Trump threatens new sanctions amid farcical indictment of Iran

by Bill Van Auken

US President Donald Trump threatened Wednesday to ratchet up once again the punishing US “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran.

In an ignorant and lying tweet, the US president stated: “Iran has long been secretly ‘enriching’, in total violation of the terrible 150 Billion Dollar deal made by John Kerry and the Obama Administration … Sanctions will soon be increased, substantially!”

There is no evidence whatsoever that Iran is “secretly enriching” uranium. The country has subjected itself to the most intrusive nuclear inspection regime of any country in history.

As for the reference to the “150 billion dollar deal,” which Trump portrays as some kind of US payout to Tehran, the figure represents previously existing Iranian overseas assets that had been frozen under UN nuclear sanctions. They were released as part of the 2015 nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that was reached between Tehran and six major world powers—the US, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany.

Trump made his denunciation of the “terrible deal” on the same day that the US staged a farcical intervention before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors in Vienna, Austria.

Washington demanded the emergency session of the 35-nation board in order to denounce Iran for carrying out minor increases to its uranium stockpile and enrichment levels, exceeding caps set by the 2015 agreement, under conditions in which the Trump administration, in flagrant violation of international law, tore up the entire treaty over a year ago, while repeatedly denouncing it as useless.

The US performance in Vienna provided a revealing exposure of the nature of American “diplomacy,” which consists of ultimatums designed only to further the twin aims of regime change and war.

The US ambassador to the international organizations in Vienna, Jackie Wolcott, charged Iran with “nuclear extortion” and demanded that its “misbehavior not be rewarded.” She further insisted that “There is no credible reason for Iran to expand its nuclear program.”

Everyone knows, however, that Iran agreed to contract its nuclear program in exchange for guarantees from the major powers, including Washington, that sanctions would be lifted and trade and economic ties with the country restored.

Washington not only reneged on these guarantees when it unilaterally abrogated the agreement, it instituted a sanctions regime aimed at driving Iranian oil exports down to zero and collapsing the country’s economy by targeting not only Iran, but any company or country that dares to trade with it.

Tehran has charged that, a full year after the US deserted the agreement and began its sanctions campaign, the three Western European signatories to the deal have failed to take substantive measures to counter its effects and provide the sanctions relief that had been guaranteed.

Last month Tehran announced that it had deliberately exceeded the 300 kg cap imposed by the JCPOA on its enriched uranium stockpiles, and last Sunday it announced a second deliberate breach of a limit set in the agreement, increasing its uranium enrichment level—which had been capped at 3.67 percent and has risen to 4.5 percent.

Both steps are largely symbolic, bringing Iran no significant step closer to producing weapons-grade uranium, which Tehran has repeatedly stated has never been its aim. Moreover, such stockpiles and enrichment levels in no way violate the terms of Iran’s obligations to the IAEA, which continues to inspect its nuclear facilities. Neither the IAEA, nor for that matter Washington, are parties to the JCPOA, making the agency an entirely inappropriate forum for Washington to deliver its tirade.

The Iranian government indicated that it would take further steps within 60 days unless the European powers make good on the promise they made last year, in the wake of Washington’s trashing of the agreement, to provide “practical solutions in order to maintain the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran.”

With Iran’s oil exports having been slashed from 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in April 2018 to just 300,000 bpd today, it is self-evident that no such “normalization” has taken place. Meanwhile, the European powers’ roll-out of Instex (Instrument to Support Trade Exchanges), a trade mechanism meant to evade US sanctions and bypass the dollar-based financial system, has repeatedly been postponed for what are supposedly technical reasons.

While the European bourgeoisie fears the catastrophic consequences of a US war against Iran and harbors its own ambitions to exploit the country’s markets and resources, it has posed no challenge to Washington’s aggression.

In advance of the IAEA board meeting, Germany, France and the UK issued a cowardly and cynical joint statement in which they made no mention of the US sabotage of the JCPOA or their own obligations under the accord, while denouncing Iran for “pursuing activities inconsistent with the JCPOA” and demanding that Tehran “immediately reverse the actions.”

Under the terms of the nuclear agreement, Iran is entitled to “cease performing its commitments under the JCPOA in whole or in part” if it finds that parties to the deal are engaged in “significant non-performance” of their obligations, until the dispute is resolved.

In his own remarks at the IAEA session, Iran’s chief diplomat to the Vienna-based international organizations, Kazem Gharib Abadi, described as a “sad irony” that the US had come to the IAEA to denounce Iran over a deal that Washington had repudiated. He described the US unilateral and extra-territorial sanctions as a form of “economic terrorism” that are “neither legitimate nor legal” and tantamount to “weapons of warfare.”

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani was quoted as condemning the hypocrisy of the European powers in remarks to a cabinet meeting Wednesday. “On one side, Americans described the JCPOA as the worst possible deal and withdrew from it,” Rouhani said. “On the other side, when Iran reduces its commitments to the deal, everyone expresses concern, while they should be concerned about the United States, which violated the entire agreement.” He described Washington’s convening of the meeting of the IAEA as “ridiculous.”

The Iranian representative to IAEA reported after the session that Washington had sought in vain to get other member countries to call for the meeting. He noted that the body took no decision nor issued any formal statement in response to the US intervention, underscoring its “ridiculous” character.

The US representative to the IAEA provocatively demanded that Tehran enter negotiations “without preconditions.” Having thrown out the results of over a decade of negotiations, Washington is now demanding, under the pressure of sanctions aimed at starving the country’s population, that Iran enter into talks aimed at turning it into a semi-colony of US imperialism.

The Pentagon also escalated its military threat against Iran Wednesday, with Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announcing that the US is forming a “coalition” to “ensure freedom of navigation both in the Straits of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb,” the strategic “chokepoints” that link, respectively, the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden.

Dunford told reporters that the coalition would be “scalable.” He continued, “So with a small number of contributors we can have a small mission and we’ll expand that as the number of nations that are willing to participate identify themselves.”

The remark suggested that at this point the “coalition” will consist of just the US and the Persian Gulf Sunni oil sheikdoms led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Mark Esper, Trump’s latest acting secretary of defense, raised the prospect of such a coalition last month with Washington’s ostensible allies in NATO and was roundly rebuffed.

Whatever countries sign on to this latest escalation of US military intervention in the Persian Gulf, the increased naval operations will only escalate the threat of a military confrontation.

With Washington attempting to assert by military might its unrestricted hegemony over the Middle East and its vast energy reserves, such a clash could drag in all of the major powers, including nuclear-armed Russia and China, posing the stark danger of a third world war.

Trump doubles down on US lies about Iran

by Bill Van Auken

US President Donald Trump escalated the war threats against Iran Friday, insisting that Tehran was responsible for the damage done to two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman the previous day and vowing US retaliation for any Iranian action to shut the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Trump based his ignorant and belligerent remarks on a grainy, black-and-white video released Thursday night by the US Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs US military interventions throughout the Middle East.

CENTCOM claimed that the video, apparently shot from a US spy plane, showed a small boat of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) approaching one of the damaged tankers, the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous, and removing an unexploded limpet mine attached to its hull. The video was touted as proof that Iran carried out attacks on the vessels and had sent the IRGC boat to remove any incriminating evidence.

Fire and smoke billowing from Norwegian-owned Front Altair tanker said to have been attacked in the waters of the Gulf of Oman on June 13, 2019 [Credit: ISNA]

In a Fox News television interview Friday, Trump declared, “Well, Iran did do it, and you know they did it because you saw the boat.”

He continued: “I guess one of the mines didn’t explode, and it’s probably got essentially Iran written all over it. And you saw the boat at night, trying to take the mine off and successfully took the mine off the boat. And that was exposed. That was their boat. That was them, and they didn’t want the evidence left behind.”

He went on to denounce Iran as a “nation of terror”, adding that “they’re in deep, deep trouble.” He also told Fox News that if Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, “it’s not going to be closed for long.” The strait, which connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, is a 21-mile-wide seaway through which 30 percent of all seaborne-traded liquid products pass, most of them petroleum-based.

The claims by Trump and the Pentagon that the CENTCOM video is some kind of smoking gun proving the culpability of the Iranian government in the apparent attack on the Kokuka Courageous and the second tanker, the Norwegian-owned Front Altair, is nothing of the kind.

Unsubstantiated is the claim that those depicted in the video were removing a limpet mine from the hull, not to mention that in supposedly doing so they were engaged in a coverup designed to conceal evidence of Iranian culpability.

The CENTCOM video recalls nothing so much as the incontrovertible “proof” presented by then Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council in 2003 of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction”.

The US claims ran in direct contradiction from the owners of the tanker shown in the video. Yutaka Katada, president of the Kokuka Sangyo shipping firm which owns the Kokuka Courageous tanker, told reporters Friday in Tokyo that the claim the ship had been damaged by limpet mines was “false”.

“The crew are saying it was hit with a flying object. They say something come flying toward them, then there was an explosion, then there was a hole in the vessel. Then some crew witnessed a second shot,” Katada said.

“To put a bomb on the side is not something we are thinking,” he added, noting that the damage to the ship “was above the water surface by quite a lot.”

As for Trump’s denunciation of Iran as a “terror nation”, the wholesale terror that has been inflicted upon the Middle East has the clear imprint of “Made in the USA”.

Successive US wars against Iraq, which culminated in the illegal invasion of the country and cost the deaths of well over a million people, have been followed by the wars for regime change in Libya and Syria in which Washington utilized, funded and armed Islamist militias tied to Al Qaeda for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Muammar Gaddafi and the attempt to overthrow that of Bashar al-Assad.

Now Washington is attempting to accomplish the same goal in relation to Iran a far larger and more powerful country, with four times the landmass and more than twice the population of Iraq.

It has implemented what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Thursday boasted was a “campaign of maximum pressure” designed to starve the Iranian population into submission. Having abrogated last year the 2015 Iranian nuclear accord reached between Tehran and the five permanent member nations of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, Washington has reimposed and sharply intensified crushing economic sanctions that threaten not only Iran but any country or company doing business with it. The aim, as the US has made clear, is to reduce Iranian oil exports, which count for the overwhelming share of the country’s export earnings, to zero.

These measures, carried out unilaterally and in direct violation of UN resolutions, are the equivalent of a full-scale economic blockade, an act of war.

Iran responded to the latest threats from Trump and the Pentagon calling them “alarming and worrisome.”

Just before Trump gave his interview to Fox, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif denounced Washington for having “immediately jumped to make allegations against Iran [without] a shred of factual or circumstantial evidence.”

On Thursday, Zarif called attention to the fact that the two tankers, one owned by a Japanese firm and the other carrying a Japanese-related cargo, had been struck precisely at the moment that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. “Suspicious doesn’t begin to describe what likely transpired,” he said.

Pompeo, in his bullying speech at the State Department Thursday afternoon, declared insultingly that Zarif was trying to be “funny”. On the contrary, the Iranian foreign minister was merely hinting at the conclusion drawn by many around the world that Tehran would hardly be motivated to strike the tankers just as Abe was in Tehran crediting the Iranian government with abiding by the nuclear accord and forswearing the development of nuclear weapons. While there, he declared that “major progress has been made toward securing peace and stability in this region.” Japan had been one of the major purchasers of Iranian oil before last month when the Trump administration abrogated waivers that had been granted to several importing countries.

In examining the crime from the standpoint of the age-old detective maxim of Cui bono?, or Who benefits?, the answer is obvious: those who want to prevent Iran from reaching accommodations allowing it to loosen the economic noose tied around its neck by US imperialism. This includes both Washington itself, as well as its principal regional allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which are entirely capable of carrying out strikes on tankers in order to blame them on Tehran and set the stage for a catastrophic war.

The apparent attacks on the two tankers came just days after German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas traveled to Tehran with the aim of salvaging the nuclear accord repudiated by Washington and forestalling a region-wide war.

Maas promised Iran that Germany, the UK and France would soon put into operation a payment channel to sidestep US sanctions known as INSTEX, while warning that the European powers could not do “miracles” in the face of punishing US sanctions feared by companies who previously did business in Iran.

Germany and the other European powers–with the exception of London, which, as in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, is marching in lockstep with Washington–have voiced skepticism about the US charges of proof of Iran’s guilt in relation to the tankers and have called for de-escalation by both sides.

China, meanwhile, has rejected the US charges. Meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan, with his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed that Beijing would deepen its ties with Tehran no matter what the situation in the region. He and Rouhani both placed central responsibility for the tensions on Washington’s unilateral abrogation of the nuclear treaty.

Washington is determined to blow up any attempts to circumvent its sanctions regime and clear the way for direct military intervention in Iran. This is the most likely motive for the tanker attacks.

This conclusion is borne out by an editorial published in the Wall Street JournalThursday which stated: “Lately, some have doubted the importance of the U.S. role in the region. Two oil tankers in flames from torpedo attacks in the Gulf of Oman refute that view. The unavoidable fact is that Iran remains the primary threat to stability in the Middle East. The U.S. is right to be there, in force and prepared to defend the interests of itself and its allies.”

The Journal added that it was “all the more important that the West unite in opposition to Iran’s aggression, It would send the worst possible signal if in the aftermath of these attacks the Europeans buckled to Iran’s military pressure.”

Similarly, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, a columnist with close ties to the US military and intelligence apparatus, wrote in a piece published Thursday titled “Is the Iran-U.S. tinderbox about to ignite?”: “Trump has a new opportunity to broaden international support for his Iran policy, after isolating the United States last year by abandoning the Iran nuclear agreement.”

What is being prepared with the provocations in and around the Persian Gulf is a war that could quickly claim the lives of tens of thousands. An outright US invasion of Iran would require the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of US troops, forcing the re-introduction of the draft and creating revolutionary conditions in the US itself.

At the same time, as the tensions with Europe and China signal, such a bloody conflict would pose the direct threat of triggering a third world war.

Washington pushes to brink of war against Iran

by Bill Van Auken

The abrupt trip staged by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Brussels to push Washington’s hard line against Iran, combined with the deployment of still more US military assets to the Persian Gulf, point to Washington’s calculated escalation of a war crisis in the region.

Late Monday, the New York Times posted an article under the headline “White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War.” The article cited as sources “more than half a dozen national security officials” and reported that a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last week discussed a plan to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East.

The spark for an all-out conflict can come from any one of a number of staged provocations, including the alleged sabotage of two Saudi oil tankers and two other vessels off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) reported on Sunday.

US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Suez Canal

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih stressed that one of the Saudi tankers that was allegedly damaged was en route to pick up Saudi oil to take to the United States, a detail apparently highlighted to make the case that “US interests” were at stake in the incident.

Pompeo, national security adviser John Bolton and other US officials have repeatedly vowed to take “swift and decisive” military action in defense of US interests in the oil-rich region. They have threatened to unleash “unrelenting” force against Iran in retaliation for any action alleged to be carried out by a wide array of forces dubbed by Washington as Iranian “proxies,” ranging from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, the Houthi rebels in Yemen and various Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.

The alleged sabotage of the four vessels took place in the Gulf of Oman, east of Fujairah, a major oil port that lies approximately 85 miles south of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which passes roughly one-third of the world’s oil transported by sea.

Saudi and UAE officials indicated that there were no casualties and no oil spills resulting from the alleged sabotage. A video posted online showed a hole torn into the hull of a Norwegian-owned ship at its waterline.

The timing of the incident dovetailed neatly with the US escalation of tensions in the region. It came just days after the May 9 warning issued by the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) that commercial ships, including oil tankers, could be targeted in the growing buildup to war.

“Iran or its proxies could respond by targeting commercial vessels, including oil tankers, or US military vessels in the Red Sea, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, or the Persian Gulf,” the MARAD statement said.

Iranian officials expressed concern over the incident. Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Moussavi described the incident as “lamentable” and “worrying” and called for a thorough investigation. Moussavi also warned countries of the Persian Gulf to stay vigilant in the face of potential “adventurism by foreign players” or any “conspiracy orchestrated by ill-wishers” to undermine maritime security.

There has been no clear explanation from either the UAE or the Saudi monarchy of what exactly took place in the Gulf of Oman. The involvement of covert operations aimed at creating the pretext for war, either on the part of Washington or its two principal regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia itself, both of which have long sought to bring the US into a war with Iran, is a very real possibility.

One thing is certain. Nothing coming from the US government or its propaganda servants in the corporate media regarding the crisis in the Persian Gulf can be believed. The pretexts for war this time around will prove as fabricated as Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” or the lies about a US warship being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin that were used to justify the War in Vietnam.

The Trump administration has continued to escalate its military intervention in the region, dispatching a Patriot missile battery to the Persian Gulf along with a Navy amphibious assault ship. This follows last week’s arrival in the Red Sea of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group, as well as the landing of a bomber strike wing consisting of four B-52s at the US Al Udeid airbase in Qatar.

The Pentagon announced on Monday that the B-52s had carried out their “first mission… to defend American forces and interests in the region,” consisting of operations near Iranian airspace.

Such is the war threat that even a White House reporter questioned Trump during his Monday appearance with the far-right prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán: “Are you at war with Iran? Are you seeking regime change there?”

Trump did not deny the looming war threat, declaring: “If they do anything, they will suffer greatly. We’ll see what happens with Iran.”

Underscoring the brazen recklessness of the US drive to war, Secretary Pompeo abruptly shifted his travel plans for the second time in a week, canceling a trip to Moscow to fly to Brussels and effectively crash a scheduled meeting of European foreign ministers called to discuss their response to the Persian Gulf crisis.

The US military buildup as well as the tightening of US sanctions described by the Trump administration as “maximum pressure” against Iran, designed to suffocate the country’s economy and drive its oil exports down to zero, have sharpened tensions between Washington and its erstwhile European allies.

Since the beginning of the month, Washington has withdrawn waivers that had allowed China, South Korea, Japan, India and Turkey to continue purchasing oil from Iran, and has imposed a new round of sanctions aimed at halting all exports of Iranian iron, steel, aluminum and copper.

The US and the major European powers have been divided since Trump unilaterally abrogated the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement reached between Iran and the US, Russia, China, Germany, the UK and France. Washington reimposed sanctions that are tantamount to a state of war. The European governments, as well as the UN nuclear inspection agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have insisted that Iran has remained in compliance with the agreement, which was supposed to combine strict limits on the Iranian nuclear program with the lifting of economic sanctions.

The issue for the Trump administration, however, has never been the nuclear deal, but rather the drive for regime-change, i.e., the restoration of a US-backed puppet dictatorship in the oil-rich country like that of the Shah.

As Bolton, one of the architects of the current military buildup, put it a year before becoming national security adviser: “The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran… The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself.”

Pompeo’s meetings in Brussels with the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and the foreign ministers of Germany, France and the UK only underscored the transatlantic tensions over Iran. Mogherini said the European representatives had stressed that the crisis in the Persian Gulf had produced a “crucial delicate moment” in which “maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side” was necessary.

She said the European ministers “continue to fully support the nuclear deal with Iran,” meaning the normalization of trade and investment. She added that this included the “operationalization” of the so-called Instrument in Support of Trade Exchange (INSTEX), which is supposed to create a non-dollar direct payment channel with Iran to circumvent US sanctions. Transactions through this exchange, she claimed, would begin within the next few weeks.

Tehran last week put the European signatories to the accord on notice that it would resume uranium enrichment at a higher grade within 60 days unless they took measures to allow Iran to export its oil and access financial markets. European companies and banks, which had previously seen an opportunity for exploiting the country’s oil wealth, have withdrawn in the face of threats to be frozen out of the US market.

The European powers’ opposition to the US drive toward war against Iran is based not on any concern for the fate of 80 million Iranians, but rather on the pursuit of their own imperialist interests in the region. The conflict exposes fault lines that point to the danger of a new military conflict in the Persian Gulf becoming the antechamber of a third, nuclear, world war.

Media lies in service of war for regime change in Venezuela

Bill Van Auken

The recent abortive coup attempt initiated by the US puppet and self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó in Venezuela has served once again to expose the criminal role of the US corporate media.

Bill Van Auken, a politician and activist who was a presidential candidate in the U.S. presidential election of 2004, has more on the issue in an article titled “Media lies in service of war for regime change in Venezuela.”

Guaidó’s video of himself and Leopoldo Lopez, the leader of Guaidó’s extreme right-wing CIA-funded party, Voluntad Popular, appearing with a few dozen armed men in uniform and calling for a military uprising, was greeted with undisguised glee by the major media outlets.

This stunt was staged as the 100-day “reign” of Guaidó, existing only in the greedy imagination of US imperialism and Big Oil, appeared no closer to establishing control over Venezuela. Even as it became evident that it had turned into an unmitigated fiasco, the media continued to broadcast reports suggesting that the military was divided, and the people were in revolt.

As the failure of the coup attempt became increasingly undeniable, CNN and the major networks all repeated the farfetched claims made by the regime-change operation’s principal protagonists within the Trump administration as if they were incontrovertible fact.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the media that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was set to board a jet waiting on the tarmac in Caracas to whisk him away to Havana but had only been persuaded at the last minute by the “Russians” to stay.
Did any of the talking heads who repeated this claim over and over have any evidence beyond the words of the former CIA director to substantiate its veracity? If so, they didn’t bother to share it with their audience.

John Bolton, Trump’s warmongering national security adviser, issued a statement on the White House lawn in which he asserted that Venezuela’s Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, the head of the country’s supreme court and the chief of the palace guard had all “agreed that Maduro had to go” and now had to act on their “commitments” or “go down with the ship.”

This likewise was treated as fact, despite the public denunciations of Guaidó’s actions by both Padrino and the Supreme Court. Bolton’s peculiar repetition three times of the three men’s names in the course of his remarks was an unmistakable sign that the national security adviser was engaged in a bit of information warfare aimed at disrupting the Venezuelan government.

The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, weighed in with an editorial on the very night of the US-backed coup under the headline, “Don’t call it a coup. Venezuelans have a right to replace an oppressive, toxic regime.” It might have benefited from an underline, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

The Washington Post editors declared, “Venezuelans responded to Guaidó’s call for street protests and were met by troops loyal to Maduro. By late afternoon, clashes were taking place, regime officials were promising a decisive ‘counterattack,’ and there was no way to know whether ‘Operation Liberty,’ as Guaidó dubbed this high-risk move, would succeed or be crushed — or devolve into civil war. The Post declared, “What is not, or should not be, ambiguous is the political and moral essence of this volatile situation”.

The “moral essence” of the situation, all the invocations of “liberty” notwithstanding, smells decidedly of oil and excrement.

There was no “decisive counterattack” by the government because none was needed. Neither troops nor any sizeable number of civilians rallied to Guaidó’s tweeted video calling for the storming of the La Carlota Air Base and the armed overthrow of the Maduro government. By the end of the day, Lopez, the apparent architect of the coup attempt, had sought refuge in first the Chilean and then the Spanish embassy. The handful of soldiers who stayed with the right-wing US puppets, some 25 in all, asked for protection in the embassy of Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

Guaidó’s political party has its roots in Venezuela’s reactionary traditional ruling oligarchy, responsible for the oppression of the masses and poor and for such crimes as the massacre of thousands who rose up against IMF austerity in the caracazo uprising of 1989, which far eclipses any repression carried out under Maduro or his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
The attempt to oust a sitting and elected president by mobilizing small groups of armed men to storm a military base with the backing of a foreign power is, whether the Post likes it or not, a coup. The New York Times, in the wake of the coup fiasco, made its own contribution to Washington’s regime-change operation, publishing an article based upon a supposed “secret dossier” ostensibly provided by a turncoat Venezuelan intelligence officer and confirmed by a cohort claiming that former Venezuelan vice president and current industry minister Tareck El Aissami had “pushed to bring Lebanon’s Hezbollah into Venezuela!”

The fabricated “dossier” has all the earmarks of the kind of reporting that the Times did about “weapons of mass destruction” in the advance of the 2003 US war of aggression against Iraq.

The Times’ own readers responded to the story with suspicion and contempt. Among the top-rated readers’ comments was the observation that “the report has all the smell of a conjured-up pretext, the same as the basis to race into Iraq and wreak havoc and destabilize West Asia. In fact, the smell is even more pungent.”

Another reader wrote: “So why are ‘secret dossiers’ on the Venezuelan government suddenly appearing? Why not secret dossiers on Saudi Arabia? Why not secret dossiers on Egypt? Why not secret dossiers on Israel? Why? Because the US is 100 percent focused on regime change in Venezuela, and already has the regimes it wants in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the usurper regime of Israel, and other certain countries.”

There has been not a single critical voice raised within the so-called mainstream media against the US regime-change operation in Venezuela. The newspapers and television news programs are filled with lies and propaganda preparing for the realization of the continuously invoked threat that “all options are on the table.”

The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) recently published the results of a survey of the main trend-setting media outlets, both print and broadcast, covering the three-month period between January and April of this year. It concluded: “zero opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post took an anti-regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position. Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talk shows or PBS NewsHour came out against President Nicolas Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government.”

Underlying the corporate media’s lockstep, shameless and undisguised support for another imperialist regime-change operation and coup in Latin America are the overriding interests of crisis-ridden US capitalism in asserting its unfettered control over Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest on the planet. It is also in rolling back the growing economic and political influence of both China and Russia in a hemisphere that Washington has historically regarded as is own “backyard.”

The US media has undergone a protracted degeneration, corresponding with the abandonment by the US capitalist ruling elite of any semblance of support for democratic rights and processes. While there was never a golden age of the capitalist press in the United States, the days when the New York Times and the Washington Post could publish the Pentagon Papers, defying the US government to bring the criminal policy of US imperialism in Southeast Asia to the attention of the American public in the midst of a bitter war, are long gone.

Those attempting to carry out a similar function in today’s environment confront the full weight of capitalist repression, with the media talking heads and columnists egging the state on.

That is the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, sentenced to almost a year in prison by a UK judge and facing the threat of rendition to the US and a potential death sentence for the crime of exposing Washington’s war crimes. Like him, Chelsea Manning, the army whistleblower who provided WikiLeaks with files exposing US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and conspiracies around the world, has been jailed for nearly two months, much of it in solitary confinement and without needed medical care, for refusing to provide state’s evidence against Assange.

The struggle against the threat of war on Venezuela and the defense of Assange and Manning lies with the people, whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the warmongers in the American ruling class and their lackeys in the media.

Amid mass beheadings, Wall Street scrambles for Saudi profits

The hideous public beheadings of 37 men in a single day in Saudi Arabia just recently have provoked scant protest from Western governments and the corporate media.

Bill Van Auken a politician and activist who was a presidential candidate in the U.S. presidential election of 2004, has written a thought-provoking article on this tragedy.

The same newspapers and broadcast networks that have summoned up their moral outrage over manufactured abuses by governments in Russia, China, Iran, Syria or Venezuela, are clearly unmoved by these criminal executions. They maintain their stony silence even as those who were decapitated with swords included three young men who were arrested as minors, tortured into signing confessions and convicted of “terrorism” for daring to join protests against the country’s monarchical dictatorship.

One of those beheaded was Abdulkarem al-Hawaj, arrested when he was just 16 by Saudi security forces for attending a protest in the country’s Eastern Province, home to most of Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority population. Beginning in 2011, the oil-rich province has seen protests over the systematic discrimination and oppression against Shias at the hands of a monarchy whose rule is bound up with the official, state-sponsored religious doctrine of Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative Takfiri sect.

Abdulkarem’s real “crime” was apparently that of using social media to encourage participation in a demonstration. He was held in solitary confinement, beaten, tortured with electric cables and hung in chains by his wrists until he submitted to signing a false confession.

Also murdered in the barbaric execution spree was Mujtaba al-Sweikat, who was 17 when he was arrested at an airport as he was about to board a plane to the United States, where he was to become a student at Western Michigan University. His crime was also that of daring to demonstrate against the Saudi royal dictatorship.

His father, who represented him in a sham trial, accused the state of creating the “illusion” of a “terrorist cell”, where none existed. Sweikat’s father told the court, “He was subjected to psychological and physical abuse which drained his strength”. “The interrogator dictated the confession to Sweikat and forced him to sign it so that the torture would stop. He signed it.”

As in all the other cases, the court ignored the evidence of torture and forced confession and imposed the sentence of death by decapitation already dictated by the House of Saud.

The US government has said next to nothing about these atrocities. A State Department spokesman issued a boilerplate statement allowing that “We have seen these reports. We urge the government of Saudi Arabia, and all governments, to ensure trial guarantees, freedom from arbitrary and extrajudicial detention, transparency, rule of law, and freedom of religion and belief.”
During the same two days after the Saudi public beheadings, which included the crucifixion of one of the victims and the display of a severed head on a pike to intimidate anyone thinking of opposing the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the same State Department managed to churn out statements condemning Russia for “gross human rights violations” in Chechnya, Venezuela for use of “intimidation and imprisonment” against the US-funded right-wing opposition and Havana for acting to “suppress the human rights of the Cuban people”.

Washington’s patent indifference to the mass executions in Saudi Arabia exposes the unmitigated cynicism and hypocrisy of all of US imperialism’s “human rights” pretensions and feigned outrage over alleged crimes carried out by governments that it views as strategic rivals or that it is seeking to overthrow. The United States has long counted Saudi Arabia as a pillar of imperialist domination and reaction in West Asia, and the Obama administration exhibited a similar reaction to the mass execution of 47 men in January 2016.

But just as blatant as the complicity of the US government with the crimes of the Saudi regime, is the embrace of the bloody monarchical dictatorship by Wall Street and global finance capital.

In October of last year, a significant number of Wall Street moguls and chiefs of international finance houses canceled their trips to an annual Saudi investment conference known as “Davos in the Desert.” The gathering—which was attended by lower ranking operatives of their firms—came just weeks after the brutal murder and dismemberment of the well-known Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul.

A regime insider who had served as an aide to the Saudi intelligence chief and a semi-official interlocutor between the House of Saud and the Western media before falling out with Riyadh, Khashoggi’s grim fate at the hands of a Saudi military and intelligence death squad was traced by the CIA and other intelligence agencies directly to an order given by Crown Prince bin Salman.

While the death of the well-placed journalist, who had been given a column in the Washington Post after going into self-exile in the US, elicited a brief period of attention and protests from the US media and politicians, months have passed, and the crime has largely been forgotten. US officials speak vaguely about the need for “accountability”, while studiously ignoring that the author of the grisly and brazen assassination is none other than their closest ally, bin Salman.

Six months was more than enough time for Wall Street to cast aside any inhibitions and jump with both feet into the latest Saudi “Financial Sector Conference,” which convened at the King Abdul Azziz International Conference Center. While its opening came in the immediate wake of the mass executions, the conference center is miles away from Riyadh’s Deera Square where the executioners hack off heads with swords, so the Wall Street CEOs did not have to worry about staining their Prada shoes with blood.
The mood at the conference was a reprise of the giddy reception that bin Salman received when he visited the US just a year ago, when he was embraced as a visionary and so-called “reformer” by billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah Winfrey.
HSBC CEO John Flint told the recently held Riyadh conference, “We are excited about the role that we can play here”. “This is an economy we have a lot of confidence in. I think the future is bright.”

He boasted that a number of former HSBC bankers had joined the head-chopping Saudi regime. HSBC CEO said, “That’s been a privilege of ours, to see so many of our ex-colleagues actually in the audience and serving their country now.”

Among the others attending at the conference were BlackRock Inc’s CEO Larry Fink, JPMorgan’s chief executive officer Daniel Pinto, the World Bank’s vice president for development finance Akihiko Nishio, as well as representatives of various other banks and hedge funds.

BlackRock’s Fink was among the most effusive. He brushed aside any qualms about the hideous crimes of the Saudi regime, which include not only the mass executions and the assassination of Khashoggi, but the near-genocidal US-backed war that has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis and brought millions to the brink of starvation.

He stated that “The fact that there are issues in the press does not tell me I must run away from a place. In many cases, it tells me I should run to and invest because what we are most frightened of are things that we don’t talk about.” He uttered not a word more about the “things we don’t talk about.”

The magnet pulling in all of the finance capitalist parasites is Saudi Arabia’s state-run oil company, Aramco, whose income equals that of the five biggest energy conglomerates in the world and tops the combined net profits of Apple and Google.
Many of the banks and finance houses represented in Riyadh, including JPMorgan, HSBC, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs participated this month in Aramco’s floating of $12 billion worth of bonds.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih told the conference in Riyadh that Aramco’s bond sale was “only the beginning”, holding out the prospect that the oil giant may go for an initial public offering (IPO) as early as next year.

He added, “There will be more.” “I won’t tell you what and when, and it won’t be bonds only. Aramco sooner than you think will be accessing equity markets.”

Blackrock’s Fink, who described the so-called “reforms” by the Saudi monarchy as “amazing”, said he saw “very large opportunities” across West Asia, insisting that the region is “becoming more secure”.

To describe West Asia, after a quarter century of US imperialist wars, whose victims number in the millions, and which have shattered entire societies, as “more secure” is delusional.

No doubt for Fink and his fellow financial oligarchs the mass beheadings of manufactured name “terrorists” – a synonym for agitators, troublemakers and dissidents – is not a problem, but rather an attraction. They feel that the defense of their vast wealth under conditions of unprecedented social inequality and an increasingly combative society will require similar measures at home and abroad.