The Growth Schism: Greater Israel At Odds With U.S Decline In The Middle East

Dick Platkin & Jeff Warner

“Our alliance with America is transitory.”

Israeli writer Amos Oz in the March 8, 2015, Los Angeles Times

For those who carefully follow the relationship between the governments of the United States and Israel, the dust-up over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's March 3, 2015,anti-Iran speech to a joint session of Congress comes as no surprise.  In fact, we think the handwriting has been on the wall since last year, and it was predicted by Jeffrey Goldberg in his October 2014 article in The Atlantic.  Despite the content of Netanyahu speech,according to Ha'Aretz the underlying issues have much more to do with the construction of an apartheid Greater Israel than with Iran's nuclear program.

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In an attempt to put Netanyahu's Congressional speech about Iran into a historical and political context, we describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state.  We also analyze several scenariosin which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when, not if, the US government is no longer willing or able to support Israel's long-term settlement program in the occupied territories.  In essence, we try to explain how the decline of US dominance in the Middle East, including reengagement with Iran, means that Israel's occupation is not sustainable.  Our analysisalso offers many new political opportunities to anti-occupation activists in the wake of U.S. decline.

Greater Israel on the Road to Apartheid:  Israel today, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, is effectively a single state, referred to as Greater Israel by its architects and supporters.  Many analysts, such as Jeff Halper, Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD),have pointed out that this de facto single state is quickly developing a system of apartheid in the territories Israel captured in 1967 during the Six Day War.  In contrast, the areas within Israel's 1948-1967 Green Line boundaries have legal and quasi-legal segregation, but not yet full-blown apartheid.  Furthermore, the legal structure of this emerging apartheid state differs between those areas annexed by Israel after the Six Day War (East Jerusalem andGolan Heights) and the territories remaining under direct and indirect military control (West Bank and Gaza Strip).  Israeli civil authorities govern all those living in the former, while Palestinians living in the occupied areas are controlled by the Israeli military, unlike adjacent Israeli settlers, who are governed by the same civil authorities running the Israeli state within the Green Line.

To date over 500,000 Israeli Jews have been moved into the neighborhoods of annexed East Jerusalem and into the occupied West Bank.  In most cases they are protected by the Israeli military in heavily fortified towns and cities, euphemistically called “settlements” by the press and even most opponents, although more critics are now referring to them as colonial outposts.

An obvious consequence of the rapid construction of Greater Israel is the deliberate geographical and political demise of a viable two state solution, an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.  This is because a sovereign Palestinian state is incompatible with an Israeli stateoccupying the same territory and maintaining an authoritarian military regime that implants and protects hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jewish settlers.

There are also parallel political factors that block the emergence of a Palestinian state, as defined by the Oslo Accords, most importantly the recent frankness of Israeli officialswho openly oppose a two state solution, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu during those rare moments when he is not deflecting attention away from settlements and toward Iran.  On July 11, 2014, he declared, “There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we [Israel] relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan [meaning the West Bank].”

Other political factors include the rapid growth of extremely right-wing and often religious Israeli political parties and factions, such as the Price Tag group, which engages in systematic violence against Christian and Palestinian property.  These movements have not only infiltrated the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)but also violently intimidatedIsraeli moderates still committed to a two-state solution.  The most important political factor is, however, the U.S. government's carte blanche, bi-partisanmaterial and political support for Greater Israel, especially lethal Israeli military attacks designed to weaken Palestinian national aspirations, in particular Cast Lead (2008-9) and Protective Edge (2014).

Despite occasional press statements from the White House and State Department critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu and expanded Israeli civilian outposts and towns in the areas intended for the Palestinian state (by numerous UN resolutions and the Oslo Accords) are unhelpful, the day-to-day construction of Greater Israel's “facts on the ground” has the full backing of the United States government, including both Republican and Democratic administrations.  Israel's reliance on a great power is not a new phenomenon, as Prof. Avi Shlaim pointed out in his 2001 book The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World, ”This has always been Israel's modus operandi, as it was for the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.”

In the late 1890s Theodor Herzl focused on building a Jewish state under the auspices of the Ottoman Empire.  The first major step towards a Jewish state, however, came in 1917 when Chaim Weizmann successfully obtained the Balfour Declaration from the British government in the midst of World War I, prior to the British victory over the Ottoman Empire.  The USSR and its client Czechoslovakia later provided life-saving military support to Israel during the 1948 war.  The French subsequently armed Israel for the 1967 war, and the United States has been Israel's primarybenefactor ever since. 

Jeff Halper made a similar point in his 2005 essay entitled “Israel as Extension of American Empire.”  He wrote, “Israel's leading position in this [U.S.] military alliance, has global implications, but is also gives Israel the military strength and political umbrella needed to transform its Occupation into annexation while advancing the Pax Americana over the Middle East.”

In the past 48 yearsthe U.S. government backing for Greater Israel has included extensivefinancial support, grants and transfers of military hardware and technology, intelligence sharing, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, tax-exempt status for private donations to settler organizations, permission for U.S. citizens to join the Israeli military, and mind-numbing repetition of Israeli government talking points.  This support is essential for Israel to maintain its post-1967 annexations and occupations, which, cumulatively results in the de facto construction of an apartheid state.

U.S. Decline in the Middle East:  There is afly in this ointment, however,and it is the slow and uneven decline of the United State in the Middle East, as expressed by its growing inability to influence events and successfully project power throughout the region.  True, the United States has been the dominant power in the Middle East since it supplanted the British, beginning in the1950s.  Throughout this entire period the U.S. has built an enormous network of military bases, directly and indirectly waged many wars, and supporteda host of oppressive regimes, includingIsrael, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, mostly characterized by neoliberal economic policies that favor a small elite at the expense of the general public.

Many people believe this Pax Americana is permanent because the U.S.can still unleash massive death and destruction, mostly from the air. But, despite this enormous firepower, the United States has been totally unable to transform Middle East blood baths into political victories, whether through its own wars in Iraq and Libya, or through its historic proxies, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

American decline is evidenced by manymilitary and political failures in this region and elsewhere:

·         Its bloated military has not been able to decisively win any war since WW-II, most recently its failed invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush and Obama administrations, and its faltering fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and possibly Libya.

·         Its former regional hegemon for the Persian Gulf, Iran, successfully bolted from US domination in 1979 and has been at odds with the United States ever since.  Furthermore, the present nuclear negotiations between the U.S and Iran indicate that some foreign policy realists are finally coming to terms with the U.S. government's declining political influence in the Middle East.  In fact, it is this fledgling realignment of U.S. policy in the region, not Iran's nuclear programs, that so alarms Israeli rightists, such as Netanyahu.  They know that Greater Israel demands unwavering support from the U.S. government.

·         Its foremost regional ally in the Middle East, Israel, has not unwilling to use its vast arsenal of American military hardware to assist the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, or areas of Sunni Jihadist activity, most notably the Islamic State in Syria.  For that matter, Israel has not even succeeded in defeating two small Islamic forces in adjacent areas, Hezbollah and Hamas, despite inflicting enormous death and destruction on Lebanon and Gaza.  As “gratitude” for continued U.S supportof these assaults, the Israeli government has openly disparaged the U.S.President, Vice President, and Secretary of State.  It even attempted to interfere in American elections, supporting Republican Mitt Romney for President in the 2012.  And, most recently Israel bypassed traditionaldiplomatic protocol by wangling an invitation for Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak directly to Congress, without first contacting the White House.

·         The United States has employed hundreds of drone attacks against perceived threats in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.  So far, this high tech version of Whack-a-Mole has not made the slightest difference in these countries, other than assisting the recruiting drives of Jihadist groups, especially the Islamic State.

·         The United States has had few successes in influencing events in the Arab Spring, such as keeping its loyal satrap, Hosni Mubarak, in power in Egypt.  Meanwhile, its one direct military intervention related to the Arab Spring, Libya, is an unmitigated disaster, including the murder of the US Ambassador by one of the country's many warring Islamic militias, which now includes the Islamic State.

·         Finally, in Syria, the uprising against the Assad regime is totally beyond the reach of the United States or its regional allies, Israel, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan.  Instead, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf Monarchies have supported the Sunni Jihadist opposition to Assad, a tactic that has directly led to the explosive growth and military successes of the Islamic State against the US client state of Iraq.

·         In desperate efforts to maintain the government the U.S. installed in Iraq, the “coalition” attacks on the Islamic State in Syria have made the U.S. an ally of Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran, while it now totally at odds with its former ally Turkey, which favor the Sunni opposition to Assad.  Meanwhile Israel periodically attacks Hezbollah, a military ally of Assad and Iran.

·         Finally, as the US coalition against the Islamic State unravels, President Obama is asking Congress to authorize direct U.S. military intervention.

The Trajectory of Decline: Like the French and British empires that preceded it in the Middle East, U.S.imperial declinedoes not have a smooth trajectory, butit will profoundly impact countries and non-state actors across the entire region, from Morocco to Pakistan.  When the “American Century” finally draws to a close, the unraveling of the existing order will accelerate, and there will be dramatic repercussions in many areas, including Israel-Palestine.  The waning of U.S. power means that at some point the U.S. government will either be technically unable or politically unwilling to sustain Greater Israel. Israel's eventual loss of support from the region's currenthegemonic power – presaged by the pushback against Netanyahu's speech to Congress -- will become a critical barrier to itslong-term consolidationof an apartheid state. 

At present the U.S. government's backing for the construction of Greater Israel is maintained by the power of the Israel lobby. But, according to Peter Beinert, the lobby's power is declining as the older leaders of the Jewish component of the Israel Lobby are replaced by younger Jewish-Americans with more liberal, egalitarian, secular, and humanistic political values.  This insight was recently repeated by Ha'Aretz columnist Ari Shavit, who wrote:

However, our common values don't accord with the removal of Arabs from buses in Judea and Samaria, with the undermining and neutralization of the (Israeli) Supreme Court, or with the constant and perplexing settlement drive.  An Israel that occupies, settles and discriminates is not an Israel that the United States can continue to back indefinitely.An Israel that insists on behaving like a bull in a china shop will sooner or later lose the support of America's younger generation. This won't happen next week or next month, not even next year. But it will happen. If the head-trippers in Israel continue on their path, the collapse will inevitably come.

The coming generation of Jewish American leaderswill not blindly accept Israel's continued dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, especially as cracks in the U.S. foreign policy establishment regarding Israel and Palestine, including the Israel Lobby itself, become more public, as evidenced by their response to Netanyahu's scheduled address to Congress. Furthermore, younger Jewish leaders will become increasingly uncomfortable with the rise of Israel's religious-tinged, xenophobic nationalism, including the harassment of governmental critics, because it reminds them of the racism and political repression they associate with fascism.  In their case, pointing a finger at Iran will not succeed in counteracting their distress with Israel.

As the influence of the Israel lobby ebbs,including from Christian Zionists, it will be less able to convince the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon to maintain their unconditional, bi-partisan political, military, intelligence, and financial support for Greater Israel.

In addition to the decline of the Israel Lobby, there are several other factors slowly undermining the U.S. government's support for Israeli apartheid.  Within the foreign policy establishment there is a clear consensus to repair relations with Iran and shift US military forces from the Middle East to China, often called “The Pivot to Asia.”  Other secondary factors include growing Palestinian opposition to Greater Israel, as evidenced by the IDF's inability to defeat Hamas, even with full US support, as well as broad international Palestinian solidaritygroupsundertaking economic and cultural boycotts of Israel.  In addition, the divestment movement is finally gaining traction, as indicated by the Presbyterian Church's recent divestment decision.  So far there have been no U.S. Government sanctions against Israel, but the calls for such sanctions can now be heard, such as in Chris Hedge's column at Truthdig.com at the beginning of Decisive Edge.  Later Noam Chomsky made a similar call when he recently spoke at the United Nations.

Without the US government's full support, it is extremely unlikely that a politically isolated Israel could sustain an increasingly repressive apartheid regime by itself.  Israeli apartheid, even more thanits current annexations and occupation, depends on major military, financial, diplomatic, and media support from an outside power.  For the foreseeable future Israeli prosperity and technology is simply not powerful enough to fill the void, especially because the country has so much internal economic inequality and political discontent to overcome. 

Furthermore, once the role of the United States weakens, there is no other global power on the horizon -- not the EU, China, or Russia -- that would readily replace theU.S. lifeline to an apartheid Israeli state.  While these forces would quickly fill voids throughout the Middle East created by the demise of the United States, their priority would be securing petroleum reserves and shipping routes, not propping up a politically isolated Israeli pariah state.

The Collapse of Greater Israel – Some Scenarios:  Long before U.S. government support for Greater Israel withers away,Palestinian resistance will likely shift from demands for a sovereign Palestinian mini-state to campaigns for civil, economic, and political rights within Greater Israel.  As the Palestinian struggle for equal rights garners support from progressive Israelis sharing a common egalitarian political and economic agenda, and as well as international support, the stage will be set for the rapid and turbulent unraveling of Greater Israel.  If we also factor in the long and cyclical history of anti-racist and anti-war movements in the United States, domestic opposition to the US government's support for Greater Israel could also become a significant factor accelerating the country's retreat from the Middle East, including the likelihood of a U.S. military conflict with Iran.

When this day of reckoning finally comes, several scenarios are likely.  The rights-based Palestinian struggle, combined with the loss of U.S. government support, points to a bumpy transition to several alternative one-state formulas: a single, non-ethnocratic democratic state (like South Africa) or a bi-national state.  Ian Lustick explored these one state options in the New York Times, as did John Mearsheimer in his 2012 lecture at the Palestine Center. 

The reaction to these one-state proposals and campaigns -- mostly Palestinian, but also from alternative Israeli voices-- for a liberal unitary state, could unleash several wildly different responses among Israelis.  Liberal Zionists like Amos Oz, Peter Beinart, Ari Shavit, and Uri Avnery, hope that once Jewish Israelis fully understand that a single democratic state -- regardless of the exact model -- would have a non-Jewish majority, they will realize that – like South Africa -- this is the moment for serious compromise. Given their determination to maintain a Jewish majority state to protect them from their fears of a future Holocaust -- as emphasized by Avi Shavit in his 2013 book My Promised Land, The Triumph and tragedy of Israel -- the Israeli government would reluctantly abandon Greater Israel.  It would then be forced to finally accept a sovereign Palestinian state alongside an Israeli Jewish state within its 1967 boundaries.  If this scenario prevailed, the Israeli government would have finally complied with the Oslo Accords, the U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, renewed in 2007 and 2013.

Furthermore, the two-state solution would be more robust if it emerged as part of a Palestine-Israel economic confederation, as described by Jeff Halper in 2007. If this confederation provided for the free exchange of labor and capital, as the European Union does, citizens of both the Jewish and the Palestinian states would be able to live and work anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean coast.  This would, in theory, allow Jews to live in the Biblically significant West Bank, and Palestinians to return to the remnants of their ancestral villages within Israel's abandoned Green Line.Josef Avesar describes a different confederation model, based on legal factors, in his 2011 book, “Peace, A Case for an Israeli Palestinian Confederation.”

Besides these peaceful outcomes emerging from the collapse of apartheid Greater Israel, there are also grim, violent scenarios.

The downside of Israel finally implementing a two-state solution is that it would mean the forced transfer of about 150,000 to 500,000 settlers into Israel proper, or leaving them in place to become Palestinian citizens.  Either option could spark a Jewish civil war, accompanied by many attacks onIsraeli soldiers and atrocities against Palestinians that are certain to trigger equally violent reactions.  This scenario is extremely foreboding, and it cannot be dismissed considering the amounts of settler violence against both Palestinians and Israel soldiers in recent years, already carefully documented by B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization.

A pariah Israel state may also indulge in a devastating last stand that would lead to wide-scale destruction of everything and everyone within its boundaries.  This might be a modern version of the Samson story in which he brought destruction to the Philistines through his own suicide.  If Greater Israel's last stand combined with a regional war in which the United States and its other Middle East proxies, such as Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia joined forces, perhaps against Iran, WW III scenarios must be considered a possible outcome.

Another destructive possibility is the collapse of the Israel state and Palestinian communities through a massive out-migration of modern, secular Israelis and Palestinians.  This could produce two failed states: on one side a Jewish population of zealous nationalists and ultra-orthodox Jews, and on the other side extremist Islamic Palestinians.

In order to assure that a non-destructive outcome emerges, it is essential that we fully analyze the peaceful rather than apocalyptic outcomes.  While we still can, we need to spell-out these peaceful options in detail, and pursue practical ways to promote them in both the US and in Israel-Palestine.

In fact, in a recent article Noam Chomsky came to these same conclusions and argued that the primary political focus of Americans concerned about Israel and Palestine must be the US government.  In his words, “There is every reason to expect it [Greater Israel] to persist as long the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support. For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can no higher priority than working to change US policies.”

Nancy Pelosi was visibly bothered by Netanyahu's speech to Congress.  Representing foreign policy realists, she later said, “ I was near tears throughout the Prime Minister's speech – saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States as part of the P5 +1 nations, and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation.” (Photo: NY Post)

Historian Chalmers Johnson addressed the American side of the declining American empire and how anti-war activists can effectively oppose the descent of a globally declining US empire into horrific military spasms. He wrote, “The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of its missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner, rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overreach, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.”  Johnson then went on to outline a 10 step political program, including many grass roots initiatives, to finally tame U.S. militarism, including support for proxies, such as Israel.

Next Steps:  Civic efforts, as described by Chalmers Johnson, can affect how the United States government reacts to its decline in the Middle East, and how that decline affects Israel-Palestine.  His goal is to assure that the United States will retreat in an orderly way, modeled after the decline of the Soviet Union in 1999, and not resort to a violent last gasps of desperate military adventures to maintain its failing hegemony.  These efforts, as outlined below, should also work to assure that Israel-Palestine transforms into an egalitarian one-state or two-state solution, avoiding mayhem in the process.

·         Emphasize BDS sanctions by calling for the U.S. to halt arms sales to the entire region, including Israel, but also countries like Saudi Arabia.

·         Follow the lead of Josh Ruebner (national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation),as well as the October 2012 Christian Clergy letter to lobby Congress, to call for the United States to enforce the U.S. Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act.

·         Fuse Israel-Palestine rallies, marches, and vigils with general anti-war and anti-police violence actions, such as Muslim and Black Lives Matter.  These issues should be treated in a unified, not isolated manner.

·         Clarify that sensible U.S. policies toward Israel-Palestine are just one element of sensible policies toward the entire Middle East, such as sanctions on shipments of U.S. military hardware to states that violate United Nations resolutions or use the equipment againsttheir civilian populations

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Los Angeles-based Levantine Cultural Center and the nationalconference of the U.S Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation in San Diego.Please send any comments and questions to info@lajewsforpeace.org.

The CIA And America's Presidents

John Chuckman

Many people still think of the CIA as an agency designed to help American presidents make informed decisions about matters outside the United States. That was the basis for President Truman’s signing the legislation which created the agency, and indeed it does serve that role, generally rather inadequately, but it has become something far beyond that.

Information is certainly not something to which any reasonable person objects, but the CIA has two houses under its roof, and it is the operational side of the CIA which gives it a world-wide bad reputation. The scope of undercover operations has evolved to make the CIA into a kind of civilian army, one involving great secrecy, little accountability, and huge budgets - altogether a dangerous development indeed for any country which regards itself as a democracy and whose military is forbidden political activity. After all, the CIA’s secret operational army in practice is not curtailed by restrictions around politics, many of its tasks having been quite openly political. Yes, its charter forbids operations in the United States, but those restrictions have been ignored or bent countless times both in secret programs like Echelon (monitoring telephone communications by five English-speaking allies who then share the information obtained, a forerunner to the NSA’s recently-revealed collection of computer data) and years of mail-opening inside the United States or using substitutes to go around the rule, as was likely the case with the many Mossad agents trailing the eventual perpetrators of 9/11 inside the United States before the event.

As with all large, powerful institutions over time, the CIA constantly seeks expansion of its means and responsibilities, much like a growing child wanting ever more food and clothing and entertainment. This inherent tendency, the expansion of institutional empire, is difficult enough to control under normal circumstances, but when there are complex operations in many countries and tens of billions in spending and many levels of secrecy and secret multi-level files, the ability of any elected politicians - whose keenest attention is always directed towards re-election and acquiring enough funds to run a campaign - to exercise meaningful control and supervision becomes problematic at best. The larger and more complex the institution becomes, the truer this is.

Under Eisenhower, the CIA’s operational role first came to considerable prominence, which is hardly surprising considering Eisenhower was a former Supreme Commander in the military, the military having used many dark operations during WWII, operations still classified in some cases. In his farewell address, it is true, Eisenhower gave Americans a dark warning about the “military-industrial complex,” but as President he used CIA dark operations extensively, largely to protect American corporate interests in various parts of the world – everything from oil interests to banana monopolies in Central America. Perhaps, he viewed the approach as less destructive or dangerous or likely to tarnish America’s post-WWII reputation than “sending in the Marines,” America’s traditional gang of paid-muscle for such tasks, but, over the long term, he was wrong, and his extensive use of CIA operations would prove highly destructive and not just tarnish America’s image but totally shatter it. It set in motion a number of developments and problems which haunt America to this day.

In the 1950s, the CIA was involved in a number of operations whose success bred hubris and professional contempt for those not part of its secret cult, an attitude not unlike that of members of an elite fraternity or secret society at university. The toppling of disliked but democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran and other operations had, by about the time of President Kennedy’s coming to power in 1960, bred an arrogant and unwarranted belief in its ability to do almost anything it felt was needed. The case of Cuba became a watershed for the CIA and its relationship with Presidents of the United States, President Eisenhower and his CIA having come to believe that Castro, widely regarded by the public as a heroic figure at the time, had turned dangerous to American corporate and overseas interests and needed to be removed. Fairly elaborate preparations for doing so were put into place, and parts of the southern United States became large secret training grounds for would-be terrorists selected from the anti-Castro exile community by CIA officers in charge of a project which dwarfed Osama bin Laden’s later camp in the mountains of Afghanistan.

A just-elected President Kennedy was faced with a momentous decision: whether to permit and support the invasion of neighboring Cuba, great effort and expense having gone into the scheme. Kennedy supported it with limited reservations, reservations which became the source of the deepest resentment by the old boys at the CIA looking for someone to blame for the invasion’s embarrassing public failure. The truth is the CIA’s plans were ill-considered from the beginning, the product of those arrogant attitudes bred from “successes” such as Guatemala. Cuba was not Guatemala, it had a far larger population, fewer discontented elements to exploit, a cohort of soldiers freshly-experienced from the revolution against former dictator Batista, and Castro was widely regarded as a national hero. The Bay of Pigs invasion never had a chance of success, and the very fact that the CIA put so many resources into it and pressured the President to have it done shows how badly it had lost its way by that time.

That failure of the invasion, a highly public failure, created a serious rift between the President and the CIA. When the President, in an unprecedented act, fired three senior CIA figures, holding them responsible for the fiasco, we can only imagine the words which echoed in the halls of Langley. CIA plots against Castro nevertheless carried right on. America was an intensely hostile place on the matter of communism at that time, its press continuously beating the drums, and no President could afford politically to appear even slightly indifferent. Kennedy himself was not quite the peace-loving figure some of his later admirers would hold him to be. He was a work in progress, and he gave speeches often colored by strident martinet and jingo phrases. Secret attempts were made to assassinate Castro, and the Kennedys, at that time, undoubtedly would have been pleased had they succeeded.

Again, in some these attempts, the CIA went to great and genuinely weird lengths, including an arrangement with Mafia figures, something the public did not know until the 1975 Church Committee looking into illegality in CIA operations. Rumors and threats of another invasion, likely often fed by the CIA itself as psychological warfare against Cuba, led to the confrontation known as the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962. Here, more than ever, the President was ill-served by the CIA and the Pentagon. They wanted an immediate invasion of Cuba when U2 spy cameras detected what appeared to be missile installations under construction, utterly unaware that Russia already had battlefield-ready tactical nuclear weapons mounted on short-range missiles ready to repel an invasion.

The 1975 Church Senate Committee looking into earlier illegality came into being because a number of sources were suggesting the CIA had been engaged in assassination and other dark practices, matters which at that time quite upset the general public and some decent politicians. The names in rumors included Lumumba of Congo, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Diem of Vietnam, Schneider of Chile, and others, but since only part of the Church Report was released we cannot know the full extent of what had been going on. Another possible name is Dag Hammarskjöld of the UN. It is perhaps a key measure of how far things have deteriorated with the CIA that the Church Committee today appears almost naïve. Following the committee’s report, President Ford issued an Executive Order banning assassinations. This was replaced just a few years later by an Executive Order of Ronald Reagan’s, Reagan being a great fan of dark operations, having appointed one of the more dangerous men ever to hold the title of CIA Director, William Casey.

The CIA, of course, now runs a regular assassination air force which has killed thousands of innocent people apart from the intended targets, themselves individuals proved guilty of nothing under law. The CIA today thinks nothing of using mass killing to reach desired goals, the Maidan shootings of innocent people demonstrating in Kiev being an outstanding example, shootings which precipitated a coup last year in Ukraine against an elected government. And then there are the trained and armed maniacs which were set loose upon the people of Syria to do pretty much whatever they pleased.

Kennedy managed to resist demands for invasion in 1962, perhaps his one great achievement as President, and he took another path which eventually led to an agreement with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. That agreement, which included America’s pledge not to invade Cuba, made Kennedy a marked man. He was hated by the fanatical and well-armed Cuban émigré community, and he was hated by all the men who had devoted a fair part of their lives to eliminating Castro, the émigrés’ recruiters, trainers, handlers, and suppliers - members all of the CIA country club set whose commie-hatred was so intense it could make the veins in their foreheads pop. Some at the CIA were undoubtedly even further irked by backchannel communications which opened up between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and tentative efforts to open something of that nature with Castro. They weren’t supposed to know about these efforts, but they almost certainly did.

It is difficult today for people to grasp the intensity of anti-communist and anti-Castro feelings that pervaded America’s establishment in 1963, more resembling a religious hysteria than political views. One thing is absolutely clear, Kennedy’s assassination was about Cuba, and it was conceived out of a simmering conviction that Kennedy literally was not fit to be President. No important person who ever expressed a quiet opinion on the matter – including Mrs. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and some members of the Warren Commission - ever believed the fantasy story fashioned by the Warren Commission. Neither did informed observers abroad – the Russian and French governments for example later expressed their views - as well as a great many ordinary Americans.

Other facts about Kennedy undoubtedly added to the volatile reactions of the plotters, facts not known by the public until decades later, one fact in particular was his relatively long and intense affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, a highly intelligent woman, socialite, and former wife of a senior CIA agent, Cord Meyer, who for a time ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Kennedy and Mary Meyer are said to have had long talks about world affairs and prospects for peace, and she also is said to have introduced Kennedy to marijuana and LSD, he, given his chronic back pain, willing to try almost anything. She kept a diary which was known to the CIA’s James Angleton because he was discovered searching for it after her mysterious, professional hit-style murder in 1964 (small calibre bullet by a gun held to the head). One can only imagine the raised eyebrows of CIA officials when they learned about drugs and Mary’s influence on Kennedy (could some of their numerous meetings possibly not have been bugged?). Double betrayal over Cuba, backchannel communications with Russia, and drugs and sex with an artistic, intellectual type – those surely would have made the men who decided the fates of leaders in much lesser places extremely uneasy about the future.

My focus is not the assassination, but I’ve gone into some length because I believe it was a defining event in relations between future Presidents and the CIA. After this, every President would work under its rather frightening shadow.

Lyndon Johnson was ready from day one to give the CIA anything it wanted. Whether Johnson was involved in the assassination as some plausibly believe, or whether he was just intimidated by those involved – after all, like all bullies, Johnson was at heart a coward as he demonstrated numerous times. He wasn’t long in launching the most vicious and pointless war since World War II with the cheap trick of a story about an attack upon American ships. The CIA got right into the fun in 1965 with its Operation Phoenix, which over some years involved tens of thousands of silent assassinations of village leaders and others by night-crawling Special Forces soldiers guided to their targets by CIA agents.

Like all the CIA’s more lunatic operations - this one just kept running until at least 1972 - chalking up a toll of murders estimated as high as 40,000 and proving a complete failure in its goal of securing America’s artificial rump-state of South Vietnam. It was madness to be involved in Vietnam, and it proved in the end infinitely more embarrassing and destructive to America’s morale and reputation than the Bay of Pigs invasion, but then more a few people who knew and worked with Johnson have said that he was pretty much mad himself. The CIA fed Johnson the kind of things he wanted to hear, but the War in Vietnam was always characterized by poor intelligence, and when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the huge, surprise of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Washington was hit by an earthquake, and a lot of people suddenly understood Vietnam was a lost cause. Johnson, always the coward, his party starting to split into factions over the matter, announced his resignation not long after.

Of course, the truth is that the information side of the CIA’s house has never been very good at its work. Apart from the abject failures of Vietnam, the CIA is said to have never once got the most critical assessments of the Cold War era, those of the Soviet Union’s economic and military strength, anywhere close to accurate. There were many reasons for that, but the perceived need to exaggerate your enemy’s strength to inflate the size of CIA budgets was an important one. Whether Big Intelligence ever really works in obtaining reliable information and reliable information which will be used by politicians is certainly a topic open for discussion. The most successful information-gathering intelligence service of the early Cold War, the KGB, often had its sometimes remarkable material questioned or cast aside by Stalin.

Richard Nixon’s demise in the Watergate scandal likely was served up by CIA dirty tricks. The Watergate break-in was in mid-1972, although it took more than two years before Nixon resigned. Some of the old CIA hands who worked for Nixon’s secret “plumber’s unit,” a private operations group which did jobs like breaking in to the Watergate Hotel offices of the Democrats, had a history going back to the assassination. They undoubtedly kept Langley informed of what steps they were being ordered to take. Nixon was a problem for some of the CIA’s darkest secrets: he was jealous and bitter towards the Kennedys for beating him in the 1960 election (he also knew election fraud was used), and he had an obsessive curiosity about the assassination, having made a number of attempts to ascertain just what happened for which he was rebuffed.

A possible second reason for the CIA’s wanting to dump Nixon was the deteriorated situation in Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were signed early in 1973, however there is evidence that Nixon and Kissinger actually put forward their proposals in the hope that they would be rejected and Congress then would allow them a free hand in seeking a clearer victory. But by that time even the CIA recognized the war in Vietnam could not be won by conventional means and that the interests of the United States were being damaged by its continuation. Despite press blurbs about peace, Nixon always desperately wanted to triumph in Vietnam, having gone so far in secret as to discuss the possibility of using nuclear weapons on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Despite various speculations, we have never learned just what Nixon’s burglars were after at the Watergate, and the reason for that may just well be the CIA’s having baited him with false information about what might be discovered there. The job very likely was deliberately sabotaged when old CIA hands do things like sloppy door-taping. The neat little trick alerted a security guard and led to the whole long Watergate Affair and Nixon’s eventual resignation, just the kind of neat outcome operations-types love to chuckle over at expense account lunches.

George H. W. Bush senior, the man for whom the Langley headquarters is named was more than a short-term appointed CIA Director. He had a long but never acknowledged background in CIA, a fact which has come to light from a few references in obscure documents obtained by assassination researchers over decades. He almost certainly was involved with the operations against Castro before the assassination. He was likely America’s first official CIA President. One of the regular activities of the CIA abroad is to pay secret pensions to likely future leaders in select countries so that they will be both beholden and in a position to be compromised. They do this in dozens of significant countries as part of an effort to control future relations with America. So why not take a similar approach to leadership inside the United States? The first clear example was George H. W. Bush whose single term as President gave the CIA several schemes abroad dear to their hearts, including setting up Saddam Hussein for invasion after his foolish invasion of Kuwait (done following the seeming approval of the United States’ ambassador to Iraq), and the invasion of Panama in 1989. Panama’s General Noriega had apparently done the unforgivable thing of setting up “honey traps” in which American diplomats and CIA officials were photographed having sex, giving Noriega a powerful weapon against Washington’s interference. So he was set up on drug charges - which may or may not have been true, but they were not the business of American justice - other provocations were arranged like a silly stunt about an American sailor being beaten up, and Noriega’s country promptly was invaded.

Of course George Bush Junior was not CIA, lacking the fundamental requirement of a decent brain. But his presidency was effectively America’s first dual presidency, with Dick Cheney serving as senior partner despite his lesser title, and Dick Cheney was CIA-connected, having served as Secretary of Defense under George Bush’s father, overseen such operations as Desert Storm, and after George H. W.’s election defeat, serving as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton, a gigantic oil services company which operates all over the globe. Such companies - in much the same fashion as large American news organizations such as Time-Life, CBS, or The New York Times - notoriously are well connected with the CIA. Because companies like Halliburton operate in scores of countries, deal with strategic resources, travel to remote sites, and often have access to important figures, they provide perfect cover for CIA agents and other intelligence assets. The Bush-Cheney period was certainly a golden one for the CIA in terms of institutional growth and new projects. Many ugly projects now making our world a less secure place were started in this period.

The CIA now is so firmly entrenched and so immensely well financed – much of it off the books, including everything from secret budget items to peddling drugs and weapons – that it is all but impossible for a president to oppose it the way Kennedy did. Obama, who has proved himself a fairly weak character from the start, certainly has given the CIA anything it wants. The dirty business of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is one project. The coup in Ukraine is another. The pushing of NATO’s face right against Russia’s borders is still another. Several attempted coups in Venezuela are still more. And the creation of a drone air force for extrajudicial killing in half a dozen countries is yet another. They don’t resemble projects we would expect from a smiley-faced, intelligent man who sometimes wore sandals and refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel during his first election campaign.

More than one observer has speculated about Obama’s being CIA, and there are significant holes in his resume which could be accounted for by his involvement. He would have been an attractive candidate for several reasons. Obama is bright, and the CIA employs few blacks in its important jobs. He also might have been viewed as a good political prospect for the future in just the way foreign politicians are selected for secret pensions. After all, before he was elected, there were stories about people meeting this smart and (superficially) charming man and remarking that they may just have met a future president.

If Obama is not actually CIA, then he is so intimidated that he pretty much rubber stamps their projects. A young, inexperienced President must always be mindful of that other young President whose head was half blown off in the streets of Dallas. Moreover, there are some shady areas in Obama’s background around drugs and perhaps other matters which could be politically compromising. The CIA is perfectly capable of using anything of that nature for political exposure while making it look as though it came from elsewhere.

So, when people write of America’s secret government or of its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone’s being elected President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President’s case, it would be either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end.

Dissatisfaction With U.S. Government Soars

Eric Zuesse

The latest Gallup poll shows that even as Americans are more satisfied with the American economy, they are more dissatisfied with the government; and that this government-dissatisfaction is so high that for the first time while Gallup has been following this matter, the ratio of dissatisfaction with government is swamping the ratio of dissatisfaction with both of the other two matters that Americans are dissatisfied with: the economy, and unemployment.

In this Gallup report, dated March 12th, dissatisfaction with government has slightly risen, while dissatisfaction regarding all other matters has either gone down, or else remained constant.

When asked “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” 18% now say “government.” 11% say “economy.” 10% say “unemployment.” And 7% say “immigration/illegal aliens.” “Healthcare” was also 7%. All other issues were lower than 7%.

What has actually soared is the ratio of dissatisfaction with the government, divided by the highest other issue of dissatisfaction. This ratio has recently skyrocketed.

Dissatisfaction with government has previously been as high as 20% in April 2014, but at those times dissatisfaction with other issues was higher than it is now (for example, dissatisfaction with the economy was 16% in April 2014, whereas now it's only 11% — the economy has improved).

For some reason(s), Americans are especially frustrated with their government right now. Perhaps Americans, who previously preferred divided control of government (a ‘Democratic' President and a solid-Republican Congress — both houses being now Republican), and who now have what the polls had previously shown that Americans wanted on that (divided government), are starting to change their minds about divided govenment: they don't like it, after all.

Here is additional support for this hypothesis: This particular poll happens to have been taken during March 5th throuth 8th. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the U.S. Congress occurred right before that, on March 3rd, and it represented a historically unprecedented affront and insult to a sitting U.S. President, both from the opposition political party (in this case, by Republicans), and also from a supposedly-allied foreign government (Israel).

Another Gallup poll, released just a day earlier, on March 11th, was headlined, "Americans' Views of Netanyahu Less Positive Post-Visit,”  and it found that Netanyahu's speech caused his “favorable” rating to plunge, from 32% down to 17%, among Democrats, and to edge upward slightly from 60% to 62% among Republicans. Among the population overall, his favorable rating declined, from 45% down to 38%.

German radio, Deutsche Welle, headlined on March 10th, "Republicans to Obama: We really don't like you,” and reported:

If there was any doubt how Republicans felt about President Obama and a nuclear deal with Iran after last week's congressional spectacle featuring the Israeli premier, there shouldn't be after their letter to Tehran.

 

Last week's unprecedented event of having a foreign leader in the final stages of a close election campaign speak before a joint session of Congress without consulting the White House seemed like a tough act to follow -- especially when the sole purpose of that speech was to bash the Obama administration's nuclear talks with Iran. That event was orchestrated by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

By [now] publishing an open letter to Iran's leadership and lecturing Tehran about the US Constitution and legislators' opposition to a nuclear agreement, however, the Republican-controlled Senate may have succeeded in besting the performance of the lower house. 

"I think there is no precedent in the history of the Republic for Senators to write to a foreign leader in this way," Nigel Bowles, director of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, told DW.

So: perhaps this historically unprecedented desire by the opposition political party to sabotage a sitting American President explains the reason why Americans' dissatisfaction with their government is increasing, even when dissatisfaction with other matters is not rising.

It's hard to explain the increase in government-dissatisfaction any other way. Whereas in February, Gallup had found that 17% of Americans were dissatisfied with their government and that 16% were dissatisfied with their economy, in March Gallup found that 18% of Americans were dissatisfied with their government and that only 11% were dissatisfied with their economy. Even with the economy's apparent improvement, dissatisfaction with the government was still edging up. Perhaps Netanyahu's speech, and the 46 Senate Republicans telling Iran that a treaty signed by this President would bind only him and not the U.S. Government, can explain this rise in dissatisfaction with the government.

On March 10th, veteran foreign-affairs journalist Robert Parry, a partisan Democrat, said, "Yes, I know many Republicans and their overwhelmingly white ‘base' don't consider the African-American Obama the legitimate President despite his two election victories. But never in American history has a major political party as brazenly challenged the constitutional authority of a sitting president to conduct foreign policy.”

According to my hypothesis, the people who would be the most dissatisfied with our government now would likely be independents — the people who are dissatisfied with both political parties. I therefore requested from Gallup a party-breakdown of that 18%; and they kindly provided those figures: the 18% overall figure consisted of:  21% of Independents, 18% of Republicans, and 14% of Democrats. That fits.

In our hyper-partisan era, perhaps one might think of Democrats as being people who dislike Republicans, Republicans as being people who dislike Democrats, and Independents as being people who dislike both. Since our government consists of both, Independents tend to dislike government. That does not mean they dislike democracy. Perhaps they tend to question whether we still have a democracy. By contrast, Democrats and Republicans tend to think that their party should run the Government. Democrats want a “democracy”; Republicans want a “republic” (presumably meaning an elite to run the country); and Independents are largely dissatisfied with the way that both parties are functioning.

As of February 8-11, Gallup's findings regarding party-affiliation were: 43% Independents, 29% Democrats, and 25% Republicans.

However, this is a far more partisan era than most in U.S. history. And the percentage of independents is higher now than before. Usually, Republicans are dissatisfied with the government when a Democrat is President, and Democrats are dissatisfied with the government when a Republican is President. Independents used to be in the middle on that. Until recently, Independents weren't so much rejecting the government as they were simply “moderates” between the two parties — on the fence. That was a less partisan time. For example, on 10 January 2006, when Republican G.W. Bush was President, Gallup reported that, "Ten percent of Republicans mention government dissatisfaction as the most important problem, while 12% of independents and 14% of Democrats do so.” Americans were far more satisfied with their government then, than they are today; and, whereas Democrats were the most-dissatified group with it then, they are the least-dissatisfied group with it now. And, whereas Independents were in the middle then for government-dissatisfaction, they are at the top in that, today, in our far-more-polarized political environment. The general sense back in 2006, even after the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and after the dismal handling of 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, was far more favorable toward the American government, than today's environment is. 

Fifteen years of unmitigated rotten government have had an impact on the public's perceptions about the government. And this impact has not been favorable.

Bangladesh To Use SERVIR Satellite-Based Flood Forecasting, Warning System

Janet Anderson

Bangladesh officials have announced plans to expand a satellite-based flood forecasting and warning system developed by SERVIR to aid an area where floodwaters inundate from 1/3 to 2/3 of the country annually, killing hundreds of people and affecting millions. The system, which relies on river level data provided by the Jason-2 satellite, last year provided the longest lead time for flood warnings ever produced in Bangladesh.

SERVIR is a joint development initiative of NASA and USAID, working in partnership with leading regional organizations around the globe to help developing countries use information provided by Earth Observing satellites and geospatial technologies for managing climate risks and land use. SERVIR and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development based in Kathmandu, Nepal, developed the Jason-2 based flood forecasting and warning solution.

"Forecasters have the dream to extend lead time for flood warnings," said Amirul Hossain, executive engineer for the Bangladesh Water Development Board. "By using Jason-2 near real-time data, we made a real step forward in the flood forecasting system in Bangladesh."

About 80 million people depend on the BWDB Flood Forecasting and Warning Center flood warnings. This organization has progressively built and expanded its flood forecasting system. However, without data from Jason-2, warnings were issued just three to five days in advance of flooding. During the 2014 monsoon season, the FFWC used the new Jason-2 solution experimentally and was able to forecast flooding eight days in advance at nine locations of the Ganges and Brahmaputra River Basins in the north, northwest, and central part of the country.

SERVIR Applied Sciences Team member Faisal Hossain developed the new system. Hossain and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development trained FFWC officials to use it. FFWC quickly FFWC mastered use of the system and became completely independent in using the satellite technology and processing tools, generating warnings at several locations inside Bangladesh.

Jason-2's radar altimeter measures the precise distance between the satellite and the river surface at points where the satellite crosses overhead. The data, available almost immediately, reveals the river's height at the point of crossing, so flood risks downstream can be assessed.

Based on the new solution’s successes, FFWC officials announced their intention to expand Jason-2 based forecasting system nation-wide in Bangladesh for 2015.

"We hope this is the beginning of a new journey, a new era for further development of the flood early warning system using space data or space technology,” said Hossain. “In the coming year, with support provided by the NASA SERVIR team, we would like to expand the system to many other locations where possible, to enable more people to benefit from this system by receiving more extended lead time for flood forecasts."

The SERVIR project operates via regional "hubs" in Nairobi, Kenya; Kathmandu, Nepal; and Bangkok, Thailand. The coordination office for SERVIR is located at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Oil Demand Could Fall Without Climate Solution, Warns Shell

 Ed King

Demand for oil and gas could fall if major producers fail to find economically viable and publicly acceptable ways of cutting their climate-warming gas emissions, Shell has warned.

The oil giant revealed its fears in its Strategic Report, released on March 12, 2015, telling investors that new climate change regulations “may result in project delays and higher costs.”

“Furthermore, continued and increased attention to climate change, including activities by non-governmental and political organizations, as well as more interest by the broader public, is likely to lead to additional regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” it said.

In the past 12 months World Bank and Bank of England have warned that some fossil fuel assets may be “stranded” as a result of new climate laws which mean they cannot be burnt.

But only last year Shell executive vice president JJ Traynor dismissed the idea of a carbon bubble as “alarmist” and said the theory had “fundamental flaws”.

New technology

In his foreword, Shell chairman Jorma Ollila said carbon pricing and technology to capture emissions remained the best ways to address climate change, but both needed “widespread” government support.

“I was encouraged to hear at the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in September 2014 that the need for effective carbon pricing systems had broad support,” he wrote.

“I hope that significant progress can be made on this at the crucial UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015.”

In 2014 the company recorded an improvement in earnings, US$19.0 billion compared with $16.7 billion in 2013, on a current cost of supplies basis.

But like other oil companies, Shell has been hit hard by the dramatic fall in prices for crude, with its share prices underperforming over the past 12 months.

“We generally test projects and other opportunities against a long-term price range of $70-110 per barrel,” it said, significantly above the current price of $60 per barrel.

Shell also announced capital investment for 2015 would be lower than the $35 billion in 2014.

Despite the threat of increased regulations as a result of a proposed global climate pact, Shell said its investments in natural gas, biofuels and carbon, capture and storage (CCS) place it in a strong position for growth into the 2020s.

In 2014 the company secured millions of pounds of UK government funding for a pilot CCS plant in Scotland, which aims to be the world’s first scale project at a gas-fired power station.

“We expect that, in combination with renewables and use of CCS, natural gas will be essential for significantly lower CO2 emissions beyond 2020.

“Withhell’s leading position in liquified natural gas (LNG) and new technologies for recovering gas from tight rock formations, we can supply natural gas to replace coal in power generation.”

New equipment to tackle spills would also allow it to drill for oil in the Arctic in 2015, the company said, an area it classes as one of its “future opportunities” and “resource plays”.

“Large reserves” in Iraq, Kazakhstan and Nigeria could also come available it added.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Yatsenyuk Declares War On Russia

Eric Zuesse

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who on 4 February 2014 was selected for his post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department, was quoted by Ukrainian media on Thursday March 12th of 2015 as saying that, “Ukraine is in a state of war with a nuclear state, which is the Russian Federation. Hostile countries over the past decade have spent billions of dollars rearming it.”

His quoted statement went on to blame Ukraine's problems on Russia: “The country [Ukraine] is billions of dollars in debt, having been a corrupt and demoralized nation that has no gas in storage and no dollars to buy it. … [Russia] destroyed 20% of Ukraine's economy, bombed the mines in the fighting, and produced a million displaced persons, who, as a result are forced to leave their homes.” [NOTE: Those bombs, some of which were firebombs, actually fell from Ukrainian Air Force planes, and were supplemented by Ukrainian Army missiles. The resident forces in the rebel area of the southeast that the Ukrainian Government is fighting against had no air force at all until recently, and very little even now. And, of course, any “rearming” of Russia is being done by Russia, not by “Hostile countries over the past decade.”]

The next day, March 13th, the same Ukrainian ‘news' source headlined “Militants in the Donbass Are Professional Soldiers Led by the Army of the Russian Federation,” and ‘reported' that, "Military units of illegal armed groups ‘DNR' and ‘LC' are formed on the organizational structure of Russian military units, and the main staff and command positions are appointed by the Russian officers. This was announced during a briefing for foreign journalists on the situation in the Donbas by Deputy Chief of Staff, Colonel Valentin Fedichev of the ATO [Anti Terrorist Operation].” [NOTE: On 29 January 2015, the Chief of Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces said that, at least as of that moment in time, there were no Russian troops fighting against the Ukrainian Government's forces, but only a few individual volunteers from Russia. There are likewise individual volunteers from several countries who are fighting for the Ukrainian Government. In addition, there are military advisors in the war from the U.S. and from Russia.]

On 7 January 2015, Yatsenyuk said in Germany:

“Russian aggression in Ukraine is an attack on world order and order in Europe. All of us still clearly remember the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. That has to be avoided. And nobody has the right to rewrite the results of the Second World War. And that is exactly what Russia's President Putin is trying to do.”

[NOTE: There was no “Soviet invasioin of Ukraine and Germany.” Instead, Hitler's German forces invaded both countries.]

Fishermen, Are They Criminals? An Open Letter To Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka And India

Ravi Nitesh

I, as a citizen of South Asia region condemn the statement of Mr. Ranil Wickremsinghe, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in which he told that ‘If someone tries to break into my house, I can shoot. If he gets killed, law allows me to do that," he said in the interview to Thanthi TV broadcast on Friday night. "This is our waters. Fishermen of Jaffna should be allowed to fish. We stopped them from fishing. That's why the Indian fishermen came in. They (Jaffna fishermen) are willing to have a deal. Let's have a reasonable settlement but not at the cost of the livelihood of northern fishermen .”

I see this statement as unfortunate and highly condemnable. This statement is not only against humanity but even also differs and violate the international law such as UN sea laws. Being a primeminister, Mr. Wickremsinghe must know the importance of humanitarian approach in resolving the conflicts among countries and groups.

Sea boundary of India and Sri Lanka attracts fishermen from both sides to earn their livelihood. Fishing as a traditional business is very old in its practice and it exists since the time when division of sea was not made stringent in such away. As a group of human being, fishermen represent a common interest group and identity of ‘being fishermen’. Conflicts between the countries, politicization and high pressure of increasing financial growth are working negatively in terms of collective solidarity, friendship and living style of fishermen.

South Asia is already a region vulnerable for such activities of crossing boundaries in search of employment and reducing poverty. We, as a south asian must know the situation of our countries that is similar and filled with challenges of poverty, hunger etc. But at the same time, unfortunately, we also spend a lot ‘against’ each other rather than ‘for’ each other.

I believe that any such conflict must be raised in suitable forums and through mutual dialogues. Government of India and Sri Lanka must work together to stop such activities that restrict livelihood of Sri Lankan fishermen.

Sri Lankan fishermen and Indian fishermen are not enemy of each other, they both earn their livelihood from the same sea and the only requirement in present situation is the requirement to fix their access to a certain sea boundary. This can be done easily through mutual discussions and decisions without provocation of people.

I demand Sri Lankan PM to express his apology over the statement because it was against humanitarian approach, against UN sea laws and most importantly against the unity of fishermen. He must apologise that he see fishermen not as ‘criminals’. He must also apologise to people of Sri Lanka that he doesn’t believe what he said is a common belief of Sri Lanka’s people and fishermen. We know that even fishermen of Sri Lanka will never support his statement.

I also demand Govt of India to become involve in dialogue with Govt of Sri Lanka so that any such dispute can be resolved at the earliest and can save dignity of Indian fishermen as well as livelihood of Sri Lankan fishermen.https://www.youtube.com/watch