[CM/P is being run out of France--but, believe thee me, it's just temporary, and it'll change nothing about us.
I'd like to think we were under the guns of those French Fascist collaborators who are currently so exercised over Sarkozy's killing of innocents in North Africa and the Middle-East. Those little Pépés who are always trying to slarv the biggest dode in the room—then, as they wipe their petulant lips, claim they’re working undercover for the morals squad.
And here we're not talking about the National Front or their ilk. No, these are the polite cosmopolitans (as my friend Péan referred to Doc Kouchner), pretending to erudition and deep feelings for the Defense of Human Rights, Victims Rights—they’re frequently gathered into SOS Associations (like SOS Racisme: went after Péan for four pages of his monumental book on Rwanda, “Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs”; or SOS Attentat: went after those reparation bucks for the victims of Terrorist Attacks in 1980s France [almost always bogusly blamed on Libya: e,g,, La Belle disco, or UTA flt. 772, or Pan Am flt. 103 {La Belle is, to this day, bragged about as a false flag by the Mossad--see: Victor Ostrovski's "By Way of Deception . . .} or, my pants-down favorite, SOS-Papa: sets up mediations for bi-national couples, then [according to its leader, my asshole landlord, one of the principal reasons for CM/P's relocation to Jersey, and a Shoah-survivor who proudly supports the US/NATO aggressions against Libya and Syria], then sends mercenaries, 'paid black ops commandos' [like all short guys, the lord of my manor's a bit of a fantasist], in after the kids being fought over [think: Zoés Ark]).
–But, hey, this post is not about us, it’s about Maitre Jacques Vergès, one of the world’s greatest, most principled defense attorneys ever.
Yet these same organizations I was complaining about just now are the ones Me Vergès finds himself pitted against time after time in the media. My great pal, Jack (though, when he sees me, Vergès can never seem to remember who I am, where he’s seen me before—and I would never call him ‘Jack’ to his face!) has also been a formidable teacher and ethical model to me. His defenses of Carlos, Klaus Barbie, Omar the gardener (great film just out about this case: “Omar m’a tué”), Milosevic, Saddam and several African leaders, have been based on the ‘underdog principle’ (No one is more deserving of the best possible defense than an individual who is matched against the monstrous capital powers of a militarist State). Famous for clients that the Public assumed to be guilty as charged, MeV was the subject of my old Hollywood cronie, French director Barbet Schroeder's not entirely sympathetic documentary movie about the counselor, “Terror’s Advocate." In it the narrator asks the Maitre if he would even defend Bush. JV replied, gripping his stogie firmly in his steady at 83 year-old hand, “Yes, of course. But only if he first pleaded guilt.”
Of all that has happened to CM/P in these last 16 years in Paris (and some interesting shit has gone down), I don’t think anything can match the honor of being included with Maitres Vergès and Ramsey Clark as a ‘Fascist on the Milosevic Defense Committee’. Of course the bestower of this magnum accolade was the fat-headed and chronically amnesiac Jared (the greater) Israel, and it was as he was giving up on trying to subvert yet another progressive organization.
No, I can leave France a happy man, and never come back, knowing, for a column-inch or two, my CM/P and I were at the same table, smoking Cohebas and sipping Cognac with the likes of Ramsey Clark (Interational Action Center) and Jacques Vergès (the lawyer you want if you absolutely, positively don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off).
Now, let’s give the ‘parole’ to Maitre Vergès. –mc]
************************
Maitre Vergès Interview on Syria and Libya
from Michel Collon’s webzine: Investig'Action
(translated from the French by CM/P)
Jacques Vergès: “In Syria, the current government must be defended!”
An indefatigable Defense Lawyer, on juridical and political issues, to those who resist the New World Order, Jacques Vergès, who was recently seen alongside Roland Dumas in a Tripoli under NATO bombardment, shares his feelings on what is happening and what could happen in Syria. His is an uncompromising analysis of the moral and geopolitical adventurism of an Americo-Centric West, and a rational optimism about the developments in Syria and elsewhere.
—First off, what is your analysis of the situation in Syria?—
Jacques Vergès: There is a very clear attempt to destabilize the government coming from outside Syria. Saudi Arabia is on the move inside the country using the Salafist Group it inspires and finances. And, of course, the US is in charge of this would-be civil war. Israel, a bordering state and an avowed enemy of Syria, and which has intelligence services and state-of-the-art military capabilities, is, I believe, directly involved here, as well. And I would not like to forget the motivational role played by France in the destabilization of the Syrian government.
I don’t deny that there are social problems in Syria. France, too, has serious social problems, and, one could even say, French society is facing a certain number of obstacles. Its enemies, inside and outside Baathist Syria, are doing all they can to add fuel to the fire. As for me, I am very openly a friend of Syria as it exists today.
—What, in your view, will be brought about by the attitude taken by Nicholas Sarkozy in this affair?—
JV: On a strictly ideological level, there are unarguably pro-Zionist and pro-American dispositions to this President, who dreams of being at the head of his class in Europe, or the peer of Britain’s David Cameron in their “NATO-studies” course. And here we touch on something more personal, more psychological, about the man: his pathetic need to see himself hoisted to the status of Statesman and to be able to play on the “Big kids’ yard” of this world, a status that a vast majority of French public opinion seems to be denying him these days. And then there are all these internal failures—in the areas of economics and security—that they try and make the electorate forget about by rolling out all the war hardware; this is a procedure as old as the political world itself.
Finally, there is the heavy responsibility born by French diplomacy for this Arab, Tunisian and Egyptian “Spring”: From (French Prime Minister François) Fillon’s putting his vacations on (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak’s tab to “M.A.M.” offering to work with (former-Tunisian President Zine el Abidine) Ben Ali on matters of police repression, there is no shortage of Things-to-be-Forgotten as soon as possible. And most notable among these is the undeclared war against (Libyan leader Moamar) Kadhafi, ordered up precipitously and without clear political objective by a simple injunction from Bernard-Henri Levy, delivered over the shoulders of (Foreign Minister) Alain Juppé and Gerard Longuet. Such a political escapade can only lead to chaos and the wasting of human lives and riches. And as with what is already a failure, like the War in Afghanistan: Kadhafi stands firm, less because of his military superiority than the support he continues to receive from a great majority of the Libyan population, and also because his opponents, who are given carte blanche by the West, demonstrate each day how lame and unprincipled they are, not only militarily, but politically, too. Faced with this Resistance, the media break out the old double-talk of psychological war: Have you heard this picturesque “information” coming out of our TV sets? Kadhafi has issued Viagra to his soldiers to get them up for raping the female rebels! When you have to resort to this kind of propaganda you know things are going badly.
—To you, the West’s action, in Libya as in Syria, is, in some way, improvised, badly thought out and meant to fail. Yet, shouldn’t we expect a less amateurish campaign from the US administration and NATO . . .—
JV: But you can see the waste that American bungling perpetrated in Iraq over the last nearly ten years: They started the war on the phony pretext of getting rid of Saddam Hussien, a “hard case” against Israel in the Arab camp. And after innumerable victims and vast destruction, they give power over to the Shiite majority, that is, to Iran, their Public Enemy #1. Is this the Great Geopolitical Game, here? Any analyst or expert on the region could have predicted this outcome for Bush and his Neo-Con clique! This Ubu-esque situation brought a frank quip from the great American intellectual Noam Chomsky, a man with few illusions: “I thought we were going to Iraq to fight Islamic Extremists, and then we put them in power!” Well, it’s the same thing in Libya. We gave the big guns to Kadhafi—who had mended fences with the West—and whom Sarkozy, as we all remember, recently honored—and now we have no one to turn to other than the broken down, impotent and foreign-infiltrated Islamic Radicals—who, at best, represent the Province of Cyrenaïque—and even there, their representation seems very weak, indeed. And will the French—or the British—stay on after their first helicopter or their first ground soldier is shot down?
And as for Syria, if the Americans and their Saudi friends happen to topple the Bachar al-Assad government, they will merely hand this country over, ipso facto, to Sunni sectarians, who will return a modern Syria to the age Ryad—which will bring some heavy consequences for Israel and its American protectors. That said, I remain an optimist about Syria, and even Libya. The Syrian people know that it is civil war and the destruction of their country that is being forced onto them by these opposition officials acting more or less as puppets of the Americans and the armed groups that have infiltrated their land. The Syrians do not want their country to become the new Iraq.
—And if the war being waged by the Americans and their European and Arab allies were just, why, instead of trying to take over Syria, would they want to destroy the country or return it to a stage of development 50 years or more in the past, as certain trans-Atlantic strategists have bragged about having done with Iraq?—
JV: But it is precisely the example of Iraq that shows this is a politics of the short view, and dangerous for Washington’s geostrategic interests: today’s Iraq is closer than it ever has been to Iran. And the de facto creation of an autonomous Kurdish state in the north of the country has pushed Turkey further from the US. We gain nothing from creating these uncontrollable situations, and the chaos you have created will come back to you like a geopolitical boomerang! And what would Miss Clinton [sic] have achieved when the jihadists start parading in the streets of Tripoli, or after that in Benghazi? As for Syria, I think, the support that the Bachar al-Assad government continues to receive remains the most effective obstacle to Americano-Israelo-Saudian strategies.
—So, in Syria and elsewhere, the West is practicing a relentless, counterintuitive pursuit of war, a sort of gunboat diplomacy from one day to the next?—
JV: Precisely. Because the West is sick. Economically. Politically. And, above all, morally. To me, these costly military gesticulations, from Kabul to Tripoli by way of Baghdad or even Damascus, are like the involuntary throes of someone in grave suffering. America is, especially, very sick, with its ruined economy, its colossal debt, its dollar turning into a piece of Monopoly money and its giant scams à la Madoff. And, also, with the arrival into the geopolitical marketplace of emerging powers, or re-emerging powers, like Russia, China, India, and Brazil. To maintain a semblance of moral and political legitimacy, and, with that, world leadership, we have to create an enemy, a “Great Satan,” as the Iranians would say, which makes domestic opinion forget about our imminent failure. But what kind of moral credibility is accorded to those powers that practice a double-standard? So, to hold on to the Near-East, we bomb Tripoli and threaten Damascus, as we let Israel continue, against repeated UN Resolutions, its colonization and bloody repression, just as we let the Saudi troops, more American pawns in the Gulf, put down a popular protest movement in Bahrain. We stigmatize Iranian fanaticism, while we support a Saudi Arabian theocracy that practices the most sectarian and obscurantist form of Islam. I could also go on at length about Côte d’Ivoire, where France, again carrying out American orders, proclaimed that Alassane Ouattara was the mild-mannered Democratic in that movie, and Laurent Gbagbo the villain, even while the UN found evidence of numerous crimes against the civilian population carried out by Ouattara’s troops in the reign of terror they established in their northern fiefdom during the now-famous presidential elections. And if we explain this as Ouattara’s not being in control of his troops, then he is simply inept!
I repeat: these colonial expeditions into Africa and the Near-East—after all, the two former colonial powers, France and Great Britain, are in the front ranks militarily and diplomatically, just as they were at the time of the Levant—are proof of the ill-health of their instigators. Is America sick? And France, too? The DSK affair (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF, charged in NYC with raping his hotel chamber maid) shows me the moral and political failings of the Liberal-Socialist elites, corrupt and exhausted; and this moral failing compounds the failure of institutions and the economy, without forgetting domestic insecurity: each of these shows the French state, the state which is currently bombing Tripoli, is incapable of making the gang-leaders in its banlieues (comparable to the Projects) listen to reason! Why are we surprised when a president like Sarkozy, the last avatar of this governmental cast, tries to redraw his image on the backs of Libyans and Syrians! A fraud! A fraud in its death throes! The West runs the risk of dying from its cynicism and moral weakness!
—To finish up, you said you were rather optimistic about the evolution of the situation in these countries on the “front line”?—
JV: Yes. The Americans and their goons can do quite a bit of damage—just look at Libya, and Afghanistan, or still in Sudan, you can see it in Iraq and in the ex-Yugoslavia. But I don’t think they will be able to prevail over these people, these nations: We are seeing it, or we will see it, in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, in Lebanon and in Palestine. In Syria, we must be vigilant against the destabilizing tactics and the campaigns of disinformation.
—Maitre Vergès, thank you very much.—
This interview was recorded on 9 June 2011 by Louis Denghien.
Source: http://www.infosyrie.fr/2011/06/jacques-verges-en-syrie-il-faut-defendre-letat-actuel/
I'd like to think we were under the guns of those French Fascist collaborators who are currently so exercised over Sarkozy's killing of innocents in North Africa and the Middle-East. Those little Pépés who are always trying to slarv the biggest dode in the room—then, as they wipe their petulant lips, claim they’re working undercover for the morals squad.
And here we're not talking about the National Front or their ilk. No, these are the polite cosmopolitans (as my friend Péan referred to Doc Kouchner), pretending to erudition and deep feelings for the Defense of Human Rights, Victims Rights—they’re frequently gathered into SOS Associations (like SOS Racisme: went after Péan for four pages of his monumental book on Rwanda, “Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs”; or SOS Attentat: went after those reparation bucks for the victims of Terrorist Attacks in 1980s France [almost always bogusly blamed on Libya: e,g,, La Belle disco, or UTA flt. 772, or Pan Am flt. 103 {La Belle is, to this day, bragged about as a false flag by the Mossad--see: Victor Ostrovski's "By Way of Deception . . .} or, my pants-down favorite, SOS-Papa: sets up mediations for bi-national couples, then [according to its leader, my asshole landlord, one of the principal reasons for CM/P's relocation to Jersey, and a Shoah-survivor who proudly supports the US/NATO aggressions against Libya and Syria], then sends mercenaries, 'paid black ops commandos' [like all short guys, the lord of my manor's a bit of a fantasist], in after the kids being fought over [think: Zoés Ark]).
–But, hey, this post is not about us, it’s about Maitre Jacques Vergès, one of the world’s greatest, most principled defense attorneys ever.
Yet these same organizations I was complaining about just now are the ones Me Vergès finds himself pitted against time after time in the media. My great pal, Jack (though, when he sees me, Vergès can never seem to remember who I am, where he’s seen me before—and I would never call him ‘Jack’ to his face!) has also been a formidable teacher and ethical model to me. His defenses of Carlos, Klaus Barbie, Omar the gardener (great film just out about this case: “Omar m’a tué”), Milosevic, Saddam and several African leaders, have been based on the ‘underdog principle’ (No one is more deserving of the best possible defense than an individual who is matched against the monstrous capital powers of a militarist State). Famous for clients that the Public assumed to be guilty as charged, MeV was the subject of my old Hollywood cronie, French director Barbet Schroeder's not entirely sympathetic documentary movie about the counselor, “Terror’s Advocate." In it the narrator asks the Maitre if he would even defend Bush. JV replied, gripping his stogie firmly in his steady at 83 year-old hand, “Yes, of course. But only if he first pleaded guilt.”
Of all that has happened to CM/P in these last 16 years in Paris (and some interesting shit has gone down), I don’t think anything can match the honor of being included with Maitres Vergès and Ramsey Clark as a ‘Fascist on the Milosevic Defense Committee’. Of course the bestower of this magnum accolade was the fat-headed and chronically amnesiac Jared (the greater) Israel, and it was as he was giving up on trying to subvert yet another progressive organization.
No, I can leave France a happy man, and never come back, knowing, for a column-inch or two, my CM/P and I were at the same table, smoking Cohebas and sipping Cognac with the likes of Ramsey Clark (Interational Action Center) and Jacques Vergès (the lawyer you want if you absolutely, positively don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off).
Now, let’s give the ‘parole’ to Maitre Vergès. –mc]
************************
Maitre Vergès Interview on Syria and Libya
from Michel Collon’s webzine: Investig'Action
(translated from the French by CM/P)
Jacques Vergès: “In Syria, the current government must be defended!”
An indefatigable Defense Lawyer, on juridical and political issues, to those who resist the New World Order, Jacques Vergès, who was recently seen alongside Roland Dumas in a Tripoli under NATO bombardment, shares his feelings on what is happening and what could happen in Syria. His is an uncompromising analysis of the moral and geopolitical adventurism of an Americo-Centric West, and a rational optimism about the developments in Syria and elsewhere.
—First off, what is your analysis of the situation in Syria?—
Jacques Vergès: There is a very clear attempt to destabilize the government coming from outside Syria. Saudi Arabia is on the move inside the country using the Salafist Group it inspires and finances. And, of course, the US is in charge of this would-be civil war. Israel, a bordering state and an avowed enemy of Syria, and which has intelligence services and state-of-the-art military capabilities, is, I believe, directly involved here, as well. And I would not like to forget the motivational role played by France in the destabilization of the Syrian government.
I don’t deny that there are social problems in Syria. France, too, has serious social problems, and, one could even say, French society is facing a certain number of obstacles. Its enemies, inside and outside Baathist Syria, are doing all they can to add fuel to the fire. As for me, I am very openly a friend of Syria as it exists today.
—What, in your view, will be brought about by the attitude taken by Nicholas Sarkozy in this affair?—
JV: On a strictly ideological level, there are unarguably pro-Zionist and pro-American dispositions to this President, who dreams of being at the head of his class in Europe, or the peer of Britain’s David Cameron in their “NATO-studies” course. And here we touch on something more personal, more psychological, about the man: his pathetic need to see himself hoisted to the status of Statesman and to be able to play on the “Big kids’ yard” of this world, a status that a vast majority of French public opinion seems to be denying him these days. And then there are all these internal failures—in the areas of economics and security—that they try and make the electorate forget about by rolling out all the war hardware; this is a procedure as old as the political world itself.
Finally, there is the heavy responsibility born by French diplomacy for this Arab, Tunisian and Egyptian “Spring”: From (French Prime Minister François) Fillon’s putting his vacations on (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak’s tab to “M.A.M.” offering to work with (former-Tunisian President Zine el Abidine) Ben Ali on matters of police repression, there is no shortage of Things-to-be-Forgotten as soon as possible. And most notable among these is the undeclared war against (Libyan leader Moamar) Kadhafi, ordered up precipitously and without clear political objective by a simple injunction from Bernard-Henri Levy, delivered over the shoulders of (Foreign Minister) Alain Juppé and Gerard Longuet. Such a political escapade can only lead to chaos and the wasting of human lives and riches. And as with what is already a failure, like the War in Afghanistan: Kadhafi stands firm, less because of his military superiority than the support he continues to receive from a great majority of the Libyan population, and also because his opponents, who are given carte blanche by the West, demonstrate each day how lame and unprincipled they are, not only militarily, but politically, too. Faced with this Resistance, the media break out the old double-talk of psychological war: Have you heard this picturesque “information” coming out of our TV sets? Kadhafi has issued Viagra to his soldiers to get them up for raping the female rebels! When you have to resort to this kind of propaganda you know things are going badly.
—To you, the West’s action, in Libya as in Syria, is, in some way, improvised, badly thought out and meant to fail. Yet, shouldn’t we expect a less amateurish campaign from the US administration and NATO . . .—
JV: But you can see the waste that American bungling perpetrated in Iraq over the last nearly ten years: They started the war on the phony pretext of getting rid of Saddam Hussien, a “hard case” against Israel in the Arab camp. And after innumerable victims and vast destruction, they give power over to the Shiite majority, that is, to Iran, their Public Enemy #1. Is this the Great Geopolitical Game, here? Any analyst or expert on the region could have predicted this outcome for Bush and his Neo-Con clique! This Ubu-esque situation brought a frank quip from the great American intellectual Noam Chomsky, a man with few illusions: “I thought we were going to Iraq to fight Islamic Extremists, and then we put them in power!” Well, it’s the same thing in Libya. We gave the big guns to Kadhafi—who had mended fences with the West—and whom Sarkozy, as we all remember, recently honored—and now we have no one to turn to other than the broken down, impotent and foreign-infiltrated Islamic Radicals—who, at best, represent the Province of Cyrenaïque—and even there, their representation seems very weak, indeed. And will the French—or the British—stay on after their first helicopter or their first ground soldier is shot down?
And as for Syria, if the Americans and their Saudi friends happen to topple the Bachar al-Assad government, they will merely hand this country over, ipso facto, to Sunni sectarians, who will return a modern Syria to the age Ryad—which will bring some heavy consequences for Israel and its American protectors. That said, I remain an optimist about Syria, and even Libya. The Syrian people know that it is civil war and the destruction of their country that is being forced onto them by these opposition officials acting more or less as puppets of the Americans and the armed groups that have infiltrated their land. The Syrians do not want their country to become the new Iraq.
—And if the war being waged by the Americans and their European and Arab allies were just, why, instead of trying to take over Syria, would they want to destroy the country or return it to a stage of development 50 years or more in the past, as certain trans-Atlantic strategists have bragged about having done with Iraq?—
JV: But it is precisely the example of Iraq that shows this is a politics of the short view, and dangerous for Washington’s geostrategic interests: today’s Iraq is closer than it ever has been to Iran. And the de facto creation of an autonomous Kurdish state in the north of the country has pushed Turkey further from the US. We gain nothing from creating these uncontrollable situations, and the chaos you have created will come back to you like a geopolitical boomerang! And what would Miss Clinton [sic] have achieved when the jihadists start parading in the streets of Tripoli, or after that in Benghazi? As for Syria, I think, the support that the Bachar al-Assad government continues to receive remains the most effective obstacle to Americano-Israelo-Saudian strategies.
—So, in Syria and elsewhere, the West is practicing a relentless, counterintuitive pursuit of war, a sort of gunboat diplomacy from one day to the next?—
JV: Precisely. Because the West is sick. Economically. Politically. And, above all, morally. To me, these costly military gesticulations, from Kabul to Tripoli by way of Baghdad or even Damascus, are like the involuntary throes of someone in grave suffering. America is, especially, very sick, with its ruined economy, its colossal debt, its dollar turning into a piece of Monopoly money and its giant scams à la Madoff. And, also, with the arrival into the geopolitical marketplace of emerging powers, or re-emerging powers, like Russia, China, India, and Brazil. To maintain a semblance of moral and political legitimacy, and, with that, world leadership, we have to create an enemy, a “Great Satan,” as the Iranians would say, which makes domestic opinion forget about our imminent failure. But what kind of moral credibility is accorded to those powers that practice a double-standard? So, to hold on to the Near-East, we bomb Tripoli and threaten Damascus, as we let Israel continue, against repeated UN Resolutions, its colonization and bloody repression, just as we let the Saudi troops, more American pawns in the Gulf, put down a popular protest movement in Bahrain. We stigmatize Iranian fanaticism, while we support a Saudi Arabian theocracy that practices the most sectarian and obscurantist form of Islam. I could also go on at length about Côte d’Ivoire, where France, again carrying out American orders, proclaimed that Alassane Ouattara was the mild-mannered Democratic in that movie, and Laurent Gbagbo the villain, even while the UN found evidence of numerous crimes against the civilian population carried out by Ouattara’s troops in the reign of terror they established in their northern fiefdom during the now-famous presidential elections. And if we explain this as Ouattara’s not being in control of his troops, then he is simply inept!
I repeat: these colonial expeditions into Africa and the Near-East—after all, the two former colonial powers, France and Great Britain, are in the front ranks militarily and diplomatically, just as they were at the time of the Levant—are proof of the ill-health of their instigators. Is America sick? And France, too? The DSK affair (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF, charged in NYC with raping his hotel chamber maid) shows me the moral and political failings of the Liberal-Socialist elites, corrupt and exhausted; and this moral failing compounds the failure of institutions and the economy, without forgetting domestic insecurity: each of these shows the French state, the state which is currently bombing Tripoli, is incapable of making the gang-leaders in its banlieues (comparable to the Projects) listen to reason! Why are we surprised when a president like Sarkozy, the last avatar of this governmental cast, tries to redraw his image on the backs of Libyans and Syrians! A fraud! A fraud in its death throes! The West runs the risk of dying from its cynicism and moral weakness!
—To finish up, you said you were rather optimistic about the evolution of the situation in these countries on the “front line”?—
JV: Yes. The Americans and their goons can do quite a bit of damage—just look at Libya, and Afghanistan, or still in Sudan, you can see it in Iraq and in the ex-Yugoslavia. But I don’t think they will be able to prevail over these people, these nations: We are seeing it, or we will see it, in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, in Lebanon and in Palestine. In Syria, we must be vigilant against the destabilizing tactics and the campaigns of disinformation.
—Maitre Vergès, thank you very much.—
This interview was recorded on 9 June 2011 by Louis Denghien.
Source: http://www.infosyrie.fr/2011/06/jacques-verges-en-syrie-il-faut-defendre-letat-actuel/
