THE DANGEROUS IDEA OF NATO FOR ASIA

Who is suggesting creating a US-led, NATO-style defence treaty for the Indo-Pacific?

 

By Sidney Hey

When did we become the errand boy for US plans in the Indo-Pacific? I wondered after the news that Washington DC is pushing for the Trump-Vance administration to approve the construction of a NATO-like military architecture in this part of the world. Actually I know the answer but what I don't understand is how the Australian government still can't say ‘no’.

It seems that this idea would have been the brainchild of Zionist political scientist Ely Rather who, in an article on one of those portals for readers of his ilk, suggests that the US should ‘defend’ Australia, Japan, the Philippines and other Indo-Pacific riverine states by investing in the construction of a military organisation similar to the Atlanticist one. What would be interesting to know is, do these actors want to be defended by the US?

It is clear that Rather knows how to sell his work and convince politicians to buy it without considering its usefulness - after all, it is their taxpayers' taxes that pay for this nonsense - but what would US citizens think of this new arms craze?

As the European boys do with Starmer, Macron, Kallas and Von Der Leyen to whip up mistrust and a constant state of rearmament with the justification of Russia, it seems Rather's elaborations (which is what the neo-conservatives are looking for) would seek from Albanese in Australia and the rest of the colleagues in the region an absolute alignment to Washington under the excuse of an ‘alleged Chinese threat’.

Rather and others like him are among those instigators and creators of calamitous scenarios for the arms industry Corporations to develop and test their products. The governments in the White House provide the political excuses of convenience to justify themselves and make other countries and regions (Gaza-Ukraine-Yemen) their testing grounds for that industry.

Indo-Pacific governments should know that Rather is to some extent a military developer, peddling alarmist assumptions and hypotheses based on exaggeration and in many other instances arguments based on lies and falsehoods. With no disrespect to insurance workers, these kinds of guys like Ely Rather are like the insurance broker who, in order to sell you insurance, lays out a series of bad assumptions (which you may well never suffer from) and convinces you to buy the policy for which you must protect yourself.

But in addition to seeking to place weapons and expensive systems from industries like Raytheon, Lockheed or any of the other majors, Rather politically proselytises for a father who will defend them from the bad guys in the neighbourhood, making fools of the region's governments who cannot take responsibility for their own security by building their own defence systems.

Similar examples have been seen throughout contemporary history and today, there are some that surpass the ridiculous. Argentina is undoubtedly the most prominent in the southern hemisphere and, as it goes, is a candidate for becoming totally dependent on security and defence under US direction and control.

But in the case of Australia, the capabilities of our armed forces and especially the navy are by no means negligible, nor should they envy those of other Commonwealth forces such as the British Royal Navy. In this respect we are already sufficiently dependent on British products and we have already committed ourselves for the coming decade to buying submarines from them and the possible joint construction of some indigenous ones to the specifications of the naval manufacturer in London.

As for what the average Australian citizen believes about China's fictitious threats to the national security of the big island, there is none of the scaremongering we see in the preachings of the likes of Rather and the ominous birds of ill omen nesting in Washington DC and London. On the contrary, if the Australian government took the trouble to report the movements of the Americans and their British colleagues in the region any Aussie would realise that those who are hanging a noose around their necks are not the Chinese, but our friendly relatives.

The Australians or the Filipinos don't care if the US wants to increase its military spending under these strategic mirages. What they should be concerned about is the US going into each of these countries and building an expensive new war infrastructure that will commit them to any potential hemispheric war, and all for what.... to feed the businesses of a bunch of guys who live off death?

If mainland China is a potential military threat, it should be up to the governments of each of the Asia-Pacific members, each in its own right and using its own resources, to decide whether it really is and what their plans are for dealing with it. The cooperation already being provided by countries such as Australia with the AUKUS and QUAD naval operations are already enough to satisfy ‘American fears’.

Rather's story that the US should invest more money to build a weapons juggernaut on the grounds of ‘defence of the US and its partners in the Indo-Pacific’ is only meant to collect generous fees for his fear-mongering services. It is these charlatans with the vocation of unscrupulous agitators who truly bring insecurity and sow mistrust that will eventually lead to war. At the same time, Canberra should take it upon itself to put on its trousers and stand up politically to tell Donald Trump and Keir Starmer ‘Thank you, we can defend ourselves’

JUICIO DE CONVENIENCIA

¿Por qué el gobierno argentino y a pedido de quiénes acelera su intención de abrir el juicio contra funcionarios iraníes y ciudadanos libaneses?

 

Por Charles H. Slim

El publicitado anuncio del inicio del juicio en ausencia contra los sospechados de ser autores de los atentados en 1992 y 1994 en Buenos Aires no podría ser más conveniente. Lo hemos dicho muchas veces, la casualidad no existe y mucho menos en la política argentina. La armada acusación que se lanza sobre ciudadanos iraníes y libaneses bajo el rótulo de terroristas no solo es una injuria más contra los musulmanes sino, una vergonzosa operación a la cual el gobierno argentino se presta atendiendo a meros y circunstanciales intereses geopolíticos.

Ciertamente, no hay casualidad en este anuncio. En momentos que Israel intentó (con la ayuda de EEUU) destruir a las potencialidades tecnológicas y al sistema político iraní, la administración de justicia argentina notablemente signada por los tiempos del poder, decide que iniciará un proceso valiéndose de una herramienta legal ajena a la tradición jurídica argentina. 

Esta movida ya era advertida a comienzos de año, cuando entre gallos y medianoches, en el senado se sanciono el “juicio en ausencia”, una institución del sistema anglosajón (Commonwealth) y por ende extraña a la Constitución nacional. Tal como lo afirman sus propios relatores, esta institución fue insertada con el propósito de abrir un juicio por el atentado contra la AMIA de 1994 con lo cual se advierte una poderosa presión sectorial orientada a un sector bien determinado. Como vemos no se trata de una decisión “judicial” en busca de justicia sino una movida de carácter netamente político y que claramente a su vez responde a intereses geopolíticos de un actor llamado Israel.

Pero este no el único problema en esta pretendida búsqueda de justicia. Durante décadas se ha prejuzgado sobre los posibles autores de ambos atentados, algo que fue funcional para tapar las injerencias locales que involucraron a personeros políticos de DAIA y AMIA con el entonces gobierno menemista. Al mismo tiempo y ese prejuicio por efecto de una prensa ajustada a un solo relato lo ha carnificado en una opinión general que por ignorancia, miedo a comprometerse o simple desinterés ignora los pormenores de aquellos hechos y solo repite lo que los medios dicen.

Incluso si diéramos algo de credibilidad a las pesquisas y supuestas pruebas valoradas por las instancias inferiores, la pregunta que las personas del común deberían hacerse es ¿Cuáles son esas pruebas y quiénes las aportaron?

Pero regresando a la decisión de abrir un juicio contra personas que no estarán presentes y sobre las cuales pende un innegable prejuicio por razón de su nacionalidad, ideología y religión, no se necesita tener conocimientos en derecho para saber cuál será la sentencia.

Más allá de este particular caso, la incrustación forzosa de este engendro del derecho angloestadounidense, sentará otro mal precedente para el tan trillado y exclamado respeto por la república y la democracia. Tan clara y alevosa es la direccionalidad con la que se han conducido (supongamos que las hubo) las investigaciones que la posibilidad de que semejante engendro pueda materializarse ya advierte de su inevitable nulidad.

Obviamente que los beneficiados por esta movida (y que no son las víctimas), ven de parabienes el desarrollo de esta parodia de proceso judicial que forma parte del frente propagandístico de Tel Aviv contra la república de Irán.

Y también vemos que no es casual este sorpresivo diligenciamiento de una justicia federal recurrentemente acomodaticia a los tiempos de los gobiernos de turno, que hoy se repite con este llamado “gobierno libertario” que solo es una máscara de otros intereses.

Pero volviendo a lo exclusivamente jurídico podemos intuir que los abogados de la parte iraní (que suponemos deberían tenerlos) tienen para echar mano y fundar la falta de imparcialidad, el sesgo notoriamente anti iraní e islamófobo de la propia posición del gobierno y que surgieron de las propias palabras del presidente Javier Milei cuando para apoyar a su amigo Benjamín Netanyahu en su ilegal agresión catalogó a Irán como “enemigo de la Argentina”.

Si la puñalada israelí del 13 de junio pasado -que implico la detonación de autos bomba en residencias familiares de funcionarios iraníes- hubiera salido como lo esperaban Netanyahu y sus acólitos del sionismo revisionista, otra sería la historia e incluso las palabras injuriosas del presidente argentino podrían carecer de importancia ya que, los lideres iraníes asesinados y su país sumido en el caos (como Iraq en 2003 y Libia del 2011) la parodia de juicio no encontraría reparo alguno e incluso seguramente, sin una mínima cobertura de los medios sería apoyada por las marionetas políticas que los estadounidenses pondrían en Teherán.

Más allá de la insustancialidad probatoria de la que sufre esta causa y que solo tiene como sostén los informes de inteligencia del Mossad y la CIA (que no son organismos auxiliares de la justicia) insertados judicialmente por el fiscal Alberto Nisman, ambas agencias hostiles a Irán y expertas en falsificar pistas para crear intervenciones bélicas hechas a medida de los intereses de sus gobiernos, el actual posicionamiento del gobierno argentino y muy particularmente de su presidente, no da las seguridades jurídicas mínimas para un debido proceso.

Pero más allá de esta clara maniobra geopolítica, la inserción del instituto del juicio en ausencia podría ser más ventajoso que lo que sus impulsores han pensado ya que, atendiendo a los delitos que procesa (lesa humanidad, crímenes de guerra y todos los contemplados en el Estatuto de Roma y Convenciones Interamericanas e internacionales contra la desaparición de personas y tortura entre otros), se abre la posibilidad de que las víctimas (o sus representantes) del terrorismo y genocidio a manos de Israel se conviertan en querellantes en juicios similares sin ninguna dificultad.

 

  

THE FALSE CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS

What did Samuel Huntington's work really pursue?

 

By Sidney Hey 

Today, as never before, the schemers who inspired Samuel Huntington with his fallacious thesis of a clash of civilisations need a similar argument to try to restore the Anglo-American hegemony that is partly collapsing due to the accumulation of its crass inconsistencies. That book, presented as a scientific work, was nothing more than a pamphlet to prepare public opinion for the new war that had been planned against Islam since the early 1990s.

Thus in a passage of his book Huntington stated: ‘The West is and will remain in the years to come the most powerful civilisation’ without stating at what cost and by whom it would be paid.

Today more than ever the need to create a bloc or rather a Judeo-Christian front to support the stupid and criminal policies of a peculiar duet like Trump and Netanyahu is imperative.

In the last thirty years the alliance between neoconservatives and Zionists (Israelis and Americans) bore its poisonous fruits which materialised in pre-emptive wars, invasions and the deployment of the most sinister and stark repressive policies not seen since the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps dedicated curiously to Muslims. Behind these aberrations was Huntington's ‘clash of civilisations’ argument, which was not enough to convince Westerners themselves of its veracity.

Yesterday it was easy to murder simple Iraqi, Afghan and Yemeni citizens, all under the justification of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the Islamic ‘fight against terrorism’ that gave authorisation to shoot anyone of that confession. Nor should we forget the pernicious campaign of hatred and disinformation aimed at inflaming confessional rivalries, targeting the Sunnis who according to Washington DC (based on their CIA reports) were part of the fable called ‘Al Qaeda’ and which the agency under the direction of the Islamophobe John Brennan later repackaged with another hoax called ‘ISIS’. Having rehearsed this, these thugs went one step further and, like the mafia, commissioned the assassination of high-ranking dignitaries, as happened with Gaddafi in 2010.

By then the intoxicating smoke of this clash of civilisations had dissipated and Barak Obama, another of the scams of the American deep state, changed strategy and as part of the same policy of his Republican predecessors, also changed the tactic of intervention and occupation to proxy warfare, that is, outsourcing labour on a massive scale, so that the jihadists who were supposedly the enemy in the ‘fight against terrorism’ became the infantry of Western plans.

What are we seeing today? The return of Donald Trump is ushering in a grossly hostile and brazen era, so much so that even a Brooklyn slum gangster would blush. He need not hide behind the dirty machinations of the neocons who propped up George W. Bush or Obama's stealthy double standard policies of ordering the assassination of officials of another country. Soleimani was perhaps the first sign of the criminal nature of his governance.

Trump has already shown that he has no filters and, worst of all, he likes to be that way. When Israel blew up an apartment building in Damascus in order to assassinate one of the Hizbollah commanders, Trump surely felt very identified. When Israel repeated this policy of assassination by murdering the entire Hesbollah top brass gathered in their bunker under a building in the middle of Beirut, killing several families living next door, his admiration for Netanyahu surely increased. That fervour would grow even more with the Mossad terrorist attack that killed Palestinian leader Ismael Haniyah in the middle of Tehran. It's certain that in his mustachioed head he must have been scheming ‘Why can't I do it?

This brings us to the threat he made on 27 June in his X account about Iran's spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, which, in addition to being contemptuous, is a demonstration of a poor (not to say absent) conception of how a leader should behave with his counterparts.

Disqualifications, disrespect and contempt should have no place in diplomacy or in a nation's foreign policy. If this is the Western potentiality Huntington spoke of, it has done that culture a disservice. Trump has certainly not inaugurated this mode, but he has made it worse. When the neoconservatives were in power under George W. Bush we witnessed an astonishing contempt for foreign leaders, so much so that we saw some of Bush's evangelist spiritual advisors call for the assassination of opponents of US policy.

The false prejudice-based conception of a clash of civilisations in which everything Eastern is alien and even dangerous (especially centred on Islam) to the self-styled civilised and democratic West has largely been the academic screen in an attempt to justify what the US and its partners hoped would be a quick and inconsequential task beyond the tolerable.

But the indiscriminate bombing of cities, the collective massacres, the systematic practice of torture, abuse and humiliation (Guantanamo, Abu-Graib, Bucca, Bagram, etc.), the systematic plundering of cultural wealth and, as a final result, failed states without sovereignty (Iraq and Syria), are intolerable consequences of all this and will not be erased by specious narratives.

The thirty-four years of a progressively aggressive Anglo-American policy towards both the Near and Far East make it clear that what Huntington wrote in his pamphlet was not a foreshadowing or, if you will, an analysis of the consequences of a meeting of cultures, but rather an attempt to disguise a brutal and inhumane Western onslaught on the East for the sole purpose of consolidating its global hegemony. 

 

THE ARGIE AND THE WORLD

Who with ambiguous and false arguments has facilitated Israel's aggression against Iran and which Donald Trump tried to finish off?

 

By Sir Charlattam 

How could I forget that goal with Diego Maradona's hand in the game with the British national team in the 1986 World Cup, while I was on a mission and waiting for a courier in a Berlin safe house. At the time I just said: ‘you miserable Argentine cheating son of a bitch’, but on reflection I realised that it was just a ruse, like the ones my employers at the time used to put me up to for 10 Downing Street.

Today it's all just child's play, but I thought I'd never hear of any more cheating Argentinians.

When our lovely plump prime minister David Cameron in 2010 embarked with Francoise Sarcosi's France and the libidinous Italian PM Julio Berlusconi on Barak Obama's plans to remove the Arab regimes in North Africa that no longer served him and which with the cooperation of the mainstream media and social networks like Facebook (scripted by MI6 and the CIA) spread as a spontaneous revolt they called the ‘Arab Spring’. One of these was the destruction of Libya, the massacre of part of its population and the assassination of Muhammar al-Gaddafi.

It was on this occasion that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, another Argentinean, Luis Moreno Ocampo, took the ridiculous step of accusing the Libyan government which was in the midst of an incredible and brutal aggression by nothing less than waves of Arab mercenaries (jihadists paid by Qatar and Saudi Arabia) in the service of NATO. Moreno Ocampo's role was so obvious that it was not long before he was removed from his post. When I consulted with some contacts in Buenos Aires about this guy I understood everything and surely, the prosecutor had decided to ‘play it safe’ and get an extra profit for it.

Guys like that not only ruin the reputation of the institutions they represent, they spread corruption like a damn virus.  And understand me well, it's not something against Argentines per se since in 1982 they were about to kick us in the ass and send us back from the south atlantic. It is these guys like Moreno Ocampo who, with high positions, have a remarkable vice with influence and money. 

But today it is another Argentinean who takes a pitiful lead and who has repeatedly brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, has been displaying a shameful bias on the issue of control and safety at nuclear facilities around the world, pretending to be distracted on some issues and misinforming on others.

It is true that the IAEA's record of performance in contemporary history is simply lamentable, if not to recall the fabricated history surrounding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the falsified evidence of Saddam Hussein's plans for a nuclear programme. Back then it was the individuals of honest and courageous men who made a difference even at the cost of their own lives.

The American Scott Ritter in his position as UN inspector in Iraq may have sung the song of those in Washington DC who were imposing (through the Media Corporation) as truth, but he was honest and made it clear that there was no such thing as what the George W. Bush administration and its band of neo-conservative thugs grouped in the PNAC were claiming. Or what can I say about David Kelly (who should be declared a Sir) who, also driven by his honesty and having seen for himself what was being done in Iraq, told the truth and exposed Tony Blair's government who would pay him for that honesty by sending him an MI5 assassin.

So Kelly and Ritter could have made a difference if they had looked the other way and sold their souls to the devil. But they didn't and despite this and the heavy price they paid, they are a testament to transparency in a very opaque and dirty world.

But these sizes are too big for Mr Grossi. For him, it would seem, one has to stand on the side that warms the sun according to the occasion, similar to the politicians who govern his country. But a post of such sensitive importance as the one he holds should not be filled by careerists or those with a malleable will such as he has shown himself to have.

During the constant Ukrainian drone attacks on the Energhodar nuclear complex in Zaporiye, despite Russia opening its doors to him to inspect and study the evidence of the crime that Zelensky's neo-Nazis were committing at the risk of creating a new Chernobyl, Grossi said he could not determine where the attacks were coming from. He may have believed he was dealing with amateurs or a government using his twisted logic. Had it not been for the Russian defence that was inhibiting each of these attacks, it could have created a catastrophe that Kiev sought to capitalise on militarily. His pro-Atlantistic positioning has been so disgusting that even a blind man would see through it.

Rafael Grossi should know that respect for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is for all, not for some.

With the current circumstances surrounding the deliberate Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear plants, which put and may continue to endanger the security of all humanity, we see this bias again. Some rumour that it was Donald Trump himself, speaking for Bibi Netanyahu, who called Grossi to intimidate him to behave in this way. Equally if he had integrity (like David Kelly) it doesn't matter if the devil himself orders him to turn a blind eye.

Tehran has for years and with respect for international law been willing to show its facilities and nuclear development for peaceful purposes, something we have not seen from Israel. But the most serious thing that this man has demonstrated and that Netanyahu used to justify his aggression on 13 June was the provision of information to Tel Aviv that Grossi should not use as a bargaining chip. Or can anyone believe that he has not received a good reward for that hand?