AlterNet.org: World News

Exposed: The Harrowing Impact of America's Deadly Drone War in Pakistan

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:48:00 -0700

A drone strike that killed 42 people is the focus of filmmaker Robert Greenwald's new video on the American war in Pakistan.

President Barack Obama’s big speech on U.S. counter-terror policy last month promised that drone strikes were “legal,” “heavily constrained” and only carried out if there is “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” But the use of the most deadly type of drone attacks calls that rhetoric into question. Known as “signature strikes,” these drone attacks are launched on groups of people who fit the “signature” of militants and terrorists but whose identities are not always known--and they constitute the bulk of strikes carried out in Pakistan, leading to civilian casualties.

Now, a new campaign launched by Brave New Foundation’s War Costs project is looking to expose the impact of “signature strikes” on civilian populations living under the threat of drones. The group has started a petition drive aimed at Congress to demand an end to those types of strikes. Brave New Foundation is partnering with a number of peace and justice groups on the campaign, including Just Foreign Policy, United National Antiwar Coalition, United for Peace and Justice and more.

“Tell Congress to move now to end these signature strikes, save innocent lives, protect America from the blowback of killing innocent civilians, and restore the rule of law,” the petition states. The campaign comes at a moment when some members of Congress are exploring ways to put limits on the Obama administration's use of drone strikes. The administration recently allowed a small number of Congressional officials to look at White House legal memos on drone attacks, though they haven't been released to the public. The Obama administration recently affirmed in a brief that the public has no right to see the Justice Department opinions laying out the legal basis for the drone war.

“Signature strikes,” contrasted with “personality strikes”--strikes that only target individual persons whose identities are known--have wreaked havoc in the Pakistani tribal areas, where America’s Central Intelligence Agency-run drone war continues. An articleby McClatchy Newspaper’s Jonathan Landay revealed that “drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been ‘exceedingly rare.’” The drone war in Pakistan has taken the lives of hundreds of civilians, though the exact number of civilians killed is unknown. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based media organization, estimates that 411-884 Pakistani civilians have died as a result of drone attacks, while the New America Foundation puts the numbers at 258-307. At least 178 children in Pakistan and Yemen have been killed by U.S. drones, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The Brave New Foundation campaign on “signature strikes” is also paired with a eye-opening video (watch it below) produced by Robert Greenwald, the organization’s founder. (Greenwald sits on the board of the Independent Media Institute, AlterNet’s parent organization.) The video is the result of Greenwald’s first-hand investigation into the impact of America’s drone war on Pakistan.

“In the fall of last year I traveled to Pakistan. Reports of civilian drone casualties were beginning to permeate though American news outlets, prompting myself, and Brave New Foundation, to launch a full-length documentary investigation into the claims coming out of the tribal regions,” he explained in a blog post tied to his campaign.

At the heart of the video is Greenwald’s investigation into a “signature strike” carried out on March 17, 2011 in Datta Khel, an area in the Pakistani tribal region, where America’s drone war is centered. Greenwald interviewed a number of witnesses to the strike--a crucial follow-up to previous reports of mass civilian casualties caused by this specific strike.

The strike targeted a large meeting known as a “jirga” near a bus depot in Datta Khel. “Jirgas,” as they are known in Pashto, the language spoken in the tribal areas, are meetings of tribal members where disputes are hashed out. It is the main judicial structure in tribal areas, and is a key mechanism for stability in tribal areas, as Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani Ambassador, told Greenwald.

As witnesses to the strike said, this “jirga” was over a dispute involving a local chromite mine. But 20 minutes after they gathered in the open space for the meeting known to local government officials, four missiles struck the group, killing an estimated 42 people--most of whom were civilians.

Jalal Manzar Khail, a 45-year-old tribal leader, witnessed the aftermath of the strike. In an interview conducted over Skype, he told AlterNet that when he received a message about the drone strike, he “rushed to the scene and when I reached there...there were all the dead bodies in pieces...It was a surprise to me. We were not expecting that the jirga be struck.” The interview was translated by Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents many civilian victims of the drone war.

The strike in Datta Khel wiped out tribal leaders, according to Khail. American officials took to the New York Times to claim that the strike targeted “a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ-linked militants.” But investigations carried out by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, scholars from New York University and Stanford and Greenwald call the official U.S. account into question. While the Associated Pressreported that four Pakistani Taliban fighters were also present since “ they controlled the area and any decision made would need their approval,” Khail said that no Taliban was present. Whatever the case, Greenwald’s and Khail’s account reveal that a large number of civilians were likely killed. A recent New York Times magazine piece quotes some American officials as conceding that that Datta Khel strike was “botched,” though other officials continued to defend the strike.

“There was a great uproar after the strike. Everyone was very angry that the tribal elders had been killed,” said Khail, sitting in a chair wearing a black vest and a white shirt. “This is something they can never forgive or forget what Americans have done to them.”

The drone attack in Datta Khel had wide-ranging repercussions. One survivor showcased in the video, Ahmed Jan, said that he has “severe pain in my ears and also have psychological effects.” The strike also had consequences for the social structure in this tribal area. Khail told AlterNet that as a result of the strike, jirgas don’t take place in public anymore because “they’re fearful that they are in big numbers and they might be targeted.”

And the overall drone strike campaign has led to children not going to school because they are fearful that drones will attack, Khail said. News reports have stated that U.S. drones have attacked madrassas in the past where suspected terrorists were.

Two months after the Datta Khel “signature strike,” Obama counter-terror adviser and current CIA director John Brennan claimed that “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

Greenwald’s campaign and focus on “signature strikes” like the one that took place in Datta Khel comes as the Obama administration’s deadly drone program continues to command attention. While President Obama’s speech on drones and the U.S. “war on terror” prompted media reports that the drone war was being reined in, the promised new rules purportedly meant to restrict drone use leaves out parts of Pakistan, which is defined as an area of “active hostilities” even though Congress hasn’t explicitly authorized war to be waged in Pakistan. The Obama administration claims the authority to attack the tribal areas in Pakistan because “associated forces” of al-Qaeda reside there. Obama’s speech also didn’t herald the end of “signature strikes” in Pakistan. Instead, the CIA will continue to carry out those strikes in Pakistan, despite questions raised by international law experts as to whether they are legal. Still, the spate of drone attacks in recent months has considerably slowed.

“The Obama Administration has altered its policy towards Pakistan in rhetoric only,” wrote Greenwald in a blog post. “And as long as they continue we will see more strikes like those Datta Khel, and more innocent civilians killed. In doing so they make each of us in United States and Pakistan less safe, and less secure, as we once more attempt to kill our way to security.”

What remains to be seen is the reaction of the new Pakistani government in light of the continued drone attacks. Pakistani officials in the past have decried the campaign at the same time they gave tacit consent to drone strikes. But recently, a Pakistani court ruled that drone strikes are illegal and that Pakistan should use “force” if needed to take down drones. Shahzad Akbar, the Pakistani lawyer who translated the interview with Khail, said he held a June 6 press conference to demand that the new president, Nawaz Sharif, enforce the court ruling.

Sharif said June 5that “the chapter of daily drone attacks should stop.” The rhetoric could set up a clash with the U.S.--or it could be business as usual, with Pakistani officials criticizing the attacks while giving consent to them, since the drone campaign has also taken out enemies of the Pakistani government.

An American drone attack on Pakistan June 7 allegedly killed nine people. In response, Sharif summoned the U.S. envoy to protest the attack.

NSA's Domestic Surveillance Is Motivated by Fears That Environmental Disasters Could Fuel Anti-Government Activism

Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:38:00 -0700

Pentagon concern over "anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability."

Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealandcourt records suggest that data harvested by the NSA's Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.

Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency" or "civil disturbance":

"Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances."

Other documents show that the "extraordinary emergencies" the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.

In 2006, the US National Security Strategy warned that:

"Environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response."

Two years later, the Department of Defense's (DoD) Army Modernisation Strategy described the arrival of a new "era of persistent conflict" due to competition for "depleting natural resources and overseas markets" fuelling "future resource wars over water, food and energy." The report predicted a resurgence of:

"... anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability."

In the same year, a report by the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute warned that a series of domestic crises could provoke large-scale civil unrest. The path to "disruptive domestic shock" could include traditional threats such as deployment of WMDs, alongside "catastrophic natural and human disasters" or "pervasive public health emergencies" coinciding with "unforeseen economic collapse." Such crises could lead to "loss of functioning political and legal order" leading to "purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency...

"DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance."

That year, the Pentagon had begun developing a 20,000 strong troop force who would be on-hand to respond to "domestic catastrophes" and civil unrest - the programme was reportedly based on a 2005 homeland security strategy which emphasised "preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents."

The following year, a US Army-funded RAND Corp study called for a US force presence specifically to deal with civil unrest.

Such fears were further solidified in a detailed 2010 study by the US Joint Forces Command - designed to inform "joint concept development and experimentation throughout the Department of Defense" - setting out the US military's definitive vision for future trends and potential global threats. Climate change, the study said, would lead to increased risk of:

"... tsunamis, typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural catastrophes... Furthermore, if such a catastrophe occurs within the United States itself - particularly when the nation's economy is in a fragile state or where US military bases or key civilian infrastructure are broadly affected - the damage to US security could be considerable."

The study also warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:

"A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions."

That year the DoD's Quadrennial Defense Review seconded such concerns, while recognising that "climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked."

Also in 2010, the Pentagon ran war games to explore the implications of "large scale economic breakdown" in the US impacting on food supplies and other essential services, as well as how to maintain "domestic order amid civil unrest."

Speaking about the group's conclusions at giant US defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton's conference facility in Virginia, Lt Col. Mark Elfendahl - then chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division - highlighted homeland operations as a way to legitimise the US military budget:

"An increased focus on domestic activities might be a way of justifying whatever Army force structure the country can still afford."

Two months earlier, Elfendahl explained in a DoD roundtable that future planning was needed:

"Because technology is changing so rapidly, because there's so much uncertainty in the world, both economically and politically, and because the threats are so adaptive and networked, because they live within the populations in many cases."

The 2010 exercises were part of the US Army's annual Unified Questprogramme which more recently, based on expert input from across the Pentagon, has explored the prospect that "ecological disasters and a weak economy" (as the "recovery won't take root until 2020") will fuel migration to urban areas, ramping up social tensions in the US homeland as well as within and between "resource-starved nations."

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, where he directly handled the NSA's IT systems, including the Prism surveillance system. According toBooz Allen's 2011 Annual Report, the corporation has overseen Unified Quest "for more than a decade" to help "military and civilian leaders envision the future."

The latest war games, the report reveals, focused on "detailed, realistic scenarios with hypothetical 'roads to crisis'", including "homeland operations" resulting from "a high-magnitude natural disaster" among other scenarios, in the context of:

"... converging global trends [which] may change the current security landscape and future operating environment... At the end of the two-day event, senior leaders were better prepared to understand new required capabilities and force design requirements to make homeland operations more effective."

It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.

Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People's Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state's involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement.

A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald's, Nestle and the oil major Shell, "use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability."

Indeed, Kennedy's case was just the tip of the iceberg - internal police documents obtained by the Guardian in 2009 revealed that environment activists had been routinely categorised as "domestic extremists" targeting "national infrastructure" as part of a wider strategy tracking protest groups and protestors.

Superintendent Steve Pearl, then head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Nectu), confirmed at that time how his unit worked with thousands of companies in the private sector. Nectu, according to Pearl, was set up by the Home Office because it was "getting really pressured by big business - pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks." He added that environmental protestors were being brought "more on the radar." The programme continues today, despite police acknowledgements that environmentalists have not been involved in "violent acts."

The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA's global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

Gringos on the Ayahuasca Trail ... Young Americans Are Flocking to S. America for Pychedelic Promise

Lisa Stansberry, The Fix — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:13:00 -0700

Young travelers flock to Bolivia and Peru to do hallucinogenic ayahuasca, which allegedly has spiritual, therapeutic qualities

“What do you think the shaman will say if I tell him I just want to trip balls?” Stan is a 30-something English lad who has been strolling around the hostel drunk all day, wearing nothing but a gold thong.

In defense of Stan’s outfit, it is very hot in Rurrenabaque, a pocket-sized Bolivian town at the entrance to Madidi National Park, in the upper Amazon Basin. Mosquitos as big as gumdrops whine through the humid air, joining the symphony of carimbo music and inebriated shouts pouring from the gringo bars. Rurrenabaque is at the epicenter of Bolivia’s burgeoning eco-tourism industry, with dozens of expeditions into the jungle leaving daily. But travelers often become intrigued by a different local offering: guided shamanic tours which use the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca to prompt spiritual revelations.

Ayahuasca has featured prominently in indigenous rituals in this part of the world for centuries. It is brewed using infusions of several local plants, including the actual ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi), which activates the psychedelic compound DMT in the other main component, Chacruna (Psychotria viridis). Additional ingredients are supposed to counteract the nausea that commonly accompanies use, but the exact mixture varies from shaman to shaman.

The process typically begins with a pre-interview, at which clients discuss their goals with the shaman. Some say they are looking for guidance, others for healing. Some, like Stan, just want to “trip balls.”

Dieter, 31, from Germany, tells me that he was seeking direction. “I wanted to know what the next step was. I waited for 10 years to try ayahuasca. Before, I wasn’t in the right 'psychosis'.”

His trip was preceded by a cleansing period of several days. The length of this period and its restrictions varies widely from company to company. Some shamans require a week’s abstinence from alcohol, drugs, sugar, caffeine and processed flour. More fly-by-night outfits—particularly prevalent in party towns like Rurrenabaque—require much less.

On the day before the ritual, Dieter and his fellow participants went hiking in the jungle. They meditated. They met as a group and discussed their intentions. They were “purified” with tobacco smoke. Then, as the shaman chanted and played various musical instruments, they each drank from a gourd containing the brew.

The name ayahuasca comes from a native Quechua word meaning “vine of the dead.” It’s a fitting moniker, as DMT—its key psychoactive ingredient—is said to replicate near-death experiences.

Diarrhea and vomiting are common. Some participants report seeing "unnatural matter" flood from all the orifices of their bodies. They are told that it is toxins being flushed from their system. “It was the most beautiful diarrhea I’ve ever had in my life,” says Dieter. “I shit for what felt like hours. It was very cleansing.”

But did he get an answer to his question, the question of direction? While almost all users report their trips as life-changing, they also struggle to find the words to describe the experience. “I got a...foretaste of how the answer will feel,” says Dieter. “It was good. I’m not interested in the short term. I want a long-term change for my life.” He plans on doing another ritual soon.

Whether ayahuasca actually produces a long-term spiritual shift is a matter for debate. Companies touting its use say that it has helped their clients with severe issues such as drug addiction and grief. Its primary benefit, claim many, is a renewed sense of connection with the universe. “My clients come back full of love, ready to make a lasting change,” says Johanna Aftales, a representative at Etnika’s Ancient Shamanic Inca Technique in Cusco, Peru.

Peru, the next stop on the “Gringo Trail” after Bolivia, is another popular destination for ayahuasca enthusiasts. Options range from the decidedly dodgy—reports of rip-offs, bad trips, pervy shamans—to the ultra-professional. The Way Inn, one lodge in Huarez, offers week-long packages that include massage and licensed counselors.

Down the street from Etnika’s, Shaman Kush shakes his head when he hears of two Swedish girls whose unpleasant experience included hallucinations of snakes writhing beneath their feet. He says their shaman is at fault for not explaining the vision properly: “Seeing the serpent is a very good thing. It represents the earth goddess Pachamama and resembles the ayahuasca vine.”

Kush is a charismatic middle-aged man with sparkling brown eyes. He has decades of experience as a spiritual guide, but even he doesn’t claim that the plant is a cure-all. “Ayahuasca opens the door,” he says. “Lasting change is up to the individual. There are other paths, such as Buddhism, which yield the same results.”

Those who do choose ayahuasca as a healing agent are well advised not to approach the process lightly. “The main potential danger is the occurrence of a psychotic breakdown. Although this is a rare possibility, it can occur,” says Dr. José Carlos Bouso, a researcher at Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar Institut d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM) and a contributor to the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service. He recently published a study on the psychological impact of repeated ayahuasca use, and is quick to add that while the neuroimaging assessment conducted by his team revealed brain modification due to use, it did not reveal any brain damage or evidence of eventual toxic effects. His data is preliminary, but he believes that the brain modifications may be positive ones.

Dr. Bouso is clear that there is no scientific evidence to support claims that ayahuasca can help users heal from trauma and make positive life changes. However, there is plenty of “anecdotal evidence,” he says. “There are a lot of people that failed using standard medicines that obtained benefits from ayahuasca. They feel cured but the doctors don't trust them.”

Hermione, 26, is a bubbly, chain-smoking yoga enthusiast who fled Arizona for South America following a battle with depression last year. She recently went cold-turkey off a cocktail of SSRIs, opioid painkillers and ADHD medication that she had been taking since the age of 13.

“It’s been 10 weeks. I’ve never felt better,” she says. “I didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms and I really think that it’s because he’s [her shaman, Juan] been praying for me.” Hermione chose her shaman after interviewing with several different companies. Some refused to work with her because of her history of depression. Several alkaloids in ayahuasca act as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MOAIs), putting users who have also used antidepressants at risk of serotonin syndrome—when too much of the feel-good chemical accumulates in the body, causing symptoms that range from shivering to seizures.

One shaman told Hermione that she would have to wait at least five months before doing the ceremony. He also told her to “Put on a bra. I don’t want to see your tits again.”

The shaman she eventually chose, Juan, emailed her information on the risks and suggested that she make up her own mind. Hermione decided that she wanted to fight. Juan agreed. “He told me: ‘You are strong. You are fighting for your life. If you don’t want to use these medications, you don’t need to. You are a warrior.’”

On Sunday May 5, after a week of cleansing, Hermione went with Juan to his apartment in Cusco and did the ritual. She was initially nervous but said that the months of communication with Juan about her history and goals made all the difference.

She gets in touch with me via webcam from her apartment in Ecuador a week later, excited to share her experience. After adjusting her microphone and holding her cat up to the camera to say hello, she begins rolling a cigarette. “Yeah, I’m still smoking," she says with a wry smile. “But I’m only using natural tobacco from now on. I decided that I don’t want any chemicals in my body, ever again.”

Hermione describes her trip as extremely intense: It featured strong hallucinations, psychic communication with people present and departed, and physical manifestations of the plant ayahuasca as the mother goddess. She repeatedly repressed nausea, only to watch the shaman vomit on her behalf—a process she described as him “purging the negative feelings.”

She revisited traumatic scenes of childhood abuse, drug addiction and rape. And she says that the plant spoke to her, telling her that those experiences were not who she was, and that she did not need to be afraid anymore. “Towards the end of the ritual I had a very clear vision of my pills, the pills I still had left, back in my backpack in the hostel,” she tells me. “And I knew that I had to get rid of them. So I asked him [Juan] if he would take them from me. And he said yes.”

Hermione’s ritual started in the early evening. She went to sleep around 4 am and woke up at 6, feeling “transparent, clean, like everyone could see through me.” She has woken up at 6 am every day since. A week later, she says that she still feels changed, energized, cleansed. She says that other people can see the difference in her. Her boyfriend dumped her yesterday and she declares complete peace with his decision.

“I’m never using any kind of medication again,” she says. And what if the depression comes back? Her brow furrows slightly. “I’m not going to let myself get low again. It wasn’t just the ayahuasca, it was deciding to fight for my life. Last year my life was—from the outside—really good. But if I had owned a gun I would be dead right now. So I ran away to South America. I had to make a change. I stopped taking medication when every doctor told me I shouldn’t. I feel amazing, and it’s getting stronger every day. Every day I remember what she [ayahuasca] and Juan told me—that I am a student of life.”

Linda Stansberry is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The Fix. She lives in Northern California.

Is Kurdistan the Next Autocracy? Petro-Dollars Lead to Corruption in Northern Iraq

Derek Monroe, Foreign Policy in Focus — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:43:00 -0700

Kurdistan's leader Massoud Barzani has presided over a crackdown on journalists and dissent.

A haze hangs low over the city of Erbil. Automotive exhaust and dry sand envelop the area, forming an opaque mixture that sunshine struggles to penetrate. The capital of northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Autonomous Region, Erbil operates as a de-facto independent state, with its own legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Its soldiers wear their uniforms with pride, sporting a tricolor symbol of their country sewn on to them. Meanwhile, Erbil has total control of its external and internal regional borders, just as any sovereign state would.

As a result, Erbil is separate from Iraq, and from that country’s contentious and often deadly politics in Baghdad. “Separation is a necessary step, as our representatives have only 90 seats in Iraq’s parliament (out of 700 plus). Thus we have absolutely no voice in what is going on,” said Abdullah, who owns a travel agency in downtown Erbil. “They often say we will give you money for this and this, but we want you to do this and that,” he added. “We, the Kurds, find this unacceptable, as so many people have died so things will not be the same as before anymore.”

The sentiment Abdullah expresses prevails among Kurds who are now, for the first time in history, living in a state they can call their own. As the newest petro-state, Kurdistan has enjoyed an unprecedented level of political and economic stability since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. And for the first time ever, the Iraqi Kurds’ economic fortunes are on an upward trend, especially in comparison with their co-patriots in neighboring countries, as a sea of oil revenue has lifted most economic boats.

Yet not all is well in Kurdistan, due in part to the dominant presence of one ruling family. Descended from a political dynasty that has built a power base over centuries of fighting, regional president Massoud Barzani has blossomed into an authoritarian ruler not unlike many whose regimes are now crumbling from the internal pressures of the Arab Spring.

Organized Corruption

Throughout Erbil, portraits of Barzani adorn the walls of offices and shops. That is not to say that Barzani’s cult of personality is as force-fed as Saddam Hussein’s often was in Iraq. The Barzani clan has tremendous popularity in the area of its political base in northern Iraq, and people feel a genuine reverence for Massoud, whose father led uprisings against Hussein in the 1960s and ‘70s.

However, the cracks in the family’s image are accentuated by political dissent, and the official story of the ruling Kurdish Democratic Party’s (KDP) road to power has often been challenged. “The people were the ones who first fought in the city and defeated Hussein’s troops in 1991’s revolution,” said Adar, who runs a small hotel downtown. “The Peshmerga [militia] came down two days later from the mountains after it was all over and claimed the power. This is the truth that many people in Erbil are afraid to speak of,” he said.

The fear to speak out is real, as KDP has both limited tolerance for criticism and a long memory. In December 2005, Kamal Qadir, an Austrian scholar, was arrested and sentenced to 30 years in prison for a series of articles criticizing the Barzanis’ hold on the economy and power. He was released a year later after prolonged action to free him by Amnesty International and the Austrian government.

However, Kurdish journalists Soran Mama Hama and Sardasht Osman were not so lucky; they were gunned down for writing about corruption by the political class and local governments. Demands for thorough and transparent investigations were met by Kurdish authorities maneuvering to blame others for the deaths; to this day both cases remain unsolved. Even a brief expression of criticism toward the Barzanis, such as one anonymous caller’s comments on a television call-in program, resulted in a bombing of the studio the very next day. As usual, the perpetrators were never found.

One of the most sensitive subjects is the Barzanis’ involvement in the economy of the newly rich oil state. While Massoud Barzani’s personal wealth is estimated to be in the range of $2 billion, the exact amount of the family’s involvement is unknown due to Kurdistan’s murky legal environment and a web of offshore cross-ownership entities. While the Barzanis often repudiate any reporting that follows the trail of money, such as a 2010 exposure by the newspaper Rozhnama that accused them of benefiting from illegal oil smuggling, the personal behavior of some family members leads to more questions than answers.

For example, in 2012, Mansur Barzani, the son of Massoud, lost over $3.2 million in a Dubai casino during the elder Barzani’s official state visit. Meanwhile the other son, Masrour, purchased a $10-million home in the U.S. state of Virginia. Officially, they were both living on modest government salaries—with Masrour heading the security and intelligence services, which are not shy to use deadly force to squash protests they find intolerable, as was demonstrated in 2011 in Erbil, Halabja, and Sulaymaniyah.

The family’s influence permeates the ruling class through a steady supply of official perks and status symbols. The symbol of the KDP elite has become a fleet of white sport utility vehicles that ply the pot-holed streets of Erbil at high speeds, unconcerned about pedestrians or other vehicles. Official and unofficial oil revenues streaming into governmental and party coffers compound a growing resentment over widespread corruption and mismanagement.

Signs of extreme poverty compete with these images of imported luxury goods. The contrast is easily visible at the grand bazaar in front of Erbil’s famous citadel. Women carrying small children sell chewing gum to passersby in order to retain what remains of their dignity. “Life is very hard here,” said a woman holding a toddler. She declined to give her name as she approached me. “You wouldn’t know it because you are not from here. But believe me, every day of my life is bitter.”

The KDP and its historical rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), have created interlocking mechanisms of power distribution and execution that put both of them in the driver’s seat at the same time. The balance is often altered slightly in favor of one or the other party, depending on the individual at the helm. In the Barzani clan’s case, the money trail reinforces ancient tribal allegiances and connections, making a de-facto “democratic” Barzani dynasty possible.

The dysfunction of organized corruption is most visible in economic sphere. “The Barzanis and [current Iraqi President Jalal] Talabani’s PUK own most of the lucrative businesses in Kurdistan. Mobile phones, big shopping malls, non-transparent oil deals. No one exactly knows where the oil income goes,” said Ari, editor of Austria-based publication Ekurd.net. The degree of rapaciousness at the expense of the public interest is often taken to grotesque proportions. In one example, a party-dominated cell phone company made huge profits by charging enormous sums for SIM cards, even when cell phone reception didn’t work.

A State of Schizophrenia

Large amounts of petro-dollars coming into the economy are increasingly resulting not only in a growing divide between rich and poor, but also a national state of schizophrenia with curious contradictions. “Having a look at the hospitals and their services, which are very poor, one cannot help but say ‘where does the oil income go?’” said Ari. “Despite exporting over 150,000 barrels per day, Kurdistan is still importing over 80 percent of the fuel it needs from Iraq, Iran, and Turkey,” he concluded.

The Barzanis tout break-neck land development and new construction as a monument to Kurdish independence, with new malls, shops, public buildings, and homes popping up everywhere. The mass construction along the 100-meter ring road in Erbil is creating a Nevada-like environment of gated hamlets for educated elites and expatriate foreigners. It is widely understood that any major building project has to have some type of business connection with the Barzanis, who are pivotal to the permitting process. Their involvement decides whether the construction will be a commercial success or an utter failure.

The rapid construction of this new Kurdistan results in architectural curiosities. The micro-climate of the West is often replicated in mass real estate offerings that have nothing to do with social and economic realities on the ground. Colonies like Royal City, English Village, American Village, and others, along with the wholesale import of fast food restaurants, have absolutely nothing to do with local culture or people. This disconnect also extends to parts of government. For example, the foreign affairs office is conveniently located next to a foreign settlement called Italian City, thus making the trip downtown to witness the uncomfortable truth unnecessary.

According to the 2012 report on Erbil from Associates for International Research, Inc., “The distance from the center to the outermost ring (100m Street) is approximately 2.5 miles. However, there is little need for expatriates to venture into the center of town, since most expatriate shopping outlets and housing compounds are located along or near 100m Street, or the outer ring. The Ainkawa neighborhood, or Christian quarter, is located in the north of the city.”

As one Western NGO worker who preferred to remain anonymous commented, “This is the effect of globalization, parachuted by nuts and bolts into Iraq, and is as magical as Walt Disney’s or Universal Studios’ version of life in that part of the world. All that is missing is Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves, but even this can arranged.”

Many Kurds sigh in resignation that this is a symbol of the Barzanis’ rule and expect it to continue without interruption. This is one possibility, but others are harder to predict.

A member of parliament in Iraq’s ruling party recently accused the Kurds of seeking to partition Iraq along ethnic lines and warned that the government in Baghdad would not tolerate it. Many Kurds are increasingly seeing themselves as caught between a rock (their government) and a hard place (Baghdad). “Prime Minister Maliki is a little Saddam. He will not stop in getting all of Iraq’s lands together as before. He will also come here, but he knows that Kurds will fight hard. We have no other choice,” said Adar, who works at the grand bazaar in the center of Erbil.

It would be a stretch to think that Western governments remain unaware of Kurdistan’s power dynamics. Many of them have consulates in Erbil where developments are constantly being monitored and reported on. Yet the race to profit from oil and tap a growing consumer market pushes other considerations—such as human rights and the application of democratic principles—into not even the backseat, but as far back as the trunk of a speeding car with Kurdish license plates. The ultimate tolls on this highway to prosperity will be paid not by the driver but by its passengers, the Kurds, with growing evidence that the final destination is different from what had been advertised.

The People of Brazil Are Fed Up With a Corrupt and Crooked Economy

Conor Creighton, The Guardian — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:26:00 -0700

A bus fare increase in Brazil was the straw that broke the camel's back.

For pedestrians São Paulo became a rare kind of paradise on Monday night. The protest being called the "free pass movement" meant for once in this car mad capital, the walkers had right of way.

There were close to 80,000 of us on the streets of the city. I was there to report but also to protest. I'm about to marry a Brazilian. This place in my future.

The protest met at Largo da Batata and then, marching in four different directions, they slowed the traffic down until there were 250km of tailbacks and the city was tangled up in traffic chaos that lasted till midnight.

Four nights before they'd tried to do the same thing but the police attacked with teargas and rubber bullets. One minute the crowd were chanting "no violence", the next they were firing right at us. We got herded between a fence and a sheer drop on to a motorway. People were crying, from teargas and from terror. Other protesters reached over the fence and pulled us free. It was the kind of citizen heroics you see in a blockbuster, but hope you'll never have to witness in real life.

That was the background. A series of much smaller protests over a 20 centavo increase in the bus fare had been met by ferocious police violence. They deliberately went for the journalists. Firing into the press pack and shooting at photographers on balconies. They ran through the crowds, they raided bars and cafes. They made hundreds of arrests. They sent in the cavalry. Passersby caught up in the madness were shot at. More than a hundred people were injured.

The governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, was in Paris the whole time. From there he called the protesters vandals and troublemakers.

So last night, with people enraged by what they'd seen in the media reports, there were protests in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Porto Alegre, Belém, Salvador and Maceió. A quarter of a million Brazilians took to the streets. In Brasilia they climbed on to the roof of parliament. In Rio they set fire to the assembly. But with just a few exceptions every one of the protests passed peacefully.

Some people are calling this a civil war between the people and the politicians. The 20 centavos was the straw that broke the camel's back. A back that's been trembling for some time.

In spite of the economic surge in Brazil the country is still unfair, and horribly corrupt. Politicians earn 28 times the minimum wage. Their expenses, which are reimbursed, can run as high as their salaries. And to put it in context, the minimum wage isn't only for low-skilled Brazilians: teachers too don't earn much more than that either.

The health service, the education system and the police service are all in need of a big fix.

The centre left government, Partido dos Trabalhadores, was voted in on a wave of warmth, idealism and promises to do just that in 2002. But the accusations waved on placards and flags last night showed clearly that for many people the warmth has gone.

"Keep your World Cup – we want education and health", "It's not about 20 centavos – it's about dignity", "The people have woken up".

The stereotype of protest in Brazil is the children of the rich out in the street waving placards as a rite of passage. It's all too easy to sneer at. But what's happening now is very different. There are families in the marches. There are older people too. There are middle-class kids and there are kids from poor communities. They're all singing the same song, "Come to the streets". It works. They come.

President Dilma was booed during her opening speech at the Confederations Cup. Protesters camped outside the home of Governor Alckmin. "Don't worry," they chanted, "we'll still be here when you get back from Paris."

Revealed: The 48 People Stuck in Guantanamo Forever

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:06:00 -0700

The release of the list is the first time the Obama administration has publicly named the prisoners deemed "indefinite" detainees.

For over three years, the names of Guantanamo detainees slated to be held indefinitely has been a secret. But the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, along with Yale Law students, have compelled the government to release the information for the first time.

The Herald and the students had filed a lawsuit in March asking for the list of Guantanamo detainees deemed to be too dangerous for release but who cannot be tried in court because of evidence obtained by torture, inadmissible evidence or secret intelligence. Rosenberg detailed the list in a story published yesterday.

The release of the list (see below for all the names) is the first time the administration has publicly named these 48 detainees, though two of the Afghan detainees died in Guantanamo. The men designated for being held indefinitely include people from Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and more. They were deemed to be held indefinitely as a result of a task force process that classified detainees under separate categories, including the category of being held forever.

Human rights experts say the practice of holding men indefinitely is a violation of international law. “All of the detainees should either be charged and fairly tried in federal court, or released,” Amnesty International’s Zeke Johnson told Rosenberg.

The list of indefinite detainees was released in the midst of renewed attention on the camp due to a mass hunger strike. Some of the men classified as indefinite detainees are hunger striking currently.

The names of the indefinite prisoners were also released on the heels of President Obama’s renewed vows to close the prison once and for all. But even if Obama closes the prison, his administration has indicated it plans to hold some prisoners indefinitely, even if they’re held in the U.S. As Rosenberg writes, the category of indefinite detainees arose for a number of reasons. These include the fact that evidence against some of these detainees was obtained through torture, and cannot be used in court; “insufficient evidence” to prove a crime; or military intelligence claiming that detainees had undergone training that prepared them to attack the U.S. when released.

Rosenberg also reports that the U.S. government is now saying it wants to prosecute a number of the detainees classified as indefinite prisoners. But Human Rights Watch’s Andrea Prasow noted that “many of the detainees designated for prosecution can only be prosecuted in civilian court, so unless Congress lifts the restrictions banning their transfer they are effectively ‘indefinite detainees.’”

Additionally, the administration is reportedly considering transferring 5 of the detainees on the list to Qatar in exchange for an American prisoner of war being held by the Taliban.

The Miami Herald has published the names and nationalities of Guantanamo's indefinite detainees. The numbers are each prisoners' "internment serial number."

ISN 004, Abdul Haq Wasiq (Afghanistan)

ISN 006, Mullah Norullah Noori (Afghanistan)

ISN 007, Mullah Mohammed Fazl (Afghanistan)

ISN 027, Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 028, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 029, Mohammed al-Ansi (Yemen)

ISN 031, Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid (Yemen)

ISN037, Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab al Rahabi (Yemen)

ISN041, Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN042, Abd al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah (Saudi Arabia)

ISN044, Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim (Yemen)

ISN045, Ali Ahmad al-Rahizi (Yemen)

ISN128, Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani (Yemen)

ISN131, Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (Yemen)

ISN195, Mohammed Abd al Rahman al Shumrant (Saudi Arabia)

ISN232, Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad al Odah (Kuwait)

ISN235, Saeed Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah Sarem Jarabh (Yemen)

ISN242, Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN244, Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN324, Mashur Abdullah Muqbil Ahmed al-Sabri (Yemen)

ISN434, Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd al-Aziz al-Shamiri (Yemen)

ISN441, Abdul Rahman Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN508, Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (Yemen)

ISN522, Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (Yemen)

ISN552, Faez Mohammed Ahmed al-Kandari (Kuwait)

ISN560, Haji WaH Muhammed (Afghanistan)

ISN576, Zahar Omar Hamis bin Hamdoun (Yemen)

ISN579, Khairullah Said Wali Khairkhwa (Afghanistan)

ISN695, Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar (Libya)

ISN708, Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN713, Mohammed al Zahrani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN782, Awal Gul (Afghanistan) * deceased

ISN832, Mohammad Nabi Omari (Afghanistan)

ISN836, Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (Yemen)

ISN837, Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (Yemen)

ISN838, Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (Yemen)

ISN839, Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani (Yemen)

ISN840, Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (Yemen)

ISN841, Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN975, Karim Bostan (Afghanistan)

ISN1017, Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN1045, Mohammed Kamin (Afghanistan)

ISN1119, Ahmid al Razak (Afghanistan)

ISN1463, Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN10023, Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN10025, Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

ISN10028, Inayatullah (Afghanistan)* deceassed

ISN10029, Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

Israel Stirs the Pot in Syria

Jonathan Cook, CounterPunch — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:21:00 -0700

In recent weeks Israel has moved from relative inaction to a deepening involvement in Syrian affairs.

Nazareth.

For much of the past two years Israel stood sphinx-like on the sidelines of Syria’s civil war. Did it want Bashar al-Assad’s regime toppled? Did it favour military intervention to help opposition forces? And what did it think of the increasing visibility of Islamist groups in Syria? It was difficult to guess.

In recent weeks, however, Israel has moved from relative inaction to a deepening involvement in Syrian affairs. It launched two air strikes on Syrian positions last month, and at the same time fomented claims that Damascus had used chemical weapons, in what looked suspiciously like an attempt to corner Washington into direct intervention.

Last week, based on renewed accusations of the use of the nerve agent sarin by Syria, the US said it would start giving military aid directly to the opposition.

With suspicions of Israeli meddling growing, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was finally forced last week to deny as ”nonsense” evidence that Israeli forces are operating secretly over the border.

Nonetheless, the aura of inscrutability has hardly lifted, stoked by a series of leaks from Israeli officials. Their statements have tacked wildly between threats to oust Assad one moment and denials that Israel has any interest in his departure the next.

Is Israel sending out contradictory signals to sow confusion, or is it simply confused itself?

The answer can be deduced in the unappealing outcomes before Israel whoever emerges triumphant. Israel stands to lose strategically if either Assad or the opposition wins decisively.

Assad, and before him his father, Hafez, ensured that for decades the so-called separation of forces line between Syria and Israel, after the latter occupied the Golan Heights in 1967, remained the quietest of all Israel’s borders.

A taste of what might happen should the Syrian regime fall was provided in 2011 when more than 1,000 Palestinians massed in the no man’s land next to the Golan, while Assad’s attention was directed to repressing popular demonstrations elsewhere. At least 100 Palestinians crossed into the Heights, with one even reaching Tel Aviv.

Last week, following intensified fighting between the rebels and the Syrian army over Quneitra, a town next to the only crossing between Israel and Syria, UN peacekeepers from Austria started pulling out because of the dangers.

Briefly the opposition forces captured Quneitra, offering a reminder that any void there would likely suck in Palestinian militants and jihadists keen to settle scores with Israel. That point was underlined by one Israeli official, who told the Times of London: “Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos, and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there.”

For that reason, the Israeli military is reported to considering two responses familiar from Lebanon: invading to establish a security zone on the other side of the demarcation line, or covertly training and arming Syrian proxies inside the same area.

Neither approach turned out well for Israel in Lebanon, but there are indications – despite Netanyahu’s denial – that Israel is already pursuing the second track.

According to the New York Times, Israel is working with Syrian villagers not allied to Assad or the opposition and offering “humanitarian aid” and “maintaining intense intelligence activity”. In an interview with the Argentinian media last month, Assad accused Israel of having gone further, “directly supporting” opposition groups inside Syria with “logistical support”, intelligence on potential targets and plans for attacking them.

If the future looks bleak for Israel with Assad gone, it looks no brighter if he entrenches his rule.

A strong Assad means Syria will continue to play a pivotal role in maintaining a military front opposed to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. That in turn means a strong Iran and a strong Hizbullah, the Shia militia in Lebanon.

Hizbullah’s formidable record in guerrilla warfare is the main reason Israel no longer occupies south Lebanon. Similarly, Hizbullah’s arsenal of rockets is a genuine restraint on greater Israeli aggression towards not only Lebanon but Syria and Iran too.

Israel’s air strikes in early May appear to have targeted shipments through Syria of more sophisticated weaponry for Hizbullah, probably supplied by Iran. Longer range missiles and anti-aircraft systems are seen as “game-changing” by Israel precisely because they would further limit its room for offensive manoeuvres.

Israel will be equally stymied if Assad stays in power and upgrades his anti-aircraft defences with the S-300 system promised by Russia.

Either way, Israel’s much vaunted ambition to engineer an attack on Iran to prevent what it claims is Tehran’s goal of developing a nuclear bomb – joining Israel in the club of Middle Eastern nuclear-armed states – would probably come at too high a price to be feasible.

So what does Israel consider in its interests if neither Assad’s survival nor his removal is appealing?

According to some well-placed Israeli commentators, the best Israel can hope for is that Assad holds on but only just. That would keep the regime in place, or boxed into its heartland, but sapped of the energy to concern itself with anything other than immediate matters of survival. It would be unable to offer help to Hizbullah, isolating the militia in Lebanon and cutting off its supply line to Iran.

In closed-door discussions, analyst Ben Caspit has noted, the Israeli army has put forward as its “optimal scenario” Syria breaking up into three separate states, with Assad confined to an Alawite canton in Damascus and along the coast.

A long war of attrition between Assad and the opposition has additional benefits for Israel following the decision by Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to draft thousands of fighters to assist the Syrian army. Protacted losses could deplete Hizbullah’s ranks and morale, while fighting is likely to spill over from Syria into Lebanon, tying up the militia on multiple fronts.

But there is a risk here too. If Hizbullah performs well, as it did in defeating the rebels this month at the town of Qusayr, its position in Lebanon could be strengthened rather than weakened. And in that situation Assad’s debt to Hizbullah would only deepen.

Such calculations are doubtless exercising Israeli military minds.

The greatest danger of all is that yet more parties get drawn in, turning the conflict into a regional one. That would be the likely outcome if Israel chooses to increase its interference, or if the US comes good with its recent threats to increase military aid to the opposition or impose a no-fly zone over parts or all of Syria.

Either way, Israel might see the transformation of Syria in to a new mini-cold war theatre as advantageous.

However, the Israeli sphinx isn’t offering any answers quite yet.

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

Turkish Unions Hold National Strike as Protesters Face Worst Crackdown to Date

Amy Goodman, Cigdem Özturk , Democracy Now! — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:19:00 -0700

On Sunday, around 400 people were arrested as police used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and other cities.

The following originally appeared on Democracy Now!:

More than 800,000 people are believed to be taking part in a national strike by Turkish unions in protest of the government’s crackdown on nearly three weeks of protests. The strike follows a weekend that saw the protests’ worst violence to date. On Sunday, around 400 people were arrested as police used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and other cities. Medics treating wounded demonstrators were among those detained. We’re joined from Turkey by Çigdem Öztürk, an independent journalist covering the protests for Express magazine.

Transcript:

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN:In these last few minutes, we turn to Turkey, where a nationwide strike called by several of the country’s leading unions is underway now with calls to end the police crackdown on demonstrations. The Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions and the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions are among those filling the streets. Other groups representing doctors, engineers, dentists have also joined the action.

Today’s strike comes as riot police continued their violent crackdown on protesters, using tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds. The anti-government protests have swept the country for more than two weeks and were renewed this weekend following the forced eviction of protesters at Gezi Park, which was occupied for 18 days by people protesting against plans for its redevelopment. The prime minister has defended the crackdown, saying he did his duty as prime minister.

For more, we go to independent journalist, also speaking to us from Istanbul and from Expressmagazine, Çiğdem Öztürk.

Can you describe what’s happening now?

ÇIĞDEM ÖZTÜRK: Well, hello. Can you hear me?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, we hear you fine.

ÇIĞDEM ÖZTÜRK: OK, so, hello to everybody.

Actually, what’s happening at the moment in Instanbul is we are waiting a little bit tensely about the 4:00 rally, which is for the general strike declared by the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey and Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions. So, at 4:00 normally, the people will march in Taksim Square, but the Instanbul governorship declared that this is not a legal act, and they will not let the people walk. So, there is just a few minutes, and the people are gathering, not just in Istanbul; as this is a general strike, it’s all over Turkey and in other parts of Turkey, as well. The people, the civil servants and the workers are on strike, and they are walking. So we’ll see what’s going to happen.

Maybe I could tell you a little bit about what happened last night. Last night, Instanbul had to face one of the most brutal police attacks—and not just the police, actually, also the AKP, the ruling party, supporters were some—in some groups, were on the streets with sticks and knives, trying to attack the demonstrators. And yesterday, again, according to the bar association, here at least 400 people were detained. But the problem is there is no real numbers. So, they only get news by phones and by interviewing people, so we don’t know the exact numbers, and we don’t know the names of the people who were detained. Well, that’s the situation, in short.

AMY GOODMAN: Çiğdem Öztürk, we just have about 30 seconds, independent journalist, also speaking to us from Instanbul and from Express magazine. The significance of where these protests go from here?

ÇIĞDEM ÖZTÜRK: Well, actually, what’s going to happen, the main problem is the governor and the political parties are not so in the protests. Opining by the political parties is only the Justice and Development Party in the protest. The least is the people, I would say. I mean, they did [inaudible] on the prime minister naming the protesters as some workers and some, you know, terrorists. But, anyway, these are people. Just a part of it is from organizations. So this is a moment for the people.

AMY GOODMAN: Çiğdem Öztürk, we’re going to have to leave it there. I thank you very much for being with us. We’ll continue to cover Turkey.

Published with permission from Democracy Now!.

A Troubling Appointment: National Security Adviser Susan Rice Supports Autocrats and Disdains International Law

Stephen Zunes, Truthout — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:09:00 -0700

Susan Rice's willingness to spew falsehoods to defend actions that violate international norms is very troubling.

The selection of Susan Rice as President Obama's new national security adviser is highly problematic for those of us who believe that United States foreign policy should be more attuned to international law and human rights and that alleged threats to US national security should be based on empirical evidence rather than unsubstantiated allegations by warmongers.

Rice's willingness to state demonstrable falsehoods to defend actions by the United States and its allies that violate international norms is very troubling. It is all too telling that the mainstream media was so willing to focus on spurious criticisms from the right regarding her initial responses to the killings in Benghazi while ignoring legitimate criticisms from the left.

One example of Rice's disconnect from reality came up in the lead-up to the war in Iraq ten years ago, as independent arms control analysts, scholars, investigative journalists and antiwar activists were challenging the Bush administration's lies about the supposed "Iraqi threat." In an apparent effort to discredit these efforts by those who opposed the rush to war, Rice rushed to the administration's defense by insisting that, "It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat." This claim came despite the fact that Iraq had disarmed itself of its chemical and biological weapons and eliminated its nuclear program at least eight years earlier. Moreover, despite the success of the UN's disarmament program, Rice asserted that Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on."

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell testified before the United Nations that Iraq had reconstituted its biological and chemical weapons arsenal, as well as its nuclear weapons program - and had somehow hidden all this from the hundreds of UN inspectors then in Iraq who were engaged in unfettered inspections. None of this was true, and Powell's transparently false claims were immediately challenged by UN officials, arms control specialists, and much of the press and political leadership in Europe and elsewhere. (See my article written in response to his testimony: "Mr. Powell, You're No Adlai Stevenson.")

Rice, however, was adamant that Powell had "proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don't think many informed people doubted that." In light of such widespread and public skepticism from knowledgeable sources, Rice's dismissal of all the well-founded criticism was positively Orwellian: those who blindly accepted Powell's transparently false claims were "well informed," while the UN officials, arms control specialists and others knowledgeable of the reality of the situation were presumably otherwise.

Her openness to another US war in the Middle East became apparent when she announced in September that "there is no daylight" between the United States and the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu - which has been pushing for a unilateral attack on Iran - regarding Iran's nuclear program.

Rice has also not been averse to supporting autocratic regimes in Africa, recently suppressing a UN report criticizing the government of Rwanda, a US ally, for supporting the M-23 rebels in eastern Congo. The rebels, led by a notorious warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court, have wreaked havoc in the troubled province of North Kivu. Rice dismissed the report, saying, "It's eastern Congo. If it were not the M23 killing people, it would be some other armed groups."

Similarly, this past September Rice delivered a eulogy for the late Meles Zenawi, the authoritarian ruler of Ethiopia, whom she referred to as "a true friend to me," calling him "brilliant" and "uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and the long game."

Rice has also objected to UN initiatives challenging racism, successfully pushing the Obama administration to boycott a five-day conference in Geneva in 2009 that assessed international progress in fighting racism and xenophobia since the UN's first conference in Durban, South Africa eight years earlier. The final document of the 2001 conference explicitly recognized "the right to security for all States in the [Middle East], including Israel, and call[ed] upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion." It called as well for "a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region in which all peoples shall co-exist and enjoy equality, justice and internationally recognized human rights, and security." However, because it also expressed concern regarding "the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation" and recognized their "right to self-determination," Rice determined that it was somehow "anti-Israel" since it "prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians."

Defending Israeli Colonization and Repression

Indeed, Rice has developed a reputation at the United Nations as one of the world body's most outspoken supporters of Israel's rightist government and its settlements policy. Former Congressman Robert Wexler, who now heads a right-leaning pro-Israel advocacy group in Washington, wrote in an op-ed for Politico that "Israel has no greater champion in the current administration than Susan Rice." Failing to distinguish between anti-Israel ideologues and legitimate criticism of the right-wing government's violations of international law, Rice has dismissed criticism at the UN of Israeli policies as nothing more than "anti-Israel crap." She cast one of only nine negative votes in the 193-member UN General Assembly to upgrade Palestine's status to a non-member state. In Rice's view, while Israeli statehood and membership in the United Nations is a given, Palestinian statehood and UN recognition should only be on terms agreed to by Israel's hardline government.

Indeed, Rice has made clear her contempt for international law in a series of statements regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of the outstanding issues between Israel and Palestine - such as settlements and the status of East Jerusalem - are issues of international law, many of which have been previously addressed by the UN Security Council and other United Nations bodies. For example, Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem has continued despite these settlements constituting a clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, a landmark advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, and four previous UN Security Council resolutions that passed without objection from previous administrations.

However, in justifying her veto of an otherwise unanimous resolution in 2011 reiterating the illegality of Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank, Rice insisted that it was "unwise for this Council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians."

Ironically, the resolution about which she spoke did not "attempt to resolve" the conflict. Indeed, it explicitly called for the resumption of negotiations. What Rice objected to was the resolution's insistence that such negotiations be based on international law, which is actually a very appropriate role for the UN Security Council, but one which Rice somehow found to be intolerable.

During conflict this past November between forces of Hamas and Israel, during which three Israeli civilians and over 100 Palestinian civilians died, Rice correctly noted that there was "no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel." However, she offered absolutely no criticism for Israel's far more devastating bombardment of the heavily populated Gaza Strip, simply saying that "Israel, like any nation, has the right to defend itself against such vicious attacks." She blocked an otherwise unanimous UN Security Council statement that called for a ceasefire, condemned all acts of terrorism and violence directed toward civilians, and reiterated support for all states to live in peace and security within their internationally recognized boundaries.

When a UN investigation of the 2008-2009 Gaza War raised concerns about possible war crimes by both Israel and Hamas, Rice denounced it because of its criticism of the actions by the US-armed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). "Our view is that we need to be focused on the future," she argued. The report's findings included the recommendation that both Hamas and the Israeli government bring to justice those responsible for war crimes during the three weeks of fighting and, if they failed to do so, the report urged that the case be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible prosecution. Rice labeled this call to hold those accountable for war crimes as "basically unacceptable." Though Rice had argued just a few months earlier during a UN debate on Darfur that war crimes charges should never be sacrificed for political reasons, she argued that following the report's recommendations on Israel-Palestine could somehow interfere with the "peace process," which has been stagnant for years.

Rice's lack of concern for international humanitarian law has been particularly evident in her attacks against the UN's special rapporteur for human rights, Richard Falk - an American Jew and a highly respected international legal scholar and professor emeritus from Princeton. When Falk recommended that companies profiting from Israel's illegal settlements "be boycotted until they bring their operations into line with international human rights and humanitarian law and standards," Rice denounced his recommendations as "irresponsible and unacceptable." Falk's proposals, she argued, would "do nothing to further a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and indeed poison the environment for peace," adding, that Falk's "continued service in the role of a UN special rapporteur is deeply regrettable." And, despite his outspoken criticisms of Palestinian terrorism and his insistence that his mandate should include violations of human rights by Palestinian governments (which led the Palestinian Authority to call for his resignation), Rice has labeled Falk "highly biased" against Israel.

It is unfortunate that someone with such contempt for international law as Susan Rice will now serve as the president's top foreign policy adviser. With the primary pressure in Washington coming from those even further to the right, it becomes all the more important that Americans who support international law and human rights redouble our efforts in challenging the Obama administration to adapt a more responsible foreign policy.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

Washington's Muddled Syria Policy: Arms Shipments to Rebels Won't Turn Military Tide

Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:55:00 -0700

It's still unclear what the Obama administration's grand strategy towards Syria is.

Despite Thursday’s announcement that President Barack Obama has decided to provide direct military assistance to Syrian rebels, what precisely the administration has in mind remains unclear.

Analysts here are also questioning whether the decision is part of a deliberate strategy – and, if so, what that strategy is – or whether it is instead another in a series of efforts to relieve growing pressure from its allies in Europe and the Gulf and hawks at home to take stronger military measures designed to shift the 27-month-old civil war decisively in favour of the opposition.

“When Julius Caesar actually crossed the [Rubicon], he proceeded rapidly to mission accomplishment in accordance with a sound strategy,” noted retired Ambassador Frederic Hof, a Syria specialist at the Atlantic Council who has long called for stronger U.S. military intervention.

“Although the administration’s crossing [decision] is significant, welcome, and long overdue, it is far from certain whether this particular legion will move smartly toward an objective or simply mill around the river bank.”

The White House tied the decision to escalate the “scope and scale” of military aid to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian Military Council (SMC) to the U.S. intelligence community’s determination that the Syrian forces had used chemical weapons – albeit “on a small scale” – against rebel forces in multiple battles over the past year.

It also cited the deepening involvement of Iran and Hezbollah militants from Lebanon in support of the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, whose departure from office Obama has repeatedly demanded since hostilities first broke out more than two years ago.

The announcement, however, followed a series of intensive internal meetings over the past two weeks, as it became clear that the regime’s forces had made a series of battlefield advances – most importantly by capturing, with Hezbollah’s help, the strategic western town of Al-Qusayr close to the Lebanese border – that threatened to tip the war decisively in Assad’s favour.

With pro-government forces and Hezbollah fighters reportedly preparing a major assaults on the key city of Aleppo and other “moderate” opposition leaders appealing desperately for weapons, the administration has found itself under pressure from both its allies abroad and hawks here to “do something” that could halt, if not reverse, the regime’s momentum and restore the “strategic stalemate” that Washington considers essential to any prospect for a political settlement.

But what precisely that “something” is or will be remains unclear. In a briefing for reporters Thursday evening, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes repeatedly avoided answering the question, insisting, however, that Washington will increase “the scope and scale” of direct aid to the SMC which so far has received mainly humanitarian and “non-lethal” assistance.

According to various published reports, Obama has indeed decided to provide small arms and ammunition but still pending are decisions on rebel requests for anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Washington had previously ruled out the latter, in part due to Israel’s concerns that they could be used against its aircraft, particularly if they fall into the hands of radical Islamist factions among the anti-Assad forces.

But hawks here have argued that small arms and even anti-tank weapons are at this point insufficient to redress the rapidly tilting balance of power on the ground.

“The president must rally an international coalition to take military actions to degrade Assad’s ability to use airpower and ballistic missiles and to move and resupply his forces around the battlefield by air,” declared Congress’s most visible interventionists, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham late Thursday. “We must take more decisive actions now to turn the tide of the conflict in Syria.”

They and others have called for Washington to create “no-fly zones” along Syria’s Turkish and Jordanian borders that would both safe havens for refugees and rebels and permit the latter to be trained, armed and supplied for operations against government forces inside Syria.

Hof has urged that such a zone also be used protect a rebel government that could gain formal recognition from the United States and other allies, request heavier weapons and eventually go to peace talks as diplomatic, as well as military, equals of the Assad government.

While Rhodes told reporters that Obama has “not made any decision to pursue a military operations such as a no-fly zone”, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that a Pentagon proposal still under consideration calls for a limited “no-fighting” zone extending up to 40 kilometres inside Syria that would be enforced by U.S. and allied aircraft operating from Jordanian airspace.

In recent months, Washington has set up Patriot air-defence batteries and sent fighter jets to bases inside Jordan, where it has also been secretly training rebel and Jordanian forces on securing chemical-weapons facilities and weapons in the event the Assad regime collapses, according to some reports.

Some analysts who have opposed escalating U.S. involvement in the civil war agree that directly supplying arms to the rebels would be unlikely to turn the military tide, certainly in the short term, and could carry additional risks.

“Selective arms shipments could [spur] clashes between rival rebel groups. Extremist elements might attack more moderate rebel units receiving better arms, driven by need, resentment or both,” according to Wayne White, the former deputy director of the State Department intelligence unit on the Near East, who noted that this could actually strengthen the regime. Indeed, he added, the “rebel military vanguard” for some time has been the “radical Islamist in character – even Al-Qaeda affiliated”.

He also expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone, noting that it would risk swift escalation. “The rebels would remain at the mercy of the regime’s other heavy weapons on the ground, thus tempting those establishing any sort of no-fly zone to attack regime ground targets as well.”

“The first step on the slippery slope is always easy, but it’s much harder to actually resolve a conflict or to find a way out of a quagmire,” wrote Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, on the eve of the White House announcement.

For Lynch, who has long urged Obama to resist calls to escalate Washington’s intervention, the key issue is what U.S. policy ultimately aims to achieve and whether providing military aid or taking more aggressive measures will help achieve them.

“Should Syria be viewed as a front in a broad regional cold war against Iran and its allies or as a humanitarian catastrophe that must be resolved?” he asked, noting that very different strategies should be followed depending on the answer to that question.

At the moment, according to Lynch, “advocates of arming the rebels switch between making the case that it would strike a blow against the Iranians (and Hezbollah) and that it would improve the prospects for a negotiated solution.”

While the White House clearly framed its decision this week in the latter terms, it may nonetheless add momentum to those who tend to view the Syrian conflict more as part of the larger conflict against Tehran the model for which, according to Lynch, “would presumably be the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – a long-term insurgency coordinated through neighbouring countries, fuelled by Gulf money, and popularised by Islamist and sectarian propaganda”.

Shattered Peace Talks and Grinding Conflict: How U.S. Support Bolsters the Philippines' War on Dissidents

Bill Fletcher, Jr., AlterNet — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:34:00 -0700

The government of the Philippines has continued to harass the opposition and extrajudicially kill dissenters.

“Another one was killed. Another one had disappeared.” Human rights violations…keep on happening without let up. In the nine (9) years of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s reign, more than a thousand are victims of extrajudicial killing and 206 forcibly disappeared. 1,099 tortured, 2,059 were illegally arrested. On the other hand, in a span of two (2) years of President Noynoy Aquino’s presidency, Karapatan [1] documented 137 victims of extrajudicial killing, 14 of enforced disappearance, 72 of torture, 269 of illegal arrest. [Statement of the End of Impunity Alliance, April 25, 2013, delivered by Father REX RB. Reyes, General Secretary, National Council of Churches in the Philippines]

******

At the end of April 2013, barely covered in the US media, the government of the Philippines unilaterally ended peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the coalition led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, which has led an insurgency for over forty years. In violation of the protocols established for these talks, and after repeated harassment of the NDFP—including the imprisonment of several NDFP negotiators—the government of the Philippines apparently felt comfortable that it could act with impunity.

The on-going conflict in the Philippines rarely garners much interest and attention in the USA except and insofar as the issue of “terrorism” is raised. The manner in which alleged terrorism is used to describe the conflicts in the Philippines tells one a great deal about the motives of the Philippine government and their US government supporters.

The insurgency led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, its military wing (the New People’s Army) and the NDFP can be understood as the continuation of an on-going conflict that commenced when the US illegally annexed the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War (1898). An indigenous Philippines revolutionary movement, on the verge of defeating the Spanish, was smashed by US invaders who initially presented themselves as friends of the Filipino people. In a war that cost at least 1.5 million Filipino lives, the US subjugated the population and controlled it outright until 1946, at which point the country received nominal independence. This was followed by another guerrilla insurgency against the neo-colonial regime in Manila, initiated by the Communist-led Hukbalahap movement [2].With the active involvement of the USA, the Huks—as they were referenced—were crushed. Corrupt regimes, very compliant with interests of the USA, followed ultimately resulting in renewed guerrilla war led by a refounded Communist Party of the Philippines. This was joined by a very separate insurgency in the southern island of Mindanao, where the largely Muslim Moro population fought for self-determination. Two main formations emerged in Mindanao, first the Moro National Liberation Front and later the split-off, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Ultimately a very strange outfit appeared that received a considerable amount of US media attention: Abu Sayyaf.

Although there was hope for peace when Corazon Aquino replaced the ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos, war continued, largely at the instigation of elements of the Philippine military who were not interested in peace with either the NDFP or the Moro insurgents in Mindanao. Peace talks have been going on between the government of the Philippines and the NDFP since the mid-1990s, but with little progress having been made. The objective of the government has been to, in essence, force the NDFP to capitulate rather than address any of the issues raised by the NDFP. Separate discussions have taken place in Mindanao, leading recently to a framework for an agreement with the MILF. During the NDFP-CPP-NPA insurgency the USA has done nothing to encourage a negotiated settlement, rather remaining a staunch supporter of succeeding Filipino governments, beginning with that of dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

In the aftermath of Al Qaida’s 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA, the US role in the Philippines shifted. In 2002, the US declared the Philippines to be the second front in the war against terrorism. Then, out of nowhere, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the USA was putting the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army on the list of terrorist organizations. This step not only did nothing to encourage a peaceful settlement of the conflict, but instead upped the ante by treating the CPP/NPA as the equivalent of Al Qaida, a completely fraudulent analogy given the ideologies, histories, strategies and tactics of both organizations. Interestingly, the USA did not put either the MNLF or the MILF on the terrorist list, but instead placed great attention on the role of the shadowy Abu Sayyaf organization, a group that many observers have actually tied to the Philippine government, i.e., as a sort of Wizard of Oz created to scare the population, influence world opinion, and justify the further militarization of conflict in the Philippines. The further militarization has brought with it a greater involvement by the USA. This has included the use of the so-called Visiting Forces Agreement in order to station US troops in the archipelago, engage in joint trainings as well as certain joint military exercises.

Though negotiations continued with the NDFP—up through this past April—they did so under very difficult conditions. One of the oddest conditions, referenced earlier, has been the imprisonment of members of the NDFP negotiating team, the “peace consultants.” The government of the Philippines chose to violate protocols on the status of negotiators and allege various crimes on the part of the NDFP team members. Such a step is not only outrageous in the realm of diplomacy, but undermined the ability of the peace talks to proceed. Of those NDFP team members imprisoned, the NDFP noted in a recent statement that those team members released were released not due to the good will of the Philippine government, but rather as a result of litigation taken by representatives of the negotiators.

The break off of negotiations must also be understood in the context of the adoption, by the Philippine government, of a policy known as Oplan Bayanihan. A well-crafted document, Oplan Bayanihan outlines steps that the Philippine government seeks to take in order to gain internal peace and security. Reading this document one could conclude that the Philippine government seeks to narrow military operations and engage in activities to win over the population. In fact, there is an interesting statement in the Executive Summary of the report that reads in part: “To highlight the AFP’s [Armed Forces of the Philippines—author] mandate as wielders of legitimate force, military operations shall focus only on the armed components of insurgent groups. Under this concept, the AFP shall employ distinct methodologies for the NPA, MILF, and ASF and other terrorist groups [3].” Such a statement stands in contrast to the actions of the Philippine government and its allies, raising the provocative question: who are the real terrorists?

If terrorism is the use of violence against non-military targets in order to advance political objectives, the Philippine government should be indicted, at the minimum, in the court of world opinion. Terrorist attacks, euphemistically referenced as “extrajudicial killings” take place on a regular basis in the Philippines against opponents of the government and social reformers. Human Rights Watch noted that while extrajudicial killings dropped in 2012, not a single case has resulted in prosecution since the assumption of office by President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino. Compounding this are the, apparently, disingenuous actions of the Philippine government when it responds to pressures in connection with human rights abuses. Karapatan noted, for instance, that among the nine members of the interagency body to investigate extrajudicial killings are the chiefs of both the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police, institutions that have regularly been criticized for complicity in such abuses. [4]

Extrajudicial murders and disappearances are, by definition, not official actions and are not necessarily committed by people in uniforms. An apparently common form for carrying out the murders has been what are called “riding-in-tandem liquidation units,” whereby two people on a motorcycle pull up and assassinate a particular target.

Extrajudicial murders and disappearances, along with bogus arrests followed by torturing, is not aimed solely at supporters and alleged supporters of the insurgencies. Indigenous organizations, including those that have found themselves engaged in struggles against multinational corporations (such as against mining interests), have faced the wrath of the Philippine government both officially and unofficially. [5]

The Philippine government has repeatedly attempted to dismiss charges of human rights abuses committed by the government and its allies, but to no avail. The extent of the documentation is considerable and difficult to refute. Nevertheless, compounding the difficulties of this overall situation has been the silence of the US government in the face of the charges of human rights abuses, along with their continued support for the regime itself, all in the name of allegedly fighting terrorism.

There is little question but that pressure from the US government and a de-militarization of the involvement of the USA in the Philippines would transform the situation. That said, there is little incentive for the Obama administration or any past administration, to alter its relationship to the Philippines. The Philippines exists as a neo-colony and base area for the USA. In the changing geo-politics of Asia, the Philippines is a front-line country in the efforts to surround the People’s Republic of China. The strange dance in which the USA and China engage includes periodic bouts of military tension. The US government, despite its need for an economic relationship with China, fears Chinese influence. Among other reasons this helps us understand the increased US involvement in the Philippines.

With apparent US support, the government of the Philippines believes that it is positioned to crush the CPP-NPA-NDFP insurgency by, literally and figuratively, bleeding it, through extrajudicial murders and disappearances, arrests, executions as well as through efforts at cooptation of units of the New People’s Army. There is no particular reason to believe that their efforts will succeed, however. What they will do is demonstrate the manner in which state terrorism is a source of instability and horror for both intended and unintended targets.

What is missing from the approach of the Philippine government was summarized directly by Dr. Carol Araullo, Chairperson of BAYAN (the New Patriotic Alliance), when she noted, with regard to the roots of the insurgency:

Despite all the claims of a reinvigorated economy, the hard reality of a chronic jobs crisis, unrelieved poverty and socio-economic inequity remains. Landlessness in the vast countryside continues to be pervasive and industry has been stagnant in the past half a century…Unless a program for national industrialization, genuine land reform and an independent foreign policy is pursued, unjust socio-economic conditions in the country will continue to provide fertile soil for the revolutionary movement to persist and grow with the support of the people. [6]

How many times have we heard something similar? And, in the absence of pressure from within the USA, how often is such a viewpoint ignored by the US elite?

[1] Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights

[2] Which gained a great deal of credibility during World War II in leading the resistance to the Japanese occupiers.

[3] Executive Summary: AFP Internal Peace and Security Plan, p.vi.

[4] 2012 Karapatan Year End Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Philippines, p.4. The full report is riveting.

[5] See, for example, the Karapatan report, pp.37-8.

[6] “The Aquino government is insincere in peace talks with NDFP,” www.bayan.ph/site/2013/04/the-aquino-government-is-insincere-in-peace-talks-with-ndfp/

Britain's Late Epiphany: Colonialism in Kenya Was Brutal and Torturous

Sreeram Chaulia, Foreign Policy in Focus — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:31:00 -0700

The British government has offered to pay compensation to over 5,000 survivors of their torture policies in Kenya.

The British government’s offer of monetary compensation of £20 million to over 5,000 living Kenyan survivors of systematic torture during the Mau Mau anti-colonial revolt is a historic reckoning with an ugly past. Instead of bringing the sordid chapter of crimes committed against nationalist movements to closure, this settlement is bound to trigger other claims in the former colonies of Pax Britannica.

It also augurs a thorough re-evaluation of European colonial empires and their tactics of control. The myth that the British were far more enlightened, benevolent, and liberal in their self-anointed “civilizing mission” in Africa and Asia than the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, or the Belgians is due for a revision.

According to a groundbreaking book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, by Harvard University historian Caroline Elkins, as many as 300,000 Africans were butchered in the 1950s upon the orders of racist British officers determined to stamp out the Mau Mau guerrillas. Usage of Nazi-style concentration camps, attempts to exterminate entire ethnic groups, aerial bombardment, collective punishment, and slave labor were just some of the despicable acts committed by the British in central Kenya, where the Kikuyu peasants had rebelled against colonial expropriation of land.

Desperation to hang on to empire in Africa after the loss of India in 1947, as well as the dehumanization of black people as “rabid dogs” and “ulcers” by the British military commanders, combined to produce a sinister machine of state terror.

That such savagery could happen barely a few years after the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, where the British claimed to have fought on behalf of liberty against fascism, reveals how demeaning colonialism of all shades was in terms of hierarchically ordering human beings.

The counter-insurgency strategies Britain deployed in Kenya and Malaya in the 1950s went on to become classics, adopted by armies of post-colonial states that inherited some mantles from their former masters and also got sucked into Cold War. But what was never officially acknowledged until the Mau Mau compensations case was that these examples of “successful” and militarily innovative means of crushing insurgencies came at the cost of unbelievable human suffering.

As Mau Mau veterans lamented after the British foreign secretary expressed “sincere regret” for the abuses of the 1950s, the payouts that living victims will now receive are hardly proportionate to the pains Kenyans endured. When the sun was finally setting on the British Empire around 1961, the British secretary of state for the colonies ordered a huge cover-up operation, instigating the purging of thousands of files containing sensitive and incriminating evidence of military abuses of natives. His stated goal was to prevent newly independent nations of Africa and Asia from using those records to “embarrass Her Majesty's government.”

Whatever formerly classified information has come to light in the litigation on behalf of the Mau Mau survivors is thus only the tip of the iceberg. Sarmila Bose of Oxford University has argued that the British used similar methods of terroragainst the Quit India movement in 1942-43, particularly indiscriminate aerial bombing, machine gunning of civilians, rampant torture, and sexual assaults in places like Midnapore.

If one goes back to the aftermath of the anti-colonial revolt of 1857 in northern India, historian Amaresh Misra has documented in his book, War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, that the British unleashed an “untold Holocaust” that killed nearly 10 million natives. Such spine-chilling facts take the sheen off British imperialism, whose defenders pretend that it was more benign and softer than other European empires. Colonialism of all hues was a blood-soaked, limitless criminal enterprise.

Arguments about the benefits that British colonialism brought to the colonies, marshaled by apologists like the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson tend to do a balance sheet of “achievements” on the credit side and “sins” on the debit side. They maintain that the British abolished slavery, ran incorrupt administrations, brought free markets and advanced communications technologies, and developed the concepts of good governance and rule of law. Ferguson’s oft-cited conservative classic, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, applauds the British for bequeathing all the celebrated virtues of modernity to the colonies.

But when we consider that these same institutions of modernity were harnessed to commit genocides and plunder the natural wealth of the colonies—not unlike what the Belgians did in the Congo—a different picture of Pax Britannica emerges. It is not a mathematical equation between pluses and minuses of empire, but rather a totality based on the core principles of inequality, exploitation, and violence. The British may indeed have been more tolerant than other European colonialists when natives were not rebelling, but the scale of violence perpetrated by the former when faced with periodic mass movements and revolts was no less barbaric. The “sins” were premeditated and ghastly while the “achievements” were incidental.

British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit earlier this year to the massacre site of Jallianwala Bagh in Indian Punjab and his comment that what occurred there was “a deeply shameful act” was a step in the right direction, but too little and too late. Reparations for colonial excesses are contentious topics, especially on the question of the legal liability of contemporary governments for the crimes committed by their predecessors in much earlier eras. The longer the lag since the abuses were committed, the harder it is to establish guilt or account for the full truth.

The best model for swift and meaningful reparations is that of Germany paying Israel for the Nazi Holocaust as early as 1953, just a few years after the genocide of the Jews. For descendants of the unrecognized millions who perished under British rule, the Mau Mau redemption is worth savoring. But it is also a reminder that the actual perpetrators and their immediate successors, who were directly answerable, escaped justice.

One in Eight People Go Hungry As World's Richest Countries Gather for G8 Meeting

Bill Nighy, Comment Is Free — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:36:00 -0700

Leaders might consider something radical: tackling the forgotten scandal of hunger.

It seems a long time since G8 leaders last gathered in the UK for their annual get-together. Back in 2005, we were at the height of a global boom and there was a real sense that this could be the summit to Make Poverty History.

I was proud to be a small part of the campaign that urged world leaders to boost aid, cancel debt and "make trade fair". We only got two out of three: debt and aid, and aid was not fully delivered. Yet despite that relative failure, the wins we did get made a massive difference to millions of the world's poorest people. To take just one example, 30% fewer children die of malaria in Africa than did in 2004 – that's 300,000 lives saved every year.

The week before the G8 convenes once again is a natural time to reminisce about the good old days but this is about more than nostalgia. Even in today's age of austerity, the G8 has a chance to build on the successes of the Gleneagles summit and, in particular, tackle the forgotten scandal of hunger.

A child dies every 10 seconds from malnutrition – not because their parents are reckless, stupid or lazy – but because they were unlucky enough to be born at a time and place where there is too little food available or, perhaps more tragically, where people cannot afford to buy the food that is.

One in eight people in the world will go to bed hungry tonight. That's 870 million people. The total population of the G8 is just 890 million. Just imagine the urgency to act if those 870 million lived in the G8 rather than in Africa, South Asia and other poor countries.

Since 2005, I've visited developing countries and campaigned with Oxfam at a number of G8 and G20 summits – pushing leaders to deliver on their promises to the poorest and seeing for myself the difference the money can make. In Tanzania, I met the charming and humbling villagers of Engare Sero, who explained to me that for them aid meant a grain bank so they no longer had to endure a life-sapping 10-day round trip for a single bag of maize. In Nairobi's Kibera slum I met girls as young as eight scavenging for food who were forced to give sexual favours to the criminals who controlled the dump so they could get to the fresher garbage as it was unloaded from the lorries.

At Tokyo and then Toronto leaders pledged again to deliver the aid they had promised, but with the notable exception of the UK, those expected to stump up significant sums have fallen short – increases, yes but billions shy of their promises.

In Cannes at the G20, we hoped a Robin Hood tax on banks might fill the gap – it still might. Eleven countries in Europe are pressing ahead with a financial transaction tax that could raise tens of billions from the sector that caused the economic crisis to help people in Europe and poor countries. The UK is not only not one of those countries, but George Osborne is going to court to block it.

This year's G8 is unlikely to see much movement on aid beyond the very welcome additional money for nutrition announced at last weekend's hunger summit. The UK has let it be known that this will not be a pledging summit. But that does not mean it cannot help the villagers of Engare Sero, the slum girls of Kibera and millions like them.

Protecting poor people from land grabs, making it easier for them to find out what companies and their governments are doing and stopping the ridiculous situation where G8 members' policies actively encourage land to be used for growing fuel rather than food: all these will help.

But perhaps the biggest step forward the G8 could make would be to end the scandal that sees companies dodge more than $160bn a year in tax they should pay poor countries.

It is money that could be invested in farms – providing the seeds, equipment and knowhow to get more food from the same plot of land. And it could be used to provide safety nets to help people whose ability to earn a living has failed to keep pace with rising food prices.

In the 6th century BC the Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu observed: "The people are hungry: it is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes." Now in large parts of the world the reverse is true.

The actions the G8 needs to take are relatively simple. They need to agree new global rules – on information exchange and public information so it is clear who assets belong to – to ensure that companies can no longer use tax havens to avoid paying their fair share here and in poor countries. Here David Cameron has a crucial role to play – the UK is responsible for more tax havens than any other country in the world.

As the prime minister said earlier this year: "The fact is the poorer the nation the more they need the tax revenues but often the weaker the capacity they have to collect them. All of this in developed and developing countries alike comes down to a simple issue of fairness." I couldn't have put it better myself.

Why the Media and Power Establishment Prevented the Public from Understanding the Tsarnaev Bomber Brothers' Motives

Mark Ames, Not Safe for Work Corporation — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:04:00 -0700

The Boston Bombers' ties to Chechnya and Dagestan must come to light if we're ever going to get to the bottom of "why" they did it.

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.

"Proud to be from Chechnya, I miss my homeland. #chechnyanpower" — Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

"This family [Tsarnaevs] was trying to settle in a number of places but could not properly assimilate anywhere. At the same time, they could always refer to Chechnya, which is seen as a land of noble knights and as a fairy-tale island by many Chechens who have never lived there." — Maierbek Vatchagayev, president, Association of Caucasian Studies

As soon as the Boston Marathon bombers were identified as two brothers from Chechnya who had been granted political asylum in the US a decade earlier, experts from both the left and the right furiously assured us that the bombings and shootings that left five dead and some 270 wounded had nothing to do with Chechnya or the brothers’ Chechen identity and experience.

On the right, there’s been an effort to hitch the blame all on their two favorite villains: Islam, and Vladimir Putin. The right is more responsible than anyone for coddling and protecting Chechen terrorists and separatists — Washington neocons and their right-wing allies have been assuring us for over a decade that Chechen terrorism isn’t really terrorism, since Chechens only kill Russians. It makes no logical sense, but that hasn’t stopped the neocon/right-wing lobby from arguing all this time that Chechens have some kind of Western-gag-reflex preventing their violence from blowing back this way.

On the left and libertarian side, stories of the Boston Marathon bombings were stripped of just about every relevant and interesting detail. It was all whittled down to a canned cautionary tale on the evils of the US police state. In the left’s defense, at least they’ve been motivated by recent history — previous terror attacks have led to ethnic and religious profiling targeting Muslims. That’s understandable, but it’s not journalism. Willful ignorance in the name of virtue does not tend to illuminate anything.

Meanwhile, US counterterrorism officials played around with their clunky definitions trying to decide if one or both brothers were "self-radicalized" or "never radicalized" or "radicalized on the Internet" or "radicalized in Dagestan."

With any serious attempt to understand the Tsarnaev brothers, the inadequacy of such facile definitions becomes clear. What made them kill and maim so many Americans when America was the only country that did a lot to improve their lives? And how could it be possible to deny the importance of key aspects of their lives — their personal experiences as Chechens in Russia, their Chechen identity, their rather banal struggles and family infighting as immigrants in the USA.

Of all the myths about Tsarnaevs that "experts" in the media have pushed, the stupidest and most offensive falsehood is the claim that that Chechnya — its violence, wars and savagery — played no role in shaping Tamerlan and his younger brother, Dzhokhar. Tamerlan’s fourth-grade teacher told journalists who bothered asking — German journalists from Focus magazine — that she recalled how traumatized young Tamerlan was from living in Chechnya up through Boris Yeltsin’s invasion and the shelling of the Tsarnaev’s village in 1995. This teacher described Tamerlan as a "refugee from Chechnya, from the war and terrorism."

And yet, we were assured, Chechnya had nothing to do with shaping the Tsarnaev brothers’ minds or their actions.

Initially, the old right-wing Cold War outfit, the Jamestown Foundation, led the PR campaign to steer attention away from Chechnya — and Jamestown’s "experts" were front and center, cited in just about every major media outlet in the days after the Tsarnaev brothers’ identities were revealed. Unlike other right-wing interests, Jamestown and its allies in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (both Jamestown and RFE/RL were founded by the CIA during the Cold War) downplayed both the Chechnya angle and the extent to which jihadi terrorism dominates the Chechen separatist movement.

On the day of Dhokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest, Jamestown expert Valery Dzutsev posted a blog asking "Did the Tsarnaev Brothers Have Links to Chechen Militants?" Dzutsev answered his own question:

"Little suggests that they were linked to the insurgency movement in the North Caucasus or another jihadi movement..

The most plausible explanation [...] is that some personal events triggered a violent response from the Tsarnaev brothers."

Jamestown expert Mairbek Vatchagaev, amazingly enough, came to the same counter-factual conclusion:

"There is not appear [sic] to be much, if any, indication that Jokhar had any connection to jihadist groups or sympathized with the most well-known terrorist organization in the North Caucasus called the Caucasus Emirate, or any other similar groups. On the contrary, in one of his blog entries, he laments having no American friends, having lived in the country for so long."

In other words, the Tsarnaevs were just a pair of emo-terrorists.

Over at government propaganda Radio Liberty, Aslan Doukev, who heads the North Caucasus Department, agreed that Chechen identity and the pure-as-gold Chechen separatist movement (which Doukev’s desk has promoted all these years) had zilch to do with the Tsarnaevs’ turn to terrorism, and everything to do with evil Islam, according to the Washington Post:

"One possible explanation for the Boston bombings, said Aslan Doukaev, an expert on the Caucasus who works for Radio Liberty in Prague, is that the brothers were motivated by radical jihadism, not Chechen separatism."

The usual Islamophobe suspects agreed with Doukaev: the Boston bombing was inspired by evil Islam, not Chechnya or Chechen separatism.

Debbie Schlussel shrieked:

"I note that every single major news broadcast only refers to these guys as "Chechnyan" or "Chechen" terrorists, NOT Islamic terrorists, which is what they are. ...Remember, THIS. IS. ISLAM"

...while carrot-top Canuckocon Mark Steyn quipped:

"Strictly between us, I can count what I know about Chechens on one leg...whatever was bugging him didn't have a lot to do with Chechnya...while the Chechen-nationalist struggle has certainly become more Islamic in the last two decades, it's a bit of a mystery what it has to do with [...] Massachusetts marathons....whatever their particular inheritance, many young Muslims in the West come to embrace a pan-Islamic identity."

Professor Brian Glyn Williams, who doesn’t like me very much, offered two opposing theories that all but canceled each other out, as reported in the CBC:

"The sheer fact that there's so much terror in their country [Chechnya] — suicide bombings and catastrophe — you know it's seems to be too obvious that somehow [it was] the precursor and origins [sic] of this act," said Williams, though he noted the attack may not have anything to do with the family's Chechen background.

But the most popular theory among Chechnya-separatist apologists was the most counter-intuitive theory of all: If two self-proclaimed Chechen jihadis set off the Boston Marathon bombings, then obviously Vladimir Putin was behind it. Sure, that’s like blaming 9/11 on Israel, except this is different — if your unfounded conspiracy theory blames Russia, it’s completely reasonable; if it blames the West, it’s a symptom of mental illness, argued BuzzFeed editor,"Buzzbagger" Ben Smith:

Reasonable people have directed truly horrendous allegations at President Vladimir Putin and his security services.

Yes, those "reasonable people" are back again — one of whom, according to BuzzFeed’s editor, is Chechen death squad leader-turned-president, Ramzan Kadyrov:

"Even the Chechen Republic’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, included a bizarre note of paranoia in the words he posted to Instagram, a note of doubt about the suspects’ guilt — and about one suspect’s death.
"It is evident that the special services needed to calm society by any means possible," Kadyrov, an ally of President Vladimir Putin, wrote.
This may sound paranoid. But paranoids can have real enemies. And you don’t have to be crazy to believe Chechen allegations of baroque and brutal government conspiracies —at least, not when they’re directed at the Russian government.

One unexpected supporter of Kadyrov’s conspiracy theory was his arch-enemy, London-based Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, who told his neocon contact in the Daily Beast:

"Chechens and the Chechen nation are not responsible what two crazy guys committed in the United States....Behind this action, we have to consider the involvement of a state organization or another big organization....I could believe if they come to Moscow that they have some instruction from someone, from Russian special services."

Kadyrov seed Zakayev's and BuzzBagger Ben's conspiracy theory, and raised him a Putin-friendly counter-conspiracy theory blaming the United States:

"[Attempts] to draw a parallel between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs, if they are guilty, are futile. They grew up in the U.S., and their views and beliefs were formed there. The roots of the evil should be looked for in America."

Presumably, Chechens are capable of being simultaneously reasonable and crazy, depending on whom their conspiracy theory blames.

Just about every American hack was convinced at one point or another that the Tsarnaev brothers were Manchurian candidates — victims of either "Misha," the evil Armenian brainwasher, or of "Vlad," the evil Russian mind-controller. Although the Jamestown people knew better than just about anyone in this country, they were very selective about when to tell the truth and when to bullshit an ignorant public, and they were big promoters of these conspiracy theories.

Jamestown’s Valery Dzutsev got his ominous Parallax View on,cryptically speculating:

"On April 16, 2013, Russian president Putin offered assistance with the investigation in the Boston attack a full three days before word was revealed to the Western media about the reported involvement of the two Chechen immigrants (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-16/world/38566064_1_boston-ma...). Putin’s proposal may suggest it was a courtesy, but it also might indicate some prior knowledge about the attack. So potentially one could conspiratorially theorize that the Russian security services may have planned the attack in Boston in such a way as to point to "Chechen terrorists."

One could — and one did.

And another one did too:

Another surprising piece of evidence suggests that Jokhar had accessed his webpage at 3 o’clock Boston time, but did not leave any comments. It was unclear whether it was AM or PM time (http://vk.com/id160300242?z=tag160300242). The bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line were detonated at approximately 2:50 PM, local time.

To Jamestown’s credit, their Chechnya-jihadi deflection strategy did produce some unintended comedy:

some experts have seized on the information that the brothers watched Islamist videos on YouTube (http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/boston-bomber-posted-video-black-flags...). But a fuller look at the brothers’ publicly accessible YouTube view history hardly prejudges their alleged adherence to radical Islam. In fact, it is hard to find anyone that would not visit an Islamist website at least once in his life.

Steven Colbert couldn’t have deadpanned it better.

Perhaps the most disappointing example of self-censorship came from Professor Charles King, author of an excellent book, "The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus," who took to the Daily Beast to shoo anyone with a brain far away from the trails that led back to the Tsarnaev brothers’ beloved Chechnya:

In fact, any "Chechnya angle" to the story is overshadowed by the American one. The Tsarnaevs look much more like other homegrown terrorists — animal-rights extremists, white supremacists, anarchists, and lone-wolf ideologues — than like religious warriors fighting on a faraway and exotic frontier.

King made probably the single dumbest analogy in the post-Boston bombing orgy of hackery, claiming that despite what the Tsarnaev brothers announced all over their social media pages, and despite having lived in Chechnya and Dagestan, nevertheless Chechnya had no more influence on their psyches and their terrorism than the American-born Oklahoma bomber’s Scotch-Irishness:

"connecting the Tsarnaevs with this past — at least at this stage — is like wondering about Timothy McVeigh’s Scotch-Irishness: a true but ultimately irrelevant part of the background of the Oklahoma City bomber....the focus now should be on the Tsarnaevs as homegrown terrorists, not on the ethnic or regional origins of their family."

After reading that, I went into my Kindle and deleted King’s book, along with all the notes and highlights I made, to protect myself from being infected with Stupid.

All of these hacks share a common goal: Leave Chechnya out of this, even if Chechnya has something (or everything) to do with what happened.

In my last series of articles [available through subscription], I explained the deep geopolitical and oil interests that drew so much energy and interest from America’s foreign policy establishment towards Chechnya. I also outlined how this establishment supported the same sorts of violent jihadi terrorists that it condemns in other parts of the world.

Turning the camera around and looking at the story from the Tsarnaevs’ personal experience, you begin to see how whitewashing Chechnya out of the Boston bombing story is worse than hackery — it’s malpractice.

First, let’s look at Chechnya and at Chechens’ profound sense of ethnic identity and identification with their Caucasus homeland. It’s been argued to me and to the public that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar could not have been affected by Chechnya since a) they spent too little time there; and b) even if the brothers did spend any time in Chechnya, it was so long ago it’d all’ve been forgotten by 2013 anyway.

Many of these same people would agree, however, that African-Americans harbor understandably raw wounds over the history of slavery and segregation in the United States; or that American Jews with no personal ties to Israel or the Holocaust have nevertheless been inspired by both to life-changing behavior, sometimes insanely so. Pampered middle-class dweeb Jeffrey Goldberg healed his Holocaust wounds by joining the Meir Kahane Fan Club, and doing voluntary service as an Israeli detention camp guard where, by Goldberg’s own admission, he beat Palestinian prisoners.

These ignorant assumptions about Chechens and Chechnya can be corrected by looking at the biography of Chechnya’s first president and independence leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev — whom Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was named after.

Dudayev had spent little time in Chechnya before the national reawakening during the Gorbachev years. He was born in a highlands village in 1944 — just before the mass deportation that year that sent Dudayev’s family to Kazakhstan.

As I’ve previously written, in 1944, Stalin accused the Chechen people (and five other ethnic groups in the Soviet south) of collaborating with the Nazis, and mass-deported them to Central Asia in what many, myself included, consider an act of genocide — at least one-fifth of the entire Chechen population died within the first couple of years of that deportation. In 1957, Chechens were allowed to return to Chechnya, but no sooner had Dzhokhar moved back than he moved to Vladikavkaz in Christian North Ossetia, and then to the Russian city of Tambov, where Dudayev earned his wings as a Soviet air force pilot. Dudayev eventually rose to the rank of Soviet major-general, the first and only Chechen general in the Soviet armed forces — reportedly his duties included bombing raids on mujahedeen forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Dudayev spent very little time in Chechnya before 1989, and he spoke Chechen with some difficulty. He married an Orthodox Christian Russian, Alla, the daughter of a Soviet officer; she was not asked to convert to Islam, and their children were not brought up Muslim. By Chechen standards, Dudayev was an assimilated outsider. Mixed marriages were extremely rare among ethnic Chechens at that time, despite the Soviet Union’s high rate of interethnic marriages. According to a 1989 Soviet census cited in Valery Tishkov’s book "Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society," 93.7 percent of Chechen families in Chechnya were monoethnic. Taking the entire Soviet Union as a whole, the figure was almost the same - 88.5 percent of Chechen families were monoethnic.

Tishkov explains this low rate of intermarriage by quoting a leading Chechen sociologist of the late Soviet era, Zulai Khasbulatova:

"[O]ne of the reasons for the insignificant proportion of interethnic marriages was the negative attitude of parents. The survival of religious and other prejudices ... also played a part."

In other words, Dzhokhar Dudayev was one of the most assimilated Chechens imaginable as late as the mid-1980s. And yet a few years later, Dudayev’s Chechen roots drew him back to his ancestral homeland, and transformed him almost overnight into a radical Chechen nationalist and a violent extremist who oversaw the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of non-Chechen residents, and led Chechnya down the first steps towards adopting Saudi-influencedSharia rule. Dzhokhar Dudayev also led Chechnya into its independence-or-death struggle with Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, resulting in tens of thousands of civilians killed.

Stalin’s deportation has often been cited as the main cause of Chechen fanaticism, which has been by turns heroic and utterly savage. But this ignores the fact that five of the six ethnic peoples deported by Stalin during World War II (Muslim Balkars, Karachays, Ingush and Tartars from the Crimea; and Buddhist Kalmyks) did not follow Chechnya’s path to war. The Ingush are ethnically close to Chechens. Both are "Vainakh," and until 1992, they lived together in one republic, the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. It was only when Dzhokhar Dudayev took over as president in late 1991 — accompanied by mobs of his supporters who stormed the Chechen parliament and defenestrated the ethnic Russian parliament speaker — that the Ingush amicably seceded from Chechnya and chose to remain as a republic within the Russian Federation, in order to avoid the bloodshed everyone knew was coming.

The excitement of an independent Chechnya, and its promise of possibilities, drew Chechens from all over the Soviet Union back to their homeland in 1991 — including Anzor Tsarnaev, his Dagestani wife, and his young son Tamerlan, who was born in 1986 in Kalmykia, a Buddhist republic on Russia’s north Caspian coast. The Tsarnaevs had originally come from a Chechen village named Chiri-Yurt, located 20 miles south of the capital Grozny, at the mouth of the Argun Gorge, the base of the steep mountain range, the dividing point between the Chechen lowlanders and the "barbarian" highlanders. The extended Tsarnaev family was deported along with everyone else in 1944, and forcibly settled two thousand miles away in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s father, Anzor Tsarnaev, was born in Tokmok, during the exile. Anzor’s father had been killed in an accident — "blown to bits" by an unexploded artillery shell, while out with a metal detector looking for scrap metal to pawn.

After Stalin’s death, most of the extended Tsarnaev family — which had grown so numerous, they reportedly occupied an entire street of houses in Tokmok — eventually returned to Chiri-Yurt in Chechnya. Many relatives still live there today, and in the nearby town of Urus-Martan

In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and shootings, family members denied that the children had ever been to Chechnya; later, they admitted that yes, the family had moved to Chechnya in the early 1990s, but it was unclear for how long. And yes, Tamerlan had visited Chechnya on at least two occasions in 2012 — but only to visit their relatives in Chiri-Yurt and nearby Urus-Martan.

In the early 1990s, Anzor Tsarnaev sold everything they owned in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, and moved his family to Chiri-Yurt, 20 miles south of Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, where Anzor was given his own plot of land inherited from his ancestors.

In 1993, two years after moving back to Chechnya, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the youth currently awaiting trial for the Boston bombings and shootings, was born. He was named in honor of Chechnya’s independence leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev — even though by 1993, Dudayev was a polarizing figure within Chechnya itself. Dudayev grew increasingly violent, authoritarian, and paranoid, claiming, for example, that Yeltsin was planning to set off "fake earthquakes" in Chechnya in order to retake control.

By 1993, domestic opposition against Dzhokhar Dudayev grew in strength and threatened his hold on power. President Dudayev disbanded Chechnya’s local parliament and its courts, suspended the constitution, and arrested, beat and murdered many of his domestic opponents. In the spring of that year, anti-Dudayev protesters in Grozny were "mowed down by Dudayev’s death squads" on Theater Square.

Indeed in one of the strangest twists in recent Russia-Chechnya history, Dzhokhar Dudayev wrote a personal letter to Russian president Boris Yeltsin — who in 1993 also faced a hostile parliament — advising Yeltsin to follow the same authoritarian path that he, Dudayev, had taken:

"Being in possession of vast and, believe me, highly reliable information about the work of the opponents . . . of executive power in Russia and also of those historical reforms for which you so selflessly battle, I would like to protect you from the possibility of further growth of opposition in the Russian Federation, which could lead to unpredictable and irreparable consequences....In jurisprudence there is justification for a less severe crime that does not entail judicial consequences if it is committed with the aim of preventing a more serious crime. It’s the way things are done with the troops: as long as a decision has been made—even if it is incorrect—it is wiser and more expedient to carry it out to the end than to stop halfway and adopt a new decision."

In the fall of 1993, Yeltsin defied his constitution and disbanded the opposition-controlled parliament, using tanks and troops, killing hundreds.

In December 1994 — as support for Dzhokhar Dudayev was falling — Boris Yeltsin invaded Chechnya, bombing the capital city Grozny into rubble — nearly emptying the city of 400,000. Forever after, Chechnya rallied around Dzhokhar Dudayev’s independence fight.

Many of the first war’s civilian victims in Grozny were ethnic Russian pensioners who never left because they had nowhere to go, no family to support them, unlike the locals or those who were able to escape between 1991 and 1994. Ethnic Russian pensioners were stuck in their apartment buildings, and many died there as a result of indiscriminate Russian bombing and shelling.

Thousands were killed in the first few weeks and months of Yeltsin’s invasion. In the spring of 1995, after Grozny was sufficiently flattened and emptied of life, the Russian army turned its sights southward —in the direction of the Tsarnaevs’ home village, Chiri-Yurt. The village is strategically located at the base of the gorge leading up to the Chechen highlands, where the separatist fighters were taking refuge; Chiri-Yurt was also the site of the largest cement factory in the greater Caucasus region, which had once employed tens of thousands.

The job of taking Chiri-Yurt fell to one of Russia’s most brutal generals, Vladimir Shamanov. His strategy was fairly simple: bomb, shell and flatten everything, then terrorize whatever’s left alive. His Russian forces surrounded Chiri-Yurt, bombing and shelling the village nonstop for a week. By the time Shamanov’s forces moved in, nothing was left of the cement factory but rubble and ruins. The Tsarnaev home had been flattened by Shamanov’s forces, along with all the standing structures on their street, according Tamerlan’s aunt.

It was during this time that the Tsarnaev family fled Chiri-Yurt, and returned to exile in Kyrgyzstan, in Tokmok. A neighbor in Tokmok later told reporters that the Tsarnaevs arrived back in nothing but "clothes they would wear only around the house," and how they’d "fled the bombing, managing only to grab their documents and a few things."

This would be the first in a string of emigration failures for the Tsarnaev family: They moved to their ancestral homeland full of hope and promise, and were forced to retreat back to the place where Stalin had dumped them off to die 50 years earlier.

The boys showed clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder from the war and violence. Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s fourth-grade teacher in Kyrgyzstan, Natalya Kurochkina, told German journalists fromFocus magazine,

"Tamerlan would flinch if so much as a little firecracker went off. We understood right away that they came from a war zone. It was obvious that this child had been through a lot."
"I think he was somehow affected by what he had seen during the [Chechen] war...all that was going on in Chechnya then, the terrorist acts."

Tamerlan’s father, Anzor, found work in the local prosecutor’s office for the Kyrgyzstan government. Many of Anzor’s siblings became lawyers, some quite successful — including Anzor’s sister, who lives in Canada, and his younger brother Ruslan, the most successful of the siblings. It was Ruslan Tsarni (neé "Tsarnaev") who told reporters after the bombings that his nephews, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, were "losers" who had been "brainwashed" by their Dagestani mother, and by "Misha" the evil Armenian convert.

Uncle Ruslan represented the positive side of the American Dream for the Tsarnaev extended clan. Uncle Ruslan had a knack for making all the right choices; Anzor, not so much.

In 1995, the same year Anzor Tsarnaev fled Chechnya with his family and returned to Kyrgyzstan, his younger brother Ruslan was working as a consultant for Arthur Anderson on a USAID contract to develop capital markets structures in Kazakhstan, whose huge untapped oil reserves were the source of an undeclared pipeline war that I wrote about in my last series of articles. In the late 1990s, Uncle Ruslan joined the Kazakh office of American law firm Salans Hertzfeld, where he serviced multinational oil companies tapping into Kazakhstan’s rich oil, gas and mineral resources.

Uncle Ruslan married into geopolitical royalty — Susan Fuller, the daughter of one of the most powerful CIA Cold War figures, Graham Fuller. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s father, on the hand, married a crazy Avar from Dagestan — at least, that’s how Uncle Ruslan put it in no uncertain terms, and with some justification, according to people whom I’ve spoken to who knew Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, and according to numerous other reports.

Uncle Ruslan’s father-in-law, Graham Fuller, had been forced into retirement from the CIA in the late 1980s over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Although never convicted of a crime, Graham Fuller has been named as the architect of the policy rationale used to justify the Iran-Contra operation, under which US arms were illegally sold to Ayatollah Khomeini’s armed forces. Profits from those illegal arms sales were used to make illegal arms purchases for the CIA-backed Contra forces fighting in Nicaragua.

At Harvard, Graham Fuller studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski, chairman of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya. In 1978, when Brzezinski was Jimmy Carter’s token Cold War hawk in the White House, Graham Fuller served as CIA station chief in Kabul, where Brzezinski hatched his now-famous plot to sow chaos in Afghanistan and draw in a costly Soviet invasion.

Fuller later explained:

"I was interested in understanding the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, which is why I wanted to serve in Afghanistan."

The 1978 coup in Afghanistan, Fuller's last year in Kabul, sparked a series of violent backlashes and power-struggles that eventually drew in the hoped-for Soviet invasion in late 1979.

Fuller comes from that faction of CIA Cold Warriors who believed (and still apparently believe) that fundamentalist Islam, even in its radical jihadi form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the simple reason that fundamentalist Islam is conservative, against social justice, against socialism and redistribution of wealth, and in favor of hierarchical socio-economic structures. Socialism is the common enemy to both capitalist America and to Wahhabi Islam, according to Fuller.

According to journalist Robert Dreyfuss’ book "Devil’s Game," Fuller explained his attraction to radical Islam in neoliberal/libertarian terms:

"There is no mainstream Islamic organization...with radical social views," he wrote. "Classical Islamic theory envisages the role of the state as limited to facilitating the well-being of markets and merchants rather than controlling them. Islamists have always powerfully objected to socialism and communism....Islam has never had problems with the idea that wealth is unevenly distributed."

Some people who have come across the incredible coincidence of all these high-powered CIA names and the Chechen Tsarnaevs as proof of some sort of Masonic conspiracy. Most journalists are already freaked out enough by the simplest details of the Boston Marathon bombing and the FBI murder of Ibragim Todashev during his interrogation. They don’t want to go anywhere near this.

As I’ve argued already, I think there’s a far simpler and more obvious explanation for this: Chechnya is a small land, its people number just over a million. In the United States, there are only a few hundred Chechen political refugees, maybe a few thousand immigrants at most. Yet the region they come from has been, since the end of the Cold War, the real ground zero of a major geopolitical and energy resource battle between the West, Russia and the Gulf Kingdoms. By the law of averages, in a world as small and important as Chechen separatism and Caspian oil, coincidences like this are made far more likely than most people understand.

* *

In late summer 1999, thousands of Chechen so-called "Wahhabi" radicals invaded the Russian territory of Dagestan, led by a Saudi jihadi with a matted beard and unkempt hair named "Khattab." The invasion failed after a couple of weeks — leaving nearly 300 Russian servicemen dead. As the Chechen and Islamic jihadi forces retreated (among Khattab’s mercenaries were Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis) Khattab told an AP reporter he’d get revenge in the form of bombings around Russia:

"From now on, we will not only fight against Russian fighter jets (and) tanks. From now on, they will get our bombs everywhere. Let Russia await our explosions blasting through their cities. I swear we will do it."

Khattab spoke those words to AP reporter Greg Myre — who went on to the New York Times and now, NPR — as a series of spectacular terrorist explosions brought down apartment buildings across European Russia, killing hundreds. The explosions began in early September, 1999, when a truck bomb leveled a five-story apartment block in Dagestan’s second largest city, Buinaksk, near the border with Chechnya, killing 68 and wounding over 150. The apartment building had housed Russian border guard officers and their families; many of the dead and wounded were women and children. The bombing left a 10-foot crater in front of the apartment building; two more truck bombs were timed to detonate, but were defused. The bombing coincided with a second Khattab-Chechen invasion into Dagestan.

Then the apartment bombings came to Moscow. On September 9, 1999, a nine-story apartment block was partially leveled in the Pechatniki district in the city’s south, killing 94 and wounding 249. Four days later, another apartment block structure was destroyed just a few miles away from the first, on Kashirksoye Shosse. All 119 inhabitants died in the blast, and over 200 more were injured in nearby buildings.

It was a strange and unsettling time to be in Moscow, those last few months of 1999 — like one long awful speed crash. At the time I lived in one of the big Stalin gothics, the Vysotka near Taganka, built after the war by German captive slave labor. It was exactly the sort of apartment building a real terrorist group who hated Russia — and Stalin — would want to level. The Vysotka rose above the Moscow River like a giant thumb-between-index-and-middle-finger fuck-you aimed straight at the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Because of my swarthy Sephardic looks, I was getting stopped all the time for looking like a "black ass" — a Chechen. Russian police call my looks "a face from a suspicious nationality." "Operation Whirlwind" swept up hundreds of Moscow civilians with "faces from a suspicious nationality." And just like my fellow "faces from a suspicious nationality," I tried avoiding the metro, walking in underpasses, or walking past beat cops during that time. The bribes were through the roof; some people suffered worse things than bribery. They can always find something wrong with you if they want to.

Whatever hassles I went through as someone who looked like a "black ass" was nothing compared to what Chechens and others from the Caucasus suffered: murder and terror inside of Chechnya; harassment, discrimination, hatred nearly everywhere else in Russia and in friendly pro-Russian states.

The anti-Chechen hysteria in the fall of 1999 even swept through the Kyrgyz steppes, through Tokmok, where the Tsarnaevs were living. The father, Anzar Tsarnaev, was fired during the wave of anti-Chechen hysteria, even though Kyrgyzstan is also a Muslim country.

So again the family moved. In 2000, when Tamerlan was 15 and Dzhokhar was eight, the Tsarnaevs moved two thousand miles west to Dagestan, their mother’s homeland, next door to Chechnya. They moved to a place in the center of Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, on the Caspian Sea — and the boys enrolled in School Number One.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the boys’ mother, is an Avar, the most numerous of Dagestan’s 34 ethnic groups packed into the volatile Russian republic. Avars are nearly one-third of Dagestan’s 3 million residents. Avars have usually been the most powerful ethnic group in Dagestan. The next largest ethnic group, the Dargin, make up 17% of the population; while ethnic Chechens, who mostly live near Dagestan’s border with Chechnya, make up just three percent.

Avars were the first peoples in the North Caucasus to convert to Islam in the fourteenth century, hundreds of years before Chechens converted. Imam Shamil, the legendary 19th-century warrior who pinned down the Tsar’s forces for decades in the Caucasus, was an Avar. Many of Imam Shamil’s best fighters were Chechens, and his guerrilla base throughout most of his campaign was in the Chechen highlands, just beyond the village of Chiri-Yust where Tamerlan and his family briefly lived.

The Tsarnaevs moved to Dagestan on their way to the United States, where Anzar’s more successful brother, Ruslan Tsarni, was establishing himself. They lived in Makhachkala from 2000 through 2002, when most of the family made their way to the US, except for Tamerlan, who joined his family in the US a year later, in 2003. Makhachkala and Dagestan were hardly peaceful places those years. The violence in Chechnya was pouring over the border into Dagestan — terror bomb blasts and assassinations were a growing problem during the years 2000-2002 when the Tsarnaevs lived there, and radical Wahhabi Islam was changing the culture. Dagestanis were traditionally Sufi Muslims — more introspective, spiritual, and institutionalized than the new radical Salafist Islam. Sufi Islam had been largely forbidden until the late 1980s; but by the early 1990s, the Sufi muftis quickly became part of the corrupt official structures, creating an opening for disaffected Dagestanis to turn to the newer strains of Salafist Islam, or "Wahhabis" as they are usually called.

Dagestan’s radical Wahhabi power spread quickly in the mid-late 1990s. By 1998-9, the Wahhabis controlled several Dagestani villages and districts that bordered on Chechnya. When the Chechens and their Arab mercenaries, led by the Saudi Ibn al-Khattab, invaded Dagestan in 1999, sparking the second Russian invasion into Chechnya a month later, the idea was that they’d merge Wahhabi Dagestan with Wahhabi Chechnya, and form a single Islamic Emirate on the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

Despite the appeal of Wahhabi Islam in Dagestan — mostly to younger males from the Avar, Dargin, or Chechen ethnic groups — most Dagestanis rejected the Chechen invasion, and Wahhabis were forced to go underground.

To get a sense of how the violence and radicalism would have affected young Tamerlan and Dzhokhar during their stay in Dagestan from 2000 through 2002/3 — when Tamerlan would’ve been 15-17 years old, and Dzhokhar 8-10 — here is a brief list of terrorism incidents that would have shaped their world at that time:

March 28, 2000: Car bomb in Makhachkala injures Dagestan’s deputy prime minister and his driver
July 28, 2000: Gunmen assassinate a Dagestani police colonel in his car in a suburb of Makhachkala; two gunmen killed in the battle
August 6, 2000: Car bomb in Khassavyurt, Dagestan kills two women, injures three
August 29, 2000: 4 dead, 17 injured after rumors of a bomb scare set off a stampede in a crowded market in Khasavyurt, Dagestan
November 21, 2000: The leader of Dagestan’s ethnic Laks, Magomed Khachilaev, murdered outside his home in Makhachkala
May 31, 2001: "Everyone In Makhachkala Packs a Gun"writes Anna Badkhen of the Boston Globe.
June 8, 2001: Bomb in central Makhachkala targets Dagestan’s Minister for Nationalities, Information and External Affairs. [He survives, is killed 2 years later by Wahhabi militants.]
September 1, 2001: Powerful car bomb in Makhachkala nearly vaporizes its two occupants; pieces of car and passengers sent flying hundreds of meters away
November 1 2001: The deputy speaker of Dagestan assassinated in Makhachkala
November 5, 2001: Attempted assassination using rocket-propelled grenades on mayor of Makhachkala.
January 21, 2002: IED explosion in Makhachkala kills seven Russian soldiers in a column of trucks. Nadir Khachilaev, former Duma deputy and founder of a controversial mosque in Makhachkala, is arrested. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 1997, Al Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri was arrested in Dagestan by the Russian FSB as he tried to make his way into Chechnya, and was freed from prison by Nadir Khachilaev’s intervention (and Gulf funds at his disposal). Last year, Tamerlan Tsarnaev regularly attended the radical Salafist "Khachilaev Mosque" in Makhachkala.
January 23, 2002: Gunmen assassinate deputy mayor of Makhachkala and his wife
May Day Parade, 2002: Explosions kill 42 (almost half children) and injure over 130 in Kaspiysk, 10 miles south of Makhachkala, during the Victory Day parade celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany. The bomb blast, detonated by remote control, filled the main street with body parts, pools of blood, and twisted musical instruments. Numerous victims lost their limbs. [A video on LiveLeak shows the carnage, eerily reminiscent of the Boston Marathon bombing, only far bloodier.]

As bloody as that brief synopsis is for a small region like Dagestan, those years, 2000-2, were considered quiet by current Dagestan terrorism standards.

In neighboring Chechnya, where the Tsarnaevs still had (and have) many close relatives, the years 2000-2 saw some of the most horrific human rights violations in 20 years of Russian-Chechen warfare and occupation. During those years, some 250,000-plus Chechen refugees streamed into "filtration camps" in neighboring Ingushetia; Dagestan turned away Chechen refugees during Putin’s campaign. Instead, ethnic Chechen refugees in Dagestan like the Tsarnaevs were routinely subjected to harassment and potential deportations — and worse.

Thousands of Chechen civilians and suspected insurgents were murdered, kidnapped, illegally detained, and tortured.

Atrocities and mass interrogations took place in the area around the Tsarnaevs’ ancestral village, Chiri-Yurt, where aunts, uncles and cousins still live.

About 10 miles from Chiri-Yurt is the town of Urus-Martan, which became a hotspot for Wahhabi radicals and foreign jihadis in the second half of 1990s, and was the site of some of the worst abuses of the Russian occupation in the early 2000s. In the late 1990s, according to the Los Angeles Times, Urus-Martan was the "heart of the [kidnapping] industry" and home to one of the most notorious "slave markets" in de facto independent Chechnya. Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile strike just outside of Urus-Martan in 1996. Today, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s sister and her husband’s relatives live there. Last year, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his father visited Urus-Martan on at least two occasions. According to the Moscow Times, Russian prosecutors investigating the mysterious 1999 apartment bombings claimed they found evidence of the explosives used to destroy the apartment buildings in both Urus-Martan and Chiri-Yurt. While the first apartment bombing in the fall of 1999 in Buinaksk, Dagestan, killing 68, was probably the work of Chechen and/or jihadi terrorists, there is strong evidence that the subsequent apartment blasts in Moscow that killed hundreds was the work of a faction within Russia’s secret services, operating on behalf of the Yeltsin "Family" clan and newly-appointed prime minister Vladimir Putin.

Urus-Martan was also the main base for the most violent faction of Wahhabi-inspired Chechen militants under Shamil Basayev, and foreign jihadis under Khattab. The invasion of Dagestan in 1999 was carried out largely by Chechen militants and foreign jihadis trained and stationed in Urus-Martan. As the New York Times reported,

Mr. Itslayev... is deputy editor of the Urus-Martan newspaper Marsho, or Freedom. He said the town's first Wahhabis arrived in 1997 — not from abroad, but from Dagestan, Khattab's onetime home. About 400 strong, they moved into Urus-Martan's Boarding School No. 16, built a mosque and began recruiting young people. "Some of the kids they recruited underwent three months of training in Khattab's camp in Serzhen-Yurt, and some went for six months," he said.

Note that Chiri-Yurt is located halfway between Urus-Martan and Serzhen-Yurt, each about 10 miles from the Tsarnaevs’ home village. Continuing,

Foreigners arrived only later, both Mr. Itslayev and Urus-Martan's deputy administrator, Mr. Goisultanov, said. "I saw myself Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Arabs, Azeris," Mr. Goisultanov said. "They had the most expensive cars — Lincolns, four-wheel drives — and the most expensive weapons, which even the Russians didn't have."

The foreigners also had money, handing out $200 and automatic rifles to young Chechens who joined them. By mid-1998, civilian opponents were being murdered. In mid-1999, the foreign fighters staged a coup: Urus-Martan's militia was replaced by Wahhabis, and the civil court was abolished for a tribunal that adopted Shariah, the legal code of Islam based on the Koran. Girls were shooed from school and women were ordered to wear veils. Alcohol was banned.

The group left Urus-Martan to join the August 1999 invasion of Dagestan, then returned to take power. By late 1999, he said, there were 2,000 Wahhabis; others estimated as many as 7,000. "Only one word would fit here," Mr. Itslayev said. "It was a mob."

After Russian forces and their local Chechen death squad allies took control, locals in Urus-Martan were subjected to a different form of terror:

"Two or three people are killed in Urus-Martan every night for the last one or two years," he said. "Innocent people are detained. Many disappear after they are arrested. And with most people, when they're found, they're corpses.

While Chiri-Yurt escaped the sort of total-war bombardment that the Tsarnaevs survived in 1995, the village still suffered the direct effects of Putin’s war and crackdown. Anna Politkovskaya, the murdered Novaya Gazeta journalist and anti-Chechnya War activist, described a scene she saw in Chiri-Yurt in 2001, when Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were living just 90 miles away in Dagestan:

As soon as you enter the former dormitory of the old cement factory in Chiri-Yurt, which has been turned into a refugee settlement, you hear wailing. A protracted half-animal monotone evoking the farthest reaches of despair. When these people find out that you’re a journalist, they cling to your clothing, your hands and feet, as if you were a magician, as if something essential depended on you, such as a gigantic truck with more than enough flour for everyone who is trying to survive.

Chiri-Yurtans who earlier had taken children from the settlement into their homes to feed in the winter now turn away even infants and pregnant and nursing mothers.

In this way, Chiri-Yurt, a beautiful, cozy little village in the foothills of the Caucasus, has turned into a cold, unpleasant settlement point, where bullets fly around like the wind. The key word is "point." A point for thousands of refugees to eat and sleep. A point of round-the-clock pain. Anything you like, except a place to live.

"We can’t take everyone who comes to us, the way the law says to — we’re in no position to do so," says Adam Shakhgiriev, the head of migration services in Chiri-Yurt. "We can’t handle them. It’s a disaster for the village when eleven thousand displaced people are forced on our five thousand inhabitants. All of Duba-Yurt has descended upon us, all six thousand! And everyone is utterly demoralized. It’s hard to put up with these people. They’re all in terrible shape."

Last year, when Tamerlan and his father visited Chechnya, they spent time in two towns with relatives — Chiri-Yurt, and Urus-Martan. Why does this matter? Because everyone has been claiming that none of this matters, dumbing down a conversation that already started at a remarkably low baseline. Evoking the world that made the Tsarnaev brothers isn’t meant to prove that every Chechen is a Wahhabi terrorist; rather, it’s meant to show you a glimpse of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s reality, the world that shaped them. It’s a world totally alien to most of us — not a facile good/evil world, or a world made for weepy Spielberg films. Unfortunately, the people who know this world least of all are the same ones policing the conversation about the Boston Marathon bombings.

The Shocking Amount of Wealth and Power Held by 0.001% of the World Population

Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com's Global Power Project — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:04:00 -0700

The level of inequality around the world is truly staggering.

Many now know the rhetoric of the 1% very well: the imagery of a small elite owning most of the wealth while the 99% take the table scraps.

In 2006, a UN report revealed that the world’s richest 1% own 40% of the world’s wealth, with those in the financial and internet sectors comprising the “super rich.” More than a third of the world’s super-rich live in the U.S., with roughly 27% in Japan, 6% in the U.K., and 5% in France. The world’s richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet's total assets, while the bottom half of the population – more than 3 billion people – owned less than 1% of the world’s wealth.

Looking specifically at the United States, the top 1% own more than 36% of the national wealth and more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%. Almost all of the wealth gains over the previous decade went to the top 1%. In the mid-1970s, the top 1% earned 8% of all national income; this number rose to 21% by 2010. At the highest sliver at the top, the 400 wealthiest individuals in America have more wealth than the bottom 150 million.

A 2005 report from Citigroup coined the term “plutonomy” to describe countries “where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” The report specifically identified the U.K., Canada, Australia and the United States as four plutonomies. Published three years before the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, the Citigroup report stated: “Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries.”

"The rich," said the report, "are in great shape, financially.”

In early 2013, Oxfam reported that the fortunes made by the world’s 100 richest people over the course of 2012 – roughly $240 billion – would be enough to lift the world’s poorest people out of poverty four times over. In the Oxfam report, "The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All," the international charity noted that in the past 20 years, the richest 1% had increased their incomes by 60%. Barbara Stocking, an Oxfam executive, noted that this type of extreme wealth is “economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive...We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true.”

The report added: “In the UK, inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10% now take home nearly 60% of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth and significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid.” In the United States, the share of national income going to the top 1% has doubled from 10 to 20% since 1980, and for the top 0.01% in the United States, “the share of national income is above levels last seen in the 1920s.”

Previously, in July of 2012, James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey, a major global consultancy, published a major report on tax havens for the Tax Justice Network which compiled data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the IMF and other private sector entities to reveal that the world’s super-rich have hidden between $21 and $32 trillion offshore to avoid taxation.

Henry stated: “This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and – most importantly – to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of ‘source’ countries.” John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network further commented that “Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people... This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich.”

With roughly half of the world’s offshore wealth, or some $10 trillion, belonging to 92,000 of the planet's richest individuals —representing not the top 1% but the top 0.001% — we see a far more extreme global disparity taking shape than the one invoked by the Occupy movement. Henry commented: “The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy.”

In his 2008 book, "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making," David Rothkopf, a man firmly entrenched within the institutions of global power and the elites which run them, compiled a census of roughly 6,000 individuals whom he referred to as the “superclass.” They were defined not simply by their wealth, he said, but by the influence they exercised within the realms of business, finance, politics, military, culture, the arts and beyond.

Rothkopf noted: “Each member is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members.”

The global elite are of course not defined by their wealth alone, but through the institutional, ideological and individual connections and networks in which they wield their influence. The most obvious example of these types of institutions are the multinational banks and corporations which dominate the global economy. In the first scientific study of its kind, Swiss researchers analyzed the relationship between 43,000 transnational corporations and “identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.”

In their report, "The Network of Global Corporate Control, researchers noted that this network – which they defined as "ownership" by a person or firm over another firm, whether partially or entirely – “is much more unequally distributed than wealth” and that “the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.” The “core” of this network – which consists of the world's top 737 corporations – control 80% of all transnational corporations (TNCs).

Even more extreme, the top 147 transnational corporations control roughly 40% of the entire economic value of the world’s TNCs, forming their own network known as the “super-entity.” The super-entity conglomerates all control each other, and thus control a significant portion of the rest of the world’s corporations with the “core” of the global corporate network consisting primarily of financial corporations and intermediaries.

In December of 2011, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, Roger Altman, wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he described financial markets as “a global supra-government” which can “oust entrenched regimes... force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes.” Altman said bluntly that the influence of this entity “dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund” as “they have become the most powerful force on earth.”

With the formation of this “super-entity” – a veritable global supra-government – made up of the world’s largest banks and corporations exerting immense influence over all other corporations, a new global class structure has evolved. It is this rarefied group of individuals and firms, and the relations they hold with one another, that we wish to further understand.

According to the 2012 report, "Corporate Clout Distributed: The Influence of the World’s Largest 100 Economic Entities," of the world’s 100 largest economic entities in 2010, 42% were corporations while the rest were governments. Among the largest 150 economic entities, 58% were corporations. Wal-Mart was the largest corporation in 2010 and the 25th largest economic entity on earth, with greater revenue than the GDPs of no less than 171 countries.

According to the Fortune Global 500 list of corporations for 2011, Royal Dutch Shell next became the largest conglomerate on earth, followed by Exxon, Wal-Mart, and BP. The Global 500 made record revenue in 2011 totaling some $29.5 trillion — more than a 13% increase from 2010.

With such massive wealth and power held by these institutions and "networks" of corporations, those individuals who sit on the boards, executive committees and advisory groups to the largest corporations and banks wield significant influence on their own. But their influence does not stand in isolation from other elites, nor do the institutions of banks and corporations function in isolation from other entities such as state, educational, cultural or media institutions.

Largely facilitated by the cross-membership that exists between boards of corporations, think tanks, foundations, educational institutions and advisory groups — not to mention the continual "revolving door" between the state and corporate sectors — these elites become a highly integrated, organized and evolved social group. This is as true for the formation of national elites as it is for transnational, or global, elites.

The rise of corporations and banks to a truly global scale – what is popularly referred to as the process of “globalization” – was facilitated by the growth of other transnational networks and institutions such as think tanks and foundations, which sought to facilitate these ideological and institutional structures of globalization. A wealth of research and analysis has been undertaken in academic literature over the past couple of decades to understand the development of this phenomenon, examining the emergence of what is often referred to as the "Transnational Capitalist Class" (TCC). In various political science and sociology journals, researchers and academics reject a conspiratorial thesis and instead advance a social analysis of what is viewed as a powerful social system and group.

As Val Burris and Clifford L. Staples argued in an article for the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (Vol. 53, No. 4, 2012), “as transnational corporations become increasingly global in their operations, the elites who own and control those corporations will also cease to be organized or divided along national lines.” They added: “We are witnessing the formation of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) whose social networks, affiliations, and identities will no longer be embedded primarily in the roles they occupy as citizens of specific nations.” To properly understand this TCC, it is necessary to study what the authors call “interlocking directorates,” defined as “the structure of interpersonal or interorganizational relations that is created whenever a director of one corporation sits on the governing board of another corporation.”

The growth of “interlocking directorates” is primarily confined to European and North American conglomerates, whereas those in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East largely remain “isolated from the global interlock network.” Thus, the “transnationalization” of corporate directorates and, ultimately, of global class structures “is more a manifestation of the process of European integration – or, perhaps, of the emergence of a North Atlantic ruling class.”

The conclusion of these researchers was that the ruling class is not “global” as such, but rather “a supra-national capitalist class that has gone a considerable way toward transcending national divisions,” notably in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America; in their words, "the regional locus of transnational class formation is more accurately described as the North Atlantic region.” However, with the rise of the "East" – notably the economic might of Japan, China, India, and other East Asian nations – the interlocks and interconnections among elites are likely to expand as various other networks of institutions seek to integrate these regions.

The influence wielded by banks and corporations is not simply through their direct wealth or operations, but through the affiliations, interactions and integration by those who run the institutions with political and social elites, both nationally and globally. While we can identify a global elite as a wealth percentage (the top 1% or, more accurately, the top 0.001%), this does not account for the more indirect and institutionalized influence that corporate and financial leaders exert over politics and society as a whole.

To further understand this, we must identify and explore the dominant institutions which facilitate the integration of these elites from an array of corporations, banks, academia, the media, military, intelligence, political and cultural spheres.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is Project Manager of The People’s Book Project, head of the Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute, Research Director for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project and hosts a weekly podcast show at BoilingFrogsPost.

AlterNet.org: World News

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