Two reTweets for your consideration

First, from the Extinction Rebellion newsletter’s ‘Drones Are Changing Asymmetrical Warfare’, September 18, 2019, Max Wilbert, deep green resistance news service

The following scheme is deranged, dangerous, and as disgusting as any thing I’ve heard promoted in a long time.  In fact, after having worked on this for a couple days, before bed last night I’d tossed my cookies when the images flashed in my mind like a neon light again.  It’s also insanely cavalier given how much of the world depends on oil for heating, cooling, and cooking through no fault of their own, and how many economies are based on oil.  Whose refineries does Wilbert imagine drone bombing next?

Allow me to add once again that had ‘the civilized Western World’ listened to the ecosocialists in the global south two decades ago, the planet wouldn’t have had to been suffering such devastation and climate chaos.  I know that there are many climate militants who echo: ‘By any means necessary’, but this is crossing the Rubicon for me. 

Take it, Max:

“On Saturday, September 14^th, a “suicide drone” attack struck the Abqaiq oil processing facility in Buqayq, Saudi Arabia. The drones were destroyed in the attack, but at this time it is not believed that the operators were exposed or harmed in any way.

Abqaiq is the largest oil facility in the world, with the capacity to process 7% of global oil supplies. Before the attack it was refining around 6.8 million barrels of oil per day. The attack is believed to have reduced Saudi Oil production by 50 percent, or 6 million barrels per day. That’s equivalent to the national usage of India and Australia combined, or more than 1/3^rd of the United States oil consumption.

Saudi Arabia produces 10% of the global supply of crude oil. Therefore, this single attack, believed to have been carried out with roughly 10 drones with a range of less than 100 miles, cut world oil production by 5 percent.

The use of drones in warfare has risen over the past five years. Initially, large UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) designed by U.S. weapons manufacturers dominated drone warfare. Increasingly, however, small and even off-the-shelf drones are being used in asymmetrical conflict to great effect. For example, in Syria, Daesh (Isis) and Hezbollah have both been recorded using inexpensive off-the-shelf drones to scout and direct fire for ground troops, to drop small bombs, and as “suicide bombers.”

Environmentalists should take heed. This one attack—albeit an attack unlikely to be motivated by concern for the planet and ecology—has been more effective than the entire environmental movement, which has failed to stop the growth in fossil fuel production and consumption. These new tactics change how strategies such as Decisive Ecological Warfare could be implemented.”

Some people may worry about the environmental damage caused by such a massive fire. But we should remember that all the petroleum processed at this refinery would have been burned anyway. The only difference is that it would have been burned while powering cargo ships, mining platforms, tanks, and other destructive industrial infrastructure. It is always preferable to see petroleum burn all at once, with no application, than to have it all burned over time while aiding in the destruction of the planet. The destruction of the equipment also means that more fossil fuels will stay in the ground for longer, since if there is no nearby processing capacity for them, extraction must stop. With very few exceptions, the living world would benefit from any fossil fuel infrastructure being destroyed, no matter how “messy” that destruction is.”

‘…an attack unlikely to be motivated by concern for the planet and ecology’, ya think, you asshat?  The Houthis bombed the refinery to get Saudi Arabia to quit bombing Yemen to smithereens, and killing and starving hundreds of thousands of Yemenis!  I won’t even challenge your ‘facts’ on reducing the facilities oil refining, except to note that it’s all temporary until they have some new parts made to get production online again.]

Now as for Gene Sharp, over a decade ago I’d dutifully written up the Guardian coverage, including his adorable little handbook of suggestions.  A year or so later I was appalled and embarrassed  when I’d learned some of the following:

‘CIA Backed Color Revolutions; The Dishonest Career of the Remarkable Srđa Popović,  F. William Engdahl, October 03, 2017, journal-neo.org (Creative Commons)

“Many readers likely never heard the name of the remarkable Serbia-born political operator named Srđa Popović. Yet he and his organization, CANVAS, have played a lead role in most every CIA-backed Color Revolution since he led the toppling of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, at least fifty according to last count. Now he has turned his sights on Hungary and Hungary’s popular and defiant Prime Minister Victor Orban.

On September 8, the professional regime-change specialist Srđa Popović came to Budapest and joined with the anti-Orban opposition groups in front of the Hungarian Parliament. It‘s clear that Popović was not in town to promote his Hungarian book on nonviolent regime change but rather to give aid to the anti-Orban parties before Hungarian elections in spring of 2018. Many in Hungary smell the oily hand of Hungarian-born regime-change financier George Soros behind the Popović appearance now in Budapest.

Because of the manufactured aura of “hip doer-of-good-deeds” surrounding the personality of Srđa Popović, it’s useful to look closely at who sponsored his remarkable career since he founded a tiny Belgrade student opposition NGO called Otpor! in 1998 with its now famous clenched fist logo. The career of Srđa Popović from 2000 until today suggest a remarkably dishonest manipulator in the service of foreign intelligence agencies and governments, despite his vehement claims otherwise.

Popović first came to international notice as the founder of the Belgrade student political activist organization Otpor! which means “Resistance!” in Serbian. In October 1998 Popović founded Otpor!, initially as a student protest group at Belgrade University dealing with student grievances. That was soon to change. He and other Otpor founders were trained in the methods of US regime-change specialist Gene Sharp founder of the Albert Einstein Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts and by US State Department soft coup specialists such as Belgrade Ambassador Richard Miles and other trained US intelligence operatives, including election specialists and public relations image makers.

Guiding Otpor!’s Milošević ouster operation, US Ambassador to Serbia Richard Miles was a specialist in regime change, far more so than in classical diplomacy. He orchestrated the CIA coup in Azerbaijan that brought Aliyev to power in 1993 before arriving in Belgrade, and after that went on to orchestrate the CIA coup in Georgia that brought US asset Mikheil Saakashvili to power.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID), widely known as a CIA front, had channeled the Serb Otpor! Millions of dollars in funds through commercial contractors and through the US-government-financed NGOs: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute. The Open Society Institute of George Soros was also funneling money into Popović ’s Otpor! for the toppling of Milosevic. I have yet to find a CIA and US State Department regime change or Color Revolution in which the “democracy-building” foundations of Soros were not in a kind of harmony with the Washington State Department and CIA agenda. Maybe just a coincidence.

The NED with all its affiliates was a project of Ronald Reagan CIA head, Bill Casey, in the early 1980’s to conceal CIA regime change operations around the world behind the front of a “private” democracy NGO, the NED. Allen Weinstein, cofounder of the NED admitted to the Washington Post, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” [snip]

“In short, Popović began his revolution-making career as a regime change specialist in an operation funded by the CIA, US State Department, US Government NGOs including the infamous NED and George Soros’ Open Society Institute. The question is what did Srđa Popović do after his first helpful service to Washington in 2000?” [snip]

Popović’s CANVAS claims to have trained “pro-democracy activists” from more than 50 countries, including Ukraine, Georgia, Zimbabwe, Burma (actually the legal name since independence from the British is Myanmar but Washington insists on the colonial name), Ukraine, Georgia, Eritrea, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Popović ’s CANVAS was involved as well in unsuccessful attempts to start Color Revolution regime change against Venezuela’s Hugo Chaves and the opposition in the failed 2009 Iran Green Revolution.

Every one of those countries happen to also be targets for Washington regime-change of governments who refuse to toe the Washington line on key foreign policy issues, or which contain vital raw materials such as oil, natural gas or strategic minerals.

Goldman Sachs and Stratfor

Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor—known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.

Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”

(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)