Transcript - Audio - JULIAN ASSANGE Interview By Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project

ꕤ Transcript SOURCE http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3 TRANSCRIPT [for quotations, confirm audio] INTERVIEW JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS INTERVIEWED BY: Kostas Ephemera The Press Project Podcast On:  Monday, 20th October 2015 AUDIO SOURCE http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3 Hi, I'm  Kostas Ephemera from the Press Project, and I'm speaking to you from the Embassy of Ecuador. I'm here with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and he's agreed to give us some answers for the Greek audience. The first question is:  through the work of WikiLeaks & people like Edward Snowden, people now know that the system is corrupted.  Although we've had movements like the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, they don't seem to last.  Why is that? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks The visible, apparent failure of Occupy Wall Street to produce a clear result has discouraged people, at least in the West, from engaging in large, mass gatherings. However, a great many lessons and networks did emerge from Occupy Wall Street and have continued on in other areas. More generally, the problem of mankind has always been its lack of understanding about how the world actually works, and the first task of human beings is to educate themselves and each other.  That is what has led to all the advances that mankind has achieved. Further advances in relation to how to restructure society or how to produce better institutions can only occur as a result of: (a) new information which further reveals how modern human institutions actually behave; and (b) the conveyance of that information into people's heads, in an accurate manner. The problem of (a) is the problem of secrecy.  The problem of (b) is the problem of media accuracy. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project OK, you spoke of the media.  When you started WikiLeaks, you collaborated with some of the biggest international media, but after a while they backed off.  Why? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, all institutions eventually become defined by their own quest for power, regardless of how they start. Large media organisations have been around for a long time and are powerful and, so, their management and ownership class, has learnt how to exploit that power by doing favours for other power groups that are around them, or defending their own social class or their shareholders directly. The only exception is when the organisation is small, or where it has an ideological leader that has firm control over the organisation's destiny, or, perhaps, where its business model is populist and directly relies on its readers. 2:56 As a result of our publications, we have contracts with more than a hundred and ten (110) different media organisations around the world, and in a number of different publishing projects, we've given all those hundred and ten (110) media organisations exactly the same material and, so, we're able to compare results. And we can see the geopolitical biases, cultural biases, the political interference from owners, the political interference from the management class, and redaction and censorship, for political purposes or because of fears of legal costs, or because of cultural sensitivities. For example, The Guardian newspaper, El Pais, Le Monde & The New York Times, extensively redacted material in the diplomatic cables publication, for reasons other than protecting people from retribution, whereas The Hindu newspaper (which is the highest quality English newspaper in India), only redacted two cables. 4:07 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project *** [???]  the dictum "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" works, after all, for the system. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks First of all, the national security state is very powerful. In the United States, the  Defence Department alone feeds ten percent (10%) of the US population in terms of its salaries and direct contracts. That ten percent (10%) of the population has a social group on its periphery.  It's people they are related to.  For example, they have good friends, business partners.  It maybe extends to thirty (30%) or forty (40%) percent of the entire US population. Media proprietors tend to have many business interests and, so, those business interests intersect with the national security state. So there has been suppression of the story, first of all. Secondly, it is a complex story about spy agencies and it involves the interception of nearly the entire world. It's not easy for people to imagine such a thing and still believe in it. This interception is a lot like the concept of god:  it is invisible; intangible; knows what you're doing; knows what everyone is doing; it seems that one has to take it on faith. The fact is, strangely, mass surveillance is the first god in that respect, that has been proven to exist, that even atheists can believe in. 5:53 But-- atheists can say they believe in, but, really, most people don't believe in things they haven't directly seen themselves, because most people don't see direct -- they don't see the National Security Agency or GCHQ spies under their bed -- they don't understand the danger. 6:17 But I'm pleased that they don't understand the danger, because if everyone understood the danger, the response wouldn't be to stop mass surveillance:  the response, by most people, would be become extremely conformist. Now, this old result of 'nothing wrong'.  So what is it? 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.' That encodes within it exactly the problem. People try and guess what it is that these powerful agencies might consider wrong, and they are not sure where the boundaries are, and so they adjust their own behaviour and start to self-censor.  But it's intellectually bankrupt. 7:00 In the end, even if you are a baker, not involved in any politics at all, its not simply a matter of arbitrary injustice might trip you up anyway, because of confusion and incompetence in the national security state.  But it is necessary to protect forces in society that keep society honest. For example, human rights activists, journalists, and opposition politicians. These are all involved in preventing society collapsing due to corruption or incompetence. And if those elements can't operate, then society will decay. 7:46 And it will even affect 'the baker' when society does decay. So it's not just about you. It is about this professional class of people who are involved in trying to holding government to account. If they can't hold government to account, government will go bad. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Oh, yeah. Lately, governments are becoming more aggressive, while their people find it harder to control them. Are conspiracy theorists not wild enough anymore? 8:11 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks The US government is prosecuting me for conspiracy to commit espionage and general conspiracy. And the government has conspiracy theories about the people, and even laws called 'conspiracy'. It is interesting if you look at some conspiracy.  You know, some unfounded paranoid conspiracy theories, spread around by people about the capacities of the National Security Agency and some other national spying services, they were not paranoid about. 8:46 I knew that at that time, and we know even more now. But the bigger concern is where all of that is going. I like to joke that the only thing that has saved mankind is bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence, because massive spy agencies like the National Security Agency that are intercepting nearly all the world's electronic communication, of nearly every person, would completely dominate the Earth if they were not corrupt, if they were not bureaucratic, and if they were not incompetent. But, fortunately, secrecy breeds incompetence and corruption, and these are very large secret organisations, so they are also very corrupt ones -- corrupt and incompetent. The problem is that the commercial sector like Google and Facebook are not corrupt or incompetent, as traditionally defined. They are in a highly competitive commercial market and so they have become extremely efficient at collecting information, and the security agencies then simply stick their fangs into the big corporate players and suck the information out from there. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Let me ask you something different. Greece, now, has a left-wing government with very friendly relationships with Ecuador and with *** [???] How would you like to ask Greece for political asylum? 10:08 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks I would be very interested to hear of such an offer from Greece, as we know there's a lot of support from the Greek population, and it would be a legally and politically important gesture here in Europe. It's an interesting question [whether] the true nature of Greek power permits such an action or not. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Why do you think Greek government is powerless to offer you asylum? 10:33 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks If I had been Cyprus, what would I have done in this conflict with the troika? I can see that there's different arguments for going different ways, but what I would have found most interesting would be to use the conflict to create an intense unity within Greece and, provided you have control over the police, the army and the law, and you have a healthy population and no natural disasters, you can do a lot. But there is really that question. And you effectively create a war-time footing, which has effectively been a problem like war for Greece, and Greece has survived much harsher circumstances in war, so there's no reason to believe it couldn't survive a conflict of that type and, in fact, a number of good things might come out of that conflict -- but only if you have control of the police and the army.  And, I think, the reality is that Syriza did not have full control over those three services, so that was not an option. 11:42 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project In Greece, we have suffered and continue to suffer the results of austerity. Does the TTIP mean such kind of austerity for the whole of Europe? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks TTIP is the US-EU portion of a much grander project. That grand project [is] the three t'd agreements:  TTIP, TISA, and TPP. It's a project to create a new grand enclosure, a modern form perhaps analogous to the partition of Africa or the construction of the European Union -- a new economic and legal regime that will incorporate fifty-two (52) nations -- 1.6 billion people -- and, most importantly, two-thirds of global GDP. It has been constructed politically by playing the China card. So whenever something that radical and that large occurs, it's because it has the backing of several powerful forces. In this case, it has the backing of the major US multinationals, who have been always trying to achieve agreements like this. But it has also managed to get the backing of the US national security class, who view it as a strategic way of isolating China, India and Russia. 13:07 By playing that China card, they've also scared much of the establishment in Western Europe to coming into the system, and a lot of the South-East Asian countries like Australia. It is the most radical construction of an international regime since the construction of Europe [ie the European Union], and it cements once and for all, international and neoliberalism [interests?] into those fifty-two (52) countries, in a binding international treaty which is exceedingly difficult to withdraw from -- much more difficult than Greece withdrawing from Europe [ie the European Union]. 13:45 It covers nearly every aspect of the economy:  transportation, all services -- and services make up about seventy-five percent (75%) of the European economy, so that means all internet services, banking services, consulting engineers and accountants.  In fact, it covers everything that you can't drop on your foot. [Laughter] 14:10 It arises -- let's go back to World War II. After World War II, the US had fifty percent (50%) of the global GDP and it started to construct some international institutions to deal with that and the  Bretton Woods system, the WTO [World Trade Organisation] and, eventually the WTO became an institution with its own goals to expand, and it included India, Brazil, Russia and China. And the WTO became too democratised for the United States and there was several rounds of negotiation in the WTO in the 2000s, called the Doha Rounds, to negotiate some mutual lowering -- lower of tariffs and other mechanisms -- and the the US didn't like where things were going.  So it effectively created a negotiation outside the WTO with its allies that it could push around, and the result is those T-3 agreements. So, as negotiations originally started in Doha show, [the US] set up this legal and trading system covering two-thirds of global GDP.  So its multinationals get what [they] want and, also, to isolate China. 15:35 To my mind, the single most significant issue is that it locks in, for at least decades, the US model of global multinational-led neoliberalism -- this radical new form of international neoliberalism -- which means that if Greece elects a different government, or Syriza wants to go a different way, it can't.  It's too late.  There's clauses in the treaty, such as if the government tries to introduce new legislation it will be penalised. 16:25 It may even be seriously anti-economic. It does introduce the establishment of a great many new monopolies for the US pharmaceutical and copyright industries, which is anti-economic. But just having such an invasive level of regulation for ninety-seven percent (97%) of industry in an international trade agreement suggests that it will calcify around economic activity. 17:01 It's very hard to change this international agreement, and as industry changes and new inventions come onto the scene, and there's new ways of working and new ways of trading, countries which have signed up to this treaty system will be bogged down in this international regulation. 17:22 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project One last question. These days, the refugee crisis is the main issue for all Euro summits, but the people who participate in those meetings are the very same leaders of countries who sold their weapons, or, actually, their armies actively contributed to the bombing of the refugee countries. What are your thoughts on that? 17:40 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, it's a moral disgrace, you know, that the US is not taking Syrian refugees, and that the UK has said it will take only four thousand (4,000) per year over five (5) years. It's no surprise to anyone.  But, I mean, the situation comes about as a result of US, UK and French policy in the Middle East, together with the behaviour of US regional allies in the Middle East -- Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. But we published cables, including in my new book -- The WikiLeaks Files -- showing that the US has been trying to overthrow the Syrian government since at least 2006 and has very serious plans to do that; was trying to make the Syrian government 'paranoid,' trying to get it to 'over-react' by instilling that fear and paranoia, trying to make it worried about coups; trying to stir up sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shi'ites; trying to make its efforts to stop the originator of ISIS -- the ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq -- to make Syria look weak, and the fact that it was trying to crack down on terrorists at all, pushed that as an example of Syrian government not having full control over its territory, to encourage the government overthrow; trying to stop foreign investment in Syria and secretly funding a variety of NGOs in Syria and, also, *** [???], using Saudi and Egypt to help push that along. There's an interesting question:  what is even in it for the US, this result? 19:37 Well, it's not about the US population as a whole, of course.  It's about the particular factions that pushed for it -- whether they have a benefit -- and, of course, the CIA perceives they have a benefit.  They create a problem and then they're given a greater budget to clean 'the problem' up. Similarly, with the contractors, arms dealers and arms manufacturers:  if there's no 'problem', then their budgets are cut.  So they create problems. It's also part of a grand area strategy to, you know, weaken Hezbollah, to allow Israel greater control over Golan Heights and maybe a buffer zone as well; to knock out a regional ally of Iran; to knock out the last Russian base, that's left outside the former Soviet Union, in Tartus; to create a path for a gas pipeline [with] a proposed path from Qatar to Saudi, up through Syria to Europe, which will compete with Russian gas. 20:39 So there's like, as I said before:  like most significant changes that happen in the world, they happen because significant forces come together, and with multiple motivations. It's what we see here. But an easily predictable disaster.  But from the US perspective there's nothing for them to dislike about having Europe flooded with Syrian refugees. In fact, we have an interesting speculation about the refugee movements.  We looked through our cables. So the speculation was this: occasionally, opponents of a country will engage in strategic depopulation -- which is, to decrease the fighting capacity of a government, you try and get people to flee the country. 21:28 In the case of Syria, it is predominantly the middle class that is fleeing, because it is the most able to flee -- it has the language skills, money, some connections, and that's the engineering class, the management class, the bureaucratic class, precisely the class that is needed to keep the government functioning, and encouraging it to flee Syria -- for example, Germany saying that they will accept any refugees and by Turkey taking nearly two (2) million refugees, it does significantly weaken the Syrian government. 22:09 So we looked for other recent precedents of that. In 2007, the Iraqi government made a formal demand of Germany to stop encouraging migration from Iraq to Germany. Now, in that case clearly Germany wasn't trying to collapse the Iraqi government, but nonetheless the Iraqi government was feeling the same effect, that it was weakening its governing capacity. Sweden, in the Iraq war, is documented in the cables as making its contribution to the Iraq war, as it said to the United States, the acceptance of the Iraqi refugees was part of its contribution. So, regardless of whether there is design behind it, the forces engaged in trying to overthrow the Syrian government must be happy with the results. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project We have the same effect of brain-drain from Greece due to the economic crisis now.  Or the brains go. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Exactly. So, the result is to weaken. As a political asylee myself, I'm not suggesting at all that Syrians shouldn't be treated kindly as refugees. But we should understand that engaging in the situation that causes depopulation of a country does encourage its collapse. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Thank you very much. --- end audio --- More Article by Kostas Ephemera  (Greek)  http://www.thepressproject.gr/article/83422/Ligi-ora-me-ton-Julian-Assange  (English translation)   here 2014 US population estimated at 322,583,006 -- ref:  http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ USA DOD Beneficiaries Therefore, 10% of that estimate total population is equal to 32,258,300.6 Americans -- ie over 32-million US citizens benefit directly from US Dept of Defence. Adding estimates of periphery associations, perhaps up to over one-third of the total US population would benefit, either directly or indirectly, from the US Dept of Defence. Troika = European Troika  /  tripartite committee led by European Commission (Eurogroup) with European Central Bank (ECB) & the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - representing the European Union (EU) in its foreign relations, particularly re common foreign policy & security policy -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_troika Syriza - a left-wing political party in Greece, originally founded in 2004 as a coalition of left-wing and radical left parties. It is the largest party in the Hellenic Parliament, with party chairman Alexis Tsipras serving as Prime Minister of Greece -- ref:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriza Bretton Woods system -- landmark system for monetary and exchange rate management established in 1944  - ref:  http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brettonwoodsagreement.asp ꕤ

Refugee Crisis | How Neocons Destabilise Europe

ꕤ Article SOURCE Robert Parry American investigative journalist breaking Iran-Contra affair for Associated Press (AP) & Newsweek breaking Psychological Ops in Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the Nicaraguan contras) breaking CIA & Contras cocaine trafficking in the US scandal (1985) http://newcoldwar.org/refugee-crisis-how-neocons-destabilized-europe/ Refugee crisis: How neocons destabilized Europe By Robert Parry, Consortium News, September 7, 2015 Introduction by New Cold War.org: The neocon prescription of endless “regime change” is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough “regime change,” as Robert Parry reports. Amidst the righteous humanitarian concern over the fate of millions of refugees in the Middle East seeking to flee the devastation of their homelands, Parry provides a needed reminder of the source of the crisis which mainstream news reporting and many analysts are ignoring, namely, the military interventions and austerity policies of the U.S., European Union and NATO military alliance into the region. Importantly, Parry explains the disastrous consequences of the extension of that intervention into Ukraine, leading to ‘regime change’ there in late 2013/early 2014. * * * The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe – dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey – started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through “regime change”. On Aug 30, 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claims to have proof that the Syrian gov't was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, but evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited [State Department photo] Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough “regime change”. For instance, The Washington Post’s neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday blamed “realists” for the cascading catastrophes. Hiatt castigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for “regime change.” But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists. In early 2014, the neocons and liberal hawks sabotaged Syrian peace talks in Geneva by blocking Iran’s participation and turning the peace conference into a one-sided shouting match where U.S.-funded opposition leaders yelled at Assad’s representatives who then went home. All the while, the Post’s editors and their friends kept egging Obama to start bombing Assad’s forces. The madness of this neocon approach grew more obvious in the summer of 2014 when the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda spinoff which had been slaughtering suspected pro-government people in Syria, expanded its bloody campaign of beheadings back into Iraq where this hyper-brutal movement first emerged as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” in response to the 2003 U.S. invasion. It should have been clear by mid-2014 that if the neocons had gotten their way and Obama had conducted a massive U.S. bombing campaign to devastate Assad’s military, the black flag of Sunni terrorism might well be flying above the Syrian capital of Damascus while its streets would run red with blood. But now a year later, the likes of Hiatt still have not absorbed that lesson and the spreading chaos from neocon strategies is destabilizing Europe. As shocking and disturbing as that is, none of it should have come as much of a surprise, since the neocons have always brought chaos and dislocations in their wake. When I first encountered the neocons in the 1980s, they had been given Central America to play with. President Ronald Reagan had credentialed many of them, bringing into the U.S. government neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan. But Reagan mostly kept them out of the big-power realms: the Mideast and Europe. Those strategic areas went to the “adults,” people like James Baker, George Shultz, Philip Habib and Brent Scowcroft. The poor Central Americans, as they tried to shed generations of repression and backwardness imposed by brutal right-wing oligarchies, faced U.S. neocon ideologues who unleashed death squads and even genocide against peasants, students and workers. The result – not surprisingly – was a flood of refugees, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, northward to the United States. The neocon “success” in the 1980s, crushing progressive social movements and reinforcing the oligarchic controls, left most countries of Central America in the grip of corrupt regimes and crime syndicates, periodically driving more waves of what Reagan called “feet people” through Mexico to the southern U.S. border. Messing up the Mideast But the neocons weren’t satisfied sitting at the kids’ table. Even during the Reagan administration, they tried to squeeze themselves among the “adults” at the grown-ups’ table. For instance, neocons, such as Robert McFarlane and Paul Wolfowitz, pushed Israel-friendly policies toward Iran, which the Israelis then saw as a counterweight to Iraq. That strategy led eventually to the Iran-Contra Affair, the worst scandal of the Reagan administration. [See Consortiumnews.com’s When Israel /Neocons Favored Iran.] However, the right-wing and mainstream U.S. media never liked the complex Iran-Contra story and thus exposure of the many levels of the scandal’s criminality was avoided. Democrats also preferred compromise to confrontation. So, most of the key neocons survived the Iran-Contra fallout, leaving their ranks still firmly in place for the next phase of their rise to power. In the 1990s, the neocons built up a well-funded infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets, benefiting from both the largesse of military contractors donating to think tanks and government-funded operations like the National Endowment for Democracy, headed by neocon Carl Gershman. The neocons gained more political momentum from the U.S. military might displayed during the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Many Americans began to see war as fun, almost like a video game in which “enemy” forces get obliterated from afar. On TV news shows, tough-talking pundits were all the rage. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you couldn’t go wrong taking the most macho position, what I sometimes call the “er-er-er” growling effect. Combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the notion that U.S. military supremacy was unmatched and unchallengeable gave rise to neocon theories about turning “diplomacy” into nothing more than the delivery of U.S. ultimatums. In the Middle East, that was a view shared by Israeli hardliners, who had grown tired of negotiating with the Palestinians and other Arabs. Instead of talk, there would be “regime change” for any government that would not fall into line. This strategy was articulated in 1996 when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in Israel and compiled a strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” Iraq was first on the neocon hit list, but next came Syria and Iran. The overriding idea was that once the regimes assisting the Palestinians and Hezbollah were removed or neutralized, then Israel could dictate peace terms to the Palestinians who would have no choice but to accept what was on the table. In 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century, founded by neocons Robert Kagan and William Kristol, called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but President Bill Clinton balked at something that extreme. The situation changed, however, when President George W. Bush took office and the 9/11 attacks terrified and infuriated the American public. Suddenly, the neocons had a Commander-in-Chief who agreed with the need to eliminate Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – and Americans were easily persuaded although Iraq and Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. [See Consortiumnews.com’s The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.] The death of ‘realism’ The 2003 Iraq invasion sounded the death knell for foreign policy “realism” in Official Washington. Aging or dead, the old adult voices were silent or ignored. From Congress and the Executive Branch to the think tanks and the mainstream news media, almost all the “opinion leaders” were neocons and many liberals fell into line behind Bush’s case for war. And, even though the Iraq War “group think” was almost entirely wrong, both on the WMD justifications for war and the “cakewalk” expectations for remaking Iraq, almost no one who promoted the fiasco suffered punishment for either the illegality of the invasion or the absence of sanity in promoting such a harebrained scheme. Instead of negative repercussions, the Iraq War backers – the neocons and their liberal-hawk accomplices – essentially solidified their control over U.S. foreign policy and the major news media. From The New York Times and The Washington Post to the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, the “regime change” agenda continued to hold sway. It didn’t even matter when the sectarian warfare unleashed in Iraq left hundreds of thousands dead, displaced millions and gave rise to Al Qaeda’s ruthless Iraq affiliate. Not even the 2008 election of Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent, changed this overall dynamic. Rather than standing up to this new foreign policy establishment, Obama bowed to it, retaining key players from President Bush’s national security team, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, and by hiring hawkish Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, who became Secretary of State, and Samantha Power at the National Security Council. Thus, the cult of “regime change” did not just survive the Iraq disaster; it thrived. Whenever a difficult foreign problem emerged, the go-to solution was still “regime change,” accompanied by the usual demonizing of a targeted leader, support for the “democratic opposition” and calls for military intervention. President Obama, arguably a “closet realist,” found himself as the foot-dragger-in-chief as he reluctantly was pulled along on one “regime change” crusade after another. In 2011, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton and National Security Council aide Power persuaded Obama to join with some hot-for-war European leaders to achieve “regime change” in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi had gone on the offensive against groups in eastern Libya that he identified as Islamic terrorists. But Clinton and Power saw the case as a test for their theories of “humanitarian warfare” – or “regime change” to remove a “bad guy” like Gaddafi from power. Obama soon signed on and, with the U.S. military providing crucial technological support, a devastating bombing campaign destroyed Gaddafi’s army, drove him from Tripoli, and ultimately led to his torture-murder. ‘We came, we saw, he died’ Secretary Clinton scurried to secure credit for this “regime change.” According to one email chain in August 2011, her longtime friend and personal adviser Sidney Blumenthal praised the bombing campaign to destroy Gaddafi’s army and hailed the dictator’s impending ouster. “First, brava! This is a historic moment and you will be credited for realizing it,” Blumenthal wrote on Aug. 22, 2011. “When Qaddafi himself is finally removed, you should of course make a public statement before the cameras wherever you are, even in the driveway of your vacation home. … You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment. … The most important phrase is: ‘successful strategy.’” Clinton forwarded Blumenthal’s advice to Jake Sullivan, a close State Department aide. “Pls read below,” she wrote. “Sid makes a good case for what I should say, but it’s premised on being said after Q[addafi] goes, which will make it more dramatic. That’s my hesitancy, since I’m not sure how many chances I’ll get.” Sullivan responded, saying “it might make sense for you to do an op-ed to run right after he falls, making this point. … You can reinforce the op-ed in all your appearances, but it makes sense to lay down something definitive, almost like the Clinton Doctrine.” However, when Gaddafi abandoned Tripoli that day, President Obama seized the moment to make a triumphant announcement. Clinton’s opportunity to highlight her joy at the Libyan “regime change” had to wait until Oct. 20, 2011, when Gaddafi was captured, tortured and murdered. In a TV interview, Clinton celebrated the news when it appeared on her cell phone and paraphrased Julius Caesar’s famous line after Roman forces achieved a resounding victory in 46 B.C. and he declared, “veni, vidi, vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Clinton’s reprise of Caesar’s boast went: “We came; we saw; he died.” She then laughed and clapped her hands. Killary Clinton Gaddafi was captured, tortured & murdered Presumably, the “Clinton Doctrine” would have been a policy of “liberal interventionism” to achieve “regime change” in countries where there is some crisis in which the leader seeks to put down an internal security threat and where the United States objects to the action.  [TokyRose Note:  similar scenario - done by Clinton No. 1:  Yugoslavia] But the problem with Clinton’s boasting about the “Clinton Doctrine” was that the Libyan adventure quickly turned sour with the Islamic terrorists, whom Gaddafi had warned about, seizing wide swaths of territory and turning it into another Iraq-like badlands. On Sept. 11, 2012, this reality hit home when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was overrun and U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomatic personnel were killed. It turned out that Gaddafi wasn’t entirely wrong about the nature of his opposition. Eventually, the extremist violence in Libya grew so out of control that the United States and European countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Since then, Islamic State terrorists have begun decapitating Coptic Christians on Libyan beaches and slaughtering other “heretics.” Amid the anarchy, Libya has become a route for desperate migrants seeking passage across the Mediterranean to Europe. A war on Assad Parallel to the “regime change” in Libya was a similar enterprise in Syria in which the neocons and liberal interventionists pressed for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, whose government in 2011 cracked down on what had quickly become a violent rebellion led by extremist elements, though the Western propaganda portrayed the opposition as “moderate” and “peaceful.” For the first years of the Syrian civil war, the pretense remained that these “moderate” rebels were facing unjustified repression and the only answer was “regime change” in Damascus. Assad’s claim that the opposition included many Islamic extremists was largely dismissed as were Gaddafi’s alarms in Libya.  On Aug. 21, 2013, a sarin gas attack outside Damascus killed hundreds of civilians and the U.S. State Department and the mainstream news media immediately blamed Assad’s forces amid demands for military retaliation against the Syrian army. On Aug 30, 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claims to have proof that the Syrian gov't was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, but evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited  [State Department photo] Despite doubts within the U.S. intelligence community about Assad’s responsibility for the sarin attack, which some analysts saw instead as a provocation by anti-Assad terrorists, the clamor from Official Washington’s neocons and liberal interventionists for war was intense and any doubts were brushed aside. But President Obama, aware of the uncertainty within the U.S. intelligence community, held back from a military strike and eventually worked out a deal, brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which Assad agreed to surrender his entire chemical-weapons arsenal while still denying any role in the sarin attack. Though the case pinning the sarin attack on the Syrian government eventually fell apart – with evidence pointing to a “false flag” operation by Sunni radicals to trick the United States into intervening on their side – Official Washington’s “group think” refused to reconsider the initial rush to judgment. In Monday’s column, Hiatt still references Assad’s “savagery of chemical weapons.” Any suggestion that the only realistic option in Syria is a power-sharing compromise that would include Assad – who is viewed as the protector of Syria’s Christian, Shiite and Alawite minorities – is rejected out of hand with the slogan, “Assad must go!” The neocons have created a conventional wisdom which holds that the Syrian crisis would have been prevented if only Obama had followed the neocons’ 2011 prescription of another U.S. intervention to force another “regime change.” Yet, the far more likely outcome would have been either another indefinite and bloody U.S. military occupation of Syria or the black flag of Islamic terrorism flying over Damascus. Get Putin Another villain who emerged from the 2013 failure to bomb Syria was Russian President Putin, who infuriated the neocons by his work with Obama on Syria’s surrender of its chemical weapons and who further annoyed the neocons by helping to get the Iranians to negotiate seriously on constraining their nuclear program. Despite the “regime change” disasters in Iraq and Libya, the neocons wanted to wave the “regime change” wand again over Syria and Iran. Putin got his comeuppance when U.S. neocons, including NED President Carl Gershman and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife), helped orchestrate a “regime change” in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and putting in a fiercely anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border. F*ck the EU CIA Ukraine Coup   Victoria Nuland As thrilled as the neocons were with their “victory” in Kiev and their success in demonizing Putin in the mainstream U.S. news media, Ukraine followed the now-predictable post-regime-change descent into a vicious civil war. Western Ukrainians waged a brutal “anti-terrorist operation” against ethnic Russians in the east who resisted the U.S.-backed coup.   Thousands of Ukrainians died and millions were displaced as Ukraine’s national economy teetered toward collapse. Yet, the neocons and their liberal-hawk friends again showed their propaganda skills by pinning the blame for everything on “Russian aggression” and Putin. Though Obama was apparently caught off-guard by the Ukrainian “regime change,” he soon joined in denouncing Putin and Russia. The European Union also got behind U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia despite the harm those sanctions also inflicted on Europe’s already shaky economy. Europe’s stability is now under additional strain because of the flows of refugees from the war zones of the Middle East. A dozen years of chaos So, we can now look at the consequences and costs of the past dozen years under the spell of neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” strategies. According to many estimates, the death toll in Iraq, Syria and Libya has exceeded one million with several million more refugees flooding into – and stretching the resources – of fragile Mideast countries. Hundreds of thousands of other refugees and migrants have fled to Europe, putting major strains on the Continent’s social structures already stressed by the severe recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. Even without the refugee crisis, Greece and other southern European countries would be struggling to meet their citizens’ needs. Stepping back for a moment and assessing the full impact of neoconservative policies, you might be amazed at how widely they have spread chaos across a large swath of the globe. Who would have thought that the neocons would have succeeded in destabilizing not only the Mideast but Europe as well. And, as Europe struggles, the export markets of China are squeezed, spreading economic instability to that crucial economy and, with its market shocks, the reverberations rumbling back to the United States, too. We now see the human tragedies of neocon/liberal-hawk ideologies captured in the suffering of the Syrians and other refugees flooding Europe and the death of children drowning as their desperate families flee the chaos created by “regime change.” But will the neocon/liberal-hawk grip on Official Washington finally be broken? Will a debate even be allowed about the dangers of “regime change” prescriptions in the future? Not if the likes of The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt have anything to say about it. The truth is that Hiatt and other neocons retain their dominance of the mainstream U.S. news media, so all that one can expect from the various MSM outlets is more neocon propaganda, blaming the chaos not on their policy of “regime change” but on the failure to undertake even more “regime change. The one hope is that many Americans will not be fooled this time and that a belated “realism” will finally return to U.S. geopolitical strategies that will look for obtainable compromises to restore some political order to places such as Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Rather than more and more tough-guy/gal confrontations, maybe there will finally be some serious efforts at reconciliation. But the other reality is that the interventionist forces have rooted themselves deeply in Official Washington, inside NATO, within the mainstream news media and even in European institutions. It will not be easy to rid the world of the grave dangers created by neocon policies. http://newcoldwar.org/refugee-crisis-how-neocons-destabilized-europe/  ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT Ran into a problem formatting above copy article.   Best to go to original for easy read:  this copy's for me.  lol Lost my paragraph formatting while editing layout after highlighting (long story), not far off being ready to publish post.   Having spent ages highlighting, I've had to recreate the paragraphs.  Hopefully I've not put in too many additional paragraphs. The videos didn't appear in the linked-to article source. I really love this article.   I think Parry's being too kind to Obama.  Obama's on the same plutocratic / Wall Street team as everybody else: so the Ukraine coup came as no surprise to Obama. Those horrible women using 'humanitarianism' to destroy countries (and people), have never had anything to do with humanitarian concerns; that's just the cover and an excuse for destruction.  And these same neocon animals are now destroying Europe - with the cooperation of neocon swine European politicians who don't care about the future of their own people or nations. The proposed 'Clinton doctrine' goes way back to the early 1990s Balkans under Bill 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman' Clinton (and probably earlier than that).  So, this is not that new. We're all screwed. What we see in the United States is pretty much what controls the entire West, via the US neocon foreign policy that is backed by various toady politicians in US-allied countries, who are replicas acting on behalf of the same monied interests (rather than national interests). The 'opposition' are just more replicas of these neocons and are their accomplices, no matter what they publicly pay lip-service to. Now I need to go away and digest all of this.  lol This means that Western governments don't care about us or our societies, and that they routinely lie to us. It also means that Western media routinely lies to us, as well. Assange Transnational Security Elite, Carving Up the World Using Your Tax Money London  OCT8 Antiwar Mass Assembly (2011) Link  |  here ꕤ

MUST READ: Neoliberal Capitalism - Planned Machinations of Empire & Militarism - Syria, Ukraine, Libya & Beyond

MUST READ SOURCE http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-collateral-damage-of-us-nato-wars-europes-refugee-crisis-depraved-morality-of-uk-prime-minister-david-cameron/5473997?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter The “Collateral Damage” of US-NATO Wars: Europe’s Refugee Crisis, Depraved Morality of UK Prime Minister David Cameron By Colin Todhunter Global Research, September 06, 2015 Region: Europe, Middle East & North Africa Theme: Police State & Civil Rights, United Nations UK Prime Minister David Cameron this week said “as a father I felt deeply moved” by the image of a Syrian boy dead on a Turkish beach. As pressure mounts on the UK to take in more of those fleeing to Europe from Syria and elsewhere. Cameron added that the UK would fulfil its “moral responsibilities.” On hearing Cameron’s words on the role of ‘morality’, something he talks a lot about, anyone who has been following the crisis in Syria would not have failed to detect the hypocrisy. According to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009. He told French TV: I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business… I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria. Writing in The Guardian in 2013, Nafeez Ahmed discusses leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, that confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.” He goes on to write that, according to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources. In 2009, Syrian President Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets in direct competition with Russia. Being a Russian ally, Assad refused to sign and instead pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran crossing Iraq and into Syria that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe. Thus Assad had to go. And this is where Cameron’s concerns really lie: not with ordinary people compelled to flee war zones that his government had a hand in making but with removing Assad in order for instance to run a pipeline through Syrian territory and to prevent Iran and Russia gaining strategic momentum in the region. Ordinary folk are merely ‘collateral damage’ in the geopolitical machinations of bankers, oilmen and arms manufacturers, only to be shown any sympathy when the media flashes images of a dead Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach or people drowned at sea trying to escape turmoil at home. It is then that people like Cameron are obliged to demonstrate mock sincerity in the face of public concern. ***** It is not only Syrians who are heading for Europe and the UK but also people from Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Countries that Britain has helped to devastate as part of the US-led long war based on the Project for a New American Century and the US right to intervene unilaterally as and when it deems fit under the notion of the US ‘exceptionalism’ (better known as the project for a new imperialism – the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’). Cameron said that Britain is a moral nation and would fulfil its moral responsibilities. Large sections of the population – ordinary men and women – are certainly ‘moral’ but that is unfortunately where any notion of morality seems to stop. Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has called the UK a rogue state and a danger to the world. Last year, he told a meeting at St Andrews University in Scotland that the British Government is deeply immoral and doesn’t care how many people its kills abroad if it advances it aims. Moreover, he said the UK was a state that is prepared to go to war to make a few people wealthy. He added that Libya is now a disaster and 15,000 people were killed when NATO (British and French jets) bombed Sirte, something the BBC never told the public. Murray told his audience what many already know or suspect but what many more remain ignorant of: I’ve seen things from the inside and the UK’s foreign interventions are almost always about resources. It is every bit as corrupt as others have indicated. It is not an academic construct, the system stinks. Murray was a British diplomat for 20 years. But after only six months, he said that in the country where he was Ambassador, the British and the US were shipping people in order for them to be tortured and some of them were tortured to death. As far as Iraq is concerned, Murray said that he knew for certain that key British officials were fully aware that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction. He said that invading Iraq wasn’t a mistake, it was a lie. Back in 2011, 200 prominent African figures accused Western nations and the International Criminal Court of “subverting international law” in Libya. The UN has been misused to militarise policy, legalise military action and effect regime change, according to University of Johannesburg professor Chris Landsberg. He said it is unprecedented for the UN to have outsourced military action to NATO in this way and challenges the International Criminal Court to investigate NATO for “violating international law.” In 2015, the outcome has been to turn Africa’s most developed nation to ruins and run by armed militias fighting one another. Is this the stability and morality Cameron preaches? Yet for public consumption, Cameron flags up his ‘morality’ by stating that the UK would continue to take in “thousands” of refugees. But he cautions that this is not the only answer to the crisis, saying a “comprehensive solution” is required. Awash with self-righteous platitudes he hoped would drown out any hint of hypocrisy or irony, Cameron added: “We have to try and stabilise the countries from which these people are coming.” One year ago, Cameron told the United Nations that Britain was ready to play its part in confronting “an evil against which the whole world must unite.” He also said that that “we” must not be so “frozen with fear” of repeating the mistakes of the 2003 Iraq invasion. He was attempting to drum up support for wider Anglo-US direct military action against Syria under the pretext of attacking ISIS. At the same time, Cameron spoke of the virtues of the West’s economic freedom and democratic values as well as the horrors of extremism and terror. Cameron’s was a monologue of hypocrisy. Over a million people have been killed via the US-led or US-backed attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, so we were told. It did not. That was a lie and hundreds of thousands have paid with their lives. We were told that Gaddafi was a tyrant. He used the nation’s oil wealth well by presiding over a country that possessed some of the best indices of social and economic well-being in Africa. Now, thanks to Western backed terror and military conflict, Libya lies in ruins and torn apart. Russia is a threat to world peace because of its actions in Ukraine, we are told. It is not. The US helped instigate the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Ukraine and has instigated provocations, sanctions and a proxy war against an emerging, confident Russia. But how far in history should we go back to stress that the West and Cameron and his ilk have no right to take the moral high ground when it comes to peace, respect for international law, self-determination, truth or democracy? The much quoted work by historian William Blum documents the crimes, bombings, assassinations, destabilisations and wars committed by the US in country after country since 1945. And since 1945 the UK has consistently stood shoulder to shoulder with Washington. Cameron stood at the UN and talked of the West’s values of freedom and democracy and the wonders of economic neoliberalism in an attempt to promote Western values and disguise imperialist intent. But it’s a thin disguise. The Anglo-US establishment has imposed its economic structural violence on much of the world by bankrupting economies, throwing millions into poverty and imposing ‘austerity’ and by rigging and manipulating global commodity markets and prices. Add to that the mass illegal surveillance at home and abroad, torture, drone murders, destabilisations, bombings and invasions and it becomes clear that Cameron’s ongoing eulogies to morality, freedom, humanitarianism, democracy and the ‘free’ market is hollow rhetoric. Apart from attempting to legitimise neoliberal capitalism, this rhetoric has one purpose: it is part of the ongoing ‘psych-ops’ being waged on the public to encourage people to regard what is happening in the world – from Syria, Iraq and Ukraine to Afghanistan and Libya, etc – as a confusing, disconnected array of events (perpetuated by unhinged madmen or terror groups) that are in need of Western intervention. These events are not for one minute to be regarded by the public as the planned machinations of empire and militarism, which entail a global energy and trade war against Russia and China, the associated preservation of the petro-dollar system and the encircling and intimidation of these two states with military hardware. Any mainstream narrative about the current migrant-refugee ‘crisis’ must steer well clear of such an analysis. Instead, we must listen to Cameron talking about the West ‘helping’ to stabilise the countries it helped to destabilise or destroy in the first place. It’s the same old story based on the same misrepresentation of imperialism: the US-led West acting as a force for good in the world and reluctantly taking up the role of ‘world policeman’. Whether it’s the now amply financially rewarded Blair or whether it is Cameron at the political helm, the perpetual wars and perpetual deceptions continue. Cameron plays his role well. Like Tony Blair, Cameron’s media-friendly bonhomie is slicker (and cheaper) than the most experienced used car salesman. And like Blair before him, Cameron is the media-friendly PR man who beats the drums of war (or mock sincerity, as the situation dictates), courtesy of a global power elite, who through their think tanks, institutions and financial clout ultimately determine economic policies and decide which wars are to be fought and for what purpose: “… the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet-flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world, people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid. They are 94 percent male, predominantly white, and mostly from North America and Europe. These are the people setting the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, G-8, G-20, NATO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. They are from the highest levels of finance capital, transnational corporations, the government, the military, the academy, nongovernmental organizations, spiritual leaders and other shadow elites. Shadow elites include, for instance, the deep politics of national security organizations in connection with international drug cartels, who extract 8,000 tons of opium from US war zones annually, then launder $500 billion through transnational banks, half of which are US-based.” – David Rothkopf (Project Censored ‘Exposing the transnational ruling class’) SOURCE http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-collateral-damage-of-us-nato-wars-europes-refugee-crisis-depraved-morality-of-uk-prime-minister-david-cameron/5473997?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT An excellent article, packed with everything that these slimy used-car salesmen politicians (and their corporate media enabler handmaidens), responsible for devastating their own countries and destroying those abroad, don't want you to know. These same hypocrite politicians that are responsible for the wilful destruction abroad and ensuing mayhem at home, wring their hands about 'radicalisation' ... like they haven't a clue how such a thing could possibly happen ... while entire populations in their countries are placed under totalitarian control, and their vulnerable and working classes are reduced to homelessness and relying on food banks.  lol It's a lot to take in.  Might have to do some notes. Assange Transnational Security Elite, Carving Up the World Using Your Tax Money London  OCT8 Antiwar Mass Assembly (2011) Link  |  here ꕤ