Obama Heads Closer & Closer to War on Syria

by Stephen Lendman

Obama plans lots more death and destruction. Current multiple direct and proxy wars aren’t enough. His appetite for more is insatiable. A previous article discussed spurious allegations of Syrian chemical weapons use. Obama calls using them a “game changer.” He also said their use crosses a “red line.”

Syrian officials categorically deny using them. According to Information Minister Omran al-Zoabi:

“Even if Syria does have chemical weapons, our leadership and our military will not use them either against Syrians or against Israelis, above all for moral reasons and secondarily on legal and political grounds.”

On April 24, The New York Times headlined “US Says It Suspects Assad Used Chemical Weapons,” saying:

“….American intelligence agencies now assess, with ‘varying degrees of confidence,’ that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, but it said it needed conclusive proof before President Obama would take action.”

On April 25, the White House Office of Legislative Affairs director Miguel Rodriguez addressed Syria. His letter to Senators John McCain (R. AZ) ad Carl Levin (D. MI) said:

“At the president’s direction, the United States government has been closely monitoring the potential use of chemical weapons within Syria…We have kept the relevant committees of Congress fully informed of our assessments on this issue, consistent with our statutory obligations.”

“Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin. This assessment is based in part on physiological samples.”

“Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions. We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime. Thus far, we believe that the Assad regime maintains custody of these weapons and has demonstrated a willingness to escalate its horrific use of violence against the Syrian people.”

“Because of our concern about the deteriorating situation in Syria, the president has made it clear that the use of chemical weapons – or transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups – is a red line for the United States of America.”

“Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our own recent experience, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient – only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making….”

“In the interim, the administration is prepared for all contingencies so that we can respond appropriately to any confirmed use of chemical weapons, consistent with our national interests.”

“The United States and the international community have a number of potential responses available, and no option is off the table.”

Britain’s Foreign Office claims “limited but persuasive information from various sources showing chemical weapons use in Syria, including Sarin.”

Days earlier, Israeli General Itai Brun claimed Syria used chemical weapons “on a number of occasions.” He cited unspecified photo evidence. He called the weapon used sarin-based. Former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said Obama’s “red line appears to have been crossed. The administration has to take some time to decide what to do about it.”

“But if they end up leaving the impression that the president is not willing to enforce his red line, that will have consequences in the region, particularly when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, as well as for our ability to deter Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria.”

An unnamed Israeli official told the New York Times:

“Every intelligence branch can submit its own assessment. The issue of chemical weapons is being examined by Israel and the United States at the most senior levels, and is still being discussed.”

The Times added:

“Administration officials said that the Pentagon had prepared a menu of military options for Mr. Obama if he concluded that there was incontrovertible evidence that chemical weapons had been used.”

“Those options, one official said, could include missile strikes on Syrian aircraft from American ships in the Mediterranean or commando raids.” Days earlier in Brussels, Secretary of State John Kerry said NATO should plan for a possible Syrian chemical weapons attack. He stopped short of calling for NATO’s intervention.

Separately, Mossad-connected DEBKAfile (DF) said Israeli warplanes downed a Hezbollah drone eight kilometers “out at sea” from Haifa. It flew south from Lebanon.

An IDF spokesman said:

“An attempt by an unmanned aerial vehicle to enter Israel’s air space was thwarted. The UAV was identified flying from the north past the coast of southern Lebanon and continuing south.”

“It was tracked continuously until it was downed by Israeli fighter planes and attack helicopters.”

“They went into action after the drone was identified as not coming from a friendly source. The Air Force gave the order to shoot it down.”

Netanyahu said:

“We take an extremely grave view of this attempt to violate our borders and will continue to guard them and keep our citizens safe. We are watching events in Syria and Lebanon with extreme concern. Syria is breaking up and Lebanon is unstable.”

“Both places pose not inconsiderable perils to Israel – two emanating directly from Syria.”

“The first is the possible transfer of sophisticated weaponry to terrorist organizations and the second, attempts by terrorists to break through our borders and attack our towns and villages.”

“Israel stands ready to counteract any threats from Syria or Lebanon by sea, air and land.”

DF claims “there are plans afoot to spread (Syria’s) violence into Israel.” It cites Hezbollah’s UAV incident and violent incidents on the Israeli/Israel border. On April 23 (updated on April 25), Washington Post editors headlined “Honoring a ‘red line in Syria over chemical weapons,” saying:

“THREE MAJOR US allies – Britain, France and Israel – have now concluded that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has very likely used chemical weapons, not once but on multiple occasions.”

“This would cross a ‘red line’ drawn by President Obama.” He’s been very clear saying America “will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people.”

So far he stopped short of intervening. “If there is no response, Damascus may decide that it is free to use its chemicals on a larger scale.”

At the same time, “Obama has been inching toward more decisive action.”

“If (he) waffles or retreats on the one clear red line he drew, US credibility across the region will be severely damaged.”

These type reports bear watching. Their significance remains to be seen. They may be prelude to direct US intervention. Stay tuned. More reports will follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

The Terror of Capitalism

By VIJAY PRAHAD (dedicated to Alex Massie)
FROM BELLA CALEDONIA | SUGGESTED BY PAUL CARLINE

Victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (New York): one among many “accidents” invariably vaused by capitalism’s inherent and irrevocable thirst for profit at any cost.

On Wednesday, April 24, a day after Bangladeshi authorities asked the owners to evacuate their garment factory that employed almost three thousand workers, the building collapsed. The building, Rana Plaza, located in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, produced garments for the commodity chain that stretches from the cotton fields of South Asia through Bangladesh’s machines and workers to the retail houses in the Atlantic world. Famous name brands were stitched here, as are clothes that hang on the satanic shelves of Wal-Mart. Rescue workers were able to save two thousand people as of this writing, with confirmation that over three hundred are dead. The numbers for the latter are fated to rise. It is well worth mentioning that the death toll in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City of 1911 was one hundred and forty six. The death toll here is already twice that. This “accident” comes five months (November 24, 2012) after the Tazreen garment factory fire that killed at least one hundred and twelve workers.

The list of “accidents” is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing seventy-five workers. In February 2006, another factory collapsed in Dhaka, killing eighteen. In June 2010, a building collapsed in Dhaka, killing twenty-five. These are the “factories” of twenty-first century globalization – poorly built shelters for a production process geared toward long working days, third rate machines, and workers whose own lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, “But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight…. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility” (Capital, Chapter 10).
Dhaka

Photo by Taslim Akhter

These Bangladesh factories are a part of the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in the factories along the US-Mexico border, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, and in other places that opened their doors to the garment industry’s savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Subdued countries that had neither the patriotic will to fight for their citizens nor any concern for the long-term debilitation of their social order rushed to welcome garment production. The big garment producers no longer wanted to invest in factories – they turned to sub-contractors, offering them very narrow margins for profit and thereby forcing them to run their factories like prison-houses of labour. The sub-contracting regime allowed these firms to deny any culpability for what was done by the actual owners of these small factories, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the cheap products without having their consciences stained with the sweat and blood of the workers. It also allowed the consumers in the Atlantic world to buy vast amount of commodities, often with debt-financed consumption, without concern for the methods of production. An occasionally outburst of liberal sentiment turned against this or that company, but there was no overall appreciation of the way the Wal-Mart type of commodity chain made normal the sorts of business practices that occasioned this or that campaign.

Bangladeshi workers have not been as prone as the consumers in the Atlantic world. As recently as June 2012, thousands of workers in the Ashulia Industrial Zone, outside Dhaka, protested for higher wages and better working conditions. For days on end, these workers closed down three hundred factories, blocking the Dhaka-Tangali highway at Narasinghapur. The workers earn between 3000 taka ($35) and 5,500 taka ($70) a month; they wanted a raise of between 1500 taka ($19) and 2000 taka ($25) per month. The government sent in three thousand policemen to secure the scene, and the Prime Minister offered anodyne entreaties that she would look into the matter. A three-member committee was set up, but nothing substantial came of it.

Aware of the futility of negotiations with a government subordinated to the logic of the commodity chain, Dhaka exploded in violence as more and more news from the Rana Building emerged. Workers have shut down the factory area around Dhaka, blocking roads and smashing cars. The callousness of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Association (BGMEA) adds fire to the workers’ anger. After the protests in June, BGMEA head Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin accused the workers of being involved in “some conspiracy.” He argued that there is “no logic for increasing the wages of the workers.” This time, BGMEA’s new president Atiqul Islam suggested that the problem was not the death of the workers or the poor conditions in which workers toil but “the disruption in production owing to unrest and hartals [strikes].” These strikes, he said, are “just another heavy blow to the garment sector.” No wonder those who took to the streets have so little faith in the sub-contractors and the government.

Attempts to shift the needle of exploitation have been thwarted by concerted government pressure and the advantages of assassination. Whatever decent lurks in Bangladesh’s Labour Act is eclipsed by weak enforcement by the Ministry of Labour’s Inspections Department. There are only eighteen inspectors and assistant inspectors to monitor 100,000 factories in the Dhaka area, where most of the garment factories are located. If an infraction is detected, the fines are too low to generate any reforms. When workers try to form unions, the harsh response from the management is sufficient to curtail their efforts. Management prefers the anarchic outbreaks of violence to the steady consolidation of worker power. In fact, the violence led the Bangladeshi government to create a Crisis Management Cell and an Industrial Police not to monitor violations of labour laws, but to spy on worker organisers. In April 2012, agents of capital kidnapped Aminul Islam, one of the key organisers of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. He was found dead a few days later, his body littered with the marks of torture.

Bangladesh has been convulsed this past months with protests over its history – the terrible violence visited among the freedom fighters in 1971 by the Jamaat-e-Islami brought thousands of people into Shanbagh in Dhaka; this protest morphed into the political civil war between the two mainstream parties, setting aside the calls for justice for victims of that violence. This protest has inflamed the country, which has been otherwise quite sanguine about the everyday terror against its garment sector workers. The Rana building “accident” might provide a progressive hinge for a protest movement that is otherwise adrift.

In the Atlantic world, meanwhile, self-absorption over the wars on terror and on the downturn in the economy prevent any genuine introspection over the mode of life that relies upon debt-fueled consumerism at the expense of workers in Dhaka. Those who died in the Rana building are victims not only of the malfeasance of the sub-contractors, but also of twenty-first century globalisation.

Vijay Prashad’s new book, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, is out this month from Verso Books.

Annals of Filth: Obama is Comfortable with Bush’s Inferno

A Lawless Legacy

by RALPH NADER

G.W. Bush: Not just still at large unindicted war criminal, but a celebrated figure in the complicit corporate media.

ABOVE THE LAW—G.W. Bush: Not just an unindicted war criminal happily strutting around, but a celebrated figure in the complicit corporate media.

George W. Bush is riding high. A megamillionaire, from the taxpayer-subsidized Texas Rangers company, he makes $150,000 to $200,000 per speech, receives a large presidential pension and support facilities and is about to dedicate the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on April 25.

President Obama will be at the dedication, continuing to legitimize Mr. Bush, as he did from the outset by announcing in 2009 there would be no investigations or prosecutions of the Bush officials for their crimes.

In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Bush continued to say he has no regrets about his Presidency. “I’m comfortable with what I did,” he said, “I’m comfortable with who I am.” He added, “Much of my presidency was defined by things that you didn’t necessarily want to have happen.”

But he and Dick Cheney made them happen, although Mr. Bush attributed some military events to Providence. One of the “things” he is comfortable with was his criminal, unconstitutional invasion and occupation of Iraq, which took over one million Iraqi lives – children, women and men – created 5 million refugees and committed overall sociocide on that country which posed no threat to the U.S. The carnage continues to this day by a militarized al-Qaeda-in-Iraq that didn’t exist before his invasion.

Apparently, Mr. Bush is “comfortable” with the price paid by the U.S. soldiers and their broken families – over 5,000 fatalities and suicides, 200,000 injuries, illnesses and traumatic syndromes – and by U.S. taxpayers, who over time will pay an estimated 3 trillion dollars according to Nobel Laureate and economist, Joseph Stiglitz.

Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has said repeatedly that Bush and Cheney “lied us into invading Iraq.” Such an understatement. Bush and Cheney not only lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, they also deceived, covered-up, corrupted or intimidated the mass media [which don’t take too much intimidating to toe the line], bullied an abdicatory Congress [ditto], and delivered a false address to the United Nations with the now regretful Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Two secretary generals of the UN subsequently declared Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq to be a violation of international law.

The Bushes have received fawning coverage by the networks, with NBC leading the pack. Former President George W. Bush has become a grandfather. One of his twin daughters, Jenna Bush Hager, gave birth to her first child, a daughter, on Saturday night in New York City. The former president announced the birth in a statement Sunday. The baby's name is Margaret Laura "Mila" Hager. The former president said the baby was named for her grandmothers. Jenna Bush Hager is a contributing correspondent for NBC's "Today" show. She's married to Henry Hager. Bush said, "We met our beautiful granddaughter today. Jenna and Mila are healthy. And our family is elated."

The Bushes have received shameless fawning coverage from the networks, with NBC leading the pack. This item is typical. “Former President George W. Bush has become a grandfather. One of his twin daughters, Jenna Bush Hager, gave birth to her first child, a daughter, on Saturday night in New York City. The former president announced the birth in a statement Sunday. The baby’s name is Margaret Laura “Mila” Hager. The former president said the baby was named for her grandmothers.
Jenna Bush Hager is a contributing correspondent for NBC’s “Today” show. She’s married to Henry Hager.
Bush said, “We met our beautiful granddaughter today. Jenna and Mila are healthy. And our family is elated.” (Source: NBC’s Dallas/FW affiliate)

Bush suffers no qualms about the brutal realities of his war and his recidivist violations of our Constitution, federal statutes and international treaties. “One of the real challenges of life is when you complete a chapter, you don’t atrophy, that you continue to find ways to contribute,” said Bush in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. Army veteran Tomas Young is atrophying from his massive wounds in Iraq. Before he decides to end his devastated life, possibly this month, he summoned his moral energy to write Mr. Bush a poignant lettercalling him to account for his war crimes. Bush, however, never responds. After all he’s “comfortable” and that bloody “chapter” is closed.

The American people have yet to come to terms with the reality that presidents are above the law. Presidents can commit repeated crimes in an outlaw presidency so long as they can invoke, however falsely and vaguely, national security.

Were presidents to engage in personal crimes or obstruction of justice, like Nixon with the burglary of the Democratic Party’s Watergate offices, the law and Congress can hold them accountable. But Bush and Cheney had bigger fish to fry with their destruction of justice. As the ancient Roman historian Tacitus wrote: “The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more, and tolerated by all.”

Fortunately, for our fragile democracy, there were dissenters. After 9/11, leading civil liberty groups objected to provisions in the Patriot Act that allowed searches of your home and businesses without telling you for 72 hours. And, the muzzling of librarians and custodians of your financial medical records from even telling you that the feds are retrieving them. And warrantless snooping on millions of Americans.

In the months leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, more than three hundred retired generals, admirals, high ranking officers, national security officials and diplomats spoke out against any invasion.

Retired General and former Director of the National Security Agency Bill Odom called the invasion the most strategic military blunder in our history. Bush’s father was privately opposed to the invasion, urging his top retired advisors, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft to speak and write against the pending invasion.

The venerable, conservative American Bar Association weighed in with three White Papers declaring Bush’s many signing statements – that he was not bound by legislation – domestic surveillance and treatment of enemy combatants were unconstitutional actions. Bush never acknowledged these reports. And this week, a bipartisan report by the Constitution Project concluded that Bush/Cheney approved torture practices at Guantanamo.

All the above plus mass anti-war rallies in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere did not slow the march to war. The protests were not strong enough to penetrate the political and electoral systems. Until that happens, criminal unconstitutional actions regularly conducted at top levels of our government will not, as a practical matter, trigger either the application of the rule of law or the impeachment authority of the U.S. Congress. To the contrary, each succeeding President feels free to push the illegal, unconstitutional envelope further.

So the lawless legacy of George W. Bush continues under Obama – sometimes worse, sometimes not. Indefinite detention, arbitrary use of military rather than civil tribunals, secret evidence and secret laws, war crimes, secret courts, immunity from judicial review, continual snooping on citizens, extraordinary renditions to foreign countries and, for the first time, President Barack Obama claims to have the right to assassinate an American citizen, far from the battlefield, in his sole secret judgment as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. All shame the Obama Administration.

The above list comes from the great law professor, Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, who published a chilling article in the Washington Post on January 15, 2012.

The Presidential outlawry continues as a bipartisan dissolution of our constitutional system because the vast majority of the “we the people” are not demanding our constitutionally sovereign power.

They give truth to Tacitus’ dictum.

On April 25, George W. Bush will bask in the fawning media sunlight of his presidential library and museum. The devastated people of Iraq and the soldiers of America, sent to kill and die in Bush’s illegal, boomeranging war, may have some exhibits, pictures and artifacts to suggest for the museum’s collection.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

Unanswered questions in Boston bombings

By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother.

The Boston Marathon bombings last week, which killed three and wounded over 170, were seized on to implement a far-reaching attack on democratic rights, including a police lockdown of an entire city. As with previous incidents, much remains unknown, including the motive of those who allegedly carried it out, whether others were involved and what connection the FBI and other government agencies had to them.

In a televised statement immediately after the capture of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the bombings, President Barack Obama told the American public: “Obviously, tonight there are still many unanswered questions. Among them, why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence? How did they plan and carry out these attacks, and did they receive any help?”

However, it is the government that has released very little information about what it knows. Moreover, the Obama administration has decreed that Dzhokhar will be denied his Miranda rights, allowing CIA, FBI and military interrogators to question him without the presence of an attorney, thereby further limiting any information surfacing outside of what is vetted by the government and its intelligence agencies.

In addition to the questions raised by Obama, there are a number of others that bear serious scrutiny.

How did the two brothers obtain the explosives used in the bombings?
What relationship existed between the Tsarnaev brothers and the FBI and other US intelligence agencies?
Did US authorities have any knowledge about the Boston bombing plot before it was executed?
What role did US policy in relation to Russia and the separatist movements in Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucasus play in the US government’s attitude toward the Tsarnaevs?

While much remains murky about these and other issues, one thing is clear: the Boston bombing, like virtually every other major terrorist incident, real or invented, since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, was carried out by someone who was known to and under surveillance by US intelligence agencies.

•••

Armored vehicles in downtown Boston [Photo: Jeff Cutler]

There have been increasing questions raised concerning the FBI’s handling of a request from a foreign government, presumed to be Russia, that it investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev on suspicion of involvement in Islamist terrorism.

The request came in advance of a six-month visit that Tamerlan made to Russia beginning in January of last year, during which he stayed with his father in Dagestan and visited Chechnya, where several members of the family live.

In a statement released in the wake of the Boston bombings, the FBI acknowledged that Russian authorities had determined that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a “follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

The FBI said that in response to this request it “checked US government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history.”

The statement concluded that the FBI “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011.”

The Russian media has reported that Russian security services again contacted the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in November of last year.

Both of the parents of the two suspects have provided accounts of the FBI’s role that contradict the agency’s public statement.

The mother of the two brothers, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, a naturalized US citizen, told Russia Today that the FBI agents had told her that “Tamerlan was an extremist leader and they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremists’ web sites.”

“It is a setup,” she added. “He was controlled by FBI for three to five years. They knew what my son was doing. They knew what actions and what sites on the Internet he was going… So how could this happen? How could they, they were controlling his every step, and they are telling today that this is a terrorist act.”

In an interview with the Reuters news agency, the young men’s father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said that the FBI had visited the family’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at least five times looking for Tamerlan. He said: “They said there were doing preventive work. They were afraid there might be some explosions on the streets of Boston.”

The father said that he had been present at one FBI interrogation in which agents had told his son, “We know what sites you are on, we know where you are calling, we know everything about you. Everything.” Like the mother, he insisted that his sons had been “framed up.”

Russian sources reported that both parents had subsequently been questioned by Russia’s Federal Security Service, after which they cut off further contact with the Western media.

Reports of FBI involvement with Tamerlan Tsarnaev have led to criticism by US lawmakers, including South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has called for the younger brother to be treated as an “enemy combatant” and turned over to the US military. He said in a Sunday television interview that “the ball was dropped” by the FBI.

There have been no explanations forthcoming about how “the ball was dropped.” And without either of the two suspects or anyone else providing a motive for the bombings, much is unclear.

Among the explanations that have been suggested is one from the Israeli web site Debka, citing “counterterrorism and intelligence sources,” who it said had concluded that the two brothers were “recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents” to gain access to jihadist networks in the Russian Caucasus, but then “turned coat and bit their recruiters.”

It has been widely charged that Washington has offered covert support to Chechen and other Islamist separatists in the Caucasus, who have waged two wars with Russian forces in 1994-1996 and again in 1999.

Chechen fighters have also been reportedly active in the Western-backed Islamist militias fighting to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Videos supporting this war for regime change were found on Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s YouTube channel, along with other Islamist material. The channel had some 700 subscribers. Moscow Times quoted Russian “intelligence expert” Andrei Soldatov as questioning the FBI’s handling of the case. “He was very open about his beliefs,” he said of Tamerlan. “I’m at a loss as to why the FBI didn’t pay attention to him then.”

A web site backing the Islamist groups in the North Caucasus posted a statement on Sunday denying any link between them and those who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings. “The Caucasus fighters are not waging any military activities against the United States of America,” the Kavkazcenter.com web site said. Servers for the site are located in the US.

Tamerlan, lying dead from wounds received in encounters with the police. End of the line for a tragic project that had no winners.

A Russian intelligence source also told AFP, “At the moment we have no credible information about the Tsarnaev brothers’ involvement with the Caucasus Emirate movement,” the main Islamist organization in the region. The group has previously claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks such as the bombing of the Moscow airport in January 2011 in which 37 died and bombings of its metro system in 2010, which killed over 40.

As to whether the government had prior knowledge of the Boston bombing plot before last Monday’s explosions at the Marathon finish line, participants in the event have cited what they saw at the time as unusual developments. The coach of the University of Mobile’s cross-country team, Ali Stevenson, told the Alabama media that he found it odd that bomb-sniffing dogs were brought out at both the starting and finish lines.

“They kept making announcements to the participants do not worry, it’s just a training exercise,” he said. He added that he had also observed “law enforcement spotters” on roofs at the start of the race. “Evidently, I don’t believe they were just having a training exercise,” Stevenson said. “I think they must have had some sort of threat or suspicion called in.”

If such prior knowledge did exist, this raises another question. In all but a handful of cases, every major terrorist plot reported in the US over the past decade has been the product of a sting operation organized by the FBI or other police agencies. In almost all of these cases, those arrested and prosecuted for terrorism would never have had either means or even the intention of carrying out such acts without the guiding hand of covert informers and agent provocateurs.

This pattern goes back at least to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in which a former Egyptian army officer, Emad Salem acting as a paid FBI informant, had actually participated in building the bomb, claiming that the original plan had been to substitute harmless powder for the explosives.

Were the Boston bombings the result of such an operation that got out of control? Or did sections of the state know about it and it was allowed to go forward?

How the Boston Marathon bombing plot unfolded and what motives lay behind it are still not known. Only one thing is certain: whatever the source of this terrorist atrocity, it will be used by the US government as a pretext for further escalating militarism abroad and repression at home.

Zionism and the United States Congress

The Locus of the Conflict in Palestine is in Washington DC

Herzl: No nice way to do serious ethnic cleansing.

by WILLIAM JAMES MARTIN

The ideology, or political project, of Zionism which underlies the creation of the State of Israel had, in fact, a Christian origin rather than a Jewish one, as writings can be found dating from the 1500’s, written by Christian clergymen in England advocating the migration of Jews to the Holy Land.

The migration of Jews to Palestine was also advocated by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The first Jewish presentations of Zionism were written by Moses Hess in 1862 and 20 years later by Leo Pinsker, both of the Russian Pale, with each writer advocated a separate state for Jews.

Twentieth century Zionism was initiated by Theodore Herzl who, likewise, advocated a separate state for Jews in his book, Der Judenstaat, written in 1896. One year later he formed the World Zionist Congress which held its first meeting in Basel Switzerland in that same year.

What to do with the Arabs present in the prospective Jewish state dominated the thoughts of the founders of Israel from Herzl up until the actual expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.
Thus Herzl stated:

“[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Thus the concept of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was introduced.

It is not rocket science, if you want to create a state exclusively of Jews, mostly European, in the heart of the Middle East, then you must first get rid of the Arabs.

In 1928, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement, which advocated the revision of the British Mandate for Palestine, to include the east bank of the Jordan and some of present-day Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and which was the progenitor of the present-day Lukud party, wrote, of the Palestinians, in his booklet, The Iron Wall, that no people were ever willing to give up their land to another people through mutual agreement and that the colonization by European Jews of Palestine must be prosecuted by force and against the will of the indigenous people, and must be executed behind an iron wall of bayonets, using his metaphor.

By the 1930′s, ‘transfer’ of the Arabs was the unanimous preference of the founders of Israel. So-called transfer committees, headed by Joseph Weitz, Director of Land Management for the Jewish Agency, were set up explicitly for the purpose of studying ways of ‘transferring’ the Arabs out of Palestine.

At the beginning of 1948, despite 50 years of land purchases, Jews only owned 6% of the land of Palestine. By the year’s end, the Israeli army controlled 78% of Palestine in a process of ethnic cleansing that saw the destruction of 531 Arab towns or villages and 11 Arab urban areas, with massacres, large or small, at almost all of those towns or villages, the almost complete looting of Palestinian property and wealth, including looting of the banks, confiscation of Palestinian homes and property, businesses, fields and orchards.

The Palestinian people lost everything. Those who survived the massacres lost their careers, their means of livelihood, only to find refuge in tent cities set up by the United Nations which were later to become squalid refugee camps of cinder block buildings dotted around the Middle East.

By just checking the time line, one quickly disposes of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda myth that the pre-state of Israel was innocently minding its own business when it was attacked by five armies of surrounding Arab states.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began on November 30, 1947 in Haifa when the Jewish army under David Ben Gurion, along with the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, began shelling the Arab sections of that city. The ethnic cleansing of the Arabs of Haifa was completed by April, 1948 when shelling by the Jewish forces forced Haifa’s Arab residents to flee toward the harbor where they attempted to board boats in order to escape. Thus the Arabs of Haifa were literally ‘pushed into the sea’ by the Jewish forces. Many of those fleeing were drowned when the boats were overloaded and capsized.

In March of 1948, David Ben Gurion finalized and distributed Plan D to his officers, which was a program for destroying and depopulating Arab villages and eliminating any resistance. Already, by that date, already 30 Arab villages had been depopulated of Arabs.

On revealing paragraph of this document states:

The massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin, only one of many, but possibly the most famous, occurred on April 9, 1948. Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, and it was the next day, May 15, that the first regular soldier of an Arab army set foot in Palestine. By then, about half of the 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinian refugees had been generated and all of Palestine’s urban centers and had been depopulated of Arabs.

Let me be clear: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began six months before the entrance into Palestine of any regular member of the surrounding Arab armies. And further, the intent of the Zionist movement to displace the Arab population had been in place for half a century.

One cannot understand the natural anger and resentment of the Arab people, and particularly the Palestinian people, toward Israel, and also to the West, for supporting their oppressors and for being blind to their own suffering, without coming to a full understanding of the catastrophe, which the Palestinian people call the Nakbah, that befell them in 1948. One cannot so understand if one accepts the lie that the pre-state of Israel was just innocently defending itself, which is the fiction which, I suspect, most members of the US Congress accept.

Nor can one understand the futility of the exalted ‘peace process’, ongoing now for the last 24 years, concurrent with the further erosion of Palestinian rights and freedom, and migration of new Jewish settlers into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, without understanding that Israeli acquired its present status as a state, not by negotiation with Palestinians, but by brute force and very much against the will of the indigenous people.

For the Arab people, Israel is an alien implant, imposed by western powers, in the heart of the Arab world against the will of the Arab people.

The Palestinians living under occupation have been living in that situation for 45 years, deprived of basic human rights, abused and, more often than not, humiliated, suffering degradation and humiliation on a daily basis, as their land and property and resources are daily confiscated by the state of Israel, which also winks at settler violence and looks the other way as settlers, who have built their settlement on hilltops, dump their sewage onto Palestinian farmland, as they also cut down their olive trees, burn their fields and poison or otherwise kill their livestock, in order to make way for more settlers and settlements as well as to make life as miserable as possible for the Palestinians with the intention of make their migration from Palestine more attractive than their continuing presence.

The Palestinian refugee population now stands at about 5 million – the largest refugee population in the world and the longest standing refugee population. There are no prospects on the horizon for any change in their situation.

Zionism is a political program of clearing Palestine of Palestinian Arabs in order to create the space for an exclusive Jewish state. As such, its goal is to destroy the Palestinians as a people with an identity as a people and with an attachment to the land of their births and the births of their ancestry. Such a project meets the definition of genocide in international law. Genocide is a crime against humanity was well as against its immediate victims. Genocide is a crime in which all of humanity is degraded.

When the US Congress gave 29 standing ovations to the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Netanyahu, in his most recent appearance before this body, they were applauding a man whose has dedicated his entire life to the destruction of the Palestinian people and their ethnic cleansing.

The US Congress does not seem to know, or to care: Those who came to Palestine in the 20th century for the purpose of ethnically cleansing the indigenous people in order to establish a racially or ethnically pure Jewish state are the victimizers, not the victims; those who are being ethnically cleansed are the victims, not the victimizers. The US Congress has it backwards.

Did it not occur to the members of this august group that Mr Netanyahu, after receiving 29 standing ovations, would return to Israel with an imprimatur from the US Congress to continue, or even accelerate, the disenfranchise of the Palestinians?

The day that the Knesset endorsed Oslo II by a majority of one, in 1993, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Zion Square in Jerusalem. While the demonstrators displayed an effigy of Rabin in SS uniform, Netanyahu delivered an inflammatory speech calling Oslo II a surrender agreement and accused Rabin of ‘causing national humiliation by accepting the dictates of the terrorist Arafat.’ A month later, on November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a religious-nationalist Jewish fanatic with the explicit aim of derailing the peace process. Rabin’s demise, as his murderer expected, dealt a serious body blow to the entire peace process. (Shlaim – Israel and Palestine, Verso)

There is a YouTube video, from 2002, of Mr Netanyahu seated on a couch in the home of an Israeli family, unwittingly on camera, and bragging that he was able to destroy Oslo, and that he deceived the US president at that time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right direction” and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel “absurd.”

He also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel’s harsh military repression of the Palestinian uprising, was designed chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat so that it could be made more pliable for Israeli diktats.

Mr Netanyahu is playing the US Congress for fools.

Days before he received 29 standing ovations from the US Congress, Mr Netanyahu sat in the Oval Office with the American President and told him that he would not accept the ’67 borders as the basis of a solution. The ’67 borders as a basis for a settlement has been the consistent American position since the ’67 war, for 45 years, under both Democrat and Republican presidents.

Mr Netanyahu told the American President that Israel needed most of the West Bank because otherwise Israel would be militarily vulnerable, and also, an indefinitely long presence in the Jordan Valley, also because otherwise Israel would be militarily vulnerable. And, of course, Mr Netanyahu has a consistent policy of ethnically cleansing Jerusalem of Palestinians because it was given to Jews by God, or because it is the Jewish birthright. That leaves very little for the Palestinians, does it not? The original inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinians, were promised statehood by the British Mandate for Palestine.

It is not true, BTW, that Jews were building the city of Jerusalem 3000 years ago, as Mr Netanyahu repeatedly claims, and even if it were, it would not override international law’s injunction against ethnic cleansing. The archeologists tell us that Jerusalem was an abandoned village 3000 years ago surrounded by a small agrarian population. This is during the purported time of David and Solomon and the purported United Kingdom. Jerusalem did not achieve any significance until the 8th century BCE and then as the continuous development of a Palestinian settlement from which artifacts have been discovered of representing a variety of Palestinians deities of which Yahweh was only one of several . There is not one shred of evidence for a Jewish temple dating from 3000 years ago, or any other significant engineering structures from that time.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that Mr Netanyahu, or any other Israeli who claims to be derived from God’s Chosen, possesses any genetic connection to the ancient Judeans. The burden of proof is on Mr Netanyahu to produce a verifiable pedigree or genealogical tree stretching back 3000 years into the Iron Age. In fact, no living person is able to do that.

Mr Netanyahu derives from European Jewish ancestry, who, in turn, derive mostly from the Russian Khazars, those living near the Volga and Don Rivers, who converted in mass to Judaism in the 9th century CE bringing a much larger population to Judaic belief than any population of Judeans of the ancient world, or their descendants.

Paul Wexler, a philological archeologist at Tel Aviv University, in his book, The Non-Jewish Origin of the Sephardic Jews, writes that Hebrew and Aramaic made their appearance in European Jewish text only in the 10th century CE, and were not products of earlier linguistic developments. During the first millennium CE, Jewish believers in Europe knew no Hebrew or Aramaic. Only after the religious canonization of Arabic in Islam and Latin in Christianity, did Judaism adopt and propagate its own religious language as a high cultural code.

It is as likely that Adolf Hitler is a descendant of the ancient Judeans as is Mr Netanyahu, for all anyone knows.

The locus of the present day conflict in Palestine may not be in Palestine but in Washington, DC, and in the US Congress, because the US Congress supports, probably unwittingly for the most part, the ethnic cleansing and the destruction the Palestinian people.

William James Martin has written many articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East.