American Policing Needs To Be Radically Reformulated

taibbi |  Even as rates of both violent crime and property crime have been decreasing steadily since the early nineties, rates of incarceration have been exploding in the other direction. For most of the 20th century the rate of incarceration in America was roughly 110 per 100,000 people. As of last year, the number was 655 per 100,000. Although the numbers have dipped slightly in recent years, down from a high of about 760 per 100,000 in 2013, the quantity of prisoners in America remains absurdly high. 

Such aggressive, military-style policing would be not be tolerated by voters if it were taking place everywhere. It’s popular, and continues to be embraced by politicians in both parties, because it’s only happening in “those” neighborhoods (or, as Mike Bloomberg once put it, “where the crime is”). Even during the Covid-19 crisis, 80% of the summonses for social distancing violations are given out to blacks and Hispanics. Does anyone really think that minorities account for that massive a percentage of those violations? Do they think black people really commit 3.73 times as many marijuana offenses as white people? 

Basically we have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else. In the same way our army in Vietnam got in trouble when it started searching for ways to quantify the success of its occupation, choosing sociopathic metrics like “body counts” and “truck kills,” modern big-city policing has been corrupted by its lust for summonses, stops, and arrests. It’s made monsters where none needed to exist.

Because they’re constantly throwing those people against walls, writing them nuisance tickets, and violating their space with humiliating searches (New York in 2010 paid $33 million to a staggering 100,000 people strip-searched after misdemeanor charges), modern cops correctly perceive that they’re hated. As a result, many embrace a “warrior” ethos that teaches them to view themselves as under constant threat.  

This is why you see so many knees on heads and necks, guns drawn on unarmed motorists, chokeholds by the thousand, and patterns of massive overkill everywhere – 41 shots fired at Amadou Diallo, 50 at Sean Bell, 137 at Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in Cleveland, and homicides over twenty bucks or a loose cigarette. 

Police are trained to behave like occupiers, which is why they increasingly dress like they’ve been sent to clear houses in Mosul and treat random motorists like potential car-bombers – think of poor Philando Castile, shot seven times by a police officer who leaped back firing in panic like he was being attacked by Freddy Krueger, instead of a calm, compliant, educated young man. Officers with histories of abuse complaints like Daniel Pantaleo and Derek Chauvin are kept on the force because senior officers value police who make numbers more than they fear outrage from residents in their districts. The incentives in this system are wrong in every direction.

The current protests are likely to inspire politicians to think the other way, but it’s probably time to reconsider what we’re trying to accomplish with this kind of policing. In upscale white America drug use is effectively decriminalized, and Terry stops, strip searches, and “quality of life” arrests are unknowns. The country isn’t going to heal as long as everyone else gets a knee in the neck. 

Uh.., About That New 4-F Medical Disqualification From "Selective Service"...,

livescience |  After the new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 enters the human body, it seems to reach sites well beyond the lungs — it's been found in the kidneys, heart, liver and gastrointestinal tract. And now, researchers have detected the virus in semen, according to a small study.

However, the findings, published Thursday (May 7) in the journal JAMA Network Open, don't necessarily mean that the virus can be sexually transmitted through contact with semen.

The study involved 38 men in Shangqiu, China, who had tested positive for COVID-19 and were experiencing symptoms of the disease or had recently recovered. Participants provided semen samples, which doctors analyzed for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The researchers detected SARS-CoV-2 in sperm from six participants, or 16% overall. Of these, four patients were currently experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, and two patients had recently recovered.  Fist tap Big Don

WELP - THAT SPLAINS THAT!!!

npr |   The nation's top military officer says the Pentagon is still weighing its options when it comes to recruitment and COVID-19, several days after an internal memo surfaced publicly that suggested all recovered patients would be ineligible to join the military. That interim guidance was revised Wednesday to suggest that only those who had been hospitalized would be disqualified — but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Mark Milley, told NPR that even the latest version remains just a draft.

"During the medical history interview or examination, a history of COVID-19, confirmed by either a laboratory test or a clinician diagnosis, is permanently disqualifying," officials stated in the earlier version of the document, which the Pentagon has confirmed as authentic.  Fist tap Dale.

Surprise, Surprise..., U.S. Bioweapons Research Yields Early Coronavirus Detection

Guardian |  Scientists working for the US military have designed a new Covid-19 test that could potentially identify carriers before they become infectious and spread the disease, the Guardian has learned.

In what could be a significant breakthrough, project coordinators hope the blood-based test will be able to detect the virus’s presence as early as 24 hours after infection – before people show symptoms and several days before a carrier is considered capable of spreading it to other people. That is also around four days before current tests can detect the virus.

The test has emerged from a project set up by the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) aimed at rapid diagnosis of germ or chemical warfare poisoning. It was hurriedly repurposed when the pandemic broke out and the new test is expected to be put forward for emergency use approval (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within a week.

“The concept fills a diagnostic gap worldwide,” the head of Darpa’s biological technologies office, Dr Brad Ringeisen, told the Guardian, since it should also fill in testing gaps at later stages of the infection. If given FDA approval, he said, it had the potential to be “absolutely a gamechanger”.

While pre-infectious detection would improve the efficiency of test-and-trace programmes as governments worldwide relax lockdowns, Darpa cautioned that it must wait until after FDA approval is given and the test can be put into practise for evidence of exactly how early it can pick up the virus.

“The goal of research is to develop and validate an early host blood response diagnostic test for Covid,” Prof Stuart Sealfon, who leads the research team at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, said in an email.

He said the testing approach, which looks at the body’s response as it fights Covid-19, should produce earlier results than current nose-swab tests that hunt for the virus itself. “Because the immune response to infection develops immediately after infection, a Covid signature is expected to provide more sensitive Covid infection diagnosis earlier,” he told the Guardian.

The research behind the development of the tests will eventually be made public, with the collaborating teams from medical schools at Mount Sinai, Duke University and Princeton expected to publish online, allowing scientists around the world to trial similar methods.

If EUA is granted, the test should start being rolled out in the US in the second half of May. Approval is not guaranteed, but Darpa scientists are enthusiastic about the potential impact as governments loosen lockdowns amid worries about controlling potential second-wave outbreaks.

Washington Talm'Some Ole Bullshit - Fired Resigned Dept. Sec. Navy Mobly Talm'bout WW-III

SCMP |  Even if Congress is able to return to regular business in the coming months, attention from legislative matters will quickly be pulled away again – this time by election season. In the run-up to November 3, not only will President Trump be seeking re-election, but most members of the House and around a third of the Senate will also be absorbed in fights to stay in office.

“In an election year, really anything after July is not likely to happen,” said Chris Lu, a former House oversight committee lawyer who later served as Barack Obama’s White House cabinet secretary.

“This will be an incredibly short legislating year with the exception of, obviously, continuing to provide relief and possible stimulus [relating to the coronavirus outbreak],” said Lu, who also served as a commissioner on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, an influential advisory panel on human rights issues in the country.

Neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – one of Beijing’s most vocal critics – or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to requests for comment on whether they anticipated scheduling floor time for any of the China-related bills that still await votes. One House aide on the Democratic side, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the chance of any non-coronavirus legislation moving ahead was “pretty, pretty limited”.

Yet despite the narrowing window for China-related legislation to reach Trump by January, many lawmakers are pressing ahead, both with intensifying rhetoric and several pieces of legislation about Beijing’s handling of the outbreak.

“Not much of what gets proposed or introduced in the upcoming days [regarding China] will become policy, but everyone wants to message that they’re on it,” said a senior congressional staffer, who requested anonymity to discuss lawmakers’ internal deliberations.

In March alone, lawmakers introduced at least 20 China-related bills, ranging from demands that China pay for the US pandemic costs to calls for an international investigation of Beijing’s coronavirus response.

With criticism intensifying about the US government’s own response, Republicans’ complaints have become ever louder. On Friday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proclaimed on Twitter that the Chinese government was “responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million Americans being unemployed”.

If You Want to Go to War..., I'll Take You There!

wsws |  “White privilege,” “wealthy elites,” “mansplainers,” “old white people,” “ivory tower elites.” These are just a few of the epithets hurled at me and the four historians I joined in protesting the flawed and inaccurate history presented in the New York Times’s 1619 Project. A quick pass through Twitter reveals that some historians are “ashamed of,” even “heartbroken by,” our letter to the Times editor. One historian chastised us for criticizing the 1619 Project at a time when our “republic” is so dangerously divided! Really, historians? Is it no longer our right or responsibility to critique works of history, at least not when they’re about a long, ugly episode of our nation’s history? Does history not have to be accurate if the subjects were truly victims, as enslaved Americans surely were? But I digress.

On August 18, 2019, the New York Times released its highly-touted 1619 Project, featuring historical essays and original literary works aimed at “reframing” American history with a new founding date—1619, the year that 20 or more Africans were brought to Virginia—to replace 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. The project offers slavery and its legacies to contemporary American society as the nation’s central defining features. New York Times journalist and project director Nikole Hannah-Jones provides the project’s “intellectual framework,” which posits slavery as the dominant feature of North American settlement, and the American Revolution as a duplicitous movement designed to protect slavery from its abolition by the British Empire. Hannah-Jones urges that we remember Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln first and foremost for their racism rather than their ideals of nationhood. Her assertions on these topics were forcefully critiqued by historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and James Oakes in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), and by Sean Wilentz in the New York Times Review of Books (NYTR). My own criticisms, in an interview with the WSWS, centered on the Project’s historical treatment of class and race. I elaborate here on those remarks.

After reframing the meaning of the American Revolution, Hannah-Jones moves on to the Civil War and Reconstruction, barely touching on American abolitionism and ignoring the free soil movement, though both were seeds of the antislavery Republican Party. In discussing the nation’s wrenching effort to reconstruct itself after the Civil War, she asserts that “blacks worked for the most part. .. alone” to free themselves and push for full rights of citizenship through passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. Rightly emphasizing the vigilante white violence that immediately followed the victories of a Republican-dominated Congress, she ignores important exceptions, including the Southern white “Scalawags,” many of whom were nonslaveholders who fought against the Confederacy in the war and participated with blacks and Northern Republicans in passing the Reconstruction Amendments.

Identity Politics When You're Concocting a Hoax? NYTimes1619 Project Some Bullshidt....,

wsws |  Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project

Historian Victoria Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), spoke to the World Socialist Web Site’s Eric London on the historical falsifications involved in the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

The 1619 Project, launched by the Times in August, presents American history in a purely racial lens and blames all “white people” for the enslavement of 4 million black people as chattel property.

Bynum is an expert on the attitude of Southern white yeomen farmers and impoverished people toward slavery. Her book The Free State of Jones studied efforts by anti-slavery and anti-confederate militia leader Newton Knight, who abandoned the Confederate army and led an armed insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was adapted for the big screen in Gary Ross’s 2016 film Free State of Jones.

Who Decides U.S. Foreign Policy?

thenation |  President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where, he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente (“cooperation”) with Moscow.

And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear. 

Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president’s thinking about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.

Regime Change in Mexico - Conspicuously Obvious to the Casual Observer...,

thegrayzone |  AMLO’s left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.

On November 27 — a day after declaring Nicaragua a “national security threat” — Trump announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”

Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.

The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.

Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central America.

These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed, trained, and funded far-right Islamist extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from Washington when he was fighting against Russia.

The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to cartels in Mexico.

Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration’s designation of cartels as terrorists, “They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security.”

“Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in Mexico?” Duarte asked.

Trump Is Crystal Clear About Our Oil and Gas

oilprice |  Ever since the U.S. signalled through its effective withdrawal from Syria that it now has little interest in becoming involved in military actions in the Middle East, the door has been fully opened to China and Russia to advance their ambitions in the region. For Russia, the Middle East offers a key military pivot from which it can project influence West and East and that it can use to capture and control massive oil and gas flows in both directions as well. For China, the Middle East – and, absolutely vitally, Iran and Iraq – are irreplaceable stepping stones towards Europe for its era-defining ‘One Belt, One Road’ project. Earlier this week an announcement was made by Iraq’s Oil Ministry that highlights each of these factors at play, through a relatively innocuous-sounding contract award to a relatively unknown Chinese firm.

Specifically, it was announced that China Petroleum Engineering & Construction Corp (CPECC) has been awarded a US$121 million engineering contract to upgrade the facilities that are used to extract gas during crude oil production at the supergiant West Qurna-1 oilfield in Iraq, 50 kilometres northwest of the principal oil hub of Basra. The project is due to be completed within 27 months and aims to increase the capture of gas currently being flared across the site. Two factors that were not highlighted in the general announcement were firstly that CPECC is a subsidiary of China’s principal political proxy in the oil and gas sector, China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), and secondly that the gas capture project will also include the development of the oil reserves at West Qurna 1. The current level of oil reserves at West Qurna 1 is just under nine billion barrels but, crucially, the site is part of the overall massive West Qurna reservoir that comprises at least 43 billion barrels of crude oil reserves. “For China, it’s always all about positioning itself so that it is perfectly placed to expand its foothold,” a senior oil and gas industry source who works closely with Iraq’s Oil Ministry told OilPrice.com earlier this week. 

Certainly it makes sense for Iraq to finally begin to monetise its associated gas that it has been burnt off for decades as a product of its burgeoning oil production. Aside from the negative environmental impact of this practice, there is the bizarre practical result that Iraq – which holds some of the biggest oil and gas reserves in the world – has to go to its neighbour Iran every year and beg for electricity imports to plug the huge power deficits that afflict it, particularly during the summer months. As it stands, Iraq has been steadily importing around one third of its total energy supplies from Iran, which equates to around 28 million cubic feet (mcf) of gas to feed its power stations. Even with these extra supplies, frequent daily power outages across Iraq occur and have been a prime catalyst for widespread protests in the past, including last year. The situation is also likely to become worse if change does not occur as, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Iraq’s population is growing at a rate of over one million per year, with electricity demand set to double by 2030, reaching about 17.5 gigawatts average.

Apart from this, burning gas associated with the production of crude oil is costing Iraq billions of dollars in lost revenues. It loses money in the first place because in order to try to minimise power shortages, Iraq is forced to burn crude oil directly at power plants that it could sell in the open market for currently well over US$55 per barrel (and the lifting cost per barrel in Iraq is just US$2 on average). In this context, the average volume of crude oil used for power generation has fallen in the past two years from a peak of 223,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2015 but it still averages around 110,000 bpd, or around US$2.25 billion per year in value. It costs Iraq money in the second place because this associated gas that is flared could itself either be sold off directly or in LNG form or used as high-quality feedstock to finally truly kick-start the country’s long-stalled petrochemicals industry that itself could generate massive added-value product revenue streams. According to the IEA, Iraq has around 3.5 trillion cubic metres (tcm) of proven reserves of gas - mainly associated - which would be enough to supply nearly 200 years of Iraq’s current consumption of gas, as long as flaring is minimised. It added, though, that proven reserves do not provide an accurate picture of Iraq’s long-term production potential and that the underlying resource base – ultimately recoverable resources – is significantly larger, at 8 tcm or more.

Why Trump Aims to Get PAID for Access to Africom Infrastructure...,

theduran |  In Part 2 we examine the geopolitical associations in Africa which vary by nation, where major powers have a vested interest in a particular resource causing that major power to assume an aggressive posture to ‘protect’ its national interest by dominating or subverting the African state, in possession of that resource.

Typically those resources include natural gas, oil, gold, diamonds, silver, uranium, coal, rare earth elements and minerals, etc.  Thus the major powers have their ‘client states’ in pursuance of the extraction of those resources, where that extraction may result in corruption, confrontation, armed aggression, and even support for terrorist organizations in those states.

In this post-Colonial era the extraction of resources by the major powers in a region where the indigenous people are exhorted to have their own right to self-determination is a significant challenge to global corporations, and former colonial occupiers in Africa like Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, etc.

When corporate interests either collide or collude with state interests the local insurrection may be severe as mining giant Rio Tinto discovered in Bougainville. Other examples include coal and natural gas in Mozambique; uranium and gold in Niger and Mali; oil in Sudan; diamonds in the Central African Republic, and so on.

France in Africa

Perhaps the most notable component for NATO – specifically for France – is the uranium needed to run its nuclear operations. Most of that uranium originates in Africa even though France has reduced its capacity for nuclear power. Even so, France still receives in excess of two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power via the former Areva Corporation, now called Framatome.

The uranium mined for Framatome’s nuclear reactors is commonly found in the Sahel region of Africa where most of France’s uranium comes from, primarily northern Niger and Mali. Chad** and Mauritania also possess enormous reserves of the dangerous material. Mali is the fourth-largest supplier of gold too, and with falling registered gold reserves and the already accomplished confiscation of gold by the west from its failed states Mali makes an especially attractive target… particularly for the EU’s struggling banks.

After the indigenous people of the Sahel suffered serious illness from the effect of uranium mining – where drinking water is frequently contaminated – activist leader Almoustapha Alhacen and NGO Aghirin cooperated to oppose France’s corrupt mining giant Areva in Niger and Mali after 2001.

By 2006-2009 the protests and strikes in Agadez and Mali became effective versus Areva. And by 2011 – surprisingly coincident with Hillary Clinton’s “Arab Spring” – mysterious new terror cells appeared in the Sahel subsequent to the NATO destruction of Gaddafi’s government, including:

• Movement for Oneness Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) funded by France/Morocco Intel
• Ansar Dine funded by France/Morocco Intelligence Services
• Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) funded by the United States of America CIA

Prior to 2011, a Tuareg rebellion led by the Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) had some success versus the Malian government and versus Areva. The MNLA is a legitimate secular rebel group and is not funded by any western intelligence service. MNLA’s success eventually led to air and ground assaults by France in Mali in Operation Serval (with bases in Bamako and N’Djamena) by 2014.

Under the guise of striking al Qaeda and ISIL in Africa – a continent where those groups did not  exist prior to 2010 – France invoked air strikes and ground assaults versus the indigenous  people  who have been most effective in their resistance to Areva.

How Come We Never Hear About NATO in Africa?

theduran |  Russia’s intent in Africa – whatever it may be – is certainly as misunderstood now as it was leading up to the Suez crisis of 1956. That crisis led to a dangerous and pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Nasser’s Egypt hatched in a crackpot conspiracy involving Israel, France, and Britain.

The potential parallel to Suez in 1956 re NATO versus Russia in Africa today is not altogether preposterous. Because there is another side to the coin in what appears to be a nascent Russian Federation attempt at taming Africa for its own — and perhaps China’s! — corporate interests, being the toxic effect of AFRICOM/ NATO and its abject mismanagement of resources and subversion of the African right to progressive state self-determination.

That’s because the United States and NATO operate the largest military infrastructure in Africa with thirty-four bases (some secret) and thirty new US military or NATO construction projects underway in Africa spanning four countries.

The US military has more sites in Niger – five, including Niamey, Ouallam, Arlit, Maradi, and a secret base in Dirkou – than all other countries combined in Western Africa.

Chebelley drone base in Djibouti is the largest drone base in the world where the US can strike any target in the Sahel or for that matter Iran. And AFRICOM is building a larger base, Niger Air Base 201 in Agadez, capable of striking Algeria or any location in the Sahel region while the US operates a secret drone base in Tunisia (Sidi Ahmed) now opposed by president Qays Sayed (Kais Saied).

There are five more bases in Somalia including secret bases supporting AFRICOM’s ‘Lightning Brigade’ also known as the Danab Advanced Infantry Brigade. Now guess who is training the Danab? Private US military contractors of course, Bancroft Global Development.

Kenya sports four more US military bases including Manda Bay and Mombasa, where the Manda bay base has consistently launched US drone strikes against Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq. There are three more secret US/NATO base locations located along the Libyan coast to carry out drone strikes as far-ranging as Pakistan.

Then there is Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti where approximately 4,000 US and NATO personnel are stationed. Camp Lemonnier is claimed to be the ‘only permanent US base in Africa’ – perhaps because so many new US/NATO bases are under construction while many of the rest are secret or simply addressed by some arcane acronym known only to the military.

Cameroon, Mali, and Chad also host what the US military calls ‘contingency locations’ no doubt leveraged by NATO in its rather lame attempt to control the Sahel. They include Garoua drone base, Douala, and Salak …  bases which train private military contractors and track US drone strikes versus the immortal and indestructible Boko Haram terrorists, of course.

Another secret US base in Chad is the historic site of Faya Largeau. The present operational status of Faya Largeau is of course officially unknown. Gabon’s Libreville location exists to allow US military or NATO quick access for a rapid influx of US forces analogous to the base in Dakar, Senegal, which serves the same strategic purpose.

The list of NATO and US bases in Africa (whether secret or not) might continue on, however hopefully the point has been made that the mighty US/NATO presence in Africa extends far beyond the imagination of even the most devoted follower of military affairs.

That such a behemoth of an operation as represented by the US/NATO military presence in Africa could be seriously undermined by an influx of a small number of lightly armed and under-resourced Russian military contractors is not only laughable, but patently absurd.

How the DEA Invented NarcoTerrorism...,

propublica  |  On Sept. 11, 2001, when
 American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, DEA agents were among the first to respond, racing from their headquarters, less than half a mile away. A former special agent named Edward Follis, in his memoir, “The Dark Art,” recalls how he and dozens of his colleagues “rushed over … to pull out bodies, but there were no bodies to pull out.” The agency had outposts in more than 60 countries around the world, the most of any federal law-enforcement agency. And it had some 5,000 informants and confidential sources. Michael Vigil, who was the DEA’s head of international operations at the time, told me, “We called in every source we could find, looking for information about what had happened, who was responsible, and whether there were plans for an imminent attack.” He added, “Since the end of the Cold War, we had seen signs that terrorist groups had started relying on drug trafficking for funding. After 9/11, we were sure that trend was going to spread.”

  

But other intelligence agencies saw the DEA’s sources as drug traffickers — and drug traffickers didn’t know anything about terrorism. A former senior money-laundering investigator at the Justice Department told me that there wasn’t any substantive proof to support the DEA’s assertions.

“What is going on after 9/11 is that a lot of resources move out of drug enforcement and into terrorism,” he said. “The DEA doesn’t want to be the stepchild that is last in line.” Narco-terrorism, the former investigator said, became an “expedient way for the agency to justify its existence.”

The White House proved more receptive to the DEA’s claims. Juan Zarate, a former deputy national-security adviser, in his book, “Treasury’s War,” says that President George W. Bush wanted “all elements of national power” to contribute to the effort to “prevent another attack from hitting our shores.” A few months after 9/11, at a gathering of community anti-addiction organizations, Bush said, “It’s so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror. If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.” In February 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy turned Bush’s message into a series of publicservice announcements that were aired during the Super Bowl. Departing from the portrayal of illegal narcotics as dangerous to those who use them — “This is your brain on drugs” — the ads instead warned that getting high helped terrorists “torture someone’s dad” or “murder a family.”

In the next seven years, the DEA’s funding for international activities increased by 75 percent. Until then, the agency’s greatest foreign involvement had been in Mexico and in the Andean region of South America, the world’s largest producer of cocaine and home to violent Marxist guerrilla groups, including the FARC, in Colombia, and the Shining Path, in Peru. Both groups began, in the 1960s and early ‘70s, as peasant rebellions; before long, they started taxing coca growers and smugglers to finance their expansion. The DEA saw the organizations as examples of how criminal motivations can overlap with, and even advance, ideological ones.

Umm-kay Then Private Bish-Boy Potato-Head Douche-Bag...,

mises |  On Tuesday, Congressional impeachment hearings exposed an interesting facet of the current battle between Donald Trump and the so-called deep state: namely, that many government bureaucrats now fancy themselves as superior to the elected civilian government.

In an exchange between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Alexander Vindman, a US Army Lt. Colonel, Vindman insisted that Nunes address him by his rank.

After being addressed as "Mr. Vindman," Vindman retorted "Ranking Member, it's Lt. Col. Vindman, please."

Throughout social media, anti-Trump forces, who have apparently now become pro-military partisans, sang Vindman's praises, applauding him for putting Nunes in his place.

In a properly functioning government — with a proper view of military power — however, no one would tolerate a military officer lecturing a civilian on how to address him "correctly."

It is not even clear that Nunes was trying to "dis" Vindman, given that junior officers have historically been referred to as "Mister" in a wide variety of times and place. It is true that higher-ranking offers like Vindman are rarely referred to as "Mister," but even if Nunes was trying to insult Vindman, the question remains: so what?

Military modes of address are for the use of military personnel, and no one else. Indeed, Vindman was forced to retreat on this point when later asked by Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) if he always insists on civilians calling him by his rank. Vindman blubbered that since he was wearing his uniform (for no good reason, mind you) he figured civilians ought to refer to him by his rank.

Live by the Sword Die by the Sword...,

PCR |  Jeanine Anez, one of the Bolivian Spanish elite, has declared herself the President of Bolivia. She is one of the elite allied with Washington who accused Evo Morales of rigging his reelection. But the CIA’s Bolivian lackeys who forced Morales to resign his presidency don’t bother with elections. They just declare themselves president like Juan Guaido, the CIA creep in Venezuela, who hoped to unseat Maduro, the elected president, by declaring himself president. Neither Anez nor Guaido ran for the office. They just self-appointed themselves president. The organization of American States, a CIA front organization, accepted the unelected presidents as rightful rulers. President Trump declared the CIA coup to be an increase in freedom and democracy. 

As Trump approves of the attempted coup against Venezuela’s Maduro and the successful coup against Bolivia’s Morales, how can he complain about the CIA/DNC ongoing coup against him?
Live by the sword and die by the sword.

The whores that constitute the Western “media” pretend that self-declared “presidents” are the real presidents, and those elected by the people are not. Every Latin American election that does not elect Washington’s candidate is reported by the Western presstitutes as a “disputed election.” It doesn’t matter if the winning candidate gets 85% of the votes. As he is the wrong candidate from Washington’s standpoint, his election is disputed and illegitimate.

Washington paid the corrupt Bolivian military to unseat Morales, the elected president. This has always been the way Washington has ruled the entirety of Latin America. Buy the corrupt military. They will prostitute their wives for money.

The World Birthed in the Near Extinction of One-Fifth of Humanity Still Exists

blackagendareport |  The world birthed in the near extinction of one-fifth of humanity still exists, in the social relations bequeathed to the Americas by conquistadors and enslavers.

“In Latin America, U.S. influence means White Power.”

The events in Bolivia lay bare the central role that racial subjugation has always played in the “New World,” a hemisphere whose “discovery” by Europeans resulted -- within the span of only 50 years -- in the death by genocide and pandemic of fully a fifth of the Earth’s human population. The Conquistadors frenzied “primitive accumulation” of precious metals, mined by enslaved Natives who died quicker than they could be replenished, created a demand for the capture and importation of millions of Africans with immunities to both European and tropical disease. For centuries, until deep into the 1700s, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s population was Indigenous and Black, with African slaves comprising the great bulk of newcomers to the New World. Thus was laid the material basis for the rise of Europe, the beginnings of capitalism and the global supremacy of whiteness.

“My crime is to be a union leader, to be indigenous…and anti-imperialist,” said Evo Morales, the three-time elected president of South America’s most indigenous nation as he entered exile in Mexico. Bolivia is roughly two-thirds native. Morales’ election victory, October 20 – his fourth since 2005 -- was aborted in the ensuing weeks by rampaging gangs of thugs employed by oligarchs based in the whitest – and most fossil fuel-rich – regions of the country who terrorized, beat and kidnapped  government and Movement for Socialism party officials and their families and eventually laid siege to the capital in La Paz, with no resistance from the police and army. Unable to protect his comrades or kinfolk, Morales resigned, and was quickly replaced as president by the leader of the white-dominated minority legislative party. Morales’ party had won absolute majorities in both houses of the legislature, but was left leaderless and terror-struck by the coup. The white rump prevailed.

“Morales’ election victory was aborted by rampaging gangs of thugs employed by oligarchs based in the whitest – and most fossil fuel-rich – regions of the country.”

The United States did not immediately recognize the new government of Senator Jeanine Añez Chavez, but will doubtless soon do so, having schemed incessantly for regime change ever since Morales joined Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (1998) and Brazil’s Lula da Silva (2003) to set in motion Latin America’s “pink tide.” When Argentina (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner), Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega) and Ecuador (Rafael Correa) elected leftish presidents in 2007, US imperial power sank to its nadir in the hemisphere. But the CIA never sleeps, and neither do the white oligarchs who remained at the commanding heights of the economy and media in the “pink”-led nations of the hemisphere. One by one, the anti-imperialist presidents were removed, with U.S. assistance, in Brazil (2016), Ecuador (2017) and Argentina (2015), for a time leaving only Venezuela and Nicaragua in the anti-imperialist camp – along with, of course, Cuba, which has not had a U.S.-allied oligarchic class to contend with since the revolution of 1959.

Shifting Gears for a Minute: Lessons Learned from the Bolivia Coup

moonofalabama |  The coup in Bolivia is devastating for the majority of the people in that country. Are their lessons to be learnt from it?

Andrea Lobo writes at WSWS:

Bolivian president Evo Morales of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party was forced to resign Sunday evening by the Bolivian military in a coup backed by the United States. Last night, Morales tweeted that he is “leaving for Mexico” after that country agreed to grant him asylum. After three weeks of protests following the disputed October 20 presidential elections, the imperialist powers and their Bolivian client elite have overthrown the government of Morales. In the context of a deepening crisis of global capitalism and a resurgence of the class struggle internationally, including recent mass strikes among miners and doctors in Bolivia, the ruling class lost confidence that Morales and the MAS apparatus can continue to suppress social opposition.

During his twelve years in office Evo Morales achieved quite a lot of good things:

Illiteracy rates:
2006 13.0%, 2018 2.4%

Unemployment rates
2006 9.2%, 2018 4.1%

Moderate poverty rates
2006 60.6%, 2018 34.6%

Extreme poverty rates
2006 38.2%, 2018 15.2%

But Morales failed to build the defenses that are necessary to make such changes permanent. The leadership of the military and police stood against him. Why were these men in such positions?

Jeb Sprague @JebSprague - 20:19 UTC · Nov 11, 2019

The US coup connection
Officials who forced #Evo to resign worked as #Bolivia's Mil. Attachés in DC. The CIA often seeks to recruit Attachés working in DC.
2013: Gen. Kaliman served as Mil. Attaché
2018: Police Com. Calderón Mariscal was Pres. of APALA in DC

The Agregados Policiales de América Latina (APALA) is supposed to fight international organized crime in Latin America. It is curiously hosted in Washington DC.

These police and military men cooperated with a racist Christian-fascist multi-millionaire to bring Morales down.

Morales had clearly won a fourth term in the the October 20 elections. The vote count was confusing (pdf) because it followed the process defined by the Organization of American States:

Burisma was a Huge Issue for V.P. Joe Biden

johnsolomon |  In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation during the Obama years, with the former vice president  suggesting he didn’t even know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings.

There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice president’s account, including Hunter Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father. 

There also was a December 2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter Biden’s firm was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors.

But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State Department clearly saw the Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the 2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden issue.

Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.”

In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer.

“Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A asked.

The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s office.”

The International Criminal Court MUST NOT BE Recognized...,

newyorker |  The I.C.C., from its inception, has been impossibly compromised by the simple, definitive fact that many of the world’s most lawless countries, along with some of its most powerful—including the U.S., Russia, and China, the majority of permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—reject its jurisdiction. After sixteen years with no major triumphs and several major failures to its name, it would be easier to make the case for it if there were reason to believe that it could yet become the court of last resort for all comers that it is supposed to be, rather than what it is: a politically captive institution that reinforces the separate and unequal structures of the world. Maybe the best that one can hope for the court, in its current form, is that it can yet inspire some people who seek the rule of law to find a way to achieve it. Bolton rejected the very idea that it could inspire any good, simultaneously exaggerating the power of the I.C.C. as an ominous global colossus and belittling it as a puny contemptible farce. The only historically proven deterrent to “the hard men of history,” he declared, is “what Franklin Roosevelt once called ‘the righteous might’ of the United States.”

So what, really, was the point of Bolton’s speech? Where was the news in this “major announcement on U.S. policy?” He noted that Israel, too, faces the prospect of an I.C.C. investigation and announced that, in solidarity, the State Department was closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington. But then he said that the closure wasn’t necessarily about the court but rather a general punishment of “the Palestinians,” because “they refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.” Beyond that, nothing that Bolton threatened—by way of shutting out, sanctioning, and declaring war on the I.C.C., and treating its personnel or anyone in the world who assisted it as criminals—went much beyond a rhetorical amplification of what he acknowledged has been established in U.S. law since the American Service-Members’ Protection Act. This wasn’t foreign policy. It was swagger.

Bolton has, thus far, enjoyed an absence from the Woodwardian accounts of Trump White House backbiting, subterfuge, and dysfunction. So it is tempting to think that he was deployed to deflect attention from the White House chaos, while his boss spent the day issuing uncharacteristically Presidential tweets about the hurricane bearing down on the Carolinas. Bolton, however, left out one point from his old Journal piece in this week’s speech, and the omission seems telling: “The ICC prosecutor,” Bolton wrote, “is an internationalized version of America’s ‘independent counsel,’ a role originally established in the wake of Watergate and later allowed to lapse (but now revived under Justice Department regulations in the form of a ‘special counsel’). Similarly, the ICC’s prosecutors are dangerously free of accountability and effective supervision.”

So the threat comes from within, after all. The problem is the existence of the prosecutor, who endangers sovereignty, which in Trump-speak means being above the law. The President and the nation cannot be held to account or supervised, so the prosecutor has to be. The President and the nation cannot be criminals, so the prosecutor must be. The prosecutor cannot be recognized. The prosecutor must be disempowered.

Why Does the NFL Mandingo Rebellion Protest Avoid Calling Out the Military?

citizensmedia |  Regardless of the situation, “the petrodollar” has no direct bearing on the ability of the United States, or any other country, to provide for its people. The only thing that affects this is a country’s supply of real resources, and the fact that the country’s currency is the only one accepted for extinguishing tax obligations.

The United States is the “reserve currency” (meaning its currency is required to purchase oil) and has more resources than most (raw materials, labor, technology, and time). But neither of these things have any bearing on how well – as opposed to how “much” – it can provide for its citizens. All sovereign fiat economies (the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and England, among others) can fully employ all their citizens with the resources at its disposal as best they can.

If a conflict were to arise because of oil or resources, or “the petrodollar,” that conflict would of course have significant consequences. Ultimately, however, none of these things have any direct impact on any country’s supply of real resources, and therefore, no direct effect on any country’s domestic economy.

As far as what specifically would happen if the world stopped using the United States dollar for oil? The answer is, “Very little.”

The United States spends more on its military than the next seven countries combined. The U.S. military is one of the largest users of fossil fuels in the world and by far the biggest consumer of energy in the United States. The real problem is that the fossil fuel industry has too much influence on the United States government. Instead of fulfilling its original and only purpose – to protect the American People – the United States Military has now been hijacked to further enrich the very few, and to impose their power and reach across the globe.

Unparalleled Examples of Human Decency

theautomaticearth |  Let’s try a different angle. How about the world through the eyes of children’s? I don’t want to dwell on John McCain, too many people already do today, but I would suggest that your thoughts and prayers are with the souls of the hundreds of thousands of children that died because McCain advocated bombing them. Or, indeed, 50-odd years ago, were bombed by him personally. I wanted to leave him be altogether, don’t kick a man when he’s down, but I can’t get the image out of my head of him singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”.

To remember that, perhaps the most vile and infamous thing he’s ever done (it’s in the top ten), and then see someone like Ocasio-Cortez say he was an “unparalleled example of human decency”, it’s almost comedy. But not as funny as when in the 2008 campaign the woman in the red dress asked him if Obama was an Arab, and he responded: “No, ma’am. No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about”. 

That is full-blown hilarious. And hardly a soul caught it, which makes it many times worse. It made him a decent man in the eyes of Americans to defend Obama by declaring that Arabs are per definition neither decent nor family men. Yeah, well, you might as well bomb them all then. But enough about McCain: it’s about the children, and their souls, not his.

The Pope is visiting Ireland this weekend. There is really just one subject on people’s minds, even though the ‘leaders’ say this is one of Ireland’s biggest events in 40 years. What’s on their minds is -child- sex abuse by Catholic clergy. And it’s been -and probably still is- rampant in the country. Like it’s been everywhere the Catholic church is an important force. Which is in many countries, there are 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. The man claimed he was begging for God’s forgiveness. Not sure that will do it, there, Francis.

The Roman Catholic religion, and the Church, are fronts for the world’s biggest business empire, a multinational at least 1500 years older than the next one, Holland’s VOC -which existed maybe 100 years-. It has played power politics for longer than anyone else, all over the world. Its real estate portfolio alone is worth more than many a country. For that matter, it effectively owns many a country. 

There would have to be a huge outcry over the child abuse before there could ever be an investigation. Multiple popes have promised exactly such investigations, and nothing has happened. It would upset the business model too much. And most faithful still believe their priests are decent men, anyway. Yes, there’s that word again, ‘decent’.

If a priest can no longer be maintained in a specific church because he’s been too obvious, too perverted and too greedy, he simply gets transferred to another parish. They’ve been doing this for 1,500 years, they got it down. And when things heat up, they beg god for forgiveness. While the Church gets ever richer. 

At a 2% annual growth rate, wealth doubles every 34-35 years. The Catholic Church has been at it for 1,500. Do your math. Or look at it this way: real estate prices have been surging over the past few decades. And that’s the Vatican’s main industry. Anyone want to venture a guess at how much money they have made?

The Vatican is a facade hiding behind a facade hiding behind… Francis Ford Coppola tried tackling the topic in The Godfather III, but he was only mildly successful and not many people believed his portrayal. But, again, this is not about the Pope playing Kabuki theater like all his predecessors, it’s about the children.