Bulletin N° 845

 

 

« Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people. »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_JYYcBP2Q

(1986 film adaptation of the book by Michael Ende)

 

 

 

 

Subject :

The Origins of Imperialist Wars & The Distribution of Scarcity

 

 

14 May 2019

Grenoble, France

 

 

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

 

In his 1968 anthology, Negations, Essays in Critical Theory, Herbert Marcuse collected essays he had written between 1934 and 1938, in the early years after the Nazi seizure of power. He was teaching at New York Institute for Social Research with his friend Max Horkheimer, and in this period it was not yet clear to them whether or not the destruction of Fascism would set free forces of life that would make possible a more humane and rational society.

 

For if there was one matter about which the author of these essays and his friends were not uncertain, it was the understanding that the fascist state was fascist society, and that totalitarian violence and totalitarian reason came from the structure of existing society, which was in the act of overcoming its liberal past and incorporating its historical negation. This presented the critical theory of society with the task of identifying the tendencies that linked the liberal past with its totalitarian abolition. This abolition was not restricted at all to the totalitarian states and since then has become reality in many democracies (and especially in the most developed ones). The present did not appear to be in immediate opposition to the past: it was necessary to exhibit the mediation by means of which bourgeois freedom could become unfreedom. But it was also necessary to indicate the elements that opposed this transformation.  

 

 

. . .

 

   The focal point is the interpretation of some of the leading ideas of intellectual culture – of ideology. In political economy, Marxian theory had traced to their origins the tendencies that linked the liberal past with its totalitarian liquidation. What I attempted was to detect and trace these tendencies in culture, more specifically in its representative philosophy. For it was mind, reason, consciousness, “pure” thought that in the traditional culture was supposed to constitute the autonomy of the subject, the essential freedom of man. Here was the sphere of  negation, of contradiction to the established order, of protest, of dissociation, of criticism. Protestantism and the bourgeois revolutions proclaimed the freedom of thought and of conscience. They were the sanctioned forms of contradiction – often the only ones – and the most precious refuge of hope. Only rarely and in exceptional cases did bourgeois society dare to infringe on this refuge. Soul and mind were (at least officially) considered holy and awesome. Spiritually and mentally, man was supposed to be as autonomous as possible. This was his inner freedom, which was his authentic and essential freedom; the other liberties were taken care of by the economy and the state. Normally it was not necessary for society to intervene in this sphere; a total coordination and subordination of individuals was not required. The productive Forces has not yet reached that stage of development at which the sale of the products of social labor demanded the systematic organization of needs and wants, including intellectual ones. The market regulated for better or worse the operation and output of a labor apparatus not yet dependent upon uninterrupted mass consumption. At a low level of productive forces, bourgeois society did not yet have the means to administer soul and mind without discrediting this administration through terroristic violence. Today total administration is necessary, and the means are at hand; mass gratification, market research, industrial psychology, computer mathematics, and the so-called science of human relations. These take care of the nonterroristic, democratic, spontaneous-automatic harmonization of individual and socially necessary needs and wants, of autonomy and heteronomy. They assure the free election of individuals and policies necessary for the system to continue to exist and grow. The democratic abolition of thought, which the “common man” undergoes automatically and which he himself carries out (in labor and in the use and enjoyment of the apparatus of production and consumption), is brought about in the “higher learning” by those positivistic and positive trends of philosophy, sociology, and psychology that make the established system into an insuperable framework for conceptual thought.

 

   But the rapidity with which it was possible to achieve the social organization and administration of the mind suggests the question whether the mind did not itself bear part of the responsibility for such a development. In other words, did intellectual culture prepare its own liquidation? Were its autonomy, inwardness, purity, and the happiness and fulfillment that it promised already permeated with unfreedom, adjustment, unhappiness, and renunciation? Did this culture have an affirmative character even where it was the negation of the status quo?(pp.xi-xiv)

 

. . .

 

More than before, breaking through the administered consciousness is a precondition of liberation. Thought in contradiction must be capable of comprehending and expressing the new potentialities of a qualitatively different existence. It must be capable of surpassing the force of technological repression and of incorporating into its concepts the elements of gratification that are suppressed and perverted in this repression. In other words, thought in contradiction must become more negative and more utopian in opposition to the status quo. This seems to me to be the imperative of the current situation in relation to my theoretical essays of the thirties.

 

   In totalitarian society, freedom remains thinkable only as autonomy over the entirety of the apparatus. This includes the freedom to reduce it or to reconstruct it in its entirety with regard to the pacification of the struggle for existence and to the rediscovery of quiet  and of happiness. The abolition of material poverty is a possibility within the status quo; peace, joy, and the abolition of labor are not. And yet only in and through them can the established order be overcome. Totalitarian society brings the realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity under its administration and fashions it after its own image. In complete contradiction to this future, autonomy over the technological apparatus is freedom in the realm of necessity. This means, however, that freedom is only possible as the realization of what today is called utopia.(p.xx)

 

Decades later, after the above discussions, Marcuse met with students and scholars in Berlin in 1970, and in a question-and-answer session following a lecture, he addressed a question about the role of violence in social change in the historical context of the post-World-War Two political economy: “[A]re not our opponents [to socialism] not the masses but the institutions? Will not the human forces tend to be on our side?” 

 

Marcuse responded by pointing out the organic relationship between “Fascism” and the capitalist culture in which it is cultivated:

 

The new fascism – if it comes – will be very different from the old fascism. History does not repeat itself so easily. When I speak of the rise of fascism I mean, with regard to America, for example, that the strength of those who support the cutback of existing civil and political liberties will grow to the point where the Congress can institute repressive legislation that is very effective. That is, the mass basis does not have to consist of masses of people going out into the streets and beating people up, it can also mean that the masses support increasingly actively a tendency that confines whatever scope still exists in democracy, thus increasingly weakening the opposition.(Five Lectures, p.100)

 

When asked about the difference between revisionism and revolutionary analysis, Marcuse responded by recounting his experiences as a young man after the First World War.

 

Question: On the definition of revisionism mentioned in the previous question: revisionists are those who think that can change something in this society within the established institutions, while a large number of students think it is necessary to form an anti-institutional and extra-parliamentary opposition.

 

Let me say something personal. If you mean by revisionism the German Social-Democratic Party, I can only say to you that from the time of my own political education, that is since 1919,I have opposed this party. In 1917 to 1918 I was a member of the Social-Democratic Party, I resigned from it after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and from then on I have criticized this party’s politics. Not because it believed that it could work within the framework of the established order – for we all do this, we all make use of even the most minute possibilities in order to transform the established order from inside it – that is not why I fought the S.P.D. The reason was rather that it worked in alliance with reactionary, destructive, and repressive forces.

 

   Since 1918 I have always been hearing of the left forces within the Social-Democratic Party, and I have continually seen these left forces move more and more to the right until nothing left was left in them. You see that I am at least not very convinced by this idea of some kind of radical work within the party.(pp. 102-103)

. . .

 

[T]here are many different kinds of violence employed in defense and in aggression. For example, the violence of the policeman which consists in overpowering a murderer is very different, not only externally but in its instinctual structure, its substance, from the violence of a policeman who clubs  a demonstrator. Both are acts of violence but they have completely different functions.

 

   What applies here in an individual case also applies socially and historically. The violence of revolutionary terror, for example, is very different from that of the White terror, because revolutionary terror as terror implies its own abolition in the process of creating a free society, which is not the case for the White terror. The terror employed in the defense of North Vietnam is essentially different form the terror employed in the aggression.

 

   How can one prevent revolutionary terror from turning into cruelty and brutality is another question. In a real revolution there are always ways and means of preventing this. At the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution there was no cruelty, no brutality, no terror going beyond resistance against those still in power. Where in a revolution this sort of terror changes into acts of cruelty, brutality, and torture, then we are already talking about a perversion of the revolution. (pp.103-104)

 

This public discussion was followed by several more questions:

 

   First, should we not use opportunities to join existing organizations to attempt to introduce ferment and consciousness into their lower levels?

 

   Second, on the right of resistance: in your essay on tolerance you put this right in quotation marks, but now you have interpreted it as an ancient principle. What is this right based on? Is it a romantic relic of natural law, or is it a self-posited right and, if so, how can the opposition invoke a right which it must first generate?

 

   Third, it is true that enlightenment of consciousness must occur through demonstrations as well as discussion. But how can we organize unarmed opposition and carry out materially manifest nonviolence when the bureaucracy reacts with efforts at physical annihilation? Our opposition essentially consists in defending existing rights, which are continually violated by state violence and manipulation. Perhaps instead of invoking the “right of resistance” we should say that we are sacrificing lower-level laws in order to defend constitutional law. Furthermore, the theoretical reasons against the principle of nonviolence contradict the humanitarian reasons for it.(p.104)

 

Here, Marcuse replies to his German audience in a careful and systematic manner:

 

   The last contradiction is based on the misunderstanding. I have not asserted that nonviolence should be applied or preached as a principle of strategy. I have in no way equated humanitarianism and nonviolence. To the contrary I have spoken of situations in which it is precisely the interest of humanitarianism which leads to violence.

 

   Whether there are situations in which work aiming at radical transformation can be carried out within existing parties? If the question is poses  in this way, I would say, Yes. This is actually a question of practicability. If you know from experience, in your evaluation of the situation, that there are groups and local organizations which are open and willing to listen, then of course one should work in these groups. I only said that from my experience I consider the possibility of transforming the major parties from within to be null and am just as pessimistic as I was forty years ago.

 

   On the question of the right of resistance: the quotation marks in the essay on tolerance were only supposed to indicate that it was an old term of political theory.

 

   There is a very interesting problem contained in the question whether those who invoke the right of resistance in their favor have not themselves brought into begin the principle on whose basis they resist positive law. That is, whether the appeal to the right of resistance is not relative and no more than the particular interest of a particular group. I should like to point out historically that this is not the meaning of the doctrine of the right of resistance. The doctrine of the right of resistance has always asserted that appealing to the right of reissuance is an appeal to a higher law, which has universal validity, that is, which goes beyond the self-defined right and privilege of a particular group. And there really is a close connection between the right of resistance and natural law. Now you will say that such a universal higher law simply does not exist. I believe that it does exist. Today we no longer call it natural law, but I believe that if we say today that what justifies us in resisting the system is more than the relative interest of a specific group and more than something that we ourselves have defined, we can demonstrate this. If we appeal to humanity’s right to peace, to humanity’s right to abolish exploitation and oppression, we are not talking about self-defined, special, group interests, but rather and in fact interests demonstrable as universal rights. That is why we can and should lay claim today to the right of resistance as more than a relative right.

 

   On the thesis that tolerance must turn into specific actions in specific situations, I am in complete agreement. In my talk I asserted that we have found ourselves for a long time in a situation in which discussion will turn in to demonstration and other forms of action. No matter how nonviolent our demonstrations are or will be, we must expect them to be met with institutional violence. We cannot calm ourselves with the thought that we are demonstrating peaceably, and therefore it’s legal and nothing bad will happen. In this sense there is no general organization of “manifest-material nonviolence.” What we must anticipate at every moment is that the established order will put into action the institutionalized violence at its disposal. This is not to exclude our being able to and having to find forms of demonstration that avoid this confrontation with violence in which, in the present situation, we are bound to be defeated. If I was correctly informed yesterday, such forms have already been developed and even tested right here in Berlin. 

 

. . .

   One thing seems to me to be dangerous. You are quite right to assert that actually we are the ones who are defending existing positive laws. If in a democracy we defend civil liberties, we are in fact defending the laws of the Establishment. But unfortunately that is too simple. For example, the police and their ordinances are also positive law.  In general we can in fact say: we are the ones who defend democracy. But that changes nothing about the fact that in the same breath we must add that we are fully conscious that we are violating positive law and that we believe we are justified in so doing.(pp.105-106)

 

At one point in the question-answer session following a 1970 lecture, the question is raised about who exactly will be the historical “agents of revolution?”:

 

Q: The student opposition know how difficult it is to get popular support in the advanced capitalist countries. In discussions with workers, students have repeatedly heard the answer: “I don’t know what you are talking about – I have got it good, much better than before.” And what does this worker care about the terror in Vietnam? Humanitarian arguments wouldn’t do, since humanity itself gave rise to terror.

 

M: The worker who says that he has it better than before is right if, in a nonrevolutionary situation, he does not think and behave like a revolutionary. All you can do is to make him aware if the costs of his (poor) well-being – the perpetual toil of his life and the misery of others. And we must eventually come to grips with the idea that, in the period of advanced capitalism, the driving revolutionary force may not be generated by poverty and misery but precisely by the higher expectations within the better living conditions, and by the developed consciousness of highly  qualified and educated workers: precursors of a new working class or a new part of the old working class. The internal contradictions of capitalism assume an ever more brutal and global form, and the new consciousness may become a catalyst in their explosion and solution. As to your suspicion about humanitarian arguments, I think we should not believe that we can no longer make use today of humanitarian arguments. I should like to ask you all a question. If I really radically excluded humanitarian arguments, on what basis can I work against the system of advanced capitalism? If you only operate within the framework of technical rationality and from the start exclude historically transcendent concepts, that is, negation of the system – for the system is not humane, and humanitarian ideas belong to the negation of the system – then you continually find yourself in the situation of being asked, and not being able to answer, the question, What is really so terrible about this system, which continually expands social wealth so that strata of the population that previously lived in the greatest poverty and misery today have automobiles, television sets, and one-family houses? What is so bad about this system that we dare take the tremendous risk of preaching its overthrow? If you content yourself with material arguments and exclude all other arguments you will not get anywhere. We must finally relearn what we forgot during the fascist period, or what you, who were not even born until after the first fascist period, have not fully become conscious of: that humanitarian and moral arguments are not merely deceitful ideology. Rather, they can and must become central social forces. If we exclude them from our argumentation at the start, we impoverish ourselves and disarm ourselves in the face of the strongest arguments of the defenders of the status quo.(pp.95-96)

 

The question was raised once more about the role students might play in revolutionary change:

 

Q: On students and radicals in the professions – how do you envisage the possibility of student revolutionary potential after students leave the university and are on the way to getting immersed in bourgeois life? At the moment it is not so important how students are internationally organized – we are already trying that in Western Europe – but how they are organized after they get their degrees.

 

M: That is really one of the most important questions. In America much more even than here. While here one can study for years without having to get a degree and then even go to another university, in the United States this is not possible. Instead one has to look for a job, and then the happy days of student opposition are simply over. It is therefore immensely important to find some means by which those who were in the opposition during their studies still remain in the opposition afterwards. How this is to be done must be worked out differently in different cases. But precisely in view of the terribly important role that the intelligentsia will be playing in the future social process of production, such a continuity of opposition after one’s studies is really a crucial problem.(p.107)

 

 

 

The 21 + items below will inform readers of the war clouds now forming on the horizon and the origins of these threatening formations, as they have  developed in the past. The transformation of men and women from productive members of communities to mindless killers is a mass psychological phenomenon that can be recognized, if we are properly educated to see the alienation that is happening in front of us. The physical and mental numbing of a population has always been a necessary preliminary stage in preparations for imperialist war. Our society has now fully entered  this stage, and our only hope is mass resistance to the continual abuse that capitalism inflicts upon us collectively, as the necessary precondition in order to extract maximum profits from capital investments at the end of each and every quarter.

 

 

 

Sincerely,

Francis Feeley

 

---

Professor emeritus of American Studies

University Grenoble-Alpes

Director of Research

University of Paris-Nanterre

Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements

The University of California-San Diego

http://www.ceimsa.org/  

 

 

a.

Imperial Decay
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51587.htm
(video-9min)

from ClassWarFilms

All empires are evil; they are certainly undemocratic. Can the U.S. un-imperialize itself, or must it go the way of all empires? Collapse.

+

The Lies That Form Our Consciousness

and False Historical Awareness

See the source image

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51592.htm

by Paul Craig Roberts

 

My generation associated dystopias, such as George Orwell’s 1984, with the Soviet Union, a country in which explanations were controlled and criticism of Stalin would land a person in the Gulag.  We thought of the United States and our life here much differently. But with the passage of time the difference between life in the Soviet Union in the 20th century and life in the Western world today is disappearing.  Today, the journalist Julian Assange is undergoing the same kind of state terror and torture as any Soviet dissident, if not worse.  The Western media is as controlled as the Soviet media, with print, TV, and public radio serving as a propaganda ministry for government and the interest groups that control government.  Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter are systematically denying their platforms to those who express views not supportive of the ruling order and its agendas.  It has turned out to be easy to get rid of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech as the media have neither the ability nor the intention of exercising it.

It was a mistake for my generation to associate Orwell’s Memory Hole and falsified history only with fictional or real dystopias.  Falsified history was all around us.  We just didn’t know enough to spot it.  What living and learning has taught me is that history tends to always be falsified, and historians who insist on the truth suffer for it.  It has been established that many of the ancient historians are unreliable, because they were “court historians” who sought material benefit by writing to please a ruler.  In my time many an historian has written for income from book sales by enthralling the public with tales of glorious victories over demonized enemies that justified all the sons, grandsons, brothers, fathers, uncles, husbands, friends, and cousins who were sacrificed for the sake of capitalist armaments profits.  No publisher wanted a truthful account that no one would buy because of the stark portrayal of the pointlessness of the deaths of loved ones. Everyone, or almost so, wants to think that their loss was for a noble cause and was “worth it.”

With few exceptions, English speaking historians have put the blame for both world wars on Germany.  This is false history.  The first real historian of World War I, or what was called at the time the Great War or the World War, was Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes was Professor of Historical Sociology at Smith College and the William Bayard Cutting Fellow in History at Columbia University. His book, The Genesis of the World War, was published in 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York.

Instead of covering up, as expected, the allied crimes and treachery against Germany, Barnes told the truth.  The German Kaiser, a relative of the British and Russian royal families, was known throughout the world as a peacemaker, praised by the New York Times for that role. It is a known and indisputable fact that the German government acted for peace until Germany, the last power to mobilize, had to mobilize or be overrun by Russia and France, who were allied with the British against Germany. Never before in history has the very last power to mobilize been blamed for starting a war.  But facts never get in the way of court historians.

The genesis of the war was the desire on the part of two of the Russian Tsar’s ministers for Constantinople and the French president for territory, Alsace-Lorraine, lost to Germany in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war.  These schemers used Austria’s response to the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Serbia, which they likely orchestrated, to declare war as Germany was the protector of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

American president Woodrow Wilson secured an armistice to the World War, which had senselessly destroyed  millions of lives, by promising Germany that if she agreed to an armistice, there would be no territorial losses for Germany and no reparations.  When Germany agreed to the armistice, it was Germany that occupied territories of the opposing camp. There were no foreign troops on German territory.

As soon as Germany disengaged, the British put into effect a food blockade that forced starving Germans to submit to the exploitative Versailles Treaty that violated every promise that President Wilson had made.

Some intelligent people, including the most famous economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, said that the Versailles Treaty, an exercise in coverup for who caused the war, guaranteed a future war.  And they, not the grasping corrupt establishment, were right.

+

When We Were the 'Good Guys':

US Keeps Invoking WWII to Validate New Wars

http://helenofdestroy.com/images/13151302-6997439-image-a-2_1557151020561.jpeg

http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/90-when-we-were-the-good-guys-us-keeps-invoking-wwii-to-validate-new-wars

 

Americans are sick of fighting a 20-year war against an undefined enemy they can’t seem to beat. With morale and recruitment scraping bottom, the world’s best-funded military reckons that, if it can’t win, it can at least look like a winner.

The US Army looked to World War II, the last war the US could decisively be said to have “won,” for inspiration when designing its new service uniform to invoke “the most prominent time the Army’s service to our nation was universally recognized,” as sergeant major Daniel Dailey, the Army’s highest-ranking enlisted soldier, told the New York Times. But the specter of World War II – when Americans were hailed as “the good guys” – was conjured up long before the military decided to reenact its golden age through cosplay. Indeed, the US has been borrowing from the WWII playbook since before the War on Terror officially began.

Like WWII, the US’ forever-war, which has long since spilled beyond the Middle East, is being fought on multiple fronts against countries that, left alone, would pose no threat to the US. In both cases, the American people had to be tricked into supporting long, bloody, expensive conflicts that served little strategic purpose for the US – but strongly benefited their allies.

Neocon think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) infamously called for a “new Pearl Harbor” to advance its foreign policy goals, and the attacks of September 11 were used to shred the Constitution and pitch the country headlong into nearly two decades of unparalleled destruction, destabilizing the Middle East for generations and bankrupting the US. Neither attack happened without plenty of warning, however, and both were arguably permitted to take place in order to manufacture consent for extremely unpopular wars.

With the US barely out of World War I, President Franklin Roosevelt faced a population 80 to 90 percent opposed to entering another global conflict; he even ran on the promise that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Not only did Roosevelt deliberately place the US’ Pacific fleet in harm’s way by anchoring it in Pearl Harbor against the advice of fleet commander Admiral James Richardson; he relieved Richardson of his command for complaining, reportedly telling him “Sooner or later the Japanese will commit an overt act against the United States and the nation will be willing to enter the war.” US military intelligence, which had cracked the Japanese encryption codes, intercepted radio messages indicating Japan planned to attack Hawaii. The attack was allowed to happen, and overnight, a population allergic to war was baying for Japanese blood.

Several government agents, including FBI Minneapolis field office chief counsel Coleen Rowley and FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, came forward before September 11, troubled by evidence that seemed to point to a foreign group planning an attack on American soil. Saudi nationals training at flight schools and Israeli “art students” probing security vulnerabilities in government buildings set off alarms in government agencies all over the country.  But the administration of President George W. Bush, packed with PNAC alumni, ignored and even punished these whistleblowers. The Twin Towers were destroyed, the PATRIOT Act (pre-written and ready to go) was rammed through a docile Congress and, less than a month later, according to General Wesley Clark, the decision to invade Iraq had been made, even as hostilities had barely commenced in Afghanistan. Clark was told of a classified memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that described how “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years,” and while their timetable is a little behind, Iran is the only country on that list where the US and its allies haven’t attempted a regime change.

+

The Real Threat to Our Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or2XvoSLygI&feature=youtu.be

by Ron Sakolsky

(video-4min)

Published on May 1, 2019

 

===========

 

b.

How we take back the internet | Edward Snowden

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVwAodrjZMY

 

Appearing by telepresence robot, Edward Snowden speaks at TED2014 about surveillance and Internet freedom. The right to data privacy, he suggests, is not a partisan issue, but requires a fundamental rethink of the role of the internet in our lives — and the laws that protect it. "Your rights matter," he say, "because you never know when you're going to need them." Chris Anderson interviews, with special guest Tim Berners-Lee. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.

+

From: Cat McGuire [mailto:cat@catmcguire.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2019
Subject: Minds

 

Check out Minds, a new privacy-friendly alternative to social media like Facebook

https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/subscriptions  

 

While you're there, listen to this report by Derrick Broze of The Conscious Resistence on the Intercept ratting out yet another whistleblower.

https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/973615701792821248

+

The rot of American journalism runs deep

with Chris Hedges & Matt Taibbi

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/chris-hedges-and-matt-taibbi-the-rot-of-american-journalism-runs-deep/

 

===========

 

c.

Another Whistleblower Bites the Dust as The Intercept Adds a Third Notch to Its Burn Belt

https://www.mintpressnews.com/daniel-hale-another-whistleblower-bites-the-dust-as-the-intercept-adds-a-third-notch-to-its-burn-belt/258386/

by Whitney Webb

 

The Intercept, which has long been associated with the documents shared by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has yet to fire any of the reporters responsible for these breaches that have seen two whistleblowers already imprisoned and third, Daniel Hale, likely to be imprisoned.

+

Trump Steps up War on Whistleblowers: Air Force Vet Daniel Hale Arrested For Leaking Drone War Info

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/10/trump_steps_up_war_on_whistleblowers

(vieo-39min.)

 

+

 

News From Underground

From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2019
Subject: [MCM] US indicts whistleblower who exposed Obama's drone assassination program (and "our free press" ignores it)

 

This is the third such indictment under Trump, who has now used the Espionage Act

three times. That's half as many as Obama's all-time record of using that repressive

act six times to punish those who dare, or try, to tell the awful truth—more than all 

previous presidents combined.

 

Trump still has (at least) some 18 months to equal or surpass Obama's record;

and what's to stop him? Not "our free press," which has blacked out this story

of Trump's tyranny, just as it blacked out or played down Obama's dismal record

crushing civil liberties. 

 

So it's not just about Julian Assange. "Our free press" doesn't come to the 

defense of anyone who dares to contradict a major US propaganda narrative—

because the function of the US press today is to promote such fictions, not

expose them.

 

MCM

US indicts whistleblower who exposed

Obama’s drone assassination program

https://www.wsws.org/asset/5b022de3-0d3e-4648-80f0-45b788a8463J/image.jpg?rendition=image480

Air Force's hunter-killer UAV now flying in Afghanistan

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/05/11/hale-m11.html

by Kevin Reed 

On Thursday, an indictment by the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was unsealed against former intelligence officer Daniel Everett Hale, 31, who was charged with multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act including illegally obtaining secret US government documents and giving them to a journalist.

No reporter or news organization was named in the indictment. However, important details indicate that the journalist is Jeremy Scahill and the publisher is the Intercept. In October 2015, the Intercept published an eight-part series of articles by Scahill called “The Drone Papers,” based on a cache of top-secret slide presentations provided by an anonymous source.

The series revealed to the public that the Pentagon has been conducting drone-based warfare for more than a decade and that President Barack Obama had been running a drone assassination program out of the White House since at least 2011. In one segment of the series called “Find, Fix, Finish,” the Intercept reported that between January 2011 and June 2012, drone strikes killed three US citizens in Yemen, including the radical preacher Anwar al Awlaki, his friend Samir Khan and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman Awlaki.

Reported on by the World Socialist Web Site at the time, the Interceptexposé showed that, under the guise of fighting the “war on terror,” two drone assassination programs were operated in parallel by the Pentagon and CIA to kill specific individuals in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq. In the series, Scahill explained that the Democratic Party administration of President Obama had rebranded “assassination” as “targeted killing.”

 

===========

 

d.

The Revelations of WikiLeaks: No. 2 —The Leak That

‘Exposed the True Afghan War’

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/09/the-revelations-of-wikileaks-no-2-the-leak-that-exposed-the-true-afghan-war/

by Elizabeth Vos

 

The Afghan Diaries set off a firestorm when it revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad, and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict, as Elizabeth Vos reports.

This is the second article in a series that is looking back on the major works of the publication that has altered the world since its founding in 2006. The series is an effort to counter mainstream media coverage, which is ignoring WikiLeaks work, and is instead focusing on Julian Assange’s personality. It is WikiLeaks uncovering of governments’ crimes and corruption that set the U.S. after Assange and which ultimately led to his arrest on April 11.

Three months after it published the “Collateral Murder” video, WikiLeaks on July 25, 2010 released a cache of secret U.S. documents on the war in Afghanistan. It revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict, among other revelations. The publication of the Afghan War Diaries helped set the U.S. government on a collision course with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ultimately led to his arrest last month.

The war diaries were leaked by then-Army-intelligence-analyst Chelsea Manning, who had legal access to the logs via her Top Secret clearance. Manning only approached WikiLeaks, after studying the organization, following unsuccessful attempts to leak the files to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

 

===========

 

e.

Assange Is Not a Journalist

(If Journalists Are Ass-Kissing Propagandists for the Ruling Class)

https://www.blackagendareport.com/assange-not-journalist-if-journalists-are-ass-kissing-propagandists-ruling-class

by Ann Garrison

 

Saying Assange not a journalist is like saying Darwin wasn’t a biologist, Einstein wasn’t a physicist and LeBron James can’t play basketball.

Assange is a genius who looked at global injustice with the mind of a systems analyst, then founded Wikileaks and the transparency movement.”

High profile journalists have been jabbering about whether or not Julian Assange is really one of them. If “journalist” is understood to mean “ass-kissing propagandist for the ruling class,” then he most certainly is not.

However, if we go by the more common, less restrictive definitions, anyone who compiles and transmits information to a willing audience is a journalist. Some are good, most are awful, even evil, but Julian Assange is historic. Saying he’s not a journalist is like saying Darwin wasn’t a biologist, Einstein wasn’t a physicist, LeBron James can’t play basketball, and by the way, Galileo was wrong. The earth’s flat after all and we’re the center of the universe.

Assange is a genius who could have joined the club of tech billionaires, but instead he looked at global injustice with the mind of a systems analyst, then founded Wikileaks and the transparency movement. They put corporations and government, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and all the other intel agencies on notice that they could no longer count on operating in secret. State and corporate scandals had been uncovered before, but there had never been anything like Wikileaks. It guaranteed sources anonymity if they used its dropbox secure technology, and it has never busted a source. It has published well over 10 million documents and never had to retract even one. Its decentralized technical infrastructure saves it from the security state’s cyber weapons, and that strikes terror in the twisted psyches of Mike Pompeo and his inner circle of spies, murderers, and thieves without borders. If a global movement can free Julian Assange, with the full force of the national security state coming at him, it’ll be a game changer, perhaps even as historic as Wikileaks itself.

Wikileaks has published well over 10 million documents and never had to retract even one.”

On the other hand, prosecuting and convicting Assange for the crime of possessing and publishing classified material would establish a precedent for convicting any journalist, media outlet, or citizen who publishes, republishes, cites, quotes, or even tweets classified material. There’s a growing list of classified Wikileaks that I could go to prison for quoting even though they’re not the ones that have shocked the world like the Collateral Murder video of US soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians from an Apache Helicopter as though they were playing video games.

+

'We need to save his life':

Pamela Anderson and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief visits Julian Assange in high security prison

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51562.htm

(video-6min.)

by RT

 

An emotional Pamela Anderson and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson opened up to reporters following the first ‘social’ visit to Julian Assange since the whistleblower was imprisoned last month.
Anderson and Hrafnsson were the first people allowed to visit Assange, aside from his lawyer, since the 47-year-old was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment for violating bail conditions. The pair looked solemn following the visit on Tuesday, and spoke to reporters outside of the prison about the “shocking” conditions the WikiLeaks founder is being held in. Friend and public advocate Anderson spoke of her love for the Australian and said he has not been able to speak to his children or access a computer or library since his incarceration.

+

Patrick Henningsen on Julian Assange's 1st Extradition Hearing

& possible new laws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g2pbtr1-c8&feature=youtu.be

(video-24min.)

 

Patrick Henningsen is an independent analyst, public speaker and founder and managing editor of the successful independent news and media analysis website 21st Century Wire.com . He is also a host on the popular weekly SUNDAY WIRE radio show which broadcasts live weekly on the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). In November 2016, he launched a new weekly show on terrestrial AM radio 'Patrick Henningsen LIVE' on Independent Talk 1100 KFNX broadcasting to one of America's top talk radio markets in Greater Phoenix. He has also appeared in a number of international publications including The Guardian, UK Column, Consortium News, Global Research, New Dawn Magazine, and also on channels like Al Jazeera English, ITN, Edge Media (SKY 200 UK) and US syndicated radio show Coast to Coast AM.

+

One Month in Belmarsh: 29th Vigil for Julian Assange

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/10/one-month-in-belmarsh-29th-vigil-for-julian-assange-live-at-4-pm-edt/

 

===========

 

f.

After nearly two months in jail, Chelsea Manning submits

powerful appeal for release

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51564.htm

by Niles Niemuth

 

Betraying my principles is “a much worse prison than the government can construct”

Whistleblower and political prisoner Chelsea Manning submitted an appeal Monday to the federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia asking for her release from jail.

Manning has been held in the Alexandria City Jail since March 8. She was detained for contempt of court after she refused to testify before a grand jury impaneled to bring frame-up charges against WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange.

“She is convinced that to cooperate with this grand jury would be a betrayal of her beliefs about the grand jury process, and this grand jury process in particular,” Manning’s attorneys told the court in a written statement on Monday. “She is prepared to suffer the consequences for her beliefs, and it should surprise nobody to find that she has the courage of her convictions.

Manning’s eight-page statement is a powerful declaration of political principles. She is being targeted by the Trump administration as part of a nearly decade-long vendetta against her and Assange for exposing the US government’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“After two months of confinement, and using every legal mechanism available so far, I can—without any hesitation—state that nothing will convince me to testify before this or any other grand jury for that matter,” Manning declared. “With each passing day my disappointment and frustration grow, but so too do my commitments to doing the right thing and continuing to refuse to submit.”

+

Chelsea Manning Has Been Released From Jail

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/aar0iaejqyyxdbktewzq.jpg

Chelsea Manning, in what she said is her first trip outside of the United States since she was released from a U.S. prison, speaks at the annual re:publica conferences on their opening day on May 2, 2018 in Berlin, Germany. Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty

https://gizmodo.com/chelsea-manning-has-been-released-from-jail-1834656732

by Dell Cameron

 

Chelsea Manning was released today from the Virginia jail where she spent 62 days for refusing to testify about her past ties to WikiLeaks before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Attorneys for Manning said the release came after the grand jury’s term expired on Thursday. Her legal team has already been served another subpoena. It demands she appear before a different grand jury on May 17. Manning has vowed not to answer any questions and, therefore, could be returned to custody as early as next week.

“Chelsea will continue to refuse to answer questions, and will use every available legal defense to prove to District Judge Trenga that she has just cause for her refusal to give testimony,” her lawyers said.

 

===========

 

g.

Palestine in Pictures: April 2019

https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-pictures-april-2019/27256

The Electronic Intifada

(1 May 2019)

+

What I Saw in Gaza Changed Me Forever

https://www.mintpressnews.com/what-i-saw-in-gaza-changed-me-forever-jewish-perspective-palestinian-liberation/258285/

by Ned Rosch

 

My true liberation as a Jewish person is bound up with the liberation of Palestinian people.

Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism is a powerful collection of 40 essays by Jews from diverse backgrounds. Each describes a personal journey from a Zionist worldview to activism in solidarity with Palestinians and Israelis striving to build a society founded on justice, equality, and peaceful coexistence. In this excerpt from the essay “Palestine and my Journey of Self-Discovery,” Ned Rosch describes the deep impact of a visit to Gaza in 2014, shortly after the intensive bombings of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge.”

The great Indian writer Arundhati Roy wrote, “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” There were numerous times in my life when I “saw” it and felt the strongly reinforced foundations of my Zionist upbringing eventually crack wide open and ultimately turn to dust, but perhaps nothing more deeply touched me and cemented my perspective than a trip to Gaza in November 2014.

For a brief but remarkable week and a half, I had the amazing privilege of being part of a health delegation to this small strip of historic Palestine that is one of the most crowded places on earth because its population is literally sealed in by the Israelis—with the assistance of the Egyptians. To be there just two months after Israel’s murderous 2014 war on the people of Gaza was to catch a glimpse—through the painful stories I heard and the overwhelming destruction I witnessed—of the grotesque horror of that 51-day war. The bombed-out structures were everywhere, the grief universal, the trauma intense.

+

1,700 Gazans shot by IDF face amputation due to funding crisis,

UN warns

https://www.rt.com/news/458855-gaza-amputation-funding-un/

1,700 Gazans shot by IDF face amputation due to funding crisis, UN warns

Palestinian amputees in Gaza © Suhaib Salem / Reuters

 

The UN has warned that 1,700 Gazans shot by Israel Defense Forces at protests may need amputations in the next two years because of a lack of healthcare funding to help them recover.

Jamie McGoldrick, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Occupied Palestinian Territory, told reporters that 7,000 Palestinians were shot by Israel at protests over the last year, with many hit in the lower legs.

“You’ve got 1,700 people who are in need of serious, complicated surgeries for them to be able to walk again,” McGoldrick said, explaining the wounded require rehabilitation and “very, very serious and complex bone reconstruction surgery over a two year period before they start to rehabilitate themselves.”

 

===========

 

h.

From: Cat McGuire
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2019
Subject: Irish pogrom -- case study of how antisemitism develops

 

I highly recommend this May 6 Kevin MacDonald interview with Andrew Joyce, an Irish Ph.D. historian. 

 

Joyce begins with the historical record showing how the Russian pogroms were calculated news stories by and large fabricated so that eastern European Jews could leave the Pale of Settlement under the guise of widespread exaggerated antisemitism and thereby be allowed into Europe where economic opportunities would be plentiful.

 

Joyce then presents a unique textbook analysis of how antisemitism develops based on a study of Jews who migrated to Limerick, Ireland in the late 1800s -- an area almost free of Jewish history, thus a blank slate to study Jewish-Gentile interactions through the lens of a Limerick pogrom.  (When Joyce talks about "morality," he's referring to the goy irrational hatred that typically explains antisemitism.)

 

Listen to these key segments: 

11:50 to 18:00 (6 min) - Myth of Russian pogroms as seeded by British press 

18:35 to 25:45 (7 min) - Ireland case study of how/why antisemitism develops

27:00 to 30:37 (3 min) - Why elite rulers align with Jewish dealmakers, throwing their own people under the bus

 

---------------

I was so taken by Joyce's findings that I sought out more information and found this astonishing detailed research of his on Russian pogroms, which he explains: 


The series will begin with an explanation of the origins of Russia’s “Jewish Question.” Subsequent articles will concern the pogroms themselves and how myth and exaggeration have plagued our conception of them. Finally, I will examine why these myths were developed, and the broader implications of the prevalence of myth in Jewish ‘history.’ 

 

Revisiting the 19th-Century Russian Pogroms, Part 1: Russia’s Jewish Question

Myth and the Russian Pogroms, Part 2: Inventing Atrocities

Myth and the Russian Pogroms Part 3 – The Jewish Role

 

I suspect Joyce's 3-part invaluable, eye-opening articles will never be expanded into a scholarly book to due lack of funding, if not outright banning by the academy as revisionist hate literature.  

 

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

 

===========

 

i.

Creeping Toward Tyranny

https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Tyranny-of-Profit-850x721.jpg

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/creeping-toward-tyranny/

by Chris Hedges

 

The destruction of the rule of law, an action essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state, began long before the arrival of the Trump administration. The George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and implementation of a doctrine of pre-emptive war were war crimes under international law. The federal government’s ongoing wholesale surveillance of the citizenry, another legacy of the Bush administration, mocks our constitutional right to privacy. Assassinating a U.S. citizen under order of the executive branch, as the Obama administration did when it murdered the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, revokes due process. The steady nullification of constitutional rights by judicial fiat—a legal trick that has enabled corporations to buy the electoral system in the name of free speech—has turned politicians from the two ruling parties into amoral tools of corporate power. Lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals write legislation to legalize tax boycotts, destroy regulations and government oversight, pump staggering sums of money into the war machine and accelerate the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history, one that has involved looting the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars in the wake of the massive financial fraud that set off the 2008 economic collapse. The ruling elites, by slavishly serving corporate interests, created a system of government that effectively denied the citizen the use of state power.

This decades-long disregard by the two major political parties for the rule of law and their distortion of government into a handmaiden for corporations set the stage for Donald Trump’s naked contempt for legality and accountability. It made inevitable our kakistocracy, rule by the worst or most unscrupulous (“kakistocracy” is derived from the Greek words kakistos, meaning worst, and kratos, meaning rule).

Those in the parade of imbeciles, grifters, con artists, conspiracy theorists, racists, Trump family members, charlatans, generals and Christian fascists, all of whom often see power as a way to enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayer, are too many to list here. They include former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (who blamed “environmental terrorist groups” for the 2018 California wildfires, hired private jets to fly himself around the country and opened public lands for mineral and gas exploitation), former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt (who held lavish dinners with the coal-mining and chemical executives whose companies he then deregulated) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. This moral swamp also contains bizarre, Svengali-like figures darting in and out of the shadows, such as Stephen Miller, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci and Omarosa Manigault Newman, not to mention paid-off porn stars and mistresses, sleazy lawyers and bungling and corrupt campaign managers.

+

Is Bolton Steering Trump Into War With Iran?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51567.htm

by Patrick J. Buchanan

 

Last week, it was Venezuela in America’s gun sights.

"While a peaceful solution is desirable, military action is possible," thundered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. "If that’s what is required, that’s what the United States will do."

John Bolton tutored Vladimir Putin on the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine: "This is our hemisphere. It’s not where the Russians ought to be interfering."

After Venezuela’s army decided not to rise up and overthrow Nicholas Maduro, by Sunday night, it was Iran that was in our gun sights.

Bolton ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln, its carrier battle group and a bomber force to the Mideast "to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force."

What "attack" was Bolton talking about?

According to Axios, Israel had alerted Bolton that an Iranian strike on U.S. interests in Iraq was imminent.

Flying to Finland, Pompeo echoed Bolton’s warning:

"We’ve seen escalatory actions from the Iranians, and … we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests. … (If) these actions take place, if they do by some third-party proxy, whether that’s a Shia militia group or the Houthis or Hezbollah, we will hold the … Iranian leadership directly accountable for that."

Taken together, the Bolton-Pompeo threats add up to an ultimatum that any attack by Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, or Iran-backed militias – on Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE or U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria or the Gulf states – will bring a U.S. retaliatory response on Iran itself.

+

Does Trump Have Control of His Government,

or Is It His Government?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51569.htm

by Paul Craig Roberts

 

I smell a rat. 

John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser or, more correctly, Israel’s agent, has assembled a team consisting of himself, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Emirati crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed, and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman. These men are Iran’s four worst enemies.

The purpose of the team is to produce a false flag event that will provide an excuse for Washington to attack Iran.  As the Israelis are the most competent member of this team, the speculation is that Israel will shoot down an American aircraft or attack a US Navy vessel, and Washington will have the presstitute media blame it on Iran.  In other words, a revival of the Northwoods Project that the US Joint Chiefs presented to President Kennedy in hopes of setting up a US invasion of Cuba.

The plot seems already to have been set in motion. Both Bolton and acting Pentagon secretary Patrick Shanahan have announced their detection of a “credible threat by Iranian regime forces. We call on the Iranian regime to cease all provocation. We will hold the Iranian regime accountable for any attack on US forces or our interests.”

To be clear, the “threat” and the “provocation” are not identified.  But they are somehow happening even though no news services and no governments anywhere in the world, excepting Washington, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are aware of the “escalatory action from the Iranians.”

+

Trump’s Iran Policy Is Becoming Dangerous
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51574.htm

by Colin Kah


Growing evidence suggests the U.S. president is traveling a path toward war—whether he knows it or not.
On May 5, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton issued a stark warning to Iran.

The United States, he announced, would deploy the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group along with a bomber task force to the Persian Gulf, “to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” The United States, he continued, “is not seeking war with the Iranian regime” but is “fully prepared to respond to any attack.”

It remains unclear what triggered the deployment and Bolton’s strong language. Initial reports suggested that it may have come in response to indications that Iranian-backed Shiite militias were planning attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. Other reporting suggested that Israel had tipped off U.S. officials to an impending Iranian attack against U.S. interests, personnel, or allies in the Gulf. An anonymous U.S. official said the deployment had been ordered to bolster “deterrence to what has been seen as potential preparations by Iranian forces and its proxies that may indicate possible attacks on U.S. forces in the region,” but the official added that there were no signs of an imminent Iranian attack.

Given Bolton’s long track record of exaggerating and manipulating intelligence to justify the use of force, it might be tempting to dismiss all of this as fake news. But the prospect of Iran engaging in a provocation that sparks a wider military confrontation is very real—even if it is the Trump administration’s own policy of cornering Tehran that has greatly magnified the danger.

+

‘Pity America, because of this crazy Trump!’

Here’s what Iran’s man in Iraq would say to Mike Pompeo
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51590.htm
by Robert Fisk


Why didn’t Mike Pompeo talk to Iran’s most important supporter in Iraq?
Mike Pompeo went to put the thumbscrews on the Iraqi government this week. No more electrical power from Iran, he told them, and make sure those pesky Iranians don’t attack our boys in that great American base in Iraq which Trump was boasting about. The New York Times numbingly told us that his trip was “shrouded in secrecy” – if only it had been. Then at least the US secretary of state could have paid a visit to Iran’s most important supporter in the Iraqi parliament.

I met Hadi al-Ameri in Baghdad a few days before Pompeo turned up in town. A tough, curmudgeonly, 64-year-old bearded ex-militia leader, fluent in Persian and in the Shia politics of Iraq, he is a personal friend of Qassem Suleimani – commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force and America’s latest “super-terrorist” in the Middle East – and fought alongside Iran in its eight-year war with Saddam.

I can imagine what he might have told Pompeo, because this is what he told me over tea in his Baghdad office.

“Pity America, because of this crazy Trump! There were 180,000 American troops here with tanks and all their equipment and we did not surrender to their intentions or wishes. Today, we want to build an Iraq depending on itself, strong and sovereign in the region and we will make good relations with all the regional countries for the interests of the people of Iraq – not for America or for Saudi Arabia or for Iran. We will not allow America to use Iraq to watch regional countries. And we will not allow Iraq to become a battlefield for other countries to clear their debts.”

Mark those words: “Not ... for Iran.” Because Ameri presents himself as an Iraqi nationalist first, a Shia second – his political enemies in Iraq will disagree. He prides himself on his leadership of the old Badr Brigade and he played a prominent role in the struggle against Isis in 2014.

 

===========

 

j.

‘Turnkey Tyranny’ on the Streets of Washington
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51595.htm

by Ray McGovern


We are at the point Edward Snowden described as “turnkey tyranny.” And on Wednesday night the key was turned a bit more dramatically. Ray McGovern explains.
Gerry Condon, President of Veterans For Peace, was bloodied and “taken to ground,” on Wednesday night for trying to get food to people inside the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington. The activists inside, some of whom have lived in the embassy for weeks with permission from the Venezuelan government, are protecting the premises from protestors who support the self-declared president Juan Guaido.

With the acquiescence of Washington police and the Secret Service, the protestors have been able to block food from entering the embassy.  On Wednesday night electricity was cut to the building.  One activist tossing a loaf of bread to a window was arrested earlier this week for using a “missile.”  Now Condon has been manhandled and nabbed for throwing a cucumber.

We are at the point Edward Snowden described as “turnkey tyranny.” On Wednesday night the key was turned a bit more dramatically. Until now it has been an almost imperceptibly gradual process, like the proverbial frog in boiling water.

 +


From: "USPC@USPeaceCouncil.org via ActionNetwork.org" <info@sg.actionnetwork.org>
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2019
Subject: Message From the Embassy Protection Collective

Message From the Embassy Protection Collective

Venezuelan Embassy — Washington DC

To: US State Department
Venezuelan Foreign Ministry
From: Embassy Protection Collective
Re: Exiting the Venezuelan Embassy
Date: May 13, 2019

 

This is the 34th day of our living in the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC. We are prepared to stay another 34 days, or however long is needed to resolve the embassy dispute in a peaceful way consistent with international law.


 

This memo is being sent to the US and Venezuela as well as members of our Collective and allies. We are encouraging people to publish this memo as a transparent process is needed to prevent the US from making a unilateral decision that could impact the security of embassies around the world and lead to military conflict.


 

There are two ways to resolve the issues around the Venezuelan embassy in DC, which we will explain.


 

Before doing so, we reiterate that our collective is one of independent people and organizations not affiliated with any government. While we are all US citizens, we are not agents of the United States. While we are here with permission of the Venezuelan government, we are not their agents or representatives.  


 

We are here in the embassy lawfully. We are breaking no laws. We did not unlawfully enter and we are not trespassing.


 

1. Exiting with a Protecting Power Agreement


The exit from the embassy that best resolves issues to the benefit of the United States and Venezuela is a mutual Protecting Power Agreement. The United States wants a Protecting Power for its embassy in Caracas. Venezuela wants a Protecting Power for its embassy in DC. Such agreements are not uncommon when diplomatic relations are severed.

A Protecting Power Agreement would avoid a military conflict that could lead to war. A war in Venezuela would be catastrophic for Venezuela, the United States, and for the region. It would lead to lives lost and mass migration from the chaos and conflict of war. It would cost the United States trillions of dollars and become a quagmire involving allied countries around the world.

We are serving as interim protectors in the hope that the two nations can negotiate this resolution. If this occurs we will take the banners off the building, pack our materials, and leave voluntarily. The electricity could be turned on and we will drive out.

We suggest a video walk-through with embassy officials to show that the Embassy Protection Collective did not damage the building. The only damage to the building has been inflicted by coup supporters in the course of their unprosecuted break-ins.

 

2. The United States violates the Vienna Convention, makes an illegal eviction and unlawful arrests


This approach will violate international law and is fraught with risks. The United States would have to cut the chains in the front door put up by embassy staff and violate the embassy. We have put up barriers there and at other entrances to protect us from constant break-ins and threats from the trespassers whom the police are permitting outside the embassy. The police's failure to protect the embassy and the US citizens inside has forced us to take these actions.

The Embassy Protectors will not barricade ourselves, or hide in the embassy in the event of an unlawful entry by police. We will gather together and peacefully assert our rights to remain in the building and uphold international law.

Any order to vacate based on a request by coup conspirators that lack governing authority will not be a lawful order. The coup has failed multiple times in Venezuela. The elected government is recognized by the Venezuelan courts under Venezuelan law and by the United Nations under international law. An order by the US-appointed coup plotters would not be legal.

Such an entry would put embassies around the world and in the United States at risk. We are concerned about US embassies and personnel around the world if the Vienna Convention is violated at this embassy. It would set a dangerous precedent that would likely be used against US embassies.

If an illegal eviction and unlawful arrests are made, we will hold all decision-makers in the chain of command and all officers who enforce unlawful orders accountable.

If there is a notice that we are trespassing and need to vacate the premises, please provide it to our attorney Mara Verhayden-Hilliard, copied on this memo.

We have taken care of this embassy and request a video tour of the building before any arrests.

We hope a wise and calm solution to this issue can be achieved so escalation of this conflict can avoided.

There is no need for the United States and Venezuela to be enemies. Resolving this embassy dispute diplomatically should lead to negotiations over other issues between the nations.

The Embassy Protection Collective
May 13, 2019
Action Network
Sent via Action Network, a free online toolset anyone can use to organize. Click here to sign up and get started building an email list and creating online actions today.
Action Network is an open platform that empowers individuals and groups to organize for progressive causes. We encourage responsible activism, and do not support using the platform to take unlawful or other improper action. We do not control or endorse the conduct of users and make no representations of any kind about them.

 

===========

 

k.

1,000 Israeli Soldiers To Arrive in Honduras to Train Troops, Police on Border Protection

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51568.htm

by teleSUR

 

Honduras will receive 1,000 Israeli soldiers to train the country's army for border protection, fight against drug trafficking, investigation, and counterterrorism.

A multilateral military treaty between Honduras, Israel, and the United States will see the deployment of 1000 Israeli soldiers at Honduras. They will train the Armed Forces of Honduras (FFAA) and National Police (PN).

The main mission of the troops is to train for border protection to stop migrants fleeing Honduras to the U.S., especially children.

This would be the second time that Honduras is allowing foreign military personnel in the territory and the first time in Israel’s history to send troops abroad.

Apart from border protection, fight against drug trafficking, investigation, and counterterrorism will be offered as well.

According to local news media El Heraldo, the presence of Israeli soldiers is part of bilateral cooperation between the two countries before Honduras transferred its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The Israeli army will share space with the Joint Task Force-Bravo (FTCB) of the U.S. at the Jose Enrique Soto Cano air base in Palmerola.

Honduras also has an agreement of more than a million dollars with Israel in terms of purchasing arms, military equipment, and repowering ships and planes. The 10-year agreement was signed in 2016.

The military training agreement was joined by the U.S. because they have a permanent military base in Palmerola and want Honduras to guard their borders due to an upsurge of migrants going towards the North American nation.

The agreement was discussed between Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the inauguration of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

+

 

From: Cat McGuire [mailto:cat@catmcguire.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2019 8:03 AM
To: Cat McGuire
Subject: FOIA release of 9/11 photos of the 5 dancing Israelis

 

Adam Green publishes FOIA photos of the infamous 5 dancing Israelis celebrating the twin tower attacks. 

First time released from FBI. Heaviiy redacted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuQz6ej7hT4

+

Israeli forces destroy Gaza office of Turkish Anadolu news agency

afp_IOPT_05-09-2019.jpg

https://cpj.org/2019/05/israeli-forces-destroy-gaza-office-of-turkish-anad.php

 

Beirut, May 9, 2019 -- The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the Israeli bombing of Turkish-stated owned news outlet Anadolu Agency's Gaza office on May 4.

Israeli warplanes fired five missiles into the building housing the Anadolu Agency office, destroying the building but causing no casualties, according to a report by Anadolu Agency, other news reports, and the regional press freedom group Skeyes.

"It is completely unacceptable for Israel to bomb and destroy the Gaza office of Turkey's Anadolu Agency and endanger the lives of journalists, who are civilians and guaranteed protection under international law," said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Representative Ignacio Miguel Delgado. "Israeli authorities know where media outlets are housed in Gaza, and must ensure that journalists can do their jobs safely, without fear of being injured or killed."

The planes first fired warning shots at the building at about 7 p.m., according to the Anadolu statement and the Skeyes report.

+

“Deal of the Century” Offers New Name to the Remains of Four Thousand Year Old Palestine

https://www.mintpressnews.com/deal-of-the-century-offers-new-name-to-the-remains-of-four-thousand-year-old-palestine/258407/ 

 

JERUSALEM, PALESTINE — Nakba Day — the day when Palestinians commemorate the destruction of their country and the mass killing and forced eviction of their people — is coming up, and with each passing day, another disturbing story unfolds.

Perhaps the most disturbing story so far is the plan to present Palestine with a new name, “New Palestine.” This, according to a rumored leak, is what Donald Trump and Jared Kushner are going to present to an anticipating world as part of the so-called “Deal of the Century.”

Also according to the leak, aside from a demand for Palestinians to accept a new name as part of the “Deal of the Century” — forgoing the name “Palestine,” which has been used to describe their land since the Bronze Age — the Palestinian people will have to accept that their heritage and their history will be erased and their land will be taken away for good. In other words, what Palestinians are going to receive, according to the leak, is a new name but no country, and they will be expected to accept this or else they will be denied access to foreign aid, not only from the U.S. but other countries as well.

 

===========

 

l.

A Brief Contemporary History of US-Russian Relations

https://therealnews.com/series/reality-asserts-itself-stephen-cohen

(video, in 5 parts)

with Stephen Cohen

+

Russia’s Ongoing Victory Day

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51596.htm

by Finian Cunningham


As the world again marked the annual Victory Day against Nazi Germany this week, one thing seems more evident with each passing year – Russia holds the highest honour for celebrating this event.
The commemorations in Russia in terms of people numbers and ceremonial splendor far excel similar public events held across Europe and North America. Even though, in theory, those latter countries were allies which defeated Nazi Germany in May 1945

Why have Victory Day celebrations seem to have become more subdued in Europe and North America with each passing year, while in Russia, 74 years on, the “Great Patriotic War” is remembered and revered with undiminished passion?

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin delivered a rousing speech dedicated to the sacrifices of the war dead in front of multitudes attending Moscow’s Red Square. There was also an impressive military parade honoring the fallen heroes, followed by a breathtaking fireworks display, and marches held across all Russia in towns and villages for the “Immortal Regiments”.

Meanwhile, tellingly, an article posted on the BBC website was headlined: “What is VE [Victory in Europe] Day?”

One reason for the difference is because Russia and other Soviet nations paid a far greater human price of suffering in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The memory of the horror is seared into Russian families. And, likewise, so too is the memory of resistance and ultimately the glory of defeating a monstrous enemy – at times against all the odds of victory.

Take the Nazi siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg). For over two years the people of that city endured starvation and cruelties that hardly anyone in Western Europe or North America could imagine. Yet the Nazi barbarity was finally overcome, the city was liberated by the Red Army, and Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich who was trapped in the besieged city wrote an internationally renowned symphony heralding the vanquishing of that trauma.

The later final defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945 was indeed a liberation for all of Europe. But that victory was indisputably due to the resilience and fortitude of Russian and other Soviet citizens. All told, the Soviet people lost about 27 million from Nazi war depredations, including from extermination operations and atrocities inflicted on whole villages. That number is incomparably greater to what other European countries incurred. Yet, in spite of the massive onslaught, it was the Soviet people who rose to the occasion to push back the Nazi invaders all the way to Berlin where the Third Reich was eventually buried in its war bunkers.

Just one more figure is enough to tell the story. Some 90 per cent of all Nazi army casualties during World War II were inflicted in the East fighting against the Soviet nations. That tells you how and where the Nazi war machine was terminated.

There are several current consequences from that horrific war that are still felt today.

One is that Russia will never allow itself to be invaded and threatened as it was by Nazi Germany in June 1941. Russia’s defense forces and weapons are perhaps the best in the world. No wonder Russia is vehemently opposed to NATO expansionism. How would Americans or British feel if the shoe was on the other foot?

Secondly, in a paradoxical way, because Russia suffered such infernal hardships from war, it is perhaps the most peace-loving of all modern nations. In President Putin’s speech this year, he once again extended a hand of friendship and cooperation to others to strengthen global security. That is in spite of the fact that the US and its NATO allies have continually insulted and provoked Russia with slanderous claims, military saber-rattling and economic sanctions.

A third consequence is that Western nations who claim to have defeated Nazi Germany – thereby trying to undermine Russia’s honorable place in that event – have at the same time an evident historical amnesia. This is not to belittle the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of ordinary soldiers from the US and Britain who gave their lives in the fight against Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, the boastful claims of Western leaders and media is belied by the diminishing memorials to the Victory in Europe.

The truth is Victory in Europe was predominantly a victory by the Russian and Soviet nations. After all, several of the European countries are guilty from their ruling establishments collaborating with Nazi Germany, as in France, Norway, Poland, and others.

The concomitant of that duplicitous reality is that victory celebrations across Europe – except for Russia – tend to become somewhat hollow and muted with time.

Another reality – one that is shameful and concealed by Western establishments – is that American and British finance capital was very much instrumental in bankrolling the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. US corporations such as Ford, ITT, General Motors and Du Pont made fortunes from investing in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, making full use of slave camps for cheap labor, before the outbreak of the war.

The ambiguous relationship between Western capitalism and Nazi fascism is testified in today’s cozy alliance between Washington and the Neo-Nazi regime that seized power in Ukraine. The disgusting veneration by politicians in Kiev for Nazi collaborators and their vile blood lust against the ethnic Russian people in Eastern Ukraine are never objected to by governments in Washington or the European Union.

Russia knows the evils of fascism because it started this force in the face and defeated it 74 years ago. That world-changing event will never be forgotten nor taken for granted.

 

===========

 

m.

Trump's Foreign Policy | Full Debate | George Galloway,

Mark Leonard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcyfVLMWqFI&feature=youtu.be

(video-43min.)

 

Many think Trump a buffoon and a threat to world peace. But with ISIS weakened, and signs of progress in North Korea, perhaps his supporters can point to some initial successes. Could a beligerent approach to foreign policy make for a safer world? Is the beat way of pursuing peace to prepare for war? Or has Trump in fact made the world more precarious than ever?

+

George Galloway setting the record straight on Iraq

BBC Hardtalk

Part 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju14plUOskU&feature=youtu.be

(video-7min.)

 

===========

 

n.

On Julian Assange & Venezuela

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51563.htm

(audio-9min.)

with John Pilger

+

Venezuela – A Risk to Dollar Hegemony –

Key Purpose Behind “Regime Change”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51593.htm

by Peter Koenig

 

After the new coup attempt – or propaganda coup – Venezuela lives in a state of foreign imposed insecurity. The failed coup was executed on 30 April by Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed and Washington-trained and endorsed “interim President”, and the opposition leader, Leopoldo López, who was hurriedly freed from house arrest by Guaidó with a couple of dozens of armed-to-the-teeth defecting military, who apparently didn’t quite know what they were up to. Because, when all was over after a few hours, most of them asked to be re-integrated into their military units – and, as far as I know, they were readmitted.

These are Washington’s puppets and “coup-makers”. When one sees that the so-called coup was defeated in a mere few hours, without any Venezuelan military interference, one wonders whether this was really planned as a coup, or merely as a “public relations” coup, for the media to ‘recharge’ their narrative of Maduro dictatorship, of a suffering people, of famine, of lack of medication and medical supply – all due to the Maduro government’s mismanagement of Venezuela’s natural riches, the lie-slander we have been used to for the last several years.

For sure, the Venezuelan people are suffering. According to a CEPR report sanctions have killed some 40,000 Venezuelans. And this, not because of President Maduro’s squandering of Venezuelan resources, but because of a brutal, merciless outside interference, principally from the United States and to a lesser degree from Washington’s European vassals. If you listen to the ceaseless drumbeat for war against Venezuela and her democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro, by Pompeo, Bolton, Pence and Trump – you can only wonder and shake your head – what pathological and schizophrenic world we are living in? – And – are we all sick to the bone, that we tolerate it, that nobody of and in power – other than Russia and China – say ‘Halt’ to this deadly fiasco?

This article by Eric Zuesse, including leaked documents from Pentagon’s southern command, SOUTHCOM, will give the non-believers plenty of reasons to change their minds.  Western humanity has reached an abject state of mental disease. We allow the slaughter of tens of millions of people by the United States and its NATO allies, in US-provoked wars and conflicts around the world, indiscriminate killing for resources and monetary dominion. But we follow the same killer nation in accusing a quiet, peace-loving, fully democratic country, like Venezuela, to be utterly trampled on and punished with the most horrific monetary and economic sanctions – all illegal, by any standards of law – and our western “leaders” know it all.

 

===========

 

o.

Which New War Next: Iran or Venezuela?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51576.htm

by Jacob G. Hornberger

 

Pity President Donald “America First” Trump, Secretary of State (and former CIA Director) Mike Pompeo, National-Security Advisor (and Cold War fanatic) John Bolton, and Special U.S. Representative to Venezuela (and Cold War fanatic) Eliott Abrams.

Knowing that the American people have grown weary with their forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, these four interventionists can’t decide whether to initiate a new war against Venezuela or against Iran or against both. They just know that they want a new war, an exciting war, a winnable war against a poor Third World country, a war that will cause Americans to forget about the ongoing fiascoes in the Middle East and Afghanistan and that will hopefully restore America to greatness through “mission-accomplished” conquest, bombing, death, destruction, and regime-change. One can easily imagine the arguments that must be taking place in the White House: “Iran! They ousted our Shah from power!” “No, Venezuela! It’s part of the worldwide communist conspiracy to take over America!”

Ideally from their standpoint, the choice will be made easier for them if either Iran or Venezuela strikes first. After all, let’s not forget that the Constitution, which is supposedly the law of the land, requires a congressional declaration of war before the president and his army can wage war. Moreover, after World War II, the Nuremberg War Crimes declared it to be a war crime for one nation to initiate an attack on another nation.

Not that any president concerns himself with the Constitution and with Nuremberg principles. Trump knows that he can violate that section of the Constitution with impunity. He knows that while Congress might impeach him for “collusion” with the Russians or with the nebulous crime of “obstructing justice,” there is no possibility that Congress will impeach him for intentionally violating the declaration-of-war restriction in the Constitution. He also knows that there is no possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court, whose responsibility is to enforce the Constitution, will be anything but passive and deferential to any war initiated by the president.

+

How The U.S. Is Pressing Iran To Breach The Nuclear Deal

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51575.htm

by Moon Of Alabama

 

363 days ago the U.S. left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 'nuclear deal' with Iran, and reintroduced sanctions against trade with Iran.

When the U.S. reintroduced sanctions on Iran it provided sanction 'wavers' for some customers of Iranian oil. Two weeks ago the extremists in the Trump administration won out and the those waivers were eliminated. Some of Iran's customers, Iraq, Turkey and China, will continue to buy Iranian oil and will face U.S. sanctions.

The declared aim of the Trump administration's 'maximum pressure campaign' is to bring all trade with Iran to zero and the country to its knees.

On Wednesday May 8, one years after the U.S. breached the deal, it will announce additional sanctions against the country:

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that new sanctions would target petrochemical sales. I'm told the administration will likely impose those sanctions soon, but the new sanctions planned for this week will target a different sector of the Iranian economy.

The only European response to the new announcements was a lame statement. The EU should fight for the JCPOA deal as it is in its interest. But instead it is slow-walking its badly designed INSTEX mechanism that would allow for sanction free trade with Iran.

Iran will use the anniversary of the U.S. breach of the deal to announce that it will no longer stick to some of the restrictions of the JCPOA.

 

===========

 

p.

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller

Sent: Friday, May 10, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Cell phone radiation affects the thyroid gland, and may increase the risk of preterm birth and thyroid cancer

 

 

Thyroid Cancer & Mobile Phone Use

cell phone thyroid Carlberg Hardell 2016.JPG

https://www.saferemr.com/


Cell phone radiation affects the thyroid gland and may increase risk of preterm birth and thyroid cancer

A new review of the research has found that cell phone radiation adversely affects cells in the thyroid gland and thyroid hormones. The study was published in the journal, Environmental Science and Pollution Research International by Jafar Asl and colleagues.

The findings from this study support the findings from two recent human studies. Ermioni Tsarna and colleagues recently found in a cohort study that cell phone use during pregnancy increased the risk of preterm birth, and Jiajun Luo and colleagues found in a case-control study that heavy cell phone use increases the risk of thyroid cancer.

 



The abstracts for all three studies appear below :

The figure above is from the following open access paper: Carlberg M, Hedendahl L, Ahonen, Koppel T, Hardell L. Increasing incidence of thyroid cancer in the Nordic countries with main focus on Swedish data. BMC Cancer. 16:246. 2016.https://bmccancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12885-016-2429-4

--

Asl JF, Larijani B, Zakerkish M, Rahim F, Shirbandi K, Akbari R. The possible global hazard of cell phone radiation on thyroid cells and hormones: a systematic review of evidences. Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2019 May 6. doi: 10.1007/s11356-019-05096-z. [Epub ahead of print]

Abstract

The aim of this review was to investigate the effects of possible harmful waves from either cell phone use or being within the range of the cell phone from 450 to 3800 MHz on the thyroid cells and hormones. Eight electronic datasets were systematically searched using MeSH terms, including "cell phone," "mobile phone," "GSM," "radio frequency," "smartphone," "triiodothyronine," "thyroxin," "thyroid-stimulating hormone," "T3," "T4," "TSH," and "morphological" and all possible combinations, to identify relevant studies published up to Dec 2018. We also manually searched the reference lists of potentially selected studies to identify further relevant publications. About 161 relevant studies were initially found. After screening titles and abstracts, 139 studies were excluded, and finally 22 studies (comprising 7182 cases) were included in the qualitative synthesis.

Of the 22 included studies, 11 studies reported changes in T3 and T4 levels (six reported a decrease in T3 levels and one reported increase in it); moreover, five found decreased T4 levels and two studies an increased level. In other 10 studies, TSH alteration was reported. Of these, two studies reported a decrease in TSH level and one reported an increase in the hormone levels, while in the remaining studies non-significant changes were reported. Finally, seven studies examined histological changes in the thyroid gland follicles and showed that the volume of these cells was reduced.

Based on the evidence discussed above, the reduction in diameter of thyroid follicles is potentially linked with cell phone radiation. Exposure may negatively influence the iodine uptake in the thyroid gland or increases temperature effect on the thyroid gland. However, further research are needed in order to show that the level of TSH and thyroid hormone suppression by microwave.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31062236

Excerpts

The range of SAR [Specific Absorption Rate] reported in this study was 0.082–4.6 W/kg. Silva et al. stated that RFE [radio frequency energy] exposure conditions have no potential carcinogenic effect on thyroid cells with 0.082–0.170 (W/kg) SAR (Silva et al. 2016). It is expected that reducing this factor will reduce the risk of cell phone waves, but Bhargav et al. show that thyroid gland hormones are significantly lesser after RF-EMF with 0.54 W/kg SAR exposure compared to sham (Bergamaschi et al. 2004), and other studies show contradictory results about the role of SAR and hormonal effects. Despite the fact that SAR is a very important criterion for judging the highest energy of a radio signal released from a source of a particular model of a mobile phone, it alone cannot provide enough information to compare the amount of radio signal released by different phones to users.

... epidemiological evidences have revealed that even a relatively slight decrease in T4 levels during pregnancy may lead to decrease of cognitive functions in offspring (Haddow et al. 1999; Pop et al. 2003). In this regard, Eşmekaya et al. stated that cell phone has the potential to cause pathological consequences in the thyroid gland via changing organ structure, as well as increasing the activity of caspase-dependent pathways related to apoptosis (Esmekaya et al. 2010). Silva et al. show the exposure to RFE seems to have no possible oncogenic consequence on human thyroid cells (Silva et al. 2016). Nonetheless, it is quite difficult to perform a study exploring the impacts of EMFs on a fetus or child due to ethical concerns (Sangun et al. 2015).

Conclusions and future perspective

Tissue heating may be usually linked to nonspecific stress reaction induced by microwave exposure. Exposure negatively influences the iodine uptake in the thyroid gland, or may influence with increased temperature effect on the thyroid gland. However, with the advent of new generations of communications like the 5 G, further research are needed in order to show the level of TSH and thyroid hormone suppression by microwave.

--

 

Maternal cell phone use during pregnancy increased preterm births


Abstract

Tsarna E, Reedijk M, Birks LE, Guxens M, Ballester F, Ha M, Jiménez-Zabala A, Kheifets L, Lertxundi A, Lim HR, Olsen J, Safont LG, Sudan M, Cardis E, Vrijheid M, Vrijkotte T, Huss A, Vermeulen R. Maternal Cell Phone Use During Pregnancy, Pregnancy Duration And Fetal Growth In Four Birth Cohorts. Am J Epidemiol. 2019 Apr 17. pii: kwz092. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwz092.

Previous studies evaluating potential effects of prenatal exposure to radiofrequency fields from cell phones on birth outcomes are inconsistent. We explored if maternal cell phone use was associated with pregnancy duration and fetal growth.

We used information from 55,507 pregnant women and their children from Denmark (1996-2002; DNBC), the Netherlands (2003-2004; ABCD), Spain (2003-2008; INMA) and Korea (2006-2011; MOCEH). Based on self-reported number of cell phone calls per day, exposure was grouped as none, low (reference level), intermediate, and high. We examined pregnancy duration (gestational age at birth, preterm/postterm birth), fetal growth (birth weight ratio, small/large for gestational age), and birth weight, low and high birth weight, and meta-analyzed cohort specific estimates.

The intermediate exposure group had higher risk of giving birth at lower gestational age (Hazard Ratio=1.04, 95% CI 1.01, 1.07), and exposure-response relationships were found for shorter pregnancy duration (P<0.001) and preterm birth (P=0.003). We observed no association with fetal growth or birth weight. In conclusion, maternal cell phone use during pregnancy may be associated with shorter pregnancy duration and increased risk for preterm birth.

Results should be interpreted with caution, as they may reflect stress during pregnancy or other residual confounding, rather than direct effect of cell phone exposure.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30995291

Excerpts

Exposure to RF-EMF [radio frequency electromagnetic fields] during pregnancy could affect the growth and development of the fetus and the pregnancy duration either due to direct radiation of the fetus and the placenta, or indirectly as a result of altered maternal physiology ...

... During calling and texting abdominal exposure is low and modeling studies estimate that exposure levels of the human fetus are very low (9–12), although an experimental study on humans has shown that abdominal RF-EMF exposure may affect the placenta function (13). In addition, an association between RF-EMF exposure and thyroid dysfunction has been indicated in animal studies (14,15)....

... A cohort study from Turkey (N=500) retrospectively assessed cell phone use and reported shorter pregnancy duration and increased risk for preterm birth (16). In a cohort study from Iran (N=1,200), no association with birth weight was found (17). In a much larger sample from Norway (N=100,231), no association was found between cell phone use and low birth weight, preterm birth, or small for gestational age (SGA) (18)....

The mothers from DNBC and ABCD reported their frequency of cell phone calls during pregnancy 7 years postnatally. In INMA and MOCEH, similar questionnaires were given to the mothers during pregnancy. To be consistent with previous analyses within these cohorts (29), we classified exposure in four categories (none, low, intermediate, high), based on available information regarding daily frequency of cell phone calls during pregnancy (Table 2)....

Table 2 footnote: In DNBC, ABCD, and INMA cohorts, none exposure corresponds to no calls per day, low exposure to 0-1 calls per day, intermediate exposure to 2-3 calls per day, and high exposure to 4 or more calls per day. In MOCEH cohort, none exposure corresponds to no calls per day, low exposure to 0-2 calls per day, intermediate exposure to 3-5 calls per day, and high exposure to 6 or more calls per day.

... the OR [odds ratio] for preterm birth gained statistical significance in the highly exposed group within the cohorts with prospective exposure assessment (OR=2.03, 95% CI 1.22, 3.39) (Web Tables 8 and 10). In the analysis with binary exposure, we observed an increased risk of giving birth at lower gestational age (HR=1.04, 95% CI 1.02, 1.07), and increased odds for preterm birth (OR=1.16, 95% CI 1.05, 1.29) for the mothers that used their cell phone more often during pregnancy (Web Tables 8 and 11). The estimates for all the other outcomes were not different from unity (Web Table 11).

In our study, we observed an association of maternal cell phone use during pregnancy with pregnancy duration, but not with fetal growth. Since fetal exposure is very low during cell phone calls (9–12), for the interpretation of these results we considered the potential effect of RF-EMF on maternal head and neck structures, as well as indirect pathways related to the use of cell phones rather than the radiation per se. Animal studies have suggested that RF-EMF exposure may result in minor thyroid gland dysfunction (14,15). Additionally, higher preconception thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels and subclinical hypothyroidism  during pregnancy have been associated with higher risk for miscarriage and preterm birth (46–49). Thus, the increased risk for giving birth preterm among heavier users of cell phones that we observed could be mediated by mild thyroid dysfunction. However, the association of RF-EMF exposure from cell phone use with thyroid function is not established, and large-scale epidemiological studies on the topic are lacking. Increased oxidative stress has been also considered (50). However, it is not clear whether the elevation of radical oxygen species resulting from local RF-EMF exposure is of such an extent in humans that it could trigger systematic responses affecting the birth outcomes. Causal pathways involving local radiation of parts of the human body other than maternal head and neck structures were not considered, as this exposure would not be reflected in the number of cell phone calls per day....

The exposure variable was based only on the number of cell phone calls per day; duration of calling was not taken into account, as it was available only in MOCEH. Furthermore, the number of cell phone calls per day during pregnancy was self-reported in all cohorts, and was validated only in MOCEH (59). Thus, misclassification of exposure should have attenuated the observed association, under our assumption that misclassification was predominantly non-differential (60–62). We expect that misclassification was much larger in the older cohorts (DNBC and ABCD), as the number of cell phone calls per day was reported seven years postnatal. Therefore, the estimates in DNBC and ABCD cohorts should be more biased towards the null in comparison to INMA and MOCEH cohorts....

In conclusion, in our study more frequent maternal cell phone use during pregnancy was associated with shorter pregnancy duration, resulting in increased risk for preterm birth. No association with fetal growth and birth weight was observed. Study results make strong effects unlikely and should be interpreted with caution, as they may reflect an effect of stress during pregnancy or other residual confounding, rather than a direct effect of RF-EMF exposure.

--

Heavy cell phone use is linked to thyroid cancer


The first case-control study examining the association between cell phone use and thyroid cancer found elevated risks of thyroid cancer among heavier, long-term cell phone users.

At greater risk of thyroid cancer were individuals who used a cell phone for more than 15 years, for more than two hours per day, or for a greater number of lifetime hours. Also, those who made the most cell phone calls in their lifetime were at increased risk.

Men who used cell phones for more than 15 years had over twice the risk of thyroid cancer as compared to non-cell phone users after controlling for other factors. Women who used cell phones for more than two hours per day had a 52% greater risk of thyroid cancer as compared to non-cell phone users.

Although the key findings in this study were of borderline statistical significance, this may be due to the relatively small sample size, especially for males. The study included 462 histologically-confirmed thyroid cancer cases and 498 population-based controls. Also, the study did not control for cordless phone use which may be a risk factor for thyroid cancer.

The study, published online in the Annals of Epidemiology on October 29, was conducted by researchers from the Yale School of Medicine and the Connecticut Health Department.

The authors recommended more research since the results from this study may not be generalizable to current cell phone users due to changing technology and patterns of use (e.g., hands-free use, texting). The authors noted that smart phones were not in common use during the period prior to 2010-2011 when the data for this study were collected. The majority of study participants did not start using cell phones until age 21. Future research should determine if age of first cell phone use is associated with greater thyroid cancer risk.

The authors reported that thyroid cancer is the fastest growing cancer in the U.S. Incidence has nearly tripled since the 1980’s from four per 100,000 in 1980 to fifteen per 100,000 in 2014 making this the fifth most common cancer among women in the country. Although over-diagnosis is believed to account for about half of this increase, the remainder is likely due to changing environmental and lifestyle factors.

Yawei Zhang, MD, PhD, of the Yale School of Medicine and Cancer Center was the senior author of this paper. The research was supported by the American Cancer Society, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China.

My comments: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 53,990 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in 2018 making this the 12th most common cancer in the U.S. Rates for new thyroid cancer cases have increased 3.1% per year over the last ten years (on average) based upon an analysis of data from the NCI Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-9 (SEER-9) cancer registry program.

Since smart phones are more likely to have cell antennas located in the bottom of the phones than earlier cell phone models, the peak radiation exposure from a smart phone is more likely in the neck than in the brain. Hence, I would hypothesize that the association between cell phone use and thyroid cancer has increased in recent years. The switch from “candy bar" and flip phones to smart phones could explain upward trends over time in thyroid cancer incidence and relatively flat trends in brain cancer observed in some countries.

Abstract

Luo J, Deziel NC, Huang H, Chen Y, Ni X, Ma S, Udelsman R, Zhang Y. Cell phone use and risk of thyroid cancer: a population-based case-control study in Connecticut. Ann Epidemiol. 2018 Oct 29. pii: S1047-2797(18)30284-9. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2018.10.004

Purpose. This study aims to investigate the association between cell phone use and thyroid cancer.

Methods.  A population-based case-control study was conducted in Connecticut between 2010 and 2011 including 462 histologically confirmed thyroid cancer cases and 498 population-based controls. Multivariate unconditional logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) for associations between cell phone use and thyroid cancer.

Results. Cell phone use was not associated with thyroid cancer (OR: 1.05, 95% CI: 0.74-1.48). A suggestive increase in risk of thyroid microcarcinoma (tumor size ≤10mm) was observed for long-term and more frequent users. Compared to cell phone non-users, several groups had non-statistically significantly increased risk of thyroid microcarcinoma: individuals who had used a cell phone >15 years (OR: 1.29, 95% CI: 0.83-2.00), who had used a cell phone >2 hours per day (OR: 1.40, 95% CI: 0.83-2.35), who had the most cumulative use hours (OR: 1.58, 95% CI: 0.98-2.54), and who had the most cumulative calls (OR: 1.20, 95% CI: 0.78-1.84).

Conclusion. This study found no significant association between cell phone use and thyroid cancer. A suggestive elevated risk of thyroid microcarcinoma associated with long-term and more frequent uses warrants further investigation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30446214

 

--

 

Related posts on Electromagnetic Radiation Safety

 

Thyroid Cancer and Mobile Phone Use

Pregnancy & Wireless Radiation Risks

Female Infertility & Cell Phone Radiation


--

Joel M. Moskowitz, Ph.D., Director
Center for Family and Community Health
School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley

Electromagnetic Radiation Safety

Website:          https://www.saferemr.com

Facebook:        https://www.facebook.com/SaferEMR
Twitter:            @berkeleyprc

 

===========

 

q.

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller

Sent: Thu, 09 May 2019

Subject: [MCM] CNN goes Goebbels with a Big Lie about Guaido winning an election in Venezuela, though there wasn't one (and he would not have won it if there was)

 

 

"Our free press" just keeps on getting scarier.

 

MCM

 

 

CNN Falsely Claims Venezuela’s Guaido Was

Elected President in January : “There was no election in January”

https://news.antiwar.com/2019/05/06/cnn-falsely-claims-venezuelas-guaido-was-elected-president-in-january/

by Jason Ditz

 

Continuing to try to advance the US narrative that Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido is the “duly elected” president, CNN went to the trouble on Sunday afternoon of inventing an entire election to base this around. In the CNN report, they declared “pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido <https://web.archive.org/web/20190505220126/https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/americas/venezuela-military-helicopter-crash/index.html>

over

him for president.” There was no election in January. In reality, Venezuela’s presidential election was held on May 20, 2018. The opposition boycotted the vote, Maduro won with 67.8% of the vote, while Guaido did not participate at all. Indeed, the only time Juan Guaido participated in a presidential vote of any kind was the 2012 Democratic Unity Roundtable’s presidential primary, which he lost. Guaido’s first claim to the presidency came in January of 2019, when he unilaterally declared himself “acting president.”Yet the Trump Administration not only endorsed Guaido as president at this time, they’ve begun referring to him as the “duly elected” president despite such an election never taking place. US media outlets have parroted that claim, but CNN took it a step farther to invent the election too.The CNN article was written by two senior writers <https://web.archive.org/web/20190505220126/https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/americas/venezuela-military-helicopter-crash/index.html>,

and had four others contribute to it. It is hard to imagine that none of them caught this false claim of a January vote. Yet the article remained unchanged throughout Sunday and overnight, and it was only some time on Monday that it was finally revised to say that Guaido had “declared himself interim president.

 

===========

 

r.

'Won't capitulate':

China warns as Trump threatens new tariffs
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51584.htm
by Al Jazeera

 

China has rejected accusations made by the United States of backtracking in trade talks and warned it would not "capitulate to any pressure" as the two sides head into make-or-break negotiations.
"The US has assigned a lot of labels, such as backtracking, going back on one's word, and so on. Lots of promises have been foisted on China," Chinese commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng told reporters in Beijing on Thursday.
"China will not capitulate to any pressure, and we have the determination and ability to defend our own interests," Gao said, warning that it "has already prepared for all possible situations".

The US has raised the stakes with plans to increase tariffs on $200bn in Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent at 12:01am (04:01GMT) on Friday, prompting Beijing to vow to hit back with "necessary countermeasures".
Gao's comments came as a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He was set to hold talks in Washington on Thursday and Friday.
The talks are aimed at salvaging the trade deal that appeared to be unravelling after US President Donald Trump accused China of breaking it and promised to impose more tariffs if no agreement is reached.

'They broke the deal'

At a rally in Florida on Wednesday, Trump said Beijing would pay if no agreement is reached.

"I just announced that we'll increase tariffs on China and we won't back down until China stops cheating our workers and stealing our jobs, and that's what's going to happen, otherwise we don't have to do business with them," Trump told a cheering crowd.

"They broke the deal," he added. "They can't do that. So they'll be paying. If we don't make the deal, nothing wrong with taking in more than $100bn a year."

Al Jazeera's Adrian Brown said there was now a "grim" realisation in Beijing that more US tariffs on Chinese goods are inevitable.

"There is so little time left for Chinese negotiators to avoid the tariffs, now talks do resume in Washington on Thursday but they are due to last just two days - just two days to try to achieve a deal that can somehow prevent this trade dispute from escalating," he said from Beijing.

"There could be a possible surprise but I think it's more likely that there is unlikely to be a deal in the short term, I think the question is will the two sides continue negotiating, if they do, it will be enough to stabilise markets."

Trump's comments triggered a round of selling in Asian and European markets.

Trade negotiations are a long process and it is normal to have disagreements, Gao said, adding that China is willing to continue talks with the US to resolve the trade dispute.

While the US wants to reduce the scale of its trade deficit with China, it is also seeking better protection for American intellectual property and more market access in China for US companies.

Gao described accusations about Chinese firms stealing tech secrets as unreasonable and said they were not based on facts.

 

===========

 

s.

The Middle East Agenda: Oil, Dollar Hegemony

& Islam in Imperialism

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51594.htm

by Professor Francis A Boyle

 

Assalamu’alaikum. Dr. Mahathir, Mrs. Mahathir, distinguished Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in seventeen eighty-nine.

The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (à la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the world.

Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the twentieth century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain — in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against the Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal conditions from which they still suffer today. All in the name of securing America’s so-called place in the sun.

And today at the dawn of the twenty first century, the world witnesses the effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Moslem states and peoples, surrounding central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy, which is total nonsense.

For the past two hundred and sixteen years, the imperialist foreign policy of the United States of America since its foundation, has been predicated upon racism, aggression, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third millennium of humankind’s parlous existence, nothing has changed about the operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack upon Iran.

Now the assigned topic today is The Middle East Agenda : Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam. So, I’m only going to limit my comments to that subject. We have to begin the story with the Arab oil embargo in 1973. As you know in 1967, Israel launched an illegal war of aggression against the surrounding Arab states, stole their land and ethnically cleansed their people. But eventually Egypt offered a Peace Treaty to Israel, which Israel rejected and the Egyptians and the Arab states decided then to use force to recover their lands.

Israel almost collapsed, the United States and Europe came to their support by providing weapons and in reaction the Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States and Europe, and brought their economies to their knees. Whereupon, the then U.S Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger threatened them and said: This will never happen again, and if you do, we will prevent it. And it was not just a threat. The United States government then at that time, planned, prepared and conspired, to steal the oil of the Persian Gulf. They did not have the military capability to do this at that time, to carry out the Kissinger threat, which was also then repeated by the Ford administration, and the Carter administration under Harold Brown and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

 

===========

 

t.

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Another one bites the dust: Jon Rappoport's blog has disappeared

 

from Jon Rappoport :

This past Saturday, between 2 and 3 PM Eastern Time, WordPress suddenly took down my blog after 10 years of continuous operation.  There was no warning or advance notice of any kind.

This is outright censorship.

We are attempting to restore service to the blog.  Meanwhile, the situation is this:

You can still access the home page of my site, NoMoreFakeNews.com.

On that page, you can order products by clicking on the "Matrix" graphics on the right side of the page.

Please consider forwarding this email to those you know letting them know what happened. They can then go to NoMoreFakeNews.com and sign up for the email list at the upper left of the home page.  They will then get my output of new articles in their email.

I thank you for your support all these years---NoMoreFakeNews has existed for 18 years.  I need that support more than ever at this time.

Make your response to this censorship known to WordPress.

[Use this link to order <http://marketplace.mybigcommerce.com/> Jon's Matrix Collections.]

_____________
Jon Rappoport :
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a  consulting practice 
for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. 

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.

You can find this article and more at NoMoreFakeNews 
https://nomorefakenews.com/

No More Fake News, Encinitas, CA 92024



===========

 

u.

News From Underground

 

From: "Mark Crispin Miller" <markcrispinmiller@gmail.com>
To: "newsfromunderground" <newsfromunderground@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2019 6:14:16 PM
Subject: [MCM] More on what's happening WEDNESDAY (15 May): National Day of Action to HALT 5G!


From Les Jamieson:

Hello all,

 


This Wed. is the National Day of Action to HALT 5G. People throughout the country can find local actions at www.5gcrisis.com. For NYC the protest will be at 4 pm, Verizon Store at 859 Broadway (at 17th Street) near Union Square. The press release is attached.

Please spread the word!

 


The science on the dangers of 5G and smart meters is overwhelming. The bottom line is, neither have been pre-tested for safety. The entire ecosystem is at risk. Here are a few info sources:



Mobilize and stand for accountability,
 
Les Jamieson