The #Government that #Honors #MLK with a #NationalHoliday #KilledHim

How Mercenaries and Advisers Fight the Wars the UK Won’t Own
By Paul Rogers, January 20, 2020
The Bahraini repression of dissent in 2011-12 caused controversy around the world, but the British government – then a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition – only mildly condemned it and the media in western Gulf states scarcely mentioned it. Behind the scenes, though, UK armed forces personnel were clearly helping the Saudis support the Bahraini government’s repression, just as they have been taken part more recently in Saudi actions in Yemen. Read more...

General Haftar Still Holds All the Cards After Berlin’s Libya SummitBy Andrew Korybko, January 20, 2020
Berlin’s Libya summit ended without any real changes to the status quo despite all relevant foreign parties to that country’s civil war superficially agreeing to some key points such as the need to abide by the arms embargo and commit to a ceasefire as soon as possible, meaning that General Haftar still holds all the cards so the fate of the country is ultimately his and his GCC+ patrons’ to decide, though Turkey will do its utmost to deter them from making another military push on the capital. Read more...

The People of Colombia Are Cracking Up the Walls of War and Authoritarianism
By Justin Podur, January 20, 2020

In Colombia, after winning the runoff in 2018, President Duque may have felt that he had a mandate to enact right-wing policies, which in Colombia have usually included new war measures in addition to the usual austerity. But combining pension cuts with betraying the peace process was simply stealing too much from the future: Young people joined the November 21 protests in huge numbers (the lowest estimates are 250,000). Read more...

“Orders to Kill” Dr. Martin Luther King: The Government that Honors MLK with a National Holiday Killed Him
By Edward Curtin, January 20, 2020
Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Forty-eight years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression , and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects. And King’s message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and urging Americans to make it “a day of service.” Needless to say, such service does not include non-violent war resistance or protesting a decadent system of economic injustice. Read more...

The Roots of American Demonization of Shi’a Islam
By Pepe Escobar, January 20, 2020
Washington had been deploying a Long War even before the concept was popularized by the Pentagon in 2001, immediately after 9/11: it’s a Long War against Iran. It started via the coup against the democratically elected government of Mosaddegh in 1953, replaced by the Shah’s dictatorship. The whole process was turbo-charged over 40 years ago when the Islamic Revolution smashed those good old Cold War days when the Shah reigned as the privileged American “gendarme of the (Persian) Gulf”. Read more...

Pompeo Claims to Know Nothing, but Can We Believe Him?
By Steven Sahiounie, January 20, 2020
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated in a Friday radio interview that he had not been previously aware that former US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch had been under surveillance in Ukraine. “Until this story broke, the best of my recollection, I’d never heard of this at all,” said Pompeo. During the interview, Pompeo failed to defend Yovanovitch or to express concern about the alleged stalking of a US diplomat. Read more...

NAFTA 1.0: Was It a “Legal Agreement”? One of Its Signatories Linked to Organized Crime. And What About NAFTA 2.0?
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 19, 2020
There is evidence that one of the signatories of NAFTA 1.0 had links to organized crime. The Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortiari had pervasive family ties to the Mexican Drug Cartel. In turn, the President of the United States had a long standing personal relationship to the Salinas family. While this was known and documented prior to the signing of the agreement in 1992, the information was withheld. It was not an object of legislative debate nor was it revealed to the broader public until AFTER the official launching of NAFTA on January 1st 1994. Read more...