Saturday 11 November 2017

Who Killed President Kennedy and Why?

Global Research, November 11, 2017
Oriental Review 10 November 2017

In late October President Trump ordered that “the veil be lifted” from the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. More than 3,000 new, previously classified FBI, CIA, and Congressional documents were released to the public.
A quick overview of the material shows that the bulk of it pertains either to the CIA’s covert operations against Cuba (one of the most popular theories about JFK’s assassination focuses on the ties between Lee Harvey Oswald and anti-Castro paramilitary groups that were upset about Kennedy’s “soft” policy toward the island) or the CIA’s search for a “Soviet fingerprint” in the crime – as can be seen in Langley’s fruitless but determined attempts to turn the defector Yuri Nosenko into a key source of information (although, truth be told, he adamantly refused to give the required “testimony” and was for this reason long suspected of being a KGB double agent). We cannot avoid the impression that these huge document dumps – along with the scores of “investigations” conducted over the last 54 years, in addition to the books and movies about this cryptic murder – have one goal: to keep whoever really ordered the JFK assassination from being brought to justice.
All of these materials focus in one way or another on the figure of the unhappy “psychopath,” known as Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone gunman who shot the 35th US president on Nov. 22, 1963, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, using a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano Italian rifle with telescopic sight. Each new batch of released documents (and there have been three just this year: on July 24, Oct. 26, and Nov. 3) triggers another round of furious debate, all over the world, about his motives, connections, and the facts of the crime.
Oswald being led from the Texas Theatre following his arrest
Oswald being led from the Texas Theatre following his arrest, Nov 22 1963
The narrative of the murder would seem quite straightforward. Just a few minutes after the fatal shots were fired, the security services were already combing through the depository building. On the 6th floor, they discovered an open window, three shell casings, and a rifle bearing Oswald’s fingerprints. Forty minutes after Kennedy’s death, the cops already had a name, physical description, and address for his alleged killer. The crime of the century was easily solved. The police surrounded the Texas Theatre building where Mr. Oswald was hiding, and he was arrested barely an hour after the president was assassinated.
But not everything was quite so simple. A 26-second movie, made that day by Abraham Zapruder, shows the exact moment of the murder, which has made it possible to dissect the instant of Kennedy’s death, frame by frame.
According to the official story, three shots were fired (the first missed, the second passed through the president’s neck and ricocheted into the chest, wrist, and thigh of Texas Governor John Connally, and the third bullet struck Kennedy in the head). But the film clearly shows that the second bullet (frame 225) and third bullet (frame 313) are of completely different types: the second passed through the president’s neck without serious tissue damage, while the third was obviously an expanding bullet, the impact of which shattered the American leader’s skull! A mix of different types of bullets within a single clip of a semi-automatic gun would be a game-changer for shooters. But the most likely explanation is that there were at least two snipers involved.
A number of recognized probe inconsistencies (missing bullets, improper autopsy procedure, faked autopsy photos & notes, to point out a few) that led to repeated official and inofficial attempts to reconsider the case for the past decades, eventually resulted in the fact that today only 24% of Americans believe that LHO had acted alone.
An analysis of the Zapruder film prompts even more awkward questions. It turns out that the killer took about five seconds to fire all the shots. That seems quite unlikely for this model of rifle with a telescopic sight, because the bolt has to be cycled with each firing. If you look at the video below, a professional is taking a few shots using the same type of rifle, but without the telescopic sight.

If you time the video carefully, you can see that this expert rifleman takes just about five seconds to get off three shots, but you’ll notice that he’s making no attempt to aim! Is it possible to believe that a second-rate marksman like Lee Harvey Oswald could have performed with robot-like precision in such an extreme situation?
And so Oswald was arrested. I did not kill President Kennedy … I didn’t kill anybody … I don’t know anything about what you are accusing me,” he said. Nor for that matter was he allowed to call a lawyer. He never admitted to murdering Kennedy. And two days after the president’s death, while Oswald was being transferred between jails, he was shot at close range by a Texas underworld figure named Jack Ruby (Jacob Rubenstein), who was also, according to the Warren Commission, “a lone gunman.” You don’t have to dig too deeply into the man’s background to realize that he had very deep ties to the police and American security agencies.
And then within the next two years, an astonishing number of people (more than 50!) who possessed some kind of information about the Kennedy assassination died under mysterious circumstances. The Navy officer Lt. William Pitzer, who managed the closed-circuit camera in the autopsy room at the at Bethesda Naval Hospital and filmed the proceeding, was later discovered to have “shot himself”, and the tape of the film had vanished. A week later, the taxi driver who drove Oswald home from the book depository on the day of the president’s assassination, William Whaley, was killed in a car crash. The same fate befell one of the witnesses to the Kennedy assassination, Lee Bowers, who saw “two men shooting from behind the fence.” Three of the five people who were present in Jack Ruby’s house on the evening of Nov. 24, 1963 were shot to death (the lawyer Tom Howard and reporters Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe) … And on Nov. 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen, who was the only journalist granted a private interview with Jack Ruby after Oswald’s assassination, died of a “drug overdose,” although she had never taken drugs. There are dozens of such examples, and the names involved have never been a secret, but is it even worth pointing out once again that these people are never mentioned in the declassified files from the US National Archives?
On Nov. 29, 1963, Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president who had automatically risen to head of state upon JFK’s death, ordered a special commission to be established to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. The chief justice of the US Supreme Court, Earl Warren, was asked to head the seven-man panel, which also included two senators, two members of the House of Representatives, the former director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and the banker John McCloy. The commission listened to testimony from 552 witnesses and obtained more than 3,000 reports from courts and law-enforcement agencies, which, in turn, had conducted approximately 26,000 interviews, collected in 26 volumes of documentation. However, the final report, which was intended to shed light on the mysterious details of the “crime of the century,” merely offered withering criticism of the CIA, the FBI, and the Dallas police for not being able to prevent the death of the president, who had been shot by a deranged lone gunman… Hale Boggs, a Democratic Representative from Louisiana, was the only member of the Warren Commission who did not buckle to Earl Warren and his disciples and disagreed with the conclusion. In October 1972 he was killed in a plane crash over frozen Alaska …
Rep. Hale Boggs
One of the last photos of Rep. Hale Boggs
The findings of the investigation, which ignored a whole slew of facts and the death of almost all the witnesses, were so obviously bizarre that in 1976 the US Congress created a new special commission on the Kennedy case. In 1979 it issued its verdict: Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” The HSCA determined, based on available evidence, that the probable conspiracy did not involve the governments of the Soviet Union or Cuba. The committee also added that no organized crime group, anti-Castro group, or the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service was mixed up in that conspiracy. Is it any wonder that following this report,the FBI and the US Department of Justice “raised numerous concerns regarding perceived inadequacies in the Committee’s experts’ methodology, which led to the conclusion of a conspiracy”?
So, who ordered the murder of President Kennedy and then covered up the tracks? Obviously the masterminds were not merely some group of conspirators or Mafiosi, but rather individuals who wield immense and very real power in the American government. So immense that they could force the entire US law-enforcement system to do everything necessary to keep this crime from being solved and to compel the Kennedy family to obediently close their eyes to it!
Who would have been capable of doing this? The Mafia? Cuban emigrants? Anyone could pull the trigger, but not just anyone could force the investigation to overlook obvious facts and turn a blind eye to what any of us can see in the films and photos. Nor did the CIA or FBI command such power. If it were simply a matter of liquidating an undesirable foreign political figure or an out-of-control drug baron, then either of these agencies could contain the scandal on its own. But even they would be in over their heads in any attempt to assassinate a US president in his own country.
In order to get closer to unraveling one of the most mysterious political murders of the 20th century, we should turn our attention to an obscure document signed by that resident of the Oval Office less than six months before his death.
On June 4, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110 authorizing the US Treasury to issue paper currency that could be redeemed for silver held by the treasury. As a result, this US currency was printed in denominations of $2 and $5 and inscribed with the words “United States Note” instead of “Federal Reserve Note.”
United States Note 1963
United States Note 1963 5 dollars
Kennedy’s order was intended to wean the Federal Reserve System away from printing money, beginning a smooth transition toward returning the printing press to the hands of the American government.
He was correcting a clear violation of the US Constitution and an absurd situation in which the US government could not print its own money. It was a quiet and inconspicuous coup d’état. For the bankers who had founded the Federal Reserve, their greatest fear was about to come true. Now with one stroke of the pen, their plans to establish complete control over the US government and American society were faced with a clear and present danger. Because the fact was that the issuance of these small banknotes was to be followed by the complete suspension of the Fed’s right to print money. So what was that agency to do then? Regulate the financial market, monitoring it so as to forestall any crises? Fine, regulating and monitoring is all well and good. Just stop printing money …
The Federal Reserve’s monopoly on the issuance of its own dollar, which is for some reason considered to be the “US dollar,” hinges on a single act of legislationthat was signed by President Woodrow Wilson in December of 1913. Consequently, a single, different act of legislation would be enough to destroy this monopoly.But John F. Kennedy failed to realize his agenda. Executive Order 11110 was not revoked but was never actually implemented. For the owners of the Fed, however, the threat remained that the order could be revived by a new US president, potentially JFK’s brother Robert, who in his position as US Attorney General fully grasped the implications of what was happening. And the equally enigmaticmurder of Robert Kennedy, who was a leading candidate headed into the Democratic primary for the 1968 presidential election, occurred exactly five years after the signing of the very executive order that killed his brotherIt looks like the very influential bankers from the Federal Reserve sent a clear signal: the clan whose representatives tried to betray the System will no longer be allowed to play a significant role in US politics. And they haven’t.
We still can’t reliably assess President Trump’s motivation in releasing the JFK files. The plenitude, relevance and authenticity of this archive are highly questionable. Nevertheless, he might have intuitively felt that the draining of Washington’s swamp should eventually be completed at the Constitution Avenue…
All images in this article are from Oriental Review.
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Thanks to Syrian & Iraqi Armies, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia, ISIS Defeated In Syria And Iraq



"Information Clearing House" -  Two days ago, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), supported by Russian air power, finally took control of Albu Kamal – the last Daesh base in the Syria/Iraq border.

One week ago, the Iraqi Army and the PMUs reconquered al-Qaim, on their side of the border. Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, the legendary PMU commander, previously had told a small group of us in Baghdad that would happen “in a matter of days”.

It ended up being four – to be exact.

The Syrian forces will now be redeployed northwest, towards Idlib, the last “moderate rebel” stronghold of that thing called Syrian Conquest Front, a.k.a. Nusra Front, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria.

The key point is that Syrian and Iraqi forces have met at the border – with defeated Daesh jihadis scurrying around or turned into roadkill.

This is History in the making.

And right on cue, VIRTUALLY NOTHING about this REAL ON THE GROUND VICTORY OF A REAL WAR ON TERROR is being covered by Western corporate media.

No wonder. Because this was the work of Damascus, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran advisers, Baghdad and the PMUs – actually the “4+1” - and not the US-led “coalition” that includes Wahhabi mongrels House of Saud and UAE - that totally smashes to bits the monochord Washington narrative.

So History in the making must be silenced.

Of course Project Daesh of balkanizing “Syraq” is not dead.

Yet.

The jihadi diaspora – across the desert, towards other fronts (Afghanistan, Philippines, the Caucasus) – is in effect.

The usual suspects - and their proxies/lackeys – simply won’t give up

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SYRIAN WAR: HOW DEFEAT OF ISIS CHANGES PROSPECTS OF CONFLICT


The liberation of al-Bukamal become another turning point marking the start of a new phase in the Syrian conflict. ISIS has lost all important cities, which it used to control in Syria, thus becoming just a terrorist group rather than a terrorist state.
The terrorist group still controls some villages in an area between al-Bukamal and Deir Ezzor, a part of the border between Syria and Iraq, a part of the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus and a chunk of territory near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Many ISIS members are now fleeing the country in an attempt to reach safe havens around the world. The remaining terrorists will be involved in a guerilla war against the Syrian government and US-backed forces.
Now, Syria could be divided into 7 sectors controlled by various parties:
  1. The Syrian government, backed by its allies – Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, controls the biggest part of the country, including the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Deir Ezzor, Damascus, Latakia, as-Suwayda and Tartus. However, the militant-held pockets inside the government-held area pose a significant security threat. The situation is especially complicated in Eastern Ghouta and the Yarmouk Refugee Camp. The pockets of Bayt Jinn, Jayrud and Rastan are relatively calm.
  2. The situation is complicated in Daraa where Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and its allies are in control of a part of the provincial capital. The Russia-US de-escalation zone agreement in southern Syria allowed the intensity of fighting there to decrease. Despite this, clashes erupt from time to time in Daraa city and near the Golan Heights. Militants in southern Syria are mostly backed by Jordan, the US and Israel. Tel Aviv often uses tensions in the area to justify its strikes against Syrian forces and describes its support to local militants as a humanitarian assistance to the local population. It is interesting to note that Israel has no problems with the ISIS-linked Khalid ibn al-Walid Army, which operates near its forces. The so-called local armed opposition does not seek to fight ISIS there either.
  3. The at-Tanf area on the Syrian-Iraqi border is controlled by the US-led coalition and a few US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups. FSA units are concentrated around the US garrison at at-Tanf and in the nearby refugee camp. The US says that it needs this garrison to fight ISIS while in fact it is just preventing Syria and Iraq from using the Damascus-Baghdad highway as a supply line. US forces respond with airstrikes and shelling to any Syrian Arab Army (SAA) attempts to reach at-Tanf.
  4. Northeastern Syria, including the cities of Raqqa, Tabqah, Hasakah and a part of Qamishli, is controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Kurdish militias YPG and YPJ are a core of the SDF and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) de-facto controls this area. A notable number of US military facilities and troops in this area are an important factor contributing to the SDF’s confidence. Some aggressive SDF statements against Damascus can serve as an illustration of this fact.
  5. Northwestern Syria is also controlled by the SDF. However, the US influence in this area is lower and local Kurdish militias maintain better military relations with the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance. They also face more pressure from Turkey and its proxies.
  6. Turkey and pro-Turkish militant groups control a chunk of the border area, including al-Bab, Azaz and Jarabulus, in northern Syria. Ankara has a strong position there and pro-Turkish militants have repeatedly clashed with SDF members near Tall Rifat.
  7. Turkish forces are also deployed at the contact line with the SDF in the province of Idlib. However, almost the entire province is still controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). This means that Ankara and the terrorist group have reached a kind of agreement over the deployment of the Turkish troops. Ankara actively uses various militant groups to pressure Kurdish forces, which it sees a part of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The PKK operates in Turkey and northern Iraq and has been seeking for a long time to establish an independent Kurdish state there.
Clashes of various intensity between the SAA and HTS have been ongoing in northern and northeastern Hama since October. This clearly shows that the Idlib de-escalation agreement is not working and creates HTS positions in the area, which will be an obvious target for the expected SAA operation after ISIS is driven out from the rest of villages in the Euphrates Valley. According to pro-government sources, the SAA has already started redeploying elite units from Deir Ezzor to Hama.
Experts believe that the mid-term SAA goal there is to further expand buffer zone along the Ithriyah-Khanaser-Aleppo highway and to liberate Abu ad-Duhur. This will allow to shorten frontline and increase a concentration of troops and equipment on the contact line when the so-called opposition decides that it’s time to negotiate.
Another possible hot point is Daraa. Local militants will resume their military activity in the city if they see that their Idlib counterparts have become a target of a large-scale SAA operation.
Now, Russia, the US, Turkey, Iran and Syria are increasing their diplomatic activity in order to find a way, which could allow work to start on developing a final political settlement of the crisis. They all have objective limits to their influence on the ground and some contradictory goals. This complicates the situation, especially amid a lack of strategic vision from the US which, according even to American experts, has no long-term strategy for Syria. The US elites and their Israeli and Saudi counterparts are especially dissatisfied with the strengthened position of Hezbollah and Iran.
If the sides are not able to find common ground in the nearest future, the conflict may easily give rise to a new round of violence.
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The national forces of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt الجيوش الوطنية في سورية والعراق ومصر

 The national forces of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt

نوفمبر 7, 2017
Written by Nasser Kandil,حرب سعوديّة أم حرب «إسرائيليّة» بواجهة سعودية؟
It was clear and certified that there is a plan that aims at destroying and dismantling the national forces especially in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. For those who want to ask about the future of the Israeli project in the region, have to measure the outcome of what has happened at the level of the future of these armies, and to measure as well the future of the disintegration projects from the most important gate which is represented by the separatist attempt of the Kurdistan region in Iraq.
A look at the situation of the armies in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, especially because the Syrian and the Iraqi armies have been exposed to systematic dismantling projects and have suffered from serious losses in their structure, armament, and geographical control, shows that these armies got out of war stronger than what they were before, more cohesive, and have more experience, number, steadfastness, morale, armament, and skill.
In Syria and Iraq we are in front of two armies of one million  soldiers and officers who have the most modern military weapons that were tested in the fields, they got out of battles which last for years victorious contrary to many armies in the world, these armies are surrounded by about two million  people in similar fighting organizations as the national and the popular defense in Syria, and the popular Crowd in Iraq, in coordination with a resistance that can mobilize  a quarter of a million fighters led by an elite of fifty thousand fighters who master all kinds of wars and have all kinds of weapons. While in the strategic depth which is represented by Iran there is an army of million soldiers surrounded by five million of Revolutionary Guard and mobilization forces who participated in the wars of Syria and Iraq. So it is not hidden that in Lebanon and Egypt some of that also, moreover, in Palestine there is a resistance that is recovering after the plight of the wrong positioning of some of its factions in the war of Syria.
The Israeli leadership looks from this perspective to its future in the region, but it finds it black, it commemorates the centenary of Balfour Declaration as a one hundred year non-renewal promise, as the British 99-years lease contracts, where Israel has completed it in 1946. Many predictors and soothsayers ensured its end before that date, while the seculars and the scientists said depending on facts and figures that Israel will not withstand till that date, maybe the next decade will be the date of its demise, so if it does not go to war to accelerate the historic confrontation others will drive it to, otherwise why do they accumulate arms and expertise and spend money for that?
I have asked three leading figures of active influential countries in the wars of the region, who have relation with the security and the military act about if there is a final conception of the formula of settlements in the region, their answer was the same; almost everything is clear and decisive but what is delaying is the complex of the American insistence on ensuring the security of Israel and the impossibility of getting this guarantee, therefore the settlements will take place gradually as well as the combination between the understandings and the imposing of the fait accompli and linking the ongoing conflict about the security of Israel till something great happens, they added either to indulge in a war that is difficult to stop or Israel has to accelerate to accept the comprehensive withdrawal till the line of the fourth of June of the year 1967 and the establishment of real Palestinian state, then there will be card shuffling that will change the rules of engagement.
Translated by Lina Shehadeh,

الجيوش الوطنية في سورية والعراق ومصر

نوفمبر 3, 2017

حرب سعوديّة أم حرب «إسرائيليّة» بواجهة سعودية؟ناصر قنديل

– كان واضحاً وموثقاً أنّ ثمة مخططاً يستهدف تدمير وتفكيك الجيوش الوطنية، خصوصاً في سورية والعراق ومصر، وللذين يريدون التساؤل عن مستقبل المشروع «الإسرائيلي» في المنطقة، أن يقيسوا حاصل ما جرى على مستوى مستقبل هذه الجيوش، وأن يقيسوا بالتوازي معها مستقبل مشاريع التفتيت من بوابة المشروع الأشدّ أهمية وجاهزية، الذي مثّله المسعى الانفصالي لإقليم كردستان في العراق.

– إنّ نظرة نحو حال الجيوش في مصر وسورية والعراق، خصوصاً في سورية والعراق، وقد تعرّض الجيشان لمشاريع تفكيك منهجية، وتلقى كلّ منهما إصابات بالغة في بنيته وتسليحه وسيطرته الجغرافية، تفيد بأنها جيوش تخرج من هذه الحرب أشدّ قوة مما كانت قبلها، وأكثر تماسكاً وخبرة وعديداً وثباتاً ومعنويات وتسليحاً ومهارة.

– في سورية والعراق نحن أمام جيشين من مليون جندي وضابط يملكون أحدث العتاد الحربي وقد اختبروه في الميدان، وخرجوا من معارك لم يعِش مثلها جيشُ في العالم لسنوات ويخرج منتصراً، محاطين بحوالي مليوني منضوٍ في أطر رديفة للقتال كالدفاع الوطني والشعبي في سورية والحشد الشعبي في العراق، وبالتنسيق مع مقاومة تستطيع تعبئة ربع مليون مقاتل تقودهم نخبة من خمسين ألف مقاتل يتقنُون أنواع الحروب كلها ويملكون أنواع السلاح كافة، وفي العمق الاستراتيجي الذي تمثله إيران جيش من مليون جندي وحوله خمسة ملايين بين حرس ثوري وقوات تعبئة، وقد شاركوا في حربَيْ سورية والعراق، وليس خافياً، أنّ في لبنان ومصر بعضاً من هذا، وفي فلسطين حال مقاومة تتعافى بعد محنة التموضع الخاطئ لبعض فصائلها في حرب سورية.

– تنظر القيادة «الإسرائيلية» بهذه الحسابات لمستقبلها في المنطقة فتراه أسود، وهي تحتفل بمئوية وعد بلفور، كأنه وعد مئة عام غير قابلة للتجديد، كحال عقود الليزينغ البريطانية سقفها تسعة وتسعون سنة، ستتمّها «إسرائيل» عام 1946، فيكثر المتنبئون والمنجمون بزوالها قبل هذا التاريخ، وينظر العلمانيون والعلميون بعيون أخرى تقول بالوقائع والأرقام إنّ «إسرائيل» لن تصمد حتى ذلك التاريخ، فربما يكون العقد المقبل موعد الرحيل، فإنْ لم تذهب هي للحرب لتسريع المواجهة التاريخية، سيأتيها بالحرب الآخرون، وإلا فلماذا يكدّسون السلاح والخبرات وينفقون عليهما الأموال؟

– ثلاث شخصيات قيادية ذات صلة بالعمل الأمني والعسكري من دول فاعلة ومؤثرة في حروب المنطقة، سألتهم السؤال ذاته، هل من تصوّر نهائي لصيغة التسويات في المنطقة، كان جوابهم واحداً، كل شيء تقريباً واضح ومحسوم، والذي يؤخّر هو عقدة الإصرار الأميركي على ضمان أمن «إسرائيل»، واستحالة الحصول على هذه الضمانة، ولذلك ستتمّ التسويات بالتدريج والمزاوجة بين التفاهمات وفرض الأمر الواقع، وربط النزاع المستمرّ حول أمن «إسرائيل» حتى يحدث شيء كبير، وعن هذا الشيء الكبير قالوا، إما الانزلاق لحرب يصعُب وقفها تكتبُ هي الجواب، أو مسارعة «إسرائيل» لقبول الانسحاب الشامل حتى خط الرابع من حزيران من العام 1969 وقيام دولة فلسطينية حقيقية، عندها سيحدث خلط أوراق يغيّر قواعد الاشتباك.

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How We All Learned to Accept Bush’s Lies About Libya



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How We All Learned to Accept Bush’s Lies About Libya


According to non-partisan, pan-ideological lore in 2017, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi gave up his quest for nukes in 2003—spooked by the Iraq war or strong-armed by imperialism or just trying to be nice, depending on the lesson plan. But instead of making his regime more secure, the gesture only secured his eventual downfall.
“North Koreans invariably mention the former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi,” Evan Osnos wrote in The New Yorker following a recent trip to Pyongyang. And these North Korean officials cite the officially prepared narrative: that in December 2003, following talks that the U.S. president said began when the U.S. and UK invaded Iraq nine months earlier, the government of Colonel Gaddafi announced it was giving up on nuclear deterrence.
As Bush recounted in his 2004 State of the Union address, “the leader of Libya voluntarily pledged to disclose and dismantle all of his regime’s weapons of mass destruction programs, including a uranium-enrichment project for nuclear weapons.” Gaddafi, Bush said, “correctly judged that his country would be better off and far more secure without weapons of mass murder.”
The North Korean state, seeing how Gaddafi was executed less than eight years later by rebels with NATO air support, claims to have learned a lesson: that the Libyan leader signed his death warrant when he traded weapons for diplomatic relations. “It has been shown to the corners of the earth that Libya’s giving up its nuclear arms, which the U.S. liked to chatter on about, was used as an invasion tactic to disarm the country,” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a 2011 statement. A Foreign Ministry official repeated the claim in an October 5 interview with Nick Kristof, which The New York Timescolumnist left unchallenged.
This is also the tidy narrative adopted by the current White House to explain why diplomacy won’t work with Pyongyang. “The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes is, unfortunately, if you had nukes, never give them up,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2017. A write-up in The Intercept reported that comment as detailing how, with respect to proliferation, “we got to this point,” a fact—disarmament followed by regime change prompting others to build and test more nukes—“shamelessly denied” by the previous administration.
Business news network CNBC has likewise speculated that North Korea’s “refusal to drop its nuclear weapons program may have a lot to do with the fate that met [Gaddafi],” while Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute is less equivocal, saying that, with respect to Libya, “Pyongyang saw America’s policy plain.
Farewell to Arms?
But Libya never gave up nuclear arms; it never had them—it hardly even had what might be called a “program.” And that 2003 deal was followed not by preparations for war against a newly disarmed enemy, but a shameful period of normalization that saw respected politicians in the U.S. and Europe flatter the Libyan dictator with praise and arms, all while their governments abducted and extradited his political opponents.
Amid that deplorable friendship, North Korea, in 2006, conducted its first nuclear weapons test. As analyst Samuel Ramani argues, it was the NATO intervention in Kosovo, and “NATO’s decision not to remove [Slobodan] Milosevic from power in 1999,” that informed North Korean policy to build up a conventional and nuclear deterrent. “From Pyongyang’s vantage point, NATO’s restrained military intervention in Yugoslavia demonstrated that the United States was only willing to carry out military interventions if they resulted in few casualties,” Ramani writes.
What happened in Libya years later may not have discouraged Pyongyang’s thinking with respect to deterrence, but it was at best a data point. And the Islamic Republic of Iran, for years in the crosshairs of America’s most belligerent militarists, even cheered Gaddafi’s downfall, congratulating the Libyans for changing their regime with a “popular uprising.” It then agreed to curb its own nuclear program.
That Libyan WMDs were real and a threat has served everyone’s interests. Gaddafi had since the late 1990s sought “normalized relations with the United States,” former CIA analyst Flynt Leverett noted in a 2004 piece for the Brookings Institution, while Bush and Blair, dealing with an insurgency in Iraq, desired vindication. A dictator giving up his WMDs, just months after the March 2003 invasion, would do just right.
As with Iraq, however, inspectors found no evidence to back the atomic hyperbole. In February 2004, three months after the weapons deal was announced, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a report declaring that its inspectors could find no facilities in Libya “dedicated to nuclear weapon component manufacturing.” What it found instead, by way of Libyan officials, were “a series of engineering drawings relating to nuclear weapons components” and “notes (many of them handwritten) related to the fabrication of weapon components.”
Libya did possess some potentially dual-use nuclear opponents, including two centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride with which to feed them, according to the Arms Control AssociationBut, according to the IAEA, there was no evidence the Libyan regime ever tried to build a nuclear weapon.
Libya Rewarded
Giving up this on-paper nuclear program was richly rewarded. Within four months, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was extending Gaddafi the “hand of friendship,” naming General Robin Searby his government’s “defense coordinator with Libya under an agreement to advise and train members of the Libyan army,” according to The Independent. Critics, the account continued, complained that Libya’s “capacity and willingness to develop and deploy WMDs has been exaggerated to make the diplomatic breakthrough appear much more significant.”
General Searby would himself echo those critics years later, telling Al Jazeera in 2011that Libyan weapons programs were so primitive that “they tried to make things fly which would go a few yards then explode or turn around head straight back towards them.” Although there were chemical weapons and stockpiles of chemicals that could have been used to make more—the last removed in 2016, post-regime change—Searby said he had “no knowledge” of the biological weapons said to be part of the deal, an apparent embellishment.
By the time that news came out, the Libyan government had already obtained over $143 million in weapons and other military equipment from British arms dealers, including the riot gear and tear gas that security forces used against Arab Spring protests against Gaddafi’s regime. Many other Western governments supplied the bullets, with the European Union selling $1 billion in arms in the five years following the lifting of the arms embargo on Libya, with Gaddafi promising—for a fee—to help keep Black migrants out of Europe.
Rather than plan for a full-scale invasion against a freshly neutered pest, the U.S and Europe propped up the Gaddafi regime, snatching families and delivering them to be detained and tortured by the Libyan government. On the eve of the Arab Spring, the U.S. government was preparing not for war, but for business “on an increasing scale,” according to the Associated Press, having planned to sell the Libyan military $77 million in armored troop carriers. Military exports were only suspended weeks after the first reports of massacres carried out by forces who benefitted from U.S. military training(with Blair whispering in the ear of “the leader” to try and talk him down).
Just as it served the political and financial interests of many to pretend that the 2003 deal with Libya was more than spectacle, it has been useful to many of all political stripes, post-2011, to omit the fact that Gaddafi’s relations with the West had been normalized and that Libya had become just another place to sell weapons, buy oil, and deposit the unfortunates kidnapped by the CIA and MI6.
Gaddafi was never the reformed villain Bush and Blair made him out to be, nor was he an anti-imperialist martyr done in by naiveté and disarmament. If the West had thought him more of a burden than a viable business partner back in 2003, the Libyan military (and its missiles that wouldn’t fly right) weren’t standing in the way of changing his regime.
It serves a popular storyline to act otherwise, with all sides, foreign and domestic, now omitting years of incriminating friendship. But the propaganda we serve ourselves is now serving to inform policy in an increasingly authoritarian dystopia: the Trump administration’s United States, which believes this tale to be evidence that diplomacy is no way to achieve disarmament. Truth is often a casualty of war, and mutually agreed upon deception is also a damningly myopic way to prevent one.
Charles Davis is a journalist in Los Angeles whose work has been published by outlets such as Al Jazeera, The Daily Beast, The New Republic and Vice. Photo: Muammar Gaddafi (openDemocracy via Flickr)

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BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg deletes tweet about UK’s ‘corrupt’ relationship with israel

MEMO | November 10, 2107
BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg [Policy Exchnage/Flickr]
A prominent BBC journalist has deleted a tweet in which a senior Conservative MP can be seen complaining about the British media turning a blind eye to the corrupt relationship that has allowed Israel to “buy access” in Westminster.
The tweet was posted by the BBC’s Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg on Wednesday while the Scottish journalist was covering the build up to the resignation of Priti Patel. The Secretary of State for International Development had taken part in undisclosed meetings in Israel organised by the powerful Conservative Friends of Israel lobby (CFI) last summer.
Kuenssberg’s Twitter posts on the day was full of posts on the Patel story including comments about Number 10 denying the allegation made by the Jewish Chronicle that Prime Minster Theresa May had been made aware of the 12 meetings Patel had had during her “family holiday” in Israel.
In her deleted tweet, which MEMO has been able to grab as a screenshot, Kuenssberg reported a comment made by a “senior” Tory MP who, enraged by the debacle, called for Lord Polak, honorary president of CFI and the person thought to be behind Patel’s Israel trip, to be sacked.
“Strong words,” tweeted Kuenssberg, “Senior Tory says Lord Polak should be chucked out of the party, claiming ‘the entire apparatus has turned a blind eye to a corrupt relationship that allows a country to buy access’.”
MEMO contacted Kuenssberg to ask why she had deleted the tweet but has not received a reply from the journalist.
The BBC has often been accused of pro-Israel bias and it would appear that this was yet another example of the broadcaster censoring criticism of Israel or senior BBC journalists enforcing self-censorship when it comes to Israel.
While it’s not absolutely clear what the senior Tory meant by the “entire apparatus”, it would appear that the concerns raised by the Conservative politician echo similar complaints made by Israel’s critics over the influence of CFI and other pro-Israeli lobby groups on the entire British establishment including the media.
Kuenssberg’s decision to delete the tweet it seems is further proof that the “entire apparatus” is reluctant to shed light on the “corrupt relationship” between the UK and Israel, which critics say is the reason why the BBC and other media corporations have turned a blind eye, and allowed Israel through the CFI and organisations like the Labour Friends of Israel to “buy access”.

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U.S. Imposes Oil Blockade to Force Venezuela into Default


The U.S. is betting on the default of Venezuela affecting its financial credibility and hampering its debt repayments.
While continuing the commercial and financial embargo and the systematic attack on PDVSA, it was revealed at the start of November that imports of Venezuelan oil to the United States this year have declined to 56 percent compared to last year. This multi-pronged attack that this state industry is facing as the main foreign exchange earner of the country, has been run by a network of internal allies, many of whom have been detained by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in recent months. This was after the former Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz became a key factor in allowing the continuity of these mafias to operate within the company.
In addition to corruption and internal sabotage, PDVSA is facing a series of sanctions for the issuance of debt, which has also complicated transactions with U.S. refineries for the purchase of crude oil. In recent months America’s banks, under pressure from the U.S. Treasury Department, have restricted credit notes that U.S. refineries need to pay for Venezuelan oil. The result is that imports and dividends in dollars have been reduced by half in comparison to 2016.
Trump did not dare take the measure of prohibiting imports from Venezuela, given the many interests of U.S. companies involved, but this multi-pronged attack is making any explicit prohibition unnecessary. The measures taken have managed to make a dent in exports of oil to that country. All this is with the objective of continuing to strangle the Venezuela’s economy and force the nation into a debt default by restricting purchases by U.S. refineries.
Forecasts in respect of servicing PDVSA bonds for these dates have been varied. According to Kapital Consultants, between October and November PDVSA must comply with payments of US$3.525 billion for a total of approximately US$9 billion paid in debt interest and capital for the year 2018. As usual, the partial information in this report was used as a means of propaganda by the Venezuelan opposition to confuse and sow doubts about the payment capacity of the company.
According to President Nicolas Maduro, the Republic and PDVSA have paid more than US$71.7 billion in the last four years for capital and debt servicing.
These maneuvers against PDVSA are not isolated and form part of a framework of actions imposed since the Barack Obama administration issued an executive decree which declares Venezuela as a “threat to the national security” of the United States, behind which were the major U.S. oil corporations.
Reports from Reuters and other national media about PDVSA’s alleged inability to pay are part of this plan, adding fuel to the fire of financial terrorism directed from the Rating Agencies against Venezuela as well as from some opposition leaders such as Julio Borges who continues pushing for sanctions.
The U.S. is betting on the default of Venezuela affecting its financial credibility and hampering its debt repayments, as part of a maneuver to force a default on payments that would allow the violation of PDVSA’s international assets and partially block its oil income. However, the timely payments by Venezuela have prevented the default from happening, even if the rating agencies, the treasury department and some Wall Street banks keep pushing in that direction.
But given that this action in the financial war has not yielded the expected results, the U.S. looks as if it will take the road of the oil embargo as its ace card. The objective of pressuring banks and U.S. refineries from buying Venezuelan crude seeks to restrict the flow of dollars into the Venezuelan economy which are used for various purposes – such as debt repayment and imports of basic goods.
 
Venezuela remains the third largest supplier of oil to the U.S. In 2016, it exported approximately 736,000 barrels per day, what resulted in – if measured at an average basket price of US$30 per barrel – more than US$700 million a month in oil revenues for Venezuela, just from the U.S. market. Due to the financial blockade on purchases of Venezuelan oil imposed by the treasury department on U.S. refineries, that figure has dropped to 255,000 barrels a day, reducing foreign currency income by more than 50 percent.
A few weeks ago the fifth largest buyer of Venezuelan oil, PBF Energy, suspended purchases from PDVSA due to these pressures, while other refiners are struggling to make payments to the Venezuelan State Oil Company.
With these underhand actions by the Trump administration being institutionalized as financial sanctions, the U.S. is forcing Venezuela and PDVSA to have fewer dollars to meet their debt commitments in 2018 (protected at US$8 billion approximately) and in this way is pressing the country to fall into default. Add this to the sanctions preventing the issuance of new debt by PDVSA and Venezuela in the U.S. for refinancing purposes, then this has obliged Maduro to call the holders of debt to start a process of restructuring.
The various corporate maneuvers that aim to make the Venezuelan state pay for its decision to recover its sovereignty over PDVSA, is due not only to the economic implications but also to the geopolitical consequences of this decision. Moscow has begun a restructuring of the Venezuelan debt in a friendly, conversational tone, while Beijing has supported the sovereign decision of the Venezuelan state to refinance its debt. In turn, this cooperation has generated a geopolitical counterweight to the pressure exerted by the U.S. Treasury Department on holders of debt which has resulted in their non-recognition of the negotiations with the Venezuelan government.
What can be observed is that sanctions imposed by the government of Donald Trump against PDVSA, and in particular against Venezuela in general, as well as against other major producers of oil such as Russia and Iran, is that this policy has backfired and had a negative effect on the petrodollar. This could lead to the weakening of the United States role in the world oil trade with very serious, predictable consequences for its economic hegemony in the world.
First published in Mision Verdad on Nov. 3, 2017.
This article was originally published by teleSur –

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