Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The United States is doing its best to estrange the European Union from Russia to get the upper hand in a free trade deal, and also, to manipulate European countries into buying America’s relatively more expensive natural gas.

The TTIP and Ukraine - The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a Euro-Atlantic free trade agreement that is the subject of ongoing negotiations between the US and the EU. The deadline for finalizing the TTIP free trade agreement is in 2015. Its goal is to create what is referred to as the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) and to cement the European Union with the United States as one supranational trading bloc.

These trade negations have been passing under the public’s radar, because they have been taking place very discreetly behind closed doors. The very TTIP’s name is designed to conceal, and was selected by policy and trade mandarins, because of their fears that a public backlash could erupt against the negotiations, as it did in the case of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks in 2001. Like the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which was signed in Ottawa between Canada and the EU on September 26, wordsmiths calculatingly picked the name TTIP to try to hide the fact that it is a free trade agreement.

Washington is doing its best to disrupt trade ties between its EU partners and the Russian Federation in order to get greater leverage in the TTIP negotiations. Its strategy is to economically weaken its European partners by getting them to cut ties with Moscow through anti-Russia sanctions that will directly hurt their economies too. Washington calculates that this will force a weakened EU to maximize the economic concessions to the US in the TTIP talks.

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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Why does Western media ignore critical information about the snipers that killed Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine?

Support it or oppose it, a coup d’état took place in Kiev after an EU-brokered agreement was signed by the Ukrainian government and the mainstream opposition on Feb. 21. The agreement called for power sharing between both sides through the formation of a national unity government and for an end to the opposition-led street protests in Kiev. President Viktor Yanukovych ordered the Ukrainian police and security forces to withdraw from their positions, and even earlier, he had made multiple concessions to the opposition leadership.

Instead of keeping its end of the bargain, the Ukrainian mainstream opposition executed a coup through the use of violence by organized ultra-nationalist gangs, which some analysts have compared to stay-behinds or secretive militias that were created by NATO during the Cold War.

These armed ultra-nationalist groups took over administrative bodies in Ukraine and fought until they managed to oust the Ukrainian government and opened the path for opposition leaders to take power on Feb. 25. The Ukrainian mainstream opposition used the EU-brokered agreement, which the Brussels-based European Commission deliberately refused to enforce, as a means of justifying the formation of a coup-imposed government.

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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The Middle East and North Africa have been turned into an arc of instability all the way from Iraq and the Persian Gulf to Libya and Tunisia. Chaos and violence seem to be in almost every corner of the Arab World and the Middle East. The bloodletting does not seem to stop.

One country in the region, however, is gleaming with satisfaction. Tel Aviv has been given a free hand by the instability that it has helped author with Washington in the region. The chaos around it has allowed Israel to move ahead with its annexation of more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank while it pretends to be talking peace with the Palestinian Authority of the irrelevant Mahmoud Abbas. All it needs now is for the US to lead a war against Iran and its allies.

The current upheavals actually have a resounding resemblance to the objectives of the Yinon Plan of 1982, named after its author Oded Yinon from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which calls for the fracturing of North Africa and the Middle East. The Israeli document may have been written in 1982, but it represents the strategic goals and ideas of Israel. «Breaking Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions is the political aim of Israel», according to it. It is a continuation of the colonial project of the British in the region and has been transmitted to American foreign policy, which explains the views of the neocons and Ralph Peters about the «New Middle East» that they seek. The «Clean Break» documented authored by Richard Perle for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also based on the Yinon Plan and informs the current position of the Obama Administration and Netanyahu’s government on Syria.

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Stephen Lendman

Public anger in Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, Brazil, Chile, across Europe, in America against Wall Street, and elsewhere is real. It's visceral. It's deep-seated. It's growing. It reflects what media scoundrels won't explain.

Democracy's more illusion than real. People get the best kind money can buy. Manipulated elections control things. Systemic rule is hardline. Progressive change is verboten. Monied interests have final say. Corporate giants rule the world. Exploiting nations, markets and people for profit matters most. Governments conspire with business to facilitate it. Popular needs more than ever go begging. People increasingly are on their own sink or swim. Wealth, power, and privilege are hugely disproportionate.

Wars on humanity rage. Freedom's on the chopping block for elimination. Rule of law principles don't matter. Might makes right. Police state tactics assure it. They're vicious. Things go from bad to worse. Humanity and planet earth are up for grabs. Independent thought is verboten. Controlling the message is prioritized.

Most nations aren't fit places to live in. Hardline governments keep things that way. Popular uprisings reflect discontent too intense to contain. Public anger rages against systemic injustice. It's exploitive. It's predatory. It's uncaring. It's merciless. It's untenable.

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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Propaganda image taken from The Times of Israel. The image
may just as well be from their own arsenal.

Syria will not use any chemical or biological weapons against its own people. The Obama Administration and company are just recycling the same lines that were used months earlier against Damascus.

These statements are disingenuous and hollow. They can easily be deconstructed as rhetoric. All we need to do it look at recent history.

In 2011, were not similar charges put forward against another Arab country? Were they not claiming that the late Muammar Qaddafi would use chemical weapons against his own population? Was it not claimed even earlier that Qaddafi and the Libyan military had brought in black-skinned African mercenaries to kill Libyan citizens? Or that Libyan jets were killing Libyan protesters? What happened to the genocide in Benghazi? Now there is nothing but silence and lost memories. Claims were made, morality and responsibility were invoked, and then a rising Arab country was bombarded. An engine of economic progress in Africa was halted in its tracks overnight and an entire society robbed.

There was also the textbook case of Iraq even before the lies about the Libyan Jamahiriya. Did not the Bush Jr. Administration, Tony Blair, and their circle of war criminals-in-office not lie to the entire international community and say that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program and weapons of mass destruction in 2003? What happened to those WMDs? This is not something that can easily be scoffed at. More than one million Iraqis died over the lies conjured by the Anglo-American duo. Not to mention the ecological damage and the intellectual genocide perpetrated against Iraq’s intelligentsia and professional class.

Let us be clear, Syria threatened to use chemical weapons against any invading force on July 23, 2012. Firstly, the statement was made in a defensive context. Secondly, it was directed against military threats. This is very different from planning on using chemical weapons against your own citizens, specifically civilians.

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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Obama, Ban and the late Leader of Libya, Moammar Ghadafi
in 2009. Obama and Ban apparently did not feel comfortable
in Mr. Ghadafi's presence. (They later had him killed.)

The calls at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran for reforming the United Nations and democratizing the Security Council were not exactly new. These calls for UN reform were embodied by the conference’s dictum of “lasting peace through joint global governance.” These demands have been made over and over again by various countries and groups throughout the years.

Nor was everyone present at the NAM gala in Tehran a friend of Iran or open to the Iranian proposals for reforming the United Nations. The visibly shaken Jeffry Feltman, who was uncomfortably sitting with Iranian officials in Tehran alongside his new boss Ban Ki-moon, can testify to all this. Feltman is a clear symbol of how contaminated the United Nations has become by the imperialist interests of Washington.

The manipulation of the United Nations for imperialist interests, however, goes back a long way. From its inception, the United Nations was meant to facilitate the global influence of the US after the Second World War. The idea of the United Nations, which gets its name from the military coalition (called the United Nations) of the Allied countries that was formed against Germany and the Axis countries, was based on an agreement drafted by the US and the UK during the Second World War. This agreement, the Atlantic Charter, was written out while the US was officially neutral, but secretly supported the British war effort against Germany and its Axis allies by sending supplies to Britain through Canada. The US would later use the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a justification for entering the war and getting the other Allies to accept the Anglo-American Atlantic Charter during the war and then at the San Francisco Conference in 1945.

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Johannes Stern

Israeli-US script: Divide Syria, divide the rest. (Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya)

The cynicism with which Obama is seeking to justify the next US aggression in the Middle East is staggering.

Yesterday US and NATO officials discussed plans for a US military invasion of Syria to bring down Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, after US President Barack Obama announced that the US was contemplating a direct attack on Syria at a press conference Monday night.

A delegation led by Assistant Secretary for State for near East Affairs Beth Jones discussed US military plans with Turkey. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that Defense Department and US intelligence officials met their Turkish counterparts “to share operational pictures, to talk about the effectiveness of what we’re doing now, and about what more we can do.”

Senior US officials said that contingency plans for US intervention in Syria include scenarios requiring tens of thousands of American troops.

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Bill Van Auken

There is strong evidence that NATO carried out war crimes in its eight-month war for regime-change in Libya, according to a report released Thursday by Middle East human rights groups.

The United Nations resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians was utilized as the justification for military actions against civilian targets in which many Libyans were killed and wounded, according to the groups’ investigation.

The report is based upon a fact-finding mission to Libya conducted by the Arab Organization for Human Rights, together with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the International Legal Assistance Consortium. The investigators conducted extensive interviews with victims of war crimes as well as witnesses and Libyan officials. The mission carried out on-site field investigations in and around Tripoli, Zawiya, Sibrata, Khoms, Zliten, Misrata, Tawergha and Sirte.

While the investigation concluded that the government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi used excessive force against protesters, the report also states: “There does not appear to have been a clear demarcation between peaceful protests and armed opposition, and the Mission received credible information indicating that protestors took up arms in the early stages of the revolution.”

In terms of NATO’s role, the report cites evidence that in addition to NATO air strikes, the US-led alliance deployed troops on the ground, which coordinated the offensive of the so-called “rebels” with the bombing campaign.

“NATO participated in what could be classified as offensive actions undertaken by the opposition forces, including, for example, attacks on towns and cities held by Gaddafi forces,” the report states. “Equally, the choice of certain targets, such as a regional food warehouse, raises prima facie questions regarding the role of such attacks with respect to the protection of civilians.”

Among civilian sites visited by the mission that had been struck by NATO bombs and missiles were schools and colleges, a Zliten regional food warehouse, the Office of the Administrative Controller in Tripoli, and private homes.

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Rick Rozoff

Interview conducted by John Robles on August 27 with Rick Rozoff, the manager of the Stop NATO website and a contributing writer to the Center for Global Research and Voltaire Network.

Libya may be yet another country for NATO to take root in, suspects Rick Rozoff, who sees the repetition of an all-too-familiar modus operandi.

First, NATO carpet bombs the whole country from top to bottom, then sets up military bases and finally doesn’t leave. In Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel is still going strong, and there are no signs that military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan will ever be left behind, despite persistent pledges of troop withdrawal.

Can you shed a little light on the situation in Libya, in particular with NATO?

As you know, I’m in Chicago, not in Tripoli, so I’m observing events from afar. Yet there is an old Roman expression which says the game is best viewed by the spectator. So, what I have to say I think is trying to situate developments in Libya, whatever they are on the ground, within both a regional and an international context.

And, within that framework, we know that the African Union has refused recognition to the so-called Transitional National Council, consisting of what by all accounts is a fairly motley, heterogeneous grouping of anti-government forces in Libya, aided and abetted by major NATO powers like France, Britain, the U.S. and Italy and by Persian Gulf monarchies like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

So, the fact that the African continent, on which Libya is located, has collectively refused recognition to the new rebel regime is significant, as is the fact that the Russian Foreign Ministry has voiced its concerns and its opposition to any plans that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may entertain for placing troops on the ground in Libya, ostensibly under the guise of a peacekeeping or stabilization force, but also more prominently voiced some concerns about the prospect of NATO military facilities being authorized by the forces opposed to Gaddafi.

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Stephen Lendman

Wherever it goes, NATO slaughters, ravages, lays waste, incinerates, contaminates, devastates, conquers, colonizes, plunders, exploits, impoverishes and immiserates.

Libya is its latest victim. It's now a hellish inferno thanks to NATO and its rebel gangs, unleashed to commit mass murder with impunity. NATO calls it humanitarian intervention responsibility to protect. This is Orwellian doublespeak for war.

For Libyans, it's a war without mercy to destroy their independent state. For America, Britain and France, it's for another imperial trophy.

For Libyans, it turned their world upside down through the barrel of a gun. They call it naked aggression, mass slaughter, and turning Africa's most developed state into a dystopian nightmare. It's why people of conscience say never forgive or forget.

Watch the Libya Truth video and compare the country before and after NATO, accessed through this link.

With independent Tripoli-based voices silenced, it's hard getting accurate daily information. Nonetheless, some mainstream sources report rebel forces are committing reprisals, revenge killings, and perhaps indiscriminate murder across the city, repeating the same pattern they followed in other parts of the country.

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