The June 6 US Airstrike Against Syria

I am very honored to publish a guest post from the Inside Syria Media Center on the latest US airstrike against Syria.

Guest Post by Sophie Mangal

Investigative Correspondent and Co-Editor Inside Syria Media Center

 

On June 6, the U.S.-led International Coalition jets once again attacked the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) positions in southeastern countryside of the Homs Governorate, targeting a unit advancing towards the Al-Tanf Crossing. At least two SAA servicemen were killed and over 15 were badly wounded.

This is not the first time the United States has attacked government forces positions. Previously on May 18, they carried out a similar attack and killed a number of soldiers and destroyed several vehicles.

The Syrian Defense Ministry immediately assessed the incident and released a statement. They assert this aggression confirms once again the coalition’s support for terrorism at a time when SAA and its allies are making daily progress in fighting the ISIS terrorist organization. U.S. aggression has led to military escalation situation in the region, and Syrian authorities have called on the coalition not to not carry out such aggressive actions under any pretext.

Moreover, a number of states have condemned the U.S. strike. In particular Iran sharply criticized the incident. Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani stated that such an aggression and strengthening the presence of armed forces in the Arab country will only deepen the ongoing crisis.

In actuality, the U.S. military campaign in Syria has accomplished nothing but numerous civilian casualties and the disruption of key urban infrastructure. Americans have invaded sovereign Syrian territory under the pretext of fighting terrorist organizations. However Raqqa, which they have been trying to liberate with Kurdish support since last November, is still under ISIS control.

Trying to justify the air strike, the Pentagon claimed it was carried out in order to secure its own military base. Allegedly U.S. military instructors are teaching the local population how to fight terrorists on this base. However, nobody can guaranty that after completing the U.S. training the trainees will fight terrorists rather than the Syrian government.

Using the military base to justify the attack also raises some obvious questions. At the time of the attack, Syrian troops were at a distance of 50 kilometers from the US base. Technologically they possessed no weapons effective at this distance.

Despite the barbarous attempts of the Western countries to prevent the political settlement of the Syrian crisis, the Syrian army and its true allies must continue its large-scale offensive against ISIS and other terrorist groups across the whole country. Only they have a legal right to fight for the freedom and independence of their own state.

Follow the latest developments by reading Inside Syria Media Center.

The End of Oil

The End of Oil

by Paul Roberts

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (20014)

Book Review

Although fourteen years old, The End of Oil offers an invaluable historical analysis about the absolute link between cheap fossil fuels and the development of industrial capitalism. Roberts starts his analysis with the first century Persians who first distilled surface petroleum for use as lamp fuel. According to Roberts, widespread use of oil as a fuel was impossible until drill technology became available in the 19^th century to drill for it at deep levels.

Roberts identifies coal mining as the first really capital intensive industry requiring extensive external funding. Building the infrastructure to mine and process all three fossil fuels is always extremely capital intensive. The fact that a coal or gas-fired power plant takes three or four decades to pay off is one of the main reasons fossil fuel companies, and the banks and governments that subsidize them, are so reluctant to replace them with renewable energy infrastructure. The End of Oil also emphasizes the absolute importance of cheap fossil fuel to the economic health of industrialized countries, Between1945 and 2004 (when the book was published), there were six big spikes in the price of oil – each was accompanies by a major economic recession.

Roberts maintains the cheap, easily accessible oil is all used up, explaining its steady price increase since the late 70s. Russian oil, which is fairly costly to mine, only became economically viable when the price of oil hit $35 a barrel in 1980.

Prior to the final chapters, which review the economics of various forms of renewal energy, the book also discusses the geopolitics of oil. Roberts leaves absolutely no doubt that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an effort by neoconservatives Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz et al to control the volatile price of oil and the devastating effects of this lability on the US economy. Although the US wars in Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen occurred after the book’s publication, Roberts’s analysis left me with no doubt whatsoever they were driven by similar geopolitical objectives.

Roberts also discusses the geopolitical threats posed by China, India and Southeast Asian countries as their growing middle classes put pressure on a finite supply of oil. He also explores the threat the growing political/military alliance between Russian and Iran creates. Between them, the two countries control half the world supply of natural gas. He leaves no doubt, in other words, that the current US military threats against China, Russia and Iran are also about fossil fuel security, just like the war on Iraq.

The Cover-Up: BP Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill

The Big Fix: BP Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill Cover-up

Directed by Josh Tickell (2012)

Film Review

The Big Fix is about the extreme corruption in the Louisiana State capitol and Washington DC which resulted in a massive cover-up of the disastrous environmental and health consequences of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The documentary begins by exploring the ugly history of the Anglo-Iranian oil company, later renamed BP. It describes the efforts by the Iranian people to reclaim control of their oil with the democratic election of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1951. Determined to retain British control of Iran’ oil, Winston Churchill approached President Eisenhower, who instigated a CIA-sponsored coup to oust Mosaddegh and install the brutal dictator Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

It would take the 1979 Islamic revolution to restore the right of the Iranian people to control their own oil.

The Oil Colony Known as Louisiana

Tickell makes the case that Louisiana is an oil colony in much the same way Iran was. Populist governor Huey Long, virtually the only Louisiana governor to stand up to Big Oil, was assassinated in 1935 – two days after announcing plans to run for president.

The Deep Water Horizon Coverup

The film goes on to expose important aspects of the Deep Water Horizon disaster that the corporate media neglect to report on – with special emphasis on BP cost cutting measures that violated safety regulations, including the manual disabling of warning alarms to enable faster drilling.

The role the Obama administration played in lying about the aftermath of the spill is even more shocking. When he opened contaminated areas to fishing, despite the continuing presence of large concentrations of oil, he also participated in a slick PR video him and his daughters swimming in a protected area (St Andrews Bay) unaffected by the spill.

Obama also lied about the health dangers of Corexit, a toxic chemical (banned in Britain since 2002) used to disperse surface oil slicks, as well as claiming BP discontinued aerial Corexit spraying in July 2010.*

The True Extent of Environmental and Human Health Consequences

A highlight of the film is the numerous poignant interviews with fishing families who not only lost their livelihoods as a result of the BP disaster but are suffering life threatening health problems from ongoing exposure to Corexit.

Despite the best efforts by BP and the Coast Guard to keep journalists and scientists out of the spill area, by 2012 a number of scientists (including Jean Costeau) had collected strong documentary evidence that the majority of the oil spill was pooled in enormous oil lakes on the sea bed. These oil lakes, in turn, were systematically killing off all sea life.

When oil geologist Matthew Sims attempted to bring this information to media attention, he mysteriously drowned in his hot tub.

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*Numerous investigators have documented that Corexit spraying continued for at least two years after the spill.

 

Introducing 9-11 Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds

Kill the Messenger (Sibel Edmonds)

Directed by Jean Robert Viallet, Mathieu Verboud (2006)

Film Review

Kill the Messenger is a French documentary about FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and the organized criminal behavior she discovered inside the Bush State Department and Pentagon.

Edmonds, the daughter of a Turkish family, was raised in Iran and recruited by the FBI four days after 9-11 to translate telephone conversations they had intercepted from suspected terrorists. In addition to English, Edmonds speaks Turkish, Farsi and Azairi.

Several months after she began her job, a fellow translator named Melek Dickerson and her husband, an Air Force major named Douglas Dickerson, tried to recruit her to a Turkish interest group whose intercepts she was translating. Believing they were spies, she reported the incident to her superiors, as well as FBI director Frank Mellor. The FBI responded by firing her and threatening to charge her under the State Secrets Privilege Act if she spoke to anyone else (including a lawyer) about the incident.

Other than filing suit for unlawful dismissal and breech of freedom of speech (which went all the way to the Supreme Court, who refused to review it), Edmonds spoke to no one about it until a 9-11 families group encouraged her to reveal what she knew about the Dickersons to the 9-11 Commission Bush appointed in 2003. This would lead Major Dickerson and his wife to be transferred out of the country.

When the 9-11 Commission Report failed to address Edmond’s evidence, she collaborated with Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to found the National Security Whistleblowers Network. Approximately 100 whistleblowers joined who had been tracking Middle East jihadists for years and whose warnings about 9-11 were ignored by the Bush administration.

Although Edmonds herself never disclosed the name of the group that attempted to recruit her, several journalists have identified it as the American Turkish Council. As they all report, the ATC, which has all the main US arms manufacturers on its board, first started to be wiretapped by the FBI in 1997 because they were illegally smuggling embargoed US weapons systems to Turkey.

As Giraldi writes inThe American Conservative, the ATC worked closely with pro-Israel White House insiders Douglas Feith and Richard Perle to illegally smuggle nuclear triggers to Pakistan via South Africa.

As the filmmakers point out the same pro-Israel Bush advisors blew CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover in 2003. Plame’s main assignment was investigating ATC involvement in illegal nuclear proliferation.

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*Farsi is widely spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.
**Azeri is the official language of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

Brexit,Trump, Syria and the Fabricated War on Terror

Adam Curtis Forced Hypernormalisation BBC

Directed by Adam Curtis

Film Review

Curtis, one of my favorite documentary makers, has a unique ability to conceptualize and describe the collective psychological conditioning the political elites subject us to – and the unintended consequences  of their use of public relations (as opposed to diplomacy and statecraft) to retain power. In this fascinating documentary, he explores the link between the rise of Putin and Donald Trump, the Brexit vote in Britain and the fabricated War on Terror. He also explains Syria’s critical role in this process, dating back to Hafeez al-Asaad (1970-2000) and his dream of unifying the Arab world against western exploiting.

The Concept of Forced Hypernormalisation

According to Curtis, “forced hypernormalisation,” is a term coined by the Soviets to describe a psychological control technique in which politicians retain power by projecting a vastly oversimplified view of world. Curtis maintains that Ronald Reagan was the first president to embrace this version of popular control, as he projected US foreign policy as a simple matter of good vs evil and encouraged Americans to withdraw from frustrating social and political concerns by focusing on their individual selves.

Curtis begins his capsule history of forced hypnormalisation with the invention of the strategy of suicide bombing by Hafeez al-Asaad and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini (when he was losing the Iran-Iraq WAR). Al-Assad (using Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia) would force US troops to withdraw from Lebanon with a dramatic suicide bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.

Through the 1980s, Syria would engage in several other dramatic anti-US suicide bombings. However because Reagan felt retaliation against Syria was too risky (due to the support al-Assad enjoyed from other Arab leaders), he would blame Gaddafi, who other Arab leaders viewed as a madman, and bomb Libya instead. Gaddafi, eager for the notoriety, was always happy to take the credit.

Incessant Shapeshifting in US and British Foreign Policy

Thus a pattern emerged where US and British foreign policy became an indistinguishable mixture of fabrication and reality. The public got their first clear view of this strategy with the fabricated reality (ie non-existent weapons of mass destruction and non-existent links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida) used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This film also includes an intriguing account (the first I have seen from mainstream media) of the 30+ year Air Force Intelligence campaign to promote popular belief in UFOs.

Putin and Non-Linear Warfare

Curtis contends Russian information specialist Vladislav Surkoff, one of the dozen or so technocrats who keep Putin in power, is also a master of this ceaseless shapeshifting geared towards undermining people’s perception of the world. It is nothing for Surkoff to simultaneously promote Russia’s antifascist movement, nationalist neo-Nazi groups, human rights groups and the Russian Orthodox Church. In foreign policy, the Russians refer to this approach as “non-linear warfare, and they have used it in the Ukraine and Syria. The end result is the west never really knows what their real intentions are.

Enter Donald Trump

Donald Trump is also a master at this type of shapeshifting, with his unique blend of extreme right wing racism and anti-corporatism.  He’s notorious for constantly reversing and contradicting himself, and his speeches are a complex mixtures of facts. The fact he’s so difficult to pin down makes it extremely difficult for the media to attack him.

CIA Cocaine Trafficking, Bill Clinton and the Mena Airport

The Mena Connection

Directed by Terry Reed (1985)

Film Review

The Mena Connection establishes unequivocally that both Vice-president George H. W. Bush and Governor Bill Clinton had direct involvement in the CIA’s cocaine smuggling operation at Arkansas’ Mena Airport during the 1980s. Aircraft loaded with illegal weapons for the Contras in Honduras returned to Mena with tons of Columbia cocaine used to finance the operation. Reprising documentary evidence Reed presents in his 1994 bestselling book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA , the film also establishes that Clinton also deliberately obstructed investigations into Mena by local and federal prosecutors and the IRS.

Half the documentary is devoted to exposes a local Arkansas TV reporter and a WMAQ (Chicago) reporter did on cocaine smuggling at Mena during the congressional investigation into Iran Contra.* The other half consists of lengthy interviews with whistleblower Terry Reed and his wife Janis.

An experienced Vietnam War pilot, in 1983 Oliver North recruited Reed to participate in The Enterprise, a CIA operation to assemble and deliver untraceable weapons to Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Reed also trained Contra pilots in “night flying” – landing without runway lights – on a remote mountainous airstrip eleven miles from Mena.

According to Reed, the CIA shut down the Mena operation shortly Iran Contra scandal broke in 1986, shortly after movingthe guns-for-cocaine operation to Mexico. Soon after Reed moved his family to Guadalajara, his CIA control order him to participate in the cocaine smuggling side of the operation. Things got nasty when he refused to comply and submitted his resignation. The Department of Justice attempted to frame him and his wife for drug smuggling.

They spent the next two years fighting the conviction. Following their 1991 acquittal, Reed filed suit against Arkansas law enforcement and Clinton administration officials who had framed him. Both Reed and Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander, whose efforts to obtain a General Accounting Office investigation into Mena were blocked by the CIA, believed the lawsuit would lead to Clinton’s impeachment.

In a roundabout way it did. Owing to CIA interference, it proved impossible to impeach Clinton for cocaine smuggling or money laundering. Ultimately the only charge Congress could make stick was lying under oath about a sexual affair with a White House intern.

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*The Iran Contra Affair was a political scandal in which senior Reagan administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran (an enemy state) to secure funding for CIA-sponsored Contras in Nicaragua.

Untold History of the US – The Cold War

Parts 4 and 5 of Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States explore the exaggerated claims of Soviet expansionism that characterized the Truman/Eisenhower administration.

Part 4 begins by contrasting the economic standing of the US and the USSR when the war ended in 1945. The US economy was booming. America controlled 50% of the world’s economic production and most of its gold. The Soviet economy, in contrast, had been shattered. Truman reneged on Roosevelt’s promise to provide the Soviets post war aid to assist in their recovery. During the US occupation of West Germany, he also discontinued German war reparations to the USSR.

The late forties was a period of excruciating poverty for Eastern Europe, with major famine in the Ukraine. With the Soviet economy in a shambles, the claims made by Truman about their intention to conquer the world were ludicrous.

After Henry Wallace, the last holdover from the Roosevelt administration, made a major speech (echoing statements by Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt) opposing nuclear weapons, Truman fired him.

This episode also explores the first implementation of the Truman Doctrine, justifying US intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries. Truman first used it in 1947 to put down a popular uprising against a fascist coup in Greece. In a clear precursor to US intervention in Vietnam, Truman sent in US advisors to train the Greek military in “counterinsurgency tactics,” ie death squads to crush unions and human rights organizations and concentration camps to extinguish civilian support for pro-independence activists.

Part 4: Cold War: 1945-50

Part 5 explores the election of Eisenhower to power in 1952, coinciding with Khrushchev’s rise to power in 1953 and the re-election of Churchill in 1951 (Churchill was replaced by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee from 1945-51).

Eisenhower, who had opposed using the A-bomb against Japan at Pottsdam, became a fervent nuclear weapons supporter as president. Under pressure from anti-communist hawk John Foster Dulles, he resisted Khrushchev’s and Churchill’s to organize a peace summit to limit the nuclear arms race.

Eisenhower would go on to engage in war crimes in Korean, causing massive civilian deaths by bombing North Korean dams.

In addition to authorizing the CIA overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, he paid 80% of French military costs as they endeavored to defeat Vietnam’s pro-independence movement.

In this episode, Stone also explores the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955 in Java. Members consisted of world leaders determined to remain independent of either US or Soviet influence. In attendance at the first meeting were Ho Chi Minh  (Vietnam), Tito (Yugoslavia), Nehru (India), Nasser (Egypt), Zhou Enlai (China) and Sukarno (Indonesia). The CIA eventually removed each of these men from power, in some cases via assassination.

Part 5: the ’50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb and the Third World

Falling Oil Prices: a Saudi Viewpoint

Inside Story – What’s Behind the Falling Oil Prices

Al Jazeera (2015)

Film Review

A most revealing documentary. Unlike western pundits who speculate about conspiracies to wipe out shale oil producers (ie fracking) and the oil  economies of Russia and Venezuela, these Middle East analysts stick to economic fundamentals.

The three analysts identify three main factors behind the present oil glut: shale gas production, a big increase in renewable energy production and dropping demand by emerging economies such as China.

They maintain Saudi Arabia’s primary motivation for current output levels is fear of losing “market share” if they unilaterally cut oil production.

There’s also an interesting discussion about the Saudi plan to introduce taxation to help reduce their $98 billion deficit.

Iranian “Terrorist” Commands Assault on ISIS

Our Man in Tikrit

According to Reuters, Iraqi security forces and Shi’ite militia fighters (with the support of Canadian special forces and US weapons, trainers and air strikes) are presently engaged in a major assault to retake the Iraqi city of Tikrit from ISIS. Until recently, the western media rarely mentioned the figure commanding these forces.

His name is Major General Qasem Soleimani, and he’s the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force. This creates an embarrassing situation for Obama because the US still officially designates Soleimani as a terrorist for his alleged role in a 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US

Given all the saber rattling against Iran by congressional Republicans (cheered on by Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu), the US media has been loathe to acknowledge that Iran has been spearheading the offensive against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. In Syria, Soleimani is widely credited with helping President Bashar al-Assad turn the tide against rebel forces and recapture key cities and towns.

The US political elite prefers to spoon feed Americans the cartoon version of US foreign policy, in which Americans only go to war against evil doers. For this reason, they have greatly downplayed the role of Soleimani and other Iranian military “advisers” in the battle against ISIS. A recent explosion of interest in General Soleimani on Twitter and Facebook has forced them to come clean.

According to the BBC, this isn’t the first time Soleimani has aided US military efforts in the Middle East. In 2001, he provided military intelligence to the US to support its invasion to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan, and in 2007 in participated in US-led talks in Baghdad over the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

As best I can ascertain, Soleimani has been a prominent figure in containing Iraqi sectarian violence since 2011

He has commanded Iranian forces active in the Syrian civil war since the latter half of 2012.

photo credit: www.yjc.ir

Also posted at Veterans Today

Farrakhan’s Views on Obama

Below is a fascinating excerpt from Part 8 of Louis Farrakhan’s lecture series The Time and What Must Be Done. Farrahkan is the present leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), best known for its most famous member Malcolm X.

It’s been more than ten years since I heard Farrakhan speak. He has made remarkable progress from his overt antisemitism and talk of white people as blue-eyed devils. I still have a slight problem with the “666” symbolism of the year 2013, which he links with the “beasts” (America, England, Germany and France).

Otherwise his analysis is remarkably similar to that of white economist, journalist and former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts. The NOI leader is highly critical of Obama’s murderous policies in Libya and Syria and his use of drones for targeted assassinations, as well as his apparent willingness to support an Israeli-inspired war with Iran. He also condemns the President’s destruction of American democracy. He describes the US as an oligarchy leading the American people into fascism.

The video is nearly two years old. Amazing how little US foreign policy has changed.