The Fall of Libya: A Study in Hypocrisy
By Max Ajl
Gaddafi’s brutal murder at the hands of the fanatical hyenas unleashed on him by the US-led Western alliance was a cynical and cold-blooded war crime. Hillary Clinton typically and memorably joked about his killing.
Global Research, April 29, 2013
UK’s Daily Mirror, a typical media prostitute for the imperialists, whitewashing the ugliness of what they do around the world. The headlines are a complete lie. The Mirror, which usually favours Labour, pretends to be on the side of the people.
Forte is an anthropologist, and what he offers us in Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa is an ethnography of U.S. culture and the way it enabled and contributed to the destruction of Libya. It is also a meticulously documented study in hypocrisy: that of the U.S. elite, of the Gulf ruling classes who have lately welded their agenda directly onto that of the United States, and of the liberal bombardiers who emerged in the crucible of the “humanitarian” wars of the 1990s only to reemerge as cheerleaders for the destruction of another Arab country in 2011.
Finally, it is a study of the breakdown of the anti-war principles of leftists in the United States and Europe, so many of whom, for so long, sustained an infatuation with confused rebels whose leadership early on had their hand out to the U.S. empire, prepared to pay any cost—including Libya itself—to take out a leader under whom they no longer were prepared to live.
Forte begins by describing Sirte, the emblem of the new state Qadhafi—and almost literally, Qadhafi—had constructed with the post–1973 torrent of petrodollars flowing into Libyan coffers in the wake of a series of price increases which Qadhafi’s aggressive resource nationalism had played a part in securing. Sirte was, in effect, a second capital, thick with new buildings and lavished with benefits from the money which had streamed into the new Libya. Qadhafi hosted numerous convocations there, including summits for the Organization for African Unity, a new pan-African network which he played a large part in developing. Sirte was also the place where Qadhafi had chosen to summon the ConocoPhillips CEO in 2008 to criticize the way he was dealing with the company’s oil contracts in Libya.
Forte turns the fate of Sirte into a parable of the fate of Libya, as it fell under, and with, Qadhafi. Indeed, Sirte was one of the places especially targeted by the rebellious forces of the National Transition Council: Forte quotes an AP report stating that “Residents now believe the Misrata fighters intentionally destroyed Sirte, beyond the collateral damage of fighting.”
It is to that destruction that Forte turns. Against too many accounts of the attack on Libya which make far too much of the partial rapprochement between Libya and the United States in the post-Global War on Terror interlude, Forte looks back at the historically belligerent face the United States had shown Libya, especially under Reagan: bombing it repeatedly, and taking down Libyan fighter jets defending Libyan land in the Gulf of Sirte, trying to get members of the Organization for African Unity to censure Libya, and then putting in place a series of sanctions against the Libyan government. Although many of the sanctions were eventually lifted, the close U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, sponsor of the mujahideen who had attempted to assassinate Qadhafi in 1996, continued, contributing to lasting friction between the government of Libya and the government of the United States.
Forte’s contribution here is to complicate the meaning of words like “rebellion” and “revolution” too often incanted to short circuit independent thought. His method is to look at the revolt which was happening in parts of Libya and then to zoom in on Sirte, the Qadhafi stronghold, to see if indeed the revolt was taking place there. To the contrary, Forte finds that the NATO/NTC (National Transitional Council) assault on Sirte continued for months before the rebels were finally able to take control of the city. Their assault consisted of indiscriminate bombing using heavy weaponry, a fact Forte is able to establish using mainstream media reporting of the civil war.
Furthermore, Forte is able to bring to bear evidence that NATO carried out extensive war crimes during its “liberation” of Sirte, and the evidence he brings to bear is impeccable: the statements of the NATO command and the various human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, finding evidence of massacres of captured pro-Qadhafi fighters and even of civilians. Even more damning is the quotation from Georg Charpentier, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya, who could speak in October 2011 of the “liberation of Bani Walid and Sirte in October,” and then in another note that “Public infrastructure, housing, education and health facilities need to be rehabilitated, reconstructed, and reactivated, intense and focused reconciliation efforts also need to be encouraged.”
This and dozens of quotations like it attest to NATO’s knowledge of what it was doing: intervening on one side of a civil war, for “reconciliation” is only necessary when you have two sides, and by elevating one side to angelic revolutionaries, one is laying the groundwork for legitimizing the wholesale destruction of the other.
Another strength of the book is Forte’s account of the double standards not just of the Western states and human rights organizations but also—perhaps especially—of Al Jazeera and its inflated, not to say fabricated, accounts of atrocities and particularly the way it incited racial hatred against darker Libyans.
Forte also clearly shows that Qadhafi had what is now spitefully referred to as a “social base”—as though the modern state is merely a crime syndicate rather than tightly integrated into social reproduction. The avoidance of these questions by dominant currents of the Euro-Atlantic socialist left led to a situation in which too many no longer seem able to distinguish between riots, revolts, and revolutions.
So how did NATO go about intervening? And how did it exploit the Libyan regime’s vulnerabilities? Here Forte seems to misstep a little. He writes of the very real improvements in social welfare, under a populist rentier social contract, and links those improvements to the government. But here some more delving into the academic literature, books such as Ruth First’s or Dirk Vandewalle’s, would have been helpful. While living standards were improving, and the oil wealth was going to the hands of the Libyan people—at least in part—the deliberate “statelessness” of the Qadhafi government had created a situation within which the state was materially embedded within the society, but links between the two were one of a social rather than a civic contract. Anomie and estrangement prevailed under the later Qadhafi, and the people living under his government increasingly felt that they were not the owners of their country. Legitimate discontent grew.
With the advent of the Arab Spring, that discontent found an outlet: revolt. Here Forte moves to surer ground. Disregarding narratives of a “peaceful revolt” militarized only in reluctant response to state savagery, he finds that the revolt was militarized practically from day one, with an attack on a Libyan military barracks. Forte documents that the right wing of the regime was clearly prepared to execute a coup d’état against Qadhafi, with the open assistance of France, the United States, and especially Qatar, which sent in special forces, airplanes, and gunships to ensure his rapid deposition.
Forte goes further than most other analysts of the Libyan coup d’état but at the same time not far enough. Al Jazeera, the television station owned by the Emir of Qatar and early on christened the voice of the Arab Spring, started reporting on “massacres” carried out by “black mercenaries” in Libya, starting February 17 and 18, 2011. The sourcing tended to be to anonymous activists in Benghazi or elsewhere—a script later replayed in Syria, where articles from Al Jazeera are so liberally brocaded with “activists say” to the point where little of what the article says is anything but what activists have said. Such subterfuges have escaped much of the left, and for that reason Forte’s account is laced with contempt for their gullibility with respect to opposition propaganda.
Furthermore, Forte does a very good job of pulling together the reasons the United States never liked Qadhafi—his prickliness with respect to U.S. investment, his leadership in Africa, his support of the African National Congress, and his resolute hostility to AFRICOM and U.S. bases on African soil. Far too much has been made of Qadhafi’s cozying up to the United States after 2004. What is forgotten is that the United States maintains hostility to any state-capitalist regime that is not fully integrated with and subservient to the U.S. global system, with respect both to the free flow of capital and foreign policy. On both counts, Qadhafi failed—the Heritage Foundation, which reports on what matters to the people who matter, found that Iran, Libya, and Syria have been the most “economically repressed” countries in the region—that is, the least open to U.S. investment, while far too often supporting Palestinian resistance movements, decrying normalization with Israel, giving aid to the left wing of Fateh, and other recalcitrant behavior which U.S. imperialists never forgot.
Libya offers a place to rethink dominant theories of imperialism, which have trouble accounting for the role of Western capitalist interests with respect to state-capitalist regimes, even ones implementing neoliberal economic programs or hollowing out their domestic industrial or agricultural sectors. What those theories miss is the resolute hostility of the U.S. state and ruling class to any foreign leadership which seems to be carrying out a national project.
A weakness of Forte’s book is that although he is a leftist, he is not a Marxist. So an occasion is lost to think about the ways in which the positive social transformations carried out under the Qadhafi junta also had the effect of contributing to the future downfall of Libya—for lacking a revolution within the Green Revolution, there was a counter-coup by the regime’s right wing against the populist coup d’état under which Qadhafi came to power. The left needs to understand both the benefits afforded by populist regimes and the limits they impose. The object is to understand what kind of opposition movements can arise which can both defend the gains of previous—and also deeply flawed—governments while simultaneously advancing on them, to further horizons. But these are theoretical and political problems that were with us before the destruction of Libya and will remain with us after. It is to the knowledge of this sordid event of the Euro-Atlantic left that Forte has made an important contribution, one which ought be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in and concerned about the destruction of Libya, and looking to understand more fully the next targets of empire.
SLOUCHING TOWARDS SIRTE: NATO’S WAR ON LIBYA AND AFRICA
Available to order from Global Research
Slouching Towards Sirte:
NATO’s War on Libya and Africa
- ISBN: 978-1-926824-52-9
- Year: 2012
- Pages: 352 with 27 BW photos, 3 maps
- Publisher: Baraka Books
Price: $24.95
Should We Invade Syria? Obama and U.S. Military Divided Over Syria
By Shamus Cooke
Global Research, April 29, 2013
Has Syria crossed the “red line” that warrants a U.S. military invasion? Has it not? The political establishment in the United States seems at odds over itself. Obama’s government cannot speak with one voice on the issue, and the U.S. media is likewise spewing from both sides of its mouth in an attempt to reconcile U.S. foreign policy with that most stubborn of annoyances, truth.
“The White House said on Thursday that American intelligence agencies now believed, with “varying degrees of confidence,” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons…”
Immediately afterwards, Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, gave a blunt rebuke: “Suspicions are one thing; evidence is another.”
This disunity mirrored the recent disagreement that Chuck Hagel had with Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, when both testified in front of Congress with nearly opposite versions of what was happening in Syria and how the U.S. should respond. Kerry was a cheerleader for intervention while Hagel — the military’s mouthpiece — advised caution.
The U.S. government’s internal squabbling over whether the Syrian government used chemical weapons is really an argument on whether the U.S. should invade Syria, since Obama claimed that any use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that, if crossed, would invoke an American military response. Never mind that Obama’s “red line” rhetoric was stolen from the mouth of Bush Jr., who enjoyed saying all kinds of similarly stupid things to sound tough.
But now Obama’s Bushism must be enforced, say the politicians, less the U.S. look weak by inaction. This seemingly childish argument is in fact very compelling among the U.S. political establishment, who view foreign policy only in terms of military power. If Syria is not frightened into submission by U.S. military threats, then Iran and other countries might follow suit and do as they please and U.S. “influence” would wane. Only a “firm response” can stop this domino effect from starting.This type of logic is the basis for the recent Syria chemical weapons accusations, which was conjured up by the U.S. “Intelligence” service (CIA) and its British and Israeli counterparts (the same people who “proved” that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which later proved to be a fabricated lie). All three of these countries’ intelligence agencies simply announced that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, provided zero evidence, and then let their respective nations’ media run with the story, which referred to the baseless accusations as “mounting evidence.”In the real world it appears that the U.S.-backed Syrian rebels are the ones responsible for having used chemical weapons against the Syrian government. It was the Syrian government who initially accused the U.S.-backed rebels of using chemical weapons, and asked the UN to investigate the attack. This triggered the Syrian rebels and later the Obama administration to accuse the Syrian government of the attack.A very revealing New York Times article quoted U.S.-backed Syrian rebels admitting that the chemical weapons attack took place in a Syrian government controlled territory and that 16 Syrian government soldiers died as a result of the attack, along with 10 civilians plus a hundred more injured. But the rebels later made the absurd claim that the Syrian government accidentally bombed its own military with the chemical weapons.Interestingly, the Russian government later accused the United States of trying to stall the UN investigation requested by the Syrian government, by insisting that the parameters of the investigation be expanded to such a degree that a never-ending discussion over jurisdiction and rules would eventually abort the investigation.Complicating the U.S.’ stumbling march to war against Syria is the fact that the only effective U.S.-backed rebel forces are Islamist extremists, the best fighters of which have sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda. The same week that the U.S. media was screaming about chemical weapons, The NewYork Times actually published a realistic picture of the U.S.-backed Syrian rebels, which warrants extended quotes:“Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.”
“Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”
“The Islamist character of the [rebel] opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion…The religious agenda of the combatants sets them apart from many civilian activists, protesters and aid workers who had hoped the uprising would create a civil, democratic Syria.”
Thus, yet another secular Middle Eastern government — after Iraq and Libya — is being pushed into the abyss of Islamist extremism, and the shoving is being done by the United States, which The NewYork Times discovered was funneling thousands of tons of weapons into Syria through U.S. allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. We now know that these weapons were given to the Islamist extremists; directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter.
Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org) He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com
Chronicles of Inequality [TOO MUCH, 29 April 2013]
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April 29, 2013 |
| THIS WEEK | |
| Ed Stack, the CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, has a rather unique claim to fame. A few years back, Stack invented “the stupid list.” He asked his managers and employees to list the three things Dick’s does “that make no sense.”We have a suggestion for the Dick’s “stupid list”: the windfalls Dick’s is stuffing into the pockets of Ed Stack. In 2012, news reports last week informed us, CEO Stack grabbed an astonishing $137 million cashing out stock options, on top of $10.7 million in his regular annual compensation.How much more did Stack take home last year than his workers? We don’t know. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, firms like Dick’s must reveal the gap between their CEO and median worker pay. But the federal Securities and Exchange Commission has so far made no move to enforce the Dodd-Frank mandate.Two dozen national citizen groups have just asked the new SEC chair, Mary Jo White, to stop the foot-dragging and start requiring CEO-worker pay disclosure. We need her to listen. More on the reasons why in this week’s Too Much. | About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common GoodSubscribe to Too MuchJoin us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
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| GREED AT A GLANCE | |
| America’s fourth- and ninth-biggest dailies, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, may soon become the property of Koch Industries, the privately held corporation that fuels the fortune of America’s two most notorious right-wing billionaires, Charles and David Koch. The two papers stand as the crown jewels of an eight-daily chain that also includes high-profile papers in Baltimore and Orlando. The likely cost of the total package: $623 million, pocket change for the Koch brothers. Their personal net worths now total, Bloomberg estimates, $45 billion each. A Koch Industries flack is telling reporters that the Kochs would not meddle with the “independence” of any media that might fall into the Koch camp. But a new Columbia Journalism Review analysis of a media property already under Koch control shows a tendency to “blur reporting and opinion.••••
” Cara David, the top marketing exec at American Express, has some great news to report — for the businesses that service America’s rich. The latest AmexSurvey of Affluence and Wealth in America, co-authored with the Harrison Group,is estimating that luxury sales will grow 3.4 percent this year, over twice the growth forecast for national GDP. America’s top 1 percent, says David, have maneuvered themselves into “a better position to spend on luxury.” Gushes Harrison’s Jim Taylor: “Lessons learned from the recession — resourcefulness, self-reliance, and a deep sense of financial responsibility — continue to dominate purchasing strategies in the country’s most successful households.” |
Quote of the Week
“We used to be a country with a rich heart. Now we’re the land of the heartless rich.” |
| PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK | |
 Mark Bertolini, the CEO at health insurer giant Aetna, has been loudly warning Americans to beware next January 1, the date Obamacare finally goes into near full effect. Consumers, says Bertolini, will be facing “rate shock” when they see how much their insurance premiums are going to be costing. But he’s not saying why. Aetna and other insurers, industry whistle-blower Wendell Potter points out, have been making big bucks selling low-premium policies that lead consumers to believe they’re buying much more coverage than they actually get. Obamacare bans this “junk insurance,” and firms like Aetna will have to offer policies that provide real coverage. Expect Aetna to charge dearly for these policies. How else will the insurer be able to continue paying Bertolini his going rate? He pulled in a sweet $36.4 million last year. |
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| PROGRESS AND PROMISE | |
| Know Where Your Premiums Are Going? Only one state in America, Vermont, has so far moved to shove giant health insurers and their lavishly paid execs out of their central role in the nation’s health care. Vermont lawmakers two years ago passed legislation that puts the state on track to creating a “single-payer” health care system. But single-payer remains years away. In the meantime, Vermont is moving to up the heat on health insurer CEOs. State legislation enacted last year requires insurers to reveal to consumers exactly how much they spend on lobbying and advertising, how often they deny consumer claims, and how much they pay their CEOs. | Take Action on InequalityUrge your rep in Congress to back the Inclusive Prosperity Act, the new bill that would set a financial transactions tax on Wall Street speculation. More at the Robin Hood campaign. |
| IMAGES OF INEQUALITY | |
 ••••
The property in London’s 10 most exclusive boroughs, we learned earlier this year, now holds more value than all the property combined in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Insatiable global billionaire demand for London addresses now appears poised to drive that gap even wider. The second largest manse in London has just gone on the market for £250 million, about $382 million. The sale, if completed at the asking price, will make the “palatial Regency mansion” at 18 Carlton House Terrace the developed world’s most expensive abode. |
Web Gem Global Rich List/ See where you rate in the worldwide distribution of income. |
| INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS | |
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Stat of the Week
In the world’s top four financial hubs — New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore — over 300 residential properties sold for over $15.5 million in 2012, says a new report co-produced by Deutsche Bank. The total outlay for the 300 properties: over $10 billion, for an average over $33 million each.
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| IN FOCUS | |
| From a Sloppy Spreadsheet, an Eternal TruthIf we let wealth continue to concentrate — and corrupt every element of our contemporary societies — we’ll all end up crying ’96 tears.’
Aging baby boomers may remember, from way back in 1966, a one-hit-wonder rock band that sported an all-time great of a name. That band — Question Mark and the Mysterians — may now have a worthy rival on the name front. Make way for Reinhart-Rogoff and the Austerians. Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff don’t make smash records. They write learned economic papers that make austerians happy — and help smash the life prospects of average working families. Austerians preach the absolute necessity of whacking away at government spending for public services. We must, these champions of austerity solemnly intone, discipline ourselves to reduce government deficit and debt, no matter the pain austerity may bring us. And austerity does bring pain. People lose access to basic services. People lose jobs. People even go hungry. But some people — extremely affluent people — don’t mind austerity at all. These affluents don’t send their kids to public schools. They don’t spend weekend afternoons at public parks. They never step aboard public transit. These wealthy don’t need public services and resent having to pay taxes to support them. Austerity works for these affluents. Cutbacks in public services won’t, by and large, bring any discomfort to their daily lives. And if austerity should create some unanticipated discomfort, they can always get their friends in high places to intervene — as Americans saw last week when lawmakers rushed to undo recent austerity cutbacks in the Federal Aviation Administration budget that had affluent people cooling their heels in airports. Austerity cutbacks, notes Center for Economic and Policy Research economist Dean Baker, promise even greater payoffs — for the rich — down the road. The austerity push for cuts in programs like Social Security, he points out, “opens the door for lowering tax rates on the wealthy in the future.” “If these sorts of social commitments can be reduced,” Baker writes, “then the wealthy can look forward to being able to keep more of their income.” All this may help explain why pollsters have found, as economist Paul Krugmanpointed out last Friday, that wealthy Americans “by a large majority” consider budget deficits “the most important problem we face.” America’s wealthy make their personal predilection for austerity equally plain to the politicians who seek their favor. These pols, for their part, want to be helpful to their deep-pocketed patrons. But these pols, Dean Baker reminds us, also have needs of their own. They need “evidence” they can use to show the general public that “austerity serves the general good and not just the rich.” Three years ago, Harvard’s Reinhart and Rogoff supplied that “evidence,” via an academic paper that purported to show a clear and imminent danger whenever government debt hits a particular percent of Gross Domestic Product. This Reinhart-Rogoff paper rushed to the “top of the charts,” in elite public policy circles. Austerians worldwide waved the paper at every opportunity. They cited Reinhart and Rogoff’s work as an unassailable justification for cutting government spending quick and cutting government spending deep. Reinhart and Rogoff made no meaningful move to discourage the austerians. They basked instead in their global celebrity — until earlier this month when a team of unorthodox economists at the University of Massachusetts exposed the Reinhart-Rogoff paper as essentially a sloppy scholarly fraud. This Massachusetts work quickly went viral. By last week, Reinhart and Rogoff’s Excel spreadsheet errors had become fodder for late-night TV comics. End of story? Not quite. We have much more here than a spectacularly failed attempt to make the case for a doctrine that suits the sensibilities of the richest among us. We have powerful proof that inequality corrupts every corner of contemporary societies, even — and especially — our ivory towers. The academic peers of Reinhart and Rogoff, the scholars who hold the nation’s most prestigious endowed chairs in economics, never once made any effort to check out the Harvard pair’s findings. The unraveling of their bogus case for austerity started with the digging of a skeptical grad student. Like this article? Sign up The lesson in all this? In a staggeringly unequal society, as Paul Krugman summed up last week, “what the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.” The rest of us, of course, don’t have to listen, on austerity or any other front. |
New Wisdom on WealthMichael Peppard, Plutocracy in action: the FAA vs. National Parks, Commonweal, April 26, 2013. Gridlock in Congress magically ends — when the affluent squeal.Sean Reardon, No Rich Child Left Behind, New York Times, April 28, 2013. A Stanford sociologist explains why rising income inequality needs to take center stage in debates over our education future.
Find out more about Too Much editor Sam Pizzigati’snew book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. |
| NEW AND NOTABLE | |
| Why Mitt Lost: The Role Inequality PlayedLarry Bartels, The Class War Gets Personal: Inequality as a Political Issue in the 2012 Election, NYU Law School Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance, April 23, 2013.Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels has written widely and wisely about inequality over recent years. Last week, he presented this new analysis of the impact of inequality on the 2012 election, a study based in significant part on specially commissioned survey data. His basic finding: Mitt Romney owes his 2012 defeat to a “widespread public perception that he cared more about wealthy people like himself than about poor and middle-class Americans.” |
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Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman has spent billions the last few years buying up heavy equipment rivals. But that buy-up spree hasn’t juiced up company earnings. So Oberhelman has tried squeezing a closer-to-home asset: his workers. He threw 700 employees out of work at a Cat plant in Canada after workers there rejected a 50 percent wage cut. Then, 
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
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.