Wednesday, November 11, 2009

True Intentions Behind the US-Colombia Military Agreement

Official US Air Force Document Reveals The True Intentions Behind The US-Colombia Military Agreement

By Eva Golinger
Source: Postcards from the Revolution
November 6, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

An official document from the Department of the US Air Force reveals that the military base in Palanquero, Colombia will provide the Pentagon with “…an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America…” This information contradicts the explainations offered by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the US State Department regarding the military agreement signed between the two nations this past October 30th. Both governments have publicly stated that the military agreement refers only to counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations within Colombian territory. President Uribe has reiterated numerous times that the military agreement with the US will not affect Colombia’s neighbors, despite constant concern in the region regarding the true objetives of the agreement. But the US Air Force document, dated May 2009, confirms that the concerns of South American nations have been right on target. The document exposes that the true intentions behind the agreement are to enable the US to engage in “full spectrum military operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorist insurgencies…and anti-US governments…”

The military agreement between Washington and Colombia authorizes the access and use of seven military installations in Palanquero, Malambo, Tolemaida, Larandia, Apíay, Cartagena and Málaga. Additionally, the agreement allows for “the access and use of all other installations and locations as necessary” throughout Colombia, with no restrictions. Together with the complete immunity the agreement provides to US military and civilian personnel, including private defense and security contractors, the clause authorizing the US to utilize any installation throughout the entire country - even commercial aiports, for military ends, signifies a complete renouncing of Colombian sovereignty and officially converts Colombia into a client-state of the US.

The Air Force document underlines the importance of the military base in Palanquero and justifies the $46 million requested in the 2010 budget (now approved by Congress) in order to improve the airfield, associated ramps and other installations on the base to convert it into a US Cooperative Security Location (CSL). “Establishing a Cooperative Security Location (CSL) in Palanquero best supports the COCOM’s (Command Combatant’s) Theater Posture Strategy and demonstrates our commitment to this relationship. Development of this CSL provides a unique opportunity for full spectrum operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorist insurgencies, anti-US governments, endemic poverty and recurring natural disasters.”

It’s not difficult to imagine which governments in South America are considered by Washington to be “anti-US governments”. The constant agressive declarations and statements emitted by the State and Defense Departments and the US Congress against Venezuela and Bolivia, and even to some extent Ecuador, evidence that the ALBA nations are the ones perceived by Washington as a “constant threat”. To classify a country as “anti-US” is to consider it an enemy of the United States. In this context, it’s obvious that the military agreement with Colombia is a reaction to a region the US now considers full of “enemies”.

COUNTERNARCOTICS OPERATIONS ARE SECONDARY

Per the US Air Force document, “Access to Colombia will further its strategic partnership with the United States. The strong security cooperation relationship also offers an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America to include mitigating the Counternarcotics capability.” This statement clearly evidences that counternarcotics operations are secondary to the real objetives of the military agreement between Colombia and Washington. Again, this clearly contrasts the constant declarations of the Uribe and Obama governments insisting that the main focus of the agreement is to combat drug trafficking and production. The Air Force document emphasizes the necessity to improve “full spectrum” military operations throughout South America – not just in Colombia – in order to combat “constant threats” from “anti-US governments” in the region.

PALANQUERO IS THE BEST OPTION FOR CONTINENTAL MOBILITY

The Air Force document explains that “Palanquero is unquestionably the best site for investing in infrastructure development within Colombia. Its central location is within reach of…operations areas…its isolation maximizes Operational Security (OPSEC) and Force Protection and minimizes the US military profile. The intent is to leverage existing infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, improve the US ability to respond rapidly to crisis, and assure regional access and presence at minimum cost. Palanquero supports the mobility mission by providing access to the entire South American continent with the exception of Cape Horn…”

ESPIONAGE AND WARFARE

The document additionally confirms that the US military presence in Palanquero, Colombia, will improve the capacity of espionage and intelligence operations, and will allow the US armed forces to increase their warfare capabilities in the region. “Development of this CSL wil further the strategic partnership forged between the US and Colombia and is in the interest of both nations…A presence will also increase our capability to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global reach, support logistics requirements, improve partnerships, improve theater security cooperation and expand expeditionary warfare capability.”

The language of war included in this document evidences the true intentions behind the military agreement between Washington and Colombia: they are preparing for war in Latin America. The past few days have been full of conflict and tension between Colombia and Venezuela. Just days ago, the Venezuelan government captured three spies from the Colombian intelligence agency, DAS, and discovered several active destabilization and espionage operations against Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela. The operations - Fénix, Salomón and Falcón, respectively, were revealed in documents found with the captured DAS agents. Approximately two weeks ago, 10 bodies were found in Táchira, a border zone with Colombia. After completing the relevant investigations, the Venezuelan government discovered that the bodies belonged to Colombian paramilitaries infiltrated inside Venezuelan territory. This dangerous paramilitary infiltration from Colombia forms part of a destabilization plan against Venezuela that seeks to create a paramilitary state inside Venezuelan territory in order to breakdown President Chávez’s government.

The military agreement between Washington and Colombia will only increase regional tensions and violence. The information revealed in the US Air Force document unquestionably evidences that Washington seeks to promote a state of warfare in South America, using Colombia as its launching pad. Before this declaration of war, the peoples of Latin America must stand strong and unified. Latin American integration is the best defense against the Empire’s aggression.

*The US Air Force document was submitted in May 2009 to Congress as part of the 2010 budget justification. It is an official government document and reaffirms the authenticity of the White Book: Global Enroute Strategy of the US Air Mobility Command, which was denounced by President Chávez during the UNASUR meeting in Bariloche, Argentina this past August 28th. I have placed the original document and the non-official translation to Spanish that I did of the relevant parts relating to Palanquero on the web page of the Center to Alert and Defend the People “Centro de Alerta para la Defensa de los pueblos”, a new space we are creating to garantee that strategic information is available to those under constant threat from imperialist aggression.


Eva Golinger is a Venezuelan-American attorney from New York, living in Caracas, Venezuela since 2005 and author of the best-selling books, “The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela” (2006 Olive Branch Press) and “Bush vs. Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela” (2007, Monthly Review Press). Since 2003, Eva, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and CUNY Law School in New York, has been investigating, analyzing and writing about US intervention in Venezuela using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain information about the US Government’s efforts to destabilize progressive movements in Latin America.


Eva Golinger is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Eva Golinger

Spying On Americans

Obama Endorses Bush Era Warrantless Wiretapping

By Tom Burghardt
Source: Antifascist Calling...
November 7, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

President Barack Obama instructed Justice Department attorneys to argue last week in San Francisco before Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker, that he must toss out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Shubert v. Bush lawsuit challenging the secret state's driftnet surveillance of Americans' electronic communications.

This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring "unreasonable searches and seizures." EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston wrote:

In a Court filing late Friday night, the Obama Administration attempted to dress up in new clothes its embrace of one of the worst Bush Administration positions--that courts cannot be allowed to review the National Security Agency's massive, well-documented program of warrantless surveillance. In doing so it demonstrated that it will not willingly set limits on its own power and reinforced the need for Congress to step in and reform the so-called 'state secrets' privilege. (Kevin Bankston, "As Congress Considers State Secrets Reform, Obama Admin Tries to Shut Down Yet Another Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit," Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 2, 2009)

In June, Judge Walker dismissed EFF's landmark Hepting v. ATT lawsuit, when he ruled that the telecoms enjoyed immunity from liability after the Democratic-controlled Congress rammed through the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in July 2008.

That law, passed in response to citizen challenges to the state and their corporate partners in crime, granted the Attorney General exclusive power to require dismissal of the lawsuits "if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president," the civil liberties' watchdog group wrote in June.

In essence, it is not the co-equal and independent federal Judiciary that determines whether or not a crime has been committed that flaunts constitutional norms but rather, an unchallengeable assertion by an imperial Executive Branch.

As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, this craven capitulation by Congress to the Executive locks in place the statutory machinery for a presidential dictatorship, one where power is wielded with neither transparency nor accountability.

EFF's Jewel v. NSA civil suit, brought on behalf of AT&T customers to halt the firm's ongoing collaboration with the government's illegal surveillance continues--for the moment.

In April however, taking a page from the Bush/Cheney playbook, the Obama administration argued that this lawsuit too, must be dismissed, claiming that should the litigation go forward it would require government disclosure of "privileged state secrets."

Antifascist Calling reported at the time that the Obama administration has argued that under provisions of the disgraceful USA PATRIOT Act, the state is "immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act."

Claiming "sovereign immunity" in practice, this means that under DoJ's ludicrous interpretation of the Orwellian PATRIOT Act, the government can never be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statute. As Salon pointed out:

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and--even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal--you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned. (Glenn Greenwald, "New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ," Salon, April 6, 2009)

The "change" regime's cynical maneuver to have Shubert kicked to the curb is all the more remarkable considering that the Justice Department announced a month earlier that the administration will "impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons," The New York Times reported.

"Under the new policy," investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote, "if an agency like the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to block evidence or a lawsuit on state secrets grounds, it would present an evidentiary memorandum describing its reasons to the assistant attorney general for the division handling the lawsuit in question."

According to the Times, "if that official recommended approving the request" it would be sent on to a high-level committee comprised of DoJ officials who would be charged "whether the disclosure of information would risk 'significant harm' to national security."

Under the new guidelines, Justice Department officials are supposed to reject the request to deploy the state secrets privilege to quash lawsuits if the Executive Branch's motivation for doing so would "conceal violations of the law, inefficiency or administrative error" or to "prevent embarrassment."

While Holder has claimed DoJ's so-called "high-level committee" has reviewed the relevant material and concluded that disclosure would risk "significant harm" to "national security" if the case went forward, security analyst Steven Aftergood wrote in Secrecy News that "one aspect of the new policy that he did not address was the question of referral of the alleged misconduct to an agency inspector general for investigation."

This is supposed to occur whenever "invocation of the privilege would preclude adjudication of particular claims," as it certainly does in the Shubert litigation, particularly when the "case raises credible allegations of government wrongdoing."

However as Aftergood avers, "somewhat artfully" (although this writer prefers a stronger phrase to describe the Attorney General's actions) "the government denies that any such collection occurred 'under the Terrorist Surveillance Program,' implicitly allowing for the possibility that it may have occurred under some other framework."

What that "other framework" is hasn't been specified; however, in all probability it relates to other NSA above top secret Special Access Programs which haven't come to light.

Whatever the secret state is continuing to do under Obama, a recent piece in InformationWeek provides striking details that it is massive.

The publication reports that the NSA "will soon break ground on a data center in Utah that's budgeted to cost $1.5 billion."

According to InformationWeek, the new facility will "provide intelligence and warnings related to cybersecurity threats, cybersecurity support to defense and civilian agency networks, and technical assistance to the Department of Homeland Security."

The new data center will be located at Camp Williams, a National Guard training facility 26 miles from Salt Lake City in the conservative state of Utah. While providing few details on how NSA will use the 1.5 million square foot center, Glenn Gaffney, a deputy director of intelligence with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), claims that NSA will "protect civil liberties."

"We will accomplish this in full compliance with the U.S. Constitution and federal law and while observing strict guidelines that protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people," Gaffney said.

As with other pronouncements by intelligence officials, Gaffney's statement should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The New York Times revealed in April and June that the ultra-spooky agency "intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year."

Indeed, a former NSA analyst told investigative journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that he was "trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants."

We do know that NSA's STELLAR WIND and PINWALE intercept programs are giant data mining vacuum cleaners that sift emails, faxes, and text messages of millions of people in the United States. These programs are not, as the Bush and now, the Obama regime mendaciously claim, primarily "targeting al-Qaeda."

As Cryptohippie points out in their analysis of current global surveillance trends, "an electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine."

Answering those who claim they have "nothing to hide," Cryptohippie argues that "state use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence" is primarily for use "against its citizens."

Indeed, the information gathered by the secret state and stored in huge data warehouses scattered across the country "is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial," and "it is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions."

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it--the evidence is already in their database. (Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2008 National Rankings, no date)

How does this "quiet, pristine" system operate? As AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit that described how the company physically split and copied the traffic that flowed into its offices, NSA was virtually duplicating, sifting and storing the entire Internet. Klein wrote in his self-published book:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everythingflowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." ...

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in the their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine... And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

Klein's revelations were confirmed by former NSA analyst and whistleblower Russell Tice, who told MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann in January that the NSA "had access to allAmericans' communications" and spied "24/7" on domestic political activist groups and "U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists."

In demanding that the independent federal judiciary toss these cases, the Obama administration is asserting a broad interpretation of Executive Branch privileges that caused much outrage and hand-wringing by congressional Democrats--when they were out of power.

Under the "change" regime however, what were once viewed by Democrats and their supporters as prime examples of Bushist lawlessness and contempt for constitutional safeguards, are now deemed vital state secrets that "protect" the American people, even as the capitalist state wages an endless "War on Terror" to seize other people's resources for geostrategic advantage over the competition. As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama's argument is true--that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government's surveillance activities, even when criminal--doesn't that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn't that the logical conclusion from Obama's claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe? (Glenn Greenwald, "Obama's latest use of 'secrecy' to shield presidential lawbreaking," Salon, November 1, 2009)

Democrat or Republican, "liberal" or "conservative:" what matters most for all factions in Washington is the defense and preservation of the elites.

Criminality on such a scale requires that the armed fist of the state is mobilized and ever-vigilant

Warrantless

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt

America's Democracy in Crisis

Is "Executive Privilege" Undemocratic

By Prof John Kozy
November 3, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

Keeping an eclectic system consistent is difficult, especially if the borrowing system is fundamentally different from the system borrowed from. Taking a feature from one and placing it into another often compromises the latter's fundamental nature, because implicit contradictions are often hidden and difficult to detect.

The essence of democracy is fundamentally egalitarian. This egalitarianism is enshrined in such commonly known dictums as all men are created equal, one man one vote, equality under the law, and no man is above the law. Monarchy, on the other hand, is hierarchical. Some groups of people are granted privileges not available to others. The systems are fundamentally different, and privilege of any kind compromises democracy's essential nature.

Executive privilege, deliberative process privilege, state secrets privilege, and public interest immunity are forms of English crown privilege. They are attributes of monarchial systems. All are derived from the common-law principle that the internal processes of the executive branch of government are immune from normal disclosure, and all are based on the belief that by guaranteeing confidentiality, the executive branch receives more candid advice than would be given if confidentiality were not assured. Such advice, it is claimed, results in better decisions for society as a whole, but not a jot of empirical evidence has ever been cited to support this claim. In fact, the evidence supports the opposite view, that confidential advice results is decisions that produce horrid results for society.

There is even an obvious absurdity in the claim itself, and that no one has recognized it is a mystery. If advice given to the executive branch of government actually produces beneficial results, why would anyone, especially a politician, want to keep the advice confidential? Why wouldn't the advisors want to take credit for it? On the other hand, people are unlikely to want to take responsibility for advice that results in bad consequences, and the confidentiality merely serves to protect those persons from blame. If the advice also advocates breaking the law, the confidentiality puts advisers of the executive branch above the law, granting them a privilege unavailable to the people as a whole, compromising the democratic nature of society. Executive privilege turns the executive branch of government into a species of monarchy, the essence of which is that someone is above the law.

Monarchs have rarely been called enlightened. Many were openly vicious. That such monarchs should appoint advisors with similar vicious character traits is natural. That such people would want their advice to be kept secret is also natural. Monarchies do not exist for the benefit of their peoples. Louis XIV (1638–1715) said it nicely when he said, "L'état, c'est moi!" The French people were his to do whatever he wanted with. Interestingly enough, the first public discussions of crown privileges in England appeared during the reign of Charles I (1600–1649). So introducing executive privilege into the American governmental system set the nation's political progress back four hundred years, and Americans, who fought two wars with the British to free themselves from the yoke of English monarchial government, now find themselves living under one where the executive branch has acquired monarchial attributes. But the United States of America was founded on enlightenment principles during the Age of Enlightenment, so the federal courts have, whether in maliciousness, ignorance, or sheer stupidity, abolished the republican nature of the government by allowing claims of privilege.

It is true, of course, that the Supreme Court has waffled in dealing with such claims. In United States v Nixon, the Court writes "The first ground is the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties; the importance of this confidentiality is too plain to require further discussion." But this last sentence is reminiscent of the Papacy's claim against Galileo that the Earth's position at the center of the universe is too obvious to require examination. If there is one thing that seekers of truth discover early on it is that nothing is so obvious that it escapes examination. In fact, such people learn that claims of obviousness always require examination; yet the Court often bases decisions on what appears "obvious" or "too plain to require further discussion." In reality, there is nothing obvious about this claim. Nevertheless, the Court also writes in the same decision "To read the Art. II powers of the President as providing an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforcement of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of the public interest in confidentiality of nonmilitary and nondiplomatic discussions would upset the constitutional balance of 'a workable government' and gravely impair the role of the courts under Art. III." So what the Court takes away with one hand it often gives back with the other.

The Court never has judged a question of privilege by its overall effects on the fundamental nature of the government but always on some perceived "practical" consideration, such as "national security," "military secrets," "diplomatic confidence," all of which are slippery slopes to national disasters. The Court has always ignored admonitions such as that given by Botts to Chief Justice John Marshall in the trial of Aaron Burr: "If you determine that we be deprived of the benefit of important written or oral evidence by the introduction of this State secrecy, you lay, without intending it, the foundation for a system of oppression." The Court was relieved of the responsibility of having to decide the matter because Jefferson supplied the required documents.

Often, the Court entertains arguments provided to support secrecy which are ludicrous. For instance, in relation to the release of additional torture photographs, the President has said, "My belief is the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefits to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals" and "The most direct consequence would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in greater danger." But it is difficult to understand how the release of photographs would put troops whose lives are already in danger in further danger. What kind of further danger is there?

Furthermore, the anti-American forces in the Middle East don't need to do anything to "further inflame anti-American opinion." And if they wanted to, faking and publishing photographs depicting behavior even more scurrilous than that depicted in those photographs already released would be easy. Sure, the American government would deny their authenticity, but who would believe it? The only thing the American government could do to gain conviction would be to release the original photographs which makes the attempt to conceal them ridiculous. In fact, it has recently been reported that there have been protests in the Afghan capital, Kabul, over allegations that foreign troops in the country burnt a copy of the Koran, that hundreds of Kabul University students led the latest protest, and that they burned an effigy of US President Barack Obama. Of course, the US-led NATO force denied the claim, but no one believes the denial.

Other claims entertained by the Court are even worse. The Glomar response, for instance, where the government neither confirms nor denies the existence of documents to Freedom of Information Act requests excludes the possibility of being questioned. The Justice Department's recent position in Shubert v Obama is similar. The claim is that asserting the state secrets privilege is necessary "to protect against a disclosure of highly sensitive, classified information that would irrevocably harm the national security of this country," and the Attorney General writes, "I believe there is no way for this case to move forward without jeopardizing ongoing intelligence activities that we rely upon to protect the safety of the American people." Not only is there no way to question these claims, they don't even address the question raised, which is not whether the ongoing intelligence activities are relied upon by the government but whether they are legal. All of these claims put agents of the government above the law.

Furthermore, the claim that the revelation of specific information would harm the nation is counterproductive. Nations are harmed in many ways, one of which is their reputations both domestically and internationally. Far more nations have been destroyed by internal forces than by forces from abroad. In fact, forces from abroad that succeed in destroying nations often manage that because the attacked nation has already been destroyed from within. It happened to the Roman Empire.

Secrets make people suspicious of attempts to hide wrongdoing. When a government loses the trust of its people, the nation is harmed. And when the government seeks to keep secret actions being carried out in foreign nations, the attempt is fruitless. Foreign nations know or at least suspect when they are being meddled with. The international community views the meddling nation as a pariah.

In fact, it is impossible to argue convincingly for executive privilege. That no such argument has ever been produced is shown by the persistence of the controversy and the Court's continuing ambivalence. Whenever executive privilege is invoked, objective observers always react by concluding that the government has lied or broken the law and the lies and violations of law are being covered up. Many now have adopted the maxim, don't believe anything until it's officially denied, so that people initially uncertain about claims that the government has lied come to that conclusion when the lie is denied and the evidence is kept secret. Citing executive privilege is not an effective way to gain the people's trust and govern effectively. The Court should make clear that it is never appropriate. In a democracy, no one should ever be above the law.

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said, "We've got to do a better job explaining to the world what we're doing," while being interviewed by Leslie H. Gelb. The previous Bush administration expressed similar sentiments. Alan Fisher, a Scottish journalist reporting from Islamabad wrote, "I went to the Islamic university in Islamabad on Tuesday after news of the double bombing there broke. . . . A young man . . . started blaming me and 'my people' for the bombing. . . . He said: 'This is all your fault, all your bloody fault.' pointing his finger at me angrily. 'You Americans, you are sitting there, you are doing this.' The world's people know "what we're doing," because we're doing it to them. Only the American people are being kept from knowing it.

There is an old Henry "Henny" Youngman joke that goes like this: A man goes to his doctor and says, "Doctor, when I do this it hurts." The doctor says, "Well don't do that." This joke provides all officials in democratic governments with this lesson: When an action is being proposed that would be too offensive to be revealed to the public, don't approve it, because if it is done, it will surely hurt. The government's covered-up lies have done far more damage to the United States of America than terrorists ever could have. In fact, those lies have produced the terrorists and severely limited our Constitutional rights. Ron Paul is right: they're over here because we're over there. In reality, the best defense against enemies is not to make any. Attempts to keep wrong doing secret never work and are destroying the nation in the guise of protecting it.

Some claim that "the U.S. Constitution is elitist in origin and nature, and does not include any clause providing for state intervention directed towards the removal or, at least, mitigation of social inequalities; nor does it acknowledge any social or economic rights....In addition to that, the U.S. Constitution is strictly centered on the protection of the status quo and dominant elites' power, and even on the empowerment of the state for the repression of the common citizen and for the domination over foreign nations." Although it is true that the members of the Constitutional Convention were drawn form the Colonial elite and that most were lawyers with economic interests in the Colonial economy which was British in nature, the claim, cited above, is based on well-known elementary fallacies. Unless the author or authors of a document specifically place their intentions in the document, those intentions become irrelevant. Once written, a document stands on its own. And the Constitution's preamble clearly contains the aspirations and intentions the founders wanted the new nation to fulfill, none of which are aimed at protecting the status quo and the dominant elites. The founders also explicitly stated the dangers of foreign entanglements.

Yet the Constitution has been subverted and the nascent nation destroyed by the Court's willingness to inject monarchial English common law principles into the American legal system for which not even the slightest justification can be found in the Constitution. English crown privilege is one of them. As a result, all the often claimed enlightenment aspects of American society are merely cosmetic. The Justices of the Court, those who have sworn to protect and maintain the Constitution, are the ones chiefly responsible for destroying it. The Constitution may not be perfect, but it's much better than many realize. It is the Court which has failed to read it carefully that is at fault.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who blogs on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.


John Kozy is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by John Kozy

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

America's "Jihad" On Muslims

Overseas Contingency Operation: America's "Jihad" on Muslims, abroad and at home
Three Ohio Men Convicted of Being Muslims at the Wrong Time in America
By Stephen Lendman
November 3, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

In an October 22 press release, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced another victory in its Global War on Terrorism, renamed the Overseas Contingency Operation to continue its jihad on Muslims, abroad and at home.

By now the charges are familiar, always bogus, and announced earlier about three Ohio men in a Justice Department February 2006 press release as follows:

"Three (Toledo, Ohio men) have been charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism against persons overseas, including US military personnel serving in Iraq, and with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists...."

On February 16, 2006, a Cleveland federal grand jury returned a five-count indictment against Mohammad Zaki Amawi, Marwan Othman El-Hindi, and Wassim I. Mazloum alleging they conspired, together and with others, "to kill or maim persons outside of the United States, including US military personnel serving in Iraq, and with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Amawi is also charged, individually, with distributing information regarding explosives and two counts of making verbal threats against the President of the United States."

Amawi holds both US and Jordanian citizenship. El-Hindi is also a US citizen, and Mazloum is a permanent legal resident.

The indictment further alleges that these men "engaged in activities in furtherance of their common goal to wage violent jihad, or 'holy war,' against American soldiers and Coalition allies serving in Iraq. Such activities included training and target shooting, receiving instructions in the construction and use of explosives - including improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and 'suicide bomb vests,' - recruiting others to participate in jihad training, attempting to raise funds to finance the training and to support violent jihad activities, and attempting to acquire and deliver materials - including explosives and computers - to others engaged in violent jihad in the Middle East. The indictment alleges that the conspiracy began sometime prior to November 2004."

Amawi was accused of traveling to Jordan on August 22, 2005 to deliver five laptop computers to the "co-conspirators." They were never delivered. No explanation was given why. Perhaps there were none in the first place, but, no matter. Carrying, transporting, or delivering computers isn't a crime.

Amani also "allegedly downloaded a video from a 'mujahideen website' which depicted the step-by-step construction and use of a bomb vest, and then copied it on a disk and distributed (it) to an individual who was going to be providing jihad training to the defendants. That individual - identified in the indictment as 'the Trainer' - has been cooperating since the beginning of this investigation (as a paid informant) and acting on behalf of the government" to entrap innocent men with no plans to commit terrorism. More on him below.

Other charges alleged "that in October 2004 and again in March 2005, Amawi made verbal threats to kill or inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States. The maximum sentence....of conspiring to kill or maim persons in a foreign country is 35 years in prison, or life in prison if the conspiracy is to kill."

The maximum sentence for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists is 15 years; for distributing information on explosives, 20 years, and for making verbal threats against the President, five years.

In a prepared statement, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said:

"This case stands as a reminder of the need for continued vigilance. We are committed to protecting Americans - here and overseas, particularly the brave men and women of the US Armed Forces who are serving our country by striving valiantly to preserve democracy and the rule of law in Iraq."

FBI Director Robert Mueller added:

"These arrests in indictments are examples of how, through close cooperation with our partners and enhanced intelligence capabilities, we are able to detect terrorist planning and prevent acts of terrorism before they occur."

Members of Toledo's Muslim community were shocked, saddened, and angered over the arrests. They also feared growing anti-Muslim sentiment against its 6,000 members that once included former mayor Michael Damas (1912 - 2003), perhaps the first Arab-American elected (in 1959) to high office in a large US city.

After their arrest, Amawi's (unnamed) brother told CNN he had nothing against the president, just the war. Mazloum's brother, Bilal, said his brother didn't own a gun or know how to use one. "He liked to help people. He never tried to hurt (anyone). I mean, he never (did) anything bad."

El-Hindi's lawyer at the time, Stephen Hartman, said:

"Let's face it. The atmosphere in America now, if there is an allegation of terrorism, and you are Middle Eastern, (or) Muslim, people are going to assume you're guilty" because prosecution charges and media reports imply the worst.

On February 23, 2006, the Toledo Blade reported that a year before his arrest, El-Hindi "offered spiritual nourishment to Muslim prisoners at the Toledo Correctional Institution as an 'imam,' or religious leader." Yet according to FBI Director Mueller:

"Prisons continue to be fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner's conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socioeconomic status and placement in the community upon their release."

That said, warden Khelleh Konteh, explained that federal agents never asked him about El-Hindi's work, and expressed surprise about his arrest. Before his appointment was approved, a routine background check showed no prior arrests and a clean record.

On June 13, 2008, a jury convicted the defendants on all counts:

-- Amawi and El-Hindi on conspiring to kill or maim persons outside the United States, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and two counts of distributing information on explosives; and

-- Mazloum on conspiring to kill or maim persons outside the United States and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

At the time, the DOJ claimed these "convictions represented the nation's first successful trial of a 'homegrown terror cell' for terrorism related crimes."

On October 22, a DOJ press released announced: the "Three (men were) Sentenced for Conspiring to Commit Terrorist Acts Against Americans Overseas:"

-- for Amawi, 20 years in prison, followed by life on supervised release;

-- for El-Hindi, 13 years, including 12 years for "terror violation(s)" and 18 months on fraud; and

-- for Mazloum, 100 months or 8.3 years, followed by life on supervised release.

At trial, Amawi's lawyer, Edward Bryan, said his client hated the Iraq war, cheered US soldier deaths, admired suicide bombers' courage, but isn't a terrorist and talk of going to Iraq was just talk.

"He doesn't have the courage to be like them," said Bryan. "It's fantasy. It's stuff going on in (his and other) people's minds, but not what they're really going to do. (He had no) plan to go out and murder American soldiers." He wanted to learn how to defend himself because he feared he and his family were threatened like other Muslims. "This is defensive Islam. Do they not have the right to defend themselves" without being charged with terrorism or conspiracy to commit it?

El-Hindi's lawyer, Charles Boss, said despite the "quantity" of evidence, its "quality....wasn't there." In other words, for his client and the others, it was the usual circumstantial claptrap, most gotten from the paid informant who egged on the three men, gave them money and gifts, including a cell phone and laptop, and got them to vent the way millions of Americans do about an illegal war and the millions of lives it cost.

Lawyers for all three said, over a two year period, the undercover informant manipulated their clients by suggesting jihadi tactics and entrapped them in recorded conversations.

According to Amawi, he took them to a shooting range and encouraged them to act violently. He's "the one (who) put a real gun in my hand," he said in his first public comment since his 2006 arrest. The informant lied, he said, about his wanting to travel to Iraq to become a martyr. "I'm against suicide bombing. I made this very clear."

Former Army Special Forces soldier Darren Griffin was the paid informant (referred to above as "Trainer") and key prosecution witness. He testified that by posing as a disgruntled Islam convert, he won their trust, then manipulated them through holy war training talk, secretly recorded on conversations to entrap them. However, he admitted that the men were only together once during his involvement, and he never saw emails from them about wanting to kill soldiers.

Defense attorneys said the men never bought weapons or terrorist supplies, never planned an attack, and never carried one out. They merely expressed anger, not terror plans or conspiracy to commit them. But clever prosecutors can intimidate juries to believe it, so innocent Muslims, like the defendants, are easily entrapped, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms, even though there's no plot, no weapons, no crime, nor intention to commit one.

Talk is talk, not a crime, and, in this case and others like it, manipulated to sound incendiary, but that's not proof of intent. No matter, if juries believe it, innocent victims are punished for being Muslims at the wrong time in America.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10:00 AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Stephen Lendman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Stephen Lendman

Her Majesty's Big Brother

Britain's Protesters Rebranded "Domestic Extremists"

By Tom Burghardt
Source: Antifascist Calling...
November 2, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

In "Mind Your Tweets: CIA and European Union Building Social Networking Surveillance System," Antifascist Calling explored the trend by security agencies in Europe and the United States to build political dossiers on dissidents by data mining their electronic communications.

Taking a page from America's political police force, the FBI, the British state is beefing-up an ever-growing watch list of "domestic extremists."

As we know, that trend has taken on a Kafkaesque life of its own here in the heimat. Secrecy News reports that during a Q&A last year with the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told the panel that each day between March 2008 and March 2009, "there were an average of more than 1,600 nominations for inclusion on the [Terrorist] watch list."

With this in mind, The Guardian published a series of extraordinary reports that revealed the mass monitoring of legal political activities by British citizens by the secret state.

Investigative journalists Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor provided chilling details how police and corporate spies "are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases."

Are these activists part of a shadowy network of al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" or environmental saboteurs intent on bringing Britain to its knees by targeting critical infrastructure?

Hardly! According to The Guardian, a "hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor 'domestic extremists'," one that stores this information "on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime."

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the 'terrorism and allied matters' committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100. (Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor, "Police in £9m scheme to log 'domestic extremists'," The Guardian, October 25, 2009)


That's a lot of boodle to spy on antiwar activists, environmentalists, arms' trade opponents and the state's usual suspects--anarchists, socialists and labor militants.

As the journalists point out, the phrase "domestic extremism" is not a lawful term. In fact, the widespread use of the term is a demonstration of how powerful constituencies have perverted law, thus creating their own all-embracing interpretation of the role of protest in a democratic society.

Indeed, senior officers "describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups 'that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process'."

Needless to say, that covers a lot of ground and under these fast and loose standards, it is clear that police intelligence agencies and their political masters are seeking to criminalize long-established forms of citizen action such as demonstrations, sit-ins, public meetings and strikes.

Among the newspaper's revelations we discover that the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), housed at a secret London office, is a giant database of "protest groups and protesters in the country."

NPIOU's brief is "to gather, assess, analyse and disseminate intelligence and information relating to criminal activities in the United Kingdom where there is a threat of crime or to public order which arises from domestic extremism or protest activity".

Chock-a-block with information gathered by Special Branch officers, corporate spies and paid infiltrators attached to the Confidential Intelligence Unit, ACPO's national coordinator Anton Setchell told the publication that intelligence collected in England and Wales is shunted to NPIOU which "can read across" all the forces' intelligence and regurgitate what are called "coherent" assessments.

Additionally, Lewis, Evans and Taylor reported:

• Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras.

• Police surveillance units known as Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and Evidence Gatherers, record footage and take photographs of campaigners as they enter and leave openly advertised public meetings. These images are entered on force-wide databases so that police can chronicle the campaigners' political activities. The information is added to the central NPOIU.

• Surveillance officers are provided with "spotter cards" used to identify the faces of target individuals who police believe are at risk of becoming involved in domestic extremism. Targets include high-profile activists regularly seen taking part in protests. One spotter card, produced by the Met to monitor campaigners against an arms fair, includes a mugshot of the comedian Mark Thomas.

• NPOIU works in tandem with two other little-known Acpo branches, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu), which advises thousands of companies on how to manage political campaigns, and the National Domestic Extremism Team, which pools intelligence gathered by investigations into protesters across the country. (The Guardian, op. cit.)


Why would British police target law-abiding citizens exercising their right to protest the depredations of the capitalist order?

Because they can! With a logic that only a policeman's mother could love, Setchell told The Guardian: "Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police. Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once."

And there you have it: Precrime washes up on Blighty's fabled shores!

Merchants of Death and the Secret State: Best Friends Forever!

As if to underscore the point that the business of government in the UK, in the United States, indeed everywhere, is business, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) "helps police forces, companies, universities and other bodies that are on the receiving end of protest campaigns."

Created by the Home Office in 2004, NETCU's Superintendent Steve Pearl told The Guardian New Labour was "getting really pressurised by big business--pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks--that they were not able to go about their lawful business because of the extreme criminal behaviour of some people within the animal rights movement."

But as with all things relating to "security," once our minders get a taste of what can be gleaned by deploying new technologies, mission creep inevitably follows. Seamlessly traversing the narrow terrain between "animal rights' extremism" and environmental campaigners, Pearl told the newspaper that the Green movement has now been brought "more on their radar."

But greens and antiwar activists aren't the only ones making an appearance in the "domestic extremist" database. What with enterprising capitalist grifters, pardon, defense corporations, making a killing on a planet-wide scale, it should come as no surprise that the scandal-tainted arms manufacturer, BAE, would be keen to get a handle on who might object to their grisly trade.

Indeed, one of the "domestic extremists" listed on the police spotter card as "target X" was in fact "an alleged infiltrator from the arms company BAE."

According to The Guardian Martin Hogbin "was national co-ordinator for the Campaign against the Arms Trade. He was later accused of supplying information to a company linked to BAE's security department, but denied the allegation."

With billions of pounds at stake, Europe's largest arms manufacturer continues to be caught-up in a decades' long bribery scandal that spans continents.

And New Labour under Bush's poodle, former Prime Minister Tony Blair and current PM Gordon Brown, have done everything in their power to suppress BAE's prosecution by Britain's Serious Fraud Office. As the World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this month:

Labour has operated a revolving door between powerful companies, financial consultants and Whitehall, under the guise of bringing entrepreneurial expertise into the civil service, giving the major companies enormous lobbying power. Following pressure from BAE, Rolls Royce and Airbus, the government put a stop to the Export Credit Guarantee Department's attempts to introduce stronger anti-bribery measures. It took a judicial review to get them reinstated.

The late Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, famously wrote in his memoirs, "I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10. Certainly I never knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE." (Jean Shaoul, "Britain: BAE Systems faces prosecution for bribery," World Socialist Web Site, October 5, 2009)


That "revolving door" between the secret state, arms manufacturers and the police campaign against protest is spinning ever faster.

When campaigners from the Smash EDO activist group sought to shut down an arms factory near their home, they were in for a shock.

EDO, an American arms' firm gobbled-up by defense and communications giant ITT Corp. in 2007, reportedly for $1.8 billion according to Washington Technology, pledged to "unite EDO's business with its own sensing and surveillance capabilities."

ITT Corp. ranked No. 11 on the publication's 2009 "Top 100" list of prime federal contractors with some $2.5 billion in total revenue.

ITT is a piece of work itself. According to Anthony Sampson's book The Sovereign State of ITT, one of the first American businessmen to pay homage to Adolf Hitler after the Nazis' 1933 seizure of power was none other than Sosthenses Behn, ITT's powerful CEO.

During the 1970s, the firm funded the far-right newspaper El Mercurio, the CIA's propaganda arm that was instrumental in the overthrow of Chile's democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Documents published by The National Security Archive, revealed the close collaboration between ITT and the CIA "to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende."

But that's all in the past, right? Think again!

Smash EDO avers that "EDO's military products include bomb racks, release clips and arming mechanisms for warplanes. They have contracts with the UK Ministry of 'Defence' and US arms giant Raytheon relating to the release mechanisms of the Paveway bomb system." Needless to say, the firm's "products" have been used in facilitating imperialist massacres of civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One can see why EDO and parent ITT would be keen on gagging protesters who object to war crimes.

The Guardian reports that the firm, with the assistance of "Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden (nicknamed TLC by activists) has been accused of gagging protesters' right to demonstrate. The former Household Cavalry officer's favourite legal weapon is the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act. Numerous companies have hired Lawson-Cruttenden and other City lawyers to injunct protesters under the act, a law originally introduced to protect vulnerable women from stalkers."

Under British law, protesters who defy draconian high court injunctions can be jailed for up to five years if they break the terms of the court orders.

Lawson-Cruttenden, who claims to have influenced the drafting of the law, obtained an injunction against Smash EDO in 2005 after the attorney worked with Sussex police to frame a statement that would be beneficial to his client, EDO, which claimed the demonstrators had been "intimidating and harassing" company employees.

But as documents obtained by The Guardian show, Lawson-Cruttenden "developed extensive links with many of the police forces across England and Wales to assist with the policing of injunctions".

Although a high court judge criticized the attorney for obtaining confidential police material, after being hired by EDO he "continued to acquire secret police papers even though the high court judge in the case had ruled that he was not entitled to them, as they were irrelevant."

Undeterred however, Lawson-Cruttenden obtained assistance from "the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (Netcu) which targets 'domestic extremists'. The head of Netcu, Superintendent Stephen Pearl, has testified for a number of firms which have obtained injunctions."

The Guardian revealed that private emails "show that Inspector Nic Clay and Jim Sheldrake of Netcu gave Lawson-Cruttenden the names and contact details of officers at two other police forces as he was 'keen' to obtain statements about the activities of the campaigners at a third firm."

Pearl denied that NETCU had provided assistance to EDO and told the newspaper: "Let me make this quite clear: Netcu, or me, were not involved in the EDO injunction in any way."

When his mendacious statement was exposed by a close reading of the documents, in an obvious climb-down a NETCU spokesperson claimed there had been a "misunderstanding" and that the unit "had not given evidence for the injunction." Translation: police had "only" leaked the information to a high-priced corporate attorney who did the dirty work.

The firm lost, the injunction was lifted and the company was forced to pay court costs for the Smash EDO protesters.

Despite this minor victory the secret state, fully in cahoots with giant multinational corporations responsible for the current capitalist economic meltdown, endless imperialist wars of conquest and accelerating environmental destruction will continue to index and target citizens who object to capitalism's systemic criminality.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt

Colour-Coded Revolutions

By Andrew Gavin Marshall
November 3, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

Introduction

Following US geo-strategy in what Brzezinski termed the “global Balkans,” the US government has worked closely with major NGOs to “promote democracy” and “freedom” in former Soviet republics, playing a role behind the scenes in fomenting what are termed “colour revolutions,” which install US and Western-friendly puppet leaders to advance the interests of the West, both economically and strategically.

Part 2 of this essay on “The Origins of World War III” analyzes the colour revolutions as being a key stratagem in imposing the US-led New World Order. The “colour revolution” or “soft” revolution strategy is a covert political tactic of expanding NATO and US influence to the borders of Russia and even China; following in line with one of the primary aims of US strategy in the New World Order: to contain China and Russia and prevent the rise of any challenge to US power in the region.

These revolutions are portrayed in the western media as popular democratic revolutions, in which the people of these respective nations demand democratic accountability and governance from their despotic leaders and archaic political systems. However, the reality is far from what this utopian imagery suggests. Western NGOs and media heavily finance and organize opposition groups and protest movements, and in the midst of an election, create a public perception of vote fraud in order to mobilize the mass protest movements to demand “their” candidate be put into power. It just so happens that “their” candidate is always the Western US-favoured candidate, whose campaign is often heavily financed by Washington; and who proposes US-friendly policies and neoliberal economic conditions. In the end, it is the people who lose out, as their genuine hope for change and accountability is denied by the influence the US wields over their political leaders.

The soft revolutions also have the effect of antagonizing China and Russia, specifically, as it places US protectorates on their borders, and drives many of the former Warsaw Pact nations to seek closer political, economic and military cooperation. This then exacerbates tensions between the west and China and Russia; which ultimately leads the world closer to a potential conflict between the two blocs.

Serbia

Serbia experienced its “colour revolution” in October of 2000, which led to the overthrow of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. As the Washington Post reported in December of 2000, from 1999 on, the US undertook a major “electoral strategy” to oust Milosevic, as “U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan "He's Finished," which became the revolution's catchphrase.” Further, according to Michael Dobbs,writing in the Washington Post, some “20 opposition leaders accepted an invitation from the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) in October 1999 to a seminar at the Marriott Hotel in Budapest.”

Interestingly, “Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were aware of CIA activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever it was, they concluded it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).”

The NDI (National Democratic Institute), “worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest.” At the seminar, “the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime.”[1]

As the New York Times revealed, Otpor, the major student opposition group, had a steady flow of money coming from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Congress-funded “democracy promoting” organization. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) gave money to Otpor, as did the International Republican Institute, “another nongovernmental Washington group financed partly by A.I.D.”[2]

Georgia

In 2003, Georgia went through its “Rose Revolution,” which led to the overthrow of president Eduard Shevardnadze, replacing him with Mikhail Saakashvili after the 2004 elections. In a November 2003 article in The Globe and Mail, it was reported that a US based foundation “began laying the brickwork for the toppling of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze,” as funds from his non-profit organization “sent a 31-year-old Tbilisi activist named Giga Bokeria to Serbia to meet with members of the Otpor (Resistance) movement and learn how they used street demonstrations to topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Then, in the summer,” the “foundation paid for a return trip to Georgia by Otpor activists, who ran three-day courses teaching more than 1,000 students how to stage a peaceful revolution.”

This US-based foundation “also funded a popular opposition television station that was crucial in mobilizing support for [the] ‘velvet revolution,’ and [it] reportedly gave financial support to a youth group that led the street protests.” The owner of the foundation “has a warm relationship with Mr. Shevardnadze's chief opponent, Mikhail Saakashvili, a New York-educated lawyer who is expected to win the presidency in an election scheduled for Jan. 4.”

During a press conference a week before his resignation, Mr. Shevardnadze said that the US foundation “is set against the President of Georgia.” Moreover, “Mr. Bokeria, whose Liberty Institute received money from both [the financier’s foundation] and the U.S. government-backed Eurasia Institute, says three other organizations played key roles in Mr. Shevardnadze's downfall: Mr. Saakashvili's National Movement party, the Rustavi-2 television station and Kmara! (Georgian for Enough!), a youth group that declared war on Mr. Shevardnadze [in] April and began a poster and graffiti campaign attacking government corruption.” [3]

The day following the publication of the previously quoted article, the author published another article in the Globe and Mail explaining that the “bloodless revolution” in Georgia “smells more like another victory for the United States over Russia in the post-Cold War international chess game.” The author, Mark MacKinnon, explained that Eduard Shevardnadze’s downfall lied “in the oil under the Caspian Sea, one of the world's few great remaining, relatively unexploited, sources of oil,” as “Georgia and neighbouring Azerbaijan, which borders the Caspian, quickly came to be seen not just as newly independent countries, but as part of an ‘energy corridor’.” Plans were drawn up for a massive “pipeline that would run through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean.” It is worth quoting MacKinnon at length:

When these plans were made, Mr. Shevardnadze was seen as an asset by both Western investors and the U.S. government. His reputation as the man who helped end the Cold War gave investors a sense of confidence in the country, and his stated intention to move Georgia out of Russia's orbit and into Western institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union played well at the U.S. State Department.

The United States quickly moved to embrace Georgia, opening a military base in the country [in 2001] to give Georgian soldiers "anti-terrorist" training. They were the first U.S. troops to set up in a former Soviet republic.

But somewhere along the line, Mr. Shevardnadze reversed course and decided to once more embrace Russia. This summer, Georgia signed a secret 25-year deal to make the Russian energy giant Gazprom its sole supplier of gas. Then it effectively sold the electricity grid to another Russian firm, cutting out AES, the company that the U.S. administration had backed to win the deal. Mr. Shevardnadze attacked AES as "liars and cheats." Both deals dramatically increased Russian influence in Tbilisi.

Following the elections in Georgia, the US-backed and educated Mikhail Saakashvili ascended to the Presidency and “won the day.”[4] This is again an example of the intimate relationship between oil geopolitics and US foreign policy. The colour revolution was vital in pressing US and NATO interests forward in the region; gaining control over Central Asia’s gas reserves and keeping Russia from expanding its influence. This follows directly in line with the US-NATO imperial strategy for the new world order, following the collapse of the USSR. [This strategy is outlined in detail in Part 1 of this essay: An Imperial Strategy for a New World Order: The Origins of World War III].

Ukraine

In 2004, Ukraine went through its “Orange Revolution,” in which opposition and pro-Western leader Viktor Yushchenko became President, defeating Viktor Yanukovych. As the Guardian revealed in 2004, that following the disputed elections (as happens in every “colour revolution”), “the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev,” however, “the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.”

The author, Ian Traynor, explained that, “Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.” Further, “The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO” and the same billionaire financier involved in Georgia’s Rose Revolution. In implementing the regime-change strategy, “The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.”

Traynor continues:

Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.

The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.

The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.

[. . . ] In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.[5]

As an article in the Guardian by Jonathan Steele explained, the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, who disputed the election results, “served as prime minister under the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, and some of his backers are also linked to the brutal industrial clans who manipulated Ukraine's post-Soviet privatization.” He further explained that election rigging is mainly irrelevant, as “The decision to protest appears to depend mainly on realpolitik and whether the challengers or the incumbent are considered more ‘pro-western’ or ‘pro-market’.” In other words, those who support a neoliberal economic agenda will have the support of the US-NATO, as neoliberalism is their established international economic order and advances their interests in the region.

Moreover, “In Ukraine, Yushchenko got the western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him, ranging from the youth organisation, Pora, to various opposition websites. More provocatively, the US and other western embassies paid for exit polls.” This is emblematic of the strategic importance of the Ukraine to the United States, “which refuses to abandon its cold war policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet republic to its side.”[6]

One Guardian commentator pointed out the hypocrisy of western media coverage: “Two million anti-war demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically ignored, but a few tens of thousands in central Kiev are proclaimed to be ‘the people’, while the Ukrainian police, courts and governmental institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression.” It was also explained that, “Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are not shown on our TV screens: if their existence is admitted, Yanukovich supporters are denigrated as having been ‘bussed in’. The demonstrations in favour of Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.”[7]

In 2004, the Associated Press reported that, “The Bush administration has spent more than $65 million in the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders and helping to underwrite an exit poll indicating he won last month's disputed runoff election.” The money, they state, “was funneled through organizations such as the Eurasia Foundation or through groups aligned with Republicans and Democrats that organized election training, with human rights forums or with independent news outlets.” However, even government officials “acknowledge that some of the money helped train groups and individuals opposed to the Russian-backed government candidate.”

The report stated that some major international foundations funded the exit polls, which according to the incumbent leader were “skewed.” These foundations included “The National Endowment for Democracy, which receives its money directly from Congress; the Eurasia Foundation, which receives money from the State Department, and the Renaissance Foundation,” which receives money from the same billionaire financier as well as the US State Department. Since the State Department is involved, that implies that this funding is quite directly enmeshed in US foreign policy strategy. “Other countries involved included Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.” Also involved in funding certain groups and activities in the Ukraine was the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, which was chaired by former Secretary of States Madeline Albright at the time.[8]

Mark Almond wrote for the Guardian in 2004 of the advent of “People Power,” describing it in relation to the situation that was then breaking in the Ukraine, and stated that, “The upheaval in Ukraine is presented as a battle between the people and Soviet-era power structures. The role of western cold war-era agencies is taboo. Poke your nose into the funding of the lavish carnival in Kiev, and the shrieks of rage show that you have touched a neuralgic point of the New World Order.”

Almond elaborated:

"Throughout the 1980s, in the build-up to 1989's velvet revolutions, a small army of volunteers - and, let's be frank, spies - co-operated to promote what became People Power. A network of interlocking foundations and charities mushroomed to organise the logistics of transferring millions of dollars to dissidents. The money came overwhelmingly from Nato states and covert allies such as "neutral" Sweden.

[ ...] The hangover from People Power is shock therapy. Each successive crowd is sold a multimedia vision of Euro-Atlantic prosperity by western-funded "independent" media to get them on the streets. No one dwells on the mass unemployment, rampant insider dealing, growth of organised crime, prostitution and soaring death rates in successful People Power states.

As Almond delicately put it, “People Power is, it turns out, more about closing things than creating an open society. It shuts factories but, worse still, minds. Its advocates demand a free market in everything - except opinion. The current ideology of New World Order ideologues, many of whom are renegade communists, is Market-Leninism - that combination of a dogmatic economic model with Machiavellian methods to grasp the levers of power.”[9]

As Mark MacKinnon reported for the Globe and Mail, Canada, too, supported the efforts of the youth activist group, Pora, in the Ukraine, providing funding for the “people power democracy” movement. As MacKinnon noted, “The Bush administration was particularly keen to see a pro-Western figure as president to ensure control over a key pipeline running from Odessa on the Black Sea to Brody on the Polish border.” However, “The outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, had recently reversed the flow so the pipeline carried Russian crude south instead of helping U.S. producers in the Caspian Sea region ship their product to Europe.” As MacKinnon analyzes, the initial funding from western nations came from Canada, although this was eventually far surpassed in amount by the United States.

Andrew Robinson, Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine at the time, in 2004, “began to organize secret monthly meetings of Western ambassadors, presiding over what he called "donor co-ordination" sessions among 28 countries interested in seeing Mr. Yushchenko succeed. Eventually, he acted as the group's spokesman and became a prominent critic of the Kuchma government's heavy-handed media control.” Canada further “invested in a controversial exit poll, carried out on election day by Ukraine's Razumkov Centre and other groups, that contradicted the official results showing Mr. Yanukovich had won.” Once the new, pro-Western government was in, it “announced its intention to reverse the flow of the Odessa-Brody pipeline.”[10]

Again, this follows the example of Georgia, where several US and NATO interests are met through the success of the “colour revolution”; simultaneously preventing Russian expansion and influence from spreading in the region as well as advancing US and NATO control and influence over the major resources and transport corridors of the region.

Daniel Wolf wrote for the Guardian that, “For most of the people gathered in Kiev's Independence Square, the demonstration felt spontaneous. They had every reason to want to stop the government candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, from coming to power, and they took the chance that was offered to them. But walking through the encampment last December, it was hard to ignore the evidence of meticulous preparation - the soup kitchens and tents for the demonstrators, the slickness of the concert, the professionalism of the TV coverage, the proliferation of the sickly orange logo wherever you looked.” He elaborated, writing, “the events in the square were the result of careful, secret planning by Yushchenko's inner circle over a period of years. The true story of the orange revolution is far more interesting than the fable that has been widely accepted.”

Roman Bessmertny, Yushchenko's campaign manager, two years prior to the 2004 elections, “put as many as 150,000 people through training courses, seminars, practical tuition conducted by legal and media specialists. Some attending these courses were members of election committees at local, regional and national level; others were election monitors, who were not only taught what to watch out for but given camcorders to record it on video. More than 10,000 cameras were distributed, with the aim of recording events at every third polling station.” Ultimately, it was an intricately well-planned public relations media-savvy campaign, orchestrated through heavy financing. Hardly the sporadic “people power” notion applied to the “peaceful coup” in the western media.[11]

The “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan

In 2005, Kyrgyzstan underwent its “Tulip Revolution” in which the incumbent was replaced by the pro-Western candidate through another “popular revolution.” As the New York Times reported in March of 2005, shortly before the March elections, “an opposition newspaper ran photographs of a palatial home under construction for the country's deeply unpopular president, Askar Akayev, helping set off widespread outrage and a popular revolt.” However, this “newspaper was the recipient of United States government grants and was printed on an American government-financed printing press operated by Freedom House, an American organization that describes itself as ’a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world’.”

Moreover, other countries that have “helped underwrite programs to develop democracy and civil society” in Kyrgyzstan were Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. These countries collectively “played a crucial role in preparing the ground for the popular uprising that swept opposition politicians to power.” Money mostly flowed from the United States, in particular, through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as well as through “the Freedom House printing press or Kyrgyz-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a pro-democracy broadcaster.” The National Democratic Institute also played a major financing role, for which one of the chief beneficiaries of their financial aid said, “It would have been absolutely impossible for this to have happened without that help.”

The Times further reported that:

"American money helps finance civil society centers around the country where activists and citizens can meet, receive training, read independent newspapers and even watch CNN or surf the Internet in some. The N.D.I. [National Democratic Institute] alone operates 20 centers that provide news summaries in Russian, Kyrgyz and Uzbek.

The United States sponsors the American University in Kyrgyzstan, whose stated mission is, in part, to promote the development of civil society, and pays for exchange programs that send students and non-governmental organization leaders to the United States. Kyrgyzstan's new prime minister, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was one.

All of that money and manpower gave the coalescing Kyrgyz opposition financing and moral support in recent years, as well as the infrastructure that allowed it to communicate its ideas to the Kyrgyz people."

As for those “who did not read Russian or have access to the newspaper listened to summaries of its articles on Kyrgyz-language Radio Azattyk, the local United States-government financed franchise of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.” Other “independent” media was paid for courtesy of the US State Department.[12]

As the Wall Street Journal revealed prior to the elections, opposition groups, NGOs and “independent” media in Kyrgyzstan were getting financial assistance from Freedom House in the US, as well as the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Journal reported that, “To avoid provoking Russia and violating diplomatic norms, the U.S. can't directly back opposition political parties. But it underwrites a web of influential NGOs whose support of press freedom, the rule of law and clean elections almost inevitably pits them against the entrenched interests of the old autocratic regimes.”

As the Journal further reported, Kyrgyzstan “occupies a strategic location. The U.S. and Russia both have military bases here. The country's five million citizens, mostly Muslim, are sandwiched in a tumultuous neighborhood among oil-rich Kazakhstan, whose regime tolerates little political dissent; dictatorial Uzbekistan, which has clamped down on foreign aid groups and destitute Tajikistan.”

In the country, a main opposition NGO, the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Rights, gets its funding “from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a Washington-based nonprofit funded by the U.S. government, and from USAID.” Other agencies reported to be involved, either through funding or ideological-technical promotion (see: propaganda), are the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Albert Einstein Institute, Freedom House, and the US State Department.[13]

President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan had referred to a “third force” gaining power in his country. The term was borrowed from one of the most prominent US think tanks, as “third force” is:

"... which details how western-backed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can promote regime and policy change all over the world. The formulaic repetition of a third "people power" revolution in the former Soviet Union in just over one year - after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003 and in Ukraine last Christmas - means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of US-backed coups consolidated that country's control over the western hemisphere."

As the Guardian reported:

"Many of the same US government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in eastern Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former US ambassador to Belarus, who boasted in these pages in 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua: "supporting democracy".

Further:

"The case of Freedom House is particularly arresting. Chaired by the former CIA director James Woolsey, Freedom House was a major sponsor of the orange revolution in Ukraine. It set up a printing press in Bishkek in November 2003, which prints 60 opposition journals. Although it is described as an "independent" press, the body that officially owns it is chaired by the bellicose Republican senator John McCain, while the former national security adviser Anthony Lake sits on the board. The US also supports opposition radio and TV."[14]

So again, the same formula was followed in the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. This US foreign-policy strategy of promoting “soft revolution” is managed through a network of American and international NGOs and think tanks. It advances NATO and, in particular, US interests in the region.

Conclusion

The soft revolutions or “colour revolutions” are a key stratagem in the New World Order; advancing, through deceptions and manipulation, the key strategy of containing Russia and controlling key resources. This strategy is critical to understanding the imperialistic nature of the New World Order, especially when it comes to identifying when this strategy is repeated; specifically in relation to the Iranian elections of 2009.

Part 1 of this essay outlined the US-NATO imperial strategy for entering the New World Order, following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. The primary aim was focused on encircling Russia and China and preventing the rise of a new superpower. The US was to act as the imperial hegemon, serving international financial interests in imposing the New World Order. Part 2 outlined the US imperial strategy of using “colour revolutions” to advance its interests in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, following along the overall policy outlined in Part 1, of containing Russia and China from expanding influence and gaining access to key natural resources.

The third and final part to this essay analyzes the nature of the imperial strategy to construct a New World Order, focusing on the increasing conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa; and the potential these conflicts have for starting a new world war with China and Russia. In particular, its focus is within the past few years, and emphasizes the increasing nature of conflict and war in the New World Order. Part 3 looks at the potential for “A New World War for a New World Order.”

Endnotes

[1] Michael Dobbs, U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition. The Washington Post: December 11, 2000: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18395-2000Dec3?language=printer

[2] Roger Cohen, Who Really Brought Down Milosevic? The New York Times: November 26, 2000: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/magazine/who-really-brought-down-milosevic.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

[3] Mark MacKinnon, Georgia revolt carried mark of Soros. The Globe and Mail: November 23, 2003: http://www.markmackinnon.ca/dispatches_georgia3.html

[4] Mark MacKinnon, Politics, pipelines converge in Georgia. The Globe and Mail: November 24, 2003: http://www.markmackinnon.ca/dispatches_georgia2.html

[5] Ian Traynor, US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev. The Guardian: November 26, 2004: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa

[6] Jonathan Steele, Ukraine's postmodern coup d'etat. The Guardian: November 26, 2004: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.comment

[7] John Laughland, The revolution televised. The Guardian: November 27, 2004: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/nov/27/pressandpublishing.comment

[8] Matt Kelley, U.S. money has helped opposition in Ukraine. Associated Press: December 11, 2004: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html

[9] Mark Almond, The price of People Power. The Guardian: December 7, 2004: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/dec/07/ukraine.comment

[10] Mark MacKinnon, Agent orange: Our secret role in Ukraine. The Globe and Mail: April 14, 2007: http://www.markmackinnon.ca/dispatches_ukraine4.html

[11] Daniel Wolf, A 21st century revolt. The Guardian: May 13, 2005: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/13/ukraine.features11

[12] Craig S. Smith, U.S. Helped to Prepare the Way for Kyrgyzstan's Uprising. The New York Times: March 30, 2005: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806E4D9123FF933A05750C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

[13] Philip Shishkin, In Putin's Backyard, Democracy Stirs -- With U.S. Help. The Wall Street Journal: February 25, 2005: http://www.iri.org/newsarchive/2005/2005-02-25-News-WSJ.asp

[14] John Laughland, The mythology of people power. The Guardian: April 1, 2005: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/01/usa.russia

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is currently studying Political Economy and History at Simon Fraser University.


Andrew Gavin Marshall is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Andrew Gavin Marshall

This is Part 2 of the Series, "The Origins of World War III"

Part 1: An Imperial Strategy for a New World Order: The Origins of World War III

War Crimes Multimedia

Carefully Researched Documentary

By Matthias Chang and Christopher Chang
Source: criminalisewar.com
November 2, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

The following video (Part I and II) produced and directed by Matthias Chang and Christopher Chang was shown at the War Crimes Conference & Exhibition that took place at the Putra World Trade Center (PWTC), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from October 28 to 31, 2009. The showing of this outstanding video production preceded the official opening address by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohammed.


Also participating in this event were Cynthia McKinney, Hans von Sponeck, Denis Halliday, George Galloway, Hana Al Bayaty, Dirk Andriensens, among others. Global Research's Director Michel Chossudovsky, who is a member of the Perdana War Crimes Commission, was also present.

The conference was followed by hearings of the War Crimes Commission, in which sworn testimonies by the victims of Abu Ghraib and Guantantamo were presented. These included presentations by former Guantanamo detainees Sami Al Hajj, Maozam Begg,

The mandate of the Perdana Tribunal to Criminalise War, is to examine accusations directed against alleged war criminals, including present and past heads of State and heads of government.

Global Research invites its readers to support the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise the War. You can visit the Foundation's website at http://www.criminalisewar.org/

Global Research, November 1, 2009




War Crimes Multimedia Part 1




War Crimes Multimedia Part 2



Global Research Articles by Matthias Chang

Global Research Articles by Christopher Chang

Destabilizing Baluchistan, Fracturing Pakistan


The Triangle of Jundallah, The Taliban, and Sipah-e-Sahaba

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
November 2, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

“Managed Chaos” is the proper term to describe the tensions in NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan and the border zones of Pakistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are now being described by the Pentagon and NATO as the same front in the very same war, are tied to the Iranian border province of Sistan and Baluchistan or Sistan-Baluchistan. It is with the tenure of George W. Bush Jr. and his administration that Sistan-Baluchistan, with emphases on “Baluchistan” begun getting international attention through the ignition of a series of attacks inside the Iranian border with Pakistan by a group originally calling itself the “Army of God” or Jundallah in Arabic.

One must first take a closer look at Sistan-Baluchistan and the issues being depicted as the source of antagonism there before discussing Jundallah, the nature of its attacks, its source of support, and if the Pakistani government and the Obama Administration have been involved with Jundallah’s attacks.
So, with a purposeful focus on Baluchistan, what is Sistan-Baluchistan and where is it? The Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan, which is located in southeastern Iran, is in fact the blending of two different bodies, one is Sistan and the other is Baluchistan. Both were separate historical entities and Iranian provinces until they were amalgamated into one in 1959 under the reign of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the last shah or monarch of Iran.


Sistan according to some local traditions is the legendary home of the Iranian epic hero Rustam. Sistan is also where Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who is an Iranian, originates from. In ethnic terms the people of Sistan are mostly Persians and Sistani. Sistani is a label that can be used to identify anyone from Sistan, but it also has two other meanings. Sistani in ethnographic terms is used to refer to a sub-population of the Baluch or Baluchi, which are a distinct Iranic ethno-linguistic group. The relationship between the Sistani and the Baluchi almost correlates with the affinities between the Flemish and the Dutch or of those between the Pathans (Pashto of Pakistan) and the Pashto in Afghanistan. What sets the Sistani apart and is a cause for their distinction is geography and, more importantly, the fact that they speak a localized dialect of the Persian language called Sistani.


Moving on, Baluchistan is the other part of the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan. Baluchistan, however, is not limited to Iran and is also a larger region that encompasses southern Afghanistan and a large slice of Pakistani territory. Sistan can also be included or excluded from this broader region of Baluchistan. The coastal region of Makran, which runs through both Iran and Pakistan, is also a sub-region of Baluchistan. Makran is of great geo-strategic importance and is home to the Pakistani port of Gwadar that both the U.S. and China are deeply interested in as an energy terminal and a naval base.


The province of Baluchistan in Pakistan is where the overwhelming majority of the Baluchi live. Pakistani Baluchistan was once mostly populated by Baluch and other relatively indigenous people before British control and later waves of immigration that caused demographic changes. Starting in 1947 the mass immigration of new ethnic groups leaving India for Pakistan because they were Muslims and the conflict in Afghanistan, starting with the 1979 Soviet invasion, also changed Pakistani Baluchistan’s ethnic composition. The Baluchi themselves, however, did not always live in Baluchistan. The Baluchi moved eastward to most of present-day Baluchistan from the Iranian province of Kerman or Kermania (Germania) during the period of Seljuk rule in Iran. The ancestors of the Baluchi also themselves had migrated to Kerman in earlier times.

Is Jundallah fighting for Baluch and Sunni Muslim rights against Persians and Shiite Muslims?


The genesis being presented about the Jundallah attacks in Baluchistan is offered as one that is dual-natured. Firstly the Jundallah attacks are being portrayed as being sparked on the basis of sectarianism and secondly on the basis of ethnicity. In this sense the intermittent attacks and explosions in Baluchistan are presented in the framework of a conflict between a confessional minority versus a confessional majority in Iran and to a lesser extent as an ethnic minority versus an ethnic majority.

One is almost tempted to state that the conflict between Tehran and Jundallah has been portrayed by Jundallah as one between Persians and Baluchi, which to some extent was originally how it was portrayed. In many places the media has framed it as such, along with the sectarian dimension of Sunnis versus Shiites. This is grossly inaccurate. Jundallah’s later attacks were portrayed differently by the group itself, but it should be noted that the statements of Jundallah on its fight have changed too. Jundallah’s attacks became mostly framed as being predominantly against the Iranian central government. The group even changed its name to the “People’s Resistance Movement of Iran” to make it appear as an internal Iranian struggle against the government in Tehran.

As an important side note: albeit Persian is the official language of Iran, Persians are merely a plurality in Iran and it is fundamentally wrong to describe the Iranian attribute as Persian. Iran is not a Persian country as so many authors, journalists, and sadly scholars wrongly state; Iran is an Iranian country and the Persian identity, like Azerbaijani (Azeri/Azari) or Baluchi, is a subsidiary to this Iranian identity as an Iranologist would be able to explain. All Persians are Iranian, but all Iranians are not Persians.


Who are the Baluch?


Simply asked, what are the Baluch? Are they Iranian or not? Do the Baluchi as a whole have aspirations to create “Free Baluchistan” or their own state? Do the Baluchi want independence from Iran as is being reported in the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and several other countries? Once this is answered then Jundallah can be addressed.


Nomenclature is important in regards to understanding not only Baluchistan, but all Eurasia from Lagos to Vladivostok. In categorizing the ethno-linguistic cluster of peoples in the Iranian Plateau, which extends from Iran to Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, one must grasp the understanding that the term Iranian is charged with multiple meanings. Iranian is a national, a linguistic, and an ethnic tag. These matrices can become very confusing when looking at questions concerning this area from an outside view, but yet are essential to understanding the nature of the subject.


Already as it is, ethnicity is a highly confusing topic with both subjective and objective elements. Imagine the confusion that would arise if the term “German” was being used, as it once frequently was, not only to identify German nationality and to designate German ethnicity (which is used to describe a whole people ranging from Germany to Austria and Switzerland), but to identify members of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Germanic includes English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch, amongst other languages. Great confusion would arise from calling these other peoples German on top of their other labels. In regards to Iranian, this is the case. This is also compounded by the careless substitution of Iranian as a designation for Persian or vice-versa, which is similar to the misuse of the terms English and British.

To prevent confusion the term Iranic will be used in preference to the term Iranian in regards to ethno-linguistic designation(s) to help identify the additional attributes of either ethnicity, language, or both. Without turning this discourse into a treatise on language, one may also ask are ethnicity and language linked? Yes and no. Speaking English does not necessarily make one an Anglo-Saxon, just as speaking Spanish or Russian does not make one a member of those ethnic groups either. Ethnicity, however, historically does have a direct correlation with the origins of languages.


Moving forward, the Baluch originate from the area around the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus. Speaking strictly in ethnic terms, the Baluch are an Iranian or Iranic people. They are Iranian or Iranic, regardless of if they live in Iranian Baluchistan or Pakistani Baluchistan or in Afghanistan. Despite their more commonly darker phenotype (appearance) the Baluchi are of the same stock(s) as the Persians and Kurds. They also speak their own language, Baluchi. Baluchi is a Northwestern Iranic language, which is a sub-division of a broader linguistic grouping called Western Iranic. Northwestern Iranic includes Kurdish, the language of the Kurds, and Talysh, a language mostly spoken in the Iranian province of Gilan and in the Republic of Azerbaijan. In turn Western Iranic is part of the larger Iranic branch (or sub-branch, if you consider it one with Indo-Aryan or Indic) of the Indo-European language family, which includes the Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Albanian, and Greek languages.

Persian, the official language of Iran, and Tajik are examples of Southwestern Iranic languages, which also belong to the larger Western Iranic group like both Baluchi and Kurdish. In regards to the Western Iranic languages they evolved from the three main Iranian groups of antiquity that moved into the Iranian Plateau from Europe and/or Central Asia. The Northwestern Iranic group developed from the dialects of the Parthians (who lived in Parthia, which excluding Hyrcania was roughly corresponding to the province of Khorasan) and the Medes (who lived in Media, which roughly covered northwestern Iran and parts of Iraqi Kurdistan), while the Southwestern Iranic group developed from the dialect of the ancient Persians (who lived in Persia/Persis or roughly the modern-day province of Pars/Fars in southwestern Iran). Pashto and Ossetian are respective modern examples of the Eastern Iranic group that also included Scythian, which was once spoken from the Ukraine and Russia to what is now Chinese Turkistan.


Like all other people, the Baluchi are also a mixture of new waves and different stocks of people, including the original Dravidian people who thousands of years ago lived in the Iranian Plateau before they were pushed southward or assimilated by the ancient Iranians as they migrated into Anatolia and the Iranian Plateau during a major period of Indo-European migration. The Brahui in Pakistan, which are closely tied to the Baluchi and very often mistaken for Baluchi, are a surviving remnant of this older Dravidian stock. Arabs and other Semitic peoples, as well as various groups from the littoral of the Indian Ocean, have also mixed with the Baluchi gene pool over time, especially in Makran.

Most the Baluch are also Muslims of the Sunni confession. The confessional difference between the Baluchi and the majority of Iranians has not always existed. It began under the Safavid Dynasty of Iran. During the Safavid period, when most other Iranians became Shiite Muslims, the Baluchi like many of the Kurds maintained their Sunnism. Some of the reasons for this had to do with clan autonomy from the central government and with the fact that these groups were on the frontiers of the Safavid Empire where defensive cooperation with their chieftains was important for the Safavid monarchs and thus they were relatively left undisturbed in regards to their confessions.


Difference of confession between the majority of the Baluch and the Iranian state have not been a major problem for the Baluchi. Nor have the Baluchi been barred from practicing their interpretation of Islam in Iran. In general Baluchi complaints resemble the complaints of Shiites or other ethnic groups, including Persians, against the Iranian government. Moreover, regardless of their ethnicity or their views on Islam, the main localized complaint of the residents of Sistan-Baluchistan has been underdevelopment in their province’s rural areas. In contrast to the pictures being linked to Jundallah, Sistan-Baluchistan has enjoyed peace and stability, except for the narcotic smuggling that has involved transient elements from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Baluchi Independence: Iran’s Problem or Pakistan’s Problem?

Aside from the opium wars between Iranian security forces and a multi-national narcotic smuggling network assisted by vast sections of the security and state apparatus of Pakistan, the greatest source of antagonism in the region of Baluchistan has been specific to the Pakistani side. Although the Baluchi are not a confessional minority in the mostly Sunni Muslim country of Pakistan, the Baluchi have been marginalization in Pakistan. This, however, should not be overstated either, but has resulted in a real and widely supported nationalist and secessionist movement in Pakistani Baluchistan. The Baluchistan Nationalist Party was formed on this basis and has made demands ranging from full independence from Pakistan to more local autonomy.

Baluchi separatism is not a factor in Iran, but it is a real force in Pakistan. The Baluchistan People’s Front, which from Britain claims to represent the Baluchi in Iran also has no real popular base and is propped up by British and American support, whereas the Baluchistan Nationalist Party has a popular base of support in Pakistan. The Baluch feel they were forced to join Pakistan under pressure, especially in the case of the of the Khanate of Kalat (Qalat). Starting in 1948, Pakistan has seen five rounds of ethnic-based fighting in Baluchistan. Since the creation of Pakistan, the independence movement in Pakistani Baluchistan has gone so far as to openly wage war against the Pakistani government and military. This war between Baluchi fighters and the Pakistani military has been neglected by the same journalists and mainstream media outlets that report on Jundallah synonymously with the allegations of the systematic mistreatment of the Baluch in Iran. In this context, Jundallah’s fighters are mostly imported from Pakistan and the problems of the Baluchi with the Pakistani government have deliberately been imported to Iran.

Misleading the World on Baluchistan

Returning to the question; do the Baluchi as a whole have aspirations to create “Free Baluchistan” or their own state? The answer has been given as no in regards to Iran, but a mixed yes when it comes to Baluchi feelings in Pakistan. Nevertheless, these differences amongst the Baluchi in Iran and Pakistan are generalized as one. This generalization is given so as to vindicate Jundallah as a home-grown Iranian movement that germinated out of the conditions on the ground in Iranian Baluchistan without the involvement of any external powers.

World view is categorically being misled on the Jundallah attacks in Baluchistan. The application of Cartesian Doubt is really needed when a discourse on Baluchistan is presented. Ethnic, religious, and sectarian differences do exist in Iranian Baluchistan as they do everywhere else without exception, but they are not major cleavages or forces of tension in multi-ethnic Iran. Any Iranologist or individual that knows Iran first hand will give this assessment. Tension does exist in Sistan-Baluchistan, but to an equal or far lesser extent than the tensions between the French and the Flemish in Belgium or the Québécois and English-Canadians in Canada.


In the onslaught of the media coverage of the series of attacks in Sistan-Baluchistan against Iranian security targets many journalists have presented the conflict as being one between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims and one for Baluchi rights. For example, in the process Le Figaro, an influential French newspaper, has described the situation as one where a Sunni minority is fighting for their rights in the most generic and non-context specific terms. Not only are these reports being made in Lebanon by individuals with little expertise or knowledge about Iran, but misleadingly the small force that is Jundallah and the Baluchi peoples are systematically being equated as one entity. The heavy influence of the same rhetorical tactics used in favour of the March 14 Alliance in Lebanon and used to describe the so-called Shiite-Sunni tensions (which are really political tensions between the Future Movement and Hezbollah) in Lebanon are evident in the reports that are presented by Le Figaro without any real understanding for Baluchistan.


In Saudi Arabia, where sectarian hate has been heavily enforced by the Saudi media, the attacks in Baluchistan are being presented as Sunni Muslims fighting Shiite repression. Another example of misinformation comes from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The BBC has steadily moved to a position where it has described the attacks in Baluchistan as attacks that have been perpetrated by an ethnic militia fighting for minority rights. Furthermore, while the BBC has generally designated other groups using the same tactics as terrorist organizations it has not done so for Jundallah.


Are the narratives behind the attacks in Baluchistan factual, even in the most subjective of terms? No, nothing can be further from the reality of the situation. It is somewhat of a giveaway that none of these reports even dare to venture into the theme of popular support for the Jundallah attacks by the people of Baluchistan. No exhaustive presentation of the Baluch has even been made. None of these reports even mention that many of the people and targets attacked have included Sunni Muslims. Nor is anything mentioned about the evidence Iran has provided to the United Nations, starting in 2007, validating Tehran’s claims of American and British involvement.


Spawn of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI): the Taliban, Sipah-e-Sahaba, and Jundallah


So what is Jundallah? ABC News (“The Secret War Against Iran,” April 3, 2007), based on reports from Pakistani intelligence sources in 2007, identified Jundallah as clearly being Pakistani in origin and American-supported. Iranian officials have also said the group is alien to Iran. In 2007, at the same time information began to emerge that the White House was supporting terrorist organizations and activities against Iran. The Telegraph (“Bush sanctions ‘black ops’ against Iran,” May 7, 2007), amongst numerous other sources, also reported that the U.S. government was funding Jundallah as part of a regime change agenda against Iran, because a war with Iran was not possible at the time. These operations are part of what can be called a “soft war.”

To hide and whitewash Jundallah’s Pakistani origin and its creation as an organization clearly for the purpose of destabilizing the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan, the objectives of Jundallah were finessed to fit an Iranian format. The U.S. and Britain, with Pakistan as their surrogate, also began to realize that the separatist causes and organizations they had been assembling and supporting to destabilize and balkanize Iran were garnishing little support inside Iran or internationally. In an attempt to connect its operations with the broader demands for reform in Iran, Jundallah’s aims started being presented as part of a battle for Baluchi civil rights instead of its previous pretext of fighting Shiite Muslims in a hardcore sectarian war. The organization also changed its name to the People’s Resistance Movement of Iran to distance itself from a separatist identity that the Baluchi in Iran did not support.

There is something fundamentally contradictory between Jundallah’s claims of fighting for Baluchi civil rights and its systematic attacks on civilian targets, which included ethnic Baluch, and public places. A look at Jundallah’s leader also presents contradictions. Abdul-Malak Rigi is a former Taliban fighter and a smuggler involved in the international narcotics drug ring that is active on the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. Rigi a narcotics trafficker with a criminal record has been presented as a political activist in places like the U.S., Britain, and Saudi Arabia. This is highly improbable. Little analysis is made on these linkages.

Jundallah not only has Taliban fighters in its ranks, but also members of Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba. Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba or Sipah-e-Sahaba is a former and small political party in Pakistan that was involved in attacks against Pakistani Shiite Muslims and Christians, but with the main objective of eliminating Shiites. The group shares a lot of ground with the Taliban of pre-2001 Afghanistan in regards to its use of violence, its world-view, and its intolerance against Shiite Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The transfer of Sipah-e-Sahaba fighters into the ranks of Jundallah to attack Iran is not implausible. In fact, the Pakistani government has also admitted that Lashkar-e-Jhangavi, a so-called splinter group that broke from Sipah-e-Sahaba, is part of Jundallah and Jundallah’s attacks on Iran.

Jundallah is a modified face of Sipah-e-Sahaba and the Taliban. The group would not be able to attack the Iranian police, the Iranian border guard, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard without help from the state apparatus of Pakistan or the collusion of the occupying powers in Afghanistan. This is one of the reasons that Jundallah fighters have escaped so easily into Pakistan from the Iranian border without problems with Pakistani security forces and border guards. It must also be mentioned that there are several American bases in Pakistani Baluchistan in close proximity to Iran that Jundallah could be using for support in its cross-border raids of Iran.

The truth behind so-called Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan is mostly linked to a nexus of destabilization, war, and the narcotics trade. The original Taliban (which does not include many of the different groups fighting NATO in Afghanistan), Jundallah, and Sipah-e-Sahaba are all the spawn of the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) in one way or another. All three originate in Pakistan and all of them have the hallmarks of entities created by the ISI. All three are also tied in one form or another to the international narcotics trade of opiates, such as opium and heroin. Narcotics have been involved through drug money with the funding of these organizations, as well as the Pakistani military and the personal wealth of many Pakistani leaders.

The Talibanization of Pakistan, however, is exceptional in regards to being a direct spawn of Pakistani intelligence operations. The new Taliban in Afghanistan and the Tehrik-e-Taliban in Pakistan or the Pakistani Taliban are not like the old pre-2001 Taliban. The motivations and origins for the latter two groups are different. Most the new Taliban in Afghanistan do not share the same ideology as the old Taliban and are fighting against what they see as a foreign invasion of Afghanistan. In regards to the Taliban in Pakistan, in a sense they are the blowback of Pakistani meddling in Afghanistan and a result of the American-led NATO war in Afghanistan. Demands for a united Pashto state are also at play in the formation of the Pakistani Taliban.

Tehran has accused Islamabad several times of supporting Jundallah and operations against Iran. The Iranian government has also demanded that the Pakistani government hand over Rigi for the murder of Iranian citizens and officials, including high ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders. Islamabad denies working with Jundallah. Pakistan has supported Jundallah, but the extent to which it has is not clear. In fairness it must be said that the widespread corruption in the ranks of Pakistan’s security, intelligence, and military forces is another factor at play. Pakistan itself is a victim of the collaboration of its leaders and officials with America and its allies. It can be said that Pakistan is not a state with a military, but a military with a state. A vast mosaic of the Pakistani military and officialdom act on their own and are involved in the international drug industry. These individuals and groups can easily act by themselves and even against Pakistani national interests. It is the U.S. and Britain, however, which have used the corrupt officialdom and state apparatus of Pakistan as an incubator for their geo-political objectives in Eurasia.

The original Taliban and organizations like Jundallah ultimately serve the interests of America and its allies in Eurasia. Pakistan has merely acted as an agent for the interests of America and its allies. This is one of the reasons that the U.S. State Department has never put Islamabad on its list of states sponsoring terrorism even though India and other states have provided strong cases.

Eurasian Geo-Strategy: Why Destabilize Eastern Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan?


A strong, stable, and powerful Pakistan, especially one that would be independent, is not looked at in good terms by the Pentagon and NATO for many reasons. Within an Orwellian framework, Pakistan and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan are deliberately being destabilized while there is talk about stabilizing them. Many Pakistani elites are party to this agenda.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan act as a land bridge between Iran on one side and China and India on another. If Pakistan and Afghanistan were to fall under the orbit of Russia, China, and Iran as the Pentagon and NATO (the Periphery) fear then Central Asia would virtually be encircled and closed off to America and its allies. In addition to Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Republic of Azerbaijan would complete the encirclement of Central Asia and its energy resources. This last point involving Baku, however, depends on the status of the Caspian Sea, which is why Russia and Iran want the Caspian Sea to be closed off and have liberum vetoes over any development in its waters. It is, therefore, through Afghanistan and Pakistan that the U.S. and its allies have a land bridge into Central Asia and the centre of the Eurasian landmass.

The destabilization project in Afghanistan and Pakistan is aimed at specific areas in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, such as political and national unity. Ethnic divisions are being magnified in both. The answers to this come down to the struggle over Eurasia and the encirclement of Russia, China, and Iran. In this context, not only is the securing of energy resources in Central Asia tied to the industrial and economic needs of America and its partners, but also as a means to keep these resources out of the hands of China, Russia, and Iran for use, distribution, or transit. This is why an energy corridor from Turkmenistan to the shores of the Indian Ocean, going through Afghanistan and Pakistan has been an objective of the Pentagon and NATO linked to the issue of energy security.

In regards to strategic energy routes, the Pentagon and NATO see the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) Friendship Pipeline as a threat or rival energy corridor. There is a strong possibility that China could be included in the pipeline or that the pipeline could be just an Iran-Pakistan-China pipeline that would bypass India. This is a threat to American ambitions to contain China y way of controlling its energy supplies. It is also seen as a threat by the Pentagon and NATO because the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia could supply gas to China via Iran and this pipeline. Turkmenistan already has gas pipelines going into Iran. In summary, putting a halt on the IPI Friendship Pipeline is not as important as controlling the energy route and keeping China out of the picture.

Pakistan, as noted, is filled with corrupt leaders. These leaders can easily be bought or switch sides. The fears of the Pentagon and NATO that Islamabad could become a full Chinese client state are driving the project to balkanize Pakistan. The same is true in regards to Afghanistan where NATO and the Pentagon fear that Iran and China could control Afghanistan through spheres of influence that would see a western zone controlled by Tehran and an eastern zone controlled by Beijing. Maps of Pakistan and Afghanistan falling within the geo-political orbit of China have even been produced. Balkanizing these areas makes it much harder for the area to fall under Chinese and Iranian control. Why is this important? The answer goes back to the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan as land bridges between China and Iran. In a balkanized scenario, where Pakistan and Afghanistan have been divided, there would be less of a likelihood that a geo-strategically significant land bridge would manifest between Iran and China. This would further obstruct Eurasian solidarity and cohesion, which is a major aim of the Pentagon and NATO. Out of its own geo-strategic fears India has also made common cause with the U.S. and NATO in this project to prevent the tightening of the embrace and alliance between Beijing and Tehran.

The balkanization of this area would also make it more probable that the energy routes would be controlled by America and its allies via the new and smaller states that may ask for the protection of America and NATO like some of the states of the former Yugoslavia. The balkanization of Pakistan and Afghanistan also would help destabilize the easternmost Iranian provinces, including Sistan-Baluchistan. An independent Pakistani Baluchistan could also be at odds with Tehran over territorial claims to the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan. In addition, an important question is would an independent Baluchistan serve or work against Chinese naval interests in Gwadar. The military infrastructure of the area is already under the control of the American military.

Baluchistan is not only geo-strategically important in regards to Eurasian energy linkages, but is also rich in mineral deposits and energy reserves. In most cases these minerals and energy reserves are all untouched. It would be far easier to procure the mineral and energy resourses of this area from a relatively more lightly populated Baluchistan republic.


Note: The above map shows the the different pipeline routes going through Afghanistan and Pakistan, which could easily include China. The above map was produced by the U.S. government and the following map is a cross-section of an after and before cut-out of the map of the New Middle East presented by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters.



The Return of the Realists in U.S. Foreign Policy: Obama White House involved in Baluchistan?

With the replacement of George W. Bush Jr. with Barack H. Obama Jr. it can heuristically be said that the realists of U.S. foreign policy came back into power, whereas the neo-conservatives or neo-cons were in power in the Bush Jr. Administration. In reality both were involved to different degrees. Conceptually, realists do not believe that there are morals in international relations, just interests. Amongst the realist camp are Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski.

American foreign policy realists are not different in their foreign policy objectives, just different in their methodologies. The use of military force for them is just as important as the neo-cons. The realists are known for negotiating with their geo-political rivals, but covertly work to destabilize rivals. The history of Afghanistan and Brzezinski’s involvement there against the Soviet Union during the Cold War is just one example.

So is the Obama Administration involved in the attacks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard conference in Sistan-Baluchistan? One of the main forces behind the foreign policy of President Obama is Brzezinski, a realist and someone who has talked about Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all becoming destabilized, including in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2007. The concept of a geo-political “black hole” is also his. Also, the Iranian government has categorically stated that the U.S. and Britain where the forces behind the October 18, 2009 attacks on a dialogue amongst Sistan-Baluchistan’s Shiite Muslim and Sunni Muslim leaders sponsored by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Most likely the answer is yes. While the U.S. government is also negotiating with Tehran, America has not ended its covert meddling and destabilization operations against Iran. Barack Obama is continuing the last American administration’s proxy war on Iran from the Iranian border with Iraq to Sistan-Baluchistan.


Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO's Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.


Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a writer specializing in Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs, based in Ottawa. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Related Articles

Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East” (November 18, 2006)

The War in Afghanistan: Drugs, Money Laundering and the Banking System (October 17, 2006)


Global Research Articles by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The CIA Social Networking Surveillance System

Mind Your Tweets

By Tom Burghardt
Source: Antifascist Calling...
October 27, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

That social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and their competitors can facilitate communication and information sharing amongst diverse groups and individuals is by now a cliché.

It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren't tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.

No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a "total information" surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call "actionable intelligence."

Build the Perfect Panopticon, Win Fabulous Prizes!

In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.

Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.

According to Wikileaks, INDECT's "Work package 4" is designed "to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships." Ponder that phrase again: "automatic dossiers."

This isn't the first time that European academics have applied their "knowledge skill sets" to keep the public "safe"--from a meaningful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble, that is.

Last year The Guardian reported that Bath University researchers' Cityware project covertly tracked "tens of thousands of Britons" through the installation of Bluetooth scanners that capture "radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission."

One privacy advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, told The Guardian: "This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control."

Which of course, is precisely the point.

As researchers scramble for a windfall of cash from governments eager to fund these dubious projects, European police and security agencies aren't far behind their FBI and NSA colleagues in the spy game.

The online privacy advocates, Quintessenz, published a series of leaked documents in 2008 that described the network monitoring and data mining suites designed by Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Verint.

The Nokia Siemens Intelligence Platform dubbed "intelligence in a box," integrate tasks generally done by separate security teams and pools the data from sources such as telephone or mobile calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions, insurance records and the like. Call it data mining on steroids.

Ironically enough however, Siemens, the giant German electronics firm was caught up in a global bribery scandal that cost the company some $1.6 billion in fines. Last year, The New York Times described "a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants," and a culture of "entrenched corruption ... at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions."

According to the Times, "at Siemens, bribery was just a line item." Which just goes to show, powering the secret state means never having to say you're sorry!

Social Network Spying, a Growth Industry Fueled by Capitalist Grifters

The trend by security agencies and their corporate partners to spy on their citizens has accelerated greatly in the West since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This multi-billion industry in general, has been a boon for the largest American and European defense corporations. Among the top ten companies listed by Washington Technology in their annual ranking of the "Top 100" prime government contractors, all ten--from Lockheed Martin to Booz Allen Hamilton--earned a combined total of $68 billion in 2008 from defense and related homeland security work for the secret state.

And like Siemens, all ten corporations figure prominently on the Project on Government Oversight's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which tracks "contract fraud, environmental, ethics, and labor violations." Talk about a rigged game!

Designing everything from nuclear missile components to eavesdropping equipment for various government agencies in the United States and abroad, including some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, these firms have moved into manufacturing the hardware and related computer software for social networking surveillance in a big way.

Wired revealed in April that the FBI is routinely monitoring cell phone calls and internet activity during criminal and counterterrorism investigations. The publication posted a series of internal documents that described the Wi-Fi and computer hacking capabilities of the Bureau's Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU).

New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency "is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks."

And just this week in an exclusive report published by the British high-tech publication, The Register, it was revealed that "the government has outsourced parts of its biggest ever mass surveillance project to the disaster-prone IT services giant formerly known as EDS."

That work is being conducted under the auspices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British state's equivalent of America's National Security Agency.

Investigative journalist Chris Williams disclosed that the American computer giant HP, which purchased EDS for some $13.9 billion last year, is "designing and installing the massive computing resources that will be needed to analyse details of who contacts whom, when where and how."

Work at GCHQ in Cheltenham is being carried out under "a secret project called Mastering the Internet." In May, a Home Office document surfaced that "ostensibly sought views on whether ISPs should be forced to gather terabytes of data from their networks on the government's behalf."

The Register reported earlier this year that telecommunications behemoth Detica and U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin were providing GCHQ with data mining software "which searches bulk data, such as communications records, for patterns ... to identify suspects." (For further details see: Antifascist Calling, "Spying in the UK: GCHQ Awards Lockheed Martin £200m Contract, Promises to 'Master the Internet'," May 7, 2009)

It seems however, that INDECT researchers like their GCHQ/NSA kissin' cousins in Britain and the United States, are burrowing ever-deeper into the nuts-and-bolts of electronic social networking and may be on the verge of an Orwellian surveillance "breakthrough."

As New Scientist sagely predicted, the secret state most certainly plans to "harness advances in internet technology--specifically the forthcoming 'semantic web' championed by the web standards organisation W3C--to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."

Profiling Internet Dissent

Pretty alarming, but the devil as they say is in the details and INDECT's release of their "Work package 4" file makes for a very interesting read. And with a title, "XML Data Corpus: Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat," rest assured one must plow through much in the way of geeky gibberish and tech-speak to get to the heartless heart of the matter.

INDECT itself is a rather interesting amalgamation of spooks, cops and academics.

According to their web site, INDECT partners include: the University of Science and Technology, AGH, Poland; Gdansk University of Technology; InnoTech DATA GmbH & Co., Germany; IP Grenoble (Ensimag), France; MSWiA, the General Headquarters of Police, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, Poland; Moviquity, Spain; Products and Systems of Information Technology, PSI, Germany; the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, United Kingdom (hardly slouches when it comes to stitching-up Republicans and other leftist agitators!); Poznan University of Technology; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Wuppertal, Germany; University of York, Great Britain; Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia; X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H, Austria; and finally, the Fachhochschule Technikum, also in Austria.

I don't know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the European Union, ostensible guardians of democracy and human rights, have turned for assistance in their surveillance projects to police and spy outfits from the former Soviet bloc, who after all know a thing or two when it comes to monitoring their citizens.

Right up front, York University's Suresh Manadhar, Ionnis Klapaftis and Shailesh Pandey, the principle authors of the INDECT report, make their intentions clear.

Since "security" as the authors argue, "is becoming a weak point of energy and communications infrastructures, commercial stores, conference centers, airports and sites with high person traffic in general," they aver that "access control and rapid response to potential dangers are properties that every security system for such environments should have."

Does INDECT propose building a just and prosperous global society, thus lessening the potential that terrorist killers or other miscreants will exploit a "target rich environment" that may prove deadly for innocent workers who, after all, were the principle victims of the 2004 and 2007 terrorist outrages in Madrid and London? Hardly.

As with their colleagues across the pond, INDECT is hunting for the ever-elusive technological quick-fix, a high-tech magic bullet. One, I might add, that will deliver neither safety nor security but rather, will constrict the democratic space where social justice movements flourish while furthering the reach of unaccountable security agencies.

The document "describes the first deliverable of the work package which gives an overview about the main methodology and description of the XML data corpus schema and describes the methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat, etc."

The first order of business "is the study and critical review of the annotation schemes employed so far for the development and evaluation of methods for entity resolution, co-reference resolution and entity attributes identification."

In other words, how do present technologic capabilities provide police, security agencies and capitalist grifters with the ability to identify who might be speaking to whom and for what purpose. INDECT proposes to introduce "a new annotation scheme that builds upon the strengths of the current-state-of-the-art," one that "should be extensible and modifiable to the requirements of the project."

Asserting that "an XML data corpus [can be] extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.)," the authors claim they will provide "different entity types according to the requirements of the project. The grouping of all references to an entity together. The relationships between different entities" and finally, "the events in which entities participate."

Why stop there? Why not list the ubiquitous "other" areas of concern to INDECT's secret state partners? While "hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.," may be the ostensible purpose of their "entity attributes identification" project, surely INDECT is well aware that such schemes are just as easily applicable to local citizen groups, socialist and anarchist organizations, or to the innumerable environmental, human rights or consumer campaigners who challenge the dominant free market paradigm of their corporate sponsors.

The authors however, couldn't be bothered by the sinister applications that may be spawned by their research; indeed, they seem quite proud of it.

"The main achievements of this work" they aver, "allows the identification of several types of entities, groups the same references into one class, while at the same time allows the identification of relationships and events."

Indeed, the "inclusion of a multi-layered ontology ensures the consistency of the annotation" and will facilitate in the (near) future, "the use of inference mechanisms such as transitivity to allow the development of search engines that go beyond simple keyword search."

Quite an accomplishment! An enterprising security service or capitalist marketing specialist need only sift through veritable mountains of data available from commercial databases, or mobile calls, tweets, blog posts and internet searches to instantaneously identity "key agitators," to borrow the FBI's very 20th century description of political dissidents; individuals who could be detained or "neutralized" should sterner methods be required.

Indeed, a surveillance scheme such as the one INDECT is building could greatly facilitate--and simplify--the already formidable U.S. "Main Core" database that "reportedly collects and stores--without warrants or court orders--the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security," as investigative journalists Tim Shorrock and Christopher Ketchum revealed in two disturbing reports last year.

The scale of "datasets/annotation schemes" exploited by INDECT is truly breathtaking and include: "Automatic Content Extraction" gleaned from "a variety of sources, such as news, broadcast conversations" that identify "relations between entities, and the events in which these participate."

We next discover what is euphemistically called the "Knowledge Base Population (KBP)," an annotation scheme that "focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE), Location (LOC), Facility (FAC), Geographical/Social/Political (GPE), Vehicle (VEH) and Weapon (WEA)."

How is this accomplished? Why through an exploitation of open source materials of course!

INDECT researchers readily aver that "a snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes is used as the original knowledge source. The document collection consists of newswire articles on the order of 1 million. The reference knowledge base includes hundreds of thousands of entities based on articles from an October 2008 dump of English Wikipedia. The annotation scheme in KBP focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE)."

For what purpose? Mum's the word as far as INDECT is concerned.

Nothing escapes this panoptic eye. Even popular culture and leisure activities fall under the glare of security agencies and their academic partners in the latest iteration of this truly monstrous privacy-killing scheme. Using the movie rental firm Netflix as a model, INDECT cites the firm's "100 million ratings from 480 thousand randomly-chosen, anonymous Netflix customers" as "well-suited" to the INDECT surveillance model.

In conclusion, EU surveillance architects propose a "new annotation & knowledge representation scheme" that "is extensible," one that "allows the addition of new entities, relations, and events, while at the same time avoids duplication and ensures integrity."

Deploying an ontological methodology that exploits currently available data from open source, driftnet surveillance of news, broadcasts, blog entries and search results, and linkages obtained through a perusal of mobile phone records, credit card purchases, medical records, travel itineraries, etc., INDECT claims that in the near future their research will allow "a search engine to go beyond simple keyword queries by exploiting the semantic information and relations within the ontology."

And once the scheme is perfected, "the use of expressive logics ... becomes an enabler for detecting entity relations on the web." Or transform it into an "always-on" spy you carry in your pocket or whenever you switch on your computer.

This is how our minders propose to keep us "safe."

CIA Gets In on the Fun

Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.

In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, "want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates--even check out your book reviews on Amazon."

Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel "is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence"--information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day." Wired reported:

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets," Wired, October 19, 2009)


Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an "early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally," Shachtman points out that "such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters."

According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites "for Dell, AT&T and Verizon." And as an added attraction, "Visible is tracking animal-right activists' online campaigns" against meat processing giant Hormel.

Shachtman reports that "Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field." And why wouldn't they, considering that the heimat security and even spookier black world of the U.S. "intelligence community," is a veritable cash-cow for enterprising corporations eager to do the state's bidding.

In 2008 Wired reports, Visible "teamed-up" with the Washington, DC-based consulting firm "Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others."

According to a blurb on the firm's web site they are in hot-pursuit of "social media engagement specialists" with Defense Department experience and "a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian." Wired reports that Concepts & Strategies "is also looking for an 'information system security engineer' who already has a 'Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph' security clearance."

In such an environment, nothing escapes the secret state's lens. Shachtman reveals that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) "maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites."

In 2007, the Center's director, Doug Naquin, "told an audience of intelligence professionals" that "'we're looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence.... We have groups looking at what they call 'citizens media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there's social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs'."

But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, "even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically 'open source'."

But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans' electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt

Monday, November 09, 2009

War, Negation and Muslim Identity Revisited

By Ramzy Baroud
October 27, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

A Muslim writer begins an article with, “who says the campaign for animal rights was started in the West ..” She goes on to argue that Islam provided the original treatise on the humane treatment of animals. Her case was poorly constructed, inadequately executed, although the essence of her idea was to a degree, accurate. Islamic tradition has indeed laid a foundation, with clear boundaries regarding the humane treatment of animals.

But why did the author, like so many others, choose to turn what should have been a constructive argument, into a diatribe? Was it necessary to charge Western discourses, resorting to the ever predictable classification of “us and them”, instead of trying to find a common cause?

The same point can be made regarding other discussions, whether pertaining to human rights (women’s rights in particular), the environment, labor rights, and many others.

In her defense, Amirah Sulaiman was simply following an existing pattern, commonly used to delineate one’s cultural or religious progression, at the expense of another.

But it’s more than that, it’s also a defense mechanism, a haunting reminder that the alleged civilizational clash, although more imagined and politicized, than real, pervades many aspects of our perception of ourselves and of others.

Among Muslim intellectuals, as in societies, this paradigm is omnipresent.

Cultural animosity, collective defensiveness, racism (and Orientalism), among other overriding cultural trends existed long before distained US foreign policy in the Middle East became the defining norm, before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. But these events emboldened existing arguments on both sides, with Muslims solidifying as a collective victim, and the US, from a Muslim point of view, seen as a vulgar, but true representation of the West.

Of course, Muslims and Islam had their own ominous representations in the US, thus ‘Western’ media, culture and psyche – the dagger wielding bearded man, who abuses women, whenever he takes time away from blowing up infidels. As comical as I intended this to sound, as disturbingly true such a depiction is in the minds of many.

It would be utterly unfair and largely inaccurate to equate the ‘Western’ misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims, with the latter’s misrepresentation of the West. The former approaches its caricatured depiction from a chest thumping, Fox News mentality of militarily powerful and economically stable countries. Its view of the other is largely hegemonic and its standard solution to bringing wars to an end is with military surges and the increasing of military assistance (with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan being the current cases in point.)

Collective Muslim identity however is largely fragmented, between governments that only represent themselves, and peoples facing many forms of oppression: political tyranny at home, external repression (war, foreign interventions, etc), economic uncertainty (fuelled by inequality and compounded by unfiltered globalization), and extremism.

The so-called war on terror, for obvious reasons, cemented that fragmentation. On one hand, it reinforced many Muslims’ growing sense of victimization; a notion that itself resulted in both submissiveness and extremism. On the other it inspired a re-think, positive at times, self-negating at others: it kindled a affirmative sense of identity and pride among a generation desperate to identify itself according to its own priorities and on its own turf, while, on the other hand, it led to a (minor) movement of intellectual migration, which sought in the ‘West’ an escape from the oppressive reality, of which, of course the ‘West’ is equally responsible.

But it was not war alone (and in itself) that shaped Muslim perceptions of the ‘West’; it was rather the US’ and (to lesser extent Britain’s) insistence that their war championed an essentially Western discourse on democracy and human rights. Such arguments took place in an already hostile atmosphere: incessant media and academic mutterings about Islam’s shortcomings, and a growing right wing, racist tendencies in various Western countries targeting immigrants and minorities, many of whom are Muslims.

When such political, military and intellectual encroachment is backed by such statements as that made by US Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Lieutenant General William G. Boykin (now retired), then the plot thickens, and the collective polarization of both societies grows. Boykin, author of “Never Surrender: A Soldier's Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom,” became famous for his infamous quote, several years ago, in reference to a Muslim militant in Mogadishu: “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

This was a lone quotation, of course, in a sea of bigoted references that defined many officials and media pundits during the Bush Administration. Such voices are now, somewhat mute, although, its hard to believe that the advent of President Barack Obama has altered a culture in its entirety.

It takes generations for genuine trust to take hold, and the countdown cannot possibly start as long as one US solider is stationed in a Muslim country for the purpose of conducting war and occupation.

Yet again, there is more to all of this. Reversing intellectual dogmas and collective realizations is too convoluted a process; it requires time, action and good will.

In the meantime, Muslims, who insist on living in the shadow of the ‘West’ as unreserved aficionados or obsessed detractors must redefine their own discourses. As for the latter, they must not allow war alone, MTV consumer media culture, hegemonic globalization and racist remarks by a politician or a born again evangelical to taint their entire view of what are essentially unique, diverse and in many ways impressive civilizations that have done much good. Indeed, there is the like of Boykin, but there are millions of others who are peace-loving, ordinary people, some of whom are ardent advocates of human rights, anti-war campaigners, including the thousands who have repeatedly broken the siege on Gaza, and previous to that Iraq. Muslims too must quit caricaturing them, reducing them to enemies, juxtaposing Muslims’ essential righteousness with ‘Western’ essential depravity. Not only are such reductions inaccurate and self-defeating, they also break down possible alliances between the forces of good in this world, in a time when they are of essence.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London), and his forthcoming book is, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London), now available for pre-orders on Amazon.com.


Ramzy Baroud is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Ramzy Baroud