A shared life

Pete Seeger has died, and though one cannot say that his death at the age of 94 was untimely, it nevertheless has a sad connotation and he will be missed.

He has written and performed many songs that influenced and shaped US culture, he has made his contribution and he will be remembered kindly. “If I had a Hammer,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “Where Have All The Flowers Gone,” “We Shall Overcome,” Midnight Special,” “Kisses Sweater Than Wine,” “Guantanamera,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” are songs that he either cowrote or has made popular.

If I had a hammer,
I’d hammer in the morning
I’d hammer in the evening,
All over this land 

I’d hammer out danger,
I’d hammer out a warning,
I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land. 

If I had a bell,
I’d ring it in the morning,
I’d ring it in the evening,
All over this land 

I’d ring out danger,
I’d ring out a warning
I’d ring out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land. 

If I had a song,
I’d sing it in the morning,
I’d sing it in the evening,
All over this land 

I’d sing out danger,
I’d sing out a warning
I’d sing out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land. 

It’s the hammer of Justice,
It’s the bell of Freedom,
It’s the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land. 

Huddie Ledbetter, the black ex-convict better known as Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie were Seegers influences and in turn he influenced Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, and many, many others.

Political dissent had been a family tradition, A great-grandfather was a 19th-century abolitionist, World War I poet Alan Seeger, who wrote “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” was an uncle, Seeger’s father was a conscientious objector during World War I.

Seeger had attended meetings of the Communist Party and was suspected to be as Communist Party sympathizer or even member. He was blacklisted by the US Government in the 1950s and subpoenaed in 1955 by the Congressional Un-American Activities Committee. Following a contentious hearing he was convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to one year in jail. The conviction was overturned in 1962 after a prolonged appeal process because of a technical flaw in the indictment.

He was allowed on TV again in the late 1960s but had a protest song about the Vietnam War censored.

Behind every great man stands a great woman

Johnny Cash has written and performed many famous songs, among them “I Walk the Line”, “Folsom Prison Blues”, “Ring of Fire”, “Get Rhythm,” and “Man in Black.” He married June Carter, member of the famous Carter Family and a renowned artist in her own right, in 1968 and they were deeply in love throughout the 35 years of their marriage.

When June Carter died in May 2003, Johnny Cash was heartbroken and everybody around him realized that he didn’t want to live on without her. It was not unexpected when he died in September 2003, only four month after his wife.

I watched a video, recorded during Carters short time as a widower, where he sits on the piano in his home and plays a song. His gestures and his mimic, the song, his voice, everything radiates such a fundamental sadness that it is hard not to be absorbed and devoured by it.

When I read in the post of a fellow blogger that Toshi Seeger, Pete Seeger’s wife for nearly 70 years and like he a successful artist, had died, I instantly thought of the pain, that this loss must have inflicted on him. I don’t know how he coped with the situation, it is a private matter after all, but his death only six month later is not surprising.

In November a friend called me to tell, that his wife has died. They were married for 58 years. We have had many long conversations since then where he told me that his life is uprooted and the ceiling is falling on his head. He showed me a picture that he had painted.

When people live that long together, they have completely adapted to each other and their personalities have melted into one. They share their memories, their beliefs, their knowledge, and their skills. The challenges of life are faced and met together and everyone knows her/his place and her/his tasks. 

Which means in scientific terms, that the thinking, the inner working of the brain has changed and many memory patterns depend on and make only sense if combined with the memory patterns of the dear compagnon. When the mate dies, whole areas of the brain suddenly are obsolete. The most common practices, routines, habits, skills of daily life, which depended on her cooperation are useless now, big ares of the brain have to be reorganized and reconfigured for a new solitary life.

This is the essence of loss. It is like a stroke and one has to start from scratch, to learn things new, to develop new routines, and completely reconstruct life. Many men in their later years are too burdened and tired to make this effort, they don’t want to go once again through the laborious and exhausting process, they rather follow their beloved wife into death.

My friend though seems to have overcome the devastating loss and he seems to be determined to carry on. It would be a stretch to say that he is in good spirit, but he is already looking for someone new to share his life.

Good luck, my friend!

They don’t lie this time

No, I don’t want to add another verse to John Lennon’s wonderful song, which accompanied me through many decades, yet…

Imagine, there’s no TV
Nobody tells you lies
No news that will confuse you
No conman’s false advise
Imagine all the people
Living for today….
================

Imagine:

If the quintessential message of Western news reporting would be painted in every room on every wall, if it would be broadcast around the clock on all airwave frequencies and sent through all cables, if the children would recite it instead of the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of every lesson, if it would be preached from every pulpit and blasted from all sound systems in the shopping malls and supermarkets, how much time, energy, and resources could be saved by that.

There would be no need to publish thousands of op-ed articles, analysis, interviews, and background informations, meaning that the authors could instead spend their days with something more productive (gardening for instance). There would be no need to waste scarce materials and energy with printing newspapers, the TV broadcasts could focus on weather forecasts, sport, and celebrity porn, and millions of websites could be taken down, relieving the already overstretched data centers from further strain and making it unnecessary to build new ones.

What a benefit for the environment!

So, to make a start, everybody who reads this blog post should write on every wall of every room which she or he is occupying the following short text who’s formulations are probably already well known to most:

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

Easy, isn’t it? If you have these few words in your mind all the time, there is no need to read the papers, watch the evening news, or visit the news aggregators on the web. And, anyway, Western media outlets have not a good record of being truthful and it is unlikely that you will learn from them what is really going on in the world. Western journalism failed us many times, here just a few examples:

Vietnam

Newspapers all over the world reported, that on the 2nd and 4th August 1964 North Vietnam attacked two US ships in the Bay of Tonkin. This started the “hot phase” of the Vietnam war which killed between two and three million Vietnamese, caused an epidemic of genetic malformations from Agent Orange, and inflicted ecological, economic, and social wounds that took decades to heal. Only years later the public learned from declassified documents that on August 2nd the US Navy fired first and the attack on August 4th didn’t happen at all. It was an invention of the White House, unquestioned by the media.

Grenada

In October 1983 US forces invaded Grenada after a coup had ended that Caribbean islands socialist experiment. It was claimed that Cuba was involved, that the island intended to erect a Soviet military base, and that the lives of US medical students at the True Blue Medical Facility were in danger. As it later came out, the coup was preceded by two years of intense destabilization efforts of the CIA, the medical students could have left at any time, there were only 43 Cuban soldiers on the island, Castro had condemned the renegade officers who launched the coup and killed his friend Maurice Bishop, and there were no plans for a Soviet base.

Panama

On December 20th, 1989 the USA invaded Panama with the reported intent to arrest President Noriega for drug trafficking. As it came to light later, Noriega was a CIA asset for many years and his drug involvement was well known during the time of his closest relations with Washington. The real reason for the innovation was, that Noriega claimed sovereignty over the canal, which was intolerable to the United States. A comprehensive analysis of US media coverage can be found here:
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/how-television-sold-the-panama-invasion/

Iraq I

In 1991 Iraq invaded Kuwait, not at least because Saddam Hussein, who was on good terms with the USA during the war against Iran erroneously thought to have the approval of the Americans. The press was full of horror stories about the Iraqi occupiers, the most shocking of which was, that Iraqi soldiers had taken babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and had left them to die.

As it came out later, this particular incident was a total invention of the advertising agency Hill and Knowlton, paid by the Emir of Kuwait.

Iraq was defeated by the US army and driven out of Kuwait, the UN Security Council imposed crippling economic sanctions which caused malnutrition, diseases, and widespread poverty.

 

Yugoslavia

In order to break up Yugoslavia, which was a reliable partner of Russia and had a socialist orientated economy and an advanced social welfare system, Western media organizations had to incite ethnic hatred and support right wing political desperadoes like Franjo Tudjman and Goran Izetbegovic.

In 1992 the US firm Ruder Finn and Bernard Kouchner disclosed the existence of Serbian death camps. This was a blatant lie and those camps were ordinary prison camp, which was even admitted by Goran Izetbegovic.

In 1999 Western media accused Serbs of committing a genocide against the Albanians in Kosovo. NATO started a bombing campaign which killed 2,400 Serbs and caused heavy damage to buildings and infrastructure. A third of the electric energy capacity of the country was destroyed.

The genocide against Albanians in Kosovo was a pure media intervention and there was no discrimination of Albanians. The KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) under Hashim Thaci was the crossbreed of a terrorist group with crime gangs, it had numerous contacts with Al-Queda and made money from drug trafficking and other criminal activities. The KLA had no public support and without the NATO bombing campaign would never have been able to take power.

The countless KLA atrocities against Serbs (for instance torture and killings at the Klecka prison) and the successive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo were ignored by the Western press.

Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavian president during the time of the forced breakup, was extradited to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) in The Hague by his successor Zoran Dindic, an opportunist and Western puppet. The trial lasted for five years and ended, when Milosevic died under mysterious circumstances, thereby conveniently saving the prosecution from the embarrassment of his acquittal.

(The life and death of Milosevic would be worth of a separate blog post, which may be written one day in the future, in the meantime the reader is encouraged to look for additional information on the internet.)

 

Rwanda and Congo

The 1994 genocide of Tutsis and Hutus alike is commonly portrait as the responsibility of the Hutu government, which had to be toppled by Paul Kagame’s forces to stop the bloodshed. But nothing could be further from the truth!

The RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front), led by the Tutsi expatriate and Ugandan official Paul Kagame (who was trained at Ft. Leavenworth), had fought since 1990 a war of attrition against the democratic Hutu government, resulting in the forced exodus of thousands of Hutu farmers.

Tutsis comprised not more than 16 percent of the population and Kagame would never have had a chance to attain power in a democratic election. The trigger for the genocide was the downing of a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. UN investigator Michael Hourigan charged Kagame for this crime but the report was suppressed.

UN investigator Robert Gersony came to the conclusion that RPF cells hat infiltrated Rwanda and at least shared the responsibility for the genocide, yet no Western journalist ever mentioned this. UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros- Ghali repeatedly said: “…The genocide in Rwanda was one hundred percent the responsibility of the Americans.” The only reaction was his replacement.

Kagame was encouraged to move one to the next venue, which was the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). The genocide of Hutu refugees and Congolese alike, committed by Rwandan troops from 1996 untill recently, more than equals the Rwanda genocide, but it was a “friendly” genocide, done by an US ally, so there was no need to write anything about it.

As the most important mining areas of the DRC have been conquered and made ready for the exploration by Western companies, Kagame’s troops are on the move again to the next arenas, which are the CAR (Central African Republic) and South Sudan. The USA just airlifted a Rwandan mechanized battalion with giant C-17 Globemaster III planes to the CAR.

No US-boots on the ground, Kagame does the dirty work.
https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/new-rwanda-and-the-new-scramble-for-africa/

Afghanistan

In 2001 US President G.W. Bush wanted to avenge the 9/11 attacks and capture Osama Bin Laden. After a media drumbeat of war Afghanistan was invaded, despite the fact that the Taliban had offered to extradite Bin Laden. Today Afghanistan is a failed state, the Taliban rules in many areas, the production and trafficking of opium has greatly increased.

Iraq II

In 2003 Saddam Hussein was accused, to possess large hidden stockpiles of WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence during a speech at the UN Security Council. Hussein was also accused of supporting Osama Bin Laden.

Iraq was invaded, Saddam Hussein was killed together with some 600,000 fellow Iraqis, the infrastructure was destroyed, the country descended into chaos and barbarism, and Iraqi women lost all the social gains of the Ba’ath era.

No WMDs were found and the alleged support of Bin Laden was pure fantasy. The media just ignored the corrections and went on to the next imperial conquest project.

Venezuela

Huge Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela, was untruthfully referred to as a dictator and while the US together with Venezuelan business tycoons used every trick in the book to destabilize the country and roll back the social gains of his administration the media reported breathlessly about alleged human rights violations, media censorship, and expropriations of enterprises.

As Huge Chavez has finally died of cancer (good riddance), the vitriol is now poured onto his democratically elected successor Nicolas Maduro. Needless to say, that the destabilization efforts go on unabated.

Libya

To prepare the Western public for the destruction of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was accused of using fighter jets against peaceful protesters and of distributing viagra to his solders to facilitate mass rapes of the allegedly suppressed population. None of the stories were true, but that came to light only after Libya was destroyed and 40,000 Libyans had died.

Libya has since descended into chaos and anarchy. The NATO installed authorities are clueless and helpless and have no control about a multitude of ransacking militias. It seems, that in recent days the south of Libya has been taken back by Gaddafi loyalists, as the Green Resistance Flag flies in most of the southern cities. This doesn’t mean that the days of the militias are numbered, because NATO will just drop more weapons and ammunitions to them, enabling the savages to completely destroy one southern town after the other as they did it with Bani Walid and Sirte.

Whatever happens, one will not hear anything about Libya in the media. There may be a genocide of the southern tribes but like the genocide of Kagame’s troops in the DRC it will be a “friendly” genocide, not worth to be reported.

Syria

Western journalists have no time to report about Libya, they are busy to follow the latest mission order which unmistakably demands to demonize the Syrian government and especially President Bashar al-Assad. He is now called “the butcher of Damascus,” and after media consumers were told for three years again and again that he is a bestial, depraved criminal, a brutish monster which should be eliminated from the face of the earth as soon as possible, no one will have any doubts that this depiction is the whole truth and nothing but the truth (so help us god).

Qatar commissioned the British law firm Carter-Ruck, who has in the past defended Saudis suspected of financing Al Qaeda, to write a report about 55,000 digital images, who a defected Syrian military police photographer, only known by the pseudonym “Cesar” supposedly smuggled out of Syria. The horrifying images show tortured and killed detainees.

According to Amnesty International the images are conclusive. “….while we cannot authenticate the images, the allegations are consistent with Amnesty International’s own research into the widespread use of torture and enforced disappearances by the Syrian authorities.”

The witnesses, on which Amnesty International relies are either jihadist fighters, criminals, or unscrupulous opportunists. I personally would not give much weight to their testimony but US sponsored NGOs have obviously other standards of fact checking.

Reuters has reviewed the report but acknowledges, that it was not possible to determine the authenticity of Caesar’s photographs or to contact Caesar.

Also issued was the usual stipulation: “….this is not to say that the people on the other side have been free of serious crime. There is evidence that has led very responsible people to say there have been crimes committed on both sides.”

This new story is so flimsy that without the power of totalitarian mass media propaganda it would not impress anybody, it would not even worth mentioning. There exist without any doubt thousands of gruesome photographs which depict tortured and killed prisoners, because the islamic psychopaths, which were flown and bussed to Syria by the Western allies, love to viciously torture their victims and to document their savage and barbaric acts.

Qatar is undoubtedly in a good position to collect pictures from these treasure troves of horror and mislabel them.

This story is even weaker than the fabrications about the Houla massacre and the Ghouta gas attack but as it happens in all the other incidents, we will not be informed about the objections of serious experts, which for sure soon will emerge.

All the Western media consumers will ever hear or read is the constantly repeated mantra of the bloodthirsty dictator Bashar al-Assad, who is mercilessly butchering his own people.

The compliance of mass media journalists, their willingness to follow the directives given out by the ruling elites, and their voluntary self-censorship is nearly total and there are only a precious few who are principled enough to resist (like for instance Chris Hedge, Daniel Simpson, Natasha Lennard, Rick Bragg, who left the New York Times).

Compliance is enforced with draconian measures, Here a few examples out of thousands:

NBC and National Geographic fired journalist Peter Arnett for giving an interview to an Iraqi television station in which he criticized America’s planning for the Iraq war.

Dan Guthrie, Tom Gutting, and Tim McCarthy were fired for criticizing then president G.W. Bush.

CNN journalist Octavia Nasr was fired after expressing sympathy for Lebanese Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.

KMOV reporter Larry Conners was fired after asking President Obama some tough questions, Drew Johnson was fired by the Chattanooga Times Free Press after a critical article about Obama.

Yahoo’s Washington bureau chief David Chalian was fired after he made critical comments about Mitt Romney.

Paulo Lopez was fired by Paraguay’s ABC newspaper because he refused to distort a report about Cuba.

Gemma O’Doherty, Ireland’s leading investigative journalist was fired after investigating the countries police chief Martin Callinan.

Well-known Turkish journalist Nazlı Ilıcak was fired from the daily Sabah in December after criticizing ministers whose sons are investigated for corruption.

Michael Hastings, who’s reporting did cost General Stanley McChrystal his job, died in mysterious circumstances.

If one has bills to pay and is depending on the next paycheck, if one wants to keep the position in a time when job offerings are rare because newspaper circulations, add revenues, and popularity of news-websites are declining, one has to acquiesce and roll over. Traditional journalism is dead, the journalists have become “media workers,” who leave their ethics and their conscience at home or in the wardrobe.

Press freedom is the freedom to fire anybody who does not follow the strict rules of self censorship and the empoyees of traditional media enterprises have to write or speak what their bosses want to read and hear. Don’t expect to read and hear anything what challenges the official narrative, the stranglehold of the ruling elites about traditional media is total. 

Yet there are enough alternative news sources (the fake alternative press represented by Democracy Now, Alternet, Huffington Post, Common Dreams, Salon, Daily Kos is not meant here). The internet is still partly free and many whistleblower organizations, private blogs, and small web portals, where independent journalists present their findings, can be easily accessed.

Just to name a few:

FBI wistleblower Sibel Edmonds Boiling Frog Post
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/
Ann Garrisons radio show
http://www.anngarrison.com/
Sharmine Narwanis blog
http://mideastshuffle.com/
Naked Capitalism, the blog of Susan Webber (Yves Smith)
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
http://www.counterpunch.org/
http://blackagendareport.com/
http://www.moonofalabama.org/

And all the other links in the right column beside this blog text here.

There is an abundance of independent journalism available and considering that, the continuing consummation of corporative media sources like the New York Times or the Washington Post can be justifiably considered either as mental masochism, pathological confusion, plain stupidity, or callous complicity.

Yet, in order to avoid such hard portrayal, one can grant the consumers of traditional media the excuse, that old habits are hard to abandon and change comes not easy. Many mass media consumers are like smokers who know, that they risk to develop lung cancer and who still are unable to beat their addiction.

Change comes not easy, and once you are boxed in and have established yourself comfortably in the save and cosy box of tightly controlled official media narratives, thinking outside the box and challenging the mainstream story can be disturbing, unsettling, and exhausting.

So, what to do? How to escape the clutches of mass media? How to break free and breath the fresh air of decency, honesty, and truth?

Well, it’s the same as with other addictions, obsessions, and harmful habits: Seek friends who can assist and counsel you, follow the teachers and prophets, be disciplined, systematic, unyielding.

Shun, ignore, forget the corporate media enterprises and never, ever again support the traditional media businesses with your subscription fees!

And if you really are severely and achingly suffering from withdrawal symptoms, a short reminder of this should help you to alleviate the pain for a while:

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

The Politics of Murder

This is a sequel to the blog post Death in Paris

The famous quote of Carl von Clausewitz “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” fits well to describe the conduct of many nations and it fits even better and applies to more nations if one adds the word “assassination” to the word “war.”

War and assassinations are the continuation of politics by other means.

How true!

One year ago three Kurdish women, Sakine Cansız, Fidan Dogan, and Leyla Soylemez were murdered in an execution-style assassination. Suspicion fell instantly on Turkeys intelligence agency MIT, a collusion of Turkey with Frances DCRI was also considered as likely.

One week after the murders, 30 year old Omer Guney was arrested, because surveillance footage placed him at the scene, and partial DNA from one of the victims was found on a jacket belonging to him.

In February investigators from the French anti-terrorist unit Sdat checked the contents of a borrowed Peugeot car Guney had used on the day of the killing — it was their second try. Dismantling the car, they found a passport behind the radio with stamps of three trips to Turkey in August, October and December of 2012, and a dry-cleaning bill dated a few days after the killings.

Also in February 2013, Murat Sahin, a former member of the MIT who is living in Switzerland, confirmed that Omer Guney was a member of the Turkish intelligence agency.

Sahin said: “I never met Omer nor worked with him but the “Aunt” [a code-name of the woman who lead Sahin’s MIT unit in Ankara] once showed me Omer’s photo and asked me ‘Do you know this heval (friend in Kurdish) who is our member in Paris?’. When I told her that I didn’t know him, she didn’t ask or say anything else. She was probably checking if I knew him or not. I have no doubt that the person on the photo was Omer Guney.”

Murat Sahin said he believed Omer was the man who pulled the trigger but that he was accompanied by some other people in Paris. He added: “It is impossible for him to commit these murders alone, he must have been assisted by 2 or 3 well-trained agents.”

The case is proceeding very slowly. To date no hearing has been scheduled as the investigation is not over yet. The anti-terrorism court denies that political considerations are slowing down the process, yet French intelligence has not been assisting, causing the investigation to come to a halt at critical junctures. On September 25, 2013 investigating magistrate Jeanne Duye’s computer containing judicial files was stolen from her home.

In October magistrate Duye lodged a formal appeal for information about Guney to Turkey but until now Turkish officials are not assisting, while the Turkish authorities wish to have access to the entire case file. Turkish media wrote earlier this year that the Ankara prosecutor was conducting a separate probe under an article of penal law which says a person who commits a crime abroad while in the service of the Turkish state can be tried in Turkey and that the prosecutor was seeking to establish whether Guney was indeed in the service of the Turkish state.

Meral Danıs Bestas, the lawyer representing the families of the slain in Turkey said she was not allowed to access documents because the investigation is carried on in secret.

Omer Guney is constantly claiming to be ill and suffering from a brain tumor that induces seizures, but doctors who have examined him agree that he is only faking the symptoms as a deliberate strategy to impede the investigation.

In December, the French magazine Express reported that there has been some progress made after the examination of new documents. The police laboratory near Ecully was able to retrieve photos that had been deleted from the memory of Guney’s Nokia mobile phone, which proved that Guney had entered the Kurdish association in Villiers-le-Bel on the night before the murders by using spare keys and had carefully photographed 329 membership forms. It was also established that he had sent the photographs somewhere, most probably to Turkey.

Guney had five phones with French and Turkish cards, two of them are still missing. He had sent dozens of text messages to unusual numbers that resembled “technical numbers.”

Former colleagues in the Munich area, where he lived for some time testified that Guney was close to the nationalist party MHP. They also told, that he frequently went to the firing range, that he wore a ring with 3 crescent moons on it, and that he had a Turkish flag in his room.

On January 12 this year the 10 minute recording of a phone conversation between Omer Guney and two MIT superiors was placed on YouTube. Until now five people have confirmed that this is undoubtedly Guney’s voice. The recording proves that he was working in conjunction with the Turkish state and that it was he who planned and carried out the attack.

One of the MIT officers says: “…the important part is getting away and not getting caught. That’s why I’m asking about the distance. I’m asking if they’d get there. I’m asking how many meters it is. Have you calculated how many minutes it would take to get from here to there? Do you get traffic on that road?“

The dialogue makes clear that at least two of the five mobile phones of Guney were special phones used only for communication between MIT operatives. “The mobile phones you gave, my French phones, they all are encrypted. They cannot enter it without codes.”

Guney also confirms that he receives support from the MIT: “two guns, one silencer and three cartridge clips. He asked for 2,500. I agreed and reported friends“. The fact that the officers speaking to Guney do not feel the need to speak about this issue and ask no questions shows that they already knew about the mentioned guns and their costs.

Guney complains about not being able to make use of the “opportunities” he had to kill his Kurdish enemies: “Halil İbrahim Gundoğdu was a highly significant person. He has sent 200 people to the mountains from Europe. He was going to toilet in the woods, if you’ll excuse my language. I was behind him. If I had wanted, I could have eradicated him and Nedim Uzun, the one they call heval Siyar right there. I could have killed the two of them. There was time, it was suitable. I was alone in the forest. I didn’t do anything as I didn’t have permission.“

One of the officers advises: “…make absolutely sure of these things. Do a good job. Let’s talk again. Let’s review your plan. May God protect us from the smallest mistake, because you’re important for us.” And: “Let’s do it again. Let’s co-ordinate. Wait to hear from us. If we get the chance within the framework of that encrypted telephone conversation we planned. But for now review all those plans once again.”

It is clear from this phone conversation that Guney and Turkish state officials were planning not just one attack but several attacks on various targets. The audio recording also implicates French security services by suggesting that Guney may have committed the murders in Paris while under heavy surveillance.

On January 15 the Turkish opposition newspaper Sol published a document which is apparently a November 2012 mission order issued by MIT,  identiying Guney as an agent code named “Legionnaire.” Here is the full text of the document:

“SUBMISSION NOTE

SUBJECT: Sakine CANSIZ, codenamed Sara

LEGIONNAIRE who we talked to in order to unveil the KONGRA-GEL (PKK) KCK’s activities in FRANCE/Paris and the restraint of senior members of the organisation stated in the email he sent to us in October 2012 that Sakine CANSIZ, code-named  Sara, one of the prominent staff of the  KONGRA-GEL (PKK) KCK has arrived in Le Bel in Paris/Villiers.

Sakine CANSIZ, code-named Sara, who came to France a few days after the arrest of Adem UZUN by French security forces, performed the official procedures such as residence permit and passport renewal through the Source in the scope of the assignments made by the organisation.

During his last visit to our country for a meeting with us, the Source was instructed to make preparations aimed at the persons determined in line with his attack/sabotage/assassination style operative opportunity/abilities against the organisation targets in Europe, to obtain the equipment to be used during the work, and to show ultimate attention to any kind of communication with our side, and was provided with 6000 EURO for probable spendings.

The Source who has the opportunity/ability to stay informed about Sakine CANSIZ, code named Sara, activities across Europe in the coming period, her contacts, correspondences and residence address could also be considered for an operational planning intended for the restraint of the mentioned member of the organisation.

In this context, also considering the Source and activity safety, it is being planned to instruct LEGIONNAIRE for a move against Sakine CANSIZ, codenamed Sara by means of the formerly designated coded statements.

Submitted for your information.”

Signed:

Department Chief : O. YÜRET
Head of Department: U. KAYIK
Deputy Head of Department: S. ASAL
Director: H. ÖZCAN

The leaking of the recorded phone conversation and of the mission order could be related to the attempts of the Fathullah Gulen movement to put pressure on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party and to oust him from power.

The MIT and especially its chief, Hakan Fidan, is in the crosshairs of the Gulen movement. Gulen’s followers tried to arrest Fidan, but Erdogan changed the law and saved Fidan from being jailed.

Hakan Fidan has been playing a leading role in conducting both the peace talks in Oslo and the direct talks with PKK leader Ocalan on the prison island of Imrali, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that assassination attempts were stopped for the time of the negotiations.

The Turkish daily Hurriyet  reported on October 19, 2012 about an “award regulation” which the Turkish government allegedly issued last year, targeting 50 leading members of the PKK/KCK, 20 of which are situated in Europe. The regulation includes the names of KCK (Kurdish Communities Union) executive council president Murat Karayılan, KCK executive council member Cemil Bayık, Duran Kalkan, HPG (People’s Defense Forces) main headquarters command Fehman Huseyin, as well as Mustafa Karasu, Sabri Ok, and Zubeyir Aydar, who attended the negotiation talks in Oslo. The capture or assassination of these Kurdish leaders will be rewarded with 4 million Turkish Lira. The lower limit of 2 million Turkish Lira is designated for the local leaders and European unit executives. Instant intelligence is awarded with 100 thousand Turkish Lira.

There are indications, that the Paris massacer was the first implementation of this regulation.

A very special relationship Part 2

Finian CUNNINGHAM   Strategic Culture Foundation

A rare public spat between Washington and Israeli in recent days has revealed much about the essential political relationship between the two.

The row began when Israeli minister for military affairs Moshe Ya’alon spoke to local media with vitriolic contempt about America’s top diplomat, John Kerry. Kerry had only days before been in the Middle East on yet another visit to push the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process along. The US Secretary of State has flown to Israel on at least five occasions over as many months since he made a big show of kick-starting “final status” negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians last year.

Recall that Kerry had then set out a timeframe of nine months for a final peace settlement to be achieved under his watch when he announced this roadmap in Washington last July. As it turns out that deadline looks nowhere near being met, as all knowledgeable people already promised at that time.

After his latest visit, the noise of Kerry’s departing aircraft had barely dimmed when Israeli minister Ya’alon began telling reporters of his unvarnished disdain for the American diplomat. “The best thing John Kerry can do is win the Nobel Prize and then leave us alone.” said Ya’alon. He also denounced Kerry as naive and for meddling in Israel’s affairs. “There is nothing he can tell me about the conflict with the Palestinians.”

Washington responded to the reported comments with a mixture of surprise and chagrin. The US State Department called Ya’alon’s remarks offensive and expressed dismay at the ornery attitude in Tel Aviv in light of Washington’s efforts on overseeing the putative peace process. “John Kerry has worked night and day to meet Israel’s security needs”, said Washington in the tone of an indulgent uncle who has just had his feet stamped on by a spoilt child.

There were a few political voices within Israel who rebuffed Ya’alon for his “ungrateful” comments towards Kerry. Nevertheless, Ya’alon’s acerbic derision can be taken as representative of how other senior members of the ruling Likud party tacitly view the American secretary of state, and indeed Washington in general. Their contempt is understandable. Not because Kerry has done anything to impede Israel, but rather because he and Washington are so relentlessly pathetic in pandering to the reactionary Israeli regime. If Washington shows so little backbone, then why not stamp on its toes again, and again?

Put it in this perspective. The nominal Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been going on for nearly 45 years since US president Jimmy Carter signed the Camp David Accord in 1979. Then we saw another “milestone” with the Oslo Accord in 1993 under president Bill Clinton. More than 20 years after Oslo, the Palestinians are no nearer to realizing an independent state with full sovereign rights. The only significant change that can be registered in concrete terms — metaphorically and literally — over the decades is that the Israeli state has continued to expand and consolidate its occupation of Palestinian territory — in flagrant violation of international laws.

During his last visit to the region, while Kerry was exhorting the conclusion of negotiations, the Israeli government was more concerned with announcing new plans to annex large parts of the Jordan Valley in the Palestinian West Bank. How’s that for chutzpah and right in Kerry’s face? This move, we were told with customary cynicism, is vital for Israel’s insatiable need for security. Also in recent weeks, Tel Aviv has revealed expanded construction in Jerusalem, which in effect vitiates the Palestinian claim to the eastern part of the city (al Quds) as the ancient capital of historic Palestine.

These remorseless infractions by the Israeli state constitute brazen crimes under international law, because building on occupied territory obtained through conflict, as Israeli has done since its 1967 Six Day War, is defined as a war crime under the Geneva Convention and the  UN Charter.

Yet in the face of such outrageous criminality by Israel, Washington remains unswervingly servile. Apart from Kerry’s latest pusillanimous pandering, Washington’s servility was on full display elsewhere this past week during the funeral of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon, known to many around the world as the Butcher of Beirut for his role in the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila, when over 3,500 Palestinian refugees were slaughtered by Israeli-backed Lebanese fascist militia, was buried amid fulsome eulogies emanating from Washington. 

US vice president Joe Biden, wearing a black Jewish skullcap, delivered an oration at Sharon’s funeral in Tel Aviv in which he heaped praise on this mass murderer, euphemistically referring to him as “the bulldozer”. Biden went on to reiterate the usual Washington mantra about the “unbreakable bonds” that exist between the US and Israel.

From the Palestinian point of view, there is nothing left to be salvaged from the decades-long “peace process”. The chimerical Two State Solution has evidently become a cruel travesty when ever-diminishing Palestinian territory is divided and sub-divided, built upon and walled off with an eight-meter-high concrete barrier, where Israel exerts control over sea, air, and even basic utilities like water, electricity, and sewage; and where now the ancient Jerusalem capital is finally being expropriated like a coup de grace.

On top of all this, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has begun pushing a new political demand that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as an “exclusively Jewish state”. In so doing, Netanyahu and his Likudniks are demanding that more than four million Palestinians forced into exile by the 1948 pogroms and the 1967 war must henceforth forfeit their internationally recognized right to return to their homeland.

Like a parallel universe, all the while John Kerry and the Washington establishment remain resolutely silent over these systematic Israeli war crimes, save for the odd mild reproach to “freeze settlements” — which the Israelis just ignore anyway. Indeed, Kerry and his ilk repeatedly insult common intelligence with their breathless rhetoric about a “peace process” and “final status agreement”.

Even the docile Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas appears to be realizing that Washington’s charade as an honest broker has expired, and that under the existing American framework there is negligible left to negotiate for. This week the United States Palestinian Community Network called on Abbas to abandon futile talks with Israel. “We reaffirm our call for an immediate end to negotiations and the establishment of a truly representative body for Palestinian people that can protect our rights”, said the network.

So, when Washington this past week deplored the offensive remarks of Ya’alon about John Kerry what it was really decrying was this: the US government has bent over backwards to accommodate and turn a blind eye to Israeli aggression yet the Israeli leadership repays us with insolence.

But this Israeli insolence is not unprecedented. It does not come out of thin air or inherent ethnic character. Israel’s truculence has been inculcated owing to Washington’s unconditional support to Israel regardless of the latter’s criminality. Washington indulges this regime with an official 3 billion US$ subsidy every year — equivalent to the figure that the US government is presently slashing in food stamps to millions of hungry Americans. The real US Israeli expenditure is probably multiple times more when off-the-books military aid is counted in. The US is thus the hand that feeds the Israeli state and keeps this entity viable. Even when Israel’s ruling class bites the hand that feeds it out of its overweening inculcated self-importance, Washington keeps on plying with benevolence. This is a relationship whereby the patron rewards the client for incorrigible behavior.

Why is this?

There is a fashion among some critical American analysts to attribute the dysfunctional US-Israeli relationship solely to the dominance of Zionist lobbies and Jewish-controlled mass media. There is no doubt that such Zionist influence has a significant bearing on Washington’s foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond. Political campaign donations (in truth bribes) from the likes of AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) have a major impact on how members of the US Congress and the White House formulate policy. Currently, the US Senate is working on a bill that some analysts say will commit the US to automatically back Israel if the latter were to embark on a pre-emptive war on Iran. This legislation, as in many other cases, is heavily presaged by the rabid Zionist AIPAC lobby.

In the latest Kerry phase of the Israeli-Palestinian peace shenanigans, the US interlocutor is Martin Indyk, who is a dual American-Israeli citizen and a long-time senior associate of the AIPAC.

But this “tail wagging the dog” thesis of the American-Israeli relationship fails to account for the fundamental strategic importance of the Israeli regime to US imperialism in the Middle East. Without the Israeli state, the US would not have the military and political platform that underpins its hegemony over the oil-rich region. This is a historical function of US capitalism ever since the Second World War that transcends Washington lobby groups, media pundits, or opinion-makers.

As US vice president Joe Biden said a few months back while addressing a Jewish lobby group in Washington: “If the state of Israel did not already exist, then the United States would have to create it”.

Washington may at times show consternation over the petulance of Israeli politicians. US president Barack Obama, for example, is known to find Netanyahu’s boorish manner insufferable.

However, these are mere personal effects in the wider context of geopolitics. Structurally and systematically, Washington views Israel as its military garrison in the Middle East, armed to the teeth — including hundreds of nuclear weapons. The Israeli garrison is an essential platform for the US to project its geopolitical power, thereby safeguarding its vital capitalist interests. (The feudal Saudi oil kingdom and the other Persian Gulf potentates are the second pillar to the US-American imperial order in the Middle East.)

The Israelis know only too well the essential nature of the US-Israel relationship. They know that Uncle Sam needs them as an imperative for the operation of American economic hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East. That is why the Israelis know that they can at times bite the US hands that feed them — because this US hand will keep on feeding out of its own imperialist necessity.

See also: A very special relationship