MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2016
Volume 3, Number 24
EIR Daily Alert Service
P.O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390
• 48 Hours To Shape the World’s Future
• The Syrian War Is Winnable
• The Saudi Treason Lobby Exposed
• Robert Parry Blasts John Kerry’s ‘Rush to Judgment’ of Russia for Bombing UN Aid Convoy
• Is the FBI Just Incompetent, or Worse?
• Duterte Visits China and Japan for Economic Development, and To Flank South China Sea Conflict Potential
• UNCTAD Report Warns Blowout of $25 Trillion Emerging Market Debt
• The Hill Column Helps Focus the Wells Fargo Scandal on Glass-Steagall
• China Presents New High-Speed Train for Land-Bridge Service
• China Opens World’s Largest Single-Dish Radio Telescope Today
EDITORIAL
48 Hours To Shape the World’s Future
Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—Lyndon LaRouche was very blunt with colleagues on Sunday, in discussing President Barack Obama’s treasonous veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) last Friday, and the prospects for votes early this week in the Senate and the House to override that veto: “We won, now we must make it stick.”
President Obama’s JASTA veto was an act of treachery against the United States, and particularly against those who lost their lives, their loved ones and their health in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. With that one action, President Obama declared his loyalty to the Anglo-Saudi forces behind the 9/11 attacks, and declared himself an enemy of the United States. Therefore, the upcoming vote in the Senate and then in the House is a test of more than just a vital piece of legislation, that would allow the victims of 9/11 to have their day in court against the Saudi Monarchy, as important as that is, in and of itself. It is a test of whether the United States as a nation is prepared to take a stand against the forces of empire and war at a moment when the very survival of mankind is in question.
If President Obama and his owners in London and Riyadh are able to get away with the crushing of JASTA, after both Houses of Congress voted by unanimous voice consent to pass it into law, what would stand in his way of his launching a war provocation against Russia that could lead to human devastation in a thermonuclear holocaust? Those are, in fact, the stakes in the current showdowns in Syria and Ukraine.
Similarly, Obama is threatening to escalate the conflict in the Asia-Pacific region against North Korea and China, where a similar war danger is already of grave concern to leaders of that region.
Over the weekend, LaRouche called for an all-out mobilization of patriotic forces, to inundate the Congress with phone calls, emails and other communications, demanding that JASTA be passed by an overwhelming veto override vote. JASTA is a pathway to finally getting at the truth behind the Saudi and British hand behind 9/11. It would reinstate the Saudi Monarchy as defendants in U.S. Federal Court in the Southern District of New York and subject them to discovery and trial.
The vote to override the Obama veto of JASTA can take place at any moment when the Senate reconvenes Monday. Every individual, every institution that values the lives lost on 9/11 and at Ground Zero in the rescue efforts that followed, must make sure that the Senate and then the House deliver an overwhelming defeat to Obama, to the Saudi and the British monarchies.
According to recent news account in The Hill and other media, the Saudi Monarchy has poured $9.4 million into the lobbying campaign to defeat JASTA—at the same time they lie and claim they had nothing to do with 9/11. Former elected officials, including Trent Lott and John Breaux, have gone onto the Saudi Monarchy payroll through K Street lobbying firms and have defined themselves as “foreign agents” working for a hostile power. During World War II, Prescott Bush, the father of George H.W. Bush and the grandfather of George W. Bush, was prosecuted under the Trading With the Enemy Act, for his business collusion with Hitler’s Germany. Will today’s traitors be allowed to get away with the same crime of enemy collusion?
The vetoing of JASTA was a “high crime and misdemeanor” mandating President Obama’s immediate impeachment. You cannot attempt to cover up the worst terrorist atrocity to ever occur on U.S. soil and get away with it, particularly as President of the United States, sworn to uphold the Constitution. Given President Obama’s track record of mass-kills, no one can rest easy until JASTA has been passed by an overwhelming majority in both Houses. The next 48 hours may very well determine the fate of the United States and of mankind. This is not a moment to shrink from responsibility.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
The Syrian War Is Winnable
Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—Retired DIA Middle East and human intelligence head Col. W. Patrick Lang reports, in a blog posting yesterday, that indeed, the war in Syria is winnable for the Syrian government and its Russian ally, and has been all along. Lang cites a Washington Post article of yesterday that reports that the Syrian offensive now underway in Aleppo undercuts the idea, embodied in the U.S.-Russian ceasefire agreement, that the war could only be ended by a negotiated settlement, and that Russia shared this view with the Obama Administration.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov offered a starkly different view in remarks to the press in New York, however, arguing, instead, that the only viable partner on the ground against terrorism in Syria is the Syrian army. Little by little, life will make everyone understand that it’s only together that you can fight terrorism, Lavrov said. This, the Post says, “suggests that Russia and Syria still believe the war can be won outright, without recourse to negotiations that the United States has said offer the only way out of the Syrian tragedy.”
To this, Lang writes, “this war was always winnable” and in his opinion, “the Russians have also known it was the truth but have been willing to humor the Borgist [his term for the war party and its allies] foreign policy establishments to learn what possibilities there might be for a general improvement of Russian-U.S. relations.” Now that they’ve been screwed twice by ceasefire agreements that allowed the jihadis to regroup and resupply, “the Russians and their pals seem to have decided to go for the ‘win the war’ option.”
Now, the Syrians and their allies are massing their forces for the purpose of eliminating the rebel-controlled Aleppo pocket, with a war plan that evidently includes an assault from the southeast side of the pocket as well as another assault by Palestinian militias from the northeast side of the pocket. “At the same time there is an unconfirmed report from SOHR in London (pro-rebel) that a Russian force with 3,000 men has been positioned at al-Safir about 12 km SE of the main attacks on the Aleppo pocket,” Lang writes. “If this report is correct this force is well positioned to reinforce the main attack or be used in a defensive move against a rebel effort elsewhere,” he writes.
Lang concludes: “The foreign policy establishment (Borg) in the West wants to believe that war [that is, “big war” where the adversary has the means and the will to fight back] is obsolete as a factor in the story of humanity. People created by poly sci/ IR programs across North America and Western Europe are convinced that they are smarter, and more ‘evolved’ than mere soldiers. They believe that they have inherited the earth and that their cleverness will always prevail over mere force.
“We will now have a demonstration that this is not true.”
The Saudi Treason Lobby Exposed
Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—The Hill and other publications have provided a road map of what can only be properly described as Saudi Arabia’s treason lobby, targeting the U.S. Congress on behalf of the authors of 9/11 and all subsequent jihadist terrorism.
The Hill noted that the Saudis expanded their lobbying operations in Washington to $9.4 million in 2015, and have further increased their spending by hiring a number of new lobbying firms to work for them this year. One big outfit, Squire Patton Boggs, just signed a one-year contract worth $100,000/month, and the firm has assigned two former U.S. Senators—Trent Lott and John Breaux—to head the effort on behalf of the Saudi criminals. That contract, and the other new contract with Glover Park Group, is with the Center for Studies and Media Affairs of the Saudi Royal Court, according to The Hill account. A grand total of seven new firms have been hired in recent months, as the Saudis come to realize that they have become a hate object for the American public and for many in Washington—outside of the Obama White House.
One critical question that will be explored by EIR on Monday morning is whether this Saudi army of influence peddlers have all registered, as required by law, with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Office, which maintains a public registry of foreign agents.
Given that the new contract with Squire Patton Boggs covers the next 12 months, it is fair to say that the Saudis are not confident that they will be able to sustain President Obama’s treasonous veto of JASTA, and that they will be facing a lot more problems in the coming year.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Robert Parry Blasts John Kerry’s ‘Rush to Judgment’ of Russia for Bombing UN Aid Convoy
Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—In an exclusive to Consortium News, investigative journalist and editor Robert Parry reports that the UN withdrew its claim that its Syrian relief convoy to Aleppo was bombed by an airstrike one day before Kerry blamed Russia for the air attack. Parry called out U.S. Secretary of State Kerry for “rushing to judgment” in blaming Russia for the “airstrike” on the UN convoy.
On Sept. 20, a day before Kerry’s denunciation of Russia, the UN revised its initial statement citing an airstrike. Jens Laerke, a humanitarian affairs representative for the UN said, “We are not in a position to determine whether these were in fact airstrikes. We are in a position to say the convoy was attacked.”
In his Sept. 24 article, “Another Kerry Rush to Judgment,” Parry writes that Kerry “lashed out at Russia in a repeat of Kerry’s earlier rushes to judgment against Russia in the cases of the alleged Syrian use of sarin gas in 2013, and the alleged Russian shoot-down of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, which he reports in detail. Parry notes that Kerry denounced Russia Sept. 21 at the UN Security Council in the same venue where George Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the false accusation against Iraq for possessing hidden stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
Ironically, Kerry accused Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of living “in a parallel universe” in denying Russian responsibility.
The Obama Administration was eager to go on a propaganda offensive after the U.S. military strike Sept. 17 which killed 62 Syrian soldiers who were fighting ISIS in Aleppo, Parry points out.
Parry reports that the UN, and according to his sources, CIA analysts, have not ruled out the possibility that the convoy was instead hit by a surface-to-surface missile. Parry says on Sept. 23 a source briefed by U.S. intelligence said that one fear U.S. intelligence has is that the jihadist group, Ahrar al-Sham, which has fought alongside Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, but is deemed to be part of the “moderate” opposition, may have used a U.S.-supplied TOW missile in the attack on the UN convoy. Ahrar al-Sham had a motive for destroying the UN aid convoy, because it objected to the limited ceasefires arranged by Russia and the U.S.
Is the FBI Just Incompetent, or Worse?
Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—Two days before bombs went off in Chelsea, New York and New Jersey, the accused terrorist in those attacks, Ahmad Khan Rahami, was filmed on a cell phone video exploding a “cylindrical” bomb in the back yard of a New Jersey home, states a 13-page FBI document filed by Special Agent Peter Frederick Licata in the Federal charges filed against Rahami on Sept. 20th.
But there is much more evidence of Rahami’s planning of terrorist actions, much of it coming from a notebook found on him when he was arrested after a shootout. In addition, a list of purchases of cell phones and components believed to be part of the bombs, is detailed in the FBI affidavit. The purchases of components, including a known precursor for explosives, were going on for months; Rahami’s trips to Pakistan included stays at a madrassa (religious school) linked to Taliban; and other family members were reportedly posting images of ISIS and jihadis with the words, “I bring the men who desire death.”
Yet the FBI claims it had no reason to suspect him as a terrorist, despite his father’s telling authorities in 2014 that Ahmad Rahami was a “terrorist.”
“The latest evidence is damning,” reported Paul Sperry of the New York Post yesterday. “…A family member’s cellphone video camera was used to film him testing bombs in the back yard. After one cylindrical device explodes, unidentified people are overheard laughing on the recording, an FBI document reveals. A cellphone used as a timer to detonate the Chelsea bomb ‘was subscribed in the name of a family member until 2013,’ ” Sperry adds, citing the FBI complaint.
Commentators in the media are ridiculing the FBI’s description of the terrorist attacks in the United States as “lone wolf” attacks. Rather, these are “known wolf” operations, says “PJ Media” reporter Patrick Poole, who claims to have coined the term. “PJ Media” published a list this week of more than eight deadly FBI failures including: Omar Mateen, the Orlando, FL shooter; Nadir Soofi, the Garland, TX shooter who attacked a right-wingers’ Prophet Mohammed cartoon drawing contest; and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the April 2013 Boston Marathon bomber. All three, like the latest suspect, Ahmad Rahami, had been investigated by the FBI, but then taken off watch lists, or if they weren’t taken off, not watched.
The FBI’s deadly failures make the override of Obama’s veto of JASTA and the release of the underlying FBI and CIA documents in the investigations by the Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission all the more urgent.
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Duterte Visits China and Japan for Economic Development, and To Flank South China Sea Conflict Potential
Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will make official visits to China and Japan in late October, Sputnik reports today.
Duterte told reporters a few days ago that the conflict with China over disputed islands in the South China Sea made no sense, and that he would seek to build closer business ties with China.
Professor Shen Shishun of the Chinese Institute of International Studies told Sputnik that it appeared that Duterte was ready to put the territorial dispute on the back burner and concentrate of promoting trade and investment cooperation with China: “Mending bilateral ties could be one of the high points of Mr. Duterte’s visit to China. Despite the ongoing conflict in the South China Sea, all the ten ASEAN countries are on good terms with Beijing, and their leaders see closer ties with China as key to solving their countries’ economic and social problems,” Professor Shen said.
Washington sees the Philippines as the main element of the anti-China alliance it is now trying to form, says Sputnik. But Duterte has called Obama a “son of a bitch,” and refused to apologize.
Moscow political scientist Vladimir Yevseyev said, “I think the Chinese are already using their big leverage in Manila to gradually squeeze out the Americans. Now it all depends how long [Duterte] is going to stay in power, because the U.S. will apparently be trying hard to destabilize the situation, and get rid of him. This is why [Duterte] needs Beijing’s support, and I think this is why he is going to China,” Yevseyev emphasized, Sputnik reports.
From China, Duterte will visit Japan. Sputnik reports that many believe that the United States could advise Tokyo not to accept Duterte, just as it earlier recommended that the Japanese reconsider planned Foreign Minister-level contacts with China because of the ongoing problems in the South China Sea.
Duterte is scheduled to visit Vietnam Sept. 28-29.
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
UNCTAD Report Warns Blowout of $25 Trillion Emerging Market Debt
Sept. 24 (EIRNS)—Choosing to focus on one aspect of the global $1.5 quadrillion speculative bubble, which is bankrupt in its entirety, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) issued its 2016 annual report warning that some $25 trillion in emerging market debt is facing imminent default. That conclusion, although partial, is certainly true.
The UNCTAD report notes that there was a huge influx of capital to developing markets after the 2008 crisis, because QE and other cheap credit policies in the developed sector created a massive carry trade in search of making a killing abroad. But now, “alarm bells have been ringing over the explosion of corporate debt levels in emerging economies, which now exceed $25 trillion. Damaging deflationary spirals cannot be ruled out,” the report says—a euphemism for a global collapse. Much of this emerging debt may soon become non-performing, they warn: “If the global economy were to slow down more sharply, a significant share of developing-country debt incurred since 2008 could become unpayable and exert considerable pressure on the financial system.”
UNCTAD warns of impending capital flight, devaluations, and collapsing asset prices. Last year, capital outflows from emerging markets reached $656 billion, and in the first quarter of 2016 they were already at another $185 billion.
The Hill Column Helps Focus the Wells Fargo Scandal on Glass-Steagall
Sept. 23 (EIRNS)—Following a Senate Banking Committee hearing on the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal, which was full of populist sound and fury signifying nothing but an approaching election, The Hill on Sept. 22 fortunately ran Cornell Prof. Robert Hockett’s clarifying piece on “Wells Fargo, Glass-Steagall, and ‘Do You Want Fries with That’ Banking.” Hockett made clear what the Senators failed to: That the continuous criminal conduct by the Wall Street megabanks will end only when they are broken up by a restored Glass-Steagall Act.
Hockett emphasized two essential elements of Glass-Steagall regulation, which literally cry out from the Wells Fargo fraud.
First, the commercial banking units of the megabanks have been seized and taken over by the investment bank culture which wants to turn the depositors into “sales points” and the mass of deposits effectively into trading and fees for the investment bank’s account. “Wells Fargo’s goal was for each of its clients to be sold at least eight of these products. But now ask yourself, how could you possibly buy eight distinct products from your local depository institution? What, beyond a checking account, a savings account, a credit card and perhaps one more item, could these be? The answer … is that many of the ‘other products’ are items that Glass-Steagall prohibited banks from having much, if anything, to do with. These include things like life insurance annuities, more general ‘risk management services’ (a term, of course, that embraces derivatives purchases), ‘investment advisory’ services, and similar financial products that used to be offered, not by banks or bank-affiliated entities, but by other, more high-end financial firms that Glass-Steagall expressly segregated from depository institutions.”
Secondly, the complexity of the universal bank structures, together with their constant attempts to get bigger through trading and cross-selling of structured financial products, has made them impossible to manage. Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s claim of being unaware of the large-scale criminal activity for years after it became a dominant pattern at the bank, can only mean two things. Either he was lying about a large criminal enterprise he had willfully run through the bank; or more likely, he and his top management were not actually managing the huge bank’s activities, because it is too big to manage.
“Does it not suggest, in other words, that institutions like Wells Fargo are not only now too big to fail and too big to jail, but also are too big to manage?” Hockett wrote. “It seems to me that Wells Fargo’s own CEO is now committed to this proposition. More importantly, I submit, we should now commit ourselves to the same proposition and reinstate an updated Glass-Steagall regime accordingly.”
SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
China Presents New High-Speed Train for Land-Bridge Service
Sept. 24 (EIRNS)—At the just-concluded “InnoTrans” international transport exhibit in Berlin, China’s company CRRC displayed a model of a new intercontinental high-speed train, “Intercon,” designed for future land-bridge rail services between China and Europe. As the International Railway Gazette reports, CRRC has built on its expertise from various passenger and freight rolling stock businesses, to develop a double-deck trainset which would have passenger accommodation on the upper deck and space for airline-style modular freight containers below. These would be suited to high-value premium products and express packages, rather than conventional containers.
The Intercon trainset would draw on CRRC’s family of “Chinese standard” high- speed trains, of which the 350 kph variant achieved a speed of 420 kph in July during testing on the pilot section of Zhengzhou-Xuzhou high speed line. Five pre-series trainsets are now in commercial operation on the Harbin-Dalian route, and CRRC expects to start series production before the end of this year. Development of a 250 kph variant is currently underway, with the first train expected to roll out next year. CRRC is also showing models of its 200 kph electric passenger locomotive, as well as a medium-speed inter-city EMU and a concept to operate China Railway’s planned suburban networks.
China Opens World’s Largest Single-Dish Radio Telescope Today
Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—China opened the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world today, ushered in with “jubilant national coverage,” New York Times reporters Chris Buckley and Adam Wu wrote from Pingtang County, China. The “Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope,” FAST for short, took five years to construct in Guizhou Province—a rural, mountainous region of China.
The telescope’s dish is made up of 4,450 intricately positioned triangular panels, and has a collecting area of 2.1 million square feet (the area of almost 450 basketball courts), Chris Buckley and Adam Wu report in today’s New York Times.
President Xi Jinping telegraphed a congratulatory message, and said the telescope will help China make “major advances and breakthroughs at the frontier of science,” and called it China’s “eye in the sky.” The New York Times reports that astronomers will use it to map the shape and formation of the universe—the telescope is huge, and has a mobile detector suspended above the dish (it looks like a giant iron wok placed in between mountain tops).
“China isn’t just an economic power; it is also becoming a scientific power. Now we’re racing to catch up and want to recreate the glories of our ancestors by revising our astronomy,” said astrophysicist Zhang Chengmin, of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“Radio astronomy is a very international field,” said Douglas Bock, senior astronomer at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. In Guizhou, the soluble rock covering this area has dissolved and eroded over eons into jutting hills with natural cavities—perfect for holding an “iron wok.” The population is sparse, and the hills are a natural barrier against radio noise and wind that could interfere with instruments “designed to catch whispers deep in space.”
China’s space program plans to send an astronaut to the Moon by 2025 or later, says the Times, and to land an unmanned vehicle on Mars in 2020. China plans to build the world’s biggest particle accelerator, and there may build more radio telescopes in other places, such as Tibet. Press reports say the telescope cost a modest $184 million; a fraction of what the U.S. spends on regime change wars.
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