AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID STATE

When I left South Africa and came to Australia in 1978, I knew I was leaving behind one of the most repressive and reactionary states one could be living in and hoped I would be going to one which had become liberalised over time and had less restrictive policies applied to its citizens. It was a police state and had a murderous government which was out of control.

How naive can one be?

That was then - 1978 - this is now - 2014 - and what do we have? The indigenous people of Australia are treated worse than South Africa's indigenous populations in 300 years of white occupation and laws regulating them in the parts of the country where they should be living with land rights and able to build societies for themselves where they have education, health, employment, hosing and other aspects of modern societies are denied them and their rates of incarceration and deaths in custody are worse than South Africa in any period of white domination.

The vast majority of Australians are racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, bigoted, ignorant about the indigenous peoples living - largely hidden from view and denied basic human rights which are considered the norm in such affluent societies as this - and incarcerated with the brutality of police states.

Australian treatment of asylum seekers by both major parties in the federal parliament is human rights abuse writ large and is based to a certain extent on racist values - them and us! Imagine fleeing in terror from your country of origin because of horrors being perpetrated in them with wars being nurtured by the United States of America and those countries supporting this most powerful country in the world - at the moment - and then, after exposing yourself and you family and friends to unspeakable suffering in your attempts to find asylum in a country where you will find safety and security, you end up in Manus or Nauru in concentration camps which are living hells and no better - and in some respects - worse than - where you fled from in the first instance! Ou tof the frying pan and into the furnace of hell might be an apt sort of description!

Now think of where it all started - the zionist movement and its fight for somewhere for Jews to be safe from anti-semitism after the appalling events of 19th and 20 century Europe, and you find the most anti-semitic of countries - the USA and the UK - working hard to establish and maintain a zionist homeland at the expense of the homeland of other peoples whose land it is, and they become the equivalent Jews of the 21st century to be ruthlessly oppressed and subjected to genocidal treatment by the zionists and the USA and allies. In the mean time, most Jews in the world live in other countries rather than in Israel! A complete irony!

HAVE THE GREENS LOST THE PLOT OR DON'T THEY WANT VOTES ANY MORE?

It is difficult to know where to start at a time when a state election is almost upon us and the two major parties - or if you look at it from a left/right perspective, and we then have one party with a right wing and an ultra-right wing - and you know you can't vote for what they represent and you wonder who you will be able to vote for, and you thought maybe the Greens provided an alternative which would be viable and then the following:

Philip Nitschke slams 'shut-out by Senate' in euthanasia inquiry

Date

October 15, 2014 smh

·                      

Vanessa Desloires

·                             

Controversial euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has accused the  Senate of shutting him out of an inquiry into a proposed Dying With Dignity law.

Dr Nitschke said that neither he nor his recently formed Voluntary Euthanasia Party were asked to speak at a hearing for the inquiry in Melbourne on Wednesday, despite representing the "largest and only national pro-euthanasia organisation in Australia".

The founder of Exit International blamed Greens senator Richard Di Natale, who has proposed the Dying with Dignity Bill, for the exclusion, and was angry that groups who had made "uncharitable and incorrect statements" about him in their submissions were invited to speak.  

It comes after the Medical Board of Australia suspended his licence to practice medicine due to concerns he supported the suicide of a man who was not terminally ill.

He was also recently criticised by The Australian Medical Association, Dying with Dignity Victoria and beyondblue.

So the Greens are a failure on the Euthanasia issue - and what else have they collapsed on? Think of Palestine/Israel and think of Lee Rhiannon and her pro-Palestinian support while she was a New South Wales state parliamentarian. Then she became a senator for the Greens in the Commonwealth parliament and joined the right-wing of the Greens in no longer supporting the Palestinians.

Where does it leave you as someone looking for a group or party to vote for?

Well as one of those voters it leaves me feeling it is all a waste of time and effort and as someone with a sense of humour is quoted as saying - don't vote - it only encourages them!

 

SOUTH AFRICAN ZIONISTS - A NEW NEO-NAZI CULT?

This item appeared on Mondoweiss on 10 October 2014. It seems that zionists all around the world are beginning to feel the pressure - finally - and they are reacting acordingly and responding as only they know how - by painting those who criticise Israel as anti-semites, nazis and all sorts of other expletives they can manage to find indicative of their siege mentalities.

After South African Jewish leader compared Tutu to Hitler, new Jewish group leaped into action

Activism

Dorothy Zellner on October 10, 2014

Mondoweiss

Tutu as Hitler in South African Jewish Report



I just got back from an astounding trip to South Africa where, among other things, I was privileged to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  I also spent quite a bit of time with members of the nascent group South African Jewish Voices for a Just Peace in Cape Town and Johannesburg–really fabulous people. Lately, for instance, they read out the names of children killed in Gaza at an action at Constitution Hill, an iconic historical site that symbolizes the destruction of apartheid and the rule of law.

And readers of this site may remember this post on an article in the South African Jewish Report on September 10 by one Leon Reich (who is also head of something called Likud South Africa) that trashed the beloved Tutu, comparing him to Hitler in a vicious photo-cartoon and saying that the two men were similar in their desire “to kill Jews,” all because of Tutu’s criticisms of Israel.  The cartoon and article were pulled within hours from the SAJR website but they sent ripples of dismay throughout the world, especially in the South African Jewish community.

Members of Jewish Voices for a Just Peace seized on the case and are pressing for action against Reich. First they fired off a letter to the Cape Times, which ran as the lead letter under the title “Hateful likening of Desmond Tutu to Hitler does not speak for all Jewish people.” (Note that in South Africa the word “struggle” is capitalized. Spelling is in the British style.) Here it is, in full.

Cape Times, September 17, 2014, Opinion, p. 8 (unfortunately the newspaper does not supply links to letters)

We South African Jewish Voices for a Just Peace (JVJP) refer to the op-ed article in the South African Jewish Report (SAJR) online dated September 10 in which chairperson of Likud SA and regular contributor to the SAJR, Leon Reich, compares Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu to Hitler and Stalin and refers to Tutu as a “self-appointed midget.” Reich also refers to Tutu’s “anti-Semitism.”

An image of Hitler with Tutu’s face superimposed on it, appeared with this article.

Given Desmond Tutu’s history and character as a Struggle stalwart and one of the great and unwavering contemporary moral voices in this country and the world, as South African Jews we cannot emphasise enough how strongly we condemn the article and the position of its author.

We utterly reject the assumption that dissent from Zionism is equivalent to anti-Semitism.

We also take issue with the article’s distorted and dishonest representation of the Palestinian solidarity movement as a movement invested in the “destruction of Jews.” This is an age-old myth that is perpetrated by Zionist Jews to maintain a siege mentality among Jews in South Africa.

We are also offended by the tone of the so-called apology published by the editor of the SAJR online.

The apology is more concerned with the way in which the article may have offended some Jews with its reference to the Holocaust than it is with making amends to Tutu by offering a sincere and unequivocal apology as would be fitting under the circumstances. We note that the writer of the offending article, Leon Reich, has as yet not apologised.

The reason we speak out as Jews against this offensive article is that this attack on Tutu’s character was launched by a Jewish organization, speaks to a Jewish audience, and frequently invokes the collective “we” which assumes that the Jewish community is homogeneous in its views.

For this very reason, we feel it is important to state that we will not sit in silence while hateful utterances such as these are said in the name of all South African Jews.

As proud South African Jews, we reject the comparison of the Arch to Hitler.  This comparison is hate-speech, libellous and morally offensive.

We also reject the petulant apology and call on the SAJR to immediately issue a sincere statement unequivocally apologizing to Tutu for the verbal and visual comparison to Hitler.

Reich is writing in a South Africa where hate speech is unacceptable.  We are of the view that charges should be laid against Reich with the relevant South African authorities and that he should be prosecuted for libel.

South African Jewish Voices for a Just Peace (JVJP) are a group of South African Jews who reject the equating of the religion and culture of Judaism with the political project of Zionism.

We recognize that Palestinians live under a particularly brutal military occupation which is based on a violation of their rights.

We support the formation of a society based on equality and respect for human rights for all who live in Israel-Palestine.

Emma Daitz, David Sanders, Moira Levy, Leonard Shapiro and Shereen Usdin

Jewish Voices for a Just Peace (JVJP)

Cape Town

JVJP insisted that Reich apologize within 24 hours or they would go to the authorities.  Reich refused, saying that everything he had said was “true.”

Not only did they write a letter to the newspaper, but JVJP made a formal complaint some days later to the South African Human Rights Commission charging libel, slander and hate speech against “the Arch,” as he is commonly called (even by himself).  The Commission responded last week, formally acknowledging receipt of the letter and stating that if the complaint was beyond their jurisdiction, they would send it on to authorities who could deal with it.

A member of JVJP told me yesterday that the Commission is “not a toothless tiger.” He is hopeful that some kind of action against Reich will result.

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/african-compared-hitler?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6d8171a0ba-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-6d8171a0ba-316844969#sthash.9DAgJjmz.dpuf

SWEDEN, PALESTINE AND THE UNITED STATES - THE CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN HYPOCRISY

this article was published in counterpunch on 7 OCTOBER, 2014

The Consequences of American Hypocrisy

Sweden, Palestine and the United States

by ROBERT FANTINA

Sweden’s new Prime Minister, Stefan Lofven, has announced that that nation will be the first of the European Union to grant official recognition to Palestine. To date, 134 of the 193 member states of the United Nations recognize Palestine. This is a reasonable step that will, hopefully, set the example for other European nations to do the same.

The United States, Israel’s best friend in all the world, and that bottomless pit of financial assistance for Israel, is, not surprisingly, seriously displeased. A spokeswoman for President Barack Obama said this: “We believe international recognition of a Palestinian state is premature. We certainly support Palestinian statehood, but it can only come through a negotiated outcome, a resolution of final status issues and mutual recognitions by both parties.”

Here we go with the ‘negotiated outcome’ nonsense again, nonsense that much of the world dismisses, but that the U.S. clings to, knowing that there can be no ‘negotiated outcome,’ but toeing the Israeli party line.

When Israel carpet-bombs Palestine, a nation it occupies, U.S. spokespersons say that Israel ‘has a right to defend itself’. They don’t see what most of the rest of the world does: that it is illogical for an occupying force to ‘defend’ itself against the people it occupies.

But this is the model that worked for a while for the U.S. public-relations machine, when terrorist U.S. soldiers were occupying Iraq. Iraqi freedom fighters, resisting the cruel oppression of the U.S., were labelled ‘insurgents’. For the U.S., anyone opposing occupation by it or its allies is an ‘insurgent’. Someone opposing a government that has somehow displeased the U.S. is not only a ‘freedom fighter’, but is given whatever level of support the U.S. deems appropriate, often in the form of bombs and/or ground troops. And since the Israeli lobby has purchased the U.S. governing body, and pays its annual maintenance fees, Palestine doesn’t have a chance of U.S. support.

Does anybody outside the White House or the hallowed halls of Congress reasonably believe that the U.S. can be an objective broker in bringing about a settlement between Israel and Palestine? Let’s look at some basic, very pertinent facts about the situation.

* The U.S. provides Israel with $3 billion in foreign aid each year. It provides Palestine with nothing.

* Among the aid provided to Israel is some of the most advanced weaponry in the world. Palestine is not provided with as much as a single gun.

* When the United Nations proposes to officially criticize any aspect of the Israeli occupation, the U.S. uses its veto power to prevent it.

* The U.S. condemns any rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, but supports the carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip by Israel, with bombs the U.S. provides.

* The killing of any Israeli by a Palestinian is lamented by the U.S., but the deaths of over 2000 Palestinians, nearly a quarter of them children, garners barely a mention.

When the U.S. announces a new round of worthless, meaningless and futile talks between Israel and Palestine, and asks that each side refrain from doing anything to jeopardize them, it isn’t unusual for Israel to announce new settlements on land it is ‘confiscating’ (read: stealing) from Palestine. The U.S. huffs and puffs, and says timidly that this may be counter-productive, but, as Israel well knows, will do nothing meaningful to prevent the new settlement construction.

Despite this, the world’s governments don’t laugh in the face of U.S. proclamations about its efforts to bring about a peaceful solution in the Middle East. The people of the world, however, seem to be taking a second look.

One need not wonder what the U.S. could do, if Congress and the President were not beholden to the Israeli lobby. Simply cutting the purse strings would do the trick. The United Nations, were it not constrained by its own internal inadequacies, could send a ‘peacekeeping’ force to prevent further settlement activity. And while they were about it, that same force could end the cruel, crippling, illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Any reasonable person (this, of course, does not include U.S. elected officials; ‘reasonable’ is hardly a term to describe them) would wonder why this isn’t done. Why, they might ask, does the U.S., despite the power of the Israeli lobby, allow Israel to spit in its face? Do these officials have no sense of pride? Have they no sense of shame?

The answer to those last two questions, unfortunately, is no. With very few exceptions (this writer can’t even think of any at the moment), these officials grovel at the feet of the Israeli lobby, paying homage at the unholy altar of AIPAC (American Israel Political Affairs Committee), receiving the financial largess that that lobby funnels to them, while they, in turn, throw the human rights of the Palestinian people under the proverbial bus. What, they might ask, is the worth of a dead Palestinian baby, when they have campaign coffers to fill?

Perhaps that is what is required: a powerful, wealthy Palestinian lobby. The U.S., despite all its lofty proclamations, isn’t what is generally called a representative democracy. Such a thing represents the will of the people who, ostensibly, are given periodic opportunities to replace those whom they elect. The U.S. represents the will of the rich and the powerful, including oil companies, weapons manufacturers (this writer refuses to call them ‘defense’ contractors; they have little or nothing to do with defense), and Israel, all of which have well-funded lobbies that set government policy. They do this by spending sufficient monies to assure the election and perpetual re-election of those officials that do their bidding. The Supreme Court, in its infamous ‘Citizens United’ decision, has only fostered and supported this model.

So hypocritical U.S. officials continue to fund groups opposing governments that displease it, often with disastrous long-term results. They ignore the suffering of people oppressed by its financial benefactors, decrying the human rights abuses of some countries, while countenancing and even financing the unspeakable human rights abuses of others. And when it appears that the citizenry is getting a sense of this injustice, there is always a war to start, an invented threat to address, and an American flag to wave to get everybody back in line. And like lemmings, much of the citizenry rushes out to put a brand new ‘support the troops’ bumper sticker on their car. And the current victimization of people like the Palestinians continues, while a new population experiences the horror of U.S. terrorism.

Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Pill Press).

THE WAR ON TERRORISM IS TERRORISM

The following article was published in Counterpunch WEEKEND

 EDITION on 19-21 SEPTEMBER, 2014. It helps to explain the situation

 confronted by the world at the end of 2014, and unless support is

 removed from the USA by its so-called allies, the situation will

 continue indefinitely.

The War on Terrorism is Terrorism

How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS

by GARIKAI CHENGU

Much like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS) is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region.

The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation.”

During the 1970′s the CIA used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a barrier, both to thwart Soviet expansion and prevent the spread of Marxist ideology among the Arab masses. The United States also openly supported Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, and supported the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least, there is Al Qaeda.

Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980′s. Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of “the database” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

America’s relationship with Al Qaeda has always been a love-hate affair. Depending on whether a particular Al Qaeda terrorist group in a given region furthers American interests or not, the U.S. State Department either funds or aggressively targets that terrorist group. Even as American foreign policy makers claim to oppose Muslim extremism, they knowingly foment it as a weapon of foreign policy.

The Islamic State is its latest weapon that, much like Al Qaeda, is certainly backfiring. ISIS recently rose to international prominence after its thugs began beheading American journalists. Now the terrorist group controls an area the size of the United Kingdom.

In order to understand why the Islamic State has grown and flourished so quickly, one has to take a look at the organization’s American-backed roots. The 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq created the pre-conditions for radical Sunni groups, like ISIS, to take root. America, rather unwisely, destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state machinery and replaced it with a predominantly Shiite administration. The U.S. occupation caused vast unemployment in Sunni areas, by rejecting socialism and closing down factories in the naive hope that the magical hand of the free market would create jobs. Under the new U.S.-backed Shiite regime, working class Sunni’s lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Unlike the white Afrikaners in South Africa, who were allowed to keep their wealth after regime change, upper class Sunni’s were systematically dispossessed of their assets and lost their political influence. Rather than promoting religious integration and unity, American policy in Iraq exacerbated sectarian divisions and created a fertile breading ground for Sunni discontent, from which Al Qaeda in Iraq took root.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used to have a different name: Al Qaeda in Iraq. After 2010 the group rebranded and refocused its efforts on Syria.

There are essentially three wars being waged in Syria: one between the government and the rebels, another between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and yet another between America and Russia. It is this third, neo-Cold War battle that made U.S. foreign policy makers decide to take the risk of arming Islamist rebels in Syria, because Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, is a key Russian ally. Rather embarrassingly, many of these Syrian rebels have now turned out to be ISIS thugs, who are openly brandishing American-made M16 Assault rifles.

America’s Middle East policy revolves around oil and Israel. The invasion of Iraq has partially satisfied Washington’s thirst for oil, but ongoing air strikes in Syria and economic sanctions on Iran have everything to do with Israel. The goal is to deprive Israel’s neighboring enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of crucial Syrian and Iranian support.

ISIS is not merely an instrument of terror used by America to topple the Syrian government; it is also used to put pressure on Iran.

The last time Iran invaded another nation was in 1738. Since independence in 1776, the U.S. has been engaged in over 53 military invasions and expeditions. Despite what the Western media’s war cries would have you believe, Iran is clearly not the threat to regional security, Washington is. An Intelligence Report published in 2012, endorsed by all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, confirms that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Truth is, any Iranian nuclear ambition, real or imagined, is as a result of American hostility towards Iran, and not the other way around.

America is using ISIS in three ways: to attack its enemies in the Middle East, to serve as a pretext for U.S. military intervention abroad, and at home to foment a manufactured domestic threat, used to justify the unprecedented expansion of invasive domestic surveillance.

By rapidly increasing both government secrecy and surveillance, Mr. Obama’s government is increasing its power to watch its citizens, while diminishing its citizens’ power to watch their government. Terrorism is an excuse to justify mass surveillance, in preparation for mass revolt.

The so-called “War on Terror” should be seen for what it really is: a pretext for maintaining a dangerously oversized U.S. military. The two most powerful groups in the U.S. foreign policy establishment are the Israel lobby, which directs U.S. Middle East policy, and the Military-Industrial-Complex, which profits from the former group’s actions. Since George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror” in October 2001, it has cost the American taxpayer approximately 6.6 trillion dollars and thousands of fallen sons and daughters; but, the wars have also raked in billions of dollars for Washington’s military elite.

In fact, more than seventy American companies and individuals have won up to $27 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last three years, according to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity. According to the study, nearly 75 per cent of these private companies had employees or board members, who either served in, or had close ties to, the executive branch of the Republican and Democratic administrations, members of Congress, or the highest levels of the military.

In 1997, a U.S. Department of Defense report stated, “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S.” Truth is, the only way America can win the “War On Terror” is if it stops giving terrorists the motivation and the resources to attack America. Terrorism is the symptom; American imperialism in the Middle East is the cancer. Put simply, the War on Terror is terrorism; only, it is conducted on a much larger scale by people with jets and missiles.

Garikai Chengu is a research scholar at Harvard University. Contact him on garikai.chengu@gmail.com

100 YEARS' WAR 1337-1453

The first 100 year war recorded was between England and France. This was started in approximately 1337 and continued until about 1453. Since then there have been many "100 Year Wars" including those in our times from about 1914 to 2014 and now the beginning of the next cycle from 2014 onwards. As the writer of the following article from CounterPunch explains, the United States is not part of the solution, it is the problem!

SEPTEMBER 29, 2014

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Imperial Rot

Washington’s Secret Agendas

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas.

The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for 13 years that enriched Dick Cheney’s firm, Halliburton, and other private interests only to end in another Washington failure.

The public fell for the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that were a threat to America and that if the US did not invade Iraq Americans risked a “mushroom cloud going up over an American city.”  With the rise of ISIS, this  long war apparently is far from over.  Billions of dollars more in profits will pour into the coffers of the US military security complex as Washington fights those who are redrawing the false Middle East boundaries created by the British and French after WW I when the British and French seized territories of the former Ottoman Empire.

The American public fell for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous country is now in chaos.

The American public fell for the lie that Iran has, or is building, nuclear weapons. Sanctioned and reviled by the West, Iran has shifted toward an Eastern orientation, thereby removing a principal oil producer from Western influence.

The public fell for the lie that Assad of Syria used “chemical weapons against his own people.” The jihadists that Washington sent to overthrow Assad have turned out to be, according to Washington’s propaganda, a threat to America.

The greatest threat to the world is Washington’s insistence on its hegemony. The ideology of a handful of neoconservatives is the basis for this insistence.  We face the situation in which a handful of American neoconservative psychopaths claim to determine the fate of countries.

Many still believe Washington’s lies, but increasingly the world sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace and life on earth.  The claim that America is “exceptional and indispensable” is used to justify Washington’s right to dictate to other countries.

The casualties of Washington’s bombings are invariably civilians, and the deaths will produce more recruits for ISIS.  Already there are calls for Washington to reintroduce “boots on the ground” in Iraq.  Otherwise, Western civilization is doomed, and our heads will be cut off.  The newly created propaganda of a “Russian threat” requires more NATO spending and more military bases on Russia’s borders.  A “quick reaction force” is being created to respond to a nonexistent threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltics, Poland, and Europe.

Usually it takes the American public a year, or two, three, or four to realize that it has been deceived by lies and propaganda, but by that time the public has swallowed a new set of lies and propaganda and is all concerned about the latest “threat.”  The American public seems incapable of understanding that just as the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, threat was a hoax, so is the sixth threat, and so will be the seventh, eighth, and ninth.

Moreover, none of these American military attacks on other countries have resulted in a better situation, as Vladimir Putin honestly states.  Yet, the public and its representatives in Congress support each new military adventure despite the record of deception and failure.

Perhaps if Americans were taught their true history in place of idealistic fairy tales, they would be less gullible and less susceptible to government propaganda.  I have recommended Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the US, Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the US,  and now I recommend Stephen Kinzer’s  The Brothers, the story of the long rule of John Foster and Allen Dulles over the State Department and CIA and their demonization of reformist governments that they often succeeded in overthrowing. Kinzer’s history of the Dulles brothers’ plots to overthrow six governments provides insight into how Washington operates today.

In 1953 the Dulles brothers overthrew Iran’s elected leader, Mossadegh and imposed the Shah, thus poisoning American-Iranian relations through the present day.  Americans might yet be led into a costly and pointless war with Iran, because of the Dulles brothers poisoning of relations in 1953.

The Dulles brothers overthrew Guatemala’s popular president Arbenz, because his land reform threatened the interest of the Dulles brothers’ Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s United Fruit Company client. The brothers launched an amazing disinformation campaign depicting Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was a threat to Western civilization.  The brothers enlisted dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and Batista in Cuba against Arbenz. The CIA organized air strikes and an invasion force.  But nothing could happen until Arbenz’s strong support among the people in Guatemala could be shattered.  The brothers arranged this through Cardinal Spellman, who enlisted Archbishop Rossell y Arellano. “A pastoral letter was read on April 9, 1954 in all Guatemalan churches.”

A masterpiece of propaganda, the pastoral letter misrepresented Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was the enemy of all Guatemalans.  False radio broadcasts

produced a fake reality of freedom fighter victories and army defections.  Arbenz asked the UN to send fact finders, but Washington prevented that from happening.  American journalists, with the exception of James Reston, supported the lies. Washington threatened and bought off Guatemala’s senior military commanders, who forced Arbenz to resign.  The CIA’s chosen and well paid “liberator,” Col. Castillo Armas, was installed as Arbenz’s successor.

We recently witnessed a similar operation in Ukraine.

President Eisenhower thanked the CIA for averting “a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere,” and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gave a national TV and radio address in which he declared that the events in Guatemala “expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin.”  This despite the uncontested fact that the only outside power operating in Guatemala was the Dulles brothers.

What had really happened is that a democratic and reformist government was overthrown because it compensated United Fruit Company for the nationalization of the company’s fallow land at a value listed by the company on its tax returns. America’s leading law firm or perhaps more accurately, America’s foreign policy-maker, Sullivan & Cromwell, had no intention of permitting a democratic government to prevail over the interests of the law firm’s client, especially when senior partners of the firm controlled both overt and covert US foreign policy.  The two brothers, whose family members were invested in the United Fruit Company, simply applied the resources of the CIA, State Department, and US media to the protection of their private interests.  The extraordinary gullibility of the American people, the corrupt American media,  and the indoctrinated and impotent Congress allowed the Dulles brothers to succeed in overthrowing a democracy.

Keep in mind that this use of the US government in behalf of private interests occurred 60 years ago long before the corrupt Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And no doubt in earlier times as well.

The Dulles brothers next intended victim was Ho Chi Minh.  Ho, a nationalist leader, asked for America’s help in freeing Vietnam from French colonial rule. But John Foster Dulles, a self-righteous anti-communist, miscast Ho as a Communist Threat who was springing the domino theory on the Western innocents.  Nationalism and anti-colonialism, Foster declared, were merely a cloak for communist subversion.

Paul Kattenburg, the State Department desk officer for Vietnam suggested that instead of war, the US should give Ho $500 million in reconstruction aid to rebuild the country from war and French misrule, which would free Ho from dependence on Russian and Chinese support, and, thereby, influence. Ho appealed to Washington several times, but the demonic inflexibility of the Dulles brothers prevented any sensible response. Instead, the hysteria whipped-up over the “communist threat” by the Dulles brothers landed the United States in the long, costly, fiasco known as the Vietnam War.  Kattenburg later wrote that it was suicidal for the US “to cut out its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice.”  Unfortunately for Americans and the world, castrated analytic capacity is Washington’s strongest suit.

The Dulles brothers’ next targets were President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Fidel Castro.  The plot against Castro was such a disastrous failure that it cost Allen Dulles his job.  President Kennedy lost confidence in the agency and told his brother Bobby that after his reelection he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.  When President Kennedy removed Allen Dulles, the CIA understood the threat and struck first.

Warren Nutter, my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, later Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, taught his students that for the US government to maintain the people’s trust, which democracy requires, the government’s policies must be affirmations of our principles and be openly communicated to the people.  Hidden agendas, such as those of the Dulles brothers and the Clinton, Bush and Obama regimes, must rely on secrecy and manipulation and, thereby, arouse the distrust of the people.  If Americans are too brainwashed to notice, many foreign nationals are not.

The US government’s secret agendas have cost Americans and many peoples in the world tremendously. Essentially, the Foster brothers created the Cold War with their secret agendas and anti-communist hysteria. Secret agendas committed Americans to long, costly, and unnecessary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East.  Secret CIA and military agendas intending regime change in Cuba were blocked by President John F. Kennedy and resulted in the assassination of a president, who, for all his faults, was likely to have ended the Cold War twenty years before Ronald Reagan seized the opportunity.

Secret agendas have prevailed for so long that the American people themselves are now corrupted.  As the saying goes, “a fish rots from the head.”  The rot in Washington now permeates the country.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is How America Was Lost.

SOUTH AFRICA AND RUSSIA SIGN SECRET NUKE 'STITCH-UP'

From the Mail and Guardian - South Africa

Jacob Zuma's secret nuke 'stitch-up'

26 SEP 2014 00:00QAANITAH HUNTER, LIONEL FAULL

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As the government scrambles to limit fallout, we reveal how Jacob Zuma grabbed control of the R1tn deal and negotiated directly with Vladimir Putin.

President Jacob Zuma personally negotiated a nuclear deal with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, say highly placed government and ANC sources. This ensured that the intergovernmental agreement announced with fanfare this week took all but his most trusted and intimate inner circle by surprise.

A senior ANC leader, who Zuma entrusted with intimate details of the negotiation with Putin, said that Zuma had ironed out details directly with the Russian president on the sidelines of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Brazil in July, and finalised details of the pact during his highly secretive visit to Moscow last month.

“It was simple. When Zuma came back from Brazil, it was done,” the senior ANC leader said.

The party leader and another well-placed ANC MP added that the details of the deal were finalised during Zuma’s trip to Russia in August.

The two sources said that Zuma subsequently instructed energy minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson to sign the deal with the Russians on the sidelines of the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

A joint statement issued by the Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom and the South African energy department on Monday said that the agreement “lays the foundation for the large-scale nuclear power plants procurement and development programme of South Africa based on the construction in South Africa of new nuclear power plants with Russian VVER reactors with total installed capacity of up to 9.6GW (up to eight [reactor] units)”.

Deputy energy minister Thembisile Majola told Parliament’s energy portfolio committee, which met on Tuesday, that she had no knowledge of the nuclear deal and had first learned of it through the media.

The chairperson of the committee, Fikile Majola, said that he would call Joemat-Pettersson to explain herself to the committee. “We want her to tell us the details surrounding the deal,” he said.

Shrouded in secrecy 
Sources also said that the minister and Zuma did not take the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) into their confidence over the matter. Four NEC members independently said that there was no mention of an impending nuclear agreement with Russia at last weekend’s meeting. 

One added that some senior party figures were unimpressed that Zuma, instead of resting in Russia as initially planned, had negotiated deals that had not been agreed to by the leadership. He said Zuma only gave details of the deal to his most trusted Cabinet ministers and MPs.

This week’s announcement also startled politically connected nuclear lobbyists and industry insiders, some of whom frantically exchanged calls in a bid to understand its significance.

A respected nuclear industry leader said the statement looked “pretty definitive”, and news that Russia had clinched a deal to build nuclear reactors blazed unchecked across radio and television bulletins, as well as social media.

The announcement was followed by an apparent damage control exercise. A rival to Rosatom said that they had received written assurances on Tuesday morning from a leading member of the South African delegation to the IAEA conference in Vienna that “there will be other intergovernmental agreements signed with the other vendors before the procurement process will start”.

A new statement issued solely by the department of energy on Tuesday evening said that the agreement “initiates the preparatory phase for the procurement for the new nuclear build programme”.

“Similar agreements are foreseen with other vendor countries that have expressed an interest in supporting South Africa in this massive programme,” it said. “Joemat-Pettersson will lead a delegation to visit France, where bilateral discussions will culminate with the signing of a co-operation agreement between the two countries [and] the South African government is also in discussions towards concluding an intergovernmental agreement with the Chinese government.”

Russia leads the race 
But Zuma’s personal involvement with Putin means that even if similar agreements are concluded with other states, the Russians must be considered clear frontrunners.

Rosatom told the Mail & Guardian that Monday’s joint statement was “intended to solely serve as information on the agreement and not necessarily position Rosatom as a preferred bidder”.

“The agreement stipulates the overall development of various fields of nuclear power industry, and supplementary agreements will be signed in each field stipulating all details,” added a spokesperson.

Senior government and industry sources have been telling amaBhungane for the past 18 months that Zuma has taken a personal interest in the government’s planned procurement of 9?600 megawatts (an estimated R1-trillion’s worth) of nuclear power, regarding it as one of his “presidential legacy projects”.

A senior government official said that Zuma and Putin made initial strides towards a nuclear deal at the Brics summit in Durban in March 2013, but hammered out the details during Zuma’s working visit to the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi in May last year.

The M&G reported that Zuma had slipped into the driver’s seat the following month, replacing his deputy at the time, Kgalema Motlanthe, as chair of the national nuclear energy executive co-ordinating committee.

A month later, Zuma replaced energy minister Dipuo Peters with Ben Martins, in a move widely seen as being intended to tighten control over the nuclear procurement process and tie up a deal with the Russians.

Joemat-Pettersson took over from Martins in May this year.

Draft agreement
According to the official, a draft nuclear co-operation agreement began to circulate between the Russians and the South Africans in July last year. Initiated by the Russians, this apparently sought a commitment from the South Africans to deal exclusively with them. It allegedly contained four clauses that particularly alarmed South African government officials. They included:

·                        Limiting South Africa to acquiring Russian reactor technology;  

·                        Giving Russia exclusive say over the auxiliary construction contracts; 

·                        Giving Russia a 20-year veto on South Africa doing business with any other nuclear vendor countries; and 

·                        Making South Africa exclusively liable for all nuclear equipment procured from Russia as soon as it left that country. 

“These clauses either flouted sections of our Constitution, which guarantees an open, competitive and transparent bidding processes, or they were not in our national interest,” said the source.

The Russians were said to have pushed “aggressively” for the signing of the agreement, first at the G20 summit in St Petersburg in September last year and again before the Atomex nuclear conference, hosted by Rosatom, in Johannesburg in November. But South African concerns about the proposed exclusivity and liability clauses are said to have stymied an agreement.

At the two-day G20 summit, South African and Russian officials were unable to agree on key clauses in the nuclear co-operation treaty, including those relating to its financing.

The M&G has learned reliably that Zuma summoned then finance minister Pravin Gordhan, who had accompanied him to the summit, to a meeting and appealed to him for the necessary financial commitments. Gordhan apparently declined and warned Zuma such a step would be unwise.

Gordhan could not be reached for confirmation on Thursday.

Initial agreement
In October last year, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe and treasurer general Zweli Mkhize accompanied a delegation of ANC-aligned businesspeople from the Progressive Business Forum on a four-day visit to Russia. The ANC signed a memorandum of understanding with Russia’s ruling United Russia party.

The M&G has previously reported that, before the Atomex conference, Russian state-owned media claimed a nuclear reactor deal was a fait accompli. News agency RIA Novosti reported as fact that Rosatom “are to build eight nuclear electricity units in South Africa. Formal agreements about this are to be signed … on the fringes of Atomex”.

But what was released at Atomex was a memorandum of understanding between Rosatom and the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation.

A protester in front of a Rosatom building in Russia. (Alexander Nemenov, AFP)

Martins promised at the time that a co-operation agreement would be signed early this year, pending the finalisation of “legal procedures”.

After Atomex, a source said energy department officials had stopped answering Rosatom’s calls, suggesting that the Russians had overstepped the mark or that major South African government decisions were then placed on hold until after this year’s elections.

After the May poll, Zuma removed Martins, who had held the position for less than a year, and replaced him with Joemat-Pettersson.

Presidential loyalty
Several M&G and amaBhungane sources said that she was seen as being more loyal to the president than her predecessors and more likely to deliver the outcome required on the nuclear deal.

It is not clear whether the agreement signed on Monday differs materially from the draft haggled over by the Russians and South Africans last year.

Xolile Mabhongo, a member of the South African government delegation to Vienna, told Business Day on Thursday that the veto clause had been removed from the signed agreement. He also said that the text of the new agreement would not be made public.

But the announcement reveals the Russians have finally managed to get South Africans to put pen to paper, stretching their lead in the race for the trillion-rand nuclear tender.

Presidential spokesperson Mac Maharaj did not respond to questions. – Additional reporting by Sarah Wild & Pauli van Wyk

Qaanitah Hunter is an M&G political reporter and Lionel Faull is an investigator with the M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism.

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Long and winding road to a nuclear nation

Politically, South Africa and Russia seem determined to get a nuclear build deal done with unseemly haste. But there are many obstacles to it becoming a reality.

 Before South Africa can start building nuclear power plants, Parliament must ratify every step of the process, from the broad country-to-country agreement down to the allocation of money. 

Two regulators, those for electricity pricing and nuclear power respectively, must sign off on specific details, and they are bound by their own statutes and rules on fairness and justifiability. The flow of vast sums of money to foreign suppliers, and the accompanying currency hedges, are subject to financial regulations. 

There are stringent local requirements for environmental impact assessments and consultations with the communities involved (Bantamsklip and Duinefontein in the Western Cape and Thyspunt in the Eastern Cape are currently proposed sites for the nuclear stations). 

The fairness of tenders – to bidders, but also the citizens ultimately doing the buying – is a constitutional imperative, giving the courts broad powers to review processes if an interested party cries foul. 

Nuclear build and the manufacture and transport of nuclear fuel are subject to a tangle of international agreements on nonproliferation and safety. South Africa has agreed to adhere to the International Atomic Agency’s 19 milestones for a nuclear build, an anomaly for a country that has an existing nuclear programme. 

They include securing the money to deal with nuclear waste and the decommissioning of the power plants decades down the line, and having a human resources plan to make sure there are enough skilled people to run the proposed fleet.

 The guidelines also include a very practical (not to mention time-consuming and expensive) requirement about upgrading the electricity grid to deal with the start-up requirements and output of the new nuclear stations.   

Early this month, as the United States and the European Union moved to impose sanctions against Russia because of the conflict in the Ukraine, Russian nuclear company Rosatom argued that politics should play no part in decisions on nuclear energy. With safety and enormous sums of money involved, the company said “temporary disagreements” between countries should not be a factor. 

Between 1998, when South Africa started considering new nuclear build, and 2007, when Jacob Zuma ousted Thabo Mbeki as ANC leader, Russia was not considered a serious contender for any contracts. – Sarah Wild & Phillip de Wet

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DA demands full disclosure

The Democratic Alliance said on Thursday that it has applied for full access to all the documents relating to the nuclear deal. 

It said that under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, it would demand sight of everything related to the decision to co-operate with Russia’s Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation on the new nuclear fleet, including the minutes of the interministerial committee on energy security chaired by President Jacob Zuma. 

The party has also written to the parliamentary oversight committee on energy, requesting that it subpoena Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson to appear before it and produce a copy of the full agreement with Rosatom, and to clarify Rosatom’s statements. 

DA leader Helen Zille said that the “extraordinary and unprecedented” situation where both Rosatom and the department of energy issued identical statements made it clear that there was a deal to develop nuclear programmes in “South Africa driven by Rosatom and the Russian government”. 

Despite the department trying to reinterpret the statement retrospectively, “one can hardly believe that they would have issued the first statement, which is the identical version of Rosatom statement, if there wasn’t some validity to it”. 

She said there had been speculation for many months about a secret deal being reached between Zuma and Russian President Vladimir Putin concerning the nuclear programme, which will cost an estimated R1-trillion and have to be paid for by generations to come. 

“We have been very badly burned as a society in the past and with all the secrecy that surrounds this particular deal, we are absolutely determined to get to the bottom of it,” Zille said. – Andisiwe Makinana

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Lionel is a reporter at the Mail & Guardian Centre for Investigative Journalism, Amabhungane.

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