Seymour Hersh: US Lied About Syrian Chemical Attack Then Bombed Them Anyway

“This was not a chemical weapons strike…That’s a fairy tale… He was told we did not have evidence of Syrian involvement and yet Trump says: ‘Do it’.”

Source: Seymour Hersh: US Lied About Syrian Chemical Attack Then Bombed Them Anyway | Zero Hedge

http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden

Jun 26, 2017

Liberty Blitzkrieg’s Mike Krieger notes that part of Trump’s appeal to many of his voters was, at least ostensibly, the idea that he would employ a less hawkish/neocon foreign policy than his opponent Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton.

While it’s still too early to decisively say that Trump will usher in yet another foreign policy disaster for these United States and the world, it’s certainly not looking good.

The lobbing of tomahawk missiles into Syrian based on the fairytale that Assad launched a chemical weapons attack was the first sign that Trump is easily manipulated and impulsive. In fact, the episode bothered me so much I wrote a post detailing the dire ramifications titled, Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire.  I suggest taking a read if you missed it the first time, it’s my most popular post of the year.

While that was bad enough, Trump’s cozying up to the barbaric, terrorist-supporitng leaders of Saudi Arabia has been by far the most concerning aspect of his foreign policy (if you can call it that) so far. This policy has become even more dangerous now that the 30-year old princeling who is leading the Saudis’ increasingly aggressive stance in the region has been named crown prince. It appears Trump is willing to let the Saudis do whatever they want in the region, which is guaranteed to have disastrous implications for America and the Middle East.

But a new Seymour Hersh article is out showing that the US knew there was no Assad chemical attack in April, but President Trump decided to bomb anyway.

And the details are shocking… as TheAntiMedia.org’s Darius Shahtahmasebi details, never one to accept the U.S. government’s official explanation of events without question, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has investigated Donald Trump’s decision to strike the al-Shayat Airbase in Syria in April of this year, which the president launched amid widespread allegations that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack.

In a report entitled “Trump’s Red Line,” published Sunday in the daily German newspaper Die Welt, Hersh asserts that President Donald Trump ignored important intelligence reports when he made the decision to attack Syria after pictures emerged of dying children in the war-torn country.

For those of us without goldfish memories, Hersh’s recent investigation is reminiscent of his previous examination of the alleged chemical weapons attacks in 2013, detailed in an article entitled “Whose Sarin?” That article was published in the London Review of Books.

The official White House explanation for the events in April of this year was that Donald Trump was moved by the suffering of “beautiful” Syrian babies – the same Syrian babies he doesn’t want to set foot in the United States – and decided to punish the Syrian government for the attack two days after it allegedly occurred. This punishment came in the form of an airstrike despite the lack of a thorough investigation regarding what took place that fateful day in April and who was ultimately culpable (though the Trump administration insisted they were certain that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was to blame).

In that context, it should come as no surprise that Trump acted rashly without consideration of the facts on the ground. However, what is most disturbing about Hersh’s account is the fact that, according to his source, Trump was well aware that the U.S. had no solid intelligence linking the Syrian government to a chemical weapons attack — and that’s because, according to Hersh’s article, it’s doubtful a chemical weapons attack occurred at all.

Hersh reports:

“The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.”

“None of this makes any sense,” one officer reportedly told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb Syria, according to Hersh. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.”

According to Hersh, Trump “could not be swayed” by 48 hours worth of intense briefings and decision-making following the initial reports of the alleged chemical weapons attack. Hersh, who reportedly reviewed transcripts of real-time communications, explains that there is a “total disconnect” between the president and his military advisers and intelligence officials.

As is the case with Syrian military operations, Russia gave the U.S. details of the carefully planned attack on a meeting in Khan Sheikhoun, according to Hersh’s  admittedly anonymous sources. The Russians had employed a drone to the area days before the attack to develop the intelligence necessary to coordinate it.

According to Hersh’s sources, the United States and its Russian counterpart routinely share information regarding planned attacks in order to avoid collisions. However, they also permit “coordination,”  a practice that involves giving the other side a “hot tip about a command and control facility,” which then helps the other side carry out their attack.

Therefore, there was no surprise chemical weapons attack, as the Trump administration alleged. In fact, Russia had actually warned its American counterpart on the off-chance that there were any CIA assets on the ground who should have been forewarned of an impending attack.

“They [the Russians] were playing the game right,” a senior adviser told Hersh.

Hersh continues:

“Russian and Syrian intelligence officials, who coordinate operations closely with the American command posts, made it clear that the planned strike on Khan Sheikhoun was special because of the high-value target. ‘It was a red-hot change. The mission was out of the ordinary – scrub the sked,’ the senior adviser told me. ‘Every operations officer in the region’ – in the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, CIA and NSA – ‘had to know there was something going on. The Russians gave the Syrian Air Force a guided bomb and that was a rarity. They’re skimpy with their guided bombs and rarely share them with the Syrian Air Force. And the Syrians assigned their best pilot to the mission, with the best wingman.’ The advance intelligence on the target, as supplied by the Russians, was given the highest possible score inside the American community.”

Hersh confirms Russia’s account of the incident, in which Russian authorities alleged that the Syrian Air Force bombed a “terrorist warehouse,” and that secondary bombings dispersed dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere.

Strangely, if Hersh’s reporting is accurate, it is not clear why Russia didn’t give the detailed account at the time — and why the Russians didn’t emphasize that they had shared information with the U.S. military well in advance of the attack, as this would have cast further doubt on the official U.S. narrative. In that context, Russia could have provided proof of any prior communications that took place within the so-called deconfliction channel. It also doesn’t explain why Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, appeared to endorse two competing theories behind the events at Khan Sheikhoun.

However, Hersh continues:

“A team from Médecins Sans Frontières, treating victims from Khan Sheikhoun at a clinic 60 miles to the north, reported that ‘eight patients showed symptoms – including constricted pupils, muscle spasms and involuntary defecation – which are consistent with exposure to a neurotoxic agent such as sarin gas or similar compounds.’ MSF also visited other hospitals that had received victims and found that patients there ‘smelled of bleach, suggesting that they had been exposed to chlorine.’ In other words, evidence suggested that there was more than one chemical responsible for the symptoms observed, which would not have been the case if the Syrian Air Force – as opposition activists insisted – had dropped a sarin bomb, which has no percussive or ignition power to trigger secondary explosions. The range of symptoms is, however, consistent with the release of a mixture of chemicals, including chlorine and the organophosphates used in many fertilizers, which can cause neurotoxic effects similar to those of sarin.”

Hersh is not the first high-profile investigator to cast major doubts on the Trump administration’s official narrative regarding the events at Khan Sheikhoun. MIT professor emeritus Theodore Postol, who previously worked as a former scientific advisor to the U.S. military’s Chief of Naval Operations, poked major holes in the claims that the Syrian government had launched a chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhoun, noting the “politicization” of intelligence findings (you can access all of his reports here). Postol argued that there was no possible way U.S. government officials could have been sure Assad was behind the attack before they launched their strike, even though they claimed to be certain. Postol took the conversation even further, asserting that the available evidence pointed to an attack that was executed by individuals on the ground, not from an aircraft. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter had similar concerns regarding the White House’s conclusions, as did former U.K. ambassador to Syria Peter Ford. The mainstream media paid almost zero attention to these reports, a slight that exposes the media’s complicity in allowing these acts of war to go ahead unquestioned.

“This was not a chemical weapons strike,” the adviser said. “That’s a fairy tale. If so, everyone involved in transferring, loading and arming the weapon – you’ve got to make it appear like a regular 500-pound conventional bomb – would be wearing Hazmat protective clothing in case of a leak. There would be very little chance of survival without such gear. Military grade sarin includes additives designed to increase toxicity and lethality. Every batch that comes out is maximized for death. That is why it is made. It is odorless and invisible and death can come within a minute. No cloud. Why produce a weapon that people can run away from?”

According to Hersh’s source, within hours of viewing the footage of the ‘attack’ and its aftermath, Trump ordered his national defense apparatus to plan for retaliation against the Syrian government. Hersh explains that despite the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) having no evidence that Syria even had sarin, let alone that they used it on the battlefield, Trump was not easily persuaded once he had made up his mind.

“Everyone close to him knows his proclivity for acting precipitously when he does not know the facts,” the adviser told Hersh. “He doesn’t read anything and has no real historical knowledge. He wants verbal briefings and photographs. He’s a risk-taker. He can accept the consequences of a bad decision in the business world; he will just lose money. But in our world, lives will be lost and there will be long-term damage to our national security if he guesses wrong. He was told we did not have evidence of Syrian involvement and yet Trump says: ‘Do it.”’ [emphasis added]

At a meeting on April 6, 2017, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump spoke with his national security officials regarding the best way to move forward. The meeting was not to decide what to do, Hersh explains, but how best to do it (and how to keep Trump as happy as possible).

Trump was given four options. The first one was dismissed at the outset because it involved doing nothing. The second one was the one that was decided upon: a minimal show of force (with advance warning to Russia). The third option was the strike package that Obama was unable to implement in 2013 in the face of mounting public opposition and Russia’s threats of intervention. This plan was Hillary Clinton’s ultimate fantasy considering she was encouraging it moments before Trump’s lone strike actually took place. However, this would have involved extensive air strikes on Assad’s airfields and would have drawn in the Russian military to a point of no return. The fourth option involved the direct assassination of the Syrian president by bombing his palaces, as well as his underground bunkers. This was not considered, either.

As we all witnessed in April, the second option was adopted, and the airbase Trump struck was up and running again in less than 24 hours, making it a very symbolic and empty show of force.

Hersh’s insight into the way Trump is conducting his foreign policy does not bode well for the future of the Syrian conflict (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter). Trump was not interested in the intelligence or the facts on the ground — if he had been, he would have waited until an investigation had determined culpability before ordering a strike.

Missing from Hersh’s account, however, is the fact that it was newly appointed national security advisor General H.R. McMaster who laid out the military strike proposals to the president at his resort on April 6. McMaster replaced former national security advisor Michael Flynn after the latter was forced to resign due to leaks from within the intelligence community. Due to Flynn’s alleged ties to Russia, it seems unlikely he would have proposed such a strike on Russia’s close ally to begin with.

It is unclear whether McMaster proposed the strikes in order to appease Trump or because McMaster ultimately wants Trump to adopt a tougher stance against Syria and Russia; McMaster has a history of pro-interventionism and anti-Russian sentiment.

Those commentators who can review these startling revelations but still condone Trump’s actions with a lazy ‘Assad is still a bad guy and must be overthrown’ mindset argument are being intellectually dishonest, with themselves and others. As was the case in 2013, there is still very little evidence that Assad has ever used chemical weapons — particularly in the attacks that the U.S. has tried to pin on him — yet this is the standard by which the corporate media and our respective governments have instructed us to judge Assad. Even without this conclusive evidence, shortly after the April events, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley stated Assad will fall from power.

Hersh’s investigation bolsters many claims that the U.S. acted rashly without first conducting or ordering an impartial inquiry regarding what happened in April of this year. Hersh’s report also serves as a reminder to the world of the warpath we are continuing down, spearheaded by an impulsive and reckless megalomaniac who has no interest in ascertaining fact from fiction.

*  *  *

Liberty Blitzkrieg’s Mike Krieger also notes that just as interesting as the information above, is the fact that Hersh had to turn to a German newspaper to publish it. This makes perfect sense, because the one area where U.S. corporate press maintains unassailable consistency is when it comes to cheerleading for an interventionist, imperial foreign policy based on unverified claims and outright lies. Trump’s little fireworks display checked all those boxes, which is why the corporate media drooled all over the bombing, celebrating Trump for the first time of his Presidency. As Hersh notes:

After the meeting, with the Tomahawks on their way, Trump spoke to the nation from Mar-a-Lago, and accused Assad of using nerve gas to choke out “the lives of helpless men, women and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many … No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”

The next few days were his most successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war.

Trump, who had campaigned as someone who advocated making peace with Assad, was bombing Syria 11 weeks after taking office, and was hailed for doing so by Republicans, Democrats and the media alike. One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word “beautiful” to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.” 

A review of the top 100 American newspapers showed that 39 of them published editorials supporting the bombing in its aftermath, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Which once again goes to show just how worthless, irresponsible and downright dangerous U.S. corporate media really is.

Finally, as Ron Paul rages below, Republicans cannot let go of “regime change” for Syria and new Cold War with Russia — even as the Democrats are starting to back away. Will the mainstream media stick with the narrative as well? Or is it all about to come crashing down?

Elite TV news anchors are gone: hypnotic effect crumbling

Source: Elite TV news anchors are gone: hypnotic effect crumbling « Jon Rappoport’s Blog

jonrappoport.wordpress.com

by Jon Rappoport

June 27, 2017

They’ve punched holes in their own ship.

Elite TV news anchors are gone: hypnotic effect crumbling

The ship is going down

There are many reasons why viewers are deserting mainstream news. This article is about one reason that has been overlooked. One vital reason…

Elite television news anchors are absolutely essential to the hypnotic delivery of fake news. They have always been a mainstay of the mind control operation.

From the early days of television, there has been a parade of anchors/actors with know-how—the right intonation, the right edge of authority, the parental feel, the ability to execute seamless blends from one piece of deception to the next:

John Daly, Douglas Edwards, Ed Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, Water Cronkite, Dan Rather, and more recently, second-stringers—Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Scott Pelley.

They’re all gone.

Now we have Lester Holt, David Muir, and an as-yet unannounced permanent replacement for Scott Pelley. Muir and Holt are decidedly junior varsity; they couldn’t sell water in the desert.

Lester Holt is a cadaverous timid presence on-air, whose major journalistic achievement thus far is interrupting Donald Trump 41 times during a presidential debate; and David Muir has the gravitas of a Sears underwear model.

The network news trance is falling apart.

The networks have no authoritative anchor-fathers waiting in the wings. They don’t breed them and bring them up in the minor leagues anymore.

Instead, armies of little Globalists and ideologues who don’t realize they’re working for the Globalists have been infiltrating the news business. At best, they’re incompetent.

This is one reason why mainstream news has been imploding.

When gross liars don’t have hypnotism, they don’t have anything.

And lately, things have gotten even worse for the mainstream. Their ceaseless attacks on Trump are backfiring. More members of the public are seeing through the puerile throw-ANYTHING-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach; and more important, the style of these attacks is breaking the time-honored rhythms and pace of traditional news presentation, and thus are failing to put the viewing audience into passive brain-states.

Fundamental and tested means for trance-induction are going out the window. When you add in rude and contentious interviews and thinly disguised editorializing by “news reporters” who have no business being within a mile of a broadcast studio, who spout random shots of venom, the news-production techniques that enable an ongoing illusion of oceanic authority collapse like magnetic fields that have been suddenly switched off.

The selective mood lighting, the restful blue colors on the set, the inter-cutting of graphics and B-roll footage, the flawless shifts to reporters in far-flung places…it’s as if all these supporting features have suddenly been overcome by actors in a stage play who are abruptly stepping out of character. The spell is broken.

Humpty-Dumpty is off the wall and lying in pieces on the floor.

Elite mainstream news is committing suicide. And in a fatuous attempt to save themselves, they are trying a democratic approach. Anchors are sharing more on-air minutes with other reporters. But this is counter-productive in the extreme. The News has always meant one face and one authority and one voice and one tying-together of all broadcast elements. It’s as if, in a hypnotherapist’s office, the therapist decides to bring in colleagues to help render the patient into an alpha-state.

Network news executives are clueless. News directors are clueless. The whole lot of them are too young and too foolish to remember what once made news dominate the public mind.

Plus they are swimming in shark-infested waters. The sharks are independent media.

Bottom-line?

This is a cause for celebration.

The movie called fake reality is packaged rolls of footage in the back of a very large truck moving slowly toward a graveyard.

The elite standard has always been: can we hypnotize the viewing audience and keep them hypnotized? And now the answer is leaning further toward NO on both counts.

Information mind control, as delivered by elite television news, depends entirely on the elite anchor. His modulated voice and presence and delivery are the glue that holds the illusion together. If by some miracle, the news bosses could raise Walter Cronkite, “the father of our country,” from the dead and put him back in the chair, they might have an outside chance of re-establishing their dominance. But too many years have gone by; years of unaccomplished anchors. Humpty-Dumpty is in pieces on the floor, the horse is out of the barn, the cat is out of the bag.

This is why major news outlets have been appealing to the new king: social media. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and You Tube are, in various ways, trying to shape the news the public receives and doesn’t receive. But their desperate attempt is failing, too.

It is crashing on the rocks of vast, uneven, open decentralization of information.

One veteran news director told me several years ago, “We’re losing the war. We don’t have the stars [elite anchors] anymore. The star system is dead. The same thing happened to Hollywood. Now it’s happening to us. You could comb all the local news outlets in America, and you wouldn’t find one face and voice who could really carry the freight. They’ve vanished. The up and coming people are lame and weak. We’ve made them that way. It’s some cockeyed standard of equality we’ve internalized. And now we’re paying the price.”

Yes, indeed.

Jon RappoportThe author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Wealth isn’t created at the top, It is merely devoured there: Why Society’s Biggest Freeloaders Are at the Top

We all knew that the greedy ones at the top are mostly worthless parasites that are a drain on the rest of us.

Sample of Useless parasites:

Pics added by Tales

Source: Why Society’s Biggest Freeloaders Are at the Top – Evonomics

evonomics.com

By Rutger Bregman

2017 April 15

No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there.

This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state.

These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have “made it”. By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world.

Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded – the philosophy of the left is that the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise – but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.

So entrenched is this assumption that it’s even embedded in our language. When economists talk about “productivity”, what they really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like “welfare state”, “redistribution” and “solidarity”, we’re implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens – and everybody else.

In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as “successful” and “innovative” are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it’s a non-issue.

Example of parasites

To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.

But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.

For those who know their history, the term “rentier” conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century’s large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty. These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier’s right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you’ll see rentiers everywhere.

There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard. Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass “rent” on their wealth. Even the big innovations of our age – businesses like Facebook and Uber – are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It’s hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled to their wealth.

Another example of blood sucking parasites. Get real jobs ye losers! Stop living off the poor of your land!

It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I’ll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole.

Don’t get me wrong. Banks can help to gauge risks and get money where it is needed, both of which are vital to a well-functioning economy. But consider this: economists tell us that the optimum level of total private-sector debt is 100% of GDP. Based on this equation, if the financial sector only grows, it won’t equal more wealth, but less. So here’s the bad news. In the United Kingdom, private-sector debt is now at 157.5%. In the United States, the figure is 188.8%.

In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It’s not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it’s going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.

The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximising the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.

Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion. Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim, earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell, who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.

But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.

Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer regularly unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we’ve already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.

Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.

Even more important, many of these companies function as “natural monopolies”, operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.

Aptly characterising this “platform capitalism” in an article, Tom Goodwin writes: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”

So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because they’re cool and they’re fun – and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we’re all happy to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook … because their friends are on Facebook.

Most of Mark Zuckerberg’s income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn’t come cheap. Don’t be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it’s an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US.

But don’t Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we’ll all click on more and more ads. Uber has usurped the whole taxi sector just as Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.

Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today’s tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people’s free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their earnings.

This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts. So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?

I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap, or a collateralised debt obligation? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don’t the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?

Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs’ CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. “The world’s most powerful investment bank,” wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs, “is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a “job creator” and an “investor” who “earns” his income by virtue of his high “productivity”. Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.

However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is “doing God’s work”. The Sun King would have approved.

The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We’re all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.

Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it’s in their interest if house prices continue to scale new heights(read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades we’ve all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.

The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.

Don’t get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it’s hard to point fingers at a kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.

So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.

Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It’s no different for the modern rentier. He’s got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That’s why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.

The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society’s best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it’s insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.

One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child’s growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.

What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society’s biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income.

But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in “solidarity” with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society’s strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.

And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners – theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.

Originally published at the Guardian here.

2017 April 15

Order ‘Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World‘ by Rutger Bregman

• Translated from the original Dutch by Elizabeth Manton

Putin: US Routinely Meddles in Russian and Other Nations’ Elections

Source: Putin: US Routinely Meddles in Russian and Other Nations’ Elections

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Eric ZUESSE

19.06.2017

In a Showtime interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American film-maker Oliver Stone, which started airing on June 12^th, Putin called «lies» many of the allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies, to the effect that he or his government attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He also accused the U.S. government of having actually done not only that (influencing other countries’ democratic process), but far more actual meddling in Russian elections, and in the elections in other former Soviet-and-allied countries, and even done it in recent times, and even done it to countries that had never been friendly toward Russia. The way he asserted this accusation was veiled, however, so that he didn’t identify the specific governments he was referring to, otherthan to say: «In 2000, and in 2012, this always happened. But especially aggressively in 2012. I will not go into details.» (This article will supply some of those «details», in what follows.) 

Putin described the current accusations against Russia, by the U.S. government, as a deceitful and fictitious tat, which ignores the very real and longstanding American tit, of CIA and other U.S., meddling in the electoral processes of foreign countries. The neoconservative American Jan Wenner’s Rolling Stone magazine headlined on June 16^th about these Showtime interviews, «10 Most WTF Things We Learned From Oliver Stone’s Putin Interviews», and sub-headlined: «From denying any involvement with U.S. election hacking to Putin’s love of Judo and Stalin, our takeaways from these truly baffling conversations». Wenner’s reporter opened:

What’s the Russian equivalent of Kool-Aid? Whatever it is, it’s definitely red – and Oliver Stone has eagerly drunk it down. The trailers for The Putin Interviews, Showtime’s four-part series documenting a series of conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Stone, would have you believe that you’re going to hear some pretty hard-hitting stuff as the autocrat and the filmmaker face off, Frost-Nixon style. What we got instead was a series of softballs lobbed lovingly in the direction of one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world. Except for a few moments, Stone seems serenely unconcerned with anything beyond flattering his subject – and engaging in some supremely one-sided exchanges about history and policy along the way.

The term «red» in this context refers, of course, to communism, and alleges that Russia is still a communist country. To allow that type of smear to appear in any ‘news’ vehicle, is to expose itself as being actually a propaganda-vehicle, unless the allegation is backed up by solid documentation, which Wenner’s magazine didn’t do — Wenner’s magazine presented no documentation at all, for the inflammatory allegation. The magazine’s presumption was that their readers will simply believe what Wenner’s operation delivers, to be ipso-facto ‘true’. But any such reader would be welcoming his own deception by Wenner’s propaganda-operation. Evidently, successful magazines can insult their own subscribers’ intelligence, so long as it’s done in ‘the right way’ — the subscribers won’t despise the publisher for trying to deceive them about such important matters as what countries to invade, or whether to invade, or why to invade. The U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) can attract cannon-fodder for its operations, by means of such ‘news’ media to produce dupes for that MIC.

During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Mr. Wenner’s propaganda-machine had ardently campaigned for the neoconservative Hillary Clinton against the moderately progressive Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Democratic Party primaries; and, then, once she (and her friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz who ran the Democratic National Committee) managed to steal the nomination from her opponent, Wenner’s operation campaigned for Ms. Clinton against her Republican opponent Trump, who claimed (falsely as it turns out, in lies exceeding Clinton’s own) to be opposed to neoconservatives (whom he has actually loaded into his Administration). Trump now relies upon neocons for his support, but perhaps Wenner and Robert Kagan and other neoconservatives won’t be satisfied until the U.S. government takes control over Russia — which cannot happen except upon all of our dead bodies (WW III) — which is precisely what Hillary Clinton was aiming for (and maybe Trump is, too). That’s how insane the U.S. aristocracy (and its PR organs such as Wenner’s) now is — they’re pushing the world toward nuclear Armageddon.

So, the American system had offered to its public a choice between two neoconservatives, one of whom hid his neoconservatism and won the election but still isn’t sufficiently neoconservative to suit the neoconservatives (such as Wenner).

What, then, about the substance of Putin’s allegation here, that the U.S. government meddles in other nations’ democratic processes?

Here are some prominent examples of that phenomenon:

From the very moment when Barack Obama became the U.S. President on 20 January 2009, the U.S. government was aiming for a ‘revolution’ to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Then, by no later than 2011, the operation was already under way in the U.S. State Department. Furthermore, also by no later than 2011, a parallel operation was under way to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Whereas in Syria it would be ‘freedom fighters’ who would be paid by the Sauds but armed and trained mainly by the U.S., and mainly organized and led by Al Qaeda; in Ukraine it would be ‘Maidan demonstrators’ who would be paid by the U.S., and mainly led and organized by leaders of Ukraine’s existing two racist-facist, or ideologically nazi, political parties, Right Sektor, and the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine (renamed by the CIA as «Svoboda» or «Freedom» Party). 

Furthermore, on 28 June 2009, shortly after Obama became President, a coup by Honduras’s twenty-four richest families overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, who had been trying to institute land reform so that serfdom could become replaced there by a real democracy, but all governments except the U.S. refused to recognize the coup-regime, until first Hillary Clinton and then her boss Barack Obama recognized it and financed it with U.S. taxpayer money so that the international pressure to restore the democratically elected President failed and the junta-regime became stabilized. The U.S. government supported the aristocratic families, and helped them rig an ‘election’ amongst only contenders whom that oligarchy and the U.S. oligarchy supported. Much manipulation of the Honduran ‘news’ media and deceit against the Honduran public were perpetrated by both the U.S. aristocracy and the Honduran aristocracy in order to silence of else kill anyone who would challenge it. Here’s the excellent 3-minute video summary of that; and here’s my article documenting it with 72 links to the sources on that matter.

So: those are three examples of extremely severe «meddling» — Syria, Ukraine, and Honduras — all three of which occurred during Obama’s Presidency (and so we’re not talking here about Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973 or Iraq in 2003 or anything other than the most recent U.S. President). Each and every one of them is vastly more heinous than anything that Putin and Russia did, but Russia isn’t imposing sanctions upon the U.S. Even if all of the U.S. regime’s propaganda against Russia were true, the U.S. regime does vastly more damage to democracy, and to national sovereignty, around the world, than Russia does.

On 14 June 2017, at 2:08 in the afternoon, the U.S. Senate passed, by a vote of 97 to 2 (only Rand Paul and Mike Lee voted against it) an intensification of U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, sanctions that President Obama had first instituted when Russia accepted the petition supported by more than 96% of Crimeans, for Crimea to become again a part of Russia, from which the Soviet dictator Khrushchev had transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 without even consulting the residents there at all. Obama’s brutal coup overthrowing the Ukrainian President for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted is what had sparked Crimeans to seek to become, yet again — as they had been for hundreds of years until 1954 — Russians. For this ‘conquest of land’ as Obama called it, Russia was slapped with sanctions by Obama, and even now increasingly by the U.S. Congress. One of the four co-sponsors of that bill was the ‘progressive’ Democrat, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown. Apparently, corruption (or else one would need to call it simply «evil») is quite bi-partisan. And, given that the vote to increase sanctions was 97 to 2, that corruption (or evil) is almost universal in the U.S. Senate.

This government of the United States became finally entrenched as a facsist regime on 24 February 1990, when the U.S. President, George Herbert Walker Bush, began telling America’s allies, in secret, that, though the Cold War was now ending on the Soviet side, it would be continuing on the U.S. side, until Russia itself is finally conquered by the U.S. What we’re seeing now is an intensification of that aggression by the U.S. government.

The Politics of Terror Mirrors the Politics of Heroin

“Our Western governments tell us  that they’re at war with “Islamic terror”. Yet in the geopolitics of the Middle East our governments align themselves with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – the kingdoms which sponsor “Islamic terror”. Everyone with half a brain knows that Saudi Wahhabism is the mother of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Source: The Politics of Terror Mirrors the Politics of Heroin 

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Aidan O’Brien

June 19, 2017

“The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq…..It’s doubling the bet across the region [and the world]. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down.”

— Martin Indyk (former US ambassador to Israel) 2007

The West’s policies in the Middle East are coming home. Remember the “Vietnamese” heroin that showed up in the body bags at home? Well there’s a lot of body bags at home right now that are full of “Islamic” terrorism. And remember the army that invaded Basra? The British one! Well it’s now on the streets of Britain. And the army that destroyed Libya? The French one! It’s now on the streets of France. Meanwhile in America the US President is fighting the FBI and the US media are begging for a coup. And everywhere in the trans-Atlantic sewer the populists are freaking out the elitists. The Empire of chaos is a structural mess.

It is a case of one contradiction too many. On top of the West’s never ending class wars and imperial wars, the West’s latest “forever and ever war on terror” is a fiasco that has tipped the balance in favour disbelief and dissent. The illegitimacy of this “war on terrorism” points to the illegitimacy of all the structural wars the West is fighting across the planet. It is the domino theory in reverse. One imperial war stops making sense and so all the wars stop making sense (if they ever did). The Western establishment has tied itself in a knot in an attempt to prolong itself. Watch it fall.

Our Western governments tell us  that they’re at war with “Islamic terror”. Yet in the geopolitics of the Middle East our governments align themselves with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – the kingdoms which sponsor “Islamic terror”. Everyone with half a brain knows that Saudi Wahhabism is the mother of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And a half of that half a brain can connect the dots between Western Interests in Arabia and “Islamic terror”. It’s obvious that the West have used and still are using “Islamic terrorism” as a proxy in places like Syria, Libya and Iraq. So when these same “terrorists” pop up in the West and cause mayhem: what the fuck?

Could it be that the West’s terrorists in the Middle East are still working for the West when they bomb and shoot in the West? Could our Western governments be targeting the West?

The House of Saud and the House of Commons as well as the White House  (you can add the Houses of Rothschild and Rockefeller to this list of elite Houses) do nothing without each other. So if a Saudi linked death squad attacks the West: the Western establishment is complicit.

Why? To begin with the House of Saud was a British intelligence asset during World War I – long before Saudi Arabia was born in 1932. The British paid for Saudi head chopping back in the 1920s. And nothing has changed since then. For example, since the Saudi invasion of Yemen in 2015 the UK has sold £3.3 billion worth of military equipment to the Saudis.

The USA joined the Saudi bloodbath in the interwar period. The California -Arabian Standard Oil Company institutionalised this nefarious relationship in the 1930s. And Henry Kissinger cemented it in the 1970s. Oil and petrodollars therefore were the parents of Al-Qaeda. And any jihad since the 1980s has been a happy meeting of CIA and Saudi minds.

This includes ISIS. Seymour Hersh explains the latest US/Saudi cooperation explicitly in his 2007 New Yorker article ‘The Redirection’. After the US lost control of Iraq, Washington DC allowed the Saudis to ‘redirect’ US foreign policy in the region – in an effort to “contain” Iran. The end result was Sunni extremism in Iraq and eventually ISIS. And a US/Saudi 2017 military deal worth $110 billion.

This fundamental link between the Western establishment and Saudi Arabia’s overt and covert terror networks doesn’t categorically connect the West’s governments to the bullets and bombs of ISIS that explode in the West. It doesn’t suggest anything else other than blowback. But a more sinister connection than ‘guilt by association’ comes to the surface if we analyse Western elite behaviour elsewhere. If we widen our perspective and look at the war on drugs and compare it to the war on terror, then what the Western elite are capable of within the West is alarming.

It isn’t just blowback – it’s by design. That’s the lesson of the “war on drugs”. Richard Nixon started this war in 1971. However in 2015, according to RT, the illegal drug market was “bigger than the automotive industry and it’s volume is approaching that of the oil and gas sector“. In his book The CIA As Organised Crime, Douglas Valentine answers the following question:

Ken McCarthy: A member of the Sinaloa cartel, Vicente Zambada-Niebla, is currently in prison in the US “on charges of trafficking more than a billion dollars in cocaine and heroin.” Zambada’s attorney is saying that since the late 1990s, the Sinaloa cartel has provided various US law enforcement agencies with information about the other cartels. They help the US eliminate their rivals and in exchange they’re allowed to import limitless quantities of drugs into the US. Chicago is one of their main drop-off points.

So, Doug, has there ever been a case when the US government through its various law enforcement agencies gave a pass to drug dealers in exchange for something else? How often does it happen and how far back does it go?

Valentine: An old FBN [Federal Bureau of Narcotics] agent, Lenny Schrier, once told me: “The only way you can make cases is if your informant sells dope.” So, yes; not only has it happened, and not only does it still happen, but giving dealers a free pass to deal drugs is the foundation stone upon which federal drug law enforcement is based. Once you realise that, you have to look beyond, at the political and economic context that makes such an extra-legal practice possible…

The point here, is that the “war on drugs” is a contradiction. The official Western attempt to stop the trafficking of drugs is responsible for the proliferation of drugs in the West. Valentine’s point is that politics and economics trumps the law in the “war on drugs”. For political and economic reasons the West and its intelligence agencies (primarily the CIA) allows drug trafficking to flourish.

Maybe the reason is that drug money is a good way to fund a secret war (the Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, for example). Maybe drug money maintains Third World CIA assets (landlords, generals, right-wing politicians, organised criminals – the usual anti-communists). Maybe drugs destabilise and therefore controls a strategic country (Mexico) or a strategic class (the working class and underclass). Or maybe drug money fuels a key part of the economy (the Western banks and corporations). Whatever the political or economic reasons the world’s illegal hard drugs are secretly tolerated and encouraged by the West despite the law.

If this is the reality of the war on drugs: can the same contradiction be found in the war on terror? If we superimpose the war on terror onto Valentine’s description of the war on drugs: will the patterns of one fit into the patterns of the other? In the war on terror does politics and economics trump the law? Is terrorism secretly tolerated and encouraged by the Western powers? According to the UK’s Independent newspaper in November 2016:

“A 650 per cent increase in deaths from terrorism in OECD countries and a marked rise in transnational terrorist attacks means the world is now a yet-more dangerous place in terms of terrorism, according to the IEP [Institute for Economics and Peace].”

Is the war on terror therefore like the war on drugs: does it actually promote what it allegedly is fighting against? The facts suggest that this is the case. Why?

As Valentine argues in relation to the war on drugs: the reasons concern politics and economics. The war on terror which George W. Bush began in the 2000s and which Donald Trump continues today is in fact similar to the war on terror which Ronald Reagan initiated in the 1980s. In short, it’s a hoax. It’s deceitful because to paraphrase Martin Luther King: the USA and the West back in the 1980s was, as it is today in the 2010s, the greatest purveyor of terror in the world. And it is so for political and economic reasons.

Like drugs, terrorism facilitates Western power. If no non-Western military force can compete with the military power of the West, then what scares the West? Why is the West panicking if it dominates the air, sea and land when it comes to conventional warfare? Why? Because that which makes the West nervous is the world’s civilian population. Cue unconventional warfare!

When the US war on drugs began in 1971, the US and it’s allies were producing heroin and killing civilians on a massive scale in South East Asia. A postmodern (anti-modern) partnership was born. A postmodern (two faced) pattern was set. Under the cover of Western self righteousness – drugs and terror became tools of the West. And they’ve been dovetailing each other ever since – targeting civilians all the way.

The template for the West’s postmodern terror onslaught, according to Douglas Valentine, was the Phoenix Program that shaped the underbelly of America’s war in Vietnam. Realising that the civilian population of South Vietnam was it’s real enemy the US – using it’s secret CIA “warriors” – in a very conscious, bureaucratic and bloody way covertly attacked it.

Secret detention centres, torture and executions terrorised the south Vietnamese population in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. Up to 40,000 civilians were killed. And the rest were psyched out with propaganda – if they were not killed by a straightforward bombing raid. In this darkly coordinated approach to disobedient civilians the Western state-mafia found a formula that could be systematically used elsewhere. Like heroin, programmatic terrorism could be exported in a clandestine fashion. And in a massive scale it was.

The Phoenix Program was exported to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. It was called the ‘Salvador Option’ up north and ‘Operation Condor’ down south. And it ripped the guts out of civilian life in Central America and the Southern Cone.

A few hundred thousand executed civilians here and a few hundred thousand butchered civilians there. And, it’s fair to say, every one of the Latin American state terrorists responsible for this systematic killing of civilians passed through the US [Terror] School of the Americas which was located in Panama and now, under the name the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”, is based in Fort Benning, Georgia. And, significantly, all of these terrorists had the political support of Latin America’s Cocaine kings and that ultimate king of war: Henry Kissinger.

At about the same time the CIA was training the mujahideen in the arts of terror and letting them blow secular civilian life in Afghanistan to bits. And so the Phoenix Program slowly made its way back to Asia and the heroin business.

This Western attempt to contain modern civilian life around the world, by throwing hardcore drugs and organised terrorism in the way of social progress, doubled it’s bet – in the 21st century – in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

If the Western 1% or 5% or 10% were to remain sure of their social position in global society, then they needed a countervailing primitive force or forces in the face of modern secular trends. Neoliberal capitalism and all it’s talk of competitive market forces became the primitive mainstream ideology of the 1% – the myth of free market individualism. And as it turned out hardcore drugs and hardcore terrorism covered the social and political backs of this 1% as they globalised themselves.

The catch for the Western 1% was that globalisation implied universalism. In capitalist terms, globalisation weirdly implied global equality or at least a level playing field. The BRICS took advantage of this. And the West hit back with a plethora of excuses to maintain inequality and it’s own privileged access to resources. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations was one excuse. And 911 and the subsequent “war on terror” was another excuse. The bet was that chaos in the heart of the Eurasian continent (think Zbigniew Brzezinski) would divert globalisation back into the familiar ways of Western domination.

However universalism, or the 21st century global civilian, had already bolted from Western parochialism. It was too late to slam the doors of history shut. Hence the need to double the bet against the progressive secular tendencies of the 21st century – the global dimensions of science and technology (reason), and as a result the global (non-Western) dimensions of human society. Feeling unsure of itself the parochial 1% backtracked  away from globalisation and doubled it’s belief in the “Phoenix Program”.

The 1% and it’s allies and tools – NATO, Israel, the Saudis and all their secret services – combined in an attempt to divide and rule the world’s citizens one more time. Strategic cultural and political fractures were exploited in order to engineer social chaos and social reaction. The reason was Western power. And no price was too much for that.

Since World War II, at least, Western governments (the US leading the pack) have had no qualms about working with drug dealers so as to promote their interests. Likewise, since at least the Vietnam War, the West has systematically used for it’s own benefit terrorism and terrorists freely. From Vietnam to the Middle East – via Latin America – even the names of the Western teachers of terror are the same. For example, US colonel James Steele and US diplomat John Negroponte. And hovering above the likes of these are the gods of terror – the CIA, MI6, Mossad, etc. (figures like the ghostly Ted Shackley).

Which brings us back to Saudi Arabia and it’s “free pass” to commit acts of terrorism in what Seymour Hersh calls “The Redirection”. The importance of Saudi Arabia to the financial and petroleum heights of the Western establishment are beyond doubt. So the question now is whether that Saudi free pass extends to Western cities? Are policies like the Salvador Option on the elite table when dealing with Western countries?

If the war on drugs is any guide then Western society is as much a target for a “Phoenix type Program” as any other Third World society. Indeed Douglas Valentine believes that The United States Department of Homeland Security is a direct descendant of the Phoenix Program.

And the bombs and bullets in the streets of Europe? If the black neighbourhoods of Los Angeles could be flooded with drugs with the discreet blessing of a US government which was allegedly fighting a war against drugs: then the working class streets of Europe can be flooded with terrorism with the surreptitious blessing of the Western governments which are allegedly fighting a war against terror.

More articles by:Aidan O’Brien

Aidan O’Brien is a hospital worker in Dublin, Ireland.

In The 1950s The CIA Sprayed A French Town With LSD, Here’s What Happened

Source: In The 1950s The CIA Sprayed A French Town With LSD, Here’s What Happened – Counter Current News

With permission from

countercurrentnews.com

May 6, 2017

Source: Awareness Act

In 1951, a French village suddenly became plagued with hallucinations and mass insanity. For decades, it was assumed that local bread had been poisoned with psychedelic mold, however, it has recently been discovered that instead, the CIA had contaminated the village’s food with LSD.

The discovery was found by writer H.P Albarelli Jr., who published a book on the incident. According to him, the incident was a part of the CIA’s secret mind-control experiments that were conducted by use of drug-grade LSD. The village had long referred to the incident as the mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) and it has continued to haunt the village for quite some time.

 Beginning on August 16, 1951, villagers suddenly began to have strange and horrific hallucinations of snakes, dragons, and fire. Dozens were placed in asylums and hundreds of others were left with various signs and symptoms of madness.

One man, Leon Armunier, who was working that day explained that,
“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he remembers.

It was then that he fell off of his bike and was escorted quickly to a hospital in Avignon. Once he arrived, they placed him in a straight jacket and put him into a room with teenagers that were chained down to their beds.

“Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly… screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down… the noise was terrible.

“I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again.”

Another man attempted to drown himself, due to his beliefs that he was being eaten by snakes. A young adolescent boy tried to murder his grandmother, while another man who believed that he was a plane jumped off a building leading his legs to be broken.

However, it was later decided that a local baker had unfortunately contaminated his bread flour with ergot, which is a hallucinogenic mold that could cause similar symptoms.

Now, over five decades later, H.P Albarelli Jr., has investigated the matter for his book. According to him, the incident had little to do with contaminated bread and more to do with a top-secret mind control experiment conducted by the CIA. His findings are based on a CIA document entitled “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. So Span/France Operation file, inclusion Olson. Intel files. Hand carries to Belin-tell him to see to it that these are buried.”

F. Olson, according to the BBC, was Frank Olson, or a CIA scientist that had led the research for the agency that was looking into LSD. David Bellin worked for the Rockefeller Commission that had been created by the White House in 1975 to look into the various abusive accounts carried out by the CIA.

Furthermore, it is indisputable that the CIA has conducted a variety of LSD involved mind control experiments throughout the world involving Britain, and Korea, while the Cold War tensions were steadily rising.

Albarelli explains in his book “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” that he had spoken to the former coworkers of Frank Olson who had told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was just a part of a variety of mind control experiments that had been carried out by the CIA.

However, what he could not find in his research, was whether or not French authorities were aware of the true nature of the incident. Included in a variety of news reports are requests from French intelligence agencies demanding information from the CIA regarding the statements included in the book. Many others, including those who were affected by the incident, have also requested answers. Charles Granjoh explained to a French magazine that he ‘almost kicked the bucket,’ continuing, he stated, ‘I’d like to know why.’ 

  

by Taboola 

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The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone warns Australia of US nuclear threat

Source: The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone warns Australia of US nuclear threat

http://www.news.com.au

June 16, 2017

Putin Tells Oliver Stone about his NATO Concerns

Charles MirandaNews Corp Australia Network

AUSTRALIA has lost its sovereign identity to the United States with its military ties guaranteeing it will “ride the rockets” with them in the event of a nuclear nightmare, Oscar winning film maker Oliver Stone says.

Speaking on the eve of the release of an extraordinary documentary involving a dozen one-on-one interviews over two years with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Stone said he now feared the world was sleepwalking toward a nuclear war and Australia was in the box seat.

The veteran film maker said from his lengthy in-depth interviews with the Russian leader he saw “from the other side” what the West was preparing and the quiet build-up of weapons guised as “defence shield” missiles made the risk of an accident a real scenario.

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Oliver Stone and Vladimir Putin — ‘The Putin Interviews’. Picture: ShowtimeSource:Supplied

He cited Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, that satirised the Cold War and a wayward US general who orders a first strike nuclear bomb drop on Russia, as a realistic scenario today.

“There is a tremendous amount of confusion right now and we are on the edge of each other, so close, on the borders of NATO that it’s really possible an accident in the Dr Strangelove fashion that could happen,” he told News Corp Australia.

“I do believe that could happen, an accident, and number two is the American policy is ultimately one of looking for a first strike option like they did in the old days of the 1960s, where they talk about taking out the Russian capability first,” Stone said.

Director Oliver Stone clashed with Stephen Colbert in scenes that didn’t make it to air.Source:YouTube

“He (Putin) makes the point that all these countries (like Australia) are vessels or you might even say hostages but they are not allies because the United States listens in on all its allies.”

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The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone warns Australia of US nuclear threat