HOW WASHINGTON IS POSITIONING SYRIAN AL-QAEDA’S FOUNDER AS ITS ‘ASSET’

By Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone.

June 10, 2021




https://popularresistance.org/how-washington-is-positioning-syrian-al-qaedas-founder-as-its-asset/



A PBS Frontline Special Is The Latest Vehicle In A PR Campaign To Legitimize Rebranded Syrian Al-Qaeda, HTS, And Market Its Leader Mohammad Jolani As A Competent American “Asset.”

March 2021 – marked the 10th anniversary of the Western regime-change war on Syria. And after a decade of grueling conflict, Washington is still maneuvering to extend its longstanding relationship with the Salafi-jihadist militants fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

With the northeastern province of Idlib under the control of a self-proclaimed “Syrian Salvation Government” led by the rebranded version of Syria’s al-Qaeda franchise, and protected under the military aegis of NATO member state Turkey, powerful elements from Brussels to Washington have been working to legitimize its leader.

This June, PBS Frontline aired a special, “The Jihadist,” featuring a sit-down interview with Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, de facto president of the “Syrian Salvation Government” and founder of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda originally called Jabhat al-Nusra, today re-branded as Hay-at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.

Having traded in his battlefield garb for a freshly pressed suit, Jolani was presented with the once unthinkable opportunity to market himself to a Western audience and pledge that his forces pose no threat to the US homeland because they were merely focused on waging war against Syria’s “loyalist” population.

The PBS correspondent who conducted the interview, Martin Smith, previously starred in a 2015 PBS special, “Inside Assad’s Syria,” which presented a US audience with a rare and relatively objective look at life inside Syrian government-controlled territory, as insurgents backed by NATO and Gulf monarchies encircled and terrorized its population.

Whether or not he realized it, when Smith returned to Syria this March to meet Jolani, he was on more than a journalistic field expedition. A network of think tanks and Beltway foreign policy veterans were engaged in a simultaneous push to remove Jolani and his militant faction HTS from the State Department’s list of designated terrorist groups.

This would open the door for international acceptance of his de facto government in Idlib, which regime-change advocates view as an important piece of leverage against Damascus, and as a human warehouse for the millions of refugees languishing there.

In turn, the audacious PR campaign would consolidate a branch of the organization responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States into a de facto US asset.

The campaign to normalize Jolani was publicly initiated by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank with close ties to the Biden administration and NATO. By the time of Smith’s interview, operatives from a network of Gulf-funded, pro-Israel think tanks had spent years quietly lobbying for Washington to support al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and succeeded in securing shipments of weapons from the CIA to some of its battlefield allies.

Though figures involved in this coordinated lobbying push were featured in Smith’s PBS Frontline report, they were presented to viewers as dispassionate analysts or former officials with no ulterior interests.

Framed as hard news yet shaped by one of the most insidious public relations campaigns in recent history, the nationally broadcast PBS special provided an effective vehicle for rehabilitating a jihadist leader and perpetuating the decades-long dirty war against Syria.
Whitewashing US And Foreign Support For Syria’s Extremist Insurgency

When Muhammad Jolani first crossed the Syrian-Iraqi border in 2012 with a small detachment of fighters, he belonged officially to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an extremist group responsible for countless attacks on US military occupiers and Shia civilians across Iraq.

Upon their thrust into Syria, Jolani’s forces enabled the late self-proclaimed leader of the caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to establish his Islamic State, or ISIS, in the northeastern city of Raqqa. A feud over strategy and finances soon prompted Jolani to split from the Islamic State and establish Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, with the explicit blessing of the jihadist group’s global leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Martin Smith recounted this history in his PBS Frontline report, albeit briefly, while neglecting any mention of the scandalous covert US operation that made Nusra’s rise possible.

Smith, for instance, neglected mention of the prescient August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment which stated clearly that “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” and that the Western-backed opposition would likely create a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” if weapons were placed in the hands of anti-Assad Islamist militants.

Despite the warning, in 2013, the CIA launched Operation Timber Sycamore, an arm-and-equip program that funneled up to $1 billion per year (one out of every $15 in the CIA’s budget) into material support for an armed opposition thoroughly dominated by Islamist extremists. It was the agency’s largest covert operation since a similar initiative in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which gave birth to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Just as the DIA predicted, an extremist “Salafist principality” took root in northeastern Syria, while Al Qaeda’s local franchise quickly emerged as the dominant force within the armed opposition.

Nusra militants – including a former fighters of the CIA-created “Free Syrian Army” – were filmed cutting open the chests of Syrian soldiers, tearing their hearts out, and eating the organs raw (while receiving sympathetic media coverage from the BBC).

As it seized control of the Idlib province and moved to take Damascus, Nusra earned a reputation for grisly suicide attacks and executions, while instituting a medieval-style theocratic regime in the areas it controlled. An undercover 2017 documentary filmed by local residents, “Undercover Idlib,” exposed the dystopia that unfolded under Nusra control, with all non-religious music and public celebrations banned, the wearing of colorful headscarves outlawed, and Druze and Christian residents killed or forced to convert at gunpoint.

Rather than being uprooted from its “safe haven,” Nusra was encouraged by its NATO-aligned sponsors to rebrand and superficially distance itself from al-Qaeda so it could survive. First, in 2016, the al-Qaeda franchise changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, then morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) the following year.

Under tutelage from Turkey, which controlled the northern border of Idlib, HTS subsequently formed the “Syrian Salvation Government,” and embarked on a PR campaign for international legitimacy.
Syria’s Rebranded Al Qaeda Branch Courts Western Media

In 2020, Idlib’s “Salvation Government” established a media relations office to assist the entry of Western journalists and provide them with fixers to guide them in its territory. While independent reporters (including the co-author of this article) have been subjected to waves of online abuse by mainstream Western correspondents for visiting Damascus, a New York Times tour of Idlib that was openly managed by al-Qeada’s Syrian affiliate took place without a hint of criticism.




Martin Smith’s March 2021 visit to Idlib was a similarly guided venture. His report on Jolani blended interview footage with scenes of the HTS leader pressing the flesh with residents of Idlib City, conveying the image of a popular retail politician stumping for local office.

Idlib “does not represent a threat to the security of Europe and America. This region is not a staging ground for executing foreign jihad,” Jolani reassured Smith. Over the past decade, he added, “we haven’t posed any threat to the West.”

In the interview, Smith focused entirely on whether Jolani would attack the West or not, demonstrating a near-total lack of interest in the lives of the millions of Syrians trapped under HTS’ neo-feudal rule in Idlib, and the minority groups threatened by its sectarian violence in nearby areas.

Dressed in a pressed shirt and blazer suitable for any job interview, Jolani rattled off rhetoric about the “Syrian revolution,” while stressing that his Salafi-jihadist brethren and Washington shared a common goal: regime change in Damascus.

Days after Smith left Idlib, HTS stoned three women to death as punishment for alleged adultery. It was far from the first public execution carried out by the group. Back when it was still known as Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate shot a woman in the head in the middle of a plaza in Idlib because she, too, had been accused of adultery.

None of these gruesome events were mentioned in Smith’s June 2021 PBS report, which represented the culmination of a years-long campaign to normalize HTS control in northeastern Syria.
“Al Qaeda Has Really Got It Right”

A powerful Brussels-based think tank that is funded by Western governments helped ignite the PR campaign to legitimize HTS with a highly sympathetic 2020 “conversation” with Jolani.

The think tank behind the whitewash, the International Crisis Group, gets the plurality of its funding from the European Union, Germany, France, and Australia, among other countries. It is effectively a Western intelligence cutout, and has consistently, over years, advocated for more Western military intervention in Syria.

The Crisis Group revealed that it had “[spoken] with Jolani in Idlib for four hours in late January” of 2020 while it pushed a narrative that he had become a new man.

“Following a series of rebranding efforts and internal transformations, Jolani told us, HTS presents itself today as a local group, independent of al-Qaeda’s chain of command, with a strictly Syrian, not a transnational, Islamist agenda,” the think tank wrote.

The softball interview was promoted by prominent members of the Syria regime-change lobby, including an Israeli fellow at the neoconservative, Washington DC-based Newlines Institute, Elizabeth Tsurkov, who has emerged as a de facto jihadi whisperer of the US and Israeli foreign policy nexus.

Tsurkov complimented the extremist rulers of Idlib, writing, “HTS is arguably the most pragmatic al-Qaeda offshoot to exist.”




Then there was Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), a billionaire oligarch-funded NGO that frequently promotes sanctions and regime-change operations against governments that have been targeted by Washington, from Syria to Venezuela, China to Nicaragua, Belarus to Bolivia.

Roth took to Twitter twice to promote the International Crisis Group’s interview with Jolani. Both of his tweets demonized the Syrian government and its ally Russia while making no mention of the array of crimes committed by the Salafi-jihadist militia in Idlib.




Roth’s message was clear: liberal interventionists in the Western human rights industry were on board with the HTS rebranding campaign.




In February 2021, the International Crisis Group published a follow-up paper explicitly aimed at convincing policy makers to remove the rebranded Syrian al-Qaeda franchise from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

“HTS’s continued status as a ‘terrorist’ organisation (as designated by the U.S., Russia, the UN Security Council and Turkey) presents a major obstacle,” lamented the authors of the absurdly titled paper, “In Syria’s Idlib, Washington’s Chance to Reimagine Counter-terrorism.”

A co-author of the document, Syria consultant Noah Bonsey, called for Western policymakers to show more “nuance” on the rebranded al-Qaeda extremists.




The thrust of the think tank’s argument was that, unlike ISIS and other al-Qaeda affiliates, “HTS has distanced itself from transnational attacks and the militants who advocate for them.” In other words, the extremist group’s campaign of violence is acceptable as long as it stays focused on the Syrian government and its allies – not on targets in Western countries.

The usual suspects enthusiastically promoted the policy paper, including the former Israeli soldier, Tsurkov.




Perhaps the most influential member of the Syria regime-change lobby on Washington’s K Street, Charles Lister, happily promoted the proposal as well.

The British pundit, who does not speak Arabic, has spent years advocating for Syria’s Islamist extremist occupation from within think tanks such as the Brookings Doha Center and Middle East Institute, which are funded by theocratic Gulf monarchies.

During a 2017 panel discussion at NATO’s de facto think tank, the Atlantic Council, Lister described Idlib as “the heartland of al-Nusra,” acknowledging that “Al-Qaeda’s relative success in Syria has seen its ideology and its narrative mainstreamed, not just in parts of Syria, but also in parts of the region.”

At a subsequent 2018 Capitol Hill panel discussion aimed at gathering congressional support for military intervention, Lister gushed about Nusra, “Al Qaeda has really got it right, I hate to say… Their strategy is so much more effective on the ground. They are winning hearts and minds.”

Lister has even celebrated Jolani as an Islamist version of Che Guevara who “goes deep on modern Arab political history.” As for HTS, Lister praised them as “a more politically mature and intelligent jihadist movement.”




Rankled by the successful advocacy by Lister and his Gulf monarchy-backed colleagues for arming Islamist fanatics in Syria, Brett McGurk, the former US special envoy against ISIS, grumbled to a reporter that the think tankers “got a lot of people killed.”

By 2021, Lister was comfortable enough to call for the rebranded al-Nusra franchise to become an official Western asset.



James Jeffrey And Andrew Tabler’s Undisclosed Turkish And Israeli Ties

The PBS Frontline special on Jolani provided an uncritical platform to James Jeffrey, the former US special representative for Syria engagement, and Andrew Tabler, a de facto Israel lobbyist and think tank pundit, presenting them to viewers as serious Syria experts without disclosing their longstanding ties to two of the most pernicious foreign backers of Syria’s Islamist insurgency.

HTS is “the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” Jeffrey declared to Frontline’s Martin Smith. He was finally acknowledging what was already well known in foreign policy circles but which few dared to say out loud: Washington has been allied with al-Qaeda in Syria.

The United States has not had formal diplomatic relations with Syria for years. Damascus formally broke contact with Washington in 2012 over its support for armed militants seeking to overthrow the country’s internationally recognized government.

The absence of diplomatic relations has led to the appointment of a series of US special envoys. One of the most influential, and aggressively interventionist, of these envoys has been Jeffrey.

When mainstream US media outlets mention Jeffrey, they are often careful to stress that he has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, branding him as a bipartisan figure with extensive experience working at diplomatic posts in the Middle East.

What is almost never mentioned in the many glowing media portraits of Jeffrey, however, is his deep commitment to strengthening ties with Turkey, his close personal ties to the government in Ankara, and his fellowship with one of the most influential pro-Israel think tanks in Washington.

From 2013 to 2018, Jeffrey was a “distinguished fellow” at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a DC-based think tank that effectively serves as a cutout for Israeli intelligence. There, Jeffrey co-authored policy papers with neoconservative operatives such as Dennis Ross, advocating for hardline anti-Iran positions and even more US intervention in the Middle East.

While presenting Tehran as the “biggest challenge” for the United States, Jeffrey has been an enthusiastic advocate of closer cooperation with the Turkish government. In a report at WINEP, he maintained that “Turkey is one of the most important countries for the United States overall, and of central importance for U.S. policy.”

Jeffrey called for Washington to build deeper ties with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who he noted is “the most powerful Turkish leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk established the Turkish republic in 1923.” Jeffrey warned that failing to do so could inspire Ankara to improve its relations with longtime rival Russia.

Alongside the United States, Turkey has played a pivotal role in the regime-change war on Syria. Ankara worked with the CIA to create training camps inside Turkish territory, while southern Turkey became the de facto base for Syria’s political opposition in exile, with cities like Gaziantep serving as a hub for Western intelligence agencies and their assets.

For years, Erdogan maintained an open border with his southern neighbor, allowing tens of thousands of hardened Salafi-jihadists from around the world to enter Syria and wage war on the Assad government. This arrangement, known informally as the “jihadi highway,” allowed the Syrian opposition’s foreign sponsors to send billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons, including anti-tank missiles. It also gave extremist insurgents free rein to go back and forth across the porous border, seeking reinforcements and escaping retaliations by Damascus.

Ankara directly supported fanatical Islamist groups inside Syria, playing a “double game” with ISIS and effectively turning al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra into a proxy.

The Turkish military has illegally invaded Syrian sovereign territory several times since 2016, and Ankara military occupies parts of Idlib and northern Syria. The rebranded al-Qaeda extremists who run Idlib, HTS, collaborate openly with the Turkish military.

Jeffrey publicly broadcasted his pro-Ankara views when, in March 2020, he and then US Ambassador to United Nations Kelly Craft visited Turkey on a joint trip. On the southern border with Syria, the two diplomats posed for a photo op with the Western government-funded White Helmets, while calling for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad and reaffirming Washington’s support for Turkey’s policy in Idlib.

A few weeks before the visit, Jeffrey conducted an interview on Turkish TV that was republished by the US embassy. The US special envoy on Syria enthusiastically defended Ankara’s military occupation of parts of Idlib: “There the United States totally agrees with Turkey on the legal presence and justification for Turkey defending its existential interests against refugee flow and dealing with terror and finding a solution to the terrible Syrian conflict with the war criminal regime of President Assad. We understand and support these legitimate Turkish interests that have Turkish forces in Syria and specifically in Idlib.”

Jeffrey later admitted that he had lied to then-President Trump about the number of troops in Syria to prevent a total withdrawal. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” he boasted to the military website Defense One.

A 2019 report in Foreign Policy identified Jeffrey, alongside neoconservative operative and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, as part of a group of anti-Iran hawks who “repeatedly sought to reverse Trump’s Syria withdrawal over nearly two years, culminating in a disastrous Turkish invasion that has destabilized the region.”

Foreign Policy explained: “Jeffrey began making plans to stay in northeastern Syria indefinitely as an obstacle to Assad’s attempts to consolidate power. In particular, Jeffrey’s team aimed to deny the Syrian president and his Iranian backers access to the coveted oil fields in Deir Ezzor province, which are mostly under SDF control.”

Despite Jeffrey’s relentless advocacy for more Turkish control in northern Syria, PBS Frontline’s Martin Smith portrayed him as an objective expert who was delivering clinical policy analysis uncorrupted by any ulterior political interest.

Similarly, Smith interviewed Andrew Tabler, who offered effusive praise for Turkey’s role in Idlib. Though Tabler works for the same pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy which employed Jeffrey for years, Smith presented him to viewers as a former journalist with years of supposed expertise on Syria.

In fact, Tabler has aggressively advocated a US regime-change war on Syria during apparently paid Israel lobby lectures like the one he delivered to the Israel Club of Florida’s Valencia Isles.

“The United States needs to develop and execute a plan to develop its Sunni allies’ spheres of influence in Syria to help retake and stabilize those areas from ISIS and al Qaeda,” Tabler told his pro-Israel audience. “However, such an operation will only succeed if Washington not only maintains its goal of al-Assad stepping aside, but adds a military component to the strategy as well.”

Both Israel and Turkey have played central roles in destabilizing Syria from its north and south. And in Washington, figures like Jeffrey and Tabler have helped advance the interests of these two religiously sectarian human rights violators with zealous dedication.

But none of this context was provided to viewers of Smith’s PBS Frontline special on Jolani, leaving them with the impression that the two regime-change lobbyists were merely a couple of seasoned and unbiased analysts.
“Well, It’s Complicated”: A PBS Reporter On Jolani’s Record As Al Qaeda Leader

The June 2021 release of Smith’s PBS Frontline report prompted an exuberant Twitter victory lap by Lister, who erupted in quasi-orgasmic celebration at the portrayal of HTS as a “semi-technocratic ‘govt’”, and touted his own 10 years of work whitewashing the exploits of its jihadist founders.

Though Jolani’s de facto job interview with the US government was received positively inside the Beltway, an independent interviewer managed to challenge Smith on his approach.

He was Scott Horton, the Austin, Texas-based libertarian anti-war author and Pacifica radio host. In an interview with Smith before the full PBS special appeared, Horton asked Smith if he confronted Jolani about his militia’s record of slaughtering members of Syria’s Druze religious minority who refused to convert to Islam, or the vicious theocratic regime he operated from East Aleppo to Idlib.

Smith responded with spin that sounded like damage control for al-Nusra: “Jolani says that a lot of mistakes were made,” the journalist said. Later, he insisted, “Well, it’s complicated,” when challenged about Jolani’s rampage of sectarian violence.

HTS is “considerably different” from al-Qaeda, Smith maintained, and “don’t participate in large-scale attacks against civilians.” He even insisted that Jolani had pledged protect the rights of Druze, Christians, and other religious minorities – although all have been ethnically cleansed from Idlib or forced to convert.

Finally, Smith claimed that Syria’s secular president was exponentially worse than the rebranded al-Qaeda leader, whose forces permitted no one but Sunni Muslims to exist under their rule. “There is no comparison between Assad and Jolani,” he argued.

In one of his only direct criticisms of HTS in the interview with Horton, Smith conceded that HTS’ prisons “can be pretty nasty places,” adding in another massive understatement that Jolani “still runs a pretty tough ship.”

However, the PBS reporter insisted that Jolani never affiliated with al-Qaeda because of ideology, but rather because of the terrorist group’s powerful “branding.”

“At this point they’re trying to get the West to warm up to them,” Smith conceded. “They are engaged now in an ongoing effort to try to set up dialogue with the West; they would like to have the terrorism designation lifted.”

Smith insisted that despite the ongoing public relations campaign on HTS’s behalf, he was not a participant in it. “The Americans are tired of wars in the Middle East,” the journalist claimed, implying that Jolani is someone the imperial planners in Washington can rely on to leave in charge.

Whether or not he was wittingly complicit, Martin Smith and his PBS Frontline report represented the culmination of the Washington-led lobbying campaign to clean up Syrian al-Qaeda’s image and secure its status as a respectable US proxy.

Lindsey Snell, an American independent journalist who was held captive by Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, scoffed at the public relations campaign waged on behalf of HTS by American media and think tanks. In an interview with The Grayzone, Snell said HTS still upholds the same ideology as ISIS, but has decided to appeal to the West in order to preserve its influence in Idlib while pocketing millions of dollars a month in international aid and oil money.

“Actually, their rebranding campaign started when I was their captive,” Snell told The Grayzone. “They changed their name for the first time and they announced their split from Al Qaeda when I was their captive. And of course, it didn’t actually change anything.”

“To this day most of them still call themselves ‘Nusra,’” Snell added. “Their split from Al Qaeda was really just a cosmetic, surface level thing and they’re still the same terrorists inflicting Sharia law on everyone in their territories.”

AskProfWolff: Socialism in Venezuela

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZTpSU4syLU

Identifying As A Worker - Dr. Harriet Fraad on Capitalism Hits Home

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K97cdqfpivU

THE TRUTH ABOUT DEFUNDING POLICE

By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report.

June 10, 2021




https://popularresistance.org/freedom-rider-the-truth-about-defunding-police/






“Defunding” The Police Has Often Turned Out To Be An Accounting Trick, But Community Control Of Police – A Righteous Demand – Must Also Ensure That All Government Functions Address Human Needs.

One year ago, thousands of people engaged in protest in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer. A persistent protest demand was for defunding police departments. The appeal of this rallying cry was obvious. Police in this country are a law unto themselves, killing and brutalizing at will, and rarely being called to account. Often these fatal encounters occur after minor offenses are committed or in the case of black people, when a call for assistance instead leads to death.

The premise of defunding police is well intentioned but faulty. In the past year we have seen sleight of hand in cities like New York where alleged funding cuts amounted to nothing more than budgetary trickery. Even in Minneapolis, where the movement began, defunding became nothing more than a name change.

It isn’t hard to understand why change in this area is so difficult. As of 2018, police departments in this country received more than $118 billion in funding. Only the military in the United States and China receive more money. The armed forces of Russia, Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan all receive less money than American police departments. They are in fact a domestic military force.

Why then do so many people insist that police budgets have been cut? Because this particular trope gives credibility to racist politics and practice. When Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives in 2020, the losers immediately claimed that the concept of cutting police budgets was to blame for their defeats. Republicans have leaped on the story and as usual engage in strict message discipline, insisting that the police are short of money and that increases in crime are the result.

The media adds to the drama with their usual determination to take the side of the powerful. William Bratton led police departments in New York and Los Angeles and in a recent New York Times interview said,“ They got what they wanted. They defunded the police. What do they get? Rising crime, cops leaving in droves, difficulty recruiting. Now, they’re waking up to the fact that our cities are unsafe.”

Not only should this propaganda be rejected, but the original questions about police funding should be revived. Police do have far more money than they need to do their jobs. Bloated budgets are a feature of police work in a society dedicated to racist practice. The modern day slave patrol is a racket that gives good paying employment to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it while simultaneously keeping Black people under physical control. But even if reducing funding were a realistic proposition, is that what the demand should be?

Community control of the police should be the goal but that can’t happen unless all government functions address human needs. Without real democracy and a true commitment to human rights, policing will not change. Of course, any discussion of law enforcement is inextricably linked to anti-Black racism, the controlling feature of many aspects of public policy in this country.

No one should allow themselves to be confused by racist pro-police propaganda or to be convinced that they should stop agitating for change. But questioning previous actions, even those made with the best of intentions, is always a positive step.

The United States as currently constituted can’t function without huge police departments and the big budgets that go with them. An increasingly stressed society must be kept under watch precisely because popular discontent may erupt at any moment. Last year’s protests prove that there are many very discontented people and the domestic military will be ready to keep them all under as much control as it possibly can.

We are left where we started out before anyone knew the name George Floyd. The struggle for change is difficult but it must continue with the knowledge that cutting police budgets or changing their practices in any way will be fought tooth and nail. Dishonest statements about rising crime or lost elections come with the territory.

The issues of police brutality and budgets cannot be approached as if they are separate from anything else. Community control of police cannot be separated from demands for peoples’ control over any other aspect of their lives. In short, revolutionary change is still what the people need. Everything from policing to housing to health care cannot be improved unless there is fundamental and systemic change. Of course that is a much bigger fight but it cannot begin without speaking truth about our condition and the difficult process of bringing about real justice.

Ilhan Omar SLAMMED by Lying Dems for Israel, US War Crimes Question

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YdOzkzbt8U

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND PROTESTORS INTENSIFY STRUGGLE IN COLOMBIA

By Peoples Dispatch.

June 10, 2021




https://popularresistance.org/social-movements-and-protestors-intensify-struggle-in-colombia-and-other-stories/



Today We Look At The Latest On The National Strike In Colombia, A Strike For Better Pay And Staffing By Health Workers In New Zealand, And More

In today’s episode of the Daily Round-up we look at the ongoing national strike in Colombia and the establishment of the National People’s Assembly by various social movements, the ongoing vote count in Peru as the presidential runoff elections draw to a close, a countrywide strike for better wages and safe working conditions by health workers in New Zealand, the ongoing strike to demand a renewal of wages by garment and textile workers in Lesotho, and 6 years of the #NiUnaMenos movement against femicide and other forms of gender-based violence.

THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE IS OFFICIALLY DEAD

By Brian Kahn, Gizmodo.

June 10, 2021




https://popularresistance.org/the-keystone-xl-pipeline-is-officially-dead/



TC Energy, The Company Behind The Keystone XL Pipeline, Has Said It Has “Terminated” The Project.

In a shocking move, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline has announced it will no longer move forward with the project. The controversial pipeline has been at the center of a fight over Indigenous treaties, land rights, and the permitting process. Now, it’s dead.

TC Energy, the company behind the pipeline project, announced that on Wednesday that “after a comprehensive review of its options, and in consultation with its partner, the Government of Alberta, it has terminated the Keystone XL Pipeline Project.” The project’s permits were rejected by former President Barack Obama, reinstated by former President Donald Trump, and rescinded again by President Joe Biden on his first day in office. The political seesaw, years of lawsuits, and spirited public opposition to the pipeline appear to have worked. (Disclosure: Prior to becoming a journalist, in 2011, I was arrested at a Keystone XL protest. It was worth it.)

“When this fight began, people thought Big Oil couldn’t be beat,’ Bill McKibben, author and the founder of 350 who has fought the pipeline for more than a decade, said in a statement. “But when enough people rise up we’re stronger even than the richest fossil fuel companies.”

The project would’ve transported a staggering 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the Alberta tar sands across the border. The pipeline raised risks of an environmental catastrophe, especially Nebraska’s Sand Hills, where delicate geology meant a spill could’ve contaminated drinking water supplies.

“On behalf of our Ponca Nation we welcome this long overdue news and thank all who worked so tirelessly to educate and fight to prevent this from coming to fruition,” Ponca Tribe of Nebraska Chairman Larry Wright, Jr. said in a statement. “It’s a great day for Mother Earth.”

TC Energy’s Keystone pipeline has a history of spilling on the regular, which didn’t exactly bode well for the larger Keystone XL project. It also would’ve been a climate nightmare; tar sands oil is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels on Earth, and the pipeline would have locked in a steady stream of it to the global markets.

“For over a decade we’ve said Keystone XL would never be built—and we meant it,” Colin Rees, a campaigner with Oil Change International, said in a text. “KXL has been dead on arrival for years, but it’s good to see TC Energy publicly recognize its own obsolescence. The fossil fuel era is ending—the only question is whether our leaders will prioritize people or polluters in the transition.”

In its announcement that the project was done for, TC Energy CEO François Poirier highlighted the company’s last-ditch effort to make the pipeline palatable by claiming it would be “net-zero emissions throughout its lifecycle,” a cheap marketing gimmick oil companies are deploying with increasing vigor in hopes of keeping polluting projects like this alive. The company also hinted it would continue trying to make climate-friendly oil a thing, which bless their hearts.

It’s hard to underscore how huge a victory this is for activists and particularly Indigenous organizers that have been out in front to stop Keystone XL. It comes as a number of other high-profile pipeline fights are underway, including protesters in Minnesota fighting the Line 3 pipeline and the entire state of Michigan locked in a fight over the Line 5 pipeline. Both are operated by Enbridge, another Canadian company looking to pump Canadian oil sands into the market.

Keystone XL’s cancellation will surely be a wind at protesters’ backs. Biden, however, has yet to support those fights. In fact, his administration has undermined another pipeline battle over the Dakota Access pipeline and pushed forward a controversial Arctic drilling project, both of which are opposed by Indigenous groups.

“This news comes as Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is brutalizing Indigenous water protectors resisting the deadly Line 3 tar sands pipeline in northern Minnesota. Biden must act immediately to stop Line 3 and shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline,” Rees said.

The Indigenous Environmental Network also noted in a press release that while it was celebrating the death of the Keystone XL pipeline, some Indigenous protesters were still facing charges in South Dakota for actions taken late last year. Meanwhile, a growing number of states have passed or proposed laws that impose stiff penalties on anti-fossil fuel activists despite having numerous laws in place to deal with acts like trespassing and vandalism.

The world also needs to start building out clean energy infrastructure to replace the dirty infrastructure currently undergirding the economy. On that front, the administration has also said it’s willing to let go of some climate-friendly proposals that are part of its $2 trillion infrastructure package, which immediately received pushback from some Congressional Democrats. How much pressure activists put on the administration—and state and local governments—on these myriad issues will in many ways define the decades to come. In other words, the fights are nowhere close to over yet.