Author: Alicia

The military and diplomatic intervention in Syria by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are rapidly transforming the situation in all of Southwest Asia, and in fact globally. Following last week’s visit to Moscow by Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Putin’s meeting with Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani at the Valdai Club event in Sochi, Russia, and the meeting between Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and leaders from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan in Vienna, there are discussions from several sources about progress on international cooperation on the Syria crisis, essentially bypassing Obama.

A Russian parliamentary delegation to Damascus reported that President Assad has agreed to hold preliminary elections in the country, on the condition that the move has the backing of the population, according to TASS. Russian Communist Party MP Aleksandr Yushchenko, one of the delegation, said that Assad is “ready to discuss amendments to the constitution, hold parliamentary elections and, if the people of Syria deem necessary, expressed a readiness to hold presidential elections,” which Assad is confident he would win, according to RT. Assad told the Syrian press that he is expecting a visit from Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin, and chair Valentina Matvienko.

Lavrov appeared on a talk show in Moscow Saturday, to talk about the Syria situation and his meeting with Kerry the day before. He said: “We are ready to include the patriotic opposition, including the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA), to provide it with aerial support, although we were declined information on where, according to U.S. data, terrorists are located, and where is the patriotic opposition.”

Fahad Al-Masri, a spokesman for the FSA (although there is some dispute about whether he is in fact a spokesman for the FSA), proposed a meeting in Egypt with the Russians. “The Free Syrian Army is ready for dialogue with Russia,” he said, according to RT. “We need to organize a new meeting, so that we can present our position and discuss our collective actions.”

Interestingly, Lavrov said that Kerry had explained to him the U.S. refusal to accept the delegation led by Prime Minister Medvedev. “John Kerry told me: You know, do not take it so literally, because we are in the process. So far, the conditions for such a contact are not prepared. Let’s work on the ministerial level, and then we’ll be ready to consider your other ideas,” Lavrov said.

Presidential spokesman Dmitri Peskov told BBC on Friday (the interview is actually to be aired in full on Monday): “Unfortunately all our partners have failed up to now to identify a serious opposition that has no links to terror, no links with extremist organizations, no links with ISIL, Al Qaeda and others. …. It’s important to save Syria’s integrity, territorial and political integrity, not to let the whole region, including the countries that are bordering Syria, to go into a nightmare of collapse and hegemony of terror.”

The Bush and Obama wars on sovereign states caused the refugee disaster in Europe, wrote Prof. Wang Jinglie of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in the Oct. 23 China Daily. After reviewing the refugee crisis both in Southwest Asian coutries and in Europe, Wang hit the western responsibility: “But it is indisputable that the frequent military interventions led by the West, including the United States and Europe, have fueled the chaos that has forced people from their homes.”

“On the one hand, it instigated the `Arab Spring’ to promote `democracy’ in the Arab World,” wrote Wang. “On the other, U.S.-led military actions have more than once overturned `disobedient administrations,’ such as the ones ruled by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gadhafi in Libya.

“These misdeeds eventually resulted in the latest refugee crisis, which to many Europeans was an unexpected outcome.”

In Syria, Wang wrote, the U.S. armed and funded the opposition forces to overthrow the legitimate government. “Unfortunately, crippling the Syrian government has not only led to endless turmoil and civil war in the country, but it also exposed the local residents to an unchained bloodthirsty monster — the Islamic State group.”

Reflecting the LaRouche policy, Wang concluded: “The refugee crisis will keep haunting all involved parties unless wars and poverty are eliminated in the war-stricken countries, which urgently need peace and stability to restore their economies and convince their nationals that seeking asylum elsewhere is no longer necessary. That being said, major Western powers have to stop intervening to their own liking in Middle East affairs before the regional situation spins out of control.”

In a written interview with African journalists at the third India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS) in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the BRICS’ New Development Bank was a significant initiative that can have a profound impact on the global financial order.

“I think Africa will be a major area of focus and we would also, hopefully, have an African window or regional presence of the Bank in the future,” said Modi.

The BRICS Post reported Sunday that representatives of 54 African nations, including heads of state and government of around 40 countries and the powerful African Union, are expected to participate in the four-day India-Africa Summit beginning in New Delhi on October 26.

Among powerful African leaders who have confirmed participation are South African President Jacob Zuma, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

On Friday, Modi also asked the 54 African nations to join India in demanding an overhaul of the United Nations and other global institutions. Modi said that the world is undergoing political, economic, and technological transition on a scale rarely seen in recent history. He warned that the UN and other global bodies run the risk of losing relevance if they do not adapt. 

A newly declassified 1990 study by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) found that the “war scare” of 1983 was real, that is, that the leadership of the Soviet Union really did fear that the U.S., under President Ronald Reagan, was seeking nuclear strategic superiority and that when it gained that superiority it would launch a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. The scare reached its height in November 1983, during NATO’s Able Archer nuclear release exercise, but had been building up since before Reagan’s announcement, on March 23, 1983, of his adoption of the Strategic Defense Initiative. To produce the report, the authors studied hundreds of documents, interviewed more than 75 U.S. and British officials and studied the series of national intelligence estimates and other intelligence documents from the period, according to the report’s own executive summary.

Though EIR has yet to fully review the entire 109-page document, it seems to barely mention Ronald Reagan’s adoption of the SDI policy—Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov’s response to Reagan’s SDI address wherein he declares that U.S. will continue the modernization of its nuclear strategic forces regardless, is quoted—nor does it say anything about the back channel negotiations between the Reagan Administration and the Soviet Union that were underway prior to Reagan’s announcement of the policy, negotiations conducted on behalf of the Reagan White House by Lyndon LaRouche, the author of the SDI policy.

The report also doesn’t emphasize the role of Soviet defector and British agent Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky had been the chief of the KGB residency in London for several years and had been feeding to his British handlers reports on the war scare in the Kremlin, reports that were used to cause Reagan to back off from his commitment to the SDI policy. Gordievsky’s role, in fact, was to sabotage the possibility of U.S.-Soviet collaboration that Reagan had offered as a way out of Mutually Assured Destruction, in favor of the Malthusian world view of the City of London and the heirs of Bertrand Russell. Andropov knew, all along, that the SDI policy was a proposal for cooperation to end the thermonuclear threat but he was part of the same British controlled apparatus that was also to sabotage SDI on the U.S. side.

Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that all countries genuinely interested in fighting terrorism should unify their efforts in Syria, in response to questions at the Valdai Discussion Club conference in Sochi, Russia on Oct. 22. But he also revealed that the Obama administration rejected offers by Russia to have meetings of political and military delegations between the two countries to discuss possible solutions.

“It would be wonderful if we united forces … if all the region’s countries and the outside powers, including the United States, came together on this,” Putin said. “In essence, this is just what we proposed.” He noted that Russia had proposed a military delegation go to Moscow and then that a Russian delegation led by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev go to the United States, but both proposals were refused by Washington.

On the Russian military effort in Syria, he said “We are acting in accordance with our convictions and with the norms of international law. We hope that coordinated action between our strike aircraft and the other military systems being used, coordinated with the Syrian army’s offensive, will produce positive results.”

Speaking just one day before the Vienna meeting of Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Putin reported that, in fact, he had raised a question about fighting ISIS with Al Assad when the Syrian President was in Moscow on Oct. 20. “I asked him, ‘How would you react if we see that there is an armed opposition in Syria today that is ready to genuinely fight terrorism, fight the Islamic State, and we were to support their efforts in this fight against terrorism just as we are supporting the Syrian army?’ He said, ‘I think it would be positive.’|”

“We are reflecting on this now and will try, if it all works out,” Putin reported, “to translate these agreements into practical steps.”

Putin also added that all concerned countries should be thinking to the future of economic and social reconstruction of Syria, and indeed, of the Middle East.

On October 22, Judicial Watch, the legal activist organization whose Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits have uncovered important documents showing the lies and abuses of the Obama administration in military and national security matters, announced that it had

The documents from the DSCC were provided to Judicial Watch with an October 2, 2015 cover letter, in response to a court order in an FOIA lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Washington DC filed in October 2014.

The DIA cable says:

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton released the documents with the statement, “These new smoking-gun documents show that intelligence tied the Benghazi attack to terrorists not to any videos.  It is inescapable that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice knowingly lied about the Benghazi terrorist attack.”

The FOIA cases brought by Judicial Watch have previously uncovered other crucial evidence against Obama.  In May 2015, the group received DIA documents from the middle of 2011 that warned that Al Qaeda in Iraq (now calling itself Islamic State) was capturing territory and would create a caliphate — some of the very reports that document what former DIA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (July 2012 to August 2014) identified as a “willful decision” by Obama to support the jihadis in Syria and Iraq. 

Final talks ended in Bonn last night, on the draft statement for the Paris global warming event in December, the COP21 (the 21st Conference of the Parties), starting on Nov. 29. At the beginning of this week, a draft text, 20 pages long, was presented, and roundly denounced, along with the process behind it, as “apartheid” for the developing world, by South African diplomat Nozipho Joyce Mxakato-Diseko on behalf of the G77 plus China, of which South Africa is currently the chair. Following this, she and other leaders came under attack in Bonn. They were blamed for holding things up, demanding an unwieldy, long text, and so on. However, the Group of 77 plus China bucked the attempts to corral them into compliance with the conference controllers. Now the latest version of the draft text is over 60 pages, after having various lip-service clauses added in. Whatever got included in the latest version—e.g., a hint of aid funds to poor countries to go green—the text, its premises, and originators, are all evil. It is possible that there will be many votes tonight to reject it.

Get the full story: EIR Special Report “‘Global Warming’ Scare is Population Reduction, Not Science” now available.

One last-ditch session is planned in early November, to try to bull through a shorter draft.

Yesterday a new report demanding “low-carbon transformation” of the whole world energy system was issued by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the outfit led by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the green genocidalist, who co-authored the encyclical, Laudato Si’. The crazed PIK document, “Beyond the Numbers: Understanding the Transformation Induced by INDCs (Intended Nationally Determined Contribution),” purports to review how well the national emission-reduction plans of 150 nations will collectively keep the Earth’s temperature down, relative to the goal of not exceeding 2 degrees Celsius by 2050. For example, it evaluates Obama’s U.S. Clean Power Plan, and China’s program, announced June 30.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, Schellnhuber’s cohort on the Encyclical, will visit California in November. Head of Justicia et Pax, Turkson’s specialty is eco-justice, a British royalist “issue” designed for pushing measures to wipe out people. He will keynote a conference at Santa Clara University Nov. 3-4, titled, “Our Future on a Shared Planet: Silicon Valley in Conversation with the Environmental Teachings of Pope Francis.”

A revolution is going on in this country. It can be read in the marked changes during the succession of weekly Saturday Manhattan Dialog meetings with Lyndon LaRouche, which are in fact the spearhead for the whole thing, as LaRouche first set this out just one year ago, when he began the Manhattan process. Last Saturday’s (Oct 17) meeting showed an unprecedented level of intellectual aggressivity among virtually all of the Manhattan speakers. Now, the first, initial reports from Wednesday’s Day of Action into Washington, DC, show that constituents and activists from up and down the East Coast, are joining into LaRouchePAC delegations to Congress in greater numbers, and that constituents who stay at home, are putting greater-than-ever pressure by telephone to demand Obama’s removal from office, and to demand that the US Government shut down Wall Street.

Much more important: most of the activists who came to Washington, participated actively in educating their Congressmen,— AND they did it effectively.

A major trigger in pushing this revolution forward, was the fraudulent so-called Democratic “debate” of Oct 13, coupled with LaRouche’s immediate, on-the-spot denunciation of it,— which in fact even preceded the debate itself. As LaRouche noted in a statement of Oct 20, he became an overnight popular hero, as it were, for promptly denouncing this so-called debate as a stinking farce and a fraud. This whole process,— the so-called debate and LaRouche’s immediate and deadly-accurate response,— triggered a sort of self-realization among many Americans, who suddenly grasped that the ever-sinking level of intellect and morality demonstrated by the “practical” man-in-the-street, and his news and entertainment media, lead nowhere but to death. That the completely opposite standard long championed by LaRouche was really their only salvation,— as it is.

Today, during the course of Hillary Clinton’s testimony to the House Benghazi Committee, several of the lines of questioning Clinton, echoed precisely what LaRouche has said. She was exposed as having herself understood and written that the attack on the Benghazi mission was an al-Qaeda terrorist mission, while publicly maintaining the lie that it stemmed from a protest against a video. “I think you knew the truth,” said Rep. Jordan of Ohio.

She was confronted with the fact that a US official met with a local al-Qaeda leader (from Ansar al-Sharia which was supposedly providing security to the US mission) shortly before the attack.

The closest that anyone came to confronting Hillary directly with her going along with Obama’s order to lie, as documented by Ed Klein in Blood Feud and confirmed and amplified by LaRouche, was a Congresswoman who asked Hillary whether she had spoken to Obama on the evening of the attack. Hillary confirmed that she had, but refused to answer the subsequent question, “What did he say to you?”

This confirms what LaRouche has said,— this will further the revolution underway in the US.

Meanwhile, as LaRouche has also said, the actually leading members of Barack Obama’s Administration are working around him, effectively ignoring him in order to prevent the war which Obama has tried to launch. Secretary Kerry is meeting, Friday, on Syria, with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and the Turkish and Saudi Foreign Ministers. Today, Putin addressed the Valdai Discussion Group in Sochi, Russia, sitting at the podium with former US Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, Speaker of the Iranian Majlis Ali Larijani, and former Czech President Vaclav Klaus. There is reason to link these two developments.

Now Obama can be removed, and he must be removed.

In his Oct 20 statement, LaRouche said, “The simple truth is that an honest appraisal of the disastrous collapse of real productivity in the US economy is that a large and growing majority of our fellow citizens are facing job loss, starvation, collapse of genuine health care services, the destruction of the educational system and an overall disintegration of basic infrastructure.”

Recent statistics reported by the Social Security Administration, show that while the federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, yet almost 40% of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year. There are 7.9 million working-age Americans who are “officially unemployed,” and another 94.7 million considered not to be in the labor force, as we have reported—combine the two and you get 102.6 million working-age Americans who have no jobs. “As a nation, we are flat broke, and most of us are living paycheck to paycheck,” wrote a contributor to the Zero Hedge website. It is estimated to cost $50,000 per year to support a middle-class family of four, yet 71% of all workers make less than that, making it impossible for a family to survive with just one breadwinner.

LaRouche called for shutting down Wall Street under Glass-Steagall, and emission of “Federal credit to revive the productive economy, through capital investment in infrastructure and other vital programs.”

At the same time, in his Valdai speech today,— appropriately in the context of the (Obama) war policy which he was denouncing,— Putin referred to the refugee crisis in Europe, saying, “Unfortunately, we hear the words war and conflict ever more frequently when talking about relations between people of different cultures, religions and ethnicity. Today hundreds of thousands of migrants are trying to integrate into a different society without a profession and without any knowledge of the language, traditions and culture of the countries they are moving to.”

The only answer has been given by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as in her Sept 22 statement, “Only a Fundamental Reversal of Economic Policy Can Solve the Refugee Crisis.” She opened it with the stirring words, “In these stormy days in world politics there are two fundamentally different types of political and financial policy leaders: those guided by an optimistic image of man, who put forward a clear vision for the future of mankind, and those whose small-mindedness leaves no room for any image of man. Looking backward, they seek only to defend their power and evil deeds of the past—even though they are no longer defensible. In the dramatic changes of the coming weeks, we will only be able to solve the problems confronting us if we succeed in winning the European nations and the United States to the new paradigm represented by the economic policy of the BRICS states and the ‘win-win’ perspective of China’s New Silk Road.”

Nozipho Joyce Mxakato-Diseko, South Africa’s delegate to a meeting in Germany to prepare the final draft of the COP 21 genocide conference in Paris in December, told the conference: “It is just like apartheid. We find ourselves in a position where in essence we are disenfranchised,” saying that the views of the poor had been ignored, The Mail & Guardian of South Africa reports. Mxakato-Diseko spoke on behalf of the former G77 and China, now referred to as “the main grouping of more than 130 developing nations and China” (Reuters), of which South Africa is currently chairman.

Reuters adds that the “last week of negotiations on the draft text, which began in Germany on Monday, got off to a stormy start with developing nations saying their demands had been omitted from the pared down 20-page draft.” The demands in question include provisions previously agreed on, on financial support for the cost of the program to poor nations, economies, and also holding the developed nations to account—provisions that could, in practice, scupper implementation of any agreement.

Get the full story: EIR Special Report “‘Global Warming’ Scare is Population Reduction, Not Science” now available.

U.S. delegation leader Trigg Talley said the new text could work as a basis for talks, Reuters reported. “This document has many things that most parties cannot agree with,” he said. Rich nations want to ensure that emerging economies will commit to act.

Said Reuters: “The developing nations won a demand on Monday that they could re-insert national demands into the text, raising fears by some that it could again become unwieldy. The previous version ran to 80 pages.” In other words, the genocidalists don’t want any back-talk from the wogs.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pushed the genocide line: “There is no time to waste,” he told a news conference in Slovakia. “It has been quite frustrating to see negotiators negotiating only based on their very narrow national perspectives. This is not a national issue, it’s a global issue.”