Onder
andere uit door het Pentagon vrijgegeven documenten blijkt dat de VS
zich voorbereidt op een oorlog met Rusland en China, ofwel de VS wil
WOIII starten……
Lees het volgende artikel van Andre Damon, eerder geplaatst op WSWS (World Socialist Web Site) door mij overgenomen van Information Clearing House (en huiver….):
Pentagon
Report Points To US Preparations For Total War
By
Andre Damon
October
11, 2018 “Information
Clearing House” – Over
the past two weeks, with next to no media coverage, the United States
has moved substantially closer toward open military confrontation
with both Russia and China, the second- and third-ranked nuclear
powers in the world.
On
October 3, the United States threatened, for the first time since the
Cold War, to directly attack the Russian homeland. UN Ambassador to
NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison accused the country of violating the
Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty by developing a
nuclear cruise missile and said that Washington was preparing to
“take out” the weapon with a US strike.
This
statement came just three days after a Chinese warship set a
collision course with a US destroyer carrying out a so-called
“freedom of navigation” operation in the South China Sea, forcing
the American ship to maneuver to avoid a collision and the
potentially deadliest military clash in the Pacific in decades.
Behind
such hair-raising incidents, the United States is undertaking
serious, long-term preparations to restructure the American economy
to fight a major war with a “peer” adversary, entailing radical
changes to American economic, social and political life.
This
is the essential content of a 146-page document released by the
Pentagon last Friday, titled “Assessing and Strengthening the
Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency
of the United States.” It makes it clear that Washington is
preparing not just for isolated regional clashes, but rather for a
massive, long-term war effort against Russia and China under
conditions of potential national autarchy.
The
document made clear that a major restructuring of the American
economy will be necessary to reach the United States military’s
stated goal of being prepared to “fight tonight” against a “peer
adversary.” The United States must “retool” for “great-power
competition,” the document declared.
“America’s
manufacturing and defense industrial base,” observes the report,
creates the “platform and systems” upon which “our Warfighter
depends.” This complex encompasses not just the government, but the
private sector, as well as “R&D organizations” and “academic
institutions.” In other words, the entire economy and society.
It
warns that “The erosion of American manufacturing over the last two
decades… threatens to undermine the ability of U.S. manufacturers
to meet national security requirements. Today, we rely on single
domestic sources for some products and foreign supply chains for
others, and we face the possibility of not being able to produce
specialized components for the military at home.”
Correcting
this strategic deficiency, the report concludes, means that “support
for a vibrant domestic manufacturing sector, a solid defense
industrial base, and resilient supply chains is a national priority.”
The
report squarely targets China, declaring, “China’s economic
strategies, combined with the adverse impacts of other nations’
industrial policies, pose significant threats to the U.S. industrial
base and thereby pose a growing risk to U.S. national security.”
The
promotion of US manufacturing dominance, in other words, is vital for
promoting military dominance.
The
protection of heavy industry goes together with the administration’s
efforts to defend America’s high-tech sector, the source of a vast
portion of US profitability.
As
the report notes, “One of the Chinese Communist Party’s primary
industrial initiatives, Made in China 2025, targets artificial
intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, autonomous and new energy
vehicles, high performance medical devices, high-tech ship
components, and other emerging industries critical to national
defense.”
It
warns that “Chinese R&D spending is rapidly converging to that
of the U.S. and will likely achieve parity sometime in the near
future,” and worriedly points to the fact that the Chinese
manufacturer DJI dominates the commercial aerial drone market.
The
Pentagon’s plans for protecting and expanding the US high-tech
sector include its backing for the administration’s efforts to
limit the admission of Chinese students to US universities through
visa restrictions. The report complains that, with as many as 25
percent of “STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics]
graduates in the U.S. being Chinese nationals… American
universities are major enablers of China’s economic and military
rise.”
The
vision in the document, in other words, is the concrete expression of
the conception outlined in the latest US national security strategy,
calling for “the seamless integration of multiple elements of
national power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance,
intelligence, law enforcement and military.”
A
leading element of this equation is the American corporate technology
sector, which has scrambled for fat Pentagon contracts to develop the
latest generation of weapons systems. In exchange for these payouts,
and aggressive protection from their international rivals, they have
worked closely to implement what one leaked internal Google document
called a “shift towards censorship” in cooperation with the
demands of the US military and intelligence agencies.
The
logic of this growing fusion between the repressive apparatus of the
state and increasingly powerful monopolies is the necessary
correlation between “total war” and a “totalitarian” society,
in which key constitutional provisions are rendered effectively
meaningless.
The
central target of such measures will be the forcible suppression of
the class struggle in the name of promoting “national security.”
The escalation of global US militarism has coincided with a major
upsurge in the class struggle, including the rejection of a
concessions contract by workers at UPS, the logistics giant whose
powerful workforce is capable of crippling not just America’s
industrial base, but substantial sections of the wartime economy.air
Anti-Media
bracht gisteren een artikel van Tyler Durden dat eerder op Zero Hedge
werd pepubliceerd.
Uitgebreid
verteld Robert Fisk over zijn bevindingen in Douma. Fisk is één van
de weinigen die niet geloofde dat het winnende Syrische leger het
eigen volk zou aanvallen met gifgas….. Alweer als één van de
weinigen besloot Fisk zelf op onderzoek uit te gaan en hij vertrok
naar Douma. Terwijl de reguliere westerse (massa-) media en het
grootste deel van de westerse politici (plus zogenaamde deskundigen
en opiniemakers) keihard durven te zeggen dat het Syrische leger en
daarmee Assad schuldig is aan de ‘gifgasaanval’ en nee, daar heeft men geen bewijzen voor,
men lult elkaar en terreurgroep Jaysh al-Islam plus de White Helmets gewoon na………. (de White Helmets die al heel wat ‘fake news’ [nepnieuws] hebben verspreid, zoals bekend zou moeten zijn bij de westerse reguliere media en politiek……)
Sterker
nog: door de voornoemde woordvoerders van de media en andere figuren
wordt de grote gifgasaanval van augustus 2013 er keer op keer
bijgesleept als een oorlogsmisdaad van het reguliere Syrische leger, terwijl
uit en te na is aangetoond dat door het westen genoemde ‘gematigde
rebellen’ verantwoordelijk zijn voor (ook) die aanval…….(o.a. een
VN onderzoek toonde dit aan……)
Ook nu verlaat men zich op o.a. op de terreurgroep Jaysh al-Islam
(het leger van de islam, echt een naam voor een ‘gematigde rebellen
groep…..’ ha! ha! ha!) en de White Helmets voor de
getuigenverklaringen……. Dit ‘leger van de islam’ (betekenis van Jaysh al-Islam) heeft NB toegegeven dat
het eerder gifgas heeft gebruikt in Syrië…….. Onbegrijpelijk
trouwens dat het westen geen commentaar heeft op het feit dat meerdere ‘gematigde
rebellengroepen’ in het bezit zijn van gifgas…. Wat de White
Helmets betreft, die zijn al lang door de mand gevallen als hulp van
Al Qaida en nog een paar andere terreurgroepen, waaronder Jaysh al-Islam…….
De
conclusie die Fisk heeft getrokken, is dat er zelfs geen gifgasaanval
heeft plaatsgevonden in Douma……..
Lees
het relaas van Fisk en geeft het door, de hoogste tijd dat de muur
van leugens en ongebreidelde oorlogshitserij wordt doorbroken!!
“They
Were Not Gassed”: Famed Reporter Reaches Syrian ‘Chemical Attack’
Site
(ZHE) — Robert
Fisk’s bombshell first-hand account for the UKIndependentruns
contrary to nearly every claim circulating in major international
press concerning what happened just over week ago on April 7th in an
embattled suburb outside Damascus: not only has the veteran British
journalist found no
evidence of a mass chemical attack, but he’s encountered multiple
local eyewitnesses who experienced the chaos of that night, but who
say the gas attack never happened.
Fisk
isthe
first Western journalist to reach and report from the site of
the alleged chemical weapons attackwidely
blamed on Assad’s forces. Writing
from Douma in eastern Ghouta, Robert Fisk has interviewed a Syrian
doctor who works at the hospital shown in one of the well-known
videos which purports to depict victims of a chemical attack.
The
Independent: “Middle East Correspondent Robert Fisk in one of the
miles of tunnels hacked beneath Douma by prisoners of Syrian rebels.”
(source: Yara Ismail via the Independent)
Importantly,
the report, published late in the day Monday, is
causing a stir among
mainstream journalists who–minutes
after the Saudi-sponsored jihadist group Jaish
al-Islam (Army
of Islam) accused
the Syrian Army of gassing civilians–began
uncritically promoting the “Assad gassed his own people”
narrative as an already cemented and “proven” fact based on the
mere word a notoriously brutal armed group who itself
has admitted to using chemical weapons on the Syrian battlefield in
prior years. Also
notable is that no journalist or international observer was anywhere
near Douma when the purported chemical attack took place.
Controversy
ensued immediately after Fisk’s report, especially as he is
among the most recognizable names in the past four decades of Middle
East war reporting,
having twice won the British Press Awards’ Journalist of the Year
prize and as seven time winner of the British Press Awards’ Foreign
Correspondent of the Year (the NY
Times has referred
to him as“probably
the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain” while The
Guardian has
called him “one
of the most famous journalists in the world”). An Arabic speaker,
Fisk became famous for being among the few reporters in history to
conduct face-to-face interviews with Osama bin Laden, which he did on
three occasions between 1993 and 1997.
This
is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of
smashed apartment blocks–and of an underground clinic whose images
of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful
nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in
a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same
clinic, cheerfully
tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world–
despite all the doubters–is perfectly genuine.
War
stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For
the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something
profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by
gas but by oxygen starvationin
the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a
night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
Fisk
goes on to identify
the doctor by name – Dr. Assim Rahaibani – which is notable given
the fact that all early reporting from Douma typically relied on
“unnamed doctors” and anonymous opposition sources for early
claims of a chlorine gas attack (lately
morphed into an unverified “mixed” chlorine-and-sarin attack).
The
doctor’s testimony is consistent with that of the well-known Syrian
opposition group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which
initially reported based on its own pro-rebel sourcing that
heavy government bombardment of Douma city resulted in the
collapse of homes and underground shelters, causing civilians in
hiding to suffocate.
According
to SOHR,
which has long been a key go-to source for mainstream media over the
course of the war, “70
of them [women and children] have suffered suffocation as a result of
the demolition of home basements over them due to the heavy and
intense shelling.”
Though
outlets from The
Guardian to The
Washington Post to The
New York Times have
quoted SOHR on a near daily basis throughout the past six years of
war, the
anti-Assad opposition outlet’s reporting of mass asphyxiation
due to collapse of shelters has been notably absent from the same
publications.
Fisk
details the Syrian doctor’s testimony, who is adamant in his
emphasis that civilians were suffocating en masse, and
were not gassed:
It
was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean
clinic–“Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this
partly-underground city–is a corridor leading downhill where he
showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was
crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.
“I
was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres
from here on the night but all
the doctors know what happened.There
was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always
over Douma at night–but on this night, there was wind and huge dust
clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people
lived. People
began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then
someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a
panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the
video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people
suffering from hypoxia–not gas poisoning.”
In
addition to interviewing a doctor while standing in the very hospital
featured in White Helmets footage of the events, Fisk cites the
testimonies of multiple locals in the following:
Before
we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only
story in Douma. There
are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said
they had “never believed in” gas stories–which were usually put
about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups.
These
particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living
in other’s people’s homes and in vast,
wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by
prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town.I
walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock
which still contained Russian–yes, Russian–rockets and burned-out
cars.
And
further fascinating is that the veteran British war correspondent
comes upon local Douma residents who have so long been trapped in an
isolated ‘fog
of war’ battlefield
environment, that they are not even aware of the international
importance that the town has played in the US coalition decision to
bomb Syria:
So
the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas–or no gas, as
the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for
evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside
the gunmen with whom they had to livelike
troglodytes for months in order to survive.
I
walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier,
policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a
camera and a notebook.I
sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down
almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them,
happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly
smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a
surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.
…Oddly,
after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who
showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the
Western air attacks.Two
actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.
But
it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu
Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in
Douma, although
the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam
[the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”.They
shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the
infamous Douma attack.
The
White Helmets–the medical first responders already legendary in the
West but with some interesting corners to their own story–played a
familiar role during the battles. They
are partly funded by the [British] Foreign Office and most of the
local offices were staffed by Douma men.
I
found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A
gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece
pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside
one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped
with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and
mattresses.
Of
course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen
here: a
woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma
abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the
government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel
province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was
agreed.
And
Fisk further narrates the strangeness of some of the reporting now
happening far outside of Douma which flatly contradicts the
testimonies of civilians still inside Douma that he encounters:
How
could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were
already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to
recall?It
did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through
these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma
lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our
sense of the word simply had no meaning to them.
Syria
doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy–as I cynically like to
tell my Arab colleagues–and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship,
but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among
them, from reacting with a few words of truth.So
what were they telling me?
They
talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked
about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the
Syrian government and Russian bombing.The
Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the
massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost
all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I
came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see
how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he
cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as
Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been
so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?
For
a prime example of what Fisk references as refugees in Turkey
“already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma seemed to
recall…” CNN
aired a segment from one such refugee camp which is absolutely
bizarre and stunning in its claims.
began
sniffing a 7-year-old Syrian girl’s backpack while concluding, “I
mean there’s definitely something that stings…” –
with the implication that empirical proof had been found of
government chemical weapons use against the little girl and her
family.
This CNN report by Arwa Damon is an example of what Western governments and media consider evidence that the Syrian govt used chemical weapons in #Douma. In fact it proves nothing. CNN continues to shamelessly promote Jihadist propaganda & western military intervention #Syria
And
in the full
segment,
Damon attempts to subtly introduce the idea of a nerve agent used
against the family (though initial claims were widely reported to be
chlorine) by awkwardly including the account of the girl’s escape
from Douma: “She
could barely breath…she
felt as if her
entire nerves basically released.”
This Syrian girl hid her dolls inside a box, telling them “you’re going to suffocate in here, maybe, but at least you might be safe from the bombings.” CNN reports from inside a refugee camp in Syria hours after a coordinated US-led airstrike hit the area. https://cnn.it/2H2pCLe
Though
it’s unclear what the strange phrasing of “her entire nerves
basically released” actually means, CNN’s
Arwa Damon is ultimately claiming to be able to safely and
comfortably handle and sniff a backpack which contains residual sarin
and chlorine agents,
while simultaneously presenting the backpack as “proof” of a
chemical attack which happened a week prior (to say nothing the
clearly unscientific and bogus nature all of the above).
Notably,
in addition to Fisk’s bombshell report filed from ground zero of
the claimed chemical attack in Douma, cable
network One
America News has
also issued a report from on the ground in the newly liberated town,
finding “no evidence” – in its words – that a chemical attack
took place there.
Robert
Fisk’s report for The
Independent and
the One America News segment constitute
the first major international media reports from the location of the
alleged chemical attack. But
it will be interesting to see the extent to which international
chemical and weapons experts either validate or refute their
conclusions once the site is inspected.
Meanwhile,
the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW) Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) team arrived
in Damascus on Saturday, April 14th – after the
US-led overnight strikes which primarily hit government buildings in
the capital.
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