Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Leaked documents reveal right-wing oligarch plot to overthrow Mexico’s AMLO
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/18/mexico-overthrow-president-amlo-boa/#more-25826
Mexico’s oligarchs and establishment political parties have united in a secret alliance to try to remove left-wing President López Obrador from power, with help from the media, Washington, and Wall Street. Leaked documents lay out their devious strategy.
By Ben Norton
Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.
Read part two of this investigation here: “Meet the far-right oligarchs working to topple Mexico’s progressive President AMLO”
Some of the most powerful forces in Mexico are uniting in a campaign to try to topple the country’s first left-wing president in decades, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. And they apparently have support in Washington and on Wall Street.
Known popularly as AMLO, the Mexican leader is a progressive nationalist who campaigned on the promise to “end the dark night of neoliberalism.” He has since implemented a revolutionary vision he calls the “Fourth Transformation,” vowing to fight poverty, corruption, and drug violence — and has increasingly butted heads with his nation’s wealthy elites.
López Obrador has also posed a challenge to the US foreign-policy consensus. His government provided refuge to Bolivia’s elected socialist President Evo Morales and to members of Evo’s political party who were exiled after a Trump administration-backed military coup.
AMLO also held a historic meeting with Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and even stated Mexico would be willing to break the unilateral US blockade of Venezuela and sell the besieged Chavista government gasoline.
These policies have earned AMLO the wrath of oligarchs both inside and outside of his country. On June 18, the US government ratcheted up its pressure on Mexico, targeting companies and individuals with sanctions for allegedly providing water to Venezuela, as part of an oil-for-food humanitarian agreement.
The value of the Mexican peso immediately dropped by 2 percent following the Trump administration’s imposition of sanctions.
These opening salvos of Washington’s economic war on its southern neighbor came just days after López Obrador delivered a bombshell press conference, in which he revealed that the political parties that had dominated Mexican politics for the decades before him have secretly unified in a plot to try to oust the president, years before his democratic mandate ends in 2024.
The forces trying to remove AMLO from power include major media networks, massive corporations, sitting governors and mayors, former presidents, and influential business leaders. According to a leaked document, they call themselves the Broad Opposition Bloc (Bloque Opositor Amplio, or BOA).
And they say they have lobbyists in Washington, financial investors on Wall Street, and major news publications and journalists from both domestic and foreign media outlets on their team.
‘Broad Opposition Bloc’ BOA plot to demonize AMLO with media propaganda
In a press conference on June 9, the Mexican government published a leaked strategy document purportedly drafted by the Broad Opposition Bloc, titled “Let’s Rescue Mexico” (Rescatemos a México). The AMLO administration said it did not know the origin of the leak.
These pages consist of an executive summary of “Project BOA,” outlining what it calls a “plan of action” – a blueprint of concrete steps the opposition alliance will take to unseat AMLO.
Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.
Read part two of this investigation here: “Meet the far-right oligarchs working to topple Mexico’s progressive President AMLO”
Some of the most powerful forces in Mexico are uniting in a campaign to try to topple the country’s first left-wing president in decades, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. And they apparently have support in Washington and on Wall Street.
Known popularly as AMLO, the Mexican leader is a progressive nationalist who campaigned on the promise to “end the dark night of neoliberalism.” He has since implemented a revolutionary vision he calls the “Fourth Transformation,” vowing to fight poverty, corruption, and drug violence — and has increasingly butted heads with his nation’s wealthy elites.
López Obrador has also posed a challenge to the US foreign-policy consensus. His government provided refuge to Bolivia’s elected socialist President Evo Morales and to members of Evo’s political party who were exiled after a Trump administration-backed military coup.
AMLO also held a historic meeting with Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and even stated Mexico would be willing to break the unilateral US blockade of Venezuela and sell the besieged Chavista government gasoline.
These policies have earned AMLO the wrath of oligarchs both inside and outside of his country. On June 18, the US government ratcheted up its pressure on Mexico, targeting companies and individuals with sanctions for allegedly providing water to Venezuela, as part of an oil-for-food humanitarian agreement.
The value of the Mexican peso immediately dropped by 2 percent following the Trump administration’s imposition of sanctions.
These opening salvos of Washington’s economic war on its southern neighbor came just days after López Obrador delivered a bombshell press conference, in which he revealed that the political parties that had dominated Mexican politics for the decades before him have secretly unified in a plot to try to oust the president, years before his democratic mandate ends in 2024.
The forces trying to remove AMLO from power include major media networks, massive corporations, sitting governors and mayors, former presidents, and influential business leaders. According to a leaked document, they call themselves the Broad Opposition Bloc (Bloque Opositor Amplio, or BOA).
And they say they have lobbyists in Washington, financial investors on Wall Street, and major news publications and journalists from both domestic and foreign media outlets on their team.
‘Broad Opposition Bloc’ BOA plot to demonize AMLO with media propaganda
In a press conference on June 9, the Mexican government published a leaked strategy document purportedly drafted by the Broad Opposition Bloc, titled “Let’s Rescue Mexico” (Rescatemos a México). The AMLO administration said it did not know the origin of the leak.
These pages consist of an executive summary of “Project BOA,” outlining what it calls a “plan of action” – a blueprint of concrete steps the opposition alliance will take to unseat AMLO.
Then the BOA adds: “Repeat this narrative in the US and European media.”
The cover of the leaked document, the executive summary of the Project BOA plan, “Let’s Save Mexico”
One of the key points in the plan is the following: “Lobbying by the BOA in Washington (White House and Capital Hill) to stress the damage that the government of the [Fourth Transformation] is doing to North American investors.”
The lobbying strategy depends heavily on turning the US against AMLO: “More than comparing it with Venezuela,” the document reads, “BOA should highlight the very high mass migration of Mexicans toward the United States if the crisis of unemployment and insecurity gets worse.”
The cover of the leaked document, the executive summary of the Project BOA plan, “Let’s Save Mexico”One of the key points in the plan is the following: “Lobbying by the BOA in Washington (White House and Capital Hill) to stress the damage that the government of the [Fourth Transformation] is doing to North American investors.”
The lobbying strategy depends heavily on turning the US against AMLO: “More than comparing it with Venezuela,” the document reads, “BOA should highlight the very high mass migration of Mexicans toward the United States if the crisis of unemployment and insecurity gets worse.”
The document even names specific media outlets, along with individual journalists and social media influencers, who could help spread their anti-AMLO propaganda. On the list are some of the top news publications in Mexico: Nexos, Proceso, Reforma, El Universal, Milenio, El Financiero, and El Economista.
The list of sympathetic anti-AMLO media outlets and journalists in the BOA documentThe section of the BOA plan on lobbying in Washington and using the media to push anti-AMLO messaging
The leaked pages say that BOA has the “international press (USA and Europe)” on its side, along with “foreign correspondents in Mexico.”
The “plan of action” makes it clear that this powerful opposition alliance seeks to use its extensive control over the media to obsessively blame AMLO for “unemployment, poverty, insecurity, and corruption” in Mexico.
BOA even states unambiguously in its plan that it will use “groups of social media networks, influencers, and analysts to insist on the destruction of the economy, of the democratic institutions, and the political authoritarianism of the government of the 4T” (using an acronym for the Fourth Transformation process).
This makes it especially ironic that the BOA document reluctantly acknowledges that the López Obrador “government has managed to mitigate the economic impact of the health crisis of coronavirus by giving large amounts of public money to the affected, through social programs.”
The leaked pages likewise admit that AMLO has an approval rating of more than 50 percent — lower than his peak at 86 percent support in the beginning of 2019 or his 72 percent at the end of the year, but still impressive for a region where US-backed leaders like Chile’s Sebastián Piñera or Colombia’s Iván Duque have routinely enjoyed approval ratings of 6 percent and 24 percent, respectively.
Mexico’s establishment political parties and former presidents unite to oust AMLO
With backing from the US government and utter dominance of media narratives, the Broad Opposition Bloc plan is to unite all of Mexico’s establishment political parties.
Together, these parties could potentially run candidates under the BOA umbrella, according to the document. Their goal would be, in the 2021 legislative elections, to end the majority that AMLO’s left-wing party Morena won in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies.
After that, BOA states clearly that it plans to block reforms in the Mexican legislature, and ultimately impeach President López Obrador by 2022 — at least two years before his term ends.
Quite revealing is that the “Let’s Rescue Mexico” document does not mention anything about average working-class Mexicans and their participation in the political process. Nor does it acknowledge the existence of labor unions or grassroots activist organizations, which make up the base of AMLO’s movement and his Morena party.
This is not surprising, considering the BOA alliance lists some of the most powerful figures in the Mexican ruling class.
All the major political parties are included: the right-wing National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN), the center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), the centrist Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano, or MC), and even AMLO’s former Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or PRD).
The list of sympathetic anti-AMLO media outlets and journalists in the BOA documentThe section of the BOA plan on lobbying in Washington and using the media to push anti-AMLO messagingThe leaked pages say that BOA has the “international press (USA and Europe)” on its side, along with “foreign correspondents in Mexico.”
The “plan of action” makes it clear that this powerful opposition alliance seeks to use its extensive control over the media to obsessively blame AMLO for “unemployment, poverty, insecurity, and corruption” in Mexico.
BOA even states unambiguously in its plan that it will use “groups of social media networks, influencers, and analysts to insist on the destruction of the economy, of the democratic institutions, and the political authoritarianism of the government of the 4T” (using an acronym for the Fourth Transformation process).
This makes it especially ironic that the BOA document reluctantly acknowledges that the López Obrador “government has managed to mitigate the economic impact of the health crisis of coronavirus by giving large amounts of public money to the affected, through social programs.”
The leaked pages likewise admit that AMLO has an approval rating of more than 50 percent — lower than his peak at 86 percent support in the beginning of 2019 or his 72 percent at the end of the year, but still impressive for a region where US-backed leaders like Chile’s Sebastián Piñera or Colombia’s Iván Duque have routinely enjoyed approval ratings of 6 percent and 24 percent, respectively.
Mexico’s establishment political parties and former presidents unite to oust AMLO
With backing from the US government and utter dominance of media narratives, the Broad Opposition Bloc plan is to unite all of Mexico’s establishment political parties.
Together, these parties could potentially run candidates under the BOA umbrella, according to the document. Their goal would be, in the 2021 legislative elections, to end the majority that AMLO’s left-wing party Morena won in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies.
After that, BOA states clearly that it plans to block reforms in the Mexican legislature, and ultimately impeach President López Obrador by 2022 — at least two years before his term ends.
Quite revealing is that the “Let’s Rescue Mexico” document does not mention anything about average working-class Mexicans and their participation in the political process. Nor does it acknowledge the existence of labor unions or grassroots activist organizations, which make up the base of AMLO’s movement and his Morena party.
This is not surprising, considering the BOA alliance lists some of the most powerful figures in the Mexican ruling class.
All the major political parties are included: the right-wing National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN), the center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), the centrist Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano, or MC), and even AMLO’s former Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or PRD).
The list of political parties included in the BOA document
BOA also includes the new political party México Libre, a vehicle for former right-wing President Felipe Calderón, a major ally of George W. Bush who declared a catastrophic “war on drugs” in Mexico, leading to tens of thousands of deaths.
Along with Calderón, BOA lists former President Vicente Fox, another right-wing US ally, as a coalition ally. Fox worked closely with the Bush administration during his term as president to isolate the leftist governments in Latin America, and even tried to undemocratically remove AMLO as mayor of Mexico City and ban him from running for president.
BOA also says it has support from the governors of 14 states in Mexico, along with opposition lawmakers in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, judges from the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), and officials from the National Electoral Institute (INE).
Wall Street investors and Mexican oligarchs back anti-AMLO alliance
Joining the entire Mexican political establishment in the Broad Opposition Bloc is a powerful financial oligarchy, both domestic and foreign.
Along with its “anti-4T lobbyists in Washington,” the leaked document says BOA has “Wall Street investment funds” behind it.
BOA adds that it is supported by “corporations linked to T-MEC,” using the Spanish acronym for the new “United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement” free-trade deal, known popularly as NAFTA 2.0.
BOA also includes the new political party México Libre, a vehicle for former right-wing President Felipe Calderón, a major ally of George W. Bush who declared a catastrophic “war on drugs” in Mexico, leading to tens of thousands of deaths.
Along with Calderón, BOA lists former President Vicente Fox, another right-wing US ally, as a coalition ally. Fox worked closely with the Bush administration during his term as president to isolate the leftist governments in Latin America, and even tried to undemocratically remove AMLO as mayor of Mexico City and ban him from running for president.
BOA also says it has support from the governors of 14 states in Mexico, along with opposition lawmakers in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, judges from the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), and officials from the National Electoral Institute (INE).
Wall Street investors and Mexican oligarchs back anti-AMLO alliance
Joining the entire Mexican political establishment in the Broad Opposition Bloc is a powerful financial oligarchy, both domestic and foreign.
Along with its “anti-4T lobbyists in Washington,” the leaked document says BOA has “Wall Street investment funds” behind it.
BOA adds that it is supported by “corporations linked to T-MEC,” using the Spanish acronym for the new “United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement” free-trade deal, known popularly as NAFTA 2.0.
The powerful business groups and corporations listed in the BOA document
Some of the richest capitalists in Mexico are associated with BOA. Named in the leaked document is the Mexican corporate behemoth FEMSA and oligarchs from its associated Monterrey Group, which the New York Times once described as a “a tightly knit family of wealthy and conservative businessmen.”
The BOA pages also point to Mexico’s powerful Business Coordinating Council (Consejo Coordinador Empresarial) and Employers Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex) as allies.
Opposition denies involvement in BOA, while turning up heat on AMLO
In the days after López Obrador’s press conference exposing the Broad Opposition Bloc, some of the prominent figures implicated in the alliance, such Felipe Calderón, denied involvement.
Some of these political and economic elites even claimed BOA doesn’t exist, seeking to cast doubt on the president’s scandalous revelation and accusing him of fabricating the scandal.
But their efforts are clearly part of a larger campaign by Mexican opposition groups to remove President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from power. As AMLO’s Fourth Transformation moves forward, their destabilization tactics have grown increasingly extreme.
López Obrador himself has warned of the radicalization of the right-wing opposition. As The Grayzone previously reported, the president made an ominous reference to the threat of a potential coup in November 2019.
Referencing Mexico’s former President Francisco Madero, a leader of the Mexican Revolution and fellow left-winger who was assassinated in 1913, AMLO tweeted, “How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are… Now is different… Another coup d’état won’t be allowed.”
The next part in this investigative series by The Grayzone shows how far-right forces in Mexico are pushing for a coup against AMLO.
Some of the richest capitalists in Mexico are associated with BOA. Named in the leaked document is the Mexican corporate behemoth FEMSA and oligarchs from its associated Monterrey Group, which the New York Times once described as a “a tightly knit family of wealthy and conservative businessmen.”
The BOA pages also point to Mexico’s powerful Business Coordinating Council (Consejo Coordinador Empresarial) and Employers Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex) as allies.
Opposition denies involvement in BOA, while turning up heat on AMLO
In the days after López Obrador’s press conference exposing the Broad Opposition Bloc, some of the prominent figures implicated in the alliance, such Felipe Calderón, denied involvement.
Some of these political and economic elites even claimed BOA doesn’t exist, seeking to cast doubt on the president’s scandalous revelation and accusing him of fabricating the scandal.
But their efforts are clearly part of a larger campaign by Mexican opposition groups to remove President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from power. As AMLO’s Fourth Transformation moves forward, their destabilization tactics have grown increasingly extreme.
López Obrador himself has warned of the radicalization of the right-wing opposition. As The Grayzone previously reported, the president made an ominous reference to the threat of a potential coup in November 2019.
Referencing Mexico’s former President Francisco Madero, a leader of the Mexican Revolution and fellow left-winger who was assassinated in 1913, AMLO tweeted, “How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are… Now is different… Another coup d’état won’t be allowed.”
The next part in this investigative series by The Grayzone shows how far-right forces in Mexico are pushing for a coup against AMLO.
Israel leverages dubious ‘Nuclear Archives’ to re-enlist IAEA in campaign against Iran
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/22/israel-nuclear-archives-iaea-iran/#more-26112
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has once again lent itself to the political interests of the United States and Israel, provoking a needless conflict with Iran.
Gareth Porter
The approval by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of a June 19 resolution calling on Iran to comply fully with agency demands for cooperation marks a new stage in the long-running Israeli campaign to isolate Iran over alleged covert nuclear weapons activities.
The IAEA has demanded that Iran provide “clarifications” regarding “possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities,” as well as access to two sites in question.
Those demands are based on alleged Iranian documents that Israeli intelligence supposedly stole from Iran in 2018. And as The Grayzone has previously reported, their authenticity is highly questionable, and their purported theft may have never occurred.
Israeli pressure campaign gains way with US help
The latest phase of the Iran crisis erupted in June 2018, when the Israeli government informed the IAEA that its intelligence services had discovered a new “secret atomic warehouse” in the Turquzabad district of Tehran.
In his September 2018 United Nations speech announcing the find, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently demanded that IAEA director general, Yukio Amano, “do the right thing. Go inspect this atomic warehouse, immediately, before the Iranians finish clearing it out.”
Amano pushed back publicly against the Israeli pressure in October 2018, asserting his independence from Netanyahu’s agenda. Under his watch, the IAEA also failed to accede to Israel’s demand to publicize documents from the “archive” they had provided.
When Brian Hook, a neoconservative operative serving as the US State Department’s lead official on isolating Iran, visited Israel in November 2018, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s political director told him his government was furious with the IAEA for failing to take the documents seriously.
Hook assured the Israelis that the Donald Trump administration would apply pressure on the IAEA to take action. He assigned the new US ambassador to the IAEA, a protege of John Bolton named Jackie Walcott, as his point person.
In January 2019, as an apparent result of the pressure campaign, the IAEA asked Iran to visit the warehouse that Netanyahu had identified, in order to take environmental samples. Iran agreed, suggesting that Iranian officials did not believe the agency would find anything supporting the Israeli allegations.
Months later, laboratory results showed the presence of what the IAEA called “natural uranium particles of anthropogenic origin.” That meant that the particles had been subject to a process of uranium conversion but not enrichment. The most likely explanation for the finding was that a part of retired equipment or other material that had been used in Iran’s fully monitored uranium conversion program had ended up in that warehouse.
The logical next step for the IAEA at that point would have been to have to request visits to sites where Iran’s declared conversion program has operated so the results could be compared with those of the samples found at the warehouse. That was what precisely Iran proposed to the agency in January 2020. The IAEA did carry out the sampling, but the laboratory tests on those samples are not yet available.
While the IAEA stalled on requesting environmental samples from the declared uranium conversion sites for several months, when it would have made the most sense to do so, the Israeli government exploited the lab results to resume its political offensive against Iran.
With backing from the US, Israel pushed a dubious argument that particles of natural uranium confirmed their claim that Iran had run an undeclared program to process natural uranium for use in covert nuclear weapons-related testing.
Israel enhances its position in the IAEA
This Israeli lobbying coincided with the first phase of a transition within the IAEA that would ultimately advance Tel Aviv’s position. Director General Yukio Amano underwent an unspecified medical procedure in September 2018, grew steadily weaker with a serious illness, and died on July 2, 2019.
Before his physical decline, Amano had announced plans to step down by March 2020, touching off a competition between senior IAEA officials for election to the top position. US and Israeli influence was immediately enhanced by the race, because any interested candidate required substantial backing from Washington for the requisite votes among the agency’s board of directors.
The Israelis had focused the IAEA’s attention on an alleged Iranian overt conversion program from the very beginning. Drawn from a covert program that took place from 2000 to 2003, the collection of supposedly purloined documents included a one-page flow sheet showing a process for converting uranium ore into a form of uranium that could be enriched.
But in its December 2015 “final assessment” of questions of “possible military dimensions,” the IAEA had concluded that the process shown in the document “was technically flawed and of low quality in comparison to what was available to Iran as part of its declared nuclear fuel cycle.” In other words, it wasn’t taken very seriously.
Netanyahu’s new “Iranian Nuclear Archive” included what was purported to be a May 2003 letter from the “project manager” of the “Health and Safety Group” for that same alleged covert nuclear weapons program.
The letter described a large covert uranium conversion plant and three plant designs. But the letter bore no marking that connected it with any Iranian government entity — only a crudely drawn symbol that could have been added by anyone.
What’s more, nothing about the facility designs supported the document’s authenticity, especially considering a senior Israeli intelligence official acknowledged to pro-Israel lobbyist David Albright that no such plant was ever built.
Israel, nevertheless, continued to deploy those dubious documents to hammer home its point.
The IAEA caves to Israel and the US
The documents and photos the Israelis pushed with US support eventually prompted the IAEA to cave in to their demands. The agency sent three letters to Iran on July 5, August 9, and August 21, 2019, based entirely on the Israeli claims about three “undeclared sites.”
In the missives, the IAEA claimed to have “detailed information” about what it called “possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities” at each of site. It demanded “clarifications” in each case.
According to the IAEA, the first letter related to the “possible presence” between 2002 and 2003 of a natural uranium metal disc which it said “may not have been included in Iran’s declarations.” The letter was clearly referring to Lavisan-Shian in Tehran, when it said the site “underwent extensive sanitation and leveling in 2003 and 2004.” At the time, the agency decided there was no point in visiting it.
The United States and Israel have always argued that Iran had completely removed the topsoil at the site in order to avoid detection by environmental sampling of some kind of nuclear-related work at the site. But that claim was false. In fact, the buildings belonging to the military contractor of Lavisan-Shian had been torn down, but topsoil remained.
The IAEA did undertake environmental sampling of the site in June 2004, acknowledging that the vegetation and soil samples collected at Lavisan-Shian revealed no evidence of nuclear material. Reuters reported at the time that an IAEA official had said that “on-site inspections of Lavizan produced no proof that any soil had been removed at all.”
In its July 5 letter, the IAEA demanded to know whether an undeclared natural uranium metal disc had been present at the site and, if so, where it was located. That question was clearly based on a slide in the Israeli collection that Albright’s organization has described as summarizing how to make uranium deuteride, which has been used to create a neutral initiator for a nuclear explosion, with uranium metal chips and deuterium gas.
The second site, which has not been otherwise identified, “may have been used for the processing and conversion of uranium ore including fluorination in 2003,” according to the IAEA letter. It said the site “underwent significant changes in 2004, including the demolition of most buildings,” as though that constituted evidence of wrongdoing.
The claim made little sense given that, in April 2003, Iran had formally declared to the IAEA that it was opening lines at its Esfahan nuclear technology center for production of natural uranium metal for use in the production of shielding material.
At the third site, the IAEA stated, “outdoor conventional explosive testing may have taken place in 2003” on “shielding” for use with “neutron detectors.” As part of the rationale for demanding clarification, the agency cited supposed efforts beginning in July 2019 to “sanitize part of the location.” This language was designed to imply that evidence of wrongdoing had been removed from the Iranian site.
We know that the site in question was near Abadeh, because Netanyahu showed satellite photos of the Abadeh site in June 2019 and again in late July of this year, when a set of buildings had been removed by the latter date. Netanyahu bragged that he was revealing “yet another secret nuclear site…exposed in the archives.”
However, IAEA wording suggested its letter was prompted not by any concrete evidence of nuclear activity at the Abadeh site, but by some evidence of the destruction of those buildings.
The IAEA thus chose the three sites based on nothing more than the fact that buildings were razed, and thanks to pressure applied by the Israelis and the United States. The notion that Iran “may have” used and stored undeclared nuclear material at undeclared site, moreover, was based solely on unvetted Israeli documents, contrary to the IAEA claim of “extensive and rigorous corroboration process.”
In provoking a needless crisis over obscure hypotheticals, the IAEA has once again lent itself to the political interests of Washington and Tel Aviv – just as it did during the Bush and Obama administrations. But this time the IAEA’s highly politicized campaign is serving the Israeli aim of making it politically impossible for the next administration to return to the Iran nuclear deal.
On June 8, Iran’s permanent mission the IAEA demanded that any request for clarification under the additional protocol should be based on “authenticated information” and expressed “concern” over attempts to “reopen outstanding issues” that had been closed in 2015.
Iran views the new IAEA exercise as yet another salient of the US-Israeli “maximum pressure” strategy. Tehran has thus insisted that the IAEA cease its role as a de facto prosecutor for the US-Israeli special relationship.
Finkelstein: Israel will pretend that illegal annexation is a compromise
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/23/finkelstein-israel-will-pretend-that-illegal-annexation-is-a-compromise/#more-26302
Israeli PM Netanyahu will annex valuable West Bank land while pretending to be making a compromise, Norman Finkelstein says.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set a date of July 1st to begin Israel’s annexation of major parts of the Occupied West Bank. A group of 47 independent UN legal experts call the annexation plan “a vision of a 21st century apartheid.”
Author and scholar Norman Finkelstein argues that Netanyahu is exploiting a brief window of opportunity under Trump and will use the deadline to swallow up valuable West Bank while pretending to be making a compromise because he does not seize the entire territory.
“If there were an an Oscar for Best Dramatic Performance by a Nation-State, Israel would win hands down every year,” Finkelstein says. “And so they will manage to turn this illegal annexation, which will enable Israel to appropriate some of the best farmland, agricultural land in the Occupied Territories, that will preclude the possibility of a Palestinian state — they’ll manage to turn it into another agonizing, gut-wrenching compromise. I could write the script.”
Guest: Norman Finkelstein, author and scholar. His latest book is “I Accuse! : Herewith A Proof Beyond Reasonable Doubt That ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda Whitewashed Israel.”
How a US and Qatari regime change deception produced ‘Caesar’ sanctions driving Syria towards famine
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/#more-18306
Like the mysterious figure it is named for, the Caesar sanctions bill is the product of an elaborate deception by shadowy US- and Gulf-backed operatives. Instead of protecting Syrian civilians, the unilateral measures are driving them towards hunger and death.
By Max Blumenthal
The US Department of Treasury’s imposition this June of the so-called Caesar Civilian Protection Act, a draconian set of economic sanctions on Syria, amounts to a medieval-style siege on all Syrians living inside the country.
Inspired by photos that Western governments and media claim were smuggled out of Syria by a supposed Syrian military whistleblower codenamed “Caesar,” the sanctions are the product of a highly deceptive intelligence operation orchestrated by the US and Qatari governments.
As this investigation will demonstrate, a network of US- and Qatar-backed regime change operatives marketing themselves as human rights lawyers and concerned Syrian activists groomed the supposed whistleblower, managed his files, and worked overtime to obstruct public scrutiny.
Desperate to stimulate support for war on Syria, this network worked with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in a cynical campaign to portray the Syrian crisis as equal to – and possibly worse than – the Jewish genocide in Europe.
Shockingly, investigators have determined that at least half of the photographs in the “Caesar” trove depict the bodies of government soldiers killed by the armed opposition. This highly inconvenient fact, which undermines the entire narrative of Caesar’s promoters and exposes them as cynical liars, has been ignored across the board by mainstream US media, Congress, and of course, by the network of operatives that managed “Caesar.”
Washington encourages Syrian famine as “an opportunity”
Authorized by Congress with no opposition, the so-called Caesar Civilian Protection Act amounts to an act of all out war on the very people it claims to protect. Targeting the Syrian Central Bank and penalizing any foreign company that does business with Damascus, the bill was conceived with the explicit aim of preventing the country from rebuilding after it defeated a proxy war imposed on it by the West, Israel, Turkey, and Gulf monarchies.
Charles Lister, a Gulf-backed de facto lobbyist for the Syrian opposition in Washington, inadvertently revealed the Caesar Act as an instrument of financial terror. In an op-ed for Politico this June, he forecasted “even greater levels of destitution, famine, and worsening criminality and predatory behavior” as a result of the new sanctions.
Predicting that “bread shortages are only a matter of time,” and projecting a famine in the near future, Lister cheerfully framed the human suffering caused by the sanctions as “an opportunity” for the United States to achieve regime change.
After a decade of grinding war, however, the Syrian government has proven resilient. And in Damascus, even opponents of Assad concede that sanctions are unlikely to scathe government officials. “Assad and his people are doing fine, and the security state is only stronger because of the war,” a businessman who was active in the initial round of protests against Assad in 2011 told me over lunch in Damascus in September 2019. “The sanctions ruin our currency and put old ladies into the street, but they don’t touch the regime.”
A pair of pro-opposition analysts echoed this view in the national security website War on the Rocks: “The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act may prove little more than a policy of economic escalation by default — a box-checking exercise for which ordinary Syrians will pay the price,” they wrote.
Thanks to the policy choices of the US government, the Syrian people are set to sink deeper into economic misery. Migration abroad will intensify, another generation will be lost, excess deaths will climb, and in a country where over one-third of the population are children, youth will experience deprivation at unprecedented levels.
The coming human catastrophe is the byproduct of a years-long lobbying campaign carried out by a network of regime-change operatives working under cover of shadowy international NGOs and Syrian-American diaspora groups.
Their push for an escalation of the economic war revolved around a supposed Syrian whistleblower who they claim smuggled thousands of photographs from a military prison, revealing an industrial slaughter of opposition activists. It was the code-name of that so-called whistleblower, “Caesar,” that inspired the sanctions bill.
A close look at these operatives and the forces propelling their activities reveals their campaign as a deceptive operation financed by the Qatari government and orchestrated in Washington, raising serious questions about the credibility of “Caesar.”
The dubious origins of the “Caesar” file
In June 2019, The Grayzone exposed a non-profit widely praised in Western media, the Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), as a US- and EU-funded regime-change initiative that aims to destabilize the Syrian government by subverting the international legal system.
As The Grayzone reported, CIJA field investigators worked directly with extremist militants – including Al Qaeda’s local affiliate – to gather documents from pillaged government offices and spirit them out of the country. CIJA even “pays rebel groups and couriers for logistical support,” the New Yorker acknowledged in a puff piece about the organization.
No trove of documents has been more valuable to regime-change lobbyists in Washington than the so-called “Caesar” file. In another profile of CIJA that omitted the role of the US State Department in establishing the group, the New York Times’ Anne Barnard claimed that Caesar “fled Syria with pictures of at least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which shocked the world when they emerged in 2014.”
Caesar’s supposed escape from Syria, and the story of how he obtained the photos, closely mirrored the shady tactics that CIJA investigators used to obtain other documents they planned to exploit for prosecutions of Syrian former officials in Western courts.
According to Vanity Fair, “Caesar” was actively spying for the Syrian opposition since 2011, and working with a “handler” described as “a Syrian academic and human-rights figure named Hassan al-Chalabi.” This character (no relation to the late Iraqi con artist Ahmad Chalabi) was himself “running a shadowy intelligence network inside Syria,” according to the magazine.
Chalabi told Vanity Fair that he arranged for “Caesar” to be smuggled out of Syria with his files in 2013 with the help of the CIA-created Free Syrian Army and an obscure militia known as the Strangers Battalion. (Observers of the Syrian conflict has since identified the latter group to be a collection of Uyghur foreign fighters allied with Al Qaeda.)
Caesar then passed his files to the Syrian National Movement, a marginal group of Islamists that was funded and overseen by the government of Qatar.
From there, the files went to outfits like CIJA, Human Rights Watch, and the New York Times – and “Caesar” went to Capitol Hill.
Caesar’s Qatari connection
The Caesar files were first brought to the American public’s attention in a New York Times article published on January 21, 2014 – a PR stunt carefully timed to coincide with the opening of the UN-backed Geneva II Peace Conference on Syria.
The following acknowledgement was mentioned in passing in the Times article: “only a few photographs have actually been released by lawyers commissioned by the Qatari government, an avowed opponent of Mr. Assad, and the claims about their origins could not be independently verified.”
The New York Times acknowledges that the “Caesar” photos were commissioned by Qatar and not independently verified
Sir Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, was quoted prominently by the Times. “It was like getting the keys to the Nazi archive,” Nice said of the Caesar file.
Nice, who had been charged with authenticating the photographic files, was listed at the time as “an advisor to Qatar in the possible Syria case to come.” Desmond De Silva, another British lawyer called in to authenticate the documents, was later described as part of a team of “high profile lawyers instructed by the Qatari government.”
The permanent monarchy of Qatar has bankrolled an array of Islamist militias across Syria over the years, including Al Qaeda’s ruthless affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. Carter-Ruck, the law firm employing Nice and De Silva under a Qatari contract, had also been hired by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another key sponsor of Syria’s insurgency and the destabilization campaign against Damascus.
Also quoted on the significance of the Caesar file in the New York Times article was David Crane, who was merely described by the newspaper as “an investigator involved in examining the photos, who previously indicted President Charles G. Taylor of Liberia.”
In fact, Crane was a veteran military-intelligence operative who previously held various positions inside the Pentagon, including at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Months before the Caesar file surfaced, he appeared on Capitol Hill to advocate for prosecuting Syrian government officials.
Crane stated in a 2014 interview that when his team began its investigation into the file, “We brought in what we named ‘Caesar,’ the individual who brought out these photographs, along with handler – his case officer – interviewing them separately.”
His case officer? Crane’s casual use of a term almost uniquely associated with CIA activity offered a strong suggestion that the Agency had played a role in grooming the mystery man known as “Caesar.”
The UK-based academic Tim Hayward outlined the US government’s role in supporting Crane’s various Syria regime change projects.
Crane “also leads the Syrian Accountability Project (SAP), which he founded some time prior to Caesar’s defection,” Hayward wrote. “SAP is said to be student-run and its clients include the Syrian National Council and US State Department. It also ‘works very closely with’ the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, which in turn is a conduit of US funding to CIJA.”
Crane authored the initial Qatar-sponsored report on Caesar’s trove, yet was merely described as “a war crimes prosecutor” in a Vanity Fair puff piece about the file.
“Caesar” goes to Capitol Hill
On April 13, 2014, an anonymous man completely cloaked in a blue Patagonia hooded jacket from Hudson Trail Outfitters, purporting to be “Caesar” and claiming to bear photographic evidence of “genocide,” appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Audio and video recording of the testimony was strictly forbidden, supposedly to protect Caesar’s safety.
Caesar’s handlers spun an elaborate tale to neoconservative Daily Beast writer Tim Mak about the “counter-surveillance techniques” they employed to protect their star witnesses identity in the days and hours before the hearing.
Somehow, no one covering the appearance of “Caesar” stopped to consider that the Syrian military might have already known the identity of one of the most high-profile defectors to emerge from its ranks. Were they protecting him from the Syrian Mukhabarat (which has no presence in the United States) or from public scrutiny?
As the anti-war activist and writer Rick Sterling pointed out, “how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and Military 601 Hospitals during those years and then disappeared? According to the [Qatari] Carter Ruck report, Caesar’s family left Syria around the same time. Considering this, why is ‘Caesar’ keeping his identity secret from the Western audience? Why does ‘Caesar’ refuse to meet even with highly sympathetic journalists or researchers?”
When “Caesar” appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on August 4, 2014, he was seated beside the man who had brought him to Washington. The handler was Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian-American regime-change lobbyist who served as the director of the State Department-funded Syria Emergency Task Force.
A key figure pushing for more arms to extremist militias inside Syria, Moustafa fervently opposed the State Department’s listing of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, as a terrorist group. “It was a mistake,” he said to Foreign Policy of Nusra’s blacklisting.
A year prior, Moustafa escorted Arizona Sen. John McCain on a trip inside Syria to meet with members of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army — including kidnappers of Shia pilgrims — during a failed stunt to stimulate US military intervention.
Sir Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, was quoted prominently by the Times. “It was like getting the keys to the Nazi archive,” Nice said of the Caesar file.
Nice, who had been charged with authenticating the photographic files, was listed at the time as “an advisor to Qatar in the possible Syria case to come.” Desmond De Silva, another British lawyer called in to authenticate the documents, was later described as part of a team of “high profile lawyers instructed by the Qatari government.”
The permanent monarchy of Qatar has bankrolled an array of Islamist militias across Syria over the years, including Al Qaeda’s ruthless affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. Carter-Ruck, the law firm employing Nice and De Silva under a Qatari contract, had also been hired by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another key sponsor of Syria’s insurgency and the destabilization campaign against Damascus.
Also quoted on the significance of the Caesar file in the New York Times article was David Crane, who was merely described by the newspaper as “an investigator involved in examining the photos, who previously indicted President Charles G. Taylor of Liberia.”
In fact, Crane was a veteran military-intelligence operative who previously held various positions inside the Pentagon, including at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Months before the Caesar file surfaced, he appeared on Capitol Hill to advocate for prosecuting Syrian government officials.
Crane stated in a 2014 interview that when his team began its investigation into the file, “We brought in what we named ‘Caesar,’ the individual who brought out these photographs, along with handler – his case officer – interviewing them separately.”
His case officer? Crane’s casual use of a term almost uniquely associated with CIA activity offered a strong suggestion that the Agency had played a role in grooming the mystery man known as “Caesar.”
The UK-based academic Tim Hayward outlined the US government’s role in supporting Crane’s various Syria regime change projects.
Crane “also leads the Syrian Accountability Project (SAP), which he founded some time prior to Caesar’s defection,” Hayward wrote. “SAP is said to be student-run and its clients include the Syrian National Council and US State Department. It also ‘works very closely with’ the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, which in turn is a conduit of US funding to CIJA.”
Crane authored the initial Qatar-sponsored report on Caesar’s trove, yet was merely described as “a war crimes prosecutor” in a Vanity Fair puff piece about the file.
“Caesar” goes to Capitol Hill
On April 13, 2014, an anonymous man completely cloaked in a blue Patagonia hooded jacket from Hudson Trail Outfitters, purporting to be “Caesar” and claiming to bear photographic evidence of “genocide,” appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Audio and video recording of the testimony was strictly forbidden, supposedly to protect Caesar’s safety.
Caesar’s handlers spun an elaborate tale to neoconservative Daily Beast writer Tim Mak about the “counter-surveillance techniques” they employed to protect their star witnesses identity in the days and hours before the hearing.
Somehow, no one covering the appearance of “Caesar” stopped to consider that the Syrian military might have already known the identity of one of the most high-profile defectors to emerge from its ranks. Were they protecting him from the Syrian Mukhabarat (which has no presence in the United States) or from public scrutiny?
As the anti-war activist and writer Rick Sterling pointed out, “how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and Military 601 Hospitals during those years and then disappeared? According to the [Qatari] Carter Ruck report, Caesar’s family left Syria around the same time. Considering this, why is ‘Caesar’ keeping his identity secret from the Western audience? Why does ‘Caesar’ refuse to meet even with highly sympathetic journalists or researchers?”
When “Caesar” appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on August 4, 2014, he was seated beside the man who had brought him to Washington. The handler was Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian-American regime-change lobbyist who served as the director of the State Department-funded Syria Emergency Task Force.
A key figure pushing for more arms to extremist militias inside Syria, Moustafa fervently opposed the State Department’s listing of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, as a terrorist group. “It was a mistake,” he said to Foreign Policy of Nusra’s blacklisting.
A year prior, Moustafa escorted Arizona Sen. John McCain on a trip inside Syria to meet with members of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army — including kidnappers of Shia pilgrims — during a failed stunt to stimulate US military intervention.
Mouaz Moustafa (far right) with Sen. John McCain (second to left) and armed FSA kidnapper (far left) in Syria, May 2013
Testifying alongside Caesar was David Crane, the author of the Qatar-sponsored Caesar report, who accused the Syrian government of “crimes the likes of which we have not seen since Auschwitz.”
Next, Frederic Hof of the Atlantic Council’s Saudi-funded Rafic Hariri Center demanded that Congress respond to Caesar’s testimony by allocating more US tax dollars to purchase weapons for anti-Assad extremist militants in Syria.
The stage was set for Congress to sign off on crushing sanctions on Syria, in bipartisan fashion and with negligible opposition. But first, the regime-change lobby mobilized to build a public case for its agenda by cynically linking the crisis it had helped foment in Syria to the Jewish genocide that took place in mid-century Europe.
Testifying alongside Caesar was David Crane, the author of the Qatar-sponsored Caesar report, who accused the Syrian government of “crimes the likes of which we have not seen since Auschwitz.”
Next, Frederic Hof of the Atlantic Council’s Saudi-funded Rafic Hariri Center demanded that Congress respond to Caesar’s testimony by allocating more US tax dollars to purchase weapons for anti-Assad extremist militants in Syria.
The stage was set for Congress to sign off on crushing sanctions on Syria, in bipartisan fashion and with negligible opposition. But first, the regime-change lobby mobilized to build a public case for its agenda by cynically linking the crisis it had helped foment in Syria to the Jewish genocide that took place in mid-century Europe.
Stephen Rapp (far left) at a Holocaust Memorial Museum event promoting regime change in Syria, May 2017
Enlisting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the push for war
Back in July 2014, a self-styled human rights lawyer named Stephen Rapp sat on stage at the Saudi-funded Rafiq Hariri Center of DC’s Atlantic Council think tank and demanded regime change in Syria: “Its legitimacy, its ability to serve the people of Syria is gone, if ever it where there,” he said of Assad’s government.
Throughout the event, entitled “Making the Case Against Assad,“ Rapp touted the work the aforementioned US-funded Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) was doing to gather documents implicating the Syrian government, and the State Department’s role in supporting them.
At the time, Rapp was the Barack Obama administration’s ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice. He later moved on to serve as the chair of CIJA and visiting fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, where according to his bio, he pursued “justice and accountability on Syria.”
Rapp had worked with the Qatar-sponsored authors of the initial Caesar inquiry in the past when he, David Crane, and Desmond De Silva each served as chief prosecutor at the special court for Sierra Leone.
In his capacity at the Holocaust Museum, Rapp focused on “bringing forth the first case against the Assad regime and working on potential cases related to the ‘Caesar file’ in Germany.”
Under Rapp’s watch, the Holocaust Museum was transformed into an overt tool of US foreign policy in the Middle East. The institution’s interventionist bent was supplemented by the presence of neoconservative ideologues like Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams, former DHS Chief Michael Chertoff, and Stuart A. Levey – a pioneer of US sanctions policy – on the museum’s ironically named “Committee on Conscience.”
In 2014, Mouaz Moustafa, the Syrian-American regime change lobbyist who worked as “Caesar’s” handler, joined Stephen Rapp in helping the Holocaust Memorial Museum establish an exhibition likening the Syrian war to the Jewish genocide of World War Two Europe. The exhibit contained a special section on the Caesar file, presenting it as evidence of industrial mass murder without a scintilla of critical context or evidence.
Mouaz Moustafa (right) at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Exhibition on Caesar on November 20, 2014
According to Rapp, the file provided a “better” basis for prosecutions of Syrian officials than the Allies mustered at Nuremberg, where key Nazi German officials were convicted for crimes against humanity. Rapp has even claimed that, based on the Caesar files, “Conservatively, we’re looking at 50,000 Syrian civilians tortured and murdered by their own government.”
When the Holocaust museum in DC established its exhibition in late 2014, it was only able to display 10 carefully selected photos from the Caesar file. Once other investigators were able to view the full file, however, the one-sided narrative of its promoters began to crumble.
46% of the Caesar file reveals mass killings – by a brutal armed opposition
Though the full contents of the supposed Caesar file has never been made public, Human Rights Watch (HRW) was able to view the documents in full in 2015. In a lengthy report hyping the photos and attempting to reinforce the push for regime change, HRW inadvertently demolished Washington’s narrative.
In a virtual footnote in its lengthy report on the Caesar file, HRW acknowledged that nearly half of the entire file – some 24,568 photos – depicted the bodies of government soldiers who had been killed by the armed opposition, “including [by] incidents of terrorism, fires, explosions and car bombs).”
According to Rapp, the file provided a “better” basis for prosecutions of Syrian officials than the Allies mustered at Nuremberg, where key Nazi German officials were convicted for crimes against humanity. Rapp has even claimed that, based on the Caesar files, “Conservatively, we’re looking at 50,000 Syrian civilians tortured and murdered by their own government.”
When the Holocaust museum in DC established its exhibition in late 2014, it was only able to display 10 carefully selected photos from the Caesar file. Once other investigators were able to view the full file, however, the one-sided narrative of its promoters began to crumble.
46% of the Caesar file reveals mass killings – by a brutal armed opposition
Though the full contents of the supposed Caesar file has never been made public, Human Rights Watch (HRW) was able to view the documents in full in 2015. In a lengthy report hyping the photos and attempting to reinforce the push for regime change, HRW inadvertently demolished Washington’s narrative.
In a virtual footnote in its lengthy report on the Caesar file, HRW acknowledged that nearly half of the entire file – some 24,568 photos – depicted the bodies of government soldiers who had been killed by the armed opposition, “including [by] incidents of terrorism, fires, explosions and car bombs).”
As Rick Sterling noted, “nearly half the [Caesar] photos show the opposite of what was alleged. These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians.”
HRW openly acknowledged its wholesale disinterest in this explosive fact, stating, “This report focuses on deaths in detention.” However, the organization’s researchers were unable to prove that the photos they were focused on showed the bodies of those who died in government prisons and not on the battlefield, or in other circumstances. In fact, it was able to verify only 27 cases in which individuals who appeared in the photos had been arrested.
The initial Qatar-sponsored Carter-Ruck investigation falsely claimed that the 11,000 individuals who appeared in the Caesar file had been killed in Syrian government custody. In an interview with France24, David Crane, the lead author of that report, noted that the bogus number was a only a “statistical estimate.”
HRW also revealed that though its researchers “sought an interview with Caesar through groups that identified themselves as representing him, the organization did not manage to meet with him.”
Despite these disclosures, HRW’s hyper-interventionist director Ken Roth continued to rattle off calls for US military intervention in Syria.
Others entities and individuals promoting the Caesar file, such as the New York Times and the directors of CIJA, similarly omitted HRW’s stunning revelation that at least half the photos depicted government soldiers killed in the hands of foreign-backed opposition militias. In doing so, they preserved the Western narrative of the Syrian conflict as a one-sided, unprovoked slaughter carried out by President Assad against the whole of “the Syrian people.”
As Caesar works Congress, sanctions begin killing the Syrian people
In November 2016, Congress expanded its sanctions on Syria while authorizing more funding for groups like CIJA focused on planning the prosecution of Assad and his officials. Co-sponsored by Rep. Eliot Engel, the aggressively pro-war, AIPAC-backed Democrat serving at the time as ranking chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill was called the Caesar Civilian Protection Act.
“Caesar” was shepherded by his handler, Mouaz Moustafa, to meet personally with Engel and his Republican counterpart on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ed Royce, in July 2018. As usual, the mysterious figure was shrouded in his blue Patagonia hooded jacket.
The meeting in Washington coincided with several new rounds of unilateral sanctions on Syria, meting out unprecedented economic punishment on the country’s civilian population.
Nabih Boulos of the LA Times documented how the US and EU economic war against Syria had been especially harsh on the medical sector, making radiology equipment, chemotherapy drugs, and even basic pharmaceuticals increasingly difficult to obtain. One doctor told Boulos that 10 percent of his kidney patients had died due to faulty or inaccessible dialysis machines.
Sanctions also spurred a fuel crisis that made heating oil difficult to obtain during the winter of 2018, and brought ground traffic in several cities to a near-hault by the following Spring.
Rebuilding the war-torn country had also been slowed by the impact of the coercive measures, as the Caesar Act explicitly imposed costs on companies that participated in reconstruction, even threatening to punish Gulf states which dare to normalize relations with Damascus.
Congress signs off on Syrian misery, plunging the country’s currency
On March 11, 2020, the usual suspects of the Caesar production assembled on Capitol Hill for one final lobbying push. This time, the full-time regime-change lobbyist Mouaz Moustafa delivered a self-described former prisoner from Syria’s Saydnaya complex named Omar Alshogre to the House Foreign Affairs Committee to make the case for escalating the economic war.
Alshogre’s dramatic performance demonstrated his background as a business consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and a motivational speaker managed by an elite speaker’s bureau to secure Ted X lecture gigs. (Back in March 2019, Alshogre was brought onto CNN to attack Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the maverick Democratic presidential candidate who had made opposition to regime-change wars a centerpiece of her campaign.)
Finally, this June, Congress passed the most crushing round of sanctions on Syria in history, imposing penalties on anyone conducting sovereign economic relations with any entity overseen by the Syrian government. “Anyone doing business with the Assad regime, no matter where in the world they are, is potentially exposed to travel restrictions and financial sanctions,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
As the Caesar sanctions began to sink their teeth into the Syrian economy, the Financial Times acknowledged in a June 24 report, “The first and biggest act of the Caesar act was felt, not by regime insiders, but by ordinary Syrians, who saw prices spike as the threat of sanctions roiled the country’s currency market.”
A civilian population that has suffered through nearly a decade of war is being denied a peacetime recovery. For them, it marks another chapter in a tragic conflict imposed by outside powers.
But for the operatives behind the Caesar deception, the economic pain felt by average Syrians provides another regime-change “opportunity.”
HRW openly acknowledged its wholesale disinterest in this explosive fact, stating, “This report focuses on deaths in detention.” However, the organization’s researchers were unable to prove that the photos they were focused on showed the bodies of those who died in government prisons and not on the battlefield, or in other circumstances. In fact, it was able to verify only 27 cases in which individuals who appeared in the photos had been arrested.
The initial Qatar-sponsored Carter-Ruck investigation falsely claimed that the 11,000 individuals who appeared in the Caesar file had been killed in Syrian government custody. In an interview with France24, David Crane, the lead author of that report, noted that the bogus number was a only a “statistical estimate.”
HRW also revealed that though its researchers “sought an interview with Caesar through groups that identified themselves as representing him, the organization did not manage to meet with him.”
Despite these disclosures, HRW’s hyper-interventionist director Ken Roth continued to rattle off calls for US military intervention in Syria.
Others entities and individuals promoting the Caesar file, such as the New York Times and the directors of CIJA, similarly omitted HRW’s stunning revelation that at least half the photos depicted government soldiers killed in the hands of foreign-backed opposition militias. In doing so, they preserved the Western narrative of the Syrian conflict as a one-sided, unprovoked slaughter carried out by President Assad against the whole of “the Syrian people.”
As Caesar works Congress, sanctions begin killing the Syrian people
In November 2016, Congress expanded its sanctions on Syria while authorizing more funding for groups like CIJA focused on planning the prosecution of Assad and his officials. Co-sponsored by Rep. Eliot Engel, the aggressively pro-war, AIPAC-backed Democrat serving at the time as ranking chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill was called the Caesar Civilian Protection Act.
“Caesar” was shepherded by his handler, Mouaz Moustafa, to meet personally with Engel and his Republican counterpart on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ed Royce, in July 2018. As usual, the mysterious figure was shrouded in his blue Patagonia hooded jacket.
The meeting in Washington coincided with several new rounds of unilateral sanctions on Syria, meting out unprecedented economic punishment on the country’s civilian population.
Nabih Boulos of the LA Times documented how the US and EU economic war against Syria had been especially harsh on the medical sector, making radiology equipment, chemotherapy drugs, and even basic pharmaceuticals increasingly difficult to obtain. One doctor told Boulos that 10 percent of his kidney patients had died due to faulty or inaccessible dialysis machines.
Sanctions also spurred a fuel crisis that made heating oil difficult to obtain during the winter of 2018, and brought ground traffic in several cities to a near-hault by the following Spring.
Rebuilding the war-torn country had also been slowed by the impact of the coercive measures, as the Caesar Act explicitly imposed costs on companies that participated in reconstruction, even threatening to punish Gulf states which dare to normalize relations with Damascus.
Congress signs off on Syrian misery, plunging the country’s currency
On March 11, 2020, the usual suspects of the Caesar production assembled on Capitol Hill for one final lobbying push. This time, the full-time regime-change lobbyist Mouaz Moustafa delivered a self-described former prisoner from Syria’s Saydnaya complex named Omar Alshogre to the House Foreign Affairs Committee to make the case for escalating the economic war.
Alshogre’s dramatic performance demonstrated his background as a business consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and a motivational speaker managed by an elite speaker’s bureau to secure Ted X lecture gigs. (Back in March 2019, Alshogre was brought onto CNN to attack Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the maverick Democratic presidential candidate who had made opposition to regime-change wars a centerpiece of her campaign.)
Finally, this June, Congress passed the most crushing round of sanctions on Syria in history, imposing penalties on anyone conducting sovereign economic relations with any entity overseen by the Syrian government. “Anyone doing business with the Assad regime, no matter where in the world they are, is potentially exposed to travel restrictions and financial sanctions,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
As the Caesar sanctions began to sink their teeth into the Syrian economy, the Financial Times acknowledged in a June 24 report, “The first and biggest act of the Caesar act was felt, not by regime insiders, but by ordinary Syrians, who saw prices spike as the threat of sanctions roiled the country’s currency market.”
A civilian population that has suffered through nearly a decade of war is being denied a peacetime recovery. For them, it marks another chapter in a tragic conflict imposed by outside powers.
But for the operatives behind the Caesar deception, the economic pain felt by average Syrians provides another regime-change “opportunity.”
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