Patrick Martin

The abduction and murder of a Palestinian teenager early Wednesday morning, apparently a revenge killing carried out by right-wing Israeli settlers, has sparked rioting and direct clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli security forces.

Muhammad Hussein Abu Khudair, age 16, was grabbed by several men who approached him on the street as he walked from his home to the local mosque for early morning prayers, the usual start of the day for an observant Muslim during Ramadan. Eyewitnesses said the men were Jewish. They shoved him into a dark-colored car and drove away.

The family reported the abduction to the Israeli police. About an hour later, the boy’s body was found in another part of the city, Jerusalem Forest, badly burned and bearing other signs of the violence that claimed his life. The father identified his son’s body, and this was confirmed by DNA analysis based on samples given by the parents.

The body was taken to Israel’s Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for autopsy. It will be released Thursday to the family for an independent autopsy by Palestinian doctors and for burial.

The Khudairs showed reporters a copy of the video footage from a CCTV camera in front of the family’s electronics shop showing two of the kidnappers. The original video was seized by Israeli police. Israeli courts have imposed a gag rule on media reports about the details of the crime.

More »

Patrick Martin

In the face of the unfolding debacle for the United States in Iraq, the Obama administration is preparing yet another escalation of violence. Like all of the other actions taken by American imperialism in Iraq and the broader Middle East, this too will lead to nothing but more death and destruction.

The humiliating collapse of the US-backed military forces in Iraq in the face of an offensive by the Sunni-based Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has put that tortured country once again in Washington’s gunsights.

The Pentagon announced Saturday that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had ordered the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush into the Persian Gulf, accompanied by two other warships. President Obama has declared that some form of military action is imminent, saying Friday, “there will be some short-term, immediate things that need to be done militarily.”

The possible operations reportedly range from shipping emergency supplies of weapons and ammunition to Iraqi forces, to drone missile attacks, to air and missile strikes from US naval forces in the Persian Gulf.

More »

Patrick Martin

A major American goal at the G-7 meeting is to revive an atmosphere of confrontation.

President Barack Obama left Washington Monday night for a four-day trip to Europe, where he will seek to intensify the campaign against Russia that began with the US-backed and fascist-led coup in Ukraine in February. The trip will include Obama’s first face-to-face meeting with Petro O. Poroshenko, the billionaire oligarch who is to be inaugurated as the new president of Ukraine on June 7.

Obama meets Tuesday in Warsaw with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, then with a group of Eastern European officials, including representatives from Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia. The following day he has a one-on-one session with Poroshenko.

The US president will also meet with American airmen deployed at a Polish air base and he will give a public speech marking the 25th anniversary of the first elections held after the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Poland.

Press reports suggest that Obama and Poroshenko will discuss direct US military aid to help the Kiev regime in its campaign to suppress opposition groups in eastern Ukraine, populated mainly by Russian speakers hostile to the ultra-right Ukrainian nationalists who now control the country’s government.

Washington has so far limited its aid to “nonlethal” supplies, including military rations, but may well use the May 25 presidential election—largely boycotted in the eastern third of the country—as the pretext for escalating its intervention in the Ukraine crisis by supplying weapons and ammunition as well as providing military training.

More »

Patrick Martin

There is considerable support for Russia in eastern Ukraine. A
man loyal to Moscow stands with two banners made from
shields near the Ukraine security agency building. (AFP/Getty)

In separate statements in the US and Europe, President Obama and NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen ratcheted up the threats by US and European imperialism against Russia. Their statements came on the eve of four-party talks set for Thursday in Geneva, with the US, the European Union and their Ukrainian puppet regime facing off against Moscow.

Obama gave an interview to Major Garrett of CBS News, who asked a series of provocative questions suggesting that the White House should step up its campaign of economic warfare against Russia. Before the interview, the White House announced that a new round of economic sanctions had been “prepared” for use against Russia if there was no progress in resolving the crisis in Ukraine.

Obama told CBS that it was “absolutely clear” that Russia had violated Ukrainian sovereignty in annexing Crimea and that it was continuing to do so by supporting “non-state militias” in southern and eastern Ukraine, where there is overwhelming popular hostility to the US-backed right-wing regime in Kiev. Offering no proof for his accusations against Russia, Obama declared: “What I’ve said consistently is that each time Russia takes these kinds of steps, that are designed to destabilize Ukraine and violate their sovereignty, that there are going to be consequences, and what you have already seen is the Russian economy weaker, capital fleeing out of Russia.” In language that suggested possible US support for future Ukrainian membership in NATO—a radical break from previous policy—Obama said, “We don’t need a war. What we do need is a recognition that countries like Ukraine can have relationships with a whole range of their neighbors and it is not up to anybody whether it is Russia or anybody else to make decisions for them.”

More »

Patrick Martin

Nearly two days after the London Review of Books published a lengthy exposé by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh detailing efforts by the Turkish government to stage a provocation to bring the US military directly into the civil war in Syria, the US media has blacked out the report.

Hersh, who has authored groundbreaking investigative reports uncovering US atrocities, including the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war, titled his article on last August’s sarin gas attack outside of Damascus “The Red Line and the Rat Line.”

The “red line” refers to President Obama’s threat to attack Syria if the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons. The “rat line” was a CIA-organized supply chain running from Benghazi, Libya through southern Turkey and into Syria, which was used to smuggle weapons to the Syrian “rebels.”

More »

Patrick Martin

From the August 2013 "rebel" gas attack in Damascus (Ghouta)

It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.

In a lengthy article published Sunday by the London Review of Books, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the sarin gas attack on a Damascus suburb on August 21, 2013 was actually carried out by Syrian “rebel” forces acting at the behest of Turkey, for the purpose of providing a pretext for a US attack on Syria.

The gas attack killed many hundreds of people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, and the Obama administration and the corporate-controlled US media immediately blamed the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad for the atrocity. The New York Times, in particular, published a lengthy analysis by its military “expert,” C. J. Chivers, which purported to show, based on rocket trajectories, prevailing winds and other technical factors, that the gas shells could only have been fired from Syrian army artillery positions.

For several weeks, the Ghouta attack became the pretext for a warmongering campaign by the White House and the US and European media. Obama threatened immediate air strikes, claiming that the Syrian government had crossed a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, which he had laid down in 2012.

More »

Patrick Martin

The speech delivered by President Barack Obama in Brussels Wednesday was a call to arms for a US-NATO confrontation against Russia. With a series of lies and evasions, Obama presented a world turned upside down in which the US and European imperialists, who backed the coup in Ukraine spearheaded by fascistic forces, are the defenders of democracy and peace.

US President Obama at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

There was little in the speech that could convince working people, either in Europe or the United States, that a policy of open-ended conflict with Russia was in their interests. That was not the purpose of the speech, which consisted of one propaganda lie after another, uttered with the assurance that there would be no serious criticism, let alone opposition, within the ruling elites of the US and Europe or from their media mouthpieces.

Obama sought to elaborate the basis for a major turn in US foreign policy—what one of his foreign policy advisers called a “strategic pivot” towards confronting Russia, deliberately employing the same term that the White House has used to describe its systematic anti-China policy in the Far East.

One aim of this strategy of confrontation is to provide a new political axis for the US-dominated NATO military structure, which has visibly frayed in the absence of the old Cold War framework.

Much of the speech was devoted to rehashing long-discredited claims that American imperialism and its European allies represent democracy, freedom and the popular will. Obama invoked the conflict between democratic ideals and the authoritarian view that “order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.”

But the words rang rather hollow coming from a president who has claimed absolute and unreviewable power to order the drone-missile assassination of anyone he chooses, anywhere in the world, and whose government asserts the right to collect and store the e-mails, text messages and telephone calls of the entire human race.

More »

Patrick Martin

A protester in favor of U.S. military action against Syria, right,
spits in the face of the man before him, who said he was from
Syria, is opposed to U.S. military action there, and preferred not
to give his name, during a multiple heated protests in front of
the White House in Washington Saturday, Aug. 31, 2013. The
man at right was arrested for spitting in the other protester's face
shortly after this photo was taken. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

President Obama’s announcement Saturday that he would seek congressional authorization for military strikes against Syria sets the stage for a two-week campaign of media propaganda and political intimidation. Its goal is to browbeat the American people into accepting yet another imperialist war in the Middle East.

Obama’s announcement was an abrupt reversal, after a week in which US officials suggested that a unilateral American attack on Syria was imminent, using the pretext of an alleged chemical weapons attack August 21 in the suburbs of Damascus.

The announcement incorporated what Obama described as two separate decisions: to “take military action against Syrian regime targets,” and to seek authorization for such action beforehand from Congress.

Obama’s language was carefully constructed to allow maximum flexibility in escalating the military action. “Syrian regime targets” is specifically not limited to the Syrian military, but includes the political leadership, up to and including President Bashar al-Assad, who is likely to be targeted by US drones, already active in Syrian airspace, as well as cruise missiles.

As for going to Congress, Obama made it explicit that, in his view, he was not bound to abide by the results of a congressional vote. He could launch missiles strikes and bombing raids even if Congress rejects the measure. He also acknowledged that the attack on Syria would not be authorized by the United Nations.

In other words, while disguising his intentions in the language of restraint—noting that in addition to being commander-in-chief, he is “president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy”—Obama is asserting essentially unchecked power to attack any nation, at any time, regardless of either US or international law.

More »

Thomas Gaist

A Bahraini armoured personnel vehicle reinforces US
embassy security in Manama, Bahrain. (Associated Press)

Patrick Martin: The US terror scare

The US State Department announced Sunday that 19 foreign embassies will remain closed all week in accordance with the ongoing global terror alert announced Friday. The alert was launched, according to a White House statement, in response to a threat “possibly occurring in or emanating from the Arabian Peninsula.” Britain and a number of other European countries moved to close their facilities in Yemen as well.

US officials said on Sunday that the decision to extend the closures was based on the need to “exercise caution” and not on new information regarding possible attacks. On Monday afternoon, the State Department released information citing “a rare intercepted communication” between Ayman al-Zawahri in Pakistan and Nasir al-Wahisi in Yemen, claiming that this intercept prompted the terror alert.

The media continues to promote the claims of the government uncritically, despite the absence of any factual substantiation and the vague and non-specific nature of the purported threat. There is barely a hint from the corporate-controlled media that previous terror alerts in the course of the so-called “war on terror” have proven baseless, and no reference to the rampant lying of the government in relation to the illegal spying operations that have been exposed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, continue to seize on the terror alert as supposed justification for the National Security Agency’s sweeping eavesdropping and data collection programs, which are in flagrant violation of the US Constitution. Yet there is no suggestion in the alarmist media reports that there might be an ulterior political motive behind the sudden announcement of an imminent terror threat.

More »

Patrick Martin

The latest in a long series of US terror scares since the September 11, 2001 attacks has unfolded over the last three days, following a well-worn pattern.

Top officials of the executive branch issue vague and ominous alerts. Congressional leaders, after closed-door briefings by the intelligence agencies, echo the warnings. The media amplifies the alarm uncritically, seeking to stampede the public. Not a single voice is raised to question the claims or essential premises of the scare campaign.

A number of questions are raised by the global travel alert and closure of US diplomatic facilities throughout the Middle East announced on Friday.

First, there is the timing of the measures. They come after nearly two months of nonstop revelations about massive US government spying on the American people, including the collection of both metadata and the content of the telephone conversations and e-mail of virtually every person in the United States. The Obama administration has been thrown on the defensive by the information made public by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, with the assistance of Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald.

More »