the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent.   by TJ Coles  Part 3 - Black gold, British rule   Drawing up “contracts” for energy companies, the Foreign Office (FO) created a monopoly for Anglo-Persian oil (later BP) and particularly for Shell. Prospecting contracts were awarded by the FO in the late-1930s, but it was as late as 1956 that financially viable amounts of black gold were struck. Most of the country’s oil is in the southern, Niger Delta region populated by the Ijaw and Ogoni peoples, hence there is little militant Islam in Nigeria’s illicit oil sector. Shell operations began in Ogoniland in 1958. Nigeria gained slow and painful independence from Britain in 1960. Seven years later, armed Igbo fought a war of secession in the oil-rich south to try to form their own country, the Republic of Biafra. Under a One N...

Even if we were to accept all the accusations against the WIV regarding their alleged subpar safety standards, none of it has any relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic unless it can be shown the WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 in its lab before the outbreak, and there is no evidence of that.   by Joshua Cho    Part 2 - State Department cable a ‘nothing burger’   The claim that the WIV was conducting its experiments in substandard or unsafe working conditions started gaining mainstream acceptance when Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin published an op-ed based on redacted State Department cables from 2018. Rogin claimed that the redacted cables were evidence of “safety issues” at the WIV:                                    Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy offici...

Le simple fait de compter le coût de l’intervention occidentale en Afghanistan en vies militaires américaines ou britanniques constitue la preuve ultime que nous sommes une civilisation en décomposition   David Hearst Partie 3 - Les répercussions de la défaite C’est un désastre auquel pas moins de quatre présidents américains ont participé, un effort véritablement bipartisan. Il n’est donc pas exagéré d’affirmer que les répercussions de la défaite en Afghanistan vont bien au-delà des frontières de ce pays meurtri. Si la défaite de l’URSS il y a 32 ans a marqué le début de la fin de l’empire soviétique et certainement de toutes les forces expéditionnaires russes jusqu’à l’envoi de troupes en Syrie en 2015, la défaite actuelle marque le début de la fin de l’empire occidental en tant qu’ordre mondial dominant sur le plan militaire et économique.  Cet ordre ne s’est pas effondré parce qu’il était confronté à des ennemis puissants. Il s’est effondré à cause de son orgueil démesuré,...

In “The Management of Savagery,” Max Blumenthal explores the Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks, the Islamophobic US backlash, and the neocon push to destabilize the Middle East   Max Blumenthal    Part 2 - The Summer of the Shark George W. Bush entered the White House after months of friendly coverage from the Washington press corps. With only a few exceptions, the pundits portrayed Bush as the consummate centrist, a uniter who could calm a badly divided nation. ABC’s Dean Reynolds called him a “ different kind of Republican [who could] show middle of the road voters—both white and black— that he is more moderate than they would have suspected. ” The New York Times ’ Jim Yardley praised Bush’s “ bipartisan, above-the-fray image, ” while CNN trumpeted Bush’s supposed steps toward “ healing a divided nation. ” On Bush’s selection as vice president, Representative Bill Paxon assured a CNN audience that “ Dick Cheney is the ultimate man of moderation. ” As for Condoleezza ...

Moderate Rebels   In his first United Nations address, Peru's President Pedro Castillo called for a "social transformation" that guarantees "economic rights," while reducing hunger, poverty, and inequality.   https://benjaminnorton.substack.com/p/perus-new-leftist-president-at-un

Moderate Rebels   At the United Nations, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi called US intervention " the biggest hindrance " to peace and stability, denouncing murderous American sanctions and the new cold war.  https://benjaminnorton.substack.com/p/iran-at-un-isis-would-be-europes  

failed evolution   World's number one political prisoner, Julian Assange, still in high security prison for exposing horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.   The ruthless Western imperialist regime wants to punish the No1 real journalist in the world and make him an example for any Whistleblower or real journalist who will attempt to expose its big crimes in the future.   The only thing that stands between the ruthless imperialists and their plans to exterminate Julian Assange are the thousands of people protesting against his extradition to the US. Among them, famous names from the global political, economic, academic, intellectual and arts sectors.   More and more people should join the fight until full drop of charges against Julian Assange and his release.   So, until then, we should make sure that the clear message will reach the power centers of the worst liberal establishment ever: if you dare to harm Julian Assange, ...

The Grayzone   Ben Norton discusses how the US military trained elite forces that carried out a coup in Guinea, a West African country with many natural resources, including the planet's largest reserves of bauxite, the main source of aluminum. Western government-funded think tanks boasted that the Guinean coup is a blow to China and its Belt and Road Initiative. Washington's new cold war has Africa in its crosshairs. 

The Grayzone  Ben Norton analyzes the lies and misleading claims in US President Joe Biden's speech at the United Nations, and shows how the corporate media coverage is very misleading.

by New Worlds   Part 1   It was a lethal lie that killed thousands. BBC News last month was forced to admit the lies it spread and stood behind for three years: a BBC documentary video used all over the world, made in April 2018, showed children and civilians gasping and being chaotically hosed down, with an announcer narrating breathlessly that these were the horrors perpetrated by Syria's Assad government. It reported opposition witnesses alleging aerial drops of chemical weapons barrels that killed more than 40 people and injured hundreds more.  This video and narrative was quickly used by the United States, the United Kingdom and France to justify launching over a hundred missiles into Syria a week later without any evidence, just one day before an investigation by the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Why the hurry? In 2013, the UN inspector Carla del Ponte already came out in news video clips to say that investigation showed that it was...

Under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent.   by TJ Coles  Part 2 - A brief history of a complex country It’s important to get an idea of Nigeria’s ethnic and regional complexities. The country’s 206 million people, nearly half of whom are Muslim and nearly half Christian, live north of the equator in West Africa. Their country has 36 states, seven of which are coastal. The country borders Cameroon in the east, Benin in the west, Chad in the northeast, and Niger in the north and northwest. A US Strategic Studies Institute report from the mid-‘90s describes Nigeria as “ an artificial state created according to colonial exigencies rather than ethnic coherence. ” Its fragility explains the country’s susceptibility to ethnic, religious, and class warfare. The majority of Nigerian Muslims are Sunni, but Islam in the country spans...

Even if we were to accept all the accusations against the WIV regarding their alleged subpar safety standards, none of it has any relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic unless it can be shown the WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 in its lab before the outbreak, and there is no evidence of that.   by Joshua Cho    Part 1   While many people have already criticized the lack of evidence and scientific basis for the hypothesis that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory, both critics and proponents of the lab-leak theory appear to have uncritically accepted false or unproven premises regarding work done at the laboratory most often implicated in these speculations, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).   Some of the most prominent accusations pointed at the WIV are that it was conducting research as part of China’s alleged biowarfare program, and was conducting its experiments in substandard biosafety conditions. The implication is that if the WIV lied about not hav...

Le simple fait de compter le coût de l’intervention occidentale en Afghanistan en vies militaires américaines ou britanniques constitue la preuve ultime que nous sommes une civilisation en décomposition   David Hearst Partie 2 - L’effondrement de l’Occident Mais le pays imaginaire dans lequel le libéralisme occidental continue d’opérer en Asie occidentale et au Moyen-Orient reste porteur d’enseignements. Il nous en dit long sur la psychologie d’un empire en déclin. Il est dans le déni. Notamment en ce qui concerne son rôle dans ce désastre. David Petraeus, ancien haut commandant américain en Afghanistan, le général Sir Nick Carter, chef d’état-major de la Défense britannique, ainsi que tous les généraux américains et britanniques qui ont servi en Afghanistan portent une lourde responsabilité dans une guerre que les Afghans eux-mêmes ne pouvaient pas supporter et dont ils ne voulaient pas. Aucun d’entre eux n’a su trouver la force d’assumer la responsabilité de ce désastre et de s’e...

In “The Management of Savagery,” Max Blumenthal explores the Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks, the Islamophobic US backlash, and the neocon push to destabilize the Middle East   Max Blumenthal    Part 1 Two hours’ drive from Kandahar, in the southern Afghan desert city where the Taliban were born and where Osama bin Laden maintained his operational base, a February 2001 wedding ceremony became the stage for bin Laden’s first public appearance in several years. Seated in the shade of palm trees was the Al Qaeda leader’s seventeen-year-old son, Mohammed, his father’s personal protector and likely successor. To his left was Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian comrade of Zawahiri who acted as the chief military strategist of Al Qaeda—the brains behind its operations. To Mohammed’s right sat his father, who smiled proudly as his son prepared to marry Atef’s fourteen-year-old daughter. Ahmad Zaidan, a correspondent for the Qatari outlet Al Jazeera, was ferried to the wedding with a ...

BreakThrough News   The Saudis, backed by the Americans, have been waging a war against Yemen since 2015, causing massive civilian casualties as well as famine and a cholera epidemic. How did Yemen get here? Yemen’s modern history is fascinating and overlooked, and few are aware of the Marxist republic that existed in South Yemen from 1967 to 1990. To help place recent events in their historical context, Rania Khalek was joined by Helen Lackner, a research associate at SOAS, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of several books, including, “Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War.” And she has a forthcoming book “Yemen: Poverty & Conflict”.

Katie Halper   Former CIA analyst and case officer, who blew the whistle on its torture program, breaks down the newly declassified FBI document on the Saudi connection to 9/11 so that people who haven't been in the CIA or FBI can understand what the hell it says. The report was declassified by Biden. John Kiriakou ( https://twitter.com/JohnKiriakou ) is a former CIA analyst and case officer, and counterterrorism consultant. Upon leaving the CIA, Kiriakou was the first whistleblower to reveal the torture policy practiced by the US government. While employed by the CIA he was involved in critical counterterrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He refused to be trained in “enhanced interrogation techniques” and never authorized or engaged in these, however he is the only person to have served prison time for revealing that there was a torture program. He was the 6th whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law that...

Democracy Now!   Reporter Matthieu Aikins on how his investigation for The New York Times found an August 29 U.S. drone strike, which the Pentagon claimed targeted a facilitator with the militant group ISIS-K, actually killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children and Zemari Ahmadi, an Afghan engineer who had worked since 2006 for an American aid group.  A review of video evidence by the Times shows Zemari loading canisters of water at the charity’s office, after the Pentagon claimed surveillance video showed Zemari loading what they thought were explosives into a car at an unknown compound earlier in the day. “ We put together evidence that showed that what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves from the sky was, according to his co-workers and colleagues and video evidence, just an ordinary day for this aid worker, ” says Aikins.

Democracy Now!   CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who for years has called for an end to the longest war in U.S. history says “ We didn’t want it to end like this, and there should have been better planning in terms of getting people out of the country, but we were very clear we never wanted the U.S. to go in to begin with. ” She also warns the end of the War in Afghanistan will encourage the Biden administration to pour more money and resources into a rivalry with China. “ It is a delusional idea that we should be focusing on China as an enemy, ” she says.  

failed evolution   World's number one political prisoner, Julian Assange, still in high security prison for exposing horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.   The ruthless Western imperialist regime wants to punish the No1 real journalist in the world and make him an example for any Whistleblower or real journalist who will attempt to expose its big crimes in the future.   The only thing that stands between the ruthless imperialists and their plans to exterminate Julian Assange are the thousands of people protesting against his extradition to the US. Among them, famous names from the global political, economic, academic, intellectual and arts sectors.   More and more people should join the fight until full drop of charges against Julian Assange and his release.   So, until then, we should make sure that the clear message will reach the power centers of the worst liberal establishment ever: if you dare to harm Julian Assange, ...

Glenn Greenwald   George Bush was once castigated by liberals as a new Hitler, a war criminal, and a primitive imbecile who stole not one but two elections. Yet they swooned for him on 9/11 because he gave them what they most crave: the view that Al Qaeda is comparable to those who protested at the Capitol on 1/6. 

Under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent.   by TJ Coles  Part 1 Last month, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times . It might as well have been written by the Pentagon. Buhari promoted Brand Nigeria, auctioning the country’s military services to Western powers, telling readers that Nigeria would lead Africa’s “war on terror” in exchange for foreign infrastructure investment. “ Though some believe the war on terror [WOT] winds down with the US departure from Afghanistan, ” he says, “ the threat it was supposed to address burns fiercely on my continent. ” With Boko Haram and Islamic State operating in and near Nigeria, pushing a WOT narrative is easy. But counterterror means imperial intervention. So, why is the Pentagon really interested in Nigeria, a country with a GDP of around $430 bil...

Biden’s popular and long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered a big media meltdown that exposed its de facto merger with the military.   by Gareth Porter  Part 3 - Flournoy obscures the real cause of military failure The Washington Post ’s national security reporter, Greg Jaffe, took a different tack from most of his Beltway colleagues in his coverage of the Afghanistan endgame. In an August 14 article, Jaffe implicitly acknowledged the widely-accepted fact that the war had been an abject failure, contradicting claims by military leaders. Unfortunately, the reporter offered space for one particularly credibility-deprived former official that was obviously designed to deaden popular hostility toward those responsible for the fiasco. Among the most questionable characters to lay into Biden’s withdrawal strategy was Michelle Flournoy, who was expected to be appointed as the next Secretary of Defense until Biden froze her out because of her role in advocating the failed t...

Le simple fait de compter le coût de l’intervention occidentale en Afghanistan en vies militaires américaines ou britanniques constitue la preuve ultime que nous sommes une civilisation en décomposition   David Hearst Partie 1 Lorsque les États-Unis ont envahi l’Afghanistan le 7 octobre 2001, la couverture du magazine Time proclamait : « Les derniers jours des talibans ». C’est ainsi qu’a débuté ce que l’on a qualifié de « guerre contre le terrorisme », la quête néoconservatrice visant à remplacer la défunte Union soviétique par l’islam au rang de menace mondiale. En décembre de la même année, le Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies a créé la Force internationale d’assistance à la sécurité (FIAS) pour superviser les opérations militaires et former les Forces de sécurité nationale afghanes. La guerre en Afghanistan a été perdue par une alliance occidentale hypertrophiée qui pensait pouvoir démolir les talibans et construire un nouveau pays à partir de rien Depuis lors, plus de 2 00...

To count the cost of the West's intervention in Afghanistan in US and UK military lives alone is the ultimate proof that we are a civilization in decay by David Hearst   Part 5 - Blunt truth   There is an alternative to that mad logic of thinking that you are promoting democracy by dropping drones on poor people thousands of miles away. Just imagine if the US had spent $2 trillion on the Afghan people themselves. Just imagine if it had sought to influence religious conservative movements like the Taliban, not through warfare, but by engagement. Not through drones, but through dialogue. Just imagine where Afghanistan would be now, and just imagine how much soft power the West would still have. A US in retreat cares even less for the people it abandons than it does for the people it occupies. There is an exodus right now at Kabul airport. Where will these Afghans end up? Certainly only a fraction of them will arrive in the UK or the US. They will head for Turkey and Europe as th...

Going Underground   Social Media Producer Farhaan Ahmed speaks to Pablo Vivanco, a Chilean journalist and the former director of TeleSUR English for the 48th Anniversary of the US-backed, CIA-facilitated coup in Chile which saw the death of democratically-elected socialist President Salvador Allende and the beginning of an era of neoliberal fascism.    He discusses the events on the day of the coup, the US’ campaign with Chilean allies to sabotage the Allende government and foment economic chaos, the Pinochet regime’s transformation of Chilean society into one modeled off of the Chicago Boys’ neoliberalism, conditions for the working class during the Pinochet regime and the rise of a continent-wide purge of the left through the US-organised Operation Condor, Britain and the US’ role in supporting the Pinochet dictatorship, the 2020 referendum which saw Chileans reject the Pinochet constitution and the Chilean general elections in November.

The Grayzone   Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks with Professor Asad Abukhalil, and the millions of victims of the "War on Terror." They also speak about US meddling in Lebanon, devastating sanctions on Syria, and the never-ending regime-change operations targeting Iran.   

Double Down News   The victims of 9/11 should have got justice, instead they got war.  

globinfo freexchange   In his documentary The Power Of Nightmares , Adam Curtis gives the details of how the Americans essentially invented al-Qaeda and how the neocons re-emerged after the 9/11 attacks to exploit this myth.   The result was the devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq:   For beyond his own small group, Bin Laden had no formal organization. Until the Americans invented one for him. In January 2001, a trial began in a Manhattan courtroom of four men accused of the embassy bombings in east Africa. But the Americans had also decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence. But to do this under American law, the prosecutors needed evidence of a criminal organization because, as with the Mafia, that would allow them to prosecute the head of the organization, even if he could not be linked directly to the crime. And the evidence for that organization was provided for them by an ex-associate of Bin Laden's called Jamal Al-Fadl.   The picture Al-Fadl drew for...