“Guerras del agua’’ de Israel: “apartheid acuífero” desde Cisjordania hasta Iztapalapa

Bajo la lupa

 “Guerras del agua’’ de Israel: “apartheid acuífero” desde Cisjordania hasta Iztapalapa

Alfredo Jalife-Rahme
La Jornada 19 de Junio de 2016

Israel, cada vez más aislado con uno de los peores regímenes criminales del planeta, se enfoca a que padezcan sed casi 3 millones de habitantes de Cisjordania, aglomerados en 5 mil 860 kilómetros cuadrados y desconectados territorialmente de casi 1.9 millones de sus hermanos de Gaza, hacinados y calcinados en 360 kilómetros cuadrados superlativa cárcel humana terráquea.

Mekorot, siniestra empresa estatal (sic) de agua de Israel –de fuertes vínculos con el fallido México neoliberal itamita–, impide el acceso al agua potable de decenas de miles de palestinos en Cisjordania.

No basta que el estado racista/apartheid de Israel practique su infanticidio contra los palestinos de Gaza, con el fin de expoliar sus pletóricas reservas de gas (http://goo.gl/AYmjCp).

Ya había previsto en mi libroGuerras globales del agua, elapartheid acuífero global de Israel (http://goo.gl/k33BqJ).

El exitoso portal Russia Today –prohibido en Argentina por el neoliberal filosionista Macri, quien teme la crítica a sus ex acciones– entrevistó a Ramzi Baroud (RB), editor de The Palestine Chronicle,sobre la guerra del agua de Israel contra los palestinos.

RB comenta que el objetivo de Israel y su castigo colectivo consiste en que los condenados palestinos no tengan acceso al agua y así asegurar que no desarrollen su economía que depende entre 14 a 20 por ciento de la agricultura, por lo que negarle el agua destruye sus cosechas, concomitante a una “crisis humanitaria (http://on.rt.com/7fv8)”. ¡La nuev aguerra agrícola de Israel!

RB fustiga que la tragedia de todas las tragedias es que el agua que retienen los israelíes sea de Palestina. Israel roba el agua de los palestinos de los acuíferos de Cisjordania.

Desde hace 68 años, Israel libra varias guerras del agua en todas las fronteras con sus vecinos usurpados: Siria, Líbano, Egipto, Cisjordania/Gaza, habiendo concluido solamente un plausible acuerdo con Jordania por el reparto del río Jordán.

El primer Netanyahu anexó las Alturas del Golán de Siria con el fin de controlar el mar de Galilea (http://goo.gl/fPywwe).

The Times of Israel abordó hace tres años el complot etíope-israelí para desviar las aguas del Nilo azul (nota: una de sus dos ramas), cuando los expertos advierten que la construcción de la Gran Presa Renacimiento de Etiopía –la mayor en África que alteraría el trayecto delNilo azul– podría destruir la agricultura egipcia (http://goo.gl/H9uAm9)”. ¡Otraguerra agrícola de Israel!

La prensa árabe atribuye a Israel la instigación de la presa etíope que afectaría a 5 millones de campesinos egipcios, cuando las empresas israelíes han firmado contratos para controlar la distribución de su energía.

Avigdor Liberman, quien debería estar en tratamiento siquiátrico en lugar de la cancillería de Israel, había amenazado de bombardear la presa Aswan e inundar Egipto. ¡Uf!

¿Las dos franjas azules de la bandera israelí simbolizan los ríos Nilo y Éufrates (que baña Turquía, Siria e Irak) cuando sus guerras del agua comportan un carácter paleo-bíblico/mitológico/irredentista que atenta con el vapuleado derecho internacional?

La oficina del primer ministro palestino Rami Hamdallah denunció que Israel libra una guerra del agua contra los palestinos; los colonos de asentamientos ilegales israelíes gozan de servicio ininterrumpido del líquido, mientras los palestinos son obligados a gastar enormes cantidades de dinero para comprar lo que es suyo (http://goo.gl/m98DuU)”. ¡No, bueno!

Mekorot, principal abastecedor (sic) de agua a villorrios y ciudades palestinos, es acusada de manipular el abasto, lo cual deja a decenas de miles de palestinos sin agua potable durante el noveno mes sagrado lunar islámico del ayuno diurno del Ramadán.

Jamal Dajani, subalterno del premier palestino, condenó las prácticas de Mekorot como inhumanas y ultrajantes cuando Israel no solamente se adueña sistemáticamente de la tierra palestina y usurpa sus recursos naturales, sino que rehúsa conceder a los palestinos el derecho al agua, cuando varias partes de territorios ocupados por Israel no han recibido el recurso por más de 40 días, donde familias enteras viven con un mínimo de 2 litros y hasta 10 litros por día, lo que obliga a su racionamiento y se agrava con el ardiente verano.

Israel niega (sic) haber cortado el abasto a Cisjordania (http://goo.gl/OAmqYK) y Mekorot, que suple 80 por ciento del agua potable de Israel y 70 por ciento de su abasto, tergiversa que es resultado de la escasez (¡supersic!) del abasto del hídrico en Cisjordania.

¿Por qué no sufren la misma escasez los casi 600 mil (¡supersic!) colonos ilegales israelíes, quienes consumen de cinco a 175 veces más que los palestinos en Cisjordania, dependiendo de la zona boicoteada por Mekorot?

Mekorot ha sido denunciada por su apartheid acuífero global (http://goo.gl/93GjSC).

Ciudad de la Plata, provincia de Buenos Aires, suspendió su acuerdo con Mekorot (http://goo.gl/t85aR1) que aplica por doquier el síndrome de la fétida “ley Korenfeld (http://goo.gl/8bk3wN )”.

El sesgado y mendaz DiarioJudio.com publicitó hace dos años que Mekorot tenía a su cargo “rehabilitar (sic) los acuíferos mexicanos (http://goo.gl/C5cMjI)”.

Mekorot y Conagua, todavía teledirigida por el deshonesto Korenfeld –quien compite con su esposa Sandra Kershenobich en saquear a México (http://goo.gl/tDifll)–, establecieron la segunda fase para solucionar (sic) problemas hídricos en México, en la comarca lagunera y el centro de México, y propondrán una solución para el acuífero Cuautitlán-Pachuca (http://goo.gl/CNXQ9d).

Mekorot también participa(rá) en el estudio del acuífero profundo de Iztapalapa en la Ciudad de México, donde su gobierno aceptó 10 mil millones de pesos de préstamo del tóxico Banco Mundial para la subrepticia privatización del agua (http://goo.gl/C7RZfY).

Suena esquizofrénico que Mekorot se posicione para evitar la carestía del agua a escala global, incluyendo el colonizado México neoliberal itamita, mientras en Cisjordania matan de sed a los palestinos.

¿A poco Mekorot y su pestilente socio Korenfeld tratarán mejor a los mexicanos de Iztapalapa/Cuautitlán/Pachuca que a los palestinos de Gaza/Cisjordania?

Mekorot tiene como objetivo “controlar el mercado global del agua (http://goo.gl/ucfbxq)” y ya colocó sus codiciosos ojos en los 800 mil millones de dólares que costarán losdaños por el monetizado cambio climático y el abasto de agua fresca en las próximas décadas, cuando la demanda global se incrementará 55 por ciento, según la OCDE, dirigida por el tamaulipeco Ángel Gurría, sempiterno títere de la banca israelí.

Más allá de sus suculentos negocios de venta masiva de armas, software, seguridad, y su control de inmobiliarias burbujeantes y de la mayor parte de la banca (Reserva Federal, Wall Street, la City, etcétera), al unísono de la formación/exportación/adoctrinamiento de banqueros neoliberales centralbanquistas (Brasil, Argentina, Perú y México), su verdadero meganegocio será el ominoso control del agua desde Cisjordania hasta Iztapalapa: espeluznante dictadura global del implacable apartheid acuífero de Israel.

www.alfredojalife.com

Hillary Clinton and American Empire

by ROB URIE

JUNE 17, 2016

Counterpunch.org

Despite the lack of evidence linking Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen to Daesh (ISIS) in any operational (direct) sense, the first inclination of U.S. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was to renew American bombing of Syria, Iraq and Libya— the very nations that were destroyed by U.S. bombs directed by Mrs. Clinton and from whence Daesh arose. In so doing Mrs. Clinton made it evident that she is an unrepentant militarist whose bloodlust, combined with her longstanding interest in promoting American business interests, ties her to the U.S. imperial project of the last century and one-half. The precise moral difference between mass murders for personal and state reasons depends on a theory of the state at odds with this imperial project.

The company that employed Omar Mateen, G4S, is a British-based ‘security’ company that operates in 120 countries and as a ‘private’ supplier of public services to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Army and to the very same State Department that Mrs. Clinton led as Secretary of State. The company advertises itself capable of ‘mitigating liability’ for the U.S. government— the ruse used by the CIA and other clandestine and quasi-clandestine government agencies to circumvent civil prohibitions on their activities by employing ‘private’ companies to carry them out. The NSA’s domestic surveillance programs tie to those of the FBI, DEA and CIA through this legalistic dodge. And ‘private contractors’ were behind some of the more grotesque slaughters in recent American wars.

The classical liberal separation of economic from political interests used to legitimate state violence is one that the Clintons have spent their ‘public’ careers undermining. As leading proponents of neoliberalism, the Clintons have spent three decades conflating‘private’ interests with the public interest. In history this tie of U.S. business interests to U.S. military incursions runs from residual European imperialism, including genocide against the indigenous population and slavery, to direct wars, proxy wars, coups, assassinations, murders and particularly odious ‘wars of attrition.’ What is corruption in the liberal worldview is the nature of the capitalist-state acting in / on imperial interests in a Marxian frame. If this corruption is ‘solvable,’ such has yet to be demonstrated in the U.S.

Hillary Clinton’s use of the horrific crime in Orlando to instigate further crimes against untold innocents abroad is hidden behind manufactured fears of a lunatic and craven enemy (ISIS) that is in fact both a product of earlier U.S. atrocities across the Middle East and but a pale ghost of the savagery of combined U.S. actions in the region. The American leadership’s practice of creating crises that it must then ‘respond’ to led the way to the sequential slaughters, disruptions and dislocations that now finds substantial portions of the Middle East in ruins and millions of refugees flooding an increasingly xenophobic Europe. That this leadership never seems to learn from its ‘mistakes’ suggests motivations at work other than those presented at press conferences.

Where G4S, Omar Mateen’s employer, fits in is that Mr. Mateen was in many respects the perfect mercenary— ‘our psychopath’ if we were paying for his services. Murdering 49 people and wounding 50 more is, in addition to being an atrocity, a crime and a moral calamity, a complicated logistical feat. In 2004 U.S. Colonel James Steele was brought to Iraq, in a war that Bill Clinton publicly supported and Hillary Clinton voted for, to engineer like atrocities. Mr. Mateen’s crimes would have been business-as-usual in U.S. led slaughters of innocent civilians in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s and in Iraq in the 2000s. And G4S is precisely the type of ‘public-private partnership’ favored by the Clintons to ‘mitigate liability’ behind a veil of ‘private’ actions.

This isn’t to suggest that Hillary Clinton had any part in the murders carried out by Mr. Mateen. It is to suggest that in any human and / or moral sense she is congenitally unfit for public office. The most generous explanation of her support for George W. Bush’s criminal slaughter in Iraq is that she was misled by the manufactured evidence proffered by the Bush administration. That the war tied through history to the Clinton’s own sanctions against Iraq that resulted in half a million innocents dying from privation and to eight years of bombing that left much of the country in ruins suggests that Mrs. Clinton probably well understood that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. in 2001. That the war was coincidentally a boon to Western business interests was / is as grotesque as it was predictable.

If conceptual clarity around these issues seems wanting here— that is the point. Neoliberalism as some unified theory of political economy ties through history to the Washington Consensus that in turn ties to American imperial history. Western imperialism— state-corporatism as division of the global economic spoils through insertion / assertion of ‘national’ interests, has five centuries of reasonably well defined history behind it. In this regard Donald Trump’s relative rhetorical reticence to use military force as a first choice is a threat to this imperial order whereas Hillary Clinton’s willingness to destroy an entire region of the world on a whim to benefit Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs makes her the ‘safe’ choice from the institutional perspective.

Washington Consensus precepts are:

*Fiscal discipline

*A redirection of public expenditure priorities toward fields offering both high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, such as primary health care, primary education, and infrastructure

*Tax reform (to lower marginal rates and broaden the tax base)

*Interest rate liberalization

*A competitive exchange rate

*Trade liberalization

*Liberalization of inflows of foreign direct investment

*Privatization

*Deregulation (to abolish barriers to entry and exit)

*Secure property rights

Against this imperial history the U.S. view that national elections are an internal matter places U.S. voters as the nominal ‘choosers’ of political economy for much of the world. In political terms, the 800+ military bases that the U.S. keeps around the globe serve as quasi-private security forces to assure repatriation of ‘profits’ for multi-national corporations in the form of resources, plentiful, cheap labor and the broader economy of imperial conquest. In fact, as opposed to theory, these profits are the reciprocal of the death, misery, subjugation and immiseration inevitably put forward by Western economists and politicians as the result of ‘free-choice’ by those on the losing end of American imperial fortune. That increasing numbers of Americans are on this losing end helps explain current (and heretofore slight) political unrest and its reciprocal in establishment support for Mrs. Clinton.

Hillary Clinton’s toxic jargon that “America never stopped being great” poses a seeming conundrum for her supporters who aren’t dedicated sociopaths. If U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Northern Africa are evidence of this greatness, then what are the moral and political bases of such a judgment? Mrs. Clinton’s nostalgia for the days of alleged national unity following the attacks of September 11, 2001 is apparently for the erasure of the history that led to the attacks and not for unity per se. Conversely, given the absence of any operational link to Daesh, Omar Mateen could just as well have claimed that his crimes were motivated by Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ were ISIS not such a well-implanted foe.

Externally, and in contradiction of to the exceptionalists, the democratists and Western neoliberals, the U.S. is broadly considered the greatest threat to world peace on the planet. Brought to the fore in the current Presidential election cycle is that Western elites— inherited wealth, bailout-dependent bankers, the corporate lootocracy dependent on wildly goosed (by the Federal Reserve) asset prices and various and sundry agents, functionaries and court pleaders, are now well-understood to have interests diametrically opposed to those of the vast majority of Americans. The conceptual leap not yet taken by the American electorate is the international nature of this class divide.

This international ‘footprint’ is fact regardless of whether or not Americans consider it when voting. Internal economic dislocations, such as jobs lost and stagnant wages from trade agreements, find their reciprocals in indigenous economies destroyed, in ‘developing market’ industries shut out through subsidized ‘competition,’ in IMF ‘workouts’ that place ownership of developing industries in Western hands and through commodification and expropriation of millennia of accumulated knowledge to be put back as alien product against the peoples and cultures that developed it. In this respect, the ‘Clinton model’ of sweatshop labor as economic development joins the ‘Obama model’ of subverting civil law in the interests of corporate-state plutocrats.

Calls to unify behind Hillary Clinton in her bid to become President pose the heavily engineered outcome of the Democratic primaries as the popular will. In this sense they are roughly analogous to the calls to unite behind George W. Bush following the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000. The Clintons paved the way for Mr. Bush’s brutal militarism much as Barack Obama maintained the institutional infrastructure of the ‘unitary Presidency’ and the capacity for launching criminal wars of opportunity. Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it is Mrs. Clinton who has the proven record as guardian of empire and imperial prerogative. Her unbridled militarism is an expression of this prerogative.

The question for Democrats is how evil can someone be to still be worthy of voting for? Alleged stark differences between Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush find very high degrees of synchronicity between their actual policies (and those of Barack Obama). And lest this be unclear, it is the Democratic establishment that chose Mrs. Clinton as its candidate (chart above), and not the politically and economically dispossessed electorate. The grift that American elections reflect the popular will, and therefore confer political legitimacy, contrasts with the facts that the dominant Parties are largely and increasingly unpopular and that the popular will bears no relation to the policiesdecided upon and enacted by the American political establishment.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

It Took Us Just 38 Minutes To Buy An AR-15 In Orlando

Purchasing a killing machine, even after a national tragedy, is just too easy.

 06/14/201

Andy Campbell  

Roque Planas 

The Huffington Post

ORLANDO, Fla. — It took us 38 minutes to walk out of a gun shop with a death machine.

Just two days after Omar Mateen used a semi-automatic rifle to murder 49 innocent people and injure dozens more, we were able to purchase an AR-15 — a rifle similar to Mateen’s that has been used in several other mass shootings on American soil — in less time than it takes to buy a cart full of groceries.

We would have been locked and loaded within five minutes, but the gun shop employee we spoke to said the queue on background checks was longer than usual because people were scrambling to buy AR-15s in the wake of the shooting. That’s both terrifying and unsurprising — gun sales often skyrocket after mass shootings.

But the ease with which we purchased our AR-15, a Vietnam-era gun hailed by the military as being the perfect killing machine, was surreal. This, despite the fact that Florida Gov. Rick Scott had declared a state of emergency in Orange County, which includes Orlando.

On any given day, regardless of whether your town has endured a horrific tragedy, it’s not hard to purchase a weapon of mass murder like we did in most of America. A reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News was able to get one in just seven minutes in Pennsylvania on Monday.

Within seconds, we had it in our hands: A rifle that weighs less than a small watermelon and can, like the MCX Sig Sauer that Mateen used, easily fire several dozen rounds in less than 10 seconds. Our Diamondback DB15‘s killing power is striking, and at $644, it’s a relatively affordable murder weapon.

Gun shop employees were happy to discuss lethality. When another customer looking to purchase a small, .22-caliber handgun noted that it wouldn’t fare well against a “6-foot-3, 350 pound man,” the employee agreed.

“You’d have to hit him in the neck or the heart,” said the employee, whom we aren’t naming for this story.

He went on to joke with the customer that he should either pick a bigger gun or use the .22 to “shoot him in the stomach 15 times, that’d really piss him off.”

Behind him, the TV blared Fox News coverage of the massacre at Pulse nightclub, located nearby. On the wall, a framed photo of President Barack Obama with the caption, “Firearm Salesman Of The Year,” hung next to an array of other long rifles, some of them higher caliber than the AR-15, and some of them more affordable, too.

Semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 have been used in several of the most deadly shooting rampages in the United States in recent years, even before the attack in Orlando. The killers behind the mass shootings in San Bernardino, California, the elementary school at Newtown, Connecticut, and the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, all used AR-15s.

They’re not the cheapest rifles around — another, higher-caliber carbine hung on the wall at our shop for half the price. But the National Rifle Association calls the AR-15 the most popular weapon in the U.S. “It is customizable, adaptable, reliable and accurate,” the organization says on its blog.

Shop workers told us we’d have to wait if we wanted to buy a smaller gun. There’s a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases in Florida, but that rule does not apply to rifles.

The employee made some small talk, declaring that all guns fall under one of three classifications: Leisure, defense and hunting. We aren’t sure which category Mateen’s gun falls under.

Under any of the gun shop employee’s definitions, there seems no reason for a weapon that can fire 10 or more bullets in quick succession. The AR-15 and its close cousins are not made to hunt deer. They’re made to kill people.

All it took to attain one was a driver’s license (the one we used was from out of state) and a few minutes to wait for the background check to clear. We signed state-issued proof of sale documents that asked whether we were felons or drug addicts, and where we lived.

Waiting for the background check was the hardest part — and that only involved a few minutes of idle time. We requested data from the state Department of Law Enforcement on the current volume of background checks for similar guns, but did not get an immediate response. The department has been overwhelmed by public records requests since the shooting, a spokeswoman said.

Nothing that we or the store employees did was illegal or unusual. You can buy semi-automatic rifles at several stores in the Orlando area.

As of this writing, we have the same firepower that Mateen had when he opened fire at one of Orlando’s most famous gay clubs. We don’t have any ammunition, though — the shop ran out of .223-caliber rounds.

We plan to return the gun. Eventually, it will join countless other rifles of its kind on the legal, Great American gun market.

UPDATE: 6/15 — We attempted to return the AR-15 to the shop where we purchased it. Despite having a return policy, they refused. So we opted to turn the gun over to Orlando police, who said they would have it destroyed.

Before Orlando, Omar Mateen Worked for Human Rights Abusers

by PHYLLIS BENNIS

JUNE 15, 2016

Counterpunch.org

How do we even talk about the horrific killings in Orlando, which left at least 50 LGBTQ revelers dead and more than 50 more injured in the middle of pride month? First we mourn. Then we rage. Then we hug our loved ones, especially our LGBTQ friends, comrades, and family members.

Then we look again, and we see the horror — that this murderer was licensed to carry guns and had no trouble buying incredibly powerful military-style weapons. So casually. So legally. So common, across our country. That’s when we start to rage again.

More troubling still, Omar Mateen worked for a company that was perpetrating systemic violence against vulnerable people long before he took up arms against his LGBTQ neighbors. For nine years Mateen worked for G4S Security, a British-based corporation that contracts with the U.S. and Israeli governments for work that often violates human rights on a massive scale.

G4S, which brags about having 600 staffers on the southern border, has contracts with U.S. immigration authorities to detain and deport people back to Mexico, as well as to run private juvenile detention facilities. In Israel, meanwhile, G4S profits from providing equipment and services in Israeli prisons and interrogation centers where Palestinians are routinely tortured. It’s also involved in running Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Incidentally, G4S is the company that trained Mateen to work as an armed security guard, which licensed him to carry and use weapons. And although his coworkers told supervisors that Mateen “frequently made homophobic and racial comments,” the company did nothing. It kept him on board — and kept him armed.

Should this company continue to profit from multi-million-dollar contracts with the U.S. government?

Since 2012, there’s been a major campaign against G4S, resulting in decisions by major mainstream institutions — like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Methodist Church, numerous European universities, important charities in South Africa and the Netherlands, UN agencies in the Middle East, and more — to divest from G4S holdings, or to cancel or not renew service contracts. G4S is profiting from exactly the kind of anti-Arab and anti-Latino racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that are all on the rise in the U.S. right now.

If the early reports are accurate, G4S’s long-serving employee is responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

And here let’s continue to be careful with our numbers. As my IPS colleague Karen Dolan and others have been pointing out, our nation’s origins are grounded in genocide and slavery. Earlier history has to take into account things like the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, when between 150 and 300 children, women, and men were gunned down. That mass shooting is part of our history, too.

But our nation’s history also includes the great movements that have risen against war, racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. The party at Orlando’s Pulse club was part of a month-long Gay Pride celebration rooted in the extraordinary movement that grew out of the 1969 Stonewall revolt, when bar patrons fought back against police brutality toward gay men and lesbians.

June 12, the night of the massacre, happened to be Latin Night at the Pulse. Reverend William Barber, a leader of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, reminded me that June 12 is also the anniversary of the 1963 Mississippi assassination of the great civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

One more link between our movements — from Stonewall to Orlando, and Mississippi to Palestine.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror: A Primer. 

LA MASACRE DE ORLANDO ¿QUÉ HACER?

Nueva masacre en Estados Unidos. La peor de su historia, cometida por un estadounidense de nombre Omar Mateen, hijo de padres afganos (su padre es un político que se dice “candidato a la presidencia de Afganistán”), posiblemente con desorden bipolar (psicosis maníaco-depresiva) y supuestamente inspirado, y ahora también avalado, por el Estado Islámico.

La masacre cometida en un bar de la comunidad homosexual en Orlando, Florida, también tiene por supuesto tintes homofóbicos, propios de los grupos radicales islámicos.

Ante un nuevo hecho de violencia, realizado en esta ocasión por un “lobo solitario”, cabe preguntarse: ¿Esto parará alguna vez? ¿Qué hacer ante una epidemia de actos de violencia en escuelas, iglesias, cines, centros comerciales, bares, mercados, etc., de los Estados Unidos y de ciudades europeas, del Medio Oriente, Africa y Asia[1]?

Por un lado está la posición del gobierno de Barack Obama que señala que hay que aprender a vivir con esto por muchos años (misma posición del internacionalista de la corriente realista, Stephen M. Walt), ya que es materialmente imposible prever y evitar todos los ataques terroristas, en vista de que el número de “blancos” a su disposición es prácticamente infinito; y establecer medidas restrictivas a sociedades abiertas y plurales como las occidentales, implicaría cambiar fundamentalmente las leyes y la estructura social de dichos países, limitando severamente las libertades civiles y los derechos humanos, sin que con ello se consiguiera la seguridad completa.

¿Qué propone Obama? Mejorar las capacidades de inteligencia del país; incrementar la cooperación en ese sentido con los países aliados; trabajar en conjunto con los países de mayoría musulmana, para evitar que grupos religiosos y/o políticos de dichos países, financien y apoyen la radicalización de sectores de la población; mantener informada y alerta a la población y aplicar, hasta donde sea posible, medidas de seguridad razonables, que logren un equilibrio entre seguridad y libertad.

Por el otro lado, la corriente neoconservadora y el candidato republicano a la presidencia de los Estados Unidos, Donald Trump (a pesar de sus diferencias, en esto tienen algunos puntos coincidentes), proponen mayores controles sociales, que implican más facultades para que las autoridades investiguen y monitoreen permanentemente a la población, especialmente a los grupos considerados como potencialmente peligrosos (los 3 millones de musulmanes que viven en Estados Unidos), para intentar evitar estos ataques; que se establezcan prohibiciones para entrar a Estados Unidos de los nacionales de países con importante presencia de grupos terroristas, y en general de aquellos países con mayoría de población musulmana.

Así también, una intervención militar más amplia y decidida en Medio Oriente para acabar con grupos radicales como El Estado Islámico y presiones políticas sobre los aliados musulmanes de Estados Unidos en la región (Arabia Saudita, petromonarquías del Golfo, Afganistán, Pakistán, etc.), para que ataquen decididamente a los grupos terroristas y eviten brindarles cualquier tipo de apoyo mediante escuelas, organizaciones no gubernamentales, partidos políticos, mezquitas, etc.  

Por el bando libertario (Ron y Rand Paul, el portal Antiwar.com, por ejemplo), la propuesta es  cambiar fundamentalmente la política exterior y de seguridad de Estados Unidos, pues su objetivo es mantener un imperio y con ello la hegemonía mundial, con lo que permanentemente se está interviniendo militarmente en otros países, lo que inevitablemente provoca  la respuesta (el contragolpe) de sectores sociales de los países invadidos o bombardeados por Estados Unidos y sus aliados, lo que lleva al crecimiento y ampliación de los grupos terroristas, que así encuentran una justificación para atacar a Occidente y a sus aliados, y les permite aumentar su capacidad de reclutamiento y su base de apoyo.

¿Cuál de las tres perspectivas es la más coherente y viable?

El problema radica en que las tres perspectivas dependen de los objetivos de poderosos actores internos en los países de Occidente, y de las verdaderas intenciones que tienen varios aliados de estos países en el Medio Oriente y el Norte de Africa.

El complejo militar-industrial-de seguridad (CMIS) de Estados Unidos y de sus aliados (significativamente Gran Bretaña, Francia e Israel), basa su poder económico y político en la hegemonía mundial de Estados Unidos y en la perpetua guerra contra los enemigos de dicha hegemonía (llámese el comunismo en su momento; ahora “el terrorismo”, los “rogue states”; y de nuevo China y Rusia).

El CMIS tiene presupuestos enormes cada año y su influencia política se extiende por todo el establecimiento político de Estados Unidos, pues apoya con contribuciones a diputados, senadores, gobernadores y candidatos presidenciales, con objeto de que los contratos de armas y sistemas de defensa, se mantengan continuamente al alza. Y esto sólo es justificable si el mundo es “peligroso” y hay continuamente amenazas que enfrentar; y si no, se exageran las que existen o se inventan nuevas.

Cientos de “think tanks”, universidades, consultorías y empresas de seguridad privada, dependen también de que existan amenazas a la seguridad de Estados Unidos y en general a Occidente, para recibir generosas contribuciones del gobierno, empresas privadas de armamentos y hasta de gobiernos extranjeros que intentan influir en la agenda de política exterior y de seguridad de Washington.

Por el lado de los aliados regionales de Occidente, destacan sobre manera Israel, Arabia Saudita y las petromonarquías del Golfo, que tienen intereses específicos que proteger y hacer avanzar, y para lo cual les es indispensable que Estados Unidos y Europa Occidental mantengan su presencia política y militar en Medio Oriente y Africa del Norte, para lo cual la amenaza terrorista constituye la justificación perfecta.

Así, el gobierno de Netanyahu (Israel) desea expulsar de su territorio a los 4.5 millones de palestinos que viven en Cisjordania y Gaza (de preferencia mandarlos a Jordania), y así conformar el “Gran Israel”, con amplia mayoría de judíos. De igual manera, pretende expulsar a Hezbollah del sur de Líbano y anexarse de jure (puesto que de facto ya lo tiene), las alturas del Golán de Siria.

El gobierno israelí también desea destruir a Irán, tal como ya lo logró -utilizando a los Estados Unidos y a Europa- con Irak, Libia y casi lo ha conseguido con Siria. Pues el gobierno de Tel Aviv aspira a ser la potencia hegemónica en la región y ve a Irán y sus aliados como el principal competidor en dicho objetivo, por lo que pretende devastarlo con una guerra en la que no tenga que gastar un solo dólar, ni perder un solo soldado, como sucedió en los casos de Irak y Libia, en los que quedaron eliminados dos antagonistas del proyecto sionista (Saddam Hussein y Muammar Gaddafi).

Por su parte, Arabia y las petromonarquías del Golfo, coinciden con Israel en su objetivo de destruir a Irán y sus aliados (el gobierno iraquí, el de Bashar el Assad, Hezbollah y los houthis de Yemen), con objeto de que la rama sunni del Islam consolide su hegemonía sobre los chiitas.

Otros actores en la región, como Egipto, ya no aspiran a la hegemonía regional, y dada su dependencia económica respecto a Estados Unidos y Arabia Saudita, lo único que pretende el presidente Al Sissi es desarrollar económicamente al país, evitar que el radicalismo  islámico sea un factor de poder en el ámbito interno y mantener relaciones de cooperación con Israel y el resto de países de mayoría musulmana.

Sólo el gobierno de Erdogan en Turquía, mantiene la ambición de expandir la influencia turca en la región, pero su problema interno con los kurdos y con los sectores más seculares dentro del espectro político del país, más las crecientes divisiones dentro de la propia coalición gobernante (reciente renuncia del Primer Ministro Davotoglu), no permiten prever que el gobierno de Ankara pueda lograr esos objetivos expansionistas.

Sin embargo, su disputa con el gobierno de Bashar el Assad en Siria, es fuente de apoyo y recursos a distintos grupos terroristas que combaten al gobierno sirio.

Tal cantidad de intereses y objetivos entre los supuestos aliados de Estados Unidos y Europa, aunado a los intereses específicos del CMIS y de sus aliados políticos en Washington, como los neoconservadores y los liberales intervencionistas del Partido Demócrata, complican, obstaculizan, cuando no paralizan cualquier esfuerzo por minar y debilitar a los grupos radicales islámicos, que encuentran sustento no sólo en la propia política exterior y de seguridad de Estados Unidos y Europa Occidental, caracterizada por el intervencionismo militar y la visión de que Estados Unidos debe imponer su hegemonía en todo el mundo; si no también en los intereses meramente económicos de diversos actores dentro de los países occidentales que ven en la prolongación de la amenaza terrorista, su modus vivendi, por lo que las acciones y políticas para prevenir y eventualmente erradicar al terrorismo de las calles de los Estados Unidos y las principales ciudades europeas, es una quimera; no sucederá, pues los intereses detrás del terrorismo van más allá de los propios grupos terroristas, y engloban al complejo-militar-industrial-de seguridad; corporaciones de seguridad e inteligencia; “think tanks” y consultorías; políticos y funcionarios, y hasta medios de comunicación, que literalmente viven de la “Guerra contra el Terrorismo”.

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[1] A excepción de los atentados en la AMIA en Buenos Aires, hasta ahora América Latina no ha enfrentado este tipo de ataques inspirados en los distintos problemas del Medio Oriente, Africa del Norte y de grupos radicales islámicos.

Damning Report On Mexico Another Blot On Clinton’s Record

 06/08/2016

Jeremy Kuzmarov Historian, intellectual, political activist

The Huffington Post

While the “Queen of Chaos” Hillary Clinton has been wrapping up the nomination for the Democratic Party this week, a detailed report was issued by the Open Society Foundation on the drug war in Mexico that casts further negative light on her tenure as Secretary of State.

Focusing on a nine-year period between 2006 and December 2015, the Open Society investigation determined that Mexican police and security forces routinely used torture methods to obtain confessions, and were connected to forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings which were rarely investigated let alone prosecuted.

As Secretary of State, Clinton moved to aggressively expand the Obama administration’s Plan Mérida which has provided over $2.5 billion for the War on Drugs, in addition to around one billion dollars in arms that the United States sells to Mexico annually.

The State Department under Clinton’s direction, as Jesse Franzblau reported inThe Nation, worked to bolster Mexico’s wiretap capabilities, provided communications systems and computers, and installed information sharing software, biometric databases, and radar systems. It also peddled Blackhawk helicopters, surveillance aircrafts, satellites, and all-terrain vehicles, and built joint-intelligence fusion centers for targeting high-value cartel leaders.

Raising serious questions of conflict of interest, several of the contractors profiting from U.S. security assistance including General Electric, Lockheed and United Technologies which owns Sikorsky contributed to the Clinton Foundation.

Other contractors infamous for their role in War on Terror like DynCorp and L-3 Communications (an outgrowth of Military Professional Resources Inc.) performed vital intelligence and police training functions under Clinton’s oversight that contributed to the climate of violence. Videos even surfaced showing contractors employed by Risks Inc. training an elite police unit in torture techniques.

American weapons were at times used by the Mexican army to suppress peasant uprisings in Chiapas and Oaxaca provinces driven by rampant inequalities and to force the displacement of peasants to make way for megaprojects by multi-national mining corporations, as Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda report in Drug War Mexico.

Abel Barren, director of a human rights group in Mexico’s Guerrero Province told journalist Dawn Paley that “the War on Drugs is no less than continuing to use military force to contain nonconformist, disruptive movements, groups in resistance, and collectives who raise their voices.”

Drug supply rates were little affected overall by Plan Mérida as the Coast Guard only had money to go after 39 percent of drug vessels and the cartels used underground tunnels and high-speed submarines(“narco-subs”) that traveled 80 to 90 percent below the sea’s surface and could go 2,500 miles without refueling. They also concealed drugs in jalapeno peppers and fish imports, garnering over $3 billion in profits per year. When an electronic fence was built in Arizona along the border, the Sinaola cartel used catapults to launch drugs over the fence. Michael Braun, D.E.A. chief of operations, told a reporter: “We’ve got the best fence money can buy, and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology.”

President Felipe Calderon’s drug czar, Noe Ramirez meanwhile accepted $450,000 in bribes each month, while secretary of public security, Genaro Garcia Luna, acquired sudden personal wealth and threatened to kill journalists who exposed government corruption. Edgardo Buscaglia, of the UN anti-corruption task force, noted that of the 53,174 arrests made from 2006 to 2010, only 941 were associated with the Sinaloa drug cartel, whose leader Juaqin “El Chapo” Guzman had assisted Calderon’s rise to power.

Journalist Anabel Hernandez wrote that what Mexico was experiencing was “not a war on drug traffickers but a war between drug traffickers, with the government taking sides for the Sinaloa Cartel.”

From the 1970s onwards, the United States government has used narcotics control as a rationalization for supplying military equipment and police training to strategic allies which the U.S. public would normally repudiate because of their repressive character. It has at the same time covertly supported drug traffickers that keep the trade out of the hands of left-wing or guerrilla groups.

Clinton and her associates repeated many of the familiar tropes about supporting good government and reforming police institutions as a precondition for drug war aid.

However, the Open Society Foundation report emphasizes the prevalence of militarized law enforcement in Mexico, which American initiatives under Clinton’s leadership contributed significantly to.

Hillary Clinton is now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, having apparently convinced many people that she is a champion of progressive causes and standard-bearer of the women’s liberation movement.

However, her enthusiastic championing of the drug war in Mexico is a black spot on her record. Along with her backing aggressive wars and coups, it should leave voters leery about her character and sickened by a two-party system that leaves someone like her as the only “liberal” hope.

Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of a book on the War on Drugs, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Massachusetts, 2009).

Two important lessons from Israeli attack on the USS Liberty

June 8, 2016

Bob Johnson

www.examiner.com

Today, June 8, 2016, is the 49th anniversary of the cowardly and deadly Israeli attacks on the USS Liberty. The repeated Israeli attacks from the air and sea on the American Navy ship on June 8, 1967 killed 33 American sailors and Marines and one American civilian while wounding 174 Americans. This tragic case is offering every American lessons regarding the Jewish state of Israel and US politicians and military brass.

After repeatedly attacking the USS Liberty from the air and from the sea, once Israel realized the crew of the USS Liberty had been able to get a message off to the Sixth Fleet that they were under attack, Israel lied and said it was an accident. The survivors know that Israel is lying and that the repeated and deadly attacks by the Jewish state were very deliberate.

US military brass (bureaucrats in uniform) ordered the survivors to remain completely silent about Israel's war crime. The Commander in Chief at the time, Lyndon Johnson, immediately accepted Israel's irrational excuse that the attack was a mistake. Johnson even lied about the USS Liberty attack in his autobiography by claiming 10 men were killed instead of 34 and lowering the number of wounded from 174 to 100. (It's interesting and revealing of LBJ's complete lack of courage and character that he lied about being under enemy fire and received a Silver Star for gallantry based on that lie.)

It is clear that a lesson being taught to us by the USS Liberty is to never trust politicians or bureaucrats in uniform.

During the attack, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned life rafts the crew of the USS Liberty were putting in the water. This demonstrates a cold-heartedness of Biblical proportions. It's reminiscent of Deuteronomy 7:2 in which the Jews who wrote the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament claimed God told the Jews, "And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them;" (Jewish superiority as found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is a very harmful and destructive idea.)

The USS Liberty is teaching us about the heartless Jewish state of Israel and that it cannot be expected that such a state that is based on such a twisted mindset as is found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament would be any different than it is. This cruel way of being is also plainly evident in Israel's illegal and decades long occupation of Palestine. As the Deist Thomas Paine pointed out in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition, "Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man."

Why would Israel knowingly attack an American Navy ship on June 8, 1967 in international waters? The answer to why Israel attacked the USS Liberty and why politicians in the US government covered it up is probably found in this article from the Navy Times. It states: "Some allege Israel wanted the spy ship sunk to ensure it did not pick up communications showing Israel was planning to seize the Golan Heights from Syria. Others say it was to prevent Liberty from intercepting communications dealing with an alleged Israeli massacre of Egyptian POWs in the Sinai.

"Some Liberty survivors and supporters claim the U.S. government covered up the incident to avoid a conflict with Israel that could have cost the Johnson administration support among Jewish voters and supporters. Subsequent administrations and Congresses have avoided a thorough airing of the incident for the same reasons, they say."

Since the war crime Israel committed against the USS Liberty and her crew and against America herself, things have gotten much worse. US politicians from both parties have sold out the US and its people for political gain and selfish advancement. They've been stealing tens of BILLIONS of tax dollars from Americans for decades and giving them to the Jewish state. Just yesterday US National Security Adviser Susan Rice bragged in a speech to the American Jewish Committee Global Forum that under Obama the "single largest military assistance package - with any country - in American history" has been worked out in which US political whores will take from the American people and give to the Jewish state over the next 10 years between $37.5 and $40 BILLION!

In addition to US politicians stealing from Americans and giving to Israel (kind of like a kosher Robin Hood), US politicians started the war against Iraq for Israel's benefit. This war crime against the Gentile world had its roots in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament based neocon movement. And, sadly, both US presidential hopefuls, Clinton and Trump, are in lockstep in their unquestioning support for Israel.

We should never forget the human faces of those the US military and politicians sacrificed for their own selfish benefit and for the benefit of Greater Israel. Here is a link so you can see them and learn about their lives.