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U.S. senator McCain pictured with Syrian rebel kidnapper

BEIRUT (Reuters) – U.S. Senator John McCain was photographed during a trip to Syria with a man implicated in the kidnapping by Syrian rebels of 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims a year ago, a Lebanese newspaper said on Thursday.

McCain, a Republican, has been an outspoken advocate for U.S. military aid to the rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad and made a short, highly publicised trip to meet rebel commanders in Syria three days ago.

He has insisted that the United States could locate the “right people” to help among rebel ranks infiltrated with radicalised Islamists.

However, he may have crossed paths with men linked to a group notorious in the region for kidnapping the pilgrims, the Daily Star said.

The paper said that as well as McCain’s photographs with rebel commanders, one image showed the face of Mohammad Nour – identified by two freed hostages as the chief spokesman and photographer for the Northern Storm brigade that kidnapped them.

The image demonstrates the difficulty of identifying who the West might want to deal with and could possibly further inflame the delicate sectarian balance in a conflict that is spilling over Lebanon’s borders.

A spokesman for McCain said none of the people he met identified themselves as Nour and it had not been his intention to meet anyone of that name.

“A number of the Syrians who greeted Senator McCain upon his arrival in Syria asked to take pictures with him, and as always, the senator complied. If the individual photographed with Senator McCain is in fact Mohammad Nour, that is regrettable,” spokesman Brian Rogers said.

“But it would be ludicrous to suggest that the senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible. Senator McCain condemns such heinous actions in the strongest possible terms.”

The hostages were seized in northern Syria as they returned from a pilgrimage in Iran. Lebanese officials flew to Turkey on Thursday in the latest effort to secure the release of the remaining nine hostages.

McCain has denounced Democratic President Barack Obama for shying away from deeper involvement in the conflict. The uprising-turned-civil war has become increasingly bloody and has claimed more than 80,000 in over two years of conflict.

“The senator believes his visit to Syria was critical to supporting the many brave Syrians who are fighting for their lives and the freedom of their country against a brutal regime and its foreign allies that are massacring Syrian citizens on Syrian territory,” the spokesman said.

(Reporting by Erika Solomon; Additional reporting by Alistair Bell; Editing by Alison Williams)

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Government, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Lebanon, Media & Culture, Reactionary Watch, Statements, Syria, U.S. News
Author The Red Phoenix

Syria Endgame Approaching Fast

29 May

by SHAMUS COOKE

The Fate of the Middle East in the Balance

The tempo of events in Syria has accelerated in recent weeks. The government forces have scored significant battlefield victories over the rebels, and this has provoked a mixture of war provocations and peace offers from the U.S. and its anti-Assad allies.

With Obama’s blessing Israel fighter jets recently attacked Syria on three occasions; in one massive air strike on a military installation in Damascus 42 Syrian soldiers were killed. Shortly thereafter Obama finally agreed to a peace conference with Russia, which had been asking for such talks for months.

Obama is entering these talks from a weakened position; the Syrian government is winning the war against the U.S.-backed rebels, and success on the ground is the trump card of any peace talks. Obama and the rebels are in no position to be demanding anything in Syria at the moment.

It’s possible that Obama wants to avoid further humiliation in his Syria meddling by a last minute face-saving “peace” deal. It’s equally likely, however, that these peace talks are a clever diplomatic ruse, with war being the real intention. It’s not uncommon for peace talks to break down and be used as a justification for an intensification of war, since “peace was attempted but failed.”

And Obama has plenty of reasons to pursue more war: he would look incredibly weak and foolish if Syria’s president were to stay in power after Obama’s administration had already announced that Assad’s regime was over and hand picked an alternative government of Syrian exiles that the U.S. — and other U.S. allies — were treating as the “legitimate government of Syria.”

Here’s how the BBC referred to Obama’s Syrian puppet government:

“… the Syrian opposition’s political leadership – which wanders around international capitals attending conferences and making grand speeches – is not leading anyone. It barely has control of the delegates in the room with it, let alone the fighters in the field.”

If an unlikely peace deal is reached, these Syrian exiles — who only a tiny minority of the rebel fighters actually listen to — will be the ones to sign off on the deal.

Many politicians in the U.S. are still clamoring for war in Syria, based on the unproven accusation that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against the rebels. In actuality, however, the UN so far has only indicated that the exact opposite is true: there is significant evidence the U.S.-backed rebels used chemical weapons against the Syrian government:

Of course this fact only made the back pages of the U.S.media, if it appeared at all. Similarly bad news about the U.S.-backed rebels committing large scale ethnic/religious cleansing and numerous human rights violations didn’t manage to make it on to the front pages either. And the numerous terrorist bombings by the U.S.-backed rebels that have indiscriminately killed civilians have likewise been largely ignored by U.S. politicians and the media.

The U.S. position is weakened further by the fact that the majority of the rebel fighters are Islamic extremists, who are fighting for jihad and sharia law, not democracy. The Guardian reported recently:

“Syria’s main armed opposition group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), is losing fighters and capabilities to Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist organization with links to al-Qaida that is emerging as the best-equipped, financed and motivated force fighting Bashar al-Assad’s [Syrian] regime.”

The New York Times adds:

“Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”

But even with all these barriers to the U.S. dictating its terms to the Syrian government, Obama has trump cards of his own: the U.S. and the Israeli military.

It’s possible that the Israeli airstrikes on Syria were used as a bargaining chip with the proposed peace conference in Russia. If Obama threatened to bomb Syria into the Stone Age there is plenty of evidence —Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya — to back up this threat.

Following through with this kind of threat is actually considered intelligent foreign policy to many politicians in the U.S., since a country not aligned with the U.S. will have been weakened and fragmented as an opposing force, lowering the final barrier to war with Iran.

U.S. foreign policy is now completely dependent on using the threat of annihilation. As U.S. economic power has declined in relation to China and other countries, the economic carrot has been tossed aside in favor of the military stick. Plenty of U.S. foreign policy “experts” are demanding that Obama unsheathe the stick again, lest this foundation of U.S. foreign policy be proven to be just talk and no action.

This is the essence of U.S. involvement in Syria, which is risking regional war that could include Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Iran, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia with the potential to drag in the bigger powers connected to these nations, the U.S. and Europe on one hand and Russia and China on the other.

The fate of the already-suffering Middle East is hanging in the balance.

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Categories Afghanistan, Anti-War, China, Colonialism, Government, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Reactionary Watch, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Statements, Syria, Turkey, U.S. Military, U.S. News
Author The Red Phoenix

1 Black Man Is Killed Every 28 Hours by Police or Vigilantes: America Is Perpetually at War with Its Own People

28 May

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Eugene Ivanov

By Adam Hudson

From the war on drugs to the war on terror, law enforcement’s battle against minorities serves as pacification.

Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012 according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report notes that it’s possible that the real number could be much higher.

The report, entitled “Operation Ghetto Storm”, was performed by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an antiracist grassroots activist organization. The organization has chapters in Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, D.C. It has a history of organizing campaigns against police brutality and state repression in black and brown communities. Their study’s sources included police and media reports along with other publicly available information. Last year, the organization published a similar study showing that a black person is killed by security forces every 36 hours. However, this study did not tell the whole story, as it only looked at shootings from January to June 2012. Their latest study is an update of this.

These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass incarceration of nonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the nation’s population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses.

“Operation Ghetto Storm” explains why such killings occur so often. Current practices of institutional racism have roots in the enslavement of black Africans, whose labor was exploited to build the American capitalist economy, and the genocide of Native Americans. The report points out that in order to maintain the systems of racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, the United States maintains a network of “repressive enforcement structures”. These structures include the police, FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is not the only group challenging police violence against African-Americans. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network has been challenging the policy of stop-and-frisk in New York City, in which police officers randomly stop and search individuals for weapons or contraband. African-American and Latino men are disproportionately stopped and harassed by police officers. Most of those stopped (close to 90%) are innocent, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Stop Mass Incarceration also organizes against the War on Drugs and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Along with the rate of extrajudicial killings, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report contains other important findings. Of the 313 killed, 124 (40%) were between 22 and 31 years old, 57 (18%) were between 18 and 21 years old, 54 (17%) were between 32 and 41 years old, 32 (10%) were 42 to 51 years old, 25 (8%) were children younger than 18 years old, 18 (6%) were older than 52, and 3 (1%) were of unknown ages.

A significant portion of those killed, 68 people or 22%, suffered from mental health issues and/or were self-medicated. The study says that “[m]any of them might be alive today if community members trained and committed to humane crisis intervention and mental health treatment had been called, rather than the police.”

43% of the shootings occurred after an incident of racial profiling. This means police saw a person who looked or behaved “suspiciously” largely because of their skin color and attempted to detain the suspect before killing them. Other times, the shootings occurred during a criminal investigation (24%), after 9-1-1 calls from “emotionally disturbed loved ones” (19%) or because of domestic violence (7%), or innocent people were killed for no reason (7%).

Most of the people killed were not armed. According to the report, 136 people or 44%, had no weapon at all the time they were killed by police officers. Another 27% were deaths in which police claimed the suspect had a gun but there was no corroboration to prove this. In addition, 6 people (2%) were alleged to have possessed knives or similar tools. Those who did, in fact, possess guns or knives were 20% (62 people) and 7% (23 people) of the study, respectively.

The report digs into how police justify their shootings. Most police officers, security guards, or vigilantes who extrajudicially killed black people, about 47% (146 of 313), claimed they “felt threatened”, “feared for their life”, or “were forced to shoot to protect themselves or others”. George Zimmerman, the armed self-appointed neighborhood watchman who killed Trayvon Martin last year, claimed exactly this to justify shooting Martin. Other justifications include suspects fleeing (14%), allegedly driving cars toward officers, allegedly reaching for waistbands or lunging, or allegedly pointing a gun at an officer. Only 13% or 42 people fired a weapon “before or during the officer’s arrival”.

Police recruitment, training, policies, and overall racism within society conditions police (and many other people) to assume black people are violent to begin with. This leads to police overacting in situations involving African-American suspects. It also explains why so many police claimed the black suspect “looked suspicious” or “thought they had a gun”. Johannes Mehserle, the white BART police officer who shot and killed 22-year-old Oscar Grant in January 2009, claimed Grant had a gun, even though Grant was subdued to the ground by other officers.

Of the 313 killings, the report found that 275 of them or 88% were cases of excessive force. Only 8% were not considered excessive as they involved cases were suspects shot at, wounded, or killed a police and/or others. Additionally, 4% were situations were the facts surrounding the killing were “unclear or sparsely reported”. The vast majority of the time, police officers, security guards, or armed vigilantes who extrajudicially kill black people escape accountability.

***

Over the past 70 years, the “repressive enforcement structures” described in the report have been used to “wage a grand strategy of ‘domestic’ pacification” to maintain the system through endless “containment campaigns” amounting to “perpetual war”. According to the report, this perpetual war has been called multiple names — the “Cold War”, COINTELPRO, the “War on Drugs, the “War on Gangs”, the “War on Crime”, and now the “War on Terrorism”. This pacification strategy is designed to subjugate oppressed populations and stifle political resistance. In other words, they are wars against domestic marginalized groups. “Extrajudicial killings”, says the report, “are clearly an indispensable tool in the United States government’s pacification pursuits.” It attributes the preponderance of these killings to institutionalized racism and policies within police departments.

Paramilitary police units, known as SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, developed in order to quell black riots in major cities, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, during the 1960s and ’70s. SWAT teams had major shootouts with militant black and left-wing groups, such as the Black Panther Party and Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1969 and 1974, respectively. SWAT teams were only used for high-risk situations, until the War on Drugs began in the 1980s. Now they’re used in raids – a common military tactic – of suspected drug or non-drug offenders’ homes.

The War on Drugs, first declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, was largely a product of U.S. covert operations. Anti-communist counter-revolutionaries, known as the “Contras”, were trained, funded, and largely created by the CIA to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980s. However, the CIA’s funding was not enough. Desperate for money, the Contras needed other funding sources to fight their war against the Sandinistas. The additional dollars came from the drug trade. The late investigative journalist Gary Webb, in 1996, wrote a lengthy series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News, entitled “Dark Alliance”, detailing how the Contras smuggled cocaine from South America to California’s inner cities and used the profits to fund their fight against the Sandinista government. The CIA knew about this but turned a blind eye. The report received a lot of controversy, criticism, and tarnishing of Webb’s journalistic career, which would lead him to commit suicide in 2004. However, subsequent reports from Congressional hearings and other journalists corroborated Webb’s findings.

Moreover, major banks, such as Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) and HSBC have laundered money for drug dealers. Therefore, the very threat that the Drug War claims to eliminate is perpetuated more by the National Security State and Wall Street than by low-level street dealers. But rather than go after the bigger fish, the United States has used the pretext of the “war on drugs” to implement draconian police tactics on marginalized groups, particularly poor black communities.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, which provided civilian police agencies equipment, training, and advising from the military, along with access to military research and facilities. This weakened the line between the military and civilian law enforcement established by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a Reconstruction-era law forbidding military personnel from enforcing domestic laws. Five years later, in 1986, Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 221, which declared drug trafficking a national security threat to the United States. This militarized the U.S. approach to drugs and overall policing. Additionally, the global war on terror and growth of the National Security State expanded this militarization of domestic police under the guise of “fighting terrorism”.

The adoption of military tactics, equipment, training, and weapons leads to law enforcement adopting a war-like mentality. They come to view themselves as soldiers fighting against a foreign enemy rather police protecting a community. Nick Pastore, a former Police Chief of New Haven, Connecticut from 1990 to 1997, turned down military equipment that was offered to him. “I turned it all down, because it feeds a mind-set that you’re not a police officer serving a community, you’re a soldier at war,” he told the New York Times. He said “tough-guy cops” in his department pushed for “bigger and more hardware” and “used to say, ‘It’s a war out there.’” Pastore added, “If you think everyone who uses drugs is the enemy, then you’re more likely to declare war on the people.” Mix this war-like mentality with already existing societal anti-black racism and the result is deadly. Black people, who, by default, are assumed to be criminals because of their skin color, become the victims of routine police violence.

The fact that a black person is killed by a police officer, security guard, or vigilante every 28 hours (or less) is no random act of nature. It is the inevitable result of institutional racism and militaristic tactics and thinking within America’s domestic security apparatus.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Discrimination, Government, History, Imperialism, International, Labor, Nicaragua, Police Brutality, Racism, Reactionary Watch, U.S. News, United States History, Workers Struggle, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Mass graves of Palestinians discovered

28 May

The remains indicate that they were of Palestinians of varied ages ‘killed by Zionist gangs’ in Jaffa

Mass graves have been discovered in the historical cemetery of Al-Kazakhana in Jaffa, Al-Aqsa Foundation for Islamic Endowments and Heritage announced on Monday.

The graves contain the remains of Palestinians killed by Jewish militias in 1948 during the Nakba (Catastrophe). According to the Foundation, they were discovered during routine maintenance and rehabilitation of the cemetery in one of the cities occupied by Israel since 1948.

The Head of the cemetery rehabilitation project, Mohammed al-Ashqar, said that the remains indicate that they were of Palestinians of varied ages “killed by Zionist gangs” in Jaffa. Some of the graves also date back to the Palestinian Uprising of 1936 against British Mandate rule.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Israel, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Statements, U.S. News, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Obama to increase aid to Israel: $4 billion per year beginning 2017

27 May

U.S. President Barack Obama chats with military personnel while viewing an Iron Dome missile battery on March 20 at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport.

Written by Justin Raimondo

The President, on his trip to Israel, presented Netanyahu with a new ten-year aid “package” totaling some $40 billion – a $10 billion increase over the last such agreement.

AntiWar.com - Given the kind of society we have become – a country of whining spoiled brats who have been living above our means for years – every special interest group is up in arms over the alleged tragedy known as Sequestration. While these automatic across-the-board spending cuts are portrayed as nothing less than draconian by various lobbyists and their congressional sock puppets, in reality these are not even real cuts as you and I understand them, but merely cuts in projected spending increases. Like the temperature in Hell, the imperative in Washington is that spending must always increase: “austerity” means the tempo has momentarily slackened.

From military contractors to the academic establishment, all the lobbyists are crying bloody murder: we are told air traffic controllers will be taken off duty, and hospitals are warning of cuts to vital services. Some of these cuts will hit hardest those who can afford it least: the very poorest of the poor. In this atmosphere, one would think a foreign lobby would be more discreet about calling for an exemption in the foreign aid category. However, in the case of AIPAC, the biggest pro-Israel lobby in Washington, subtlety is not at the top of their agenda.

At the beginning of this month, AIPAC’s annual conference featured a Capitol Hill blitz, in which thousands of pro-Israel activists descended on Washington to pressure Congress to exempt Israel from the cuts. This was coupled with a demand that Congress vote to designate the Jewish state a “major strategic ally,” a characterization meant to divorce aid to Israel from the general foreign aid budget and put it in a special category of its own. After all, that’s what the “special relationship” is all about – right?

As Tim Carney points out, the corporate bunch affectionately known as the Military-Industrial Complex have a big stake in all this: two-thirds of the $3.1 billion in annual aid to Israel must be spent in the United States. US arms manufacturers reap the profits, and the Israelis get free stuff. Yet Carney is wrong about whose lobbying efforts make the difference in this case: I don’t think Lockheed-Martin could mobilize thousands of people to descend on Capitol Hill the way AIPAC, or Christians United for Israel, can.

According to Israel Hayom, the most widely read Israeli newspaper, Tel Aviv has already been granted special treatment: instead of the expected 8 percent across the board cut all other federal programs will suffer under sequestration, the Israelis were recently assured by the White House that their share will amount to only 5 percent.

Yet these “cuts” have already been circumvented by the President himself, who, on his trip to Israel, presented Netanyahu with a new ten-year aid “package” totaling some $40 billion– a $10 billion increase over the last such agreement. And since our special alliance with Israel is “eternal,” as the President rhapsodized, this amount will presumably increase unto eternity. Or until the American people put a stop to it – whichever comes first.

It isn’t as if Israel is a poor, struggling, Third World country: its GDP puts it in the top forty richest countries on the world. Israeli propagandists are always boasting about how they’ve made the desert bloom: the endless parading of Israel’s technical achievements, particularly in the booming high tech sector, is a major hasbara theme. Yet somehow a minuscule “cut” in aid – in reality, a cut in the rate of increase – is going to bring about the downfall of the Jewish state? The days when the Israeli settler colony depended on outside assistance for its very survival are well over.

At a time when domestic programs are on the chopping block, why should the Israelis expect – nay, demand – an exemption? Why can’t they suffer the sequestration in silence, and be happy it wasn’t worse for them?

Apparently some in the pro-Israel community have been thinking the same heretical thought, because AIPAC’s aggressive “Israel first” strategy reportedly caused a bit of a stir, prompting fears of a backlash from some. As the Forward reports:

“J Street, the dovish pro-Israel group, immediately understood the implications of AIPAC’s rhetorical shift after getting word of the pitch made by AIPAC members on Capitol Hill. Dylan Williams, J Street’s director of government affairs, told the Forward that ‘it seems a little tone deaf. We have a unique public perception issue.’ He added that congressional aides had told him they were ‘surprised that some groups – that people from AIPAC – were asking for this.’”

Seen in the larger context of the administration’s ongoing feud with Tel Aviv – from Netanyahu’s informal endorsement of Mitt Romney to the fight over Chuck Hagel – AIPAC’s chutzpah shouldn’t be at all surprising. In the world of Washington lobbyists, it’s all about power – having it, keeping it, and using it. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

It is vitally necessary for the Israel Lobby to tamp down dangerous talk that they’re losing it, because fear is their greatest weapon. The fear they strike in the hearts of politicians who don’t want to wind up like many of the other legislators who thought they could escape the Lobby’s wrath – and soon learned otherwise. It’s much easier to give in to the Lobby’s demands than go the way of Senators Chuck Percy, William Fulbright, and Roger Jepsen, all three felled by Lobby-coordinated campaigns. Congressmen Paul Findley, Earl F. Hilliard, and Pete McCloskey are among the scalps the Lobby can rightfully claim. And while their smear campaign against Hagel didn’t succeed in stopping his confirmation as Secretary of Defense, it was a useful exercise in that it serves as a warning to others who might be thinking of straying off the reservation: Don’t go there!

J Street issued a statement soon after AIPAC’s assault on Capitol Hill, denouncing any effort to separate out aid to Israel from the requirements of sequestration as appearing to put Israel’s demands “above those of the millions of ordinary Americans who are being hurt, or the vital domestic programs that are taking a hit.” While this may be true, J Street is rather missing the point. To wrest an exemption granted to no others is precisely the demonstrative way in which AIPAC needs to flex its lobbying muscles. Isn’t this what the “special relationship” is all about? As Ayn Rand put it, “Love is exception-making,” and the romantic relationship between the US and Israel, whatever its ups and downs, continues unabated in Washington.

Out in the sticks, however – i.e. outside the Beltway – this exception-making for Israel is not all that popular, as J Street rightly worries. The problem, however, is that the American people have very little to say about it – and don’t know about it, in any case. As long as the political class lives in fear of the Lobby, our annual tribute to Israel will be paid in full – yes, even before we feed our own people. Because that’s what love is all about.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Economy, Government, Health Care, Imperialism, International, Israel, Labor, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Statements, U.S. Military, U.S. News, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Undercover police cleared ‘to have sex with activists’

25 May

Mark Kennedy had sexual relationships with several women while serving as an undercover policeman and infiltrating a ring of environmental activists

Undercover police officers routinely adopted a tactic of “promiscuity” with the blessing of senior commanders, according to a former agent who worked in a secretive unit of the Metropolitan police for four years.

The former undercover policeman claims that sexual relationships with activists were sanctioned for both men and women officers infiltrating anarchist, leftwing and environmental groups.

Sex was a tool to help officers blend in, the officer claimed, and was widely used as a technique to glean intelligence. His comments contradict claims last week from the Association of Chief Police Officers that operatives were absolutely forbidden to sleep with activists.

The one stipulation, according to the officer from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a secret unit formed to prevent violent disorder on the streets of London, was that falling in love was considered highly unprofessional because it might compromise an investigation. He said undercover officers, particularly those infiltrating environmental and leftwing groups, viewed having sex with a large number of partners “as part of the job”.

“Everybody knew it was a very promiscuous lifestyle,” said the former officer, who first revealed his life as an undercover agent to the Observer last year. “You cannot not be promiscuous in those groups. Otherwise you’ll stand out straightaway.”

The claims follow the unmasking of undercover PC Mark Kennedy, who had sexual relationships with several women during the seven years he spent infiltrating a ring of environmental activists. Another two covert officers have been named in the past fortnight who also had sex with the protesters they were sent to spy on, fuelling allegations that senior officers had authorised sleeping around as a legitimate means of gathering intelligence.

However Jon Murphy, Acpo’s spokesman on serious and organised crime, said last week that undercover officers were not permitted “under any circumstances” to sleep with protesters.

He added: “It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do.”

Mounting anger among women protesters will see female activists converge on Scotland Yard tomorrow to demand that the Met disclose the true extent of undercover policing. The demonstration is also, according to organisers, designed to express “solidarity with all the women who have been exploited by men they thought they could trust”.

Climate campaigner Sophie Stephens, 27, who knew Kennedy, said there was fury among women who felt violated by the state: “We know women have been abused by men posing as policemen and it’s becoming clear this was state-sanctioned. These women did not know they were forming a relationship with policemen. It’s appalling – and now we want the full details of the undercover officers to be made public.”

The protest will be followed on Tuesday by the appearance before the Commons home affairs select committee of the acting Met commissioner, Tim Godwin, and Commander Bob Broadhurst, who is responsible for public order in the capital. Both will be asked to explain why Scotland Yard gave false information over the use of covert operatives during the London G20 protests in 2009. The issue of sexual activity by operatives is also likely to be brought up.

The former SDS officer claims a lack of guidelines meant sex was an ideal way to maintain cover. He admitted sleeping with at least two of his female targets as a way of obtaining intelligence.

“When you are on an undercover unit you were not given a set of instructions saying you could or couldn’t do the following. They didn’t say to you that you couldn’t go out and drink because technically you’re a police officer, that you shouldn’t go out and get involved in violent confrontations, you shouldn’t take recreational drugs.

“As regards being with women in very, very, very promiscuous groups such as the eco-wing, environmental movement, leftwing, or the Animal Liberation Front – it’s an extremely promiscuous lifestyle and you cannot not be promiscuous in there.

“Among fellow undercover officers, there is not really any kudos in the fact that you are shagging other people while deployed. Basically it’s just regarded as part of the job. It’d be highly unlikely that you were not [having sex].

“When you are using the tool of sex to maintain your cover or maybe to glean more intelligence – because they certainly talk a lot more, pillow talk – you would be ready to move on if you felt an attachment growing.

“The best way of stopping any liaison getting too heavy was to shag somebody else. It’s amazing how women don’t like you going to bed with someone else,” said the officer, whose undercover deployment infiltrating anti-racist groups lasted from 1993 to 1997. Two years later the SDS became the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, the secretive organisation that employed Kennedy and whose activities are the subject of three investigations.

The officer added that undercover police were strictly encouraged not to form a bond with women they were sleeping with and said that he knew Jim Boyling, the undercover officer who married an activist he was supposed to be spying upon.

Boyling, a specialist operations detective constable with the Met, was suspended on Friday pending an investigation into his professional conduct.

The former SDS officer, who has now left the Met, said one stipulation by senior commanders was that undercover officers should be married, so that they had something to return to. He said the move was introduced when a spy never returned after five years undercover.

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US government admits to killing four American citizens with drones

24 May

United States Attorney General Eric Holder has informed Congress that four American citizens have been killed in Yemen and Pakistan by US drones since 2009.

It has been widely reported but rarely acknowledged in Washington that three US citizens — Samir Khan, Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki — were executed in Yemen by missile-equipped drones in 2011. With Holder’s latest admission, however, a fourth American — Jude Kenan Mohammed — has also been officially named as another casualty in America’s continuing drone war.

“Since 2009, the United States, in the conduct of US counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki,” the letter reads in part. “The United States is further aware of three other US citizens who have been killed in such US counterterrorism operations over that same time period,” Holder said before naming the other victims.

“These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States,” the attorney general wrote.

The news of the admission broke Wednesday afternoon when New York Times reporter Charlie Savage published the letter sent from Holder to congressional leaders in a clear attempt to counter critics who have challenged the White House for falling short of US President Barack Obama’s campaign plans of utmost transparency. Upon a growing number of executive branch scandals worsened by the Department of Justice’s recently disclosed investigation of Associated Press journalists, Holder wrote that coming clean is an effort to include the American public in a discussion all too often conducted in the shadows cast by the US intelligence community.

“The administration is determined to continue these extensive outreach efforts to communicate with the American people,” continued Holder. “To this end, the president has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified. You and other members of your committee have on numerous occasions expressed a particular interest in the administration’s use of lethal force against US citizens. In light of this fact, I am writing to disclose to you certain information about the number of US citizens who have been killed by US counterterrorism operations outside of areas of active hostilities.”

The letter, dated Wednesday, May 22, was addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Drone strikes have become a signature counterterrorism tool used by the Obama administration and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and have been attributed with killing roughly 5,000 persons abroad, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). But under the covert and protective umbrella of the Central Intelligence Agency, little has been formally acknowledged from Washington as to the details of these strikes.

As part of the vaguely defined ‘War on Terror,’ the US has reportedly waged drone strikes outside of Afghanistan where the Taliban once harbored al-Qaeda. In recent years, those strikes have targeted towns in neighboring Pakistan, as well as Yemen, Somalia and perhaps elsewhere.

But despite growing criticism over escalating use of drones, the president and his office has remained adamant about defending the operations.

“It’s important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash,” Obama said last January, adding that his administration does not conduct “a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly.”

Others have argued quite the opposite, though, and have opposed these drone strikes over the lack of due process involved and the habit of accidently executing civilians in the strikes. When researchers at Stanford University and New York University published their ‘Living Under Drones’ report last September, they found that roughly 2 percent of drone casualties are of top militant leaders. The Pakistani Interior Minister has said that around 80 percent of drone deaths in his country were suffered by civilians.

Earlier this year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) led a marathon filibuster on the floor of Congress to oppose the CIA’s drone program and demand the administration explain to elected lawmakers why the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is warranted in executing suspects, often killing innocent civilians as a result.

Of particular concern, Paul said, was whether or not the Obama administration would use the 2011 Yemen strike as justification to kill American citizens within the US. For 13 hours, he demanded the White House respond.

“I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the CIA,” Sen. Paul said. “I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

One day after the filibuster, both Attorney General Holder and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney reached out to Sen. Paul to say the president lacks the authority to issue such a strike within the US. With this week’s letter, however, Holder admits that at least four Americans have met their demise due to US drones. He also explains why the administration felt justified in using UAVs to execute its own people.

“Al-Awlaki repeatedly made clear his intent to attack US persons and his hope that these attacks would take American lives,” wrote Holder. “Based on this information, high-level US government officials appropriately concluded that al-Awlaki posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.”

Later, Holder says the decision to strike al-Awlaki was “not taken lightly” and was first put into plan in early 2010. Additionally, Holder said the plan was “subjected to exceptionally rigorous interagency legal review” and that Justice Department lawyers and attorneys for other agencies agreed that it was the appropriate action to take.

According to Holder, the senior al-Awlaki and Mr. Khan were killed in the same September 2011 drone strike in Yemen. The following month, 16-year-old Abdulrahman Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed in a strike in the same country. Mohammed, a North Carolina resident born in 1988, was killed by a drone likely in November 2011 within a tribal area of Pakistan. Mohammed was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2009 for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons in a foreign country, and was considered armed and dangerous by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both Khan and the older al-Awlaki were suspected members of al-Qaeda and were affiliated with the group’s magazine, Inspire.

Last February, friends of Mohammad told a North Carolina newspaper that they believed he was dead.

“Farhan Mohammed says he heard in November that his friend was killed in a drone strike,” Raleigh’s WRAL News reported in 2012. “Jude Mohammad’s pregnant wife was hysterical about her husband’s death and called her mother-in-law in the Triangle to break the news, according to Sabra. The US government hasn’t confirmed Mohammad’s death, but the people who knew him in North Carolina say it’s probably true.”

Holder declined to explain why either Mohammad or the teenage al-Awlaki were killed. President Obama is expected to discuss America’s drone program at an address in Washington on Thursday.

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Categories Government, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, U.S. Military, U.S. News
Author The Red Phoenix

Reagan Backed Ex-Dictator Jorge Videla and Argentina’s Dirty War

24 May

The 87-year-old ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Videla died Friday in prison where he was serving sentences for grotesque human rights crimes in the 1970s and 1980s. But one of Videla’s key backers, the late President Ronald Reagan, continues to be honored by Americans.

The death of ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, a mastermind of the right-wing state terrorism that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, means that one more of Ronald Reagan’s old allies is gone from the scene.

Videla, who fancied himself a theoretician of anti-leftist repression, died in prison at age 87 after being convicted of a central role in the Dirty War that killed some 30,000 people and involved kidnapping the babies of “disappeared” women so they could be raised by military officers who were often implicated in the murders of the mothers.

The leaders of the Argentine junta also saw themselves as pioneers in the techniques of torture and psychological operations, sharing their lessons with other regional dictatorships. Indeed, the chilling word “disappeared” was coined in recognition of their novel tactic of abducting dissidents off the streets, torturing them and then murdering them in secret – sometimes accomplishing the task by chaining naked detainees together and pushing them from planes over the Atlantic Ocean.

With such clandestine methods, the dictatorship could leave the families in doubt while deflecting international criticism by suggesting that the “disappeared” might have traveled to faraway lands to live in luxury, thus combining abject terror with clever propaganda and disinformation.

To pull off the trick, however, required collaborators in the U.S. news media who would defend the junta and heap ridicule on anyone who alleged that the thousands upon thousands of “disappeared” were actually being systematically murdered. One such ally was Ronald Reagan, who used his platform as a newspaper and radio commentator in the late 1970s to minimize the human rights crimes underway in Argentina – and to counter the Carter administration’s human rights protests.

For instance, in a newspaper column on Aug. 17, 1978, some 2½ years into Argentina’s Dirty War, Reagan portrayed Videla’s junta as the real victims here, the good guys who were getting a bad rap for their reasonable efforts to protect the public from terrorism. Reagan wrote:

“The new government set out to restore order at the same time it started to rebuild the nation’s ruined economy. It is very close to succeeding at the former, and well on its way to the latter. Inevitably in the process of rounding up hundreds of suspected terrorists, the Argentine authorities have no doubt locked up a few innocent people, too. This problem they should correct without delay.

“The incarceration of a few innocents, however, is no reason to open the jails and let the terrorists run free so they can begin a new reign of terror. Yet, the Carter administration, so long on self-righteousness and frequently so short on common sense, appears determined to force the Argentine government to do just that.”

Rather than challenge the Argentine junta over the thousands of “disappearances,” Reagan expressed concern that the United States was making a grave mistake by alienating Argentina, “a country important to our future security.”

He mocked U.S. Ambassador Raul Castro who “mingles in Buenos Aires plazas with relatives of the locked-up suspected terrorists, thus seeming to legitimize all their claims to martyrdom. It went unreported in this country, but not a single major Argentine official showed up at this year’s Fourth of July celebration at the U.S. Embassy – an unprecedented snub but hardly surprising under the circumstances.”

The Cocaine Connection

Reagan’s Argentine friends also took the lead in devising ways to fund the anti-communist crusade through the drug trade. In 1980, the Argentine intelligence services helped organize the so-called Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, deploying neo-Nazi thugs to violently oust the left-of-center government and replace it with generals closely tied to the early cocaine trafficking networks.

Bolivia’s coup regime ensured a reliable flow of coca to Colombia’s Medellin cartel, which quickly grew into a sophisticated conglomerate for smuggling cocaine into the United States. Some of those drug profits then went to finance right-wing paramilitary operations across the region, according to U.S. government investigations.

For instance, Bolivian cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez invested more than $30 million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, according to U.S. Senate testimony in 1987 by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse. He testified that the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America, where Argentine intelligence helped organize a paramilitary force, called the Contras, to attack leftist-ruled Nicaragua.

After defeating President Carter in Election 1980 and becoming President in January 1981, Reagan entered into a covert alliance with the Argentine junta. He ordered the CIA to collaborate with Argentina’s Dirty War experts in training the Contras, who were soon rampaging through towns in northern Nicaragua, raping women and dragging local officials into public squares for executions. Some Contras also went to work in the cocaine-smuggling business. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Much as he served as a pitch man for the Argentine junta, Reagan also deflected allegations of human rights violations by the Contras and various right-wing regimes in Central America, including Guatemala where another military junta was engaging in genocide against Mayan villages.

The behind-the-scenes intelligence relationship between the Argentine generals and Reagan’s CIA puffed up Argentina’s self-confidence so much that the generals felt they could not only continue repressing their own citizens but could settle an old score with Great Britain over control of the Falkland Islands, what the Argentines call the Malvinas.

Even as Argentina moved to invade the islands in 1982, the Reagan administration was divided between America’s traditional alliance with Great Britain and its more recent collaboration with the Argentines. Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick joined the Argentine generals for an elegant state dinner in Washington.

Finally, however, Reagan sided with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher whose counterattack drove the Argentines from the islands and led to the eventual collapse of the dictatorship in Buenos Aires. However, Argentina only slowly began to address the shocking crimes of the Dirty War.

Baby Snatching

The trial of Videla and co-defendant Reynaldo Bignone for the baby snatching did not end until 2012 when an Argentine court convicted the pair in the scheme to murder leftist mothers and farm their infants out to military personnel, a shocking process that was known to the Reagan administration even as it worked closely with the bloody regime in the 1980s.

Testimony at the trial included a videoconference from Washington with Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs who said he urged Bignone to reveal the babies’ identities as Argentina began a transition to democracy in 1983. Abrams said the Reagan administration “knew that it wasn’t just one or two children,” indicating that U.S. officials believed there was a high-level “plan because there were many people who were being murdered or jailed.”

A human rights group, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, says as many as 500 babies were stolen by the military during the repression from 1976 to 1983.

General Videla was accused of permitting – and concealing – the scheme to harvest infants from pregnant women who were kept alive in military prisons only long enough to give birth. According to the charges, the babies were taken from the new mothers, sometimes after late-night Caesarean sections, and then distributed to military families or sent to orphanages.

After the babies were pulled away, the mothers were removed to another site for their executions. Some were put aboard death flights and pushed out of military planes over open water.

One of the most notorious cases involved Silvia Quintela, a leftist doctor who attended to the sick in shanty towns around Buenos Aires. On Jan. 17, 1977, Quintela was abducted off a Buenos Aires street by military authorities because of her political leanings. At the time, Quintela and her agronomist husband Abel Madariaga were expecting their first child.

According to witnesses who later testified before a government truth commission, Quintela was held at a military base called Campo de Mayo, where she gave birth to a baby boy. As in similar cases, the infant then was separated from the mother.

What happened to the boy is still not clear, but Quintela reportedly was transferred to a nearby airfield. There, victims were stripped naked, shackled in groups and dragged aboard military planes. The planes then flew out over the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean, where soldiers pushed the victims out of the planes and into the water to drown.

According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Argentine military viewed the kidnappings as part of the larger counterinsurgency strategy.

“The anguish generated in the rest of the surviving family because of the absence of the disappeared would develop, after a few years, into a new generation of subversive or potentially subversive elements, thereby not permitting an effective end to the Dirty War,” the commission said in describing the army’s reasoning for kidnapping the infants of murdered women. The kidnapping strategy conformed with the “science” of the Argentine counterinsurgency operations.

According to government investigations, the military’s intelligence officers also advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a human being could endure before dying. The torture methods included experiments with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as forcing mice into a woman’s vagina. Some of the implicated military officers had trained at the U.S.-run School of the Americas.

The Argentine tactics were emulated throughout Latin America. According to a Guatemalan truth commission, the right-wing military there also adopted the practice of taking suspected subversives on death flights, although over the Pacific Ocean.

Spinning Terror

Gen. Videla, in particular, took pride in his counterinsurgency theories, including clever use of words to confuse and deflect. Known for his dapper style and his English-tailored suits, Videla rose to power amid Argentina’s political and economic unrest in the early-to-mid 1970s.

“As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure,” he declared in 1975 in support of a “death squad” known as the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. [See A Lexicon of Terror by Marguerite Feitlowitz.]

On March 24, 1976, Videla led the military coup which ousted the ineffective president, Isabel Peron. Though armed leftist groups had been shattered by the time of the coup, the generals still organized a counterinsurgency campaign to wipe out any remnants of what they judged political subversion.

Videla called this “the process of national reorganization,” intended to reestablish order while inculcating a permanent animosity toward leftist thought. “The aim of the Process is the profound transformation of consciousness,” Videla announced.

Along with selective terror, Videla employed sophisticated public relations methods. He was fascinated with techniques for using language to manage popular perceptions of reality. The general hosted international conferences on P.R. and awarded a $1 million contract to the giant U.S. firm of Burson Marsteller. Following the Burson Marsteller blueprint, the Videla government put special emphasis on cultivating American reporters from elite publications.

“Terrorism is not the only news from Argentina, nor is it the major news,” went the optimistic P.R. message. Since the jailings and executions of dissidents were rarely acknowledged, Videla felt he could count on friendly U.S. media personalities to defend his regime, people like former California Gov. Ronald Reagan.

In a grander context, Videla and the other generals saw their mission as a crusade to defend Western Civilization against international communism. They worked closely with the Asian-based World Anti-Communist League and its Latin American affiliate, the Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana [CAL].

Latin American militaries collaborated on projects such as the cross-border assassinations of political dissidents. Under one project, called Operation Condor, political leaders — centrist and leftist alike — were shot or bombed in Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid, Santiago and Washington. Operation Condor sometimes employed CIA-trained Cuban exiles as assassins. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hitler’s Shadow Reaches toward Today,” or Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

For their roles in the baby kidnappings, Videla, who was already in prison for other crimes against humanity, was sentenced to 50 years; Bignone received 15 years.

Earlier in May, Guatemala’s ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt, another close ally of Ronald Reagan, was convicted of genocide against Mayan Indians in 1982-83 and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide.”]

Yet, while fragile democracies in places like Argentina and Guatemala have sought some level of accountability for these crimes against humanity, the United States continues to honor the principal political leader who aided, abetted and rationalized these atrocities across the entire Western Hemisphere, the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

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Categories Argentina, History, Imperialism, International, U.S. News
Author The Red Phoenix

78 trans murders in 2013, mutilation common

23 May

BY RAKSHITA PATEL

New figures claim 78 trans people have already been killed in 13 countries this year and 1,233 in 59 countries since January 2008

New figures published today show 78 trans people were murdered in 13 countries from 1 January to 30 April this year.

There were 1,233 reported murders of trans people in 59 countries worldwide from 1 January 2008 to 30 April 2013.

The new figures were collected as part of the Trans Murder Monitoring project by Transgender Europe (TGEU) and published on International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO).

TGEU says the murders are often particularly violent, including mutilation and torture.

These are only preliminary results and the numbers are likely to grow over the course of the year.

The vast majority of the murders were in Central and South America. 78% of the globally reported murders of trans people (958 murders) were in Central and South America, with 468 murders in Brazil alone.

The cases were found through internet research and the cooperation of trans organizations and activists.

It is likely they reflect only a portion of the total number of murders worldwide.

The highest absolute numbers of trans murders were found in countries with strong trans communities and trans or LGBT organizations that carried out professional monitoring – indicating the global problem is far greater.

The Transgender Europe said: ‘While often the actual circumstances of the killings remain obscure due to lacking investigation and reports, many of the cases documented involve an extreme extent of aggression, including torture and mutilation.

‘Many cases are not investigated properly by the authorities.

‘In most countries, data on murdered trans people are not systematically produced and it is impossible to estimate the numbers of unreported cases.

‘The alarming figures demonstrate once more that there is an urgent need to react to the violence against trans people and to seek mechanisms to protect trans people.’

The Trans Murder Monitoring project was initiated in April 2009 to collect, monitor and analyze reports of homicides of trans people worldwide.

TGEU has members in 36 countries working for equality and inclusion of all trans people.

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Categories Brazil, Discrimination, International, LGBTQ Rights, Reactionary Watch, U.S. News
Author The Red Phoenix

France: Far right activist commits suicide in Notre Dame following legalisation of equal marriage

22 May

Dominique Venner committed suicide in front of the Notre Dame main altar

by Joseph Patrick McCormick

Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has been evacuated, after a former far-right activist committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, after writing a blog post slamming France’s recently passed equal marriage bill.

Dominique Venner, a famous French historian, wrote the post on his blog on 21 May, before committing suicide today by shooting himself dead, in the mouth, in front of Notre Dame Cathedral’s main altar.

In the blog post he spoke of respect for women and Islam, and said: “An infamous law, once passed, can always be repealed.”

In previous posts, he also asked “Why [equal marriage is a] unique phenomenon in Europe?”, and noted a civil war, and its bloody and violent end, linking it to the protests over equal marriage.

Following months of, sometimes violent, protests, and a substantial rise in homophobic attacks, on Friday French President Hollande signed the law, making France the fourteenth country in the world to allow equal marriage.

Marriage equality opponents had hoped that challenging the bill before the Constitutional Council would scupper the bill after months of debate and protest.

However, on Friday, the Council declared: “The law allowing same-sex marriage conforms with the constitution.”

The first same-sex wedding is to take place in Montpellier, which is known as the “French San Francisco”, because of its large gay community, on 29 May.

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Categories France, International, LGBTQ Rights, Reactionary Watch, Statements
Author The Red Phoenix

Syria Rebels Threaten to Wipe Out Shiite, Alawite Towns

21 May

The Syrian uprising began with peaceful protests that evolved into a civil war after the government began attacking the demonstrators. Photographer: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

By Dana El Baltaji

Communities inhabited by Shiite Muslims and President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority will be “wiped off the map” if the strategic city of Al-Qusair in central Syria falls to government troops, rebel forces said.

“We don’t want this to happen, but it will be a reality imposed on everyone,” Colonel Abdel-Hamid Zakaria, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army in Turkey, told Al-Arabiya television yesterday. “It’s going to be an open, sectarian, bloody war to the end.”

Fighter planes and heavy artillery pounded the city today, the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in an e-mail. It said two people were killed during clashes between rebels and government troops backed by Hezbollah fighters, bringing the death toll from clashes at Al-Qusair in the last three days to more than 90.

Al-Qusair is close to the highway linking Damascus to the coast and has been a conduit for weapons from Lebanon to the rebels. The government offensive began with attacks on villages on the city’s outskirts last month.

Bassam al-Dada, a political adviser to the Free Syrian Army, said from Istanbul yesterday that Assad’s forces were still at the outskirts of the city. “Our people are still fighting inside and very strongly, but it’s not an easy situation,” he said.

‘Major Setback’

“Failure to hold the town would be a major setback for opposition forces, impacting their ability to maintain clear lines of supply between safe havens in Lebanon and combat units in Syria,” said David Hartwell, senior Middle East analyst at IHS Jane’s.

The conflict in Syria, which began in March 2011, is increasingly dividing the country and the surrounding region along religious lines.

The Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Shiite-led Iran have been key allies of the Assad government, whose upper ranks come from the Alawite sect, derived from Shiite Islam. Leaders of the rebel army and political opposition are mostly Sunni, and they are backed by key Sunni powers including Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Salman Bin Abdul Aziz is in Turkey to meet President Abdullah Gul and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu today, according to Turkey’s state-run Anatolia news agency. The trip comes days after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met U.S. President Barack Obama.

Emergency Meeting

The Arab League will hold an emergency meeting today to discuss Syria at the request of Qatar, Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency reported. Talks will focus on Al-Qusair and the participation of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the fighting, the agency cited an unidentified league official as saying. Hezbollah is backed by Iran and is classified as a terrorist group by Israel and the U.S.

Hezbollah’s open involvement in the Syrian crisis is worrying because it pits the militia against Sunni extremist groups, according to Hartwell.

“While it may suit states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and even the United States to see this type of sectarian conflict develop as a means of retarding the regional influence of Iran (via Hezbollah) and al-Qaeda, the results in terms of long-term regional instability could be dramatic,” Hartwell said in an e-mailed note.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is returning to the Middle East this week and is seeking to promote peace talks. Syrian opposition leaders, due to meet May 23 in Istanbul to choose a new leader, have rejected attendance at any peace conference that includes Assad or his inner circle.

The Syrian uprising began with peaceful protests that evolved into a civil war after the government began attacking the demonstrators. Radical Islamists, some with ties to al-Qaeda, have since joined the fight against Assad.

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Categories Colonialism, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey
Author The Red Phoenix

Red lines and other double standards

20 May

By Stephen Gowans

According to the White House, Israel has the right to defend itself (1). I would argue that it doesn’t. Based on the theft of another people’s land and denial of their right to return to the homes from which they fled or were driven, Israel no more than any other thief has the right to defend itself.

Judging by its indulgent attitude to Israeli aggressions, Washington claims that Israel has the right to defend itself in any way it pleases: by unprovoked airstrikes across international borders; by meting out collective punishment; by carrying out extrajudicial assassinations; by invasions and occupations; and through other outrages against international law, sovereignty and humanity. In fact, by doing what the United States, itself, regularly does.

The White House says that the most recent Israeli aggression, airstrikes carried out over the last few days against Syrian military facilities, were intended to stop a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran to the Lebanese resistance organization, Hezbollah. Striking a dissenting note, The New York Times reported that, “Some American officials are unsure whether the new shipment was intended for use by Hezbollah or by the Assad government.” (2) Which means the airstrikes may have nothing to do with Israel “defending itself” and everything to do with Tel Aviv helping Syria’s Sunni rebels in what is, in large measure, a sectarian war, inflamed by outside interference, against an Alawi-dominated state that has (from Washington’s perspective) the wrong attitude to US free enterprise and (from Israel’s) the wrong attitude to the dispossession of the Palestinians. Or it may be that the missiles were intended for the Syrian military, but the Israelis struck as a precaution, in case the missiles were indeed destined for Hezbollah.

While indulging Israel for its aggressions, Washington denies North Korea the right to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles for self-defense, for the obvious reason that North Korea’s self-defense is self-defense against the United States. Likewise, the threat posed to Israel of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles in Hezbollah’s hands is that they bolster the resistance organization’s ability to defend both itself, and its benefactor, Iran, from Israeli attack. It’s no secret that Israel has been threatening war on Iran for some time on grounds that Iran’s civilian nuclear energy industry may, at some point, provide Tehran with the capability of developing what Israel already has in abundance: nuclear weapons.

What’s more, if Israel has the right to defend itself, why not Syria? It’s not as if the Assad government’s actions, in defense of secular pan-Arabism, have come anywhere close to matching the level of barbarity regularly visited by the Zionist regime on its opponents in defense of its settler ideology, or in helping to promote the imperial interests of its American benefactor and sponsor.

Earlier, the White House declared that Syria’s use of chemical weapons against terrorist insurgents would be a red line whose crossing would trigger a strong US response, presumably direct US military intervention in Syria’s civil war. Recent claims by Israel, Britain and one US intelligence agency of evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against rebel forces—evidence the White House says is inconclusive—touched off a controversy over whether the Obama administration had blundered in setting a red line, and whether failure to act on even weak evidence undermines US credibility.

Lost in the polemic is the telling reality that Washington has set no red line for the insurgents’ use of the same weapons.

And that can’t be because there are no grounds to believe rebel forces would use deadly gas against Syrian loyalists. The UN independent commission of inquiry on Syria says there are strong, concrete suspicions that the rebels have used sarin gas (but has no evidence the Syrian government has deployed chemical weapons against the rebels.) (3)

Okay, let’s assume that the UN’s strong and concrete suspicions do reflect the rebels’ actual use of sarin gas against loyalist forces.

The obvious question (unasked as far as I can tell by the mass media) is where did the rebels’ chemical weapons come from? Were they captured from the Syrian military, or procured through a supplier of the rebels’ other weapons—Saudi Arabia, Qatar or a NATO state?

And does the United States plan to act on the UN’s strong and concrete suspicions?

The answer to the first question is uncertain. As to the second, the US might intervene to secure the rebels’ chemical weapons if the weapons have been captured from the Syrian army by jihadists acting independently of US control, but it would likely be done quietly, to avoid raising embarrassing questions about the rebellion putting dangerous weapons into the hands of Islamists who might use them later against US targets (including, if the Assad government falls, a US-client regime in Damascus.)

On the other hand, if the weapons have been used by US-controlled opposition factions, an intervention won’t occur, unless the weapons were used without US approval. If so, measures—again quiet ones—will likely to be taken to curb their use, or to use them only at Washington’s direction.

Another possibility is that Washington colluded in the weapons’ use.

Clearly, Washington’s chemical weapons standards are contigent and not absolute. The red line against the Syrian defense forces provides Washington with a pretext for direct and open military intervention against Damascus when and if intervention is feasible. Since no intervention against the rebel forces is desired—on the contrary, only intervention on their behalf is on the agenda—a rebel red line is unnecessary, and restrictive. It’s not the use of chemical weapons that Washington opposes, but their use by a government fighting for survival against US predations. Anyone else can use chemical weapons with impunity so long as it’s done in the service of US foreign policy goals.

Finally, we might ask whether the country that has the greatest store of weapons of mass destruction, is the world’s largest manufacturer of them, and has been the most ardent user of them, would act to stop their use by rebel forces it has backed against a pan-Arab nationalist regime it has for decades sought to overthrow? Again, subject to the condition the rebels were under US control, not likely.

The United States professed opposition to weapons of mass destruction is entirely one-sided. It is applied selectively to governments and organizations that it, itself, or its proxies, are opposed to, typically because they have the wrong attitude to US free enterprise, or the wrong attitude to their proxies’ plunder of the land, natural resources and markets of other people.

1. Sam Dagher, Nour Malas and Joshua Mitnick, “Strikes in Syria raise alarm”, The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2013.
2. Anne Barnard, Michael R. Gordon and Jodi Rudoren, “Israel targeted Iranian missiles in Syria attack”, The New York Times, May 4, 2013.
3. “Syrian rebels may have used Sarin” Reuters, May 5, 2013: “UN: ‘Strong suspicions’ that Syrian rebels have used sarin nerve gas,” Euronews, May 6, 2013.

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Categories Anti-War, Apartheid, Colonialism, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Internet, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Media & Culture, Palestine, Qatar, Reactionary Watch, Saudi Arabia, Statements, Syria, Talk Radio, TV, U.S. Military, U.S. News, United Kingdom, World History, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Outrage over disgusting “cripple Stephen Hawking” jokes after he joins boycott of Israel

20 May

Stephen Hawking has joined the academic embargo

By: Charlotte Meredith

WORLD renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has faced a barrage of vile abuse today from people furious over his boycott of Israel.

The tirade of criticism came after the highly-respected Cambridge professor joined an academic embargo by refusing to attend a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres.

Professor Hawking was to take part in the Facing Tomorrow annual conference planned to be held in June but pulled out in protest at the treatment of Palestinians.

“Hawking has made an independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there,” the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine said.

Reacting angrily to the Professor’s decision to join the academic boycott, pro-Israeli users voiced their outrage on social media sites.

“The anti-Semite Stephen Hawking can’t even wipe his own a**,” one sick user posted.

“He should die already!,” another said, while one user said Professor Hawking – widely considered one of the most intelligent men in the world today – is “also crippled in the head.”

“Someone should release the hand brake when he’s on a hill,” another vile post read.

Disgusted users condemned the revolting abuse, describing it as a “festival of hate.”

Professor Hawking’s move follows a boycott of Israel by the Teachers’ Union of Ireland and by the American members of the Association for Asian American Studies.

In 2009, Professor Hawking had also condemned the three-week onslaught on Gaza, saying the response to firing of rockets from the coastal strip was “plain out of proportion … The situation is like that of [Apartheid] South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue”.

The Israeli Ambassador to London, Daniel Taub, said: “The price that democratic societies all pay is freedom of speech, even for outrageous and objectionable opinions.

“This is why it is so important to encourage intelligent debate and discussion – and why it is such a shame that Professor Hawking will not be able to joining in such open dialogue at the President’s Conference.”

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Discrimination, Imperialism, International, Internet, Israel, Media & Culture, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Statements, U.S. News, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Analyzing Barack Obama

19 May

Among the many accusations leveled against Barack Obama by the political right, few have become so commonly accepted as the claim that he is a socialist and even a Marxist. Even in what passes for mainstream political discourse one can accuse Obama of being a socialist without raising any eyebrows. For those old enough to remember the Clinton years, the idea that Democrats, or more accurately liberals, should be rightly associated with socialism is not exactly a novel concept. Yet these days it seems like every criticism of Democratic policies from the right must include the label of “socialism.” How did it come to this?

For starters, during the Clinton years, figures who accused Clinton of being a Marxist or Communist tended to be marginalized and isolated on the fringe of the political spectrum. Mainstream conservative pundits implied that liberals were the fellow travelers of Communists, but “liberal” and “socialist” had not become interchangeable at that time. Clinton being a “liberal” was sufficient for his right-wing attackers. It also did not help those who would have accused him of being a potential Communist that his administration happened to roughly coincide with the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, an event which ushered in a long period of capitalist triumphalism as the ruling class sought to cash in on the demoralization of the working class all over the world. The Cold War was over, Marx was said to have been totally discredited, and the “end of history” was declared.

Obama, in stark contrast, campaigned and later took the reins of power just at that crucial time when the capitalists’ castles in the sky began to crumble, posing a serious threat to the idea of the infallible free-market which would lead the world to general prosperity. The failure of neo-liberal economic theories, and the subsequent resurgence of discussions on alternatives to capitalism, necessitated an all-out offensive against the idea of socialism, and in particular Marxism, all over the world. When propaganda fails, force becomes a necessity. Hence, it is not possible for the right to acknowledge Obama for what he is, i.e. slightly right-of-center with some more progressive social views, but rather he must be made into a radical Communist and demonized as such.

The effect of this is twofold. First, if Obama is a radical leftist, then by default anyone who is actually to the left of Obama is automatically excluded from mainstream “respectable” politics. If Obama’s healthcare plan, written and edited by healthcare industry lobbyists, can be labeled as “socialist medicine” in the mainstream discourse, advocates of a single-payer system can be marginalized as fanatics. On the other side of the coin, the success of a “far-left,” “socialist” radical on the Democrat side can be used to justify a more radical far-right candidate for the Republican Party. Many leftists in America, at least those who acknowledge and are aware of Obama’s centrism, are often shocked at the fanaticism of figures such as Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann. This is only because they are comparing a very moderate liberal Democrat with raving right-wing fanatics. Unfortunately there are many people, who may not necessarily be hardcore conservatives, who accept that Obama is, to some extent, a “socialist.” As such, the idea that a left-wing socialist should be opposed by a passionate, more extreme conservative is only fair.

Let the reader consider what it would mean if the right-wing were to cease their accusations that Obama is a socialist, Marxist, and so on. Suppose they highlighted the many compromises he has made with their party, as well as his solid record of supporting corporate and capitalist interests via tax cuts, stimulus money, and so on.* Suppose they declared that while they still have some minor disagreements with the President, particularly on social matters, they find him on the whole to be satisfactory. It isn’t difficult to imagine that if the above were to happen, the whole game would be over. The American political system would have declared itself illegitimate, and only the willfully ignorant could deny that the two-party oligarchy exists to serve one class. Moreover, at a time when the system requires iron-fisted tactics, selective “austerity,” and most of all the reactionary leaders capable of bringing such things, it is essential to juxtapose increasingly radical reactionary candidates with far-left “socialists.” A figure like Bachmann can only be justified insofar as the opposition is presented as equally fanatical. If the socialists cannot be found, they must be invented. Ergo, we have Obama the Marxist Socialist.

Why then, does the claim that Obama is a socialist gain so much traction? After all, he has been accused of everything from being born in Kenya to being some kind of “Manchurian candidate” (of whom we’ll never know), charged with bringing down the American Republic. Not all of these views necessarily get aired regularly on cable news, and some that do often find derision even on networks such as Fox. There is one simple reason why the charge of socialism sticks, and that reason is that Americans simply know little about socialism. This includes not only the generations born during the Cold War who were inundated with anti-Communist propaganda, but even those coming of age in the last few years who are expressing curiosity toward alternatives to capitalism. Ask a conservative for his or her definition of socialism, and you will most likely hear that it is an “evil” system which rewards the lazy at the expense of the hard-working, it is enforced equality, it spreads nothing but human misery, and though it has been totally discredited and found to be responsible for the murder of one-hundred million people in the 20^th century, we must remain ever-vigilant against those who would attempt to repeat socialist revolution and kill another hundred million people. Nothing surprising there.

Ask your average self-identified leftist what socialism is, and you may get equally if not more ignorant definitions for socialism. In general it is commonly mistaken for the welfare state, the creation of which did not necessarily require the presence of leftists, much less socialists, in the seat of power. In fact it is the reactionary Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck who is commonly credited with the construction of the first welfare state as we know it. Europe is full of right-wing figures that not only uphold their countries’ various welfare schemes, but even use the preservation of such programs as a prop to bash and blame immigrants. These days it has become common, if not somewhat fashionable, to flirt in public with the term socialism. While this causes no small amount of amusing rage from the right, it tends to muddle peoples’ understanding of what socialism is. Government-sponsored initiatives such as the New Deal or the Great Society are trumpeted as evidence of successful “socialism.” Europe, particularly France, is promoted as an example of functioning socialism. Occasionally one runs across a condescending liberal explanation which claims that Communism didn’t work, but socialism, a more moderated, mixed economic system, can work. This is wrong on so many levels that refuting it would require another article entirely.

In any case, not only does a large portion of the American left, through no fault of their own, not understand what socialism is, but those who advance the aforementioned arguments or variants thereof are actually playing directly into the hands of the right. Such people are not disputing the claim that government intervention in the “private sector” is in fact, socialism, but rather they are merely arguing that this “socialism” is positive and not negative.

What’s so “socialist” about Obama?

For all the ranting and raving about Obama being a socialist or Marxist, those who insist that he is have a hard time explaining why he deserves the label. There are no writings by Obama where he praises or even writes favorably about socialism or Marxism, nor are there any quotes. We can rest assured that if Obama ever uttered a good word about Marx or socialism in public, the conservatives in America would be repeating those words constantly; they’d probably even have bumper stickers with the quote printed on it. For conservatives it is not necessary to have any evidence that Obama is a socialist; he just is, because that’s what liberals are. It’s totally par for the course; these are people who knew that Obama was raising their taxes even when he lowered them.

Now if the reader were to point out the obvious lack of Marxist activity on the part of Obama to a conservative, the conversation most likely wouldn’t end there. Proof of Obama’s socialist politics is said to be his alleged desire to redistribute or “share” the wealth. Indeed, Obama did at least once, on the campaign trail, talk about spreading the wealth around. There are several problems with this claim though; the most important one being that socialism is not merely “redistribution of wealth.” This myth about socialism was dealt with in a previous Red Phoenix article. The second problem with this claim is that the social welfare programs that Obama voices support for don’t necessarily redistribute wealth. Lastly, in connection with the previous point, any time the government collects taxes for anything, wealth is being redistributed. The bailouts of America’s banks, which was supported both by both parties, was a massive redistribution of wealth. In fact when we get paid wages or buy products we are redistributing wealth, in a sense. Wealth can be redistributed in a myriad of ways but when we look at the inequality of wealth in America we can see that nearly four years of Obama has done little to redistribute it, at least among the working class. Strike one for our allegedly “socialist” president.

So what is strike two? This would be Obama’s donors, the individuals and corporations who helped him achieve the office of the president in 2008. When looking at a list of Obama’s top campaign contributors in 2008, we see that the second highest donation came from Goldman Sachs. Other major donations came from Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase & co., Morgan Stanley, and General Electric, to name a few. Now this poses no problem for the conspiratorial fantasy so prevalent in conservatives circles these days; far from being a word with a concrete meaning, “socialism” to conservatives simply translates to “bad” or “evil,” a system by which “big government” takes from hard-working “middle class” Americans and hands it over to the undeserving, lazy poor.

Since it is typically in the interest of large corporations to avoid paying taxes and support deregulation, we can logically conclude that these donors expected something in return from Obama. Indeed, they have been rewarded for their generosity in a number of ways, from additional taxpayer funded bailouts to key appointments within Obama’s cabinet and as economic advisors. It is when we consider Obama’s donors that the absurdity of the claim that he is a socialist becomes clear. What interest do large corporations have in electing a socialist who would expropriate their property? Can we imagine a scenario where the board of directors at General Electric decides that they have too much money, and that they would rather have all their assets seized and put under the control of workers? That someone could label Obama a socialist in light of these indisputable facts betrays a level of political ignorance that would be hilarious if it weren’t such a tragic, biting reminder of historical and political illiteracy in our country.

Obama’s answer to the economic crisis which weighs heavily on the working class is in fact the same as that of the Republicans, specifically, give more tax cuts and credits to private businesses in hopes that they will feel confident enough to hire more people. This strategy of handing more taxpayer money over to private capital is the only solution allowed in our modern neo-liberal system and no matter how many times it fails to do what it promises, no alternatives may be considered.

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Categories Economic Exploitation, Economy, Elections, Former Eastern Bloc, Government, Health Care, History, Imperialism, Labor, Media & Culture, Reactionary Watch, Talk Radio, TV, U.S. News, Uncategorized, United States History, Workers Struggle, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Rebels film execution of 11 Syrian soldiers, as Obama continues anti-Assad rhetoric

18 May

An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube on May 16, 2013 by user @dirtytrainers

As a new video is published showing fighters of the Al Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front in Syria executing 11 men they say are Bashar Assad’s soldiers, Obama talks to Turkey’s Erdogan, renewing threats of action against the Syrian government.

The video, which was posted on YouTube on Thursday, is believed to have been filmed in the eastern Deir-al Zor province and appears to date from some time in 2012, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group with a network of activists in Syria.

The footage shows the commander, his face obscured in a black balaclava, shooting each prisoner in the back of the head as they kneel blindfolded lined up in the sand.

The Islamic militants shout “God is great” each time a man is shot. In some cases the executioner comes back and fires more bullets to make sure they are dead. The Al Nusra Front, which is thought to be behind the footage, has links to Al-Qaeda, and itself has ended up on America’s terrorism list in December 2012.

Rami Abderrahman, the head of the Observatory, told Reuters that the Al Nusra Front has been releasing several videos of their gruesome operations.

The Observatory said that such videos have become increasingly common in Syria’s bloody civil war, which has now claimed 80,000 lives, according to latest UN estimates.

The Nusra video is the second to appear online in the last two days to show executions by fighters who claim links to al-Qaeda.

An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube on May 16, 2013 by user @dirtytrainers

It comes after horrific footage was released on Sunday of a Syrian rebel commander apparently eating one of the lungs of a dead government fighter. Time magazine said they had first seen the footage in April and identified the man as Khaled al-Hamad. Hamad admitted to the magazine that he had mutilated the corpse of the soldier as an act of revenge for allegedly defiling a naked woman and her daughter.

The footage was swiftly condemned by the Syrian opposition.

Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch told the Guardian that it is “not enough for Syria’s opposition to condemn such behavior or blame it on violence by the government. The opposition forces need to act firmly to stop such abuses.”

But Hamad, who is also known as Abu Sakkar, has also received support amongst the more hardline rebels in Syria. Sakkar’s supporters often make portraits of him with the inscription “We Love You”.

Obama repeats warnings of a ‘military option’

The controversy comes as a joint news conference with Turkish Prime Minster, Tayyip Erdogan, and President Obama was held Thursday. Obama said that the US reserves the right to resort to diplomatic and military options if there is conclusive proof that Assad has used chemical weapons.

“There are a whole range of options that the United States is already engaged in… And I reserve the options of taking additional steps, both diplomatic and military, because those chemical weapons inside of Syria also threaten our security over the long term as well as our allies and friends and neighbors.”

US President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, May 16, 2013. (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

Erdogan, for his part, added that “ending this bloody process in Syria and meeting the legitimate demands of the people by establishing a new government are two areas where we are in full agreement with the US. We also agree that we have to prevent Syria from becoming an area for terrorist organizations. We also agree that chemical weapons should not be used.”

But Aleksandr Lukashevich, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said Monday that the accusation that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons could be a sign that public opinion is being prepared for the possibility of military intervention in Syria.

“A lot of reasoning appeared in a number of Arab and other international mass media regarding the use of chemical weapons in the standoff between the government forces and the opposition guerrillas,” he warned.

Speaking to Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV channel Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow will make no “backstage” agreements on Syria in exchange for Western concessions on missile defense or any other disputed issues.

“This is not serious. I think that those who try suggest that indulge in wishful thinking,” Lavrov said in an interview with Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV channel.

“Everyone knows well that Russia’s stance on a whole range of crucial issues is not opportunistic,” the Russian top diplomat emphasized.

On Wednesday, the UN passed resolution 6a, which has condemned Assad’s regime for re-escalating the Syrian conflict. The document was passed with a vote of 107 to 12, and with 59 abstaining.

The support was far lower than a resolution last august, which condemned Assad for cracking down on dissent. The decline in support is seen as a sign of growing unease at increasing extremism among Syria’s fractious rebels.

Russia voted against this year’s resolution, saying it was “counterproductive and irresponsible” to promote a one-sided resolution when Moscow and Washington are trying to get the Syrian government and opposition to agree to negotiations.

At a meeting in Geneva last year the major world powers reached a degree of consent between the positions of Russia and the West who do not often see eye to eye on Syria. They agreed that any future government in Syria could include members of the current regime as well as opposition groups. There was also no specific demand that Assad must step down – something the West has insisted on – and instead an agreement pushed by Russia and China that the future makeup of any Syrian government would be decided by the Syrian people. A follow-up meeting on the conference has been agreed by Lavrov and US State Secretary John Kerry; it is reported to be preliminary scheduled for June.

Source

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Categories Colonialism, Government, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Internet, Lebanon, Media & Culture, Reactionary Watch, Russia, Statements, Syria, Turkey, U.S. Military, U.S. News, Videos
Author The Red Phoenix

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Analyzing Barack Obama

Rebels film execution of 11 Syrian soldiers, as Obama continues anti-Assad rhetoric

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‘Major Setback’

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