On the face of it there is the appearance that it’s one of Martinelli’s trolls. Attacks all the same people Don Ricky does. But this persona ATTACKS, rather than promotes. And from Panama City, FLORIDA?
There is the appearance of a pseudonymous persona puffed up on social media by bots, or by a legion of some party’s or candidate’s followers.
Doubt arises if one figures the Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal may become a convicted criminal who is ineligible to run for office next year. But in that case PRD deputy running as an independent Zulay Rodríguez, former National Assembly president Yanibel Ábrego and perhaps others may be angling to capture the presidency on the strength of Martinelli’s base.
AND, somebody might be flying a false flag, perhaps in search of drawing on a mistaken identification and ensuing criminal defamation case.
¿Quién y qué es esto?
preguntas por Eric Jackson
A primera vista parece que es uno de los trolls de Martinelli. Ataca a la misma gente que Don Ricky. Pero este personaje ATACA, en vez de promover. ¿Y de la ciudad de Panamá, FLORIDA?
Aparece un seudónimo inflado en las redes sociales por bots, o por una legión de seguidores de algún partido o candidato.
La duda surge si uno se imagina que el Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal puede convertirse en un delincuente condenado, inelegible para postularse el próximo año. Pero en ese caso, la diputada del PRD Zulay Rodríguez, que se presenta como independiente, la ex presidenta de la Asamblea Nacional Yanibel Ábrego y quizás otros u otras podrían estar intentando hacerse con la presidencia gracias a la fuerza de la base de Martinelli.
Y, alguien podría estar volando una bandera falsa, tal vez en busca de sacar provecho de una identificación errónea y el consiguiente caso de calumnia e injuria.
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This is a moment that calls for renewed policies based on scaling up democracy in a profoundly participatory way. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva greeting supporters in Brazil. Photo by Ricardo Stuckert.
Brazil’s new Lula government is an opportunity for a new trade model
by Lucia Ortiz, Viviana Barreto & Natalia Carrau — Common Dreams
Change is afoot in Latin America. The region—battered by COVID, inequality and environmental crisis—is seeing a second wave of progressive governments elected, most significantly with the recent victory of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. This is a unique opportunity for us to build a new trade model that puts people and the planet first. Stopping the harmful EU-Mercosur trade deal is a good place to start.
Now Brazil is back, the priority is people over profit
In his election victory speech Lula outlined some of the government’s priorities. The focus was on fighting hunger and poverty, while also repositioning Brazil as a major player in regional and international affairs. Lula committed to re-negotiating the EU-Mercosur trade deal. He stated, “Brazil is back. We are back to help build a peaceful world order based on dialogue and multilateralism.” This will give a much needed boost to global human rights, climate action and diplomacy that have been under threat from the rising far right.
Initiatives from Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Colombia indicate that the region as a whole is keen to discuss regional integration as well as the strategic economic and political foundations on which to base our relationship with the world.
Timing is everything. The world’s vulnerabilities have been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and further heightened by the impact of the war in Europe. A war which is now taking place in key countries for the supply of energy and raw materials for the agro-industry. This alone should inspire an interrogation of international economic relations and the dominance of transnational corporations in determining trade and investment flows and national production patterns.
While some politicians are trying to use Lula’s election as a reason to accelerate the ratification of the deal, now is the time to prioritize social needs, such as access to medicines, healthy food and the environment. It is time to confront the obsolete, neo-colonial and neo-liberal trade model, driven by the supply and market demands of European companies.
The winners and losers in the harmful EU-Mercosur trade deal
The EU-Mercosur deal is a powerful symbol of the failed old trade model. In negotiation for over 20 years between Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay—known collectively as Mercosur—and the European Union, the trade agreement is beset by disagreements from both regions. It contradicts many progressive governments’ policies and election mandates. It would restrict reindustrialisation policies, undermine public procurement and open up the free trade in harmful products, thereby accelerating deforestation, climate change and human rights violations.
The treaty liberalizes trade tariffs, which will affect over 90% of the Mercosur goods portfolio. The London Schools of Economics sustainability impact assessment sees the beef, soya, derivatives, paper and beverages sectors as Mercosur’s economic winners and the vehicle, chemical, pharmaceutical and industrial sectors as the losers. Mercosur exports of ethanol from sugarcane production will also increase considerably. In Brazil the ethanol sector relies on huge concentrations of land, intensive agrochemicals and poor working conditions. This colonial legacy severely impacts the biomes and Indigenous Peoples of Mata Atlantica, Cerrado and Pantanal biomes. The trade deal also looks set to impact negatively on Uruguay’s dairy and beverage sectors.
It would also scupper the chance for Mercosur countries to develop public policies to value-added manufacturing and increase economic diversity, a particular problem for the newly elected Brazilian government. The EU has ruled out protection clauses for developing industrial sectors and the transfer of technology in investments. The agreement would open up state procurement, depriving countries of an important social and industrial promotion policy, thereby providing highly competitive EU companies with an extremely attractive market.
Far from resolving environmental concerns, this agreement will herald further expansion of the agricultural and extractive sectors, such as the energy mining sector, with inevitable impacts on deforestation, land grabbing, biodiversity, water, and food quality. This in turn results in increased violence against and displacement of the collective rights of communities. According to the report prepared by the Left in the European Parliament (GUE), trade with the European Union is directly linked to 120,000 hectares of deforestation in Mercosur countries. That is one soccer field of deforestation every three minutes.
The EU-Mercosur deal expands the private protection of intellectual property—increasing the protection provided for by WTO obligations. This will likely push up the cost of medicines while undermining technology transfer. The corporate-friendly text on the patenting of seeds and plant varieties reduces farmers’ rights to seeds and undermines food sovereignty.
A new trade model based on democracy and justice
Lula has repeatedly committed to reopening EU-Mercosur negotiations and is urging cohesion within the Mercosur block, in the face of threats by Uruguay to go their own way on trade policy. On the EU’s side some are racing to conclude the agreement as quickly as possible, while other governments want the deal stalled. Yet the new Brazilian government’s victory must set the scene for an in-depth evaluation of the treaty’s impacts, not just a whitewashing of some of its more delicate elements. The new balance of power within Mercosur underscores the need for profound changes, even in elements that form the backbone of the agreement, such as the space for industrial policy in the region. Lula is calling for renegotiation because the treaty does not respect Brazil’s development needs.
The EU’s proposal to improve the deal through a new protocol or environmental annex and other false solutions does not address the core unsustainability of the agreement. An example of a real solution would be to end the export of European pesticide agro-toxins (produced mainly by BASF and Bayer-Monsanto). Ironically these pesticides – a key part of the agribusiness global chain – are banned from use in Europe, but are exported for use in Mercosur countries’ agricultural sectors, the produce of which is then exported to the EU.
New progressive governments provide an opportunity for the Mercosur region to broadly discuss some of the treaty’s components that may have more harmful impacts on our development from a social and environmental justice perspective. It also provides us with the opportunity to discuss the trade models needed today for the region’s peoples and countries.
The challenges we face are enormous. This is a historical moment that calls for renewed policies based on scaling up democracy in a profoundly participatory way. This applies to the ways in which the countries of Latin America—which remain the most unequal in the world—integrate and build a common political space. Failed free trade agreements and corporate power have no place in the transformation of society. Justice and democracy must sit at the heart of politics.
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Politicians fire teachers and ban books, but more and more Americans are standing up against this effort to erase our history. Cartoon by Khalil Bendib — OtherWords.
When Republican President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976, he called on Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans.”
He also acknowledged that Black Americans had shown “courage and perseverance” when our country had failed to live up to its own ideals.
Today, even Ford’s simple words would be inadmissible in many American classrooms.
As of last year, at least 35 state legislatures had introduced bills to limit the discussion of racial history in their classrooms. At least 16 had passed them.
Over 300 books by predominantly Black authors are banned throughout the country. And educators are being fined, harassed, forced to resign, or fired for teaching about race.
Little acts like hanging a “Black Lives Matter Sign” in class can be grounds for termination. In Florida, keeping classroom books that haven’t been cleared by state censors can be grounds for felony prosecution.
As a result, teachers are finding it more and more difficult to teach about Black history without fear of repercussions.
As a Black woman, I am not at all surprised by these attempts to whitewash our history. If I were a politician obsessed with suppressing civil rights, voting rights, and racial justice, I too would probably want to make sure only my version of the story gets told.
These efforts aren’t new, either.
Despite progress made since the Civil Rights Movement to update the textbooks used in U.S. schools, “most mainstream social studies textbooks remain tethered to sanitized versions of history that mislead young minds,” writes fifth-grade teacher and Rethinking Schools founder Bob Peterson.
In a discussion with Color of Change president Rashad Robinson, journalist and Howard University Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that this erasure is no accident.
Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project founder, explained: “The same instinct that led powerful people to prohibit Black people from being able to read is the same instinct that’s leading powerful people to try to stop our children from learning histories that would lead them to question the unequal society that we have as well.”
It’s why politicians like Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) are going to such lengths to ban Black studies in schools. The Florida Education Department and College Board recently rejected an AP African American History high school curriculum, claiming it “lacked educational value.”
DeSantis notoriously signed the so-called “Individual Freedom Act,” also known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” which states that “teachers are not allowed to make students feel ‘guilty about past discrimination by members of their race.’”
Much of Black history in this country isn’t easy to learn, teach, or digest — there is nothing comfortable about it. But the point isn’t to make students feel “guilty.” It’s to help them learn.
To be “woke,” or to “stay woke” — a term originated by African American communities in the 1940s — is to become “woken up or sensitized to issues of justice,” as linguist Tony Thorne told The Independent.
The state of Florida apparently agrees, defining “woke” in court as simply “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society.” But the state is manipulating the term, as if it were wrong or “progressive” to believe that systemic injustices exist.
Thankfully, many people aren’t fooled. Students all over the country, including in my home state of Pennsylvania, are protesting book bans on stories of color.
Overturning those bans would benefit kids of every color. “Having a diverse curriculum will benefit students in the long haul,” argues writer Nathalie Wilson, because it “helps them to better understand the complexities in the world.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Black history is complex. It is also American history. This Black History Month, don’t ban it — teach it.
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From the pedestrian bridge between the Albrook Metro station and the national bus terminal, some salient natural and urban policy facts become noticeable. Here, in the treetops of Albrook, Clayton and the Metropolitan Nature Park, we see how some but not most of the trees in these forest fragments shed their leaves during the dry season.
The city’s sticks
photos by Eric Jackson
Panama’s capital city has a long and sometimes complicated history. How long? We’re just finding out. Spanish conqueror Pedrarias The Cruel gave it a name, but he set up the first European outpost on the Pacific Ocean on the site of an indigenous settlement that had been there perhaps a thousand years, maybe longer, and at the time of its conquest was locally known as a center for goldsmithing excellence.
That place got destroyed in one of the late reverberations of Europe’s Wars of the Reformation — Henry Morgan’s 1670-71 rampage — such that the new city center was moved to a more militarily tenable promontory that’s now the Casco Viejo. Eventually the city grew back from its new center to engulf the old, with roads, bridges, landfills, a railroad and a canal altering the cityscape.
The transforming set of events that set the city up for what it’s becoming today was the 1904 – 1999 existence of the Canal Zone, a US enclave that except for military bases that lingered for a couple of more decades, ceased its legal existence in 1979. Its formal incorporation into the capital district was the apple of many real estate developers, but at the time the ruling military strongman, General Omar Torrijos, was persuaded to leave most of the green areas off limits to the bulldozers and instead create a system of parks that’s the envy of many of the world’s capitals. Yes those battles still continue, but the crown jewel of it all, the commanding heights of Ancon Hill — visible looking the other way from the same footbridge from which these photos are taken — remains relatively natural in the face of proposals over the years to do foolish things like turn it into a theme park “just like Disney World.”
You can go to these parks and learn things about our tropical nature up close. You can also gaze from afar from the concrete, metal and glass “civilization” and learn some things about nature, history and urban planning.
Roads, parking lots, communication towers and city traffic — but further on, the green areas, and beyond that some of the skyscrapers. Your tastes, knowledge and economic interests might tell you which, in general, are the more valuable things.
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A toxicology report reveals a “great quantity” of the neurotoxin clostridium botulinum was found in the body of the leftist—who claimed he was injected while hospitalized just before his death in September 1973. Pablo Neruda photo by Jeso Carneiro.
Forensic probe confirms that Neruda was poisoned after Pinochet coup
Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel poet laureate, diplomat, and leftist politician who died days after Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power in a 1973 US-backed military coup, was poisoned to death, his nephew said Monday ahead of the expected publication of a new toxicology report later this week.
The revelation by the nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, confirms long-held suspicions that Neruda—an ardent communist—was murdered in the early days of Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship. Reyes told Spain’s EFE that laboratory testing showed a “great quantity” of clostridium botulinum—a neurotoxic bacteria that is one of the most poisonous known biological substances—in Neruda’s body when he died.
Reyes said that clostridium botulinum “would have no reason to have been in Neruda’s bones. What does this mean? That Neruda was murdered, there was an action in 1973 by agents of the state.”
“What does this mean? That Neruda was murdered, there was an action in 1973 by agents of the state.”
When the Pinochet coup occurred on September 11, 1973, 69-year-old Neruda was hospitalized with prostate cancer. While he was being treated, the poet made plans to go into exile in Mexico, where he had served as Chile’s consul-general in the 1940s.
A close friend of Salvador Allende—the democratically elected socialist president who was overthrown by Pinochet’s forces with the backing of US military, intelligence, and business organs—Neruda would undoubtedly have been a vocal critic of the right-wing dictator and a major thorn in the regime’s side.
Driver and bodyguard Manuel Araya has long said that a distressed Neruda called him from the hospital, claiming that someone injected him in the stomach while he was sleeping. Fearing the worst, Neruda left the hospital on September 23 and died hours later. His official cause of death was listed as the wasting effects of prostate cancer.
However, Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá, the Mexican ambassador to Chile at the time of the coup, said he saw Neruda two days before he died, and that although ill, he weighed 220 pounds, belying official claims of a “wasting” death.
A court-ordered exhumation and analysis of Neruda’s remains that began in 2013 and involved forensic scientists in four nations led the Chilean government to announce two years later it was “highly probable that a third party” was involved in the poet’s death. In 2017, an international team of scientists said they were “100% convinced” Neruda did not die of cancer.
During the early months of Pinochet’s rule, other prominent leftists were arrested, tortured, and murdered in a reign of terror whose victims ultimately numbered in the tens of thousands. The renowned folk singer and guitarist Victor Yara, for example, had his hands smashed by torturers who mockingly asked him to play them a song. Instead, he sang the protest song “Venceremos”—”We Shall Win”—before he was shot more than 40 times.
Neruda, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature for “poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams,” was called “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language” by Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, another Nobel laureate.
However, Neruda’s legacy has been reevaluated in the #MeToo era, as he described raping a Sri Lankan maid in his memoir. He also abandoned his first wife and only daughter when the child was born with a neurological disorder, and sexist themes in some of his work have been noted. Feminist pressure led Chile’s congress to cancel plans to rename the country’s main international airport after Neruda.
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Bomberos sent in to fight a massive toxic fire on Cerro Patacon without the needed equipment or the most basic protective clothing or breathing apparatus. Photo by the bomberos.
The health issues will be denied but the political rot won’t be forgotten
The morning that this photo appeared on social media, the lead story in La Prensa was about how the mayor, city council and a few top employees of Santiago, the provincial seat of Veraguas, passe an addendum to the city budget to divide a $260,000 tax-exempt pay raise among themselves.
The morning before that, La Prensa led with the tale of five no-bid contracts for Panama City’s Carnival celebrations being rejected by the comptroller general for crude disregard of the nation’s public contracting laws. Also above the fold in that issue was a story about how the National Assembly amended its own budget with a more than $86 million raise.
Yes, the most egregious members of the political caste will place the reports by media of various hues about what they are doing on a spectrum running from yellow journalism to organized crime. Then, if they act in accordance with traditions, they will pull some other self-interested fast ones during Carnival when few people are looking.
Will it degenerate to a faux-passionate set of arguments about who is better or who is worse? Probably it will. At the next elections, will we see a trend of distrust and disgust that sends most or many incumbent down in defeat? Panamanian history has precedents for that, too.
More than a year out from the next general elections, it’s smash-and-grab time, underway in earnest a bit earlier than usual. Public officials, both elected and appointed, are grabbing what they can when they can in anticipation of at least five years wandering in a political wilderness where the patronage streams run dry.
A crash between a bus loaded with some 60 migrants traveling from Darien to Gualaca and a minibus has, at most recent count, has left a death toll of 33. It’s awful. President Cortizo has led the nation with a proper and compassionate example of decency.
Awful tragedy in Chiriqui
Nito has said appropriate, compassionate things for the moment.
Already neofascist types are railing against those who were killed or injured. Discount or discredit what they say, perhaps, but we should NOT ignore the dangerous presence of such types in Panamanian society and electoral politics.
Then, from people who live in the area, come tales of how unsafe that road is. We need a dispassionate investigation of that, and whatever happens — let’s hope not a convenient and facile assignment of blame — Panama should get serious about road safety issues again for a change.
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The Martinelli regime orders a crime wave, back in 2011, notwithstanding court decisions that none of this ever happened. Part of a document released as part of #PegasusPapers international team journalism effort.
Is the editor this horrible spy?
The US intelligence agencies’ caution about protecting information sources and mean of gathering it is understandable but way overdone.
For starters, once information that had been secret is publicized at large and reasonably well confirmed, the pretense that it’s secret and only large corporations like The New York Times and The Washington Post may recount it or refer to it without being branded as traitors and subversives is grossly abusive. Over the years The Panama News has reported as best it can about things like the nature of Plan Colombia and its participants, the use of the former Howard and Albrook airfields for international military / political operations directed at other Latin American countries, the nature of the US-backed coup regimes in Honduras and Bolivia and so on. By loud proclamations and whispers, the American Embassy here has proclaimed that the editor is anathema because, as one diplomat said to leaders of Democrats Abroad, “We don’t represent the same interests.”
Earlier, a former US ambassador to here warned the editor about publishing diplomatic cables that were already in the public domain after being released via WikiLeaks.
But of course The Panama News is not the US Embassy’s press office. The press, when doing its job properly, is not a publicist under the control of any government.
However, a word of advice for Uncle Sam – use the intelligence agencies to actually promote democracy rather than overhrow it when Washington politicians deem it convenient to do so. Release the files that the NSA and others most likely have on Ricardo Martinelli’s electronic surveillance / hacking / sabotage of media operations. Publish things that authoritarian, totalitarian or merely thuggish governments or political operators have erased from the Internet onto the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. Help Panamanians make more informed decisions.
L.D. Barkely, second from right, among the inmate negotiators with the prisoncrats in the 1971 Attica prison rebellion. When Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the police to retake the prison, he was one of the men who were summarily slain.
We are men. We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.
L.D. Barkley
Bear in mind…
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West
The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Arthur C. Clarke
I was beginning to learn that our poverty – the lack of the most basic human necessities – was not caused or altered by the will of any deity. The source of our misery was not in heaven but on earth.
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Emmanuel Goldenberg — whose theatrical name was Edward G. Robinson — was typecast as a gangster in the classic Little Caesar and a string of other films that followed. In THIS 1938 flick, however, he played the FBI agent and the gangsters were American Nazis — who called themselves the German American Bund. You see, Edward G. was antifa — his Jewish family fled from anti-Semitic violence in Romania and as it turned out Hitler didn’t have a worse enemy than him in Hollywood.
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Gas leaking from the Nord Stream gas pipeline system causes bubbles on the surface of the water off the coast of Sweden on September 29, 2022. The Biden White House adamantly denied the veteran investigative journalist’s reporting about this, calling it “complete fiction.” Swedish Coast Guard photo.
Seymour Hersh report alleges that the United States was behind Nord Stream pipeline sabotage
by Jake Johnson — Common Dreams
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a story Wednesday alleging that the United States was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline system last year, citing a single unnamed source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning.”
According to Hersh, who published the story on his new Substack, the September attack on the Russia-to-Germany gas pipelines was carried out by the US Navy “under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22” and with the help of the Norwegian navy and secret service.
Last June, with the authorization of President Joe Biden, US Navy divers planted “remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines,” Hersh reported.
Adrienne Watson, a White House National Security Council spokesperson, told the Russian state-owned outlet TASS that Hersh’s reporting is “false and complete fiction.” The White House gave the same statement to Reuters and to Hersh himself, who over the course of his decades-long career has famously exposed US forces’ massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians and shined light on the torture of detainees at the U.S-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
In recent years, Hersh has drawn growing backlash from mainstream media outlets and the federal government for casting doubts on the official US narrative surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden and questioning whether bin Laden really masterminded the September 11 attacks. Hersh has also drawn criticism for relying too heavily on anonymous sources.
In his Wednesday piece, Hersh reported that “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal.”
“This is not kiddie stuff,” the anonymous source told Hersh, calling the pipeline attack “an act of war” that would be seen as such if it was traced back to the United States.
According to Hersh, who provided a detailed account of the closed-door deliberations that preceded the pipeline attack, “there was a vital bureaucratic reason” for the Biden administration’s decision to rely on graduates of the US Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center to carry out the operation.
“The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership,” he continued. “The Biden administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.”
As for why the United States would be compelled to sabotage the Nord Stream system, Hersh wrote:
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51% of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49% of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45% of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened…
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe.
The Biden administration wasn’t quiet about its opposition to Nord Stream 2, which never became operational after Germany put the process on hold just days before Russian forces invaded Ukraine in late February of last year.
“If Russia invades—that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine—then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Biden said during a press conference on February 7. “We will bring an end to it.”
“I promise you, we will be able to do it,” the US president added.
Citing his unnamed source, Hersh reported that “several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack” by Biden and other US officials.
“The plan was for the options to be executed post-invasion and not advertised publicly,” Hersh wrote. “Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Hersh reported that a number of options were considered to sabotage the pipelines.
“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly,” the journalist wrote. “The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes.”
The CIA denied Hersh’s reporting, calling it “completely and utterly false.”
Ultimately, according to Hersh, Norwegian officials proposed that the June NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea—sponsored annually by the United States Sixth Fleet naval unit—”would be the ideal cover to plant the mines” on the pipelines.
According to the reporting:
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.
“It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover,” Hersh wrote. “The C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.”
The White House later had second thoughts about the proposed two-day detonation window, according to Hersh, and opted for a plan by which “the C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice.”
“On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy,” Hersh wrote. “The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.”
After conducting separate investigations into the pipeline explosions, which unleashed a large sum of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere, both Sweden and Denmark concluded that the blasts were a result of deliberate sabotage, pointing to traces of explosives found at the scene.
Neither country has publicly assigned blame.
In the days following the attack, speculation and baseless allegations circulated rapidly, with some European officials pointing to Russia while Moscow suggested that the US or the UK may have been responsible.
While it remains impossible to verify Hersh’s account without access to his source or other corroborating evidence, Wednesday’s story put the international whodunit back up for serious consideration and generated a fresh round of questions about the possible US role.
If Seymour Hersh's reporting is correct that US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, it's a major act of international terrorism (and would be labeled as such if Russia did it to us). His account is very specific, down to exactly how it was done:https://t.co/Jj8r8yJardpic.twitter.com/Q6Y0NzLEcQ
Ishaan Tharoor, a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, wrote on Twitter that while he is “not going to wade into debates over the sourcing and reporting” in Hersh’s story, “it is without a doubt a bit odd how this whole story quietly went away once it became clear it didn’t make any sense as an act of Russian sabotage.”
“And of course, when the explosion actually happened, some folks in the transatlantic, anti-Kremlin space cheered it happily as a successful act of anti-Russian sabotage,” Tharoor added, an apparent reference to a European member of Parliament’s since-deleted tweet thanking the US for the Nord Stream explosions.
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This weapon got past the police guards and into the La Joya prison complex. It was used to kill a young police subteniente and an inmate, and wound others. National police photo.
With death merchants hiding in the ranks…
by Eric Jackson
It would not surprise if some deal is made with prosecutors or judges to procure a ruling that none of this ever happened and that anyone who suggests that it did is the true criminal. But somebody brought a high-powered semi-automatic weapon, which can be switched to fully automatic, into the La Joya prison complex.
There is an administrative investigation to see if somebody neglected their duties. Two prison employees are said to be the foci.
But let’s live in the real world. Such weapons get into the prisons not because of some unfortunate oversight, but by means of bribery. Repeatedly we have seen people on the police force, people in the courts and people working for the Public Ministry to be covert gangsters. Let’s hope that the proper people are identified and penalized.
There is a culture of deceit and betrayal here — it even has a Panamanian Spanish phrase for it, “juega vivo.” Mix into it a political culture of parties that stand for nothing in particular, people who sell their votes rather cheaply, bribery and conflicts of interest in both the private and public sectors and exaggerated individualism in general. We get the kind of betray wherein some police officer who is supposed to guard the prison and its inmates sells out a fellow officer.
We should be careful not to carry our indignation to misguided extremes, but Panama really does need a moral uprising against this sort of thing. Indignation is properly on the agenda.
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Investigando un derrame químico de mediados de 2021 de la mina de cobre. Foto de MiAmbiente.
La única salida frente a la minería metálica en Panamá es su erradicación
por varios grupos
En medio de la incertidumbre y turbiedad emanada del caso Minera Panamá, hay algo claro: la minería a cielo abierto es una actividad dañina que solo nos trae perjuicios: devastación, pérdidas, malos manejos, conflicto y división; por lo cual esta actividad debe ser prohibida en todo el territorio nacional.
El aparente fuego cruzado entre gobierno y minera ha caído en el descrédito ante los ojos de la población.
Por un lado, una empresa que acumula cientos de incumplimientos sin sanción y opera sin un contrato, tras el fallo de inconstitucionalidad. Por otro lado, la trayectoria de actuación incoherente, turbia y secreta del gobierno, que deja claro que no existe tal cosa como la “actuación de buena fe” de nuestras autoridades. A la fecha, ni ciudadanía ni medios de comunicación hemos conocido la verdadera propuesta de contrato, que según el Ejecutivo se había acordado y fuese posterior objeto de controversia.
Durante los 2 últimos años, nuestro movimiento ha expuesto con firmeza los graves alcances de esta actividad y los peligros de negociar un nuevo contrato con Minera Panamá; pero también la grave amenaza de permitir que el proyecto siga operando bajo otras figuras y formas. Los impactos ambientales y sociales generados por la actividad minera -privada, pública o mixta-, siguen siendo los mismos y sus efectos nocivos son permanentes en el tiempo.
Es por ello, que hemos acuerpado al movimiento ambiental chiricano, al movimiento ambiental veragüense y al Frente Santeño contra la minería con acciones tanto institucionales como de movilización para frenar las intenciones de convertir a Panamá en un país minero. Lo que ocurra en Donoso influirá en la arremetida minera hacia el resto del territorio, en un país que no puede soportar tal actividad.
Hoy, más que nunca, el Movimiento Panamá Vale Más Sin Minería y aliados que comparten este cometido inclaudicable nos reafirmamos en nuestra postura de exigir al Estado panameño:
1. Proceder con la suspensión definitiva del proyecto y su correspondiente plan de cierre, por sus graves incumplimientos ambientales; 2. Obligar al pago de las obligaciones fiscales, laborales y ambientales; 3. Presentar el plan urgente de desarrollo alternativo para las zonas y sectores impactados; y, 4. Convocar al debate del anteproyecto de Ley de Moratoria Minera Nacional, que fue presentado por nuestro movimiento y respaldado por un centenar de organizaciones en junio de 2021 ante la Asamblea Nacional, lo cual además está recogido como un compromiso del Pacto del Bicentenario.
Lo que han intentado desde el principio los paladines de la minería es convencernos del absurdo de que en nuestro territorio una minería sana es posible. Por todo esto, y a las puertas de la carrera electoral, convocamos a la ciudadanía para que estemos alertados y no dar concesión a los funcionarios que hoy pretenden presentarse ante el país como defensores del interés nacional, cuando en los hechos solo han actuado en nombre del interés propio, de espaldas a la ley y en detrimento del país.
Una vez más, llamamos a la ciudadanía a cerrar filas por un Panamá Libre de Minería a Cielo Abierto, sin ninguna concesión a los enemigos de nuestra sostenibilidad y bienestar.
¿Cómo puedes apoyar? Sigue y comparte las circulares, videos e informaciones publicadas en nuestras redes sociales @panamasinmineria para ayudar a hacer docencia sobre el problema. Comunícanos por mensaje tu interés de participar en las próximas acciones que estaremos desarrollando a nivel nacional.
Súmate a las actividades, mítines, volanteos, tuitazos y foros.
Panamá, 10 de febrero de 2023.
Suscribimos las organizaciones miembros del Movimiento Panamá Vale Más Sin Minería:
1. ADOPTA El Bosque 2. Amigos del Parque Nacional Santa Fe (AMIPARQUE) 3. Amigos del Parque Internacional La Amistad (AMIPILA) 4. Asociación Centro de Estudios y Acción Social Panameño (CEASPA) 5. Asociación de Profesores de la República de Panamá (ASOPROF) 6. Asociación de Educadores Veragüenses (AEVE) 7. Sindicato de Educadores Democráticos de Panamá 8. Centro de Capacitación Social (CCS) 9. Centro de Incidencia Ambiental (CIAM) 10. Coalición Internacional de Mujeres y Familias (CIMUF) 11. Colectivo Voces Ecológicas (COVEC) 12. Colegio de Biólogos de Panamá (COBIOPA) 13. Consejo Consultivo de la Cuenca / Jóvenes por el Ambiente y la Cuenca del Canal 14. Coordinadora para la Defensa de Tierras y Aguas de Coclé (CODETAC) 15. Coordinadora por la Defensa de los Recursos Naturales y Derechos del Pueblo Ngäbe Buglé y Campesino 16. Cuidemos a Panamá 17. Escuela de Biología, UP CRU Coclé 18. Espacio Encuentro de Mujeres (EEM) 19. Fundación Cerro Cara Iguana 20. Fundación para el Desarrollo Integral Comunitario y Conservación de los Ecosistemas de Panamá (FUNDICCEP) 21. Fundación para la Protección del Mar (PROMAR) 22. Fundación Pro- Conservación de los Primates Panameños (FCPP) 23. Fundación San José Verde (FUSAVE) 24. Frente Santeño contra la Minería 25. Guardianes del Río Cobre OBC 26. Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP) 27. Movimiento MiMar 28. Movimiento Pro-Rescate de AECHI 29. Movimiento Victoriano Lorenzo 30. Observatorio Panameño de Ambiente y Sociedad (OBPAS) 31. Poder Ciudadano 32. Red Nacional en Defensa del Agua (RNDA) 33. Red Ecológica, Social y Agropecuaria de Veraguas (RESAVE) 34. Sociedad Audubon de Panamá 35. Sociedad Panameña de Salud Pública (SPSP)
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