After Soleimani's killing, Iran fear-mongers are on overdrive

Middle East Eye

Pretend, for a moment, that you’re Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member Mary Anastasia O’Grady. Now pretend that the United States has just bombed, say, Havana. 

Your column on the episode might go something like this: “Though it should have thanked Donald Trump for the favour, the tyrannical, despotic Cuban regime once again displayed its hatred of democracy by condemning the bombing of Cuba’s capital city. 

“Democrats in the US were quick to show their communist colours by opposing the strike, which was also denounced by Hamas in Gaza and assorted Islamic State cells. Iranian proxies in 194 countries threatened retaliation on behalf of the Cuban-Venezuelan-Islamic-narco-jihad terror network. A highly knowledgeable intelligence source, meanwhile, told me that natives of the Pacific Island of Bora Bora were seen waving flags of Fidel Castro and Hassan Nasrallah and distributing cookies in the shape of Ayatollah Khomeini.”

To be sure, O’Grady has rarely met a right-wing pro-imperialist zealot that she didn’t like. Anyone not fully meeting those qualifications is generally assigned to the category of enemy conspirator. 

O’Grady’s January article on Trump’s assassination-by-drone strike of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, did not disappoint. Headlined “Soleimani’s Latin America Terror”, the article asserts that Trump “did Latin America a big favour” by eliminating the Iranian “hero of hemispheric criminality”. As proof of his criminal heroism, “Cuba’s military dictatorship quickly condemned the U.S. action”.

Never mind that said US action was, you know, illegal and a war crime. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Deporting Immigrants to Their Death Is Unconscionable

Jacobin

On February 9, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele deployed dozens of heavily armed soldiers and police inside San Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, a stunt designed to strong-arm legislators into cooperating on a $109 million loan for Bukele’s pet national security project, the Territorial Control Plan. After engaging in an exaggerated bout of prayer, Bukele revealed that god had told him to have “patience” — and so he gave lawmakers an additional week to get their act together.

In a subsequent op-ed for the Miami Herald — penned in response to suggestions that his antics may have been a little antidemocratic — Bukele contended that both El Salvador’s “unchecked violence” and Salvadoran migration to the United States had decreased under his enlightened rule. And things would only improve, he insisted, with his loan, which was “earmarked exclusively to purchase equipment and logistical support for the police and military, who have been neglected for more than thirty years.”

Lest anyone feel too sorry for the Salvadoran security forces, recall that these very forces have for over thirty years done more than their fair share to sustain the violent landscape in El Salvador — from the US-backed right-wing slaughter of the civil war (1980–1992) up to the present era. Consider, for example, Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s recent reminder that “Salvadoran security forces have…committed extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, enforced disappearances, and torture” — all within a context of essentially institutionalized impunity.

The reminder incidentally appears — speaking of Salvadoran migration to the United States — in a report titled “Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse,” which shows how, for many deportees (among other sectors of Salvadoran society), the country is still a place of “unchecked violence.”

The paper draws on 138 cases, between 2013 and 2019, of Salvadorans killed following their expulsion from the United States, as well as more than seventy cases in which deportees were disappeared, sexually assaulted, tortured, or otherwise harmed by gangs, security forces, or other actors. But given El Salvador’s position as one of the homicide capitals of the world — where crimes frequently go unreported — the problem is undoubtedly more vast.

Often, Salvadorans are sent from the United States back to the very violent threats they were trying to get away from in the first place. There’s the case of Camila Díaz Córdova, a transgender woman slain by police in 2019 after unsuccessfully seeking asylum in the States. There’s “Angelina N.,” who fled abuse by her husband and threats from a gang member — the same gang member who raped her after she was deported and who threatened to murder her father and daughter. And there’s “Javier B.,” who fled gang recruitment in El Salvador only to be found dead shortly after his forced return. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Diversions of Empire: Narco-jihad in the U.S. Backyard

Current Affairs

On the last day of July, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (better known as ICE) tweeted out an alert for a “most wanted fugitive.” The target was one Tareck El Aissami, Venezuela’s Minister of Industry and National Production, whom the United States has branded a “specially designated narcotics trafficker” (“SDNT”). The tweet was accompanied by the hashtag #MostWantedWednesdays, lest anyone think this was not some serious shit. Twitter users were warned to “not attempt to apprehend [the] subject” on their own.

Notorious right-wing news site Breitbart quickly grabbed the ball and took off with it, proclaiming El Aissami the “Hezbollah ‘bag man’ running Venezuela’s oil industry.” The source of this particular allegation was the self-styled “terrorism expert” Dr. Vanessa Neumann, one of a coterie of characters currently dedicated to exploiting a lucrative niche: the forcible fusion of America’s international enemies into a single, terrifying monster, whose power and reach successfully provide a justification for U.S. militarism worldwide. Call it #WhackjobWednesdays(AndEveryOtherDay).

This strategy is not new. During the Cold War, the United States needed to portray communism as a direct threat to the nation in order to justify its policy of arming a cavalcade of right-wing dictators and death squads from El Salvador to Argentina. Back then, the communist monster was said to manifest itself in various ways—like the purported Sandinista-Palestinian-Soviet-Cuban-Iranian-Libyan-East German-Bulgarian-North Korean scheme to attack the United States from Nicaragua, dutifully exposed by Ronald Reagan in 1986.

Nowadays, some of the old nemeses remain, but the monster has shapeshifted to reflect today’s imperial interests in the so-called U.S. “backyard” and beyond. With both the Iranian government and Lebanon’s Hezbollah occupying a prominent position in U.S. crosshairs, what better way to help validate the brutal sanctions on Iran, U.S.-backed Israeli bellicosity, and other American machinations in the Middle East than by visualizing the Iranian-Hezbollah duo right on America’s doorstep? Even better when you can link them to Venezuela, or some other thorn in the side of empire.

Let’s start with the above-named “terrorism expert”  Vanessa Neumann, a Caracas-born writer, political theorist, wealthy socialite, (and Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend), whose CV now also includes service as the “Official Representative of Pres. Juan Guaidó to the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, and the International Maritime Organization.” (Guaidó, of course, is the politician who spontaneously anointed himself leader of Venezuela in January 2019, but who has not yet managed to dispense with the actual Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, despite financial and other encouragement from the United States.)

Neumann’s LinkedIn profile defines her as an “entrepreneuse” (seriously) “with extensive relationships to identify reliable partners and bridge relationships across Western Hemisphere industry and governments.” She also served the pre-Chávez Venezuelan oil industry, in addition to doing other cool things like being an “academic reviewer for the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) teaching text on counterinsurgency in Colombia.” This year, her entrepreneuse-ship landed her in the spotlight at the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, where she argued against the Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Act on the grounds that Venezuela was “facing a massive starvation—that rivals that of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Darfur.” She also claimed that continued unrest would cause Venezuelans to flee the country, and those escaping citizens were likely to join up with ISIS in Trinidad and Tobago. “We [Venezuelans] have already been invaded,” Neumann declared, and “our slaughter is at the behest of nefarious foreign powers.” Hence, she argued, the United States should permit military action in Venezuela, because such “international assistance” could help wrest “territorial control” away from a bevy of “non-state armed groups” including the Colombian paramilitaries FARC and ELN as well as Hezbollah. 

In a May article for Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya English website, Neumann threw herself wholeheartedly into her position as Monsterfinder-General, asserting that Maduro had allowed the finance department of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to become a “money laundering mechanism for everyone from Iran to the FARC to Russian organized crime.” In particular, Neumann emphasized the “blood ties” that bound Hezbollah to Venezuela, in the form of “bag man” and SDNT Tareck El Aissami, who is of Syrian-Lebanese heritage (need we any further proof?!). Given—as Neumann insists—that Hezbollah and Venezuela are clearly partners in the drug trade, there’s a danger that Hezbollah would “seek to keep Maduro in situ through asymmetric or terrorist operations.”

But is there actually any evidence that Hezbollah is involved with drugs in Venezuela? READ MORE AT CURRENT AFFAIRS.

The Ministry of Make Believe

El Faro

What do you call it when the president of a country deploys heavily armed soldiers and police inside the Legislative Assembly, threatens to dissolve the Assembly if lawmakers don’t do as he says, and then claims to have conferred directly with god? 

If you’re El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele—who did all of the above and more on February 9—you call it “respect[ing] the separation of powers.” This, at least, is what he argued in a February 16 letter to the editor of the Washington Post, while also cordially informing American readers that “anyone who suggested I was using our security forces for anything other than to protect the safety and integrity of the National Assembly is misreporting the truth.” 

What better way to conduct damage control than by spontaneously rewriting events?

The spectacle Bukele staged in the Assembly was meant to coerce Salvadoran legislators into cooperating in his pursuit of a $109 million loan to finance the third phase of his Territorial Control Plan, which Bukele believes would—using the same failed strategies that have been flung at the wall in administrations past—increase security, reduce gang violence, and essentially make Bukele the savior of El Salvador.

And while god is apparently on board with the arrangement—recommending only that Bukele have “patience”—other powers that be were not so receptive to the show of force. United States ambassador to El Salvador Ronald Johnson, for example, unleashed some admonishing tweets about the importance of democracy and respect for the rule of law, and the Washington Post editorial board condemned Bukele’s “alarming violation of democratic norms.”

Hence Bukele’s rebuttal in the Post, titled “As El Salvador’s president, I respect the separation of powers.” According to this short and sweet assault on logic and reality, the deployment of the military and police was necessary because “[t]he safety of the National Assembly was a concern, as tens of thousands of Salvadorans were outside the National Assembly calling for the full removal of its members.”

This is a bold statement, no doubt, from the very character who summoned said crowd to the National Assembly to do precisely that. READ MORE AT EL FARO.

Colombia and Honduras: The US-Israeli 'counterterrorism' connection

Middle East Eye

In January, Colombia and Honduras designated Lebanon’s Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.

The move came in the context of a counterterrorism meeting in the Colombian capital of Bogota, attended by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The Jerusalem Post noted that Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “campaigned in recent months to have more countries in the region sanction Hezbollah”.

The Post quoted Netanyahu on the “important step” the two nations had made in “join[ing] Israel and the US in our fight against global terror”.

And yet, it wasn’t so much a “step” as a continuation of business as usual; after all, Colombia and Honduras have long been joined at the hip with the US-Israeli duo in major global “fights”.

In the 1980s, for example, Honduras served as a launchpad for the US terrorisation of Nicaragua, a key battleground in the all-important war on communism. The Central American nation also got to host its very own CIA-trained death squad, which - as the Baltimore Sun explained - “terrorised Honduras” for much of the decade.

As luck would have it, Israel was also involved at the time in arming and otherwise assisting the repressive Honduran regime, partially as a favour to the US.

In Colombia, too, Israel abetted rightwing terror: the late Carlos Castano - who after attending training in Israel in 1983 went on to become a founding father of modern Colombian paramilitarism - credited the Israelis as his inspiration for the whole paramilitary thing.

Flash forward to more recent years, and it’s clear that Colombia and Honduras are highly qualified candidates for the US-Israeli model of fighting wars of terror, disguised as wars on terror, which have devastated human populations from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine and beyond. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Child suicide is a symptom of our traumatised world

Al Jazeera English

In early January, as the world waited to see whether the United States's addiction to carnage and destruction would lead to all-out war with Iran, US congresswoman Ilhan Omar remarked: "[E]very time I hear conversations around war, I find myself being stricken with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]."

At the age of eight, Omar fled war-torn Somalia for Kenya, where she spent four years in a refugee camp. Her PTSD comment generated mockery and rage from the usual suspects in the US political establishment and commentariat; apparently, US soldiers deserve a monopoly on this particular disorder and refugees need not apply.

But in an age of unprecedented levels of forced human displacement - in which, according to the UN Refugee Agency, over half of the world's refugees are children - the prevalence of psychological trauma among refugee youth should be an issue of utmost urgency for anyone concerned with, you know, the future.

Take, for example, the severely overcrowded Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, currently home to some 7,000 migrant children. In 2018, reports emerged of children as young as 10 attempting suicide; more recently, a psychologist in the camp warned that preschool-aged kids were banging their heads against walls and pulling out their hair, among other behaviours, while children as young as seven said they wanted to die. 

Such camps serve as incubators for trauma - which for many children is cumulative and multifaceted, encompassing traumatising experiences in the home country, traumatising experiences during migration, and the trauma of being trapped in unsanitary and unsafe camps that offer no space for psychological recovery or hope. Obviously, having parents who are themselves traumatised can also have serious repercussions on a child's mental health. 

Caoimhe Butterly - an Irish trainee psychotherapist and director of the award-winning documentary The Border, who has spent six years visiting refugee camps in Greece, Calais and the Balkans - told me that children in the camps are increasingly "expressing distress, despair and hyper-vigilance or self-harm" as well as "withdrawal and shut-down".

Children are the "casualties of policies of containment and the cruelty of indefinite limbo", she said, and the "cognitive, emotional and physiological impacts of a system that is in itself re-traumatising are resulting in a profound crisis". READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Country Where Having a Miscarriage Can Land You in Prison

Jacobin

One recent night in San Salvador, I was driving through some of the more notorious gang neighborhoods in the area with a photojournalist friend, who was scouting for homicides. As we turned down a street in the municipality of Ilopango, my friend pointed out a looming structure — the Ilopango women’s prison — where, it turns out, a number of women convicted of abortion-related crimes are incarcerated.

El Salvador has some of the most draconian abortion laws on the planet. Since 1998, the procedure has been totally banned — including in cases of rape and incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger. Even having a miscarriage can land you behind bars. The charge is often “aggravated homicide,” which can carry a sentence of up to fifty years (ironic considering San Salvador is among the world’s murder capitals — you’d think the police would have enough actual homicides to deal with).

A new documentary titled En Deuda con Todas — produced by the Galician organization Agareso — offers a striking glimpse at the war on reproductive and human rights in El Salvador. One protagonist is Teodora Vásquez, released from prison in 2018 after her thirty-year sentence was commuted to ten. Her crime? “Killing” her newborn by fainting during labor. She was awaiting the arrival of an ambulance and awoke to find her baby dead.

Then there’s twenty-six-year-old Sara Rogel, a chipper, ponytailed inmate at a prison in the Salvadoran department of Sonsonate, who is six years and four months into her own three-decade sentence for “aggravated homicide” — this one for slipping and falling in her home while pregnant. Requiring urgent medical attention, Rogel recounts how the police showed up and attempted to handcuff her before the surgeon was even done.

In fact, medics are frequently the ones to alert Salvadoran law enforcement to obstetrical complications potentially qualifying as prosecutable offenses. Failure to do so can mean violating the Salvadoran constitution — Article 1 of the document recognizes human life as beginning from the very moment of conception. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.