great majority of the country’s population.

Average monthly wages amount to just $170, while the official inflation rate stands at nearly 30 percent. According to one estimate, when the plunging value of the country’s currency is taken into account, the real rate is 272 percent. The government has already approved sharp cuts to pensions, social programs and public workers’ salaries, while freezing the minimum wage. At the same time, the price of gas and other utilities is set to triple.

Ukraine’s minister of finance, the US-born, former State Department official Natalie Jaresko, is carrying out a campaign for further relief, including a radical restructuring of $15 billion in Ukrainian debt, insisting that the $40 billion IMF bailout is not enough to stave off a disaster.

According to Bloomberg News, she is warning in particular that there is growing danger of a revolt from below over the drastic decline in living standards since the US-backed coup. “If, God forbid, there is another revolution, it won’t be of the same kind,” she said.

US backs Saudi airstrikes against Houthis in Yemen

Niles Williamson

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adair Al Jubeir, announced Wednesday night from Washington, D.C. that his country, in coordination with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, had begun airstrikes on Houthi rebel positions inside Yemen. He said that Saudi Arabia and others in the coalition were prepared “to protect and defend the legitimate government” of President Adb Rabbu Mansur Hadi.

Jubeir declared that Saudi Arabia would do “whatever it takes” to keep Hadi in power.

The Saudi strikes are backed by the Obama administration, which released a statement stating that the US was providing “logistical and intelligence support.” A ground offensive involving 150,000 Saudi troops is also reportedly being prepared. 

Airstrikes were reported at the Sanaa airport and at the Al Dulaimi military base. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a MEMBER of the Houthi’s Ansarullah politburo, warned that the airstrikes would set off a “wide war” in the Arabian Peninsula. “The Yemeni people are a free people and they will confront the aggressors. I will remind you that the Saudi government and the Gulf governments will regret this aggression," Bukhaiti told Al Jazeera news.

According to US officials, Saudi Arabia has also positioned heavy artillery and other military equipment on its border with Yemen. At a weekend meeting of Gulf state princes and defense ministers, Saudi officials had PRESENTED their plans for air strikes against Houthi targets and a naval blockade of Houthi supply routes. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud Al Faisal, told reporters earlier this week that his country was prepared to “take the necessary measures for this crisis to protect the region.”

With the latest developments Yemen’s escalating civil war has openly taken on the character of a regional conflict, involving both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy is now openly backing Hadi as the legitimate leader of the country, while Shiite-dominated Iran has called for him to cede power, giving its support to the Houthis, who belong to the Zaydi Shiite sect of Islam.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia, which receives military support from the United States, has undertaken military incursions to suppress popular Shiite uprisings in neighboring countries. In late 2009, the Saudi military launched operations against the Houthi militias inside Yemen in coordination with the government of former president and longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Saudi monarchy also dispatched troops to Bahrain in March 2011 to suppress protests by that country’s Shiite majority against the dictatorship of Sunni King Hamad bin Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa.

A letter sent by Hadi to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday asked for the adoption of a resolution supporting “all means necessary, including military intervention, to protect Yemen and its people from the continuing Houthi aggression”.

The beleaguered Hadi reportedly left Yemen on Wednesday as Houthi rebel fighters backed by army units loyal to former president Saleh seized the Al Anad airbase in Lahj province as well as Aden’s international airport and central bank headquarters.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Hadi fled Aden on a boat with the assistance of a retinue of Saudi Arabian diplomatic officials to escape the impending Houthi assault. Reports of Hadi’s departure were denied by Yemen’s chief of national security, Major General Ali Al Ahmadi, who told Reuters, “He’s HERE, he’s here, he’s here. I am now with him in the palace. He is in Aden.”

Until their evacuation last weekend, US and European special forces soldiers had used the Al Anad airbase to coordinate military operations and drone missile strikes against MEMBERS of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in southern and eastern Yemen.

The Houthis seized the base as they pushed south towards the port city of Aden, where Hadi had fled after escaping house arrest in Sanaa in February. The president had been forced to announce his resignation and dissolution of the government after the Houthis seized control of the presidential palace in January.

The Houthi rebels, who took control of the capital of Sanaa in September 2014, began their advance south last week after fighting broke out in Aden between forces loyal to Saleh and Hadi over control of the international airport.

Wednesday’s advance put the Houthis within striking distance of the compound where Hadi has been marshaling military forces still loyal to him in an attempt to reassert control over the country. Fighter jets manned by Yemeni air force pilots supporting Saleh have been strafing the compound for the last few days.

The loss of Al Anad air base amid the complete collapse of the US puppet regime headed by Hadi is the latest debacle for American imperialist foreign policy following in the wake of Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The disastrous intervention of American imperialism in Yemen has stoked long-simmering sectarian tensions to the point of explosion, completely destabilizing the deeply impoverished Arab country.

Al Anad was ONE of the key sites used by the US military and CIA to launch drone strikes inside Yemen. According to estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the drone war, which began under the direction of US president Barack Obama in 2009 with the assent of then-president Saleh, has killed more than 1,000 people. The massively unpopular drone strikes were also supported by Hadi, who came to power in 2012, after Saleh was ousted by mass protests.

After the Houthi rebels seized control of Sanaa in January, the Pentagon worked to establish relations with them in order to continue drone strike operations against alleged Al Qaeda militants. The last reported strike came on March 1 in Bayda province, killing as many as THREE people. It was in an area where Houthi militants had been fighting members of AQAP.

Underscoring the debacle in Yemen, the Pentagon admits that it has lost track of more than $500 million worth of weapons and equipment amid the ongoing fighting. US military officials testified in recent closed-door congressional hearings that they have no idea whether the equipment has fallen into the hands of either Houthi fighters or Al Qaeda militants. “We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” a legislative aide told the Washington Post.

Among the US equipment provided to the Yemeni government since 2007 that has now been lost are 200 M-4 rifles, 1.25 million rounds of ammunition, 160 Humvees, and 4 Huey II helicopters. An additional unknown amount of weapons and equipment provided by the CIA and Pentagon through classified programs has also been lost.

The firing squad returns to America

Barry Grey

On Monday, Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed into law a bill reinstating the firing squad as a method of execution. The bill gives the state government the option of shooting prisoners if it is unable to secure the drugs needed to kill them by lethal injection.

In signing the measure, Herbert, a Republican, acknowledged that firing squads are “a little bit gruesome.” However, he and other state officials argued, it was a practical necessity if the state killing machine was to keep operating.

Other states, likewise driven by a determination to continue executing prisoners, are considering reviving methods most people had long considered relics of a more barbaric past, or employing new means for killing human beings.

The Wyoming state House of Representatives earlier this year passed a bill to bring back the firing squad, but the measure died in the state Senate. The state House in Alabama voted this month to reintroduce the electric chair. Republicans in the Oklahoma state legislature are proposing to put prisoners in sealed chambers and asphyxiate them with nitrogen.

Many states ban the use of nitrogen to euthanize animals, but Oklahoma Republican House member Mike Christian is enthusiastic. “I believe the use of nitrogen hypoxia will be the thing of the future once it’s passed in Oklahoma,” he declared. But then, Christian is not particularly picky when it comes to ways and means of terminating human life.

Last year, following the lethal injection torture of Oklahoma death row inmate Clayton Lockett, during which the condemned man writhed in agony for 45 minutes before succumbing, Christian emphatically reiterated his support for the death penalty: “I really don’t care it it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions.”

Lockett was one of three capital felons who suffered prolonged agony last year when states—Arizona in the case of Joseph Wood and Ohio in the case of Dennis McGuire—decided to kill them with untested drug combinations provided by poorly regulated and anonymous compounding pharmacies. State governments are finding it increasingly difficult to secure lethal drugs for executions because the European Union has banned their sale to the US by European firms, in line with its official opposition to capital punishment, while major US firms are pulling back from providing the chemicals.

There are also mounting legal challenges to executions using the drugs. The US Supreme Court, which has repeatedly upheld the death penalty, is slated to hear a case next month brought by Oklahoma death row prisoners challenging the state’s lethal injection procedure as a violation of the US Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Some states are rushing to legally bar the identification of companies that supply lethal injection drugs in a bid to keep the death penalty assembly line running. Last year, the Ohio House approved a bill to grant anonymity to such firms for 20 years, and the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that this information could legally be kept secret.

Over 3,000 people languish on America’s death rows, part of the 2.4 million who comprise the world’s biggest national prison population. They are overwhelmingly working class and poor, and disproportionately African American and Latino. Earlier this month, a female death row inmate in Georgia came within hours of death for the second time in a week before being sent back to her cell to await her next rendezvous with the executioner.

Support for state murder is by no means the exclusive province of the Republican Party. Last year, President Obama rushed to defend the death penalty following the “botched” execution of Clayton Lockett, articulating the overwhelming bipartisan consensus within the American ruling class in support of this barbaric practice.

How is this systematized sadism and violence to be explained? Can we expect to see demands for the return of other practices? What about drawing and quartering, evisceration, garroting?

The revival of the firing squad reveals the real state of class relations in America. It must be considered within the broader context of state sanction for torture, extrajudicial drone assassinations, police killings and the militarization of all facets of social life. It is being carried out by a ruling class that is waging unrelenting war on the working class, including the destruction of pensions and health benefits and the denial of such elements of civilized life as water, gas and electricity.

The seemingly gratuitous savagery of the corporate-financial elite and its political agencies reflects both the bankruptcy of their system—capitalism—and their fear of the growth of working-class opposition.

It is fitting that Utah should revive the firing squad on the centenary of the execution of revolutionary labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill. Born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Sweden, Hill immigrated to the US and became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. He was executed by a Utah firing squad on November 19, 1915, after a frame-up murder conviction.

Hill’s fate underscores the fact that capital punishment and all of the other forms of state coercion and repression are directed against the working class and its revolutionary potential.

The Marxist truths about the nature of capitalism and the irreconcilable conflict between the two major classes—the capitalist class and the working class—are increasingly emerging in the experience of masses of people: that, for example, the state consists in its essence of special bodies of armed men and, in the words of Engels, “prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds,” and that the state is “the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class,” a means of “holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.”

The Challenge Of Our Time Is Challenge Of Education: A Virus Corrupting And Destructing Young Minds

Fayaz Ahmad Bhat

The present society in which we live in is experiencing many changes, alterations. The social relations and interaction are swinging like a pendulum kabi (sometimes) here and kabi there. With continuous changes and fluctuation in the society and social relation, hapless creatures (human beings) are subjected to many challenges and confrontations. Sociologically, speaking a change in a society or social relations is one of the most important factors, exposing hapless creatures to new challenges and confrontations. Arnold Toynbee, maintained that every society faces challenges posed by environment, internal and external elements. The nature of response to these challenges determines the fate of society. The changes and challenges in a society are not something new or modern. Societies from the antiquity have been experiencing these changes and challenges but the changes in the present society have brought in new challenges and confrontation. Poverty, gender inequality, terrorism, environment pollution, human trafficking, gender discrimination, are the main confrontations the modern society is facing. But the most dangerous of all challenges of present society especially of third world is “education” rather, would I prefer to call it schooling or literacy.

Bowles and Gintis, (1976) acknowledged the contribution of school education in reducing mass illiteracy and providing learning chances to people but argued that school education could not deliver what enlightened reformers hoped from it. The scholars like Ivan Illich, Paul Freire, Apple, Bowels, Reids, Bourdieu and many others highlighted the role and function of schooling in reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. Although most of these studies were west and Europe centric but represented the scenario of other parts of the globe as well. The challenges and confrontations posed by schooling in west and Europe are not same in the societies having a different social, political and economical setup, but have introduced new challenges and confrontation there. The promotion of mass schools and schooling in these countries by national and International actors is producing a large chunk of mal-educated people. This endangers the future of these countries and poses threat to the whole world.

In my recent interaction, I met a few mal-educated chunks in Indian administered Kashmir during an interactive cum lecture arranged by Ignited Minds Circle, a circle claimed ‘to provide a way for students to develop a scientific temper’. During the interaction theory and hypothesis of mal-education got again affirmed. It was observed the group consisted many mal-educated children some of them having deficiency of educational nutrients like gender sensitivity, value neutrality, cultural relativity etc. The most affected of mal-educated lot, I found a few children are over nutritional. Over nutritional, in a sense that the quantity and the amount of educational nutrients they have been provided are over nutrition. This has radicalized them and developed self syndrome among them. The only version of truth before them is their version. The best of creatures under the sun are only and alone they. Had they been exposed to the world they would have never developed this disease? They would have got a chance to burn some calories. There software would have not been corrupted and destructed by a virus called radicalization, intolerance and ethnocentrism had there been installation of antivirus. The texts (books, audio, video etc) they are installed are full of viruses and without installation of any antivirus they are highly insecure and prone to mal-function. It is about this “education” system and group about which Bertrand Russell, way back read, “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education”.

Resisting Israeli Politics

Brenda Heard

Six months prior to the upcoming UK general election, the Board of Deputies of British Jews published its “2015 General Election Jewish Manifesto.” This forty-page document urges both existing and prospective members of the UK Parliament to support various “policy asks” and to “champion these causes.” The Manifesto was styled after a very similar one created for the 2014 EU elections. Indeed their goals appear the same: to ensure a pro-Israeli agenda in the House of Commons and beyond.

The 2015 Manifesto does include some discussion of faith-based issues, such as underscoring the need of the Jewish community in the UK to be able to provide Kosher meat and to observe the Sabbath. This discussion is a just and valid participation of citizens in their government. The problem arises, however, when the Manifesto equates Jewish and Israeli. With 58 mentions of Israel, the Manifesto, cloaked in blue and white imagery throughout, even boasts a full-page illustration of the British and Israeli flags flying together.

This self-proclaimed “voice of British Jewry” avows a “very strong attachment to the State of Israel.” Yet it is difficult to reconcile this support with such statements as “The UK Jewish community is committed to peace, security, prosperity and equality for Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Middle East” when this statement was penned less than two months after a vicious Israeli onslaught against Gaza, an indiscriminate rampage that in just fifty days killed at least 2,100 Palestinians, some 70% of whom were civilians, including 519 children. A recent report by the American National Lawyers Guild concluded that “both facts and law refute the Israeli self-defense claims” and that Israel had “collectively punished the entire civilian population.” Indeed, Israeli forces intentionally targeted Palestinian civilians, leaving them dead and wounded, homeless and devastated. There has been no peace, no security, no prosperity and no equality for the Palestinians. Not ever.

Yet the Board of Deputies of British Jews expresses unwavering support for Israel. Any resistance to Israeli policy, the Manifesto maintains, should be denounced by the world. The Manifesto offers scant attention to Palestinian resistance group Hamas, however, noting that the EU had already classified Hamas as a terrorist organisation, one with whom the UK should “refuse to engage.” Two months after the publication of the Manifesto, the EU General Court removed Hamas from the list of terrorist organisations,stating:

“the General Court finds that the contested measures are based not on acts examined and confirmed in decisions of competent authorities but on factual imputations derived from the press and the internet.”

The Board of Deputies of British Jews promptly condemned this “unacceptable” ruling, and called it “an affront to the values of Europe.” The Board statement also used the opportunity to reiterate various accusations against Hamas—characterisations that have for years engendered the very hearsay that was finally rejected by the EU General Court. The Council of the EU soon appealed the court’s decision. The Board cheered the appeal and the efforts taken to ensure the appeal, stating “we commend the European Jewish Congress on all its work in ensuring that this issue remains on top of the agenda in Brussels.” The power of lobbying for Israel.

As for Lebanon, the Manifesto proudly points out that the UK led the EU designation of Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organisation in 2013. But that action was not enough to appease the Board, which urges the UK to lead the campaign to expand that designation to the “entirety” of Hezbollah. The key here is that Israel and its allies have always wanted to destroy all semblance of Hezbollah, as every aspect of the group builds the pride and strength of a Lebanese populace. It is the will to resist Israeli encroachment—the entire culture of resistance in both Palestine and Lebanon—that Israel wants to break. And this is a sentiment of political Israel, not of “British Jewry.” This has nothing to do with the Jewish faith.

Rather similar to the hearsay problem cited by the EU General Court, the accusations hurled at Hezbollah are based on decades of presumptions that Hezbollah is a ruthless entity to be feared and crushed. The fervour to destroy Hezbollah has long been evident in the policies of Israel, the US and the UK. Together, these three bodies have tremendous abilities to create and to seemingly substantiate and certainly to sell the narrative that suits their own agenda. Perhaps it is time to question these fervent accusations.

The Manifesto asserts that Hezbollah has “launched attacks against European and Jewish civilians worldwide” and offers three examples to illustrate this sweeping and unsubstantiated accusation: Buenos Aires (1994), Bulgaria (2012), Cyprus (2013). The responsibility in each of these incidents is far from conclusive.

The Buenos Aires investigation was at once tainted by the immediate involvement of US and Israeli intelligence services. The case was indelibly ruined by layers of corruption within Argentinian services. Even The Guardian acknowledged the investigation to be a “complex saga of mind-boggling intrigue.” Surely the extensive research published in 2008 by historian Gareth Porter should at the very least create reasonable doubt about Hezbollah’s involvement.

Like Buenos Aires, the Bulgarian case investigation was aided by US and Israeli intelligence services. Several reports raise doubts as to the legitimacy of the judgement process, examples of which: Gareth Porter, here and here; Times of Israel; Haaretz;Bulgarian FM Vigenin. Despite Israel’s initial finger-pointing at Hezbollah, the investigation revealed compelling forensic evidence of an Al Qaeda-linked suspect, which was mysteriously dropped only to reveal three Lebanese dual-nationals as suspects. The investigation that struggled for answers somehow, with the help of the US and Israel, was able to link those suspects to Hezbollah. How politically convenient.

In an attempt to offer conclusive evidence of an attack-plotting Hezbollah, the Manifesto offers a fear-inspiring quotation from an allegedly self-confessed Hezbollah member who had seemingly bungled surveillance work in Cyprus and was caught out by Mossad. The man’s “handler,” who was “always wearing a mask,” wanted him to pinpoint Kosher restaurants and to track the arrival times of flights from Israel. But why risk doing such surveillance in person? This information is readily available online, even if it required some creative computing skills. The culprit’s narrative reads more like the stuff of a cheap spy novel than it does the operational expertise of a group with more than thirty-years successful experience. Even if the confessor thought he was, in his nervously ever-changing narrative, revealing some truth, who is to say that he was not led by an imposter to believe he was acting under the direction of Hezbollah, when in fact he was not? Mission not so very impossible.

Still, we are meant to believe that in planning such globally significant missions, Hezbollah was careless enough to leave a paper-trail and to choose men who were inept in their tasks and men who would break under police questioning and tell all. And we are meant to believe that the consistent aid of US and Israeli intelligence has always been strictly objective.

This article is not intended to be a full rebuttal to these specific accusations. The point remains that there is at least reasonable doubt. These accusations are on many levels fuelled by a hatred that has burned for decades, a hatred that would stop at nothing to eradicate the Islamic Resistance of Lebanon. But even if you remain unconvinced of their problematic nature, even if you cannot bring yourself to offer Hezbollah the benefit of the doubt, there remains a double standard in this “Policy Ask” from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. How in the name of civilised democracy can the British Government continue to vehemently denounce Hezbollah, yet eagerly champion an Israeli government that routinely practices that which it condemns?

The Manifesto complains, for instance, that Hezbollah arranged surveillance of Jewish people. Yet we find the following boast in the Board’s EU Manifesto:

“As part of the widespread intelligence cooperation between Israel and the EU, Israel is providing essential information to EU officials enabling them to enforce the proscription [against Hezbollah].”

So it is acceptable for Israel to spy on Lebanese, but not vice versa? The Manifesto also complains Hezbollah allegedly exploited dual-nationals and used false identity papers. Yet this technique is an integral component of Mossad, from false identities and false flags in the 1950s, to political military espionage in the 1960s, to international vigilante justice in the 1970s, to fake passports and double agent killing squads in the 1980s, to assassination attempts in the 1990s, to falsified passports and passport fraud, and assassination after assassination in the 2000s.

These activities tend to be forgotten in the wake of repeated wars on the Lebanese and Palestinians. These activities are often subjectively shrugged off as necessary handling of “legitimate” targets, perhaps with a few unfortunate mistakes. Nonetheless, they exhibit a perpetual defiance of the rule of law, a defiance that is made glaringly clear in Israel’s custom of not only indiscriminate, but also deliberate attacks on the civilian population of the Palestinian territories.

After Israel’s 2006 onslaught on Lebanon, the UN Commission of Inquiry emphasised that one third of the Lebanese casualties were children and stated:

“The Commission highlights a significant pattern of excessive, indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by IDF against Lebanese civilians and civilian objects. . . The Commission has formed a clear view that, cumulatively, the deliberate and lethal attacks by the IDF on civilians and civilian objects amounted to collective punishment.”

Likewise, after Israel’s 2009 onslaught on Gaza, the UN Fact Finding Mission concluded that:

“what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

Following Israel’s 2014 onslaught on Gaza, an Independent Medical Fact-Finding Mission described in detail the reckless, often deliberate targeting of civilians, including the use of the “double tap”: multiple consecutive strikes on a single location that would lead to additional casualties amongst civilian onlookers and rescuers.

Perhaps as much as casualty statistics, this calculated strategy reveals not merely what the Manifesto describes euphemistically as “challenges about integration between different sectors of the population that need to be addressed,” but what one IDF Staff Sergeant described as “contempt for human life.” He was relating a similar tactic ordered by his battalion commander in the West Bank:

“You leave bodies in the field—they told me they did it a lot in Lebanon— you leave a body in the field, and you wait until they come to recover it so you can shoot at them. It’s like you’re setting up an ambush around the body. But those are things I heard about Lebanon. So it happened here [in Nablus], too.”

Contempt for human life happened. Contempt for rule of law happened. Again and again, at the hands of the “democratic state” promoted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who in the same instance would like to coax British and Europeans to condemn the very victims of that state’s crimes. While their Manifesto offers a few pages pushing Israeli politics, I offer my recently published book, Hezbollah: An Outsider’s Inside View. Based on eight years of getting to know the people who are Hezbollah, this inside view of the Islamic Resistance of Lebanon offers the opportunity to explore for yourself the militants at the horizon. May common sense, not lobbying efforts, shape the concerns of the British people.

How The US Government And US Military Became Murder, Inc.

Paul Craig Roberts 

Andrew Cockburn has written a must-read book. The title is Kill Chain: The Rise Of The High-Tech Assassins. The title could just as well be: How the US Government and US Military Became Murder, Inc.

The US military no longer does war. It does assassinations, usually of the wrong people. The main victims of the US assassination policy are women, children, village elders, weddings, funerals, and occasionally US soldiers mistaken for Taliban by US surveillance operating with the visual acuity of the definition of legal blindness.

Cockburn tells the story of how the human element has been displaced by remote control killing guided by misinterpretation of unclear images on screens collected by surveillance drones and sensors thousands of miles away. Cockburn shows that the “all-seeing” drone surveillance system is an operational failure but is supported by defense contractors because of its high profitability and by the military brass because general officers, with the exception of General Paul Van Ripper, are brainwashed in the belief that the revolution in military affairs means that high-tech devices replace the human element. Cockburn demonstrates that this belief is immune to all evidence to the contrary. The US military has now reached the point that Secretary of Defense Hagel deactivated both the A-10 close support fighter and the U-2 spy plane in favor of the operationally failed unmanned Global Hawk System. With the A-10 and U-2 went the last platforms for providing a human eye on what is happening on the ground.

The surveillance/sensor technology cannot see human footprints in the snow. Consequently, the drone technology concluded that a mountain top was free of enemy and sent a detachment of unsuspecting SEALS to be shot up. Still insisting no enemy present, a second group of SEALS were sent to be shot up, and then a detachment of Army Rangers. Finally, an A-10 pilot flew over the scene and reported the enemy’s presence in force.

By 2012 even the US Air Force, which had been blindly committed to the unmanned drone system, had experienced more failure than could any longer be explained away. The Air Force admitted that the 50-year old U-2 could fly higher and in bad weather and take better pictures than the expensive Global Hawk System and declared the Global Hawk system scrapped.

The decision was supported by the 2011 report from the Pentagon’s test office that the drone system was “not operationally effective.” Among its numerous drawbacks was its inability to carry out assigned missions 75% of the time. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress that in addition to the system’s unacceptable failure rate, the drone system “has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it.”

As Cockburn reports: “It made no difference. Congress, led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and Democratic Congressman Jim Moran (whose northern Virginia district hosts the headquarters of both Northrop and Raytheon) effortless brushed aside these pleas, forcing the Air Force to keep buying the unwanted drone.”

Cockburn provides numerous examples of the utter failure of the unmanned revolution ushered in by unrealistic dreamers, such as Andrew Marshall, John Foster, William Perry, and David Deptula, who have done much harm to the US military and American taxpayers. The failure stories are legion and sad. Almost always the victims are the innocent going about their everyday affairs.

The book opens with the story of three vehicles crammed with people from the same village heading to Kabul. Some were students returning to school in Kabul, some were shopkeepers heading to the capital to buy supplies, others were unemployed men on their way to Iran seeking work, and some were women bringing gifts for relatives. This collection of ordinary people, represented on screens by vague images, was willfully mistaken, as the reproduced conversations between drone operators and assassins show, for a senior Taliban commander leading forces to attack a US Special Forces patrol. The innocent civilians were blown to smithereens.

The second chapter tells of the So Tri, an indigenous people in the remote wilderness of southeastern Laos who were bombed for nine years because the stupid American military sowed their environment with sensors that called down bombs when human presence was detected. High-tech warfare misidentified the villagers with Viet Cong moving through jungle routes.

One heartbreaking story follows another. If surveillance suspects the presence of a High Value Target in a restaurant, regardless of nominal restrictions on the number of innocents who can be murdered as the “collateral damage” part of the strike, the entire restaurant and all within are destroyed by a hellfire missile. Remember that the Israelis denounce terrorists for exploding suicide vests inside Israeli restaurants. What the US military does is even worse.

On other occasions the US assassinates an underling of a High Value Target on the
assumption that the Target will attend the funeral which is obliterated from the air whether the Target is present or not.

As the murders are indiscriminate, the US military defines all males killed to be valid targets. Generally, the US will not admit the deaths of non-Targets, and some US officials have declared there to be no such deaths. Blatant and obvious lies issue without shame in order to protect the “operationally ineffective” and very expensive high-tech production runs that mean billions of taxpayer dollars for the military/security complex and comfortable 7-figure employment salaries with contractors after retirement for the military brass.

When you read this book you will weep for your country ruled as it is by completely immoral and inhumane monsters. But Cockburn’s book is not without humor. He tells the story of Marine Lt. General Paul Van Riper, the scourge of the Unmanned Revolution in Military affairs, who repeatedly expressed contempt for the scientifically unsupported theories of unmanned war. To humiliate Gen. Ripper with a defeat in a massive war game as leader of the enemy Red force against the high-tech American Blue force, he was called out of retirement to participate in a war game stacked against him.

The Blue force armored with a massive database (Operational Net Assessment) and overflowing with acronyms was almost instantly wiped out by General Ripper. He sank the entire aircraft carrier fleet and the entire Blue force army went down with it. The war was over. The 21st century US high-tech, effects-based military was locked into a preset vision and was beaten hands down by a maverick Marine general with inferior forces.

The Joint Forces Command turned purple with rage. Gen. Ripper was informed that the outcome of the war game was unacceptable and would not stand. The sunken fleet magically re-floated, the dead army was resurrected, and the war was again on, only this time restriction after restriction was placed on the Red force. Ripper was not allowed to shoot down the Blue force’s troop transports. Ripper was ordered to turn on all of the Red force’s radars so that the Red forces could be easily located and destroyed. Umpires ruled, despite the facts, that all of Ripper’s missile strikes were intercepted. Victory was declared for high-tech war. Ripper’s report on the total defeat of the Blue force, its unwarranted resurrection, and the rigged outcome was promptly classified so that no one could read it.

The highly profitable Revolution in Military Affairs had to be protected at all costs along with the reputations of the incompetent generals that comprise today’s high command.

The infantile behavior of the US military compelled to create a victory for its high-tech, but legally blind, surveillance warfare demonstrates how far removed from the ability to conduct real warfare the US military is. What the US military has done in Afghanistan and Iraq is to create far more enemies than it has killed. Every time high-tech killing murders a village gathering, a wedding or funeral, or villagers on the way to the capital, which is often, the US creates hundreds more enemies. This is why after 14 years of killing in Afghanistan, the Taliban now control most of the country. This is why Islamist warriors have carved a new country out of Syria and Iraq despite eight years of American sacrifice in Iraq estimated by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes to have cost Americans a minimum of $3 trillion. The total failure of the American way of war is obvious to all, but the system rolls on autonomously.

The Revolution in Military Affairs has decapitated the US military, which no longer has the knowledge or ability or human tools to conduct war. If the crazed Russophobic US generals get their way and end up in confrontation with Russia, the American forces will be destroyed. The humiliation of this defeat will cause Washington to take the war nuclear.

Here is Stanislav Mishin’s view of what awaits the foolish West: http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/03/22/4790

U.S. versus Russia:Even Stephen Cohen Is Starting To Speak The Truth

Eric Zuesse

An alarming development is that Stephen F. Cohen, the internationally prominent scholar of Russia, is acknowledging that (1:35 on the video) “for the first time in my long life (I began in this field in the 1960s), I think the possibility of war with Russia is real,” and he clearly and unequivocally places all of the blame for it on the U.S. leadership. He calls this “possibly a fateful turning-point in history.” He also says “it could be the beginning of the end of the so-called trans-Atlantic alliance.”

He goes on to say (2:20): “This problem began in the 1990s, when the Clinton Administration adopted a winner-take-all policy toward post-Soviet Russia … Russia gives, we take. … This policy was adopted by the Clinton Administration but is pursued by every [meaning both] political party, every President, every American Congress, since President Clinton, to President Obama. This meant that the United States was entitled to a sphere or zone of influence as large as it wished, right up to Russia's borders, and Russia was entitled to no sphere of influence, at all, not even in Georgia, … or in Ukraine (with which Russia had been intermarried for centuries).” 

He also speaks clearly about the misrepresentations of Putin by the American Government, and he clearly states (5:25): “He's more European than 99% of other Russians.” 

Regarding Ukraine (5:45): “Since November of 2013, Putin has been not aggressive, but reactive, at every stage.” 

Regarding, in America, the effective unanimity of allowed scholarly and media opinions to the contrary of the actual facts (and this is the most startling thing of all, so you might want to go straight to it, at 7:05): “This is an unprecedented situation in American politics. … This is exceedingly dangerous, and this is a failure of American democracy. Why it happened, I am not sure.” 

He condemns (7:30) “this extraordinarily irrational [non] factual demonization of Putin … and this too is hard to explain.” 

Europe (8:40): “Now things have begun to change. Europe is splitting on this.” He acknowledges “Crimea is not coming back [to Ukraine],” and urges “a Ukraine — and this is what the dispute began over — free to trade with Russia and with the West.” And, “no membership in NATO for Ukraine. … This has to be in writing. No more oral promises such as they gave to Gorbachev. And it has to be ratified by the United Nations.” 

Regarding Obama (13:00): “I have never seen an American President make such personal remarks about a Russian leader [Putin] in public.” 

Regarding the existing Ukrainian Government (14:10): “This is not a democratic regime. … Unless the West stops supporting Kiev unconditionally, I fear we are drifting toward war with Russia."

WOW! When even a word-mincer such as he, is stating that the U.S. Government is seeking to conquer Russia, that is news!

He doesn't even so much as mention the Ukrainian Government's war to eliminate the residents in the resisting region (Donbass — Ukraine's far-east). There is still a lot of the ugliness that he covers up: Obama's having installed these genocidally anti-Russian nazis into power, the IMFs subservience to the Obama regime, the failure of European leaders to state flat-out that this American establishment of a nazi regime in Europe (Ukraine) is disgusting and will receive no cooperation whatsoever from them.

But it's a lot better than Cohen's earlier mealy-mouthed statements. And what it shows to all of us is that he is now truly alarmed. Having started out by condemning “American hawks” regarding Ukraine, he has finally come to condemning specifically both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — two Democratic Party Presidents — and saying that democracy in America might itself already be gone, and that the end of civilization might be the result from all of this. 

Which ought to alarm us all.

Things are so scary now, that even he is beginning to come close to saying publicly (to whatever small public the U.S. aristocracy will allow him to be heard) that America's corruption at the top is threatening the continued existence of civilization.

Implicit in his statements is that there is massive and systematic censorship and warping of the truth on the part of America's aristocrats. 

Regarding the reason why Cohen had not previously been so alarmed and truth-telling about the Ukrainian situation, he provided a hint in this lecture — a lecture to a group of European scholars:

He said (7:55): “We thought, some of us [Americans] when we got together and talked in 2014, that you would come to our rescue — ‘you' I mean Europe — … we thought that Europe being part of the same history as Russia, closer to Russia, economically embedded in Russia to an extent that the United States isn't, would put an end to this crisis. But instead most countries in the EU went along with Washington's policies.”

In other words: He (and, evidently, his friends) ignored the evidence, such as this and this and this, all of which atrocities Obama supported and his White House was even personally implicated in, which indicated that Obama was hard-charging into conquering Russia, and was using Ukraine as the proxy-state to make it happen, and had used Ukraine's nazis as his Ukrainian Government's spearhead, specifically because Ukraine's nazis fanatically hate Russians and want them dead. 

Elsewhere in his talk, Cohen said (12:45) that Obama is “a weak foreign-policy leader.” This is like Hitler-supporter David Irving's similarly explaining Hitler's bad decisions by saying that Hitler was a “weak leader who was taken advantage of by his advisors.” Cohen (and presumably also his friends) are like that about Obama: they simply refuse to consider the evidence that the man is evil — they ignore it; they don't want to see it. 

Consequently, with such naivete about power, they were expecting people such as this to block Obama. They shoved responsibility off onto Europeans. In other words: Cohen (and his friends) are blind to the ugliness in their own sty, because they want to be.

Maybe before people like that open their eyes to what's happening, eveybody will be turned to nuclear char, and so such liberals won't even need to suffer disillusionment about the world in which they have lived.

Relying upon liberals to protect the world from fascists or even nazis, always fails. But that's all the aristocracy will even allow onto the field, at all (at least in America). Progressives, people who acknowledge the reality, are portrayed simply as being kooks.

Hold The Rich Accountable In New U.N. Development Goals, Say NGOs

Thalif Deen

When the World Economic Forum (WEF) met last January in Switzerland, attended mostly by the rich and the super-rich, the London-based charity Oxfam unveiled a report with an alarming statistic: if current trends continue, the world’s richest one percent would own more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth by 2016.

And just 80 of the world’s richest will control as much wealth as 3.5 billion people: half the world’s population.

So, when the World Social Forum (WSF), created in response to WEF, holds its annual meeting in Tunis later this week, the primary focus will be on the growing inequalities in present day society.

The Civil Society Reflection Group (CSRG) on Global Development Perspectives will be releasing a new study which calls for both goals and commitments – this time particularly by the rich – if the UN’s 17 proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 development agenda are to succeed.

Asked if the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which will reach their targeted deadlines in December, had spelled out goals for the rich, Jens Martens, director of the Global Policy Forum in Bonn, told IPS MDG 8 on global partnership for development was indeed a goal for the rich. “But this goal remained vague and did not include any binding commitments for rich countries,” he pointed out.

This is the reason why the proposed SDG 17 aims to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development, he added.

In addition, Martens said, governments agreed to include targets on the means of implementation under each of the remaining 16 SDGs. However, many of these targets, again, are not “smart”, i.e. neither specific nor measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. “What we need are ‘smart’ targets to hold rich countries accountable,” he added.

Martens said goals without the means to achieve them are meaningless. And the post-2015 development agenda will only succeed if the SDGs include meaningful and time-bound targets and commitments for the rich that trigger the necessary regulatory and fiscal policy changes, he added. Goals for the rich are indispensable for the post-2015 agenda, stressed Barbara Adams, senior policy advisor for Global Policy Forum and a member of the coordinating committee of Social Watch.

The eight MDGs, which will be replaced by the proposed new 17 SDGs, to be finalized before world leaders meet at a summit in September, were largely for developing nations with specific targets, including the reduction of extreme poverty and hunger, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, reducing infant mortality and fighting environmental degradation.

Beginning Monday, a new round of inter-governmental negotiations will continue through Mar. 23 to finalize the SDGs.
The 17 new goals, as crafted by an open-ended working group (OWG), include proposals to end poverty, eliminate hunger, attain healthy lives, provide quality education, attain gender equality and reduce inequalities, perhaps by 2030.

The list also includes the sustainable use of water and sanitation, energy for all, productive employment, industrialization, protection of terrestrial ecosystems and strengthening the global partnership for sustainable development.

Roberto Bissio, coordinator for Social Watch, said three specific “goals for the rich” are particularly important for sustainable development worldwide:

The goal to reduce inequality within and among countries; the goal to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns; and the goal to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for development

He said the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) must be applied rigorously.

Coupled with the human rights principle of equal rights for all and the need to respect the planetary boundaries, this must necessarily translate into different obligations for different categories of countries, Bissio added.

Henning Melber, director emeritus of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, said for Dag Hammarskjöld, the former U.N. Secretary-General, the United Nations was an organization guided by solidarity. If solidarity is with the poor, the rich have to realize that less is more in terms of stability, sustainability, equality and the future of humanity, he said.

In its new study, the Civil Society Reflection Group said all of the 17 goals proposed by the Open Working Group are relevant for rich, poor and emerging economies, in North and South alike.

All governments that subscribe to the post-2015 agenda must deliver on all goals.

On the face of it, for rich countries, many of the goals and targets seem to be quite easy to fulfill or have already been achieved, especially those related to social accomplishments (e.g. targets related to absolute poverty, primary education or primary health care), the Group noted.

“Unfortunately, social achievements in reality are often fragile particularly for the socially excluded and can easily be rolled back as a result of conflict (as in the case of Ukraine), of capitalism in crisis (in many countries after 2008) or as a result of wrong-headed, economically foolish and socially destructive policies, as in the case of austerity policies in many regions, from Latin America to Asia to Southern Europe. “

In the name of debt reduction and improved competitiveness, these policies brought about large-scale unemployment and widespread impoverishment, often coupled with the loss of basic income support or access to basic primary health care. More often than not, this perversely increased sovereign debt instead of decreasing it (“Paradox of thrift”), the study said.

But also under ‘normal’ circumstances some of the “MDG-plus” targets relating to poverty eradication and other social development issues may prove to be a real challenge in many parts of the rich world, where poverty has been rising.

In the United States, the study said, poverty increased steadily in the last two decades and currently affects some 50 million people, measured by the official threshold of 23,850 dollars a year for a family of four.

In Germany, 20.3 percent of the population – a total of 16.2 million people – were affected by poverty or social exclusion in 2013.
In the European Union as a whole, the proportion of poor or socially excluded people was 24.5 percent, the Group said.

To address this and similar situations, target 1.2 in the Open Working Group’s proposal requests countries to “by 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions”.

How one looks at ‘goals for the rich’ depends on whether one takes a narrow national or inward-looking view, or whether one takes into account the international responsibilities and extraterritorial obligations of countries for past, present and future actions and omissions affecting others beyond a country’s borders; whether one accepts and honors the CBDR principle for the future of humankind and planet earth, the study said.

In addition, this depends on whether one accepts home country responsibilities for actions and omissions of non-state actors, such as transnational corporations and their international supply chains. Contemporary international soft law (e.g. UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights) is based on this assumption, as are other accords such as the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.

Last, but not least, rich countries tend to be more powerful in terms of their influence on international and global policy-making and standard setting, the study declared.