Wednesday, December 25, 2019


Behind the U.S. anti-China campaign

The facts about Xinjiang

By Sara Flounders 
December 18, 2019 


In order to evaluate the claims of massive human rights violations of the Uyghurs, an ethnic and religious minority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, it is important to know a few facts.

Xinjiang Province in the far western region of China is an arid, mountainous and still largely underdeveloped region. Xinjiang has significant oil and mineral reserves and is currently China’s largest natural-gas-producing region.
It is home to a number of diverse ethnic groups, including Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tajiks, Hui and Han peoples. 
Xinjiang borders five Central Asian countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, where more than 1 million U.S. troops and even more mercenaries, contractors and secret agents have operated over four decades in an endless U.S. war.
What is happening in Xinjiang today must be seen in the context of what has been happening throughout Central Asia.
Xinjiang is a major logistics center for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Xinjiang is the gateway to Central and West Asia, as well as to European markets.
The Southern Xinjiang Railway runs to the city of Kashgar in China’s far west where it is now connected to Pakistan’s rail network under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project of the BRI.
The U.S. government is deeply hostile to this vast economic development project and is doing all it can to sabotage China’s plans. This campaign is part of the U.S. military’s “Pivot to Asia,” along with naval threats in the South China Sea and support for separatist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet. 

     Map features Central Asia and China, including Xinjiang.

No U.N. report on Xinjiang
The U.S. and its corporate media charge that the Chinese government has rounded up 1 million people, mainly Uyghurs, into concentration camps. News reports cite the United Nations as their source.
This was disputed in a detailed investigative report by Ben Norton and Ajit Singh titled, “No, the UN did not report China has ‘massive internment camps’ for Uighur Muslims.” (The Grayzone.com, Aug. 23, 2018) They expose how this widely publicized claim is based entirely on unsourced allegations by a single U.S. member, Gay McDougall, on an “independent committee” with an official sounding name: U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed that no U.N. body or official has made such a charge against China.

CIA/NED-funded ‘human rights’
After this fraudulent news story received wide coverage, it was followed by “reports” from the Washington-based Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. This group receives most of its funds from U.S. government grants, primarily from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy, a major source of funding for U.S. “regime change” operations around the world.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders shares the same Washington address as Human Rights Watch. The HRW has been a major source of attacks on governments targeted by the U.S., such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria and China. The network has long called for sanctions against China.
The CHRD’s sources include Radio Free Asia, a news agency funded for decades by the U.S. government. The World Uighur Congress, another source of sensationalized reports, is also funded by NED. The same U.S. government funding is behind the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association.
The authors of the Grayzone article cite years of detailed IRS filing forms to back up their claim. They list millions of dollars in generous government funding — to generate false reports.
This whole network of supposedly impartial civil society groups, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks and news sources operates under the cover of “human rights” to promote sanctions and war.

CIA-funded terror
Central Asia has experienced the worst forms of U.S. military power.
Beginning in 1979, the CIA, operating with the ISI Pakistani Intelligence Service and Saudi money, funded and equipped reactionary Mujahedeen forces in Afghanistan to bring down a revolutionary government there. The U.S. cultivated and promoted extreme religious fanaticism, based in Saudi Arabia, against progressive secular regimes in the region. This reactionary force was also weaponized against the Soviet Union and an anti-imperialist Islamic current represented by the Iranian Revolution.
For four decades, the CIA and secret Pakistan ISI forces in Afghanistan sought to recruit and train Uyghur mercenaries, planning to use them as a future terror force in China. Chechnyans from Russia’s Caucasus region were recruited for the same reason. Both groups were funneled into Syria in the U.S. regime-change operation there. These fanatical religious forces, along with other small ethnic groups, formed the backbone of the Islamic State group (IS) and Al-Qaida.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center bombing, the very forces that U.S. secret operations had helped to create became the enemy.
Uyghurs from Xinjiang were among the Al-Qaida prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo for years without charges. Legal appeals exposed that the Uyghur prisoners were being held there under some of the worst conditions in solitary confinement.

U.S. wars dislocate region
The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the massive U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 created shockwaves of dislocation. Social progress, education, health care and infrastructure were destroyed. Sectarian and ethnic division was encouraged to divide opposition to U.S. occupations. Despite promises of great progress, the U.S. occupations sowed only destruction.
In this long war, U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were notorious. The CIA used “enhanced interrogation” techniques — torture — and secret rendition to Guantanamo, Bagram and the Salt Pit in Afghanistan. These secret prisons have since been the source of many legal suits.
According to U.N. investigations, by 2010 the U.S. held more than 27,000 prisoners in over 100 secret facilities around the world. Searing images and reports of systematic torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan surfaced. 

Exposing coverup of war crimes
In July 2010 WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 classified U.S./NATO reports on the war in Afghanistan.
In October of that year, a massive leak of 400,000 military videos, photos and documents exposed, in harrowing detail torture, summary executions and other war crimes. Army intelligence analyst former Private Chelsea Manning released this damning material to WikiLeaks.
Based on the leaked documents, the U.N. chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, called on U.S. President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of these crimes, including abuse, torture, rape and murder committed against the Iraqi people following the U.S. invasion and occupation.
The leaked reports provided documentary proof of 109,000 deaths — including 66,000 civilians. This is seldom mentioned in the media, in contrast to the highly publicized and unsourced charges now raised against China.

Prosecuting whistle blowers
The CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy pays handsomely for unsourced documents making claims of torture against China, while those who provided documentary proof of U.S. torture have been treated as criminals.  
John Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA between 1990 and 2004 and confirmed widespread use of systematic torture, was prosecuted by the Obama administration for revealing classified information and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Chelsea Manning’s release of tens of thousands of government documents confirming torture and abuse, in addition to horrific photos of mass killings, have led to her continued incarceration. 
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is imprisoned in Britain and faces deportation to the U.S. for his role in disseminating these documents.

Rewriting history
How much of the coverage of Xinjiang is intended to deflect world attention from the continuing crimes of U.S. wars — from Afghanistan to Syria?
In 2014 a Senate CIA Torture Report confirmed that a torture program, called “Detention and Interrogation Program,” had been approved by top U.S. officials. Only a 525-page Executive Summary of its 6,000 pages was released, but it was enough to confirm that the CIA program was far more brutal and extensive than had previously been released. 

Mercenaries flood into Syria
The U.S. regime-change effort to overturn the government of Syria funneled more than 100,000 foreign mercenaries and fanatical religious forces into the war. They were well-equipped with advanced weapons, military gear, provisions and paychecks. 
One-third of the Syrian population was uprooted in the war. Millions of refugees flooded into Europe and neighboring countries.
Beginning in 2013, thousands of Uyghur fighters were smuggled into Syria to train with the extremist Uyghur group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party. Fighting alongside Al-Qaida and Al-Nusra terror units, these forces played key roles in several battles.
Reuters, Associated Press and Newsweek all reported that up to 5,000 Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs from Xinjiang were fighting in various “militant” groups in Syria. 
According to Syrian media, a transplanted Uyghur colony transformed the city of al Zanbaka (on the Turkish border) into an entrenched camp of 18,000 people. Many of the Uyghur fighters were smuggled to the Turkish-Syrian border area with their families. Speaking Turkish, rather than Chinese, they relied on the support of the Turkish secret services.

China follows a different path
China is determined to follow a different path in dealing with fanatical groups that are weaponized by religious extremism. China’s action comes after terror attacks and explosives have killed hundreds of civilians in busy shopping areas and crowded train and bus stations since the 1990s.
China has dealt with the problem of religious extremism by setting up large-scale vocational education and training centers. Rather than creating worse underdevelopment through bombing campaigns, it is seeking to engage the population in education, skill development and rapid economic and infrastructure development.
Terrorist attacks in Xinjiang have stopped since the reeducation campaigns began in 2017.

Two worldviews of Xinjiang
In July of this year, 22 countries, most in Europe plus Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, sent a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council criticizing China for mass arbitrary detentions and other violations against Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. The statement did not include a single signature from a Muslim-majority state.
Days later, a far larger group of 34 countries — now expanded to 54 from Asia, Africa and Latin America — submitted a letter in defense of China’s policies. These countries expressed their firm support of China’s counterterrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang.
More than a dozen member countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the U.N. signed the statement.
A further statement on Oct. 31 to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly explained that a number of diplomats, international organizations, officials and journalists had traveled to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counterterrorism and deradicalization. 
“What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the [Western] media,” said the statement. 


Monday, December 23, 2019

Some recent postings from my Facebook: 


Trump's Impeachment, Ukraine, and War With Russia

Tasha Levine: “...But you won’t hear any of this in the political frenzy that surrounds our impeachment hearings. It’s all about America. And as far as our political establishment is concerned, Ukraine is just a forward operating base full of Ukrainians eager to die to keep us safe from the Russians...”







Illegal surveillance of Assange’s conversations with his lawyers must not be used in court








26 Before-and-After Pics Reveal What War Has Done to Syria

From MICHAEL ZHANG

“...Ancient locations that are categorized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO have been reduced to rubble through looting, burning, and destruction...”

Contrary to the false mainstream narrative, Syria is NOT a ‘civil war’; it is a brutally ‘uncivil’ war of foreign aggression and illegal regime change for imperialist interests, led by the gangsters of the US Empire and its terrorist proxies. Australia, to its shame, is an active accomplice in this criminality!







US Fueling Terrorism in China

Tony Cartalucci: "The West’s human rights racket has once again mobilized – this time supposedly in support of China’s Uyghur minority centered primarily in the nation’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, China.

...China’s Uyghur population is a target of foreign efforts to radicalize and recruit militants to fight proxy wars both across the globe, and within China itself.

...omitted is any mention of systematic terrorism both inside China and abroad carried out by radicalized Uyghur militants. With this information intentionally and repeatedly omitted, Chinese efforts to confront and contain rampant extremism are easily depicted as “repressive.”…

Within China, Uyghur militants have carried out serial terrorist attacks… Abroad, Uyghur-linked terrorists are believed to be responsible for the 2015 Bangkok bombing which targeted mainly Chinese tourists and left 20 dead.

The bombing followed Bangkok’s decision to send Uyghur terror suspects back to China to face justice – defying US demands that the suspects be allowed to travel onward to Turkey.

In Turkey, they were to cross the border into Syria where they would train, be armed, and join terrorists including Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in the West’s proxy war against Damascus and its allies…

The US National Endowment for Democracy’s own website admits to meddling all across China and does so so extensively that it felt the necessity to break down its targeting of China into several regions including mainland, Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang/East Turkistan…

By omitting the very real terrorist problem facing China in Xinjiang as well as elsewhere around the world where state-sponsored Uyghur terrorists are deployed and fighting, and by depicting China’s campaign to confront extremism as “repression,” the West aims at further inflaming violent conflict in Xinjiang and jeopardizing human life – not protecting it…

Uyghur extremism has become a central component in Washington’s struggle with Beijing over influence in Asia and in a much wider sense, globally…

...the US has already openly wielded terrorism as a geopolitical tool everywhere from Libya where the nation was divided and destroyed by NATO-led military operations in the air and terrorist-led troops on the ground, to Syria where the US is all but openly aiding and abetting Al Qaeda and its affiliates cornered in the northern governorate of Idlib, and even in Yemen where another AP investigation revealed the US and its allies were cutting deals with Al Qaeda militants to augment Western and Persian Gulf ground-fighting capacity….

Exposing and confronting these appendages of Western geopolitics, and the Western corporate-financier interests themselves directing their collective agenda is key to diminishing the dangerous influence they have and all the violence, conflict, division, and destruction they seek to employ as they have already done in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.”









Pardon Assange and Snowden

Jacob G. Hornberger: 

The Washington Post has just released a trove of previously secret records documenting that the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been based on a multitude of lies and deception...

But that’s also what Julian Assange and Edward Snowden did. 

They didn’t publish any lies either. They simply published records that revealed the truth about the deep state. That’s why the deep state has condemned and vilified them as bad people, even as traitors — because they revealed the truth...

Why should anyone who publishes the truth about the deep state be condemned or punished?
Why shouldn’t the condemnation and punishment instead be leveled at the entity that engages in sordid, dark-side practices and the intentional utterance of lies and deception, especially with respect to something as important as war?...

The ones who deserve condemnation and punishment are those who engage in sordid, dark-side practices and who then cover it up and lie about it.
Assange and Snowden deserve immediate pardons, which would enable them to be released from prison and exile and to begin resuming their normal lives...”








'Blinding the truth': Israeli snipers target Gaza protesters in the eyes


Tareq Hajjaj and Pam Bailey: “...According to Dr Alqedra, most people with eye injuries from the Great Return March are journalists or photographers. One of them is Sami Musran 35, a photographer who works for Al-Aqsa TV...
Sami says he had received several calls from Israeli officers warning him not to take photos at the Great Return March...

"Forty times, my Facebook account was hacked or deleted for me, and I received death threats as well," he says. "But I decided to keep on with my work to reveal the Israeli crimes against unarmed Palestinians who participate in the march...

Israel wants to blind the eyes of the truth by sending messages to photographers saying we will hit your eyes to make you stop taking photos," he says. "But we do not surrender."






Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA: an Interview with Douglas Valentine

by Heidi Boghosian and Michael Steven Smith • November 21, 2019

"Douglas Valentine is an investigator and author with a rare and tenacious approach toward research. His writing results in uniquely incisive and revealing books on the dark side of U.S. intelligence activities and the National Security State. 

In this bombshell interview, Valentine ups the ante in his decades-long campaign to expose the agency for what it is: "an instrument of the rich, political elite [that] does their dirty business."

His latest book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, shines a pervasive searchlight on the agency’s destructive covert activities in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

In this interview, Valentine airs the dirty CIA laundry from plausible deniability, paramilitary wars, drug trafficking and sabotage to blackmail, betrayal, propaganda, political corruption, assassination, operation GLADIO, class interests of the CIA establishment, Donald Trump, the Mueller Report, the Bidens, and much more.

Valentine will remind you—to paraphrase the late William Blum—that no matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you think you are, what the CIA is actually doing is always worse than you imagine."








See how global warming has changed the world since your childhood

By Tim Leslie, Joshua Byrd, and Nathan Hoad

"Global warming is already changing the world before our eyes — let’s see what has happened in your lifetime."

Enter your birth year, and watch this active presentation.

By Tim Leslie, Joshua Byrd, and Nathan Hoad
This is part of a series from the ABC News Story Lab on climate change.








Syria: the War, the Loss, and the Silence
Western moral decay


Jan Oberhausen: “...Western, Saudi, Turkish and the Gulf States supported innumerable illegal, destructive and mainly foreign terrorist groups with the goal to undermine the legitimate Syrian government and destabilise the country – as had been recommended by US ambassador William Roebuck in Damascus as far back as in 2006...

Every war is two wars: the one on the ground and the one in the media. By now, both have fallen apart...

You begin to understand why Western media, politicians and experts have virtually avoided every mention of international law – according to which everything done by the NATO countries and their regional friends, such as Saudi Arabia, was illegal, an act of aggression on sovereign Syria and never had even the faintest mandate of the UN...

War and other violence is a boomerang.
The silence on Syria offers roaring evidence of Western moral decay, media deception and political decline.

You cannot repeatedly do evil things – radical evil things – to countries, peoples, cultures and nature – without, over time, harming and undermining yourself, your own strength, identity and core values.
There were lessons to have been learned since Vietnam...”







Chemical Weapons Watchdog Is Just an American Lap Dog

Scott Ritter: “...If an organization like the OPCW can be used at will by the U.S., the UK and France to trigger military attacks intended to support regime-change activities in member states, then it no longer serves a useful purpose to the international community it ostensibly serves.

To survive as a credible entity, the OPCW must open itself to a full-scale audit of its activities in Syria by an independent authority...

Anything short of this leaves the OPCW, an organization that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its contributions to world peace, permanently stained by the reality that it is little more than a lap dog of the United States, used to promote the very conflicts it was designed to prevent.”