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Do Adults Have a Privacy Right to Use Drugs? Brazil's Supreme Court Decides Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>   
Monday, 14 September 2015 13:25

Greenwald writes: "Multiple nations no longer treat personal drug usage as a criminal problem but rather as one of public health. Many of them are actively considering following Portugal's successful example of decriminalizing all drugs."

Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Salon)
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Salon)


Do Adults Have a Privacy Right to Use Drugs? Brazil's Supreme Court Decides

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

14 September 15

 

he past decade has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the global debate over drug policy. As recently as the mid-2000s, drug legalization or even decriminalization was a fringe idea, something almost no politician would get near. That’s all changed. That the War on Drugs is a fundamental failure is a widely accepted fact among experts and even policymakers. Multiple nations no longer treat personal drug usage as a criminal problem but rather as one of public health. Many of them are actively considering following Portugal’s successful example of decriminalizing all drugs. The global trend is clearly toward abandoning prohibitionist policies.

The rationale most commonly offered for decriminalization is the utilitarian one, i.e. efficacy: that prosecuting and imprisoning drug users produces more harm than good. Also frequently invoked is a claim about justice and morality: that it’s morally wrong to criminally punish someone for what amounts to a health problem (addiction).

By contrast, the Supreme Court of Brazil may be on the verge of adopting a much different and more interesting anti-criminalization justification. The Court is deciding whether the right of privacy, guaranteed by Article 5 of the nation’s constitution (one’s “intimate” and “private life” are “inviolable”), bars the state from punishing adults who decide to consume drugs. In other words, the Court seems prepared to accept the pure civil libertarian argument against criminalizing drugs: namely, independent of outcomes, the state has no legitimate authority to punish adult citizens for the choices they make in their private sphere, provided that those choices do not result in direct harm to others.

The specific case before the court involves a defendant from São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, who was arrested and convicted for possessing three grams of marijuana. Brazilian law already bars judges from imposing prison sentences on individuals for the crime of drug possession (where the amounts suggest it is for personal usage rather than “trafficking”). The amount he had was deemed to be for personal usage, and he was convicted and sentenced to two months community service. But his lawyers raised the constitutional argument that punishing him for personal drug usage violates his constitutional guarantee of privacy.

That’s the argument that is now before the 11-justice Brazilian Supreme Court. Three weeks ago, the first of the judges, Gilmar Mendes, accepted the argument and voted in favor of decriminalization. In his ruling, he argued that treating drug users as criminals — and imposing on them a “criminal stigma” — “violates their individual rights” as well as constituting a wildly disproportionate reaction to private behavior that poses no direct harm to anyone.

The case resumed this afternoon, with the second judge, Luiz Edson Fachin, endorsing decriminalization but only for marijuana (in response, Justice Mendes argued for broad applicability of decriminalization to all narcotics: “I see no rationale for maintaining criminalization for personal usage, regardless of the quality of the drug in question”). The third judge to rule today, Luís Roberto Barroso, also endorsed decriminalization, announcing: “the war on drugs has failed.” Justice Barroso argued that criminalization has resulted in the imprisonment of vast numbers of people, including young citizens, often destroying their lives, with no resulting benefit. “The only solution to drug trafficking is the end of criminalization,” he argued, adding that the nation’s notoriously awful prisons amount to “a genocide of Brazilian youth.” (Credit to the excellent Brazilian legal news site Justificando and accompanying Twitter feed for live-blogging the ruling.)

Even a pro-decriminalization ruling from the Brazilian court would likely have limited legalistic impact. Dr. Rubens Casara, a criminal judge in Rio de Janeiro state who presides over drug cases, told The Intercept that a primary difference between Brazil’s Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court is that the decisions of the former resolve only the specific case before it (and cases that have been frozen pending the decision), and otherwise lack binding precedential effect. As a result, even if the Court rules in favor of decriminalization, as Judge Casara expects, lower-court judges are free to ignore that decision and continue to treat personal drug usage as criminal.

Moreover, there are no standards for what quantities constitute “personal usage” as opposed to “trafficking,” meaning that judges, and the government, will continue to wield vast discretion over who can be treated as a criminal. Beyond that, the court may act as a political rather than judicial body and issue what Judge Casara called a “timid” ruling by, for instance, confining decriminalization to marijuana (a distinction that has no theoretical cogency — how can a Constitutional privacy guarantee prohibit punishment for marijuana usage but allow cocaine or heroin usage to be punished? — but may be legalistically justified since the specific case before the court involves a marijuana conviction).

Still, said Casara, a pro-decriminalization decision from the Brazilian Supreme Court is likely to be influential on how judges rule on such cases in the future. More significantly, such a ruling on privacy grounds has the potential to be debate-changing both inside Brazil and globally. Casara explained that the crux of this particular argument about drug prohibition is the proper limits of state power:

The principal thesis is that nobody can be punished for what they do if their actions do not harm third parties. For example, under Brazilian law, attempted suicide is not a crime. If someone tries to commit suicide and does not die, it is not a crime. Why? Because it is understood as self-harm, it is a problem that only concerns the individual. And this creates a paradox. If a person tries to kill himself, it’s not a crime. If you smoke a joint or use cocaine, or use crack or whatever, you are punished for that. The idea is that drug usage, if there is a harm, is only self-injury, only harms the individual and thus cannot be the object of state punishment. The state must respect the individual liberty of whomever wants to use drugs.

That pro-privacy reasoning tracks the arguments made by, among others, the ACLU in opposing drug criminalization. The civil liberties group has stressed how inherently abusive is the police state needed to enforce criminal laws banning personal drug usage:

When there’s no victim, how are the police supposed to find out when the law has been broken? The only way for police to fight victimless crime is to proactively search out wrongdoing: insert themselves into people’s lives, monitor their behavior, search their cars, etc. The enforcement of drug laws thus relies disproportionately on surveillance, eavesdropping, and searches of private places and effects. This (and misguided judges) is the reason that the failed War on Drugs has generated so much bad law around privacy and the Fourth Amendment in particular.

Back in 2009, I wrote a report on the 2000 decision of Portugal to decriminalize all drugs, and, after conducting extensive research in that country, documented what a resounding success that policy has been. What struck me most about that remarkable decision was that Portugal is quite a conservative country: heavily Catholic, anti-abortion, and otherwise averse to out-of-the-mainstream social progress.

Judge Casara argues that Brazil, though quite progressive in some ways, is also deeply conservative on these issues: “I think that Brazilian society is particularly authoritarian and prejudiced. In respect to drugs, there are many prejudices, including marijuana. … In general, the society has shown itself to be very resistant to decriminalization. Obviously, Congress can decriminalize and it would be the best path. But I do not believe that in this historical framework, and with the particularly conservative Congressional make-up right now, that there is the slightest possibility that this will happen.” As Judge Barroso said today: “This is a delicate question, because the solution favored by the three of us [pro-descriminalization judges] does not correspond to the majority of the population. It’s a decision contrary to the views of the majority, but it protects the rights of criminal defendants.”

A former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has become an outspoken advocate of decriminalization. He was a member of the Global Commission on Drugs, which concluded that “the global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” Indeed, virtually every harm cited by drug prohibitionists is either exacerbated, or created in the first instance, by the criminalization scheme itself (exactly as was true of alcohol prohibition; in 2011, I debated George Bush’s drug czar, John Walters, at Brown University on exactly that proposition).

Brazil has suffered from massive societal problems from drug criminalization, with horrifically over-crowded prisons, overwhelmed courts, and tragically under-funded treatment facilities for the nation’s poor addicts (which is what happens when a country spends huge resources on arresting and prosecuting drug users). The fundamental, profound failure of the Drug War can be seen in all of its manifestations in Brazil. A judicial ruling that recognizes those harms, but more importantly announces that the state has no right to treat adults as criminals for the private choices they make about what substances to consume, could alleviate significant criminalization-caused suffering not only in Brazil but around the world.


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Republicans Are Becoming the Party of Climate Supervillains Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34656"><span class="small">Dana Nuccitelli, Guardian UK</span></a>   
Monday, 14 September 2015 13:16

Nuccitelli writes: "Republicans have moved beyond pure domestic policy obstruction to sabotaging international climate negotiations."

Arnold Schwarzenegger as supervillain Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin. (photo: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar)
Arnold Schwarzenegger as supervillain Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin. (photo: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar)


Republicans Are Becoming the Party of Climate Supervillains

By Dana Nuccitelli, Guardian UK

14 September 15

 

s Politico recently reported in a news story that seems better suited for bad a Hollywood movie script, Republican Party leaders are actively trying to sabotage the critical international climate negotiations that will happen in Paris at the end of this year.

Top Republican lawmakers are planning a wide-ranging offensive — including outreach to foreign officials by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office — to undermine President Barack Obama’s hopes of reaching an international climate change agreement that would cement his environmental legacy.

Republican Party leaders have often argued that the United States shouldn’t take action to curb its carbon pollution unless China and other countries do as well.

Now these countries are working to reach an international agreement in which all cut their carbon pollution, and Republican leaders are trying to undermine it. It’s as though they’re just looking for excuses to prevent the United States from reducing its fossil fuel consumption. As Jonathan Chait wrote,

In any case, the old conservative line, with its explicit or implicit promise that international agreement to reduce emissions might justify domestic emissions cuts, has suddenly become inoperative. The speed at which Republicans have changed from insisting other countries would never reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to warning other countries not to do so — without a peep of protest from within the party or the conservative movement — says everything you need to know about the party’s stance on climate change.

Where have Republican Party climate leaders gone?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Conservative political parties in nearly every country in the world acknowledge that human-caused global warming is real, a problem, and propose to do at least something about it. Australia’s climate-dubious prime minister Tony Abbott was the closest analogue to Republicans, but he’s just been replaced by the science-accepting Malcolm Turnbull.

Many conservative politicians used to accept climate science an risks even in the United States. In 2007, Senator John McCain (who became the Republican Party’s 2008 presidential nominee) co-authored the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act to introduce a carbon cap and trade system. In 2010, Senator Lindsay Graham likewise co-authored a bipartisan cap and trade bill.

Sadly, although a majority of Republican voters support regulating carbon as a pollutant, and a plurality even support President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the party’s leaders have now taken an extreme stance on the issue. Many of the party’s presidential candidates deny that the planet is even warming (e.g. Ted Cruz), or that humans are responsible (e.g. Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich). Among those few who accept the scientific consensus, most oppose all practical efforts to address the problem (e.g. Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina). The two Republican presidential candidates who support taking action to address the problem (Lindsey Graham and George Pataki) are polling at a combined 0.2%.

Republican Party leaders are trying hard to obstruct President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and have not offered any alternatives. The easiest way to eliminate those government regulations would involve replacing them with a small government, free market alternative carbon pricing system via the type of climate legislation introduced years ago by McCain and Graham. This approach is supported by a consensus of economists, and was introduced by Republican presidents Reagan and Bush to successfully address past environmental problems, but has virtually no support among today’s Republican Party leaders.

Becoming the party of short-sighted supervillains

Lindsay Abrams at Salon recently wrote, “Marco Rubio is trying to distinguish himself as a full-on climate villain.” With these efforts by the party leaders to sabotage all domestic and international climate policy efforts, Rubio will no longer be able to distinguish himself on this front. The Republican Party seems to be crafting itself as the party of climate supervillains, hell-bent on destroying the world. It’s an extremely short-sighted position, because as astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson put it,

That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it.

Human-caused climate change and the associated risks and consequences are real, and they’ll only become more apparent to voters as the planet continues to heat up. Becoming the party that makes every effort to obstruct and undermine all national and international attempts to address these tremendous climate threats is a recipe for long-term disaster. At the same time, the Republican Party is alienating growing minority groups who, in a few decades, are poised to become the American majority.

The point being, Republican leaders don’t seem to have any interest in the long-term health of the planet, human society, or even their own political party. They noted the latter problem in a 2013 Growth and Opportunity Project report, in the wake of their unsuccessful performance in the 2012 elections. However, party leaders seem to be largely ignoring the findings of their own report, just as they ignore the findings of the many reports on the scientific realities and threats of climate change.

Republicans should be climate change leaders

Past Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush have implemented successful policies that have solved hazardous environmental problems like acid rain, ozone depletion, and air pollution, with economic benefits far exceeding their costs. Republicans invented free market cap and trade systems as an economically preferable alternative to government regulations of pollutants, to great success.

Today it’s Democratic policymakers who favor these policies and Republican leaders who oppose them. Thus, President Obama and his administration’s Environmental Protection Agency have been forced to act unilaterally, imposing government regulations on carbon pollution. By opposing all climate policies, including small government, free market, economically beneficial solutions, Republican leaders are bringing about the very government regulations that they oppose at their core.

It’s the job of leaders to lead. When President Obama changed his stance in favor of marriage equality, public opinion quickly followed. In the Supreme Court case affirming marriage equality rights to same-sex couples, the majority decision cited that rapidly changing public opinion. In this case, not only are Republican policymakers failing to lead, they’re not even following the lead of their party’s voters, the majority of whom support cutting carbon pollution.

It’s also the job of policymakers to address the risks facing our society. Instead of mitigating the immense risks posed by human-caused global warming, Republican leaders are actively trying to increase those risks by sabotaging efforts to mitigate them. Modeling the Republican Party after characters like Lex Luthor and Captain Pollution seems like a bad strategy; supervillains always lose.


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FOCUS: Respectability Is Killing the World Economy Print
Monday, 14 September 2015 11:36

Krugman writes: "Respectability, it turns out, can be an economy-killer, and Japan isn't the only place where this happens."

Paul Krugman. (photo: NYT)
Paul Krugman. (photo: NYT)


Respectability Is Killing the World Economy

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

14 September 15

 

isitors to Japan are often surprised by how prosperous it seems. It doesn’t look like a deeply depressed economy. And that’s because it isn’t.

Unemployment is low; overall economic growth has been slow for decades, but that’s largely because it’s an aging country with ever fewer people in their prime working years. Measured relative to the number of working-age adults, Japanese growth over the past quarter century has been almost as fast as America’s, and better than Western Europe’s.

Yet Japan is still caught in an economic trap. Persistent deflation has created a society in which people hoard cash, making it hard for policy to respond when bad things happen, which is why the businesspeople I’ve been talking to here are terrified about the possible spillover from China’s troubles.

READ MORE


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FOCUS: The Democratic Revolt Against the DNC Chair Begins Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>   
Monday, 14 September 2015 10:44

Pierce writes: "Democratic operatives are starting to make noise about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's questionable leadership."

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (photo: Lynne Sladky/AP)
DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (photo: Lynne Sladky/AP)


The Democratic Revolt Against the DNC Chair Begins

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

14 September 15

 

Democratic operatives are starting to make noise about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's questionable leadership.

he blog generally stays away from the Dems In Disarray narratives because, too often in the past, these have been used to obscure the fact that the Republicans are running an incredible passel of public omadhauns for president. However, the blog also has been quite clear in its desire that Democratic national chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-CNN) be removed from her current position because the evidence that she's done much of anything in the post is not exactly overwhelming. This feeling, it appears, is becoming somewhat general.

Deb Kozikowski, vice chairwoman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, said the chief of the Democratic National Committee, US Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had done a disservice to grass-roots volunteers by allowing Republicans to dominate the airwaves for the last month. "How do I tell these really dedicated Democrats who work really hard from top to bottom that debates for our presidential candidates are restricted, and they're there watching all these Republicans get all this air time?" she said. "I think about the folks at the grass roots who work day in day out, no money no glory, because they believe in democracy with a small 'd' and the Democratic Party with a large 'D,' getting bombarded with all these Republican candidates."

I will grant the point that the vast difference in exposure doesn't necessarily work to the Republicans' advantage, since it gives the nation an extended look at the increasing virulence of the prion disease. But, even so, the notion that DWS has screwed the pre-primary process up from hell to breakfast – and, worse, that she's loaded the dice in favor of a frontrunner who now appears to be in more than a little trouble -- has taken root.

Two national committee vice chairs, US Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak, have broken with Wasserman Schultz, taking to Facebook to push for more debates and for eliminating the penalty for candidates who stray from the rules. Under the current arrangement, they said, "more people will feel excluded from our political process, rather than included." New Hampshire state Senator Martha Fuller Clark, vice chairwoman of her state party, also criticized Wasserman Schultz for threatening to punish candidates who take part in unsanctioned debates, and echoed Kozikowski's concern that the Democratic Party is putting itself at a strategic disadvantage. "I'm very disappointed that the chair of the DNC has been unwilling to reconsider this schedule, which she determined on her own, with her staff. She did not run it by the executive committee of the DNC, she did not run it by the members of the DNC. People have been telling her that they are unhappy with this schedule, and she has been adamant about not making any changes," Fuller Clark said. "The decision that was made by Debbie Wasserman Schultz makes it harder to showcase all the candidates," the Portsmouth Democrat said. Fuller Clark said that she has not decided which candidate she will support for president.

While the Republicans are not shy about sitting the crazy aunts and uncles right there in the front parlor, the Democrats seem reluctant to show the country Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders. This is called being too clever by half. It's also called administrative incompetence. It's also called screwing up a one-car funeral.

Kozikowski, a longtime Democratic activist from Chicopee who is also vice president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs, said that New Hampshire Democrats, in particular, were wronged by the party's schedule because their state's single debate is scheduled for Dec. 19. "New Hampshire's not going to put up with one debate for their entire state, an early state, that happens between Hanukkah and Christmas. On a weekend, by the way. Nobody's going to see that debate," Kozikowski said Thursday during a telephone interview. "I just think it would be better to face the idea that maybe it was not the best solution to restrict the debates," she said.

The New Hampshire State Democratic Convention will be held this weekend. All the candidates, including Jim Webb, who currently is engaged in running the party's first stealth presidential campaign, are scheduled to speak. So is DWS. This could be a lovely bit of business.


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Social Engineering 101: How to Make a Refugee Crisis Print
Monday, 14 September 2015 08:18

Cartalucci writes: "Since 2011, each and every one of the West's 'color revolutions' has predictably devolved into armies of US-backed terrorists attempting to divide and destroy each nation."

A boat filled with refugees. (photo: unknown)
A boat filled with refugees. (photo: unknown)


Social Engineering 101: How to Make a Refugee Crisis

By Tony Cartalucci, New Eastern Outlook

14 September 15

 

tarting in 2007, the US was already in the process of engineering the overthrow and destruction of all prevailing political orders across the Middle East and North African (MENA) region.

It would be in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” that it was explicitly stated (emphasis added):

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Hersh would also reveal that at the time, the US – then under the administration of President George Bush and through intermediaries including US-ally Saudi Arabia – had already begun channeling funding and support to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who would in 2011 play a crucial role in the opening phases of the destructive war now raging across the Levant.

In 2008, from Libya to Syria and beyond, activists were drawn by the US State Department from across MENA to learn the finer points of Washington and Wall Street’s “color revolution” industry. They were being prepared for an unprecedented, coordinated US-engineered MENA-wide campaign of political destabilization that would in 2011 be called the “Arab Spring.”

Through the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US State Department’s Movements.org, agitators were literally flown on several occasions to both New York and Washington D.C. as well as other locations around the globe to receive training, equipment and funding before returning to their home countries and attempting to overthrow their respective governments.

In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was admitted:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. 

It is clear that the political cover – the Arab Spring – and the premeditated support of terrorist groups including Al Qaeda brought in afterward, were planned years before the Arab Spring actually unfolded in 2011. The goal was admittedly the overthrow of governments obstructing Washington and Wall Street’s hegemonic ambitions and part of a much wider agenda of isolating, encircling, and containing Russia and China.

The destruction of the MENA region was intentional, premeditated, and continues on to this very day.

As the Wave of Regime Change Crashes 

Since 2011, each and every one of the West’s “color revolutions” has predictably devolved into armies of US-backed terrorists attempting to divide and destroy each nation. In Libya, this goal has already long-since been accomplished. In Egypt and Syria, with varying degrees of failure, this agenda has been stalled.

Egypt through sheer virtue of its size and the capabilities of its military, has prevented nationwide warfare. In Syria, facing invasion primarily from both Turkey and Jordan, violence has been far more dramatic and enduring.

But despite initial euphoria across the West that their insidious conspiracy had indeed upended the MENA region entirely, Syria’s ability to resist the West’s proxy forces, and now, more direct intervention, has entirely disrupted this wave of regime change.

US Senator John McCain (Republican – Arizona) who literally posed for pictures with terrorist leaders in both Libya and Syria, including the now head of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in Libya, Abdul Hakim Belhaj, at the height of the Arab Spring prematurely taunted Moscow and Beijing with threats to bring similarly US-orchestrated chaos in their direction.  Suffice to say, Moscow and Beijing were not only ready for this destabilization, they were prepared to foil it before it so much as reached their borders.

And as momentum stalled, the US and its regional collaborators attempted to justify direct military intervention in Syria first as they did in Libya – by claiming they would be averting a humanitarian disaster and assisting “freedom fighters.”  However with the crimes the US and NATO perpetrated in Libya still fresh in the global public’s minds, this narrative was entirely untenable.

Staged chemical weapon attacks were perpetrated on the outskirts of Damascus, under the nose of UN inspectors in a bid to frame the government of Damascus and again justify direct US military intervention against Syria. Again, the global public, recalling similar fabrications peddled by the West ahead of its ten year invasion and occupation of Iraq along with expert diplomacy by Moscow, averted war.

And while it is increasingly obvious that Al Qaeda and ISIS’ presence in Syria and Iraq is the direct, premeditated result of US-NATO and their regional allies’ sponsorship of both groups, the West has attempted to use them as a pretext for direct military intervention not only in Syria, but again, against the government of Damascus itself.

Cue the Refugees

As this last attempt to justify a final push toward regime change in Syria falters, and as European powers begin deciding whether or not to intervene further in Syria alongside the US, a sudden and convenient deluge of refugees has flooded Europe, almost as if on cue. Scenes like that out of a movie showed hordes of tattered refugees herded along various borders as they apparently appeared out of what the Western media has portrayed as a puff of smoke at Europe’s gates.

In reality, they did not appear out of a puff of smoke. They appeared in Turkey, a NATO member since the 1950’s and one of America’s closest regional allies. Turkey is currently hosting the US military, including special forces and the CIA who have, together with Turkish military and intelligence agencies, been conducting a proxy war on neighboring Syria since 2011.

Turkey has suspiciously maintained a very enthusiastic “open door” policy for refugees, spending inexplicable sums of money and political capital in accommodating them. The Brookings Institution – one of the chief policy think tanks helping engineer the proxy war with Syria – reported in its July 2015 “Order out of Chaos” article, “What Turkey’s open-door policy means for Syrian refugees,” that:

Turkey is now the world’s largest recipient of refugees. Since October 2013, the number of Syrian refugees has increased more than threefold and now numbers almost two million registered refugees.

Brookings also reports that:

The cost has been high to Turkey. Government officials are quick to point out that they have spent over $6 billion on the refugees and complain about the lack of international support.

Brooking details the vast efforts Turkey is undertaking in coordination with Western NGOs to manage the refugees. There is little way that these refugees could suddenly “disappear” and end up in Europe without the Turkish government and more importantly, European governments either knowing about it or being directly involved.

Pawns of War  

Clearly Turkey lacks any altruistic motivation behind its refugee policy. Turkey is one of the chief facilitators of terrorists operating in Syria, and a primary collaborator in NATO’s proxy war against its neighbor. Turkey has allowed literally hundreds of supply trucks a day to cross its borders uninhibited and destined for ISIS territory. Turkey has also been tasked throughout various US policy papers with establishing a “buffer zone” or “safe haven” to move these refugees into, as well as for establishing a Syrian-based stronghold for NATO’s terrorist proxies to launch military operations from. Likely, the refugees were to serve as the initial population of whatever proxy state NATO planned to create with territory it seized and established no-fly-zones over in northern Syria.

Now it appears many of these refugees are instead being rerouted to Europe.
However, not all of the refugees flooding into Europe from Turkey are even from the Syrian conflict. Many are being trafficked first to Turkey from other theaters of NATO operations, including Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as Iraq. It appears that Turkey is serving as a central transit point, not just for terrorists it is feeding into the Syrian conflict, but also for collecting refugees from across MENA and Central Asia, before allowing them to proceed in vast numbers to Europe.

Some reports even indicate that the refugees are receiving direct assistance from the Turkish government itself. The International New York Times’ Greek Kathimerini paper, in an article titled, “Refugee flow linked to Turkish policy shift,” claims (emphasis added):

A sharp increase in the influx of migrants and refugees, mostly from Syria, into Greece is due in part to a shift in Turkey’s geopolitical tactics, according to diplomatic sources. 

These officials link the wave of migrants into the eastern Aegean to political pressures in neighboring Turkey, which is bracing for snap elections in November, and to a recent decision by Ankara to join the US in bombing Islamic State targets in Syria. The analyses of several officials indicate that the influx from neighboring Turkey is taking place as Turkish officials look the other way or actively promote the exodus.

Catastrophes that are meant to look “sudden” and “unexpected” as well as “unstoppable” but are in fact, allowed to unfold within an operational theater completely controlled by the US and NATO constitutes instead a conspiracy – pitting desperate and/or exploited refugees intentionally sent out of Turkey and into Europe, against a manipulated, fearful, and ill-informed Western public.

Also brought into sharp focus, are the string of staged attacks allowed to unfold across Europe – allegedly the work of “ISIS.” In every case without exception, the perpetrators had been well-known to Western intelligence agencies, including the shooters involved in the Paris “Charlie Hebo massacre.” In that incident, all members involved were tracked by French security agencies for nearly 10 years. At least one member was even imprisoned, had traveled afterward to collude with Al Qaeda abroad, and returned to Europe, all while under surveillance. “Coincidentally,” for the 6 months needed to plan and carry out their final act, French security agencies stopped monitoring the group, claiming a lack of resources to do so.

Those familiar with NATO’s Cold War Gladio program can see clearly that the attacks were staged to play into a strategy of tension used to produce fear domestically and build up support for wars abroad.

The recent refugee crisis is being used for precisely this same purpose. In fact, while a false debate is being managed by the Western media and Western political figures to either unconditionally accept the refugees or unconditionally reject them, the only singular narrative both sides are being made to agree on is that instability across MENA is to blame and more bombing is the answer.

Debates over increased, direct military intervention in Syria are now almost entirely predicated not on supporting “freedom fighters,” stopping “WMDs,” or fighting “ISIS,” but instead on how military intervention can help solve the “refugee crisis.”

The main narratives undulating media headlines dismiss both the West’s role in devastating the MENA region, as well as acknowledging the fact that the “refugee crisis” is emanating primarily from within NATO’s borders, not from beyond them. The refugees are pawns, intentionally moved across the game board to illicit a predictable reaction from their hopelessly unskilled opponents – the public. While the social engineers are engaged in a game of three-dimensional chess, the Western public appears to be infantilely eating their checkers.

Considering this unfortunate reality, whatever justifications the West is able to predicate upon the refugee crisis will have to be confronted again by Syria and its allies alone – with the Western public hopelessly defenseless against a conspiracy they have been made accomplices of.

Social Engineering vs. the Inevitable Rot of Empire 

A refugee crisis was inevitable, regardless of the timing and magnitude of any given deluge that may have been created or manipulated by the West. Destroying the planet in pursuit of empire, pillaging nations and hauling away the wealth of the world, inevitably leads to endless streams of victims following their stolen wealth back to the thieves’ den. As an empire expands and the list of its victims expands with it, the number of those an empire is able to fully assimilate versus those who will inevitable overwhelm it eventually tips the balance against the empire’s favor.

Such was the fate of the Roman Empire, which over the course of its decline, had its institutions overwhelmed by peoples it had conquered faster than it could assimilate them.

For the West, it has chosen confrontation rather than cooperation. It has closed economic ties with Russia, alienated China, and wages ceaseless war across the MENA region and Central Asia. It pursues a now exposed campaign of divide and conquer across Southeast Asia augmented with terrorism and political subversion all while neglecting every virtue that ever made it a respected global power to begin with.

How much of the most recent refugee crisis is social engineering versus simply the inevitable rot of empire is difficult to tell – though the fact that social engineers would be tempted to use a vast number of refugees created by their own foreign policy indicates that their ploy in and of itself is indicative of immense, irreversible geopolitical rot.


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