ANNOYING: SADA’S Attempt To Explain Importation of Maize Seed

Clement Kofi Humado, Agric Minister

By Kwesi Pratt, Jnr.

A statement issued by the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) on the importation of maize seed from Brazil and South Africa is more annoying than explanatory.

SADA does not deny that 350 tons of maize seed has been lying in a warehouse in the Upper West region for three long years.

 It also does not deny that maize seed produced locally is far cheaper than what is imported into the country from Brazil and South Africa.

SADA is absolutely silent on the fact that locally produced maize seed has a far higher yield than what is imported.

The authority simply hides behinds technicalities and official processes to create the false impression that the story as originally carried by “The Ghanaian Times” is a complete fabrication without any foundation.

Part of the SADA statement reads “As part of the normal procurement process, SADA advertised for bidders to apply and procure hybrid maize seeds (Seeds with high yield potential) for distribution to farmers in the Northern Savannah Ecological Zone (NSEZ) in 2012.

“This is a normal procurement process that has to be undertaken to ensure transparency of the process and to guarantee that seed specifications are met. This is a competitive process and at no point in time did Seed Producers Association of Ghana (SeedPAG) send an application to SADA or made specific enquiries from SADA  to see if they could  be a caveat for them to be treated separately given their situation at the time”.

 This quotation from the SADA statement makes undoubtedly clear that the Authority was directly involved in the process of procuring maize seed for distribution to farmers. Indeed, the only reason it provides for not purchasing locally produced maize seed is that seedPAG did not declare its interest in the competition amongst different companies for the supply of maize seed to local famers.

Can we ask, whether SADA itself is not duty bound by its own mandate to find out the availability of maize seed locally before it jumps into any procurement processes?

The claim that SeedPAG did not express any interest in the procurement process cannot be sufficient justification for importing more expensive maize seed of inferior quality from anywhere.

SADA claims that “at no point in time (did it give) assurances to SeedPAG to purchase maize seed produced from the group as alleged by the Upper West correspondent of the Ghanaian Times.

This claim is especially shameful and reveals that SADA is not alive to its mandate. The Authority ought to have given that assurance to the local seed producers as a means of encouraging the local production of maize seed. At the very least local production would boost agriculture and contribute to the creation of jobs in the Savannah zone. That SADA by its own admission failed to give that assurance is an indictment.

SADA again claims that it started its agricultural programmes “only in late 2011 and not 2010” and therefore it cannot be held responsible for the marketing difficulties of maize seed producers dating back three years.

 This is also very strange. SADA itself admits that in 2012 it was involved in the purchase of maize seeds and farmers were supplied with maize seed. The disgusting fact is not about when the local maize seed was produced or when SADA started its agricultural programmes. What is worrying is that in 2012 imported maize seed of a lower quality than locally produced maize seed was supplied to farmers with the involvement of SADA.

It is significant that SADA does not deny that it cost GHȻ18 if it had been bought locally.

The Insight is still insisting on a full scale enquiry into this scandal and all officials found to have been negligent in the performance of their duties should be shown the exit.

Editorial

A SAD STORY

Yesterday, we published the very sad story of Mr. Peter Nkum, a 70 year old tailor and farmer from Breman Brakwa whose feet were roasted by his own nieces.

The feet of Mr Nkum are rotting away and he is in extreme pain.

The problem is that his family is unable to bear the medical expenses and some very strange herbs are being used in his treatment.

If Mr. Nkum does not get urgent medical attention he may lose his feet or even die.

The Insight is appealing to the general public to come to the aid of an old man who is nothing more than the victim of ignorance.

We can do a philanthropic duty to save the life of an old man.

Please let’s do it.

The eldest son of Mr. Nkum can be contacted on telephone number 0264987191

SADA STATEMENT ON IMPORT OF MAIZE SEEDS!

President John Mahama

Following a front page report on the Wednesday, June 5, 2013 edition of the Ghanaian Times captioned: “Tonnes of Maize Seed Locked Up….As SADA imports from Brazil”, we wish to state categorically that per the mandate of the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), the Authority at no point in time imported maize seeds from South Africa and Brazil as purported by the newspaper. The story was full of fabrication, untruth and very speculative to begin with.

To set the records straight, SADA has not either directly or indirectly engaged any entity or group of persons whatsoever to import maize seeds from South Africa or Brazil on its behalf to be distributed to farmers as alleged by the paper. As part of the normal procurement process, SADA advertised for bidders to apply and procure hybrid maize seeds (seeds with high yield potential) for distribution to farmers in the Northern Savannah Ecological Zone (NSEZ) in 2012. This is a normal procurement process that has to be undertaken to ensure the transparency of the process and to guarantee that seed specifications are met.  This is a competitive process and at no point in time did Seed Producers Association of Ghana (SeedPAG) send in an application to SADA or made specific enquiries from SADA to see if they could be a caveat for them to be treated separately given their situation at the time.

Again, SADA at no point in time gave assurances to SeedPAG to purchase produce from the group as alleged by the Upper West Regional Correspondent of the Ghanaian Times. SADA started implementing its agricultural programmes only in late 2011 and not 2010 as the writer seeks to mislead and misinform.  Indeed, it is within the authority’s purview to promote and strengthen the private sector under the NSEZ. Therefore, the doors of SADA are widely opened to any group of persons or entities that are interested in partnering with SADA to promote the private sector under NSEZ. However in this case, SeedPAG has never approached SADA on any platform or forum to discuss the issue of supplying SADA with locally produced maize seeds.

Furthermore, SADA formally began full-scale operations only last year (2012), however according to the said report, the SeedPAG maize seeds have been locked up in the warehouse three years after production. Consequently, we see this piece of information as very misleading and absurd, calculated to tarnish the good image of SADA before the wider public.

Finally, we wish to state categorically that SADA only facilitates and supports projects and programmes in partnership with our service providers. The authority could not have therefore imported maize seeds from South Africa and Brazil, and distributing them to farmers as alleged by the newspaper. We also found it strange that the Ghanaian Times correspondent did not do any painstaking investigation or due diligence to at least get the SADA side of the story before press.

SADA shall investigate this issue further and put into the public domain, the bare facts so that the Ghanaian tax payer will know the truth of the issues. We are in support of local farmers and want to ensure they earn higher income levels far and above subsistence - this is a strategic mandate that SADA will continue to pursue to achieve the expected goals.

Edem Worlanyo

(Signed)

(SADA Communications Specialist)

0244786175

50 years in search of unity and development

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah

By Claudia Fonseca Sosa

On May 25, 1963, leaders of 32 African countries initiated a new stage in the history of Africa by signing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Charter, which subsequently gave rise to the African Union (AU) in July 2002.

Decolonization had arrived and the poorest nations were seeking their own way. The founding charter emphasized the challenge of attaining genuine independence, which would eradicate all forms of exploitation and racial humiliation.

Following these guiding principles, in the 1980’s the OAU implemented the Lagos Plan of Action, directed at endogenous development. Eleven years later, through the Treaty of Aruba, the organization assumed the goal of establishing institutions such as the African Central Bank, the Monetary Union, the Court of Justice and, in particular, the Pan-African Parliament.

This legislative body came into existence in 2004, with the objective of gaining consensus around decisive issues on the regional and international political agenda.

In 2002, the OAU was formally replaced by the African Union (AU) which, since then has guided the efforts of member countries to grow from the economic and industrial point of view and find a more just way of sharing the continent’s natural resources among more than one billion Africans.

The African Union currently comprises 53 full member countries, plus Haiti with observer status. Madagascar has been temporally suspended from the mechanism on account of its 2009 political crisis, as have Guinea Bissau and the Central African Republic, due to coups d’état in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Morocco gave up its seat when the organization accepted the entry of the Saharwi Arab Democratic Republic in 1984.

The organization has played a key role in the resolution of national conflicts and the promotion of a state of law throughout the continent. It has also worked to fulfill the collective dream of independence leaders such as Julius Nyerere, Patricio Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral and Agostinho Neto: to have the African voice heard throughout the world.

However, according to specialists, certain aspects still need to be refined in the context of integration.

Dr. Reinaldo Sánchez Porro, a professor at the University of Havana, commented to Granma, "In many cases there is a political will to attain greater integration, but there is a lack of economic complementarity – apart from oil producing countries – largely on account of agricultural export economies selling commercial crops and raw materials on similar markets, an inheritance of colonial structures, in which only South Africa, with its larger industrial development, has the capacity to convert itself into a new center, in accordance with the rules of the dominant market economy."

CHALLENGES ON THE AGENDA
While during its last 50 years of the existence, the OAU/AU has been able to revert to a large extent the sad reality of the continent in the 1960’s and 70’s (when the majority of African nations became independent), work is still needed in the sectors of education and health, as well as in the social and infrastructural context.

Unfortunately, epidemics, famine and ethnic-religious confrontations are still recurrent images of Africa. There is even a new threat of terrorism hovering over the region, above all in the Sahel area.

Neither is foreign domination a mere phantom, with a number of political leaders confirming the intense political pressure exercised by the International Monetary Fund and its neoliberal policies.

During a recent visit to Cuba, Wynter Kabimba, secretary general of the governing Patriotic Front of Zambia, affirmed to this reporter, "We are currently confronting the phenomenon of globalization, which determines the world economic order and has converted the planet into a village in which the ‘partners’ have unequal conditions."

Kabimba, also Minister of Justice, emphasized that the ideal for Africa, "Is to reconstruct this dominant economic order so that it gains in social justice."

The African nations are still victims of the expropriation of resources such as water, oil and uranium, among other minerals. "Today, we live in a world characterized by injustice, in which the powerful nations have the authority to decide how to access the natural resources of less developed countries and the price they are going to pay for them. A world in which the rich are becoming constantly richer, and the poor, poorer," he stated.

But the African Union is conscious of the challenges it faces and its 21st Summit of Heads of State and Government in the Ethiopian capital addressed common strategies and solutions. 

Cuba and Africa, twinned by history
• RELATIONS between Cuba and Africa date back to the Spanish colonial era, when the first cargoes of slaves began to arrive in the Americas and Cuba. Since then, its culture has become ours.

With the rise of independence movements and the struggles against the apartheid regime in South Africa, the blood of both peoples was linked for ever.

Hundreds of Cuban cooperative health, educational and sports personnel are currently working in African countries, while students from the continent are training as professionals in Cuban universities. 

In the last three annual high level meetings of the African Union, resolutions were passed demanding an immediate end to the U.S. economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed on Cuba since 1962.

At the same time, many AU nations have called upon the U.S. government to release the Cuban anti-terrorist fighters from their unjust incarceration in that country.

As the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro affirmed at the event during which he was decorated with the Order of Good Hope (First Degree) in South Africa, September 4, 1998, "Without Africa, without its sons and daughters, without its culture and its customs, without its languages and its gods, Cuba would not be what it is today." 

Hezbollah: A game changer in Syria

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah Secretary Gen.

By Yuram Abdullah Weiler

In a decisive triumph over US and Zionist-backed rebel forces, Hezbollah resistance fighters aided by the Syrian Army have repatriated the formerly-insurgent-controlled city of Qusayr.

Qusayr, located in western Syria, was one of the first cities occupied by the overwhelmingly-Sunni Syrian rebels back in March of 2011. 

The strategic value of the town, which is just 10 kilometers from the Lebanese border, lies in the fact that it serves as a logistics gateway between Lebanon and Syria for the flow of weapons and supplies to insurgents. The triumphant recapture of Qusayr by Syrian-led forces has provided new momentum in the Assad administration’s fight against foreign-backed militants and has shown the “potentially game-changing role” played by Hezbollah in the bloody conflict dubbed the Syrian civil war by the western media. 

Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah had reminded the al-Qaeda-linked insurgents in Syria about their assurances to respect holy places in Syria after members of Jabhat al-Nusra claimed responsibility for the destruction of the shrine of the companion of the Prophet (S) Hujribn ‘Adi al-Kindi in May. He warned the insurgents of “serious repercussions” should there be any damage to the shrine of Lady Zaynab or any of the other numerous holy sites in the strife-stricken country. 

As a result of Hezbollah’s pivotal role in ousting rebels from Qusayr, the [P]GCC, whose members include the western-aligned dictatorial monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, is contemplating a move to place the Lebanese resistance organization on their “terrorist list.” The regime in Bahrain has already outlawed any contact by Bahraini opposition groups with Hezbollah, which the Saudi-supported dictator, Hamidibn ‘Issa Al Khalifa, has already labeled as “terrorist.” Parroting western reactions, Minister of Interior Lt. General Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa has ordered an investigation “to examine possible Hezbollah activity” within Bahrain.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, the defensive intervention by Hezbollah into Syria against the foreign-backed insurgency has been the target of criticism. Qatar-based Salafi cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi has called for a Sunni jihad against Hezbollah. “Every Muslim trained to fight and capable of doing that (must) make himself available,” said al-Qaradawi in Doha on Friday May 31st. General SalimIdriss, the so-called chief of staff of the rebel Supreme Military Council, warned that he would not be able to restrain his insurgents. Not mincing any words, he declared, “We will chase Hezbollah to hell.” Even moderate clerics from the Muslim Scholars Association of Lebanon are now calling upon followers to aid the Syrian insurgency. 

The reaction in the west was predictable. Israeli Minister of Military Affairs Moshe Ya’alon said “Israel” would not respond to Hezbollah’s engagement in Syria “as long as it doesn’t hurt our interest - such as transfer of advanced weapons, missiles, chemical weapons ... or escalating the theater,” which is not surprising considering the stunning defeat Hezbollah inflicted upon the Zionists in 2006. UN Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi indicated that the peace talks scheduled for mid-June in Geneva have now been postponed until July. 

British Prime Minister David Cameron is now pushing to allow the direct arming of the Syrian rebels despite fears by MPs of an Iraq replay scenario. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “We remain very concerned, and we condemn in the strongest possible terms the Assad regime's assault on Qusayr. ... It is clear that the regime is unable to contest the opposition's control of a place like Qusayr on their own….” 

What Mr. Carney and most westerners fail, or perhaps refuse, to grasp is the strategic significance of Hezbollah’s defensive mission in Syria, and the plurality of support - 70% according to NATO data - enjoyed by the al-Assad government. “With Bashar al-Assad's regime on the brink of collapse,” writes one US scholar associated with the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Hezbollah has entered into Syria over fears that it “stands to lose a close ally.” 

Michael Young, editor of the Lebanese Daily Star, on the other hand, has a clearer view of the situation on the ground in Syria than the scholars in the west. Acknowledging that the insurgents are losing ground in Syria, he stated, “The United States has been embarrassed, and Russia and Iran's approach [to the Syria crisis] has been validated.” Continuing, he observed, “This is a dire time for the Syrian opposition…while the Obama administration has spent two years fiddling about and issuing empty statements without a clear strategy.” As for the reason behind Hezbollah’s decision to enter into the Syrian conflict, Young explained that it was essential for the resistance movement to defend itself against an “alliance between the Takfiris (extremists), the Salafis, jihadists (Sunni extremists), the United States, and Israel.” 

Before the Syrian government’s Hezbollah-spearheaded success in Qusayr, President Obama had expressed vague concern over the resistance movement’s “active and growing role in Syria, fighting on behalf of the Assad regime” in a phone conversation with Lebanese President Sleiman. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, seeing the Syrian situation from a more nuanced perspective, said emphatically, ”The international community has to decide with whom it will stand by in Syria. With those who want 'forced regime change' or those who want to resolve the crisis through dialogue.”

After a recent trip to the Middle East to meet with heads of state and the “Syrian Opposition,” US Senator John McCain, underscoring ambiguous US policy towards Syria, declared, “The only power that is not fully committed in this region is us.” Commenting on this apparent American policy vacillation, Ali Rizk, Beirut bureau chief for Press TV, speculated that the US position on Syria might actually be shifting towards that of Russia in calling for a negotiated political settlement. 

Avoiding a definitive statement on the Obama administration’s response to the latest developments in Syria now that Hezbollah is clearly in the picture, White House Press Secretary Carney, when pressed for answers by reporters, said that he thought the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government - rather than Hezbollah’s open involvement - would be what the US president would consider a “game changer.” However, despite recent reports alleging that Obama had asked the US military to develop plans for a no-fly zone over Syria, Pentagon officials denied that the US president had made any such request.

In any event, if Washington still remains fuzzy about what its policy should be towards Syria, and the recent victory at Qusayr was insufficient to qualify as a game changer in Obama’s opinion, then perhaps he should have someone in his regime pick up the phone and consult with Tehran for further clarification and advice. 

Beware of spying Bilderberg!

By Prof. Rodney Shakespeare

They are spying on us. Every email and telephone call is monitored. Every comment in a chat room is noted. Even letters are opened.

It is all to do with getting absolute control over our lives. Think George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or a fascist boot crushing the face of a friend.

The spying has nothing to do with stopping terror attacks. At present, when the snoopers pick up information about a terror attack, they allow theattack to go ahead: indeed, they help it to go ahead. This is because any attack gives the snoopers and controllers another chance to advance more snooping and more control.

The New York World Trade Center attack on 9/11/2001 was known about months in advance. It was allowed to happen AND helped to happen so that three thousand Americans were murdered. (Think Tower Number Seven which was blown up and was NOT hit by an airplane).

9/11 happened because, as revealed by General Wesley Clark, the CIA and Mossad wanted to destroy seven Islamic countries - Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. And look at what has happened to those countries since 2001!

The Christmas Day ‘bomber’ was escorted onto the airplane by a CIA handler. The so-called ‘bomber’ had been given dud explosive for his underpants. This was done to justify the immediate introduction of X-ray scanning machines at airports and to allow perverts to fondlethe genitals of girls.

In the USA, as the New York Times has pointed out, the FBI specializes increating fake terrorist plots and entrapping witless pansies such as the Christmas Day’ ‘bomber’.

The Boston Marathon bombing was known about beforehand but allowed to go ahead, as was the Woolwich atrocity, because the spooks wanted it to happen so that they could openly, announce, as they are now doing, that they spy on every aspect of our lives and are rapidly moving towards absolute control.

What’s more, they are bragging about this. They say there’s nothing we can do about it. For fifty years, the BBC (an institution of organized lying) has denied the existence of the sinister Bilderberg Group but, thanks to the tenacious work of journalists like James Tucker, Daniel Estaulin and Alex Jones, this year’s meeting, in North London has been exposed.

Attendees include top snooper UK Prime Minister David Cameron and, in particular, David Petraeus, former CIA Director and a smarmy, thoroughly nasty, piece of work. Petraeus is presiding over this year’sdiscussion agenda item on Big Data. This is code for using spying to take complete control over every aspect of our lives. The 2013 Bilderberg conference is finalizing the details of the worldwide Big Data PRISM spy grid with intent to control everything.

Moreover, Petraeus has hailed the Internet of Things as causing a transformational boon for ‘clandestine tradecraft’. The Internet of Things is the process of manufacturing every new product with a system that broadcasts wirelessly via the worldwide web, allowing the government to spy ubiquitously on every aspect of our existence.

The spooks won’t have to plant a bug in your home or your vehicle because we will have done it for them. Cunning stuff!

Of course President Obama is lying his head off about the spying. On the one hand, he says nobody is listening to telephone calls while, on the other, saying that it all has to be done to prevent terror attacks. What he does not say is that he is the mainagent of a corrupt Western finance capitalism.

Obama and his Bilderberg cronies never say that the way to stop terrorist attacks is for the West to stop making thousands of terrorist attacks (by drones and throat-slitting, head-chopping proxies) in the Islamic lands. They never admit that THEY are the ones who create the terrorism and do it a thousand times more to others than is done to them.

Obama, a preposterous liar and lover of snooping, is flouting his country’s constitution and introducing a worldwide cyber control combined with war. He is a classic fascist - aggression abroad (against Islam) combined with repression (think cyber spying and two billion Homeland Security Agency dum-dum bullets) at home.

NB. Websites that we think are friendly to us are, in reality, our enemies. The head of Google, of course, is at Bilderberg. Google and Facebook are the agents of the snoopers giving them everything that they want. The USA PRISM program, with the UK in tow, is a gigantic net picking up everything from Apple, Google, Facebook and the like. You can forget warrants from judges and justices before the information is picked up. We are at the mercy of the snoopers and controllers.

Unless, of course, we get off our backsides and resolve to fight them. 

Erdogan’s political honeymoon ending?

Turkey Prime Minister Tecep Erdogan

By Anthony Mathew Jacob

Turkey has been protesting for over a week now, thousands have gathered in huge numbers in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Mugla, Antalya, and many other cities and towns. 

According to initial media reports the protests were in reaction to a planned demolition of Gezi Park, a traditional gathering point for rallies and demonstrations, the park is also a popular tourist destination and Istanbul’s last green public space. 

The number of protesters has only increased with each passing day and Istanbul’s Taksim Square has become the center of protests. What started as a peaceful sit-in protest soon turned violent when the police force; under direct orders from the government, started using violence to disperse the protesters. Amnesty International observers at the protests witnessed the use of water cannon and tear gas against peaceful protestors. Later in the week, two major trade union members with a huge strength of 600,000 went on a strike to express their support for the protesters facing police brutality. 

Testimonies of protesters, lawyers, civil society observers and medical professionals at the scene and video evidence confirm the use of widespread brutal tactics employed by the police at demonstrations continuing across central Istanbul. 

Reports suggest that thousands of protesters have been injured and at least three have succumbed to their injuries. According to a press release by Amnesty International on 3 June 2013, “The Turkish Medical Association has said that as many as 4,100 people injured during the police response to protests have been treated in hospitals across Istanbul over the past two days. Two of them had life threatening injuries and five remain in intensive care as a result of injuries sustained at demonstrations in the city.” 

For what are the people protesting?

At the face value the protests look like a reaction to save the last green public space in Istanbul, however the causes are more than what meets the eye. According to reports in the Turkish media, the demolition of Gezi Park is to pave way for a Mega Shopping Mall and the Mayor of Turkey, Kadir Topbas from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), is the owner of a retail chain that will have an important presence in the mall. Moreover, Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak is believed to have bagged the contract for the development of the mall. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), is severely criticized for widespread cronyism and support for those who fund their electoral campaigns. The rising politician-businessman nexus in Turkey has eroded the people’s trust in the government. 

Additionally, Ankara’s economy has witnessed a steep fall for the last two years. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Turkey's rate of economic growth slowed sharply to 2.2% in 2012, as weak domestic demand and spillover from the European debt crisis took its toll after two years of rapid expansion that rivaled China.” 

Turkish economy’s meteoric fall has brought along with it the perils of inflation, unemployment and a troubled market. The very economy that was hailed for its pace of growth is now experiencing a downward slump, thanks to the spillover of the European debt crisis. 

Suppression of journalists and rights activists

Another important factor that has resulted in widespread discontent is the blatant suppression of journalists, human rights activists and lawyers. Turkey tops the list of countries known for brutal suppression of freedom of press and is the first country in the world that has the largest number of journalists imprisoned. 

Hundreds of Turkish journalists are languishing in jails and more than a thousand face charges of supporting terrorists and other unspecified charges. Any journalistic activity that criticizes the government, its policy, scandals, etc. is dealt with an iron fist. Several journalists had to leave their jobs or got fired because of pressure from the Turkish government. One of Turkey’s famous journalists, Ertugrul Mavioglu, once said: “You can write anything, but only under constant threats of unemployment, fines, arrest or worse.” 

Erdogan’s mischief in Syria backfires

Erdogan’s lust for power and position has blinded him to atrocities towards his own people and the neighboring Syrians. Despite his claims of supporting the Syrians, his real intentions in Syria are not a secret anymore. 

One of the biggest allies of the Western-led, Arab-funded and Israel-directed sabotage and regime change operation in Syria is the Erdogan-led Turkish government. Since the beginning of the bloody terrorist insurgency in Syria, the Turkish authorities have done their level best to support terrorism and sabotage across the border. 

Ankara has taken the lead in providing training, logistical support and a safe transit way to the terrorists fighting against Damascus. Furthermore, Ankara has hosted numerous conferences in support of the so-called Syrian opposition groups. Naturally, the Turks are opposed to their government’s role in the merciless bloodshed across the border. According to opinion polls, “some 70.8 percent of respondents think the AKP’s policy on Syria is wrong.” 

Erdogan’s policy towards Syria has backfired on him in the worst possible way; today he seems to be falling in the same grave that he’s been digging for Assad. He dreams of becoming the most powerful leader in the Middle East but given the current situations in Turkey it looks like he is soon going to fall off his bed very soon…

It may be too early to predict Erdogan’s fall, but a careful observation of the recent events in the Middle East makes one wonder whether Taksim Square will turn out to be another Tahrir Square. 

I wish Erdogan and others like him learn from Egypt’s Mubarak, Yemen’s Saleh and Tunisia’s Zine Al-Abedine before they end up like Libya’s Gaddafi… 

How Wall St. Bailed Out the Nazis

Adolf Hitler, Leader of National Socialist Party (NAZI)

By Jerry Meldon

The amoral calculations of Wall Street insiders guided Washington’s post-World War II decision to give many Nazi war criminals a pass if they’d help in the Cold War against the world’s socialist movements. CIA Director Allen Dulles was just one of the ex-investment-bank lawyers pushing the trade-off.

Near the end of World War II, the secret collaboration between U.S. spymaster Allen Dulles and Nazi SS officers enabled many German war criminals to escape prosecution and positioned them to fan the flames of post-war tensions between the former allies, the United States and the Soviet Union.

In that way, the Old Nazis aided by Dulles and other ex-Wall Street lawyer prevented a thorough denazification of Germany and put the Third Reich’s stamp on decades of atrocities during the long Cold War, spreading their brutal death-squad techniques to faraway places, especially Latin America.

Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

Though the World War II generation has largely passed from the scene and the Cold War ended more than two decades ago, the consequences of Dulles’s actions in those final days of World War II are still reverberating in Germany.

One of the after-shocks was felt in a Munich courtroom just last month, with the opening of the trial of Beate Zschape, a 38-year-old neo-Nazi who is accused as an accessory to two bombings, 15 bank robberies and ten murders between 2000 and 2007 by the terrorist cell, the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

Two male fellow gang members reportedly took their own lives to avoid arrest before Ms. Zschape torched their hideout and turned herself in, in November 2011. But the back story is no less disturbing.

Nine of the NSU’s ten murder victims were immigrants, eight of them Turkish, one Greek. All ten were slain execution-style by the same Ceska Browning pistol. Yet it took more than a decade for police forces across Germany and the country’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution (BFV), to connect the dots that would link the homicides to Germany’s xenophobic neo-Nazi netherworld.

Troubling Background

But the question is whether the missed connections resulted from incompetence or complicity. Last summer, following reports of the massive shredding of BFV’s files on right-wing extremists, the head of the agency tendered his resignation. Then in November, Der Spiegel reported:

Four parliamentary committees [are] dissecting the work of law enforcement units four department heads have already resigned. The government’s failures in fighting rightwing terrorists have plunged [the BFV] into the worst crisis since it was set up in postwar Germany to stop precisely the kind of extremist thinking that allowed the Nazis to rise to power in the 1930s. The discovery of the NSU and its crimes has shaken the system to its core. 

The more secrets come to light, the clearer it becomes how extensively intelligence agencies had infiltrated right-wing extremist groups. The trio of neo-Nazis that made up the NSU was surrounded by informants linked with [the BFV]. One of the big questions  is whether [the BFV] actually strengthened military right-wing groups.

How the BFV worked at cross-purposes coddling neo-Nazis while supposedly constraining them is not entirely surprising in light of the circumstances surrounding the BFV’s birth.

West Germanys first parliamentary elections in 1950 propelled into the chancellorship, Konrad Adenauer a stalwart of the same party as that of current German chancellor Angela Merkel, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

When Adenauer named Dr. Hans Globke as his Secretary of State, the West German chancellor laid his cards on the table. Globs checkered past included wartime service at the helm of the Nazi Interior Ministry’s Office for Jewish Affairs. He drafted the infamous Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of German Blood and wrote the Commentary that provided the rationale for genocide.

The Interior Minister who signed the Nuremberg Laws, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg and hanged in October 1946. Globke would appear to have been culpable, too, having advanced his career during Nazi rule. His immediate supervisor, Interior Ministry Legal Counsel Bernard Loesner, resigned following Hitler’s decision to proceed with the extermination of European Jewry. When Loesner stepped down, Globke stepped up and left his fingerprints on the Final Solution.

But Globke was not only spared the fate of some colleagues tried at Nuremberg but emerged as an important figure in shaping post-war West Germany. In the 1961 book, The New Germany and the Old Nazis, T.H. Tetens, a German economist who worked for the U.S. War Crimes Commission, noted that Globke controlled every department of West Germany’s government in Bonn and has done more than anyone else to re-Nazify West Germany.

Ex-Nazis Everywhere

Der Spiegel revisited the same subject in a March 2012 article headlined The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany. It reported that two dozen cabinet ministers, a president and a chancellor had belonged to Nazi organizations.

The article reported that historians were poring through voluminous BFV files to determine how many of the Nazi dictatorship’s helpers hid under the coattails of the domestic intelligence service in the earlier years of the Federal Republic and whether the protection of the young, optimistic constitution [had been] in the hands of former National Socialists.

Berlin historian Michael Wildt told Der Spiegel he was convinced that the postwar police and intelligence services had been riddled with former Nazis. Entire government departments and agencies, he said, covered up, denied and repressed their murky history which evoked the following mea culpa from Der Spiegel’s staff:

It’s a charge that doesn’t just apply to politicians and public servants, at least not in the early years of the republic. Senior members of the media, including at Spiegel, proved to be unwilling or incapable of sounding the alarm. This isn’t surprising, given the number of ex-Nazis who had forced their way into editorial offices.

Author T.H. Tetens noted the irony in Dr. Globke, [the] former key administrator in the Final Solution, [having] full control over the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Had he lived long enough, Tetens might have suggested that the BFV be renamed the Office for the Protection of Neo-Nazis.

Tetens might also feel vindicated by recently released CIA documents describing another branch of German intelligence that Globke controlled, the vast spy network run by Adolf Hitler's former espionage czar, Lt. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, a.k.a. the Gehlen Organization, a.k.a. The Gehlen Org or, simply, the Org.

Until 1955, when West Germany became a sovereign state, the Gehlen Org operated nominally under the aegis of James Critchfield of the CIA which paid for the Org’s intelligence product. In reality, Gehlen ran the Org from its creation in 1946 until his retirement in 1968. In 1956, the Org officially became Germany’s foreign intelligence service and was renamed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).

Recently, the BND has been declassifying its files to come clean about its postwar origins. Documents released to date by both it and the CIA confirm suspicions that, at least in the Gehlen years, the Org/BND was little more than a U.S.-bankrolled sheep-dipping operation for fugitive Nazis.

The U.S. Connection

And this troubling history goes back even further to the days of World War II when the American intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, fell under the control of a group of Wall Street lawyers who saw the world in the moral grays of business deals, measured less by right and wrong than by dollars and cents.

In the introduction to The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, author Burton Hersh identifies this common denominator: In 1941 [the year of America’s entry into the war}, an extraordinarily nimble New York antitrust attorney named William Wild Bill Donovan inveigled Franklin Roosevelt into underwriting the first encompassing intelligence instrumentality, the Office of the Coordinator of Information [OCI].

Donovan’s profession was relevant, and it was no accident that all three [of The Old Boys] load-bearing protagonists Bill Donovan, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner achieved status in America by way of important Wall Street law partnerships. 

The faction-ridden [OCI] gave way in 1942 to the [OSS]. From then on a civilian-directed, operationally oriented spy service would top the wish list of America’s emerging power elite.

These Wall-Street-lawyers-turned-spymasters brought their moral relativism and their ardor for aggressive capitalism to their World War II decision-making. Thus, they created an opening for Nazi war criminals who after Germany’s crushing defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943 saw the writing on the wall regarding the future of the Third Reich and started hedging their bets.

As the war ground on for two more years, thousands of them took steps to evade post-war prosecutions, in part, by arranging protection from British and American officials. Most of those American officials served in U.S. intelligence agencies, either Army intelligence or the civilian-run OSS, the CIA’s forerunner.

OSS spymaster Allen Dulles played into this Nazi game in spring 1945, as Soviet, British and American forces were converging on Berlin. Dulles engaged in negotiations for the separate surrender of German forces in Italy with SS General Karl Wolff.

It apparently didn’t bother Dulles that Wolff, like many of his SS brethren, was a major war criminal. After September 1943, when Italy withdrew from the Axis and made peace with the Allies, Wolff’s troops committed an average of 165 war crimes a day executing his orders to liquidate the Italian resistance and terrorize its supporters.

(In 1964, a German judge sentenced Wolff to 15 years in prison for various war crimes, including ordering the deportation of 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp.)

Pushing the Envelope

Initially, Dulles met with Wolff in defiance of orders from the dying President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The contacts also were behind the back of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, whose army had not only turned the tide of the war at Stalingrad but was still doing the bulk of the fighting. As Hitler’s Third Reich neared the end of its days, six out of every seven German divisions were lined up against the Red Army.

Ultimately, Dulles secured authorization for what was code-named Operation Sunrise, but his determination to consummate a deal with Wolff didn’t stop at negotiations. When the Italian resistance set a trap for Gen. Wolff, Dulles saved him in what his OSS colleague (and future Supreme Court Justice) Arthur Goldberg described as treason.

Moreover, when Soviet spies informed Stalin about the Dulles-Wolff assignations which continued even as the Red Army suffered 300,000 casualties in a three-week period the ensuing brouhaha played right into Hitler’s own game plan for survival.

Desperate to bolster the morale of his collapsing army, Der Fuehrer seized on the dissension opening in the ranks of the Allies. He gave his generals the following pep talk (as transcribed in Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War):

The states which are now our enemies are the greatest opposites which exist on earth: ultra-capitalist states on one side and ultra-Marxist states on the other. [Their] objectives diverge daily and anyone can see how these antitheses are increasing.

If we can deal it [the alliance] a couple of heavy blows, this artificially constructed common front may collapse with a mighty thunderclap at any moment.

Indeed, Wolff’s surrender overtures to Dulles might have been an attempt to both save his own skin and help Hitler drive a wedge into the artificially constructed common front.

The overall value of Dulles’s negotiations toward ending the war also was dubious. Less than one week before the general armistice ending the War in Europe, Dulles offered Nazi officers an advantageous deal, letting one million German combatants surrender to British and American forces on May 2, 1945, rather than to the Russians.

By surrendering to the British and Americans, most of these Germans not only avoided harsh treatment from the Russians but high-ranking Nazi officers benefited from the Truman administration’s quick pivot from its war-time alliance with Stalin to the Cold War confrontation with Moscow.

President Harry Truman’s staunchly anti-communist advisers, including Secretary of State James Byrnes, persuaded Truman to default on FDR’s commitment to a thorough postwar denazification of Germany, one in a series of decisions which enabled thousands of war criminals to avoid justice and permitted many to assume key positions in the new West German government.

Steering the Cold War

Yet, the use of Nazis by U.S. intelligence agencies had the additional dangerous effect of letting the Nazis influence how the United States perceived its erstwhile allies in Moscow. Washington formulated much of its early Cold War policies based on information about Moscow’s intentions that originated with Gehlen’s blemished agents.

These infamous Final Solution perpetrators included:

Willie Krichbaum, reportedly the Gehlen Orgs top recruiter. As the senior Gestapo official for southeastern Europe, Krichbaum managed the deportation of 300,000 Hungarian Jews for extermination.

Dr. Franz Six, former Dean of the Faculty of the University of Berlin and Adolph Eichmann’s immediate supervisor in the Ideological Combat branch of the SS security apparatus. In 1941, according to a report he wrote (which Christopher Simpson cites in Blowback: The First Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis, and its Disastrous Effect on our Domestic and Foreign Policy), a Six-led SS commando group murdered 200 people in the Russian city of Smolensk, among them 38 intellectual Jews.

Wanted for war crimes, Six joined the Gehlen Org in 1946, but later was betrayed by a former SS officer working undercover for a US/UK dragnet for fugitive Nazis. In 1948, a U.S. military tribunal sentenced him to 20 years for war crimes including murder. After serving four, he was granted clemency by John McCloy, another Wall Street lawyer then serving as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. Six then rejoined the Org.

Gestapo captain Klaus Barbie, the infamous Butcher of Lyon, who escaped via the so-called rat lines to South America, where he then worked with right-wing intelligence services and organized neo-Nazi support for violent coups against elected and reformist governments, including the 1980 cocaine coup in Bolivia. After decades of spreading Nazi techniques across Latin America, Barbie was arrested and returned to France where he was given a life sentence in 1984 for ordering the deportation of 44 Jewish orphans to the death camp at Auschwitz.

SS Colonel Walter Rauff, who dodged postwar prosecution for developing mobile gas vans and administering their deployment to murder some 250,000 Eastern Europeans, mostly Jewish women and children. The appearance of Rauff’s name on the list is interesting because, as the Milan-based SS intelligence chief for northwestern Italy in 1945, he was Gen. Wolff’s liaison with Allen Dulles.

According to a 1984 Boston Globe Op-Ed by former U.S. Justice Department lawyer John Loftus, Rauff, after playing his part in Operation Sunrise, calmly turned himself in and told agents of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) that he had made surrender arrangements [with] Mr. Dulles to avoid further bloodshed in Milan.

In Loftus’s words, Dulles promised that none of the [surrender] negotiators would ever be prosecuted as war criminals. When Truman and Stalin discovered what Dulles [had been up to], there were outraged orders to call off Sunrise [But] Dulles went ahead anyway, with Truman’s reluctant concurrence [Dulles] kept his bargain Rauff was released.

Christopher Simpson confirms in Blowback that each of the SS officers involved in Operation Sunrise [escaped] serious punishment despite the fact that each was a major war criminal. A U.S. military tribunal tried [SS intelligence chief] Walter Schellenberg, who had helped trap and exterminate the Jews of France. He was convicted but freed shortly thereafter under a clemency [order] from the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John McCloy.

Wolff was sentenced to time served in a [British] denazification proceeding in 1949, then released without objection from U.S. authorities. Fifteen years later a West German court tried Wolff a second time. He was convicted of administering the murder of 300,000 persons, most of them Jews, and of overseeing SS participation in slave labor programs.

Fleeing to Latin America

However, when the war ended, neither the Gehlen Org recruitment program nor Wall Street lawyer McCloy’s clemency rulings had begun, leaving tens of thousands of war criminals desperate to relocate in secure foreign outposts. SS Col. Rauff just happened to have the right connections to make that happen.

In Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and Soviet Intelligence, Australian investigative reporter, Mark Aarons, and former Justice Department lawyer Loftus reconstruct how Rauff became the mass murderers travel agent of choice.

Shortly after the Wolff/Dulles surrender negotiations were successfully completed on April 29, 1945, Rauff was arrested by unidentified Americans and delivered to an OSS unit led by James Angleton, the future CIA counter-intelligence chief.

From its description by Aarons and Loftus, Angleton’s team appears to have been tracking communists in the Italian underground which would have been consistent with Washington’s postwar policy of backhanding leftwing resistance leaders, from European partisans to Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, irrespective of the magnitude of their contributions to the Allied cause.

Angleton’s team reportedly debriefed Rauff at length, probably about what he had learned when he carried out Wolff’s orders to liquidate the resistance. After Angleton’s team released him, Rauff established contact with his former SS colleague Friederich Schwendt  who was already on the payroll of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) and, like Rauff himself, was wanted for murder.

Schwendt was also a master counterfeiter. He laundered his product through banks, obtaining legitimate Western currency in return enough, in fact, that over the next three years, Rauff was able to furnish thousands of fellow war criminals false identities and one-way tickets to South America.

Rauff himself wound up in Chile, where he later reportedly advised Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s ruthless secret police.

As for Allen Dulles, he became director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Under his leadership, the CIA overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and replaced them with anti-democratic dictatorships. To this day, neither country has fully regained its democratic footing.

After the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, President John F. Kennedy sacked Dulles, but Dulles did not wander far from the centers of power. After JFK’s assassination two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Dulles to serve on the Warren Commission’s investigation of Kennedy’s murder.

Dulles died on Jan. 29, 1969. However, even today, seven decades after Dulles opened the door to U.S. collaboration with Nazi war criminals, his decision continues to infect government actions around the globe.