Iran Exposes US Failure in the Muslim East

Irregular warfare requires partners, not proxies

Tahir Mahmoud

In October 2019, the Washington based al-monitor.com reported that Mick Mulroy, the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official said that “the Pentagon is trying to put the finishing touches on a plan to use irregular warfare tactics to temper Iran’s military escalation in the Middle East.”

The website further quoted Mulroy as saying, “every time we [US] deploy conventional forces they [Iranians] actually take unconventional action… so conventional overmatch has not deterred… new strategy would involve economizing our force allocation and operations to deny Iran strategic success.”

The Pentagon official’s plan would not be so comical were it not for the fact that it comes from a nuclear power with the largest military budget in the world. The US military spending between October 1, 2019 and September 30, 2020 is $989 billion. The US spends more on its military than the next top nine spenders combined.

Mulroy’s statement is an indirect admission that Washington’s vast military spending is unable to achieve US objectives and is, therefore, a colossal waste of money. The self-proclaimed superpower is forced to copy its regional military strategy from a country that has been under severe sanctions for over 40 years. Let that sink in for a moment.

Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the US and Iran have been in a constant cold-war type confrontation. With far greater financial resources and a cabal of other countries backing Washington’s policies against Islamic Iran, Tehran today is a regional power and far stronger than it was 40 years ago. This is an undeniable reality.

Will the US be able to abort Iran’s rising influence by adopting irregular warfare? Before addressing this question, it is important to remember that Washington has already tried this approach in Iraq and failed completely. Today, Iran’s political and economic presence in Iraq is much greater than even a decade ago.

In 2012, Crescent International wrote about the role of US Special Forces in Washington’s imperial designs. In our seven-year-old analysis we indicated that “Special Forces Operations (SFOs) have been increasingly used as a key component of US military counterinsurgency strategy since Barack Obama became president… the Islamic Awakening in the Arab world discredited and weakened US-backed autocrats in the Muslim world and made them less usable in the current regional political and social settings. They are no longer viewed as assets by the US, but liabilities. The increasing emphasis on special operations forces will therefore require the cultivation of new fifth columns by the US… the old class of US proxies will be irritated and try to sabotage the work of the emerging new informant caste.”

With the above in mind, let us first look at what the Pentagon means by “irregular warfare.” Cutting through the jargon, this means that the US will rely more on proxies to confront Iran and will build them up from behind the scenes. This is not a new strategy; Washington tried this in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon over the past seven years. It did not work; the Americans are terrible at such things. In Syria, this approach was a disaster. In 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported that “in Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA.”

Even in Europe, where the US presence is much more entrenched and local populations view America quite favorably, its irregular approach in Ukraine failed. Moscow was able to create a strong bloc of irregular proxies through its so-called hybrid warfare strategy to upset Washington’s design of absorbing Ukraine into NATO’s security structure.

Washington’s desire to copy Iran’s irregular approach is flawed from a strategic perspective. Ever since Tehran assisted the establishment of Hizbullah in Lebanon, Western powers have been obsessed with copying this approach to establish their own reliable and determined proxy to take on Iran in a sustained and long-term confrontation. The closest they got was the creation of the Wahhabi-indoctrinated militias in Syria. The Western powers closed their eyes to the egregious crimes of these militias in the Syrian conflict and gave Turkey the green light to open its border for foreign takfiri fighters to enter and exit Syria freely. This policy was a complete failure and has been acknowledged by even those observers who have limited understanding of the region.

The US and its allies assumed that Hizbullah, Ansarullah or the People’s Moblization Units’ (PMU’s) loyalty to Islamic Iran is politically motivated and thus essentially Machiavellian. Therefore, the West assumes that all it needs to do to build its own “Hizbullah” is to throw money at various disenfranchised political groupings. This is precisely why the US and its allies failed in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. In all these theaters of operations, Islamic Iran’s allies are connected to Iran through an existential and ideological bond. This is something Western powers will not be able to achieve with any of their proxies. The brutal history of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism plays a large part in this. Western regimes are greatly distrusted and those working with them are automatically considered to be sellouts by the wider population in the Muslim world.

One of the primary reasons for the US resorting to irregular warfare is because the Donald Trump regime realizes that it lacks political and military clout to actively pursue its agenda directly. While some may challenge this analysis by pulling out quantitative economic and military data of the US, it must be remembered that wars are won primarily through achieving political goals. Yes, the US destroyed thousands of villages and towns and killed millions of human beings in Vietnam, but it lost the war because it failed to achieve its political objectives. The same phenomenon has occurred in Afghanistan, where even after occupying the country for 18 years, Washington is begging the Taliban for a face-saving retreat.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US can destabilize the situation through irregular warfare activities, but it cannot put in place a functional American project. This was best illustrated when the Iraqi Kurdish independence bid failed in 2017. Even though the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region was for decades backed and financed by the US and Israel, Washington and the Zionists failed to realize their goal to divide the region by creating an independent Kurdish state. The Kurdish independence project re-mains a destabilizing leverage of the West but it cannot bring it to successful conclusion. This reflects the limits of Western power in the region.

The primary advantage for the US in resorting to increased irregular warfare on a grander scale than it has already done is the destabilization factor. Washington has the ability to destabilize the region as it is currently doing in Iraq and Lebanon but the net result will be similar to what has happened in Syria. After eight years of NATO destabilization, today Syria is far more tightly embedded within Iran’s regional bloc than it was prior to 2011.

With Trump in the White House, US credibility even among its allies has been significantly reduced. The transactional worldview of the current US regime does not allow it to form a dedicated core of regional proxies.

Trump Flees in Disgrace from Syria But Brags of War Crimes

Kevin Barrett

Loudmouthed, egotistical, and ignorant, Donald Trump embodies the “ugly American” stereotype to the dot. When he recently reversed himself and said that instead of leaving Syria the US would stay “only to secure the oil,” he inadvertently confessed to a war crime.

All US presidents commit war crimes. But most of them are smart enough not to admit it. They invade sovereign states, slaughter millions of people, plundering resources, overthrowing governments, and wreaking international mayhem, but claim to “defend human rights and democracy.” Trump, who is rightly reviled by his opponents as a serial liar, is actually no more of a liar than other American rulers. The difference is that Trump is a bad liar, an incompetent liar, a liar so brazenly shameless that he seemingly neither knows nor cares what the truth might be and how a more skillful politician might cleverly hide it.

Ironically, the legendarily mendacious Trump occasionally blurts out truths or near-truths that the mainstream regards as unspeakable: the US is ruled by a criminal Deep State; George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11; dancing Middle Easterners in New Jersey (Israeli Mossad agents, as it happens) wildly celebrated those attacks; Bill Clinton is a credibly-accused serial rapist; Obama and Hillary Clinton created Da‘ish; and more. Trump’s admission that the war of Syrian destabilization was largely a scramble for energy resources takes its place in a long line of embarrassingly truthful utterances.

Ironically, Trump’s undisguised unpleasantness may help bring peace to Syria and the region. The American occupation intends to use a mere 2,000 US soldiers to “secure the oil.” Those soldiers are sitting ducks for attacks by irregular forces. Virtually all parties in the region, including most of America’s erstwhile allies, now loathe Trump and the US and want them to leave. Trump is setting up himself and the US as the universally-hated scapegoat whose expulsion could unify the region and bring a modicum of peace.

Though the Syrian government cannot directly attack the American plunderers, it is likely to recover its oil as predicted by Russian military strategist Konstantin Sivkov. In his article “Donald Trump’s Syrian crossroads: Americans will be driven out by the ‘dehkan farmers’” Sivkov explains that Syrian President Bashar al-Asad’s first order of business is to finish taking back Idlib. Thereafter he and his allies can focus on ending the American occupation by working with their former enemies, including Turkey and its Arab tribal friends who have suffered from encroachments by US-supported Kurds. Sivkov predicts an eruption of attacks on the small American oil-stealing contingent:

Irregular armed formations can force them [the Americans] to leave by causing unacceptable damages… For strikes they will use drones and shells (both industrial and artisanal production). Routes of movement of the American troops and convoys will be mined. Flank attacks using MANPADS and rocket launchers are expected.

The bloated US military-industrial sector has wasted trillions of dollars trying to build “Star Wars” defenses against ICBMs. Yet as the Houthis showed in recent attacks against US-protected Saudi oil facilities, the Americans have no effective air defenses against cheap artisanal drones! US air defense systems typically rely on Stinger-style heat-seeker systems that work against jet and turboprop aircraft engines, but can’t find the simplest drones.

Likewise the US cannot defend against short-range rockets. Sivkov writes,

The Americans have no antidote against rockets at all. Meanwhile, as experience shows, the militants may use single launchers of industrial production on a simple tripod, for example for 122-mm shells from “Grad” or similar models and make their own makeshift rockets. They can get help from irregular armed groups who already have such experience, such as Hizbullah, which is itself willing to join the fight against the Americans. At the same time, as in the example with the UAV, the requirements for accuracy are extremely lax — the target is large and you just need to hit it.

Just as the US bases themselves are vulnerable, so are the communications and supply routes they depend on. Even if Iraq’s government doesn’t decide to retaliate against US destabilization efforts by ejecting the US andthereby closing its supply lines to Syria, anti-US Syrian insurgent forces, covertly supported not only by Damascus but also by Turkey, Russia, Iran, and Hizbullah, should be able to win their anti-US-occupation insurgency much more quickly and decisively than have the anti-occupation insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose victory has taken the better part of two decades.

One factor that will help Syria win quickly is the looming US presidential elections. Trump’s announced exit from Syria was motivated (like all of Trump’s behavior) not by ethical considerations but by selfish political expediency. Trump knows that Americans are sick of the 9/11 wars. He understands, like most Americans, that those wars were launched on lies, and will be remembered as the “worst single mistake in US history.” Trump may not be the “very stable genius” he fancies himself, but he is not so stupid as to think that dragging the US into yet another quagmire would do anything but doom his re-election effort. So when the anti-Syrian-oil-theft insurgency starts inflicting serious damage on the American pillagers, Trump will likely seek to win political points by finally keeping his promise to completely withdraw US forces.

The coming insurgency against US occupation of Syrian oil will likely erupt just as US election season kicks into high gear in mid-2020. Until then Damascus will need to continue securing control of Idlib and environs, while quietly laying the groundwork for the coming effort to push the US out of the oilfields and other areas in the south near the Jordan and Iraq borders. As of late November 2019 Syria has been continuing to recover portions of Idlib province from the takfiri mercenaries, liberating village after village, with new small victories coming on a weekly or even daily basis.

The US is stealing Syrian oil and supporting secessionist Kurds in hopes of gaining leverage over an eventual diplomatic settlement of the Syrian conflict. But Damascus has no reason to take the Geneva so-called peace process seriously, least of all the American “Asad must go” position, when all of the important players agree that the Americans can, should, and will be forced to comply with Trump’s promise to fully and unconditionally exit from Syria. So unfortunately the world will probably have to wait another year or so for the US to flee Syria under fire, thereby establishing facts on the ground that will allow Damascus to reestablish control of its territory and resources.

Wars on Their Minds

Zafar Bangash

Last month, US President Donald Trump announced, “We’re leaving soldiers [in Syria] to secure the oil… And we may have to fight for the oil. It’s okay. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight.” That “somebody else” is none other than Syria, the legitimate owner of that oil that the US has illegally taken over. But there is more to it than oil. For more than five years, US-created, trained and financed terrorists, Da‘ish (aka ISIS), and Kurdish groups have been smuggling oil to Turkey and into the international market.

Now that the terrorists have been defeated, the US has lost its alibi for staying, hence the pretext of securing oil. There are barely 20,000 barrels/day of oil being produced, hardly the quantity to fight over. The US, however, has deployed armored personnel carriers and other heavy weapons that are clearly meant to wage ground war. So why is the US so keen to start another war in a distant land when Syria poses no threat?

War is profitable business. The American deep state and its corporate allies are heavily invested in war industries. Like the US, its Zionist protégé is also addicted to war. Most Americans, however, are tired of endless wars and want their resources to be invested at home to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure. This is what Trump had promised during the election campaign but has failed to extricate the US from distant wars. He has flip-flopped on Afghanistan and Syria and continues to support the Saudis’ disastrous war on Yemen. The US is also involved in destabilizing Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. Is it a coincidence that all these are Muslim majority countries?

America’s war on Islam can be traced to the 9/11 attacks that were blamed on Muslims. Its roots can be traced further back into the neocons’ Project for the New American Century and even before that to the scandalous “clash of civilizations” theory floated by the orientalist Bernard Lewis in September 1990.

Lewis’ theory was hailed as a masterpiece that allegedly captured the prevailing global situation accurately. Lewis postulated that a clash between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian civilizations was inevitable. This was a dream come true for the neocons. The demise of the Soviet Union was imminent and new enemies were needed to continue wars in distant lands. Lewis turned the “Red” peril into the “Green” peril. Three years later, Samuel Huntington reinforced the clash of civilizations theory by providing further intellectual impetus. He hypothesized “that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”

Lewis and Huntington’s virtually identical theories resulted in the bloody wars on Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina from which neither has recovered so far. Millions were killed in Iraq on the pretext of fighting Saddam Husayn. He was their creature and had waged an eight-year-long war on Islamic Iran at the behest of the US, Europe, and the oppressive monarchical regimes in the Muslim East. For failing in his assigned task, Saddam was hanged in December 2006. Bosnia is a fractured state but only last month French President Emmanuel Macron warned about the “danger” it posed to Europe. What possible danger could it pose when Bosnia’s economy is in shambles and there are deep divisions in its governing system? Macron’s fear arises from the fact that Bosnia is a predominantly Muslim state in the heart of Europe. This fact is unpalatable to the Islamophobic West.

The war-mongering narrative would be incomplete without mentioning India that is currently in the grip of Hindu fascists. Fascism, we are told, was defeated in the Second World War. The freedom-loving powers — Britain, France, the US and their allies — fought Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan and defeated them. Nazism and fascism were banished. But were they?

Today, fascism rides supreme in Hindu India. The ruling party and its storm troopers — the RSS, Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad — have made clear that there is no room for religious minorities, especially Muslims, in India. They must either convert to Hinduism or leave. If not, they will be physically eliminated.

Western powers that claim to have fought and defeated fascism in Europe have no qualms about consorting with Hindu fascists. Even worse, many of the unelected potentates in Muslim countries are also in bed with Indian fascists. Some have conferred their country’s highest civilian award on the Muslim-hating prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. Warmongers come in all shapes and forms and colors. Regardless, Muslims are their principal victims.

Zafar Bangash is Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT).

Guantanamo Gulag in the Context of Global War

Gitmo: torture the powerless while bowing to the emperor

Tahir Mahmoud

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once made the claim that the illegally occupied US-run Guantanamo Bay torture camp (aka Gitmo) held “the worst of the worst” terrorists. Those who watched CNN and other corporate Western media outlets when the gulag was just being erected will remember how they painted the detainees as absolute barbarians. Their line that “they deserve it,” was widely projected.

Today, the same corporate media that eagerly legitimized US aggression against Afghanistan and the need for a torture camp like Gitmo has changed its tune. Now it carries reports discussing violations of human rights of the remaining detainees at the Gitmo torture camp. Why did the propaganda machinery of Western neocolonialism change its tune? The answer is simple. The hard facts that the vast majority of detainees at Gitmo were simply caught up in the wrong place at wrong time became undeniable.

According to the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report of June 2018, “at least 780 people have been held at Guantanamo, the vast majority without charge or trial. Nine detainees have died there, six from suspected suicide. The US has transferred 732 to home or third countries, 533 during the George W. Bush regime and 144 during Barack Obama’s. Only one detainee has been released during the regime of current US President Donald Trump. Far from closing it, he has said he would like to lock up more people there, no doubt innocents, but ones who are opposed to US aggression worldwide.

On his second day in office in January 2009, Obama had promised to close Gitmo but by the end of his second term, 41 detainees still remained, including five that his regime had “designated for release.”

The above data from HRW clearly points to the fact that most of the people detained at Guantanamo Bay had nothing to do with terrorism. What is more horrifying about the data is the fact that the detainees were subjected to kangaroo style military courts, with minimum legal rights and still nothing could be pinned on them. Many American civil rights lawyers and activists have denounced the Gitmo military tribunal as a travesty of justice.

In 2008, the drumbeater for US military adventurism worldwide, Foreign Policy magazine, acknowledged, “Guantanamo has been a powerful recruitment tool for extremists and a stain on the reputation of the United States. Now we can say, with little doubt, that it did not even serve to remove terrorists or insurgents from the battlefield.” The bulletin magazine of US foreign policy of course put a “soft” spin on this crime by stating that “almost all of the detainees were turned over to US forces… for a hefty bounty or reward… contrary to standard law enforcement practice, the US military accepted the uncorroborated allegations of the award claimants with little independent investigation.”

While the story of the Guantanamo torture camp has gained worldwide attention, the wider phenomenon of US involvement in arbitrary imprisonment is being ignored. For decades Washington has been facilitating detention of innocent people in the Muslim world. The US role in training Savak, the notorious secret police of the Shah’s regime in Iran is widely known, but that is not the only locale the US was and is involved in detention and torture of innocent people. Washington outsources the dirty work of torture to illegitimate regimes it sustains in power throughout the Muslim world.

Only recently Trump referred to ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi as “my favorite dictator” during the G7 conference in France (August 24–26). This is something the world should be glad about, as Trump’s blatant stupidity has its positive side. It exposes the true colors of the US empire.

Washington’s torture industry is not only active in the Muslim world; it perfected its torture techniques in South America through the training facility located in Georgia, ironically called the School of the Americas (SOA). According to Ramona Wadi, a freelance journalist, a 2014 analysis by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Colombia-Europe-US Human Rights Observatory, found that “out of 25 Colombian graduates from 2001 to 2003, 12 had either been charged with ‘a serious crime or commanded units whose members had reportedly committed multiple extrajudicial killings.’”

The current detainees at Guantanamo gulag seem to be held not because of any credible evidence, but simply because the guards and managers at the torture camp do not like their non-compliant attitude. According to HRW, based on the latest information available, currently 40 people are held at the US-run gulag, two remain imprisoned after trial or accepted plea agreements with Guantanamo’s military commissions.

The Guantanamo saga is not merely the manifestation of Washington’s brutality; it is one of its many displays. Thus, when covering the abuses at Guantanamo, it is essential to address the root cause, which is the illegality of the US war on Afghanistan and its political background.

The corporate Western media conveniently ignores the fact that US Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel made several well-publicized trips to Kabul in September 1996 and in 1998. This was long after Osama bin Laden was wanted by the US and Washington knew that he was in Afghanistan. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban representatives was invited to the US to meet officials from the US oil company, UNOCAL. Given the US’ close relationship with Pakistani government officials and the Saudi regime, the Americans never requested the Taliban for Bin Laden’s extradition during that time. Even if the US did ask for extradition in 2001, of which there is little evidence barring Bush’s arrogant demand that the Taliban hand over Osama, Afghanistan did not have any extradition treaty with the US at the time.

Why did the US launch a war against Afghanistan for the 9/11 attacks when none of the perpetrators identified by the US was an Afghan citizen? According to the US, of the 19 alleged attackers, 15 were Saudis, two Emiratis, one Egyptian and one Lebanese. If there is one place the US army should have gone after, it should have been the palaces of the Saudi royals in Riyadh. Thus, when reporting about the Gitmo torture camp, this wider picture should never be ignored; it must be brought forward and highlighted.

America’s Multiple Wars on Muslims

Editor

People are aware of the wars the US wages against other countries. The list is endless. Since 9/11 — a false-flag operation to justify wars of aggression — the US has murdered millions of people. Countless others have been maimed. The US also maintains more than 800 military bases worldwide, one-third of which are in the Muslim East.

There is another type of war the US wages against ordinary Muslims, and some non-Muslims. These people live in Western countries, thus the US cannot bomb them directly. So, it uses other tactics. The US maintains millions of people on its no-fly list; many more are on its watch list.

People on the no-fly list are prohibited from flying to the US or even boarding a flight that goes over US territory. People on the watch list, while prohibited from entering the US, are required to obtain permission from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) before getting a boarding card to fly anywhere. To their lasting shame, many Western countries have succumbed to US bullying and accepted violations of the fundamental rights of their citizens who have committed no crime. Canada also falls under this category.

Once on the list, it is impossible to get off it. People have had to face long delays at airports waiting to get clearance for a boarding card to travel. There have been instances of people missing their flight because of DHS delays in giving timely clearance. Is America afraid, or does it simply want to terrorize these people?

 

US Biological Warfare

A toxic cocktail of germ warfare and big lies

Kevin Barrett

Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris (Kim) Newby; Pub: HarperCollins, New York, 2019, 336 pages. Price: $15.70 Pbk.

This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since by Dave Chaddock; Pub: Bennett & Hastings, Seattle, Wash., 2013, 392 pages. Price: $8.22 Pbk.

The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy by Graeme MacQueen; Pub: Clarity Press, Atlanta, Georgia, 2014, 216 pages. Price: $19.94 Pbk.

Ten years ago I interviewed Lyme disease researcher and filmmaker Timothy Grey on my radio show. Grey’s film Under the Eight-Ball recounts his harrowing experience watching his younger sister die of Lyme disease… and then learning that the American Establishment — including academia, big pharma, big media, the military, and the medical profession — are covering up the true nature, origin, scope, and threat of Lyme and related tick-borne diseases.

When I interviewed Timothy Grey in 2009 I had just been diagnosed with Lyme disease… 12 years late. I contacted Lyme in 1997, immediately developing most of the classic symptoms — including a grapefruit-size swollen ball on my knee, a grinding headache that rose and fell in intensity but never went away, chronic fatigue, occasional facial tics, insomnia, and joint damage that necessitated hip replacements while I was still in my mid-fifties. But the doctors refused to test for Lyme. They said the tests were unreliable and it was too expensive; and besides, I hadn’t noticed any red bullseye rash when the symptoms first appeared in 1997.

So I wasn’t diagnosed until the Summer of 2009, when I spent 45 days with a fever above 100 degrees that finally peaked at 105 — at which point my whole body suddenly broke out with dozens of bright red bullseye rashes. The emergency room physicians in Richland, Wisconsin, who are intimately familiar with Lyme symptoms, immediately diagnosed and treated me with three weeks of oral antibiotics. The symptoms receded. They disappeared entirely three years later, after I underwent a massive course of antibiotics (six weeks I.V., six months oral) for a staph infection contracted during hip replacement surgery (I am eternally grateful to Allah (swt) for sending me that life-threatening staph infection, which turned out to be a proverbial blessing in disguise).

During our 2009 interview, Timothy Grey told me that Lyme disease had been created in a lab by US government germ warfare scientists. He had even obtained a filmed confession from one of the scientists, Willy Burgdorfer, for whom the Lyme spirochete is named.

I believed Timothy Grey. But the mainstream authorities didn’t. The New York Times called Under the Eight-Ball “an anti-establishment tirade” “propelled by rage” in which “it’s impossible to know where verifiable science leaves off, and conspiracy theory begins.” Neither the Times nor any other mainstream journalistic outlet covered Willy Burgdorfer’s teary confession, captured on video by Timothy Grey, that he, Burgdorfer, had manufactured Lyme disease for a US germ warfare program, then spent the rest of his career lying about it.

Fortunately, award-winning Stanford University science writer Kris (Kim) Newby, a Lyme sufferer herself, understood the significance of Burgdorfer’s confession — and had the courage to launch her own investigation, despite insider warnings that “this is the kind of stuff people get killed over.” The result is Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, which establishes, with full mainstream credibility, that Timothy Grey was right all along. Though many details will remain murky until more whistleblowers step forward, it is now undeniable that Lyme disease is a US government engineered bioweapon, not a naturally-occurring pathogen.

Many people find it hard to believe that the US military would run its germ warfare programs so recklessly that a monstrous scourge like Lyme disease could emerge from one of General Frankenstein’s labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland, or Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, or the Plum Island Animal Disease Center just a few miles from Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease first appeared. Surely the United States of America, a liberal democracy with a relatively free media, would carry out only minimal germ warfare research, for purely defensive purposes, only when urgently necessary, under the most stringent safeguards. And surely it would never actually use such a weapon in anger. And if anything like this had ever happened, our free and independent media would quickly expose it. Right?

Those who still think the American Establishment is benevolent should consult Newby’s Bitten, then read two more books that provide essential historical context on the Pentagon’s shameful history of biological warfare: Dave Chaddock’s This Must Be the Place, which chronicles the US military’s massive use of bioweapons during its genocidal Korean war; and Graeme MacQueen’s The 2001 Anthrax Deception, which demonstrates that the same domestic coup-plotters who orchestrated the 9/11 false-flag event were also responsible for mailing US-military-weaponized anthrax to media outlets and members of Congress, in order to terrorize Congress into passing the USA PATRIOT Act and acquiescing to 9/11. Taken together, the two books demonstrate that those in charge of US biowar programs are not just wildly reckless and grossly unethical, but downright psychopathic. These revelations, and others like them, show that the US, far from being a liberal democracy with a free and critical media, is an oligarchical war criminal dictatorship with a controlled propaganda apparatus.

Chaddock’s book turns the received narrative of North Korean and Chinese “brainwashing” American prisoners-of-war on its head. As Chaddock shows, the numerous detailed confessions by American servicemen who admitted to dropping bioweapons on Korea are entirely credible and supported by extensive corroborating evidence, including military documents. The confessions, far from being elicited under duress, were the product of China’s (and to a lesser extent North Korea’s) shockingly humane, even friendly treatment of American prisoners. The Chinese had learned during their revolution that if you treat war prisoners well, and spread the news, enemy soldiers get the message and surrender much more readily than they otherwise would. Chaddock cites abundant documentation that captured Americans were typically greeted with hugs, a cigarette, good food, decent quarters, good medical treatment, and other amenities. Only escapees and extremely uncooperative prisoners received harsher treatment. Prisoners and their captors discussed politics and international affairs over meals and cigarettes, and developed friendly relationships. The result was that about 80% of US prisoners came over to their Communist captors’ point of view, agreeing that the US war on Korea was criminal or misguided. Only about one in five prisoners continued to view their captors as “the enemy.”

It is easy to see how, in such an atmosphere, American prisoners would confess their war crimes. And they did. When they returned home, they were browbeaten by military superiors and forced to lie. To cover up its massive use of cholera and plague-bearing fleas during the war, the American high command invented the term “brainwashing” and insisted that somehow the Communists had figured out how to make American servicemen say terrible things about their country. Today, thanks to Dave Chaddock and other researchers, we know that those terrible things, and much more, were true.

Though the US blithely murdered more than three million civilians in Korea, bombing every city, town, and village to rubble, while dropping 400,000 germ bombs on Ponyang alone according to Korean historians, and then lied about these and other matters in perpetuity, surely it wouldn’t ever use bioweapons against its own people. Would it? While I assume (or at least hope) the release of US military engineered Lyme disease was an accident, the same cannot be said of the 2001 false-flag anthrax attacks analyzed in Graeme MacQueen’s The 2001 Anthrax Deception.

Unlike 9/11, the follow-up anthrax attacks are officially deemed, by the US government itself, to have been false flags from within the US bioweapons complex designed to whip up hatred of Muslims. The American government admits it wasn’t Muslims who mailed US government anthrax to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, the two Senators blocking passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, in envelopes bearing the message: “Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” A number of journalists got similar envelopes. Twenty-two people, including postal workers, were sickened, and five died.

So if it wasn’t radical Muslims, then who did it? The official scapegoat is the conveniently suicided Bruce Ivins, senior biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland. But Graeme MacQueen, Founding Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, shows that the real perpetrators were the same insiders who orchestrated 9/11,

All evidence indicates that the master narrative of the fall [anthrax] attacks had been established prior to 9/11 — inter alia setting up Iraq through false statements about its anthrax supplies and means of delivery… (p.139).

MacQueen shows that the individuals set up to be blamed for the 9/11 “hijackings” were also set up in advance to be blamed for the anthrax attacks. When the FBI’s relatively honest preliminary investigation showed the anthrax was of American provenance, and couldn’t have come from Iraq, the 9/11-anthrax coup perpetrators were forced to change their story and suppress or downplay all of the many links they had created between the anthrax attacks and the 9/11 hijacker patsies.

The horror stories briefly summarized above show that US bioweapons programs are in the hands of madmen — and have been for almost seven decades. The damage caused by biowar programs, including the sickening and deaths of countless Koreans by plague and cholera, and the suffering, death, and partial or total disabling of millions of people afflicted with Lyme disease, is incalculable.

But all of these millions of deaths and injuries could be dwarfed by what the future will bring. Advances in biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, have vastly expanded the potential for bioweaponized malfeasance. Biological agents that kill or disable people slowly and undetectably, including race-specific bioweapons, are on the horizon. If perpetrators are not held to account for past crimes, and if we don’t insist that international conventions banning bioweapons be strictly enforced, we will be facing an even more nightmarish future.

 

Kevin Barrett

War on Their Mind

America: well on its way to becoming a sh**hole country

Waseem Shehzad

Last April, former US President Jimmy Carter made a profound and damning statement: the United States is the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Carter is no starry-eyed revolutionary. He provided evidence from US history stating that in its 242-year existence, the US has been at war for all but 17 years. This is a pretty damning indictment of a country’s record.

This of course runs contrary to the self-crafted image of the US as a force for good and a “shining light on the hill.” While this is the official narrative, the American people cannot escape blame for their country’s war addiction and must accept responsibility for not doing more to confront the warmongers — after all, the US is the original contemporary democracy in which the people are one with their decision makers and thus ultimately accountable for their actions. The warmongers comprise a tiny minority that former President Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” and warned against their excessive influence in US decision-making. Today, they have expanded to include bankers as well as Zionists — of all faiths: Jewish and Christian. This cabal is now commonly referred to as the neocons.

Looking at the pattern of US behavior, it becomes clear that Washington warlords are constantly stoking fears and instigating wars. One does not have to go too far back into history to find the evidence. There has not been a single day since 9/11 that the US has not been at war, often in multiple theatres.

Let us list some of the countries where the US is at war or has helped warlords wage war on its behalf. Dirt-poor Afghanistan was the first country that the US invaded in October 2001. Ruled by the Taliban who were demonized as “primitive” and “savages,” the Americans bombed the country beyond the Stone Age. Reason? The US accused the Taliban of harboring Osama bin Laden who was in turn accused of being the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, a charge he vehemently denied even though he praised the act. Even the FBI did not charge Osama with the 9/11 attacks.

That “honor” fell to Khalid Shaykh Muhammad who has been endlessly tortured, including water boarding, in several dark sites around the world. Now held in the Guantanamo Bay hellhole, the ignominiously disgraceful Americans have not been able to convict him so far even by the military tribunal universally denounced as a kangaroo court.

To complete the Afghan story, after using every weapon against the Taliban in Afghanistan for nearly 19 years, the Americans are now begging them for peace and a safe exit out of the country. So much for the sole superpower and its “beautiful wea-pons” that failed to subdue the Taliban because the latter were motivated by faith, a factor unknown to American warmongers. In any case, oppressors have little motivation; if they can kill the largest number of people and get the hell out quickly, fine, otherwise they develop feet of clay.

While the Americans were still involved in Afghanistan together with tens of allies — the so-called coalition of the willing — they invaded Iraq. Again, Americans had initial successes but soon got bogged down in the Iraqi desert and faced a determined resistance forcing them to leave the country. They are back in Iraq, this time under the pretext of training Iraqi troops. Americans have been doing the same in Afghanistan but with little success. How is it that American training is unable to create a credible Afghan army while the Taliban without any formal military training are able to give a bloody nose to the heavily-armed arrogant Americans?

The other theatre where the Americans have been heavily involved is Syria. Again, despite eight years of bloodletting, the regime change project has failed miserably. This was not for lack of trying. The Syrian regime project had been in the works since 2005. Syrian opposition groups were groomed and financed all these years and then unleashed in Syria with mercenaries flooding in from all over the world but thanks to the help and support of Hizbullah and Iran, and much later of Russia (September 2015), the conspiracy was thwarted.

The Syrian destabilization and regime change campaign was part of a broader plan to undermine Islamic Iran. This has been the US agenda ever since its favorite puppet, the Shah, was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Defeat of the conspiracy in Syria not only prevented the government from being overthrown but it also exposed the other conspirators: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, Turkey, Britain, France, Qatar, Jordan and a host of others. Syrian government forces are on the verge of liberating the last stronghold of the takfiri terrorists holed up in Idlib.

True, the conspirators had much greater success in Libya where Muammar al-Qadhdhafi was overthrown and then publicly lynched by mobs backed and financed by the US and its allies. Libya, however, has been left in shambles with lawlessness gripping the entire country.

One other arena in the Muslim East where the US and its Arabian puppets have faced humiliation is Yemen. It is interesting to note that the announcement to attack Yemen in March 2015 was made not in Riyadh but from the Saudi embassy in Washington, DC. Yemen was supposed to fall in two weeks, if not sooner. This was supposed to be Saudi defence minister Muhammad bin Salman’s crowning military achievement. Despite more than four years of heavy bombardment of the poorest country in the Muslim East, the Ansarallah fighters have not given up. Instead, they have started to inflict painful punishment on the Saudi invaders, targeting their airfields, destroying drones, and other ordnance as well as killing many Saudi soldiers. The Saudis are clearly looking for a way out of the quagmire they are stuck in.

The story is equally grim for the Americans in Venezuela and North Korea. It is becoming increasingly clear that imperialism’s regime change agenda is no longer working.

Despite repeated failures in multiple theatres, the mainstream media have reacted to Trump’s war plans with disappointment. They accuse him of not being presidential enough because he has failed to embark on other military adventures. One of the principal cheerleaders for war is the New York Times. In a May 11 article, the Times wrote, “Trump Said He Would Tame Rogue Nations. Now They Are Challenging Him.” This, according to the Times, is unacceptable. Others must bow to the US.

It was also the Times that in August 2002 had carried a series of articles by Judith Miller about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. That false information was fed to Miller by the office of then US Vice President Dick Cheney. Miller knew the information was false but she lapped it up and the New York Times gave it front-page space leading to the disastrous war on Iraq in March 2003.

America’s aggressive conduct is not lost on citizens of the world. How could it when they are subjected to US cruise missiles and other exotic weaponry blowing their families and children to pieces? In two global polls, they ranked the US as the greatest threat to world peace.

Two leading American economists — Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and Linda Bilmass — have tabulated the US costs of wars at $5 trillion since 2001. Of this, $1 trillion have been spent in Afghanistan from where the Americans are desperately trying to extricate themselves now.

American war veterans have been left to fend for themselves. On average, ten of them commit suicide daily. This annual attrition rate is higher than the total US casualties in Afghanistan in 18 years.

The other casualty of America’s endless wars is the collapsing infrastructure. At least 1,000 bridges on highways are in need of repairs, as are most highways. Parts of America’s inner cities resemble war zones with dilapidated buildings, broken glass, and piled-up old automobiles.

America may have the highest GDP in the world but that has failed to lift 40 million people out of poverty. At least 44 million children are without medical coverage. America is not one country; it is multiple worlds: first world, second world, and third world.

So the question that must be asked is: why is America so addicted to war when it could use the trillions of dollars on lifting its own people out of poverty? The fact is, America’s ruling elite do not care for the well-being of the people. Their only obsession is to make profit. And war is extremely profitable business: for every dollar invested in the weapons industry, there is a return of $3. Nowhere else can such high returns be realized, barring of course the casino economy of derivatives. But that is a risky undertaking. Just as billions or trillions can be made, they can just as easily be lost as happened in 2008. There is no such risk in making, using, and selling weapons, hence the constant need for more wars, even if the US cannot win them!

To return to Carter’s comments, he contrasted the US with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while America is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Not surprisingly, there are no high-speed trains in the United States. There is no money to build them.

Tanker Tensions in the Persian Gulf

Zafar Bangash 

Tiny poverty-stricken Britain pompously calls itself “great” Britain. It often tries to punch above its weight in global politics. Its latest foray on the world stage occurred on July 4 when it illegally seized the Iranian oil tanker, Grace 1, as it was entering the Mediterranean Sea. Britain claimed it acted at the request of Gibraltar, a tiny island with a total population of 300,000. Britain’s illegal occupation of the island is contested by Spain.

Naturally, Iran was upset at what it described as Britain’s “maritime piracy.” It demanded the tanker, which was carrying two million barrels of oil, be immediately released. Britain alleged the oil cargo was destined to Syria that is under unilateral European Union (EU) sanctions. Tehran dismissed the allegation saying the Syrian port of Baniyas cannot accommodate a tanker of this size. Even Carl Bildt, the former Swedish Prime Minister pointed out that since Iran is not a member of the EU, it is not obliged to abide by EU sanctions. Britain is trying to enforce extraterritorial jurisdiction on another country.

Iran not only demanded the immediate release of its oil tanker but also warned that should Britain persist in its belligerent act, undertaken at Washington’s behest, Tehran would be forced to take retaliatory steps.

This is what happened on July 19 when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) impounded the British-flagged tanker Stena Impero in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran said it took the action because the British vessel was violating international maritime rules. It had turned its transponder off as it sailed through the exit and not the designated entry point of the Strait of Hormuz. Both are illegal acts since they pose serious risk to maritime shipping. It “collided with a fishing boat on its route and, according to law, after an accident it is necessary that the causes are investigated,” said Allah-Morad Afifipoor, head of Ports and Maritime Organization in Iran’s southern Hormozgan Province.

Despite the fishing boat contacting the British vessel it did not receive any response. So the boat crew informed the Hormozgan maritime organization “according to legal procedures.” When IRGC naval units arrived, they also discovered the British tanker was spilling oil residues in the Persian Gulf waters, causing environmental pollution.

Such illegal conduct is all too common among Western regimes that dump their pollutants in other countries’ waters or poison their soil by dumping depleted uranium. But dumping toxic waste is only one aspect of the West’s atrocious conduct. Britain, which has been acting at the behest of its US master, is trying to box in Iran in its own neighborhood. And the US in turn is under total Zionist domination. The Arabian statelets of the Persian Gulf are too insignificant to matter — although they fork out hundreds of billions of dollars to the US and Britain as protection money for security guarantees.

The tanker crisis in the Persian Gulf is the direct result of US aggression against Iran. While never on good terms since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, tension escalated further since Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. The US has also imposed illegal sanctions on Iran in complete violation of all international norms. Donald Trump and his minions have vowed to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero. In other words, they want to force Iran to surrender.

Iran is not prepared to do so. It has made clear that if it cannot export oil, nobody else would be allowed to either. Iran completely controls the Strait of Hormuz. Based on maritime law, Iran allows passage to friendly vessels that pose no threat to its interests. Neither British nor American vessels can be considered friendly. Their hostility threatens Iran’s very survival. Under such circumstances, the Islamic Republic is left with no choice but to defend its interests by whatever means necessary.

Iran occupies the entire length of the Persian Gulf’s east coast. Security and stability are of vital importance to Tehran. British and American intrusion in the region, coming from thousands of miles away, is a source of great instability. It is further aggravated by the Western sale of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to illegitimate Arabian regimes.

The situation in the Persian Gulf is fraught with grave danger. If it escalates to a shooting war, the US, Britain, and their allies would be entirely responsible. As several Iranian officials have warned, “the US may start a war, it will be Iran that will end it.” And it cannot be ruled out that the entire region will go up in flames with such illegitimate regimes as the Wahhabis in Arabia and the Zionists in Colonized Palestine being consigned to the dustbin of history.

American warmongers, beware!

Zafar Bangash is Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT).

 

Zafar Bangash