Who shot down MH-17? Somebody knows
Once upon a time CIA Stations overseas received what was referred to as an “Operating Directive” which prioritized intelligence targets for the upcoming year based on their importance vis-à-vis national security. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, penetrating Moscow and preventing the KGB’s repaying the favor in kind loomed large as Russia and its allies represented the only genuine threat that could in fact destroy much of the United States. Today’s Russia retains much of that military capability but somehow the perception that you have to deal with what is important first has been lost on our policymakers, possibly due to a false impression inside the beltway that Moscow no longer matters.
A working relationship with Moscow that seeks to mitigate potential areas of conflict is not just important, it is essential. Russian willingness to cooperate with the west in key areas to include the Middle East is highly desirable in and of itself but the bottom line continues to be Moscow’s capability to go nuclear against Washington if it is backed into a corner. Unfortunately, U.S. administrations since Bill Clinton have done their best to do just that, placing Russia on the defensive by encroaching on its legitimate sphere of influence through the expansion of NATO. Washington’s meddling has also led to interfering in Russia’s domestic politics as part of a misguided policy of “democracy building” as well as second guessing its judiciary and imposing sanctions through the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012. The damage to relations has been aggravated by the ill-advised commentary from American politicians on the make, including Senator John McCain’s dismissal of Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country.”
One should legitimately be concerned over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inflicting damage on his country’s fledgling democracy through fraud, corruption, media clampdowns and exploitation of a malleable legal system. One might also object to exactly how Russia asserted its interests using force against neighboring states Georgia and Ukraine. But that does not change the bottom line, which continues to be that functional relations between Moscow and Washington are a sine qua non. Russia’s domestic politics are none of our business and the alleged grievances of Georgia and Ukraine are undeniably a lot less purely attributable to Russian actions than the White House and Congress would have us believe, with U.S. interference in both countries clearly a major contributing factor to the resulting instability.
Assuming that one accepts that lessening bilateral tension over the Ukraine is a desirable objective, the White House might soon have a good opportunity to demonstrate that it is willing to deal fairly with the Russian leadership in Moscow. The Dutch Government’s Safety Board will in October make public its long awaited report detailing its assessment of last year’s downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine. The investigation was conducted with the cooperation of the Ukrainian and Malaysian authorities, but did not include a thorough survey of the crash site, which was and still is considered too dangerous. According to leaks of its conclusions, the report will admit that there is no conclusive evidence regarding who is responsible for the shoot down but it will nevertheless make a circumstantial case that the pro-Russian separatists are the most likely suspects in spite of the fact that there is no hard technical or intelligence related evidence supporting that judgment. Blaming the separatists will, by implication, also blame Moscow.
At this point, the United States, which together with other interested parties has been reviewing a copy of the report in draft, does not intend to present its own findings but will instead go along with the Dutch conclusions. Among former intelligence, military and Foreign Service officers there has been considerable discussion of the significance of Washington’s standing on the sidelines regarding the findings. To be sure, there are a number of rumors and allegations circulating relating to what is actually known or not know about the shoot down.
According to some sources, the U.S. intelligence community disagrees over the likelihood of the alleged Russian role and has suggested as much privately to the Dutch. Some analysts who have looked at all the considerable body of information that has been collected relating to the downing actually believe that the most likely candidate might well be the then governor of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch billionaire who is an Israeli-Ukrainian dual national. Kolomoisky is known to employ Israeli mercenaries as advisers and has personally organized and paid for militias fighting the Russian separatists. He would have been strongly motivated to create an incident that could plausibly be blamed on the Russians or their surrogates and he had the means to do so. The government in Kiev acting independently also had the resources and motive to shoot down the plane and blame it on Moscow.
The dominant narrative that is still circulating widely suggests that either a direct or enabling Russian role is a given based on the claimed origin of the Buk missile, technical analysis of the plume and trajectory, and the military units that were known to be in place or moving at the time. And there was also the apparent separatist bragging on communications intercepts about shooting down a transport plane. This was the explanation that surfaced shortly after the downing, that was heavily promoted by the Ukrainian government and the media and that has been much favored by the international punditry ever since.
The third option of how to explain the shoot down is, of course, the Dutch approach: we think it was the Russians but we can’t prove it. That is an easy choice to make as it really says nothing, which is possibly why it is being favored by the White House.
But if it is actually true that there has been considerable dissent on the findings, the tacit acceptance of a possibly unreliable and essentially unsustainable report by the White House will have significant impact on relations with Russia. It constitutes a disturbing rejection of possibly accurate intelligence analysis in favor of a politically safe alternative explanation. It recalls the politicization of intelligence that included Robert Gates’ Soviet assessments of the 1980s, John McLaughlin’s tergiversation regarding Iraq, and, most recently, Michael Morell’s over the top hyping of the threat posed by political Islam. It is a return to a Manichean view of the world as “them” and “us” with the implication that intelligence professionals are willing to restrain their dissent on an important issue if it serves to advance the current war of words with Russia.
To be sure, deep sixing intelligence assessments that contradict policies that the White House is intent on pursuing anyway buys congenial access to the President and his advisers but it comes at the cost of diminishing the ability of the intelligence community to provide objective and reliable information in a timely fashion, which is at least in theory why it exists at all. Producing honest intelligence will, on the contrary, strengthen both the reputations and credibility of all involved.
If Russia is indeed to blame for the airplane shoot down it should be held accountable, but it is up to the U.S. government to put its cards on the table and be clear about what it does and does not know. The original claims that Russia was involved were based on snap judgments based on bits of information that had been obtained immediately after the event, little of which has been subsequently corroborated through either satellite imagery or electronic and signal intercepts. Since that time the German BND intelligence service has expressed its doubts that the missile used in the shoot down could have been supplied by Russia and has also claimed that photos provided by the Ukrainian government as part of the investigation had been “doctored.” There have also been reports regarding a Ukrainian fighter plane being in the area of the airliner as well as the nearby presence of Ukrainian ground to air missile units. Reported conversations among separatist claiming credit were eventually determined to be composite fakes produced by the Ukrainian intelligence services. Presumably U.S. intelligence has also taken a long and hard look at all the evidence or lack thereof but it is being quiet regarding what it has determined.
It is important to get this right because the potential damage goes far beyond the role of intelligence or even who might have been responsible for the downing of an airliner one year ago. As the relationship with Russia is of critical importance and should be regarded as the number one national security issue for the United States, it is essential that the Dutch conclusions be aggressively challenged if there is even the slightest possibility that Russia is blameless.
One does not have to be a fan of Vladimir Putin to appreciate that the nearly continuous efforts being promoted within mostly neoconservative circles to both delegitimize and confront him and his regime do not serve any conceivable American national interest. In an Independence Day phone call to President Obama, President Putin called for a working relationship with the United States based on “equality and respect,” which should, under the circumstances, be a given. Americans have been lied into intervention and war more than once over the past fifteen years and it should be clear to all that any contrived crisis based on an erroneous conclusion regarding a shot down airliner that develops into an armed conflict with Russia will have unimaginable consequences. A skeptical American public and international community must demand that any MH-17 report should reflect a full assessment, to include any dissent from its conclusions registered by the United States intelligence community. Any information at variance with the conventional view, particularly anything that suggests that there might be other interested parties who had both the means and compelling interest to shoot down a civilian airliner, must become a part of the discussion.
July 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Kolomoisky, NATO, Obama, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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Cameron plans to extend UK involvement in the wars raging in Iraq and Syria, while mounting an hysterical attack on British Muslims.
Last week’s hike in the military budget was not symbolic. Today David Cameron has proved he wants to take Britain back to a lead military role in the Middle East.
He has called for a ‘fresh assault on Isil’. As the extra 2.5 billion pounds voted for the military in the budget kicks in, he has called on the top brass to organise more SAS troop deployments, drone attacks and RAF bombing missions, not just on Iraq, but in Syria too, despite the parliamentary vote in 2013 explicitly ruling out such an attack.
David Cameron makes the extraordinary claim that his experience over the last five years has proved that drone attacks, spy plane flights and special forces are ‘vital in keeping us safe’. But this is precisely the period which has seen the emergence of Isis and constant warnings from the government about the growing threat of terrorism.
The whole history of the ‘war on terror’ suggests in fact the precise opposite. From the attack on Afghanistan in 2001 to the invasion of Iraq two years later and the Cameron lead assault on Libya in 2011, the war has devastated the Middle East and beyond, creating a series of failed states in which violence has flourished.
Since 2001, jihadist organisations have been able to spread from isolated pockets in Central Asia to a vast swathe of the world from Pakistan through the Middle East and into sub-Saharan Africa.
Last time the British people were being asked to back attacks on Syria, it was to support an (illegal) attempt to remove President Assad. Though Cameron was stopped by popular and parliamentary pressure, continued Western intervention in Syria and the renewed bombing of Iraq have plunged the region further into chaos. Infrastructure, both political and physical, has been further pummelled.
The West’s main allies in the conflict, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have been backing violent jihadist groups in Syria for years, including al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. The outcome has been a catastrophic unravelling of whole societies. In the words of Patrick Cockburn :
‘In both countries, the collapse of central government has exposed and sharpened differences between arab and kurd, Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian, secular and religious. And as Syrians and Iraqis live in a permanent state of war,, these differences are almost always settled violently’.
Now, our government wants to intervene on the opposite side, attacking one of the horrific forces that the West’s policies have helped conjure up. Forget the promises that bombing Iraq or Syria would not lead to further military involvement. Today’s open commitment to deploying special forces is not mission creep, its a brazen admission that Cameron wants to go back to full spectrum war in the Middle East.
The terrifying thing is that in this context, failure to learn the lessons of history will not just lead to repetition, but to a cycle of violence that threatens to consume whole regions of the world.
And this is a war abroad that will be accompanied by hysterical attack on the Muslim population at home. If the only foreign policy they can conceive of is escalating violence, domestically they can’t see beyond threats, intimidation and scapegoating.
In an utterly depraved move, the government have accompanied claims that unidentified Muslims who won’t condemn Isis are driving people into their hands with youtube footage showing the carnage created by British bomb attacks in Iraq. Apparently this is supposed to scare young Muslims from joining Isis. It is more likely to look like bringing the war home.
Worryingly, it looks like the Labour leadership is set to fall in with this march to war. The party’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, has been invited to a high-level security meeting on Isis on 14 July 2015. ‘Indications’ have been made that Labour is re-thinking its position on attacking Syria.
In 2013 anti war opinion and protest derailed Cameron’s war plans. Now, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign takes on a new significance, but campaigning against a new front in Britain’s war in the Middle East has become a matter of urgency.
July 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Islamophobia, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | Iraq, Syria, UK |
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MOSCOW — Russia is expecting a reaction from the United States on comments that the agreement with Iran should resolve concerns about the European missile defense system, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday.
“I’ll note such a factor as broad context — we all remember when in April 2009 in Prague President [Barack] Obama said that if the Iranian nuclear issue was settled, there would be no need in creating an air defense system in Europe. That is why today we have drawn the attention of our US colleagues to this fact. We shall be waiting for the reaction.”
The historic agreement was reached in Vienna on Tuesday after over two weeks of strenuous talks following several years of intermittent negotiations. It will limit Iran’s nuclear work in exchange for the easing of international economic restrictions.
The agreement on the Iranian nuclear program between the P5+1 group and Tehran will have a positive effect on Moscow-Tehran relations without the interference of Brussels and Washington, Lavrov said.
“Our economic ties will, no doubt, receive a new impulse because there will be no more limitations that our Western partners have introduced through their unilateral illegitimate sanctions against Iran, and there will be no situation where US and EU attempts to implement unilateral sanctions hinder our companies in carrying out financial transactions and realizing other projects together with Iranian partners,” Lavrov said at a press conference in Vienna.
July 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | European Union, Obama, Russia, United States |
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Iran and six leading world powers have reached a conclusive deal on the Iranian nuclear industry, an Iranian diplomat said as quoted by Reuters.
“All the hard work has paid off and we sealed a deal. God bless our people,” the diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The breakthrough was confirmed by a European diplomat, who told TASS that it would be announced “soon. “It was difficult work. The arguing continued throughout the night. At times it was heated, with occasional shouting. But the result should be worth all of that,” a source in the German delegation told TASS.
The economic sanctions against Iran would be lifted immediately after verification of its compliance with the deal, reported RIA Novosti citing the draft agreement. The deal also provides for the lifting of economic sanctions imposed outside of the EU, like the banking and insurance restrictions on Iran by the EU and the US. The draft provides for the lifting of restrictions for the EU to import oil and gas from Iran, as well as exports of oil and gas production equipment to Iran.
It also said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), UN’s nuclear watchdog, has signed a separate agreement with Tehran on the military aspects of its nuclear activities. According to Reuters, the separate agreement focuses on the issue of the Parchin military site.
Iran and P5+1 group are to hold ministerial-level meetings at least twice a year to evaluate how the agreement is being implemented, according to the draft document, as cited by RIA Novosti.
Iran agreed to a 15-year moratorium on enriching uranium beyond 3.67 percent. The enrichment would be conducted only at the Natanz facility, while the Fordo facility would not conduct any enrichment activities or store fissile material, TASS reports. Iran also agreed to store no more than 300 kg of low-enriched uranium. The Arak reactor would not be used to produce plutonium under the deal. The spent fuel would be handled by international mediators.
Reuters leaked others details of the upcoming deal. The UN-imposed arms embargo against Iran is to remain in force for five years, while the restrictions on rocket technology exchange are to be kept for eight years it said, citing diplomatic sources.
The economic sanctions that are to be lifted could be restored within 65 days if Iran doesn’t comply with the terms of the deal, the source added.
The Vienna agreement is to be ratified by the UN Security Council and come into force 90 days later.
Foreign ministers of the seven negotiating nations are to meet at the UN center in Vienna at 08:30 GMT, followed by a media conference, a spokeswoman for the European Union said.
As soon as the deal is officially announced it will bring an end the 12-year dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program and related economic sanctions. Foreign ministers and officials from Iran, the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China have gathered in Vienna, twice postponing the deadline in the course of the past two weeks, in a bid to make a long-term deal on Iranian nuclear program.
The lengthy negotiations remained deadlocked due to a lack of confidence in the purpose of Tehran’s nuclear activities, which the country claims to remain solely peaceful. The Western countries had accused the country of seeking a way of creating its own nuclear weapons.
July 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Sanctions against Iran |
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An alarming recent report revealed not only that prominent psychologists colluded with the Department of Defense and CIA to create a framework of justification for appalling and inexcusable torture, but the person heading that partnership was none other than Stephen Behnke, the Ethics Director of the American Psychological Association.
“The APA’s collusion with the national security apparatus is one of the greatest scandals in U.S. medical history,” declared a statement by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) following the report’s release. That statement called for a full investigation by the Department of Justice over the APA’s actions—and inactions—that gave the Bush administration the greenlight for cruel and inhumane torture of the highest order.
“The corruption of a health professional organization at this level is an extraordinary betrayal of both ethics and the law and demands an investigation and appropriate prosecutions,” implored PHR’s executive director, Donna McKay. “Rather than uphold the principle of ‘do no harm,’ APA leadership subverted its own ethics policies and sabotaged all efforts at enforcement.”
Acting in concert with DoD officials, the APA became the de facto “PR strategy” [read: propaganda campaign] that sanitized gross human rights abuses in order to “curry favor” with the DoD. Sleep deprivation, waterboarding, stress positions, and other forms of torture were both spuriously justified and allowed to continue through the creative editing and generalization of the very ethics standards that should have prevented any torture from taking place. According to the report:
“[K]ey APA officials were operating in close, confidential coordination with key Defense Department officials to set up a task force and produce an outcome that would please DoD, and to produce ethical guidelines that were the same as, or not more restrictive than, the DoD guidelines for interrogation activities.”
The 542-page report, first obtained by the New York Times, resulted from seven months of investigation by a team headed by David Hoffman of the law firm Sidley Austin, at the request of the APA’s board.
Physicians for Human Rights summarized the “overwhelming evidence of criminal activity by APA staff and officials”—whose involvement is evidenced in the report by the following four key conclusions:
- “Colluding with the U.S. Department of Defense, the CIA, and other elements of the Bush administration to enable psychologists to design, implement, and defend the post-9/11 torture program”
- “Allowing military and intelligence personnel to write APA ethics policies regulating their own conduct to ensure they were ‘covered’ in their roles for the torture program”
- “Engaging in a coordinated campaign to cover up the collusion and blocking attempts to oppose these policies within the APA” and
- “Obstructing and manipulating ethics investigations into psychologists involved in the torture program”
Hoffman’s report posits several motives—all with “organizational conflict[s] of interest”—that the APA had for its rather astonishing partnership:
“[The] DoD is one of the largest employers of psychologists and provides many millions of dollars in grants or contracts for psychologists around the country. The history of the DoD providing critical assistance to the advancement and growth of psychology as a profession is well documented . . .”
Further, the group of DoD and APA officials who crafted the laughable ethics policy actively dodged international law of the Geneva Convention, where its strictures were tighter than U.S. law. “[I] cannot take a stand opposed to the U.S. government,” said one. Even the APA’s president-elect called it “a ‘distraction’ to draw international law into APA’s ethics guidance.” This falls in line with President Bush’s outright rejection of the conventions following 9/11 as a deplorably whimsical way to land al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees in a “legal black hole,” as human rights groups and U.S. allies described it.
In a press release, former APA president Dr. Nadine Kaslow stated, “The actions, policies, and lack of independence from government influence described in the Hoffman report represented a failure to live up to our core values. We profoundly regret, and apologize for, the behavior and consequences that ensued.” Listing adopted and proposed strategies to prevent the possibility of a recurrence of such abhorrent ethics violations, Kaslow also admitted, “This bleak chapter in our history occurred over a period of years and will not be resolved in a matter of months.”
Resolved? For whom, exactly? PHR has called for the APA to change its policies for a full decade now—and has pleaded for a federal investigation for at least as long.
Despite the execrable abuses in the CIA torture report—the entirety of which hasn’t even been fully disclosed—one simple, and utterly indefensible, fact overshadows every new revelation.
Something that appears to be a minutiae from the torture report is, in actuality, a glaringly tragic prediction. One interrogator told a detainee that he would never go to court because, he explained, “we can never let the world know what I have done to you.”
But we do know. The entire planet knows.
And all those who suffered or died, enduring unspeakably heinous crimes at the behest of the U.S. government—know.
Yet no one—not a single person—has ever even been charged for their crimes.
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | American Psychological Association, APA, Human rights, Stephen Behnke, United States |
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The corporate media in both the UK and US are attempting to portray the Iranian desire to have the arms embargo lifted, as a new and extraneous demand that could torpedo the nuclear deal. This is an entirely false portrayal.
The issue has been included in the talks since, quite literally, the very first Iranian position document. And there is a reason for that. It is absolutely part and parcel of the issue and in no way extraneous to it. If there were any real journalists employed by the corporate media, that is obvious right on the face of UN Security Council Resolution 1747 of 2007 which imposed the arms embargo. The sole and exclusive reason given for the arms embargo is Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme. And it specifically states that, once the nuclear proliferation issue is resolved, the embargo will be lifted.
Paragraph 13 reads:
(b) that it shall terminate the measures specified in paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
and 12 of resolution 1737 (2006) as well as in paragraphs 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 above as
soon as it determines, following receipt of the report referred to in paragraph 12
above, that Iran has fully complied with its obligations under the relevant
resolutions of the Security Council and met the requirements of the IAEA Board of
Governors, as confirmed by the IAEA Board;
It is the United States, not Iran, which is introducing extraneous factors, banging on about Yemen, Iran and Hezbollah, which are nowhere mentioned in the Security Council Resolutions.
The way this is being reported in the media is the exact opposite of the truth. The United States is attempting to welch on a deal which was not only open, but forms the very text of the security council resolution. None of the BBC’s highly paid analysts, reporters, or guest commenters is capable of noting this basic fact.
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | BBC, Sanctions against Iran, UK, United States |
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In recent weeks, there has been much discussion about what to do about Greece. These questions become all the more relevant as the country attempts to float a multibillion-euro bond issue later this week. The Financial Times has called this fund-raising a critical test of Greece’s credibility in financial markets as it battles with a spiraling debt crisis and strikes. The “credibility” of the financial markets is an important consideration in a country which has functionally ceded its sovereign ability to create currency, and thus remains dependent on the vagaries of the very banking institutions which helped create the mess in the first place.
Maybe Greece should secede from the European Union and default on its euro debt? Or go hat-in-hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to beg for loans while promising to clean up its act? Or to the stronger Euro nations, hoping for charitable acts of forgiveness? Unfortunately, all of these options are going to mean a lot of pain and suffering for an economy that is already sinking rapidly.
And it is questionable whether any of them provide long term viable answers. Polls show that given the perception of fiscal excesses of Greece and the other countries on the periphery, the public in Germany opposes a bailout of these countries at its expense by a significant margin. Periphery countries such as Ireland that have already undertaken harsh austerity measures also oppose the notion of a bailout, despite-nay, because of — the tremendous pain already inflicted on their own respective economies (in Ireland’s case, the banks are probably insolvent as well). The IMF route is also problematic, given that Greece probably doesn’t qualify under normal IMF standards, and many euro zone nations would find this unpalatable from an ideological standpoint, as it would mean ceding control of EU macro policy to an external international institution with strong US influence.
The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted an article by Simon Johnson and Peter Boone, lamenting that the demands being foisted on Greece and other struggling Euronations would “massively curtail demand, lower wages and reduce the public sector workforce. The last time we saw this kind of precipitate fiscal austerity — when nations were tied to the gold standard — it contributed to the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s”. Where we disagree with Johnson and Boone is the suggestion that the IMF be brought in to craft a solution. Any help from this organization will come with tight strings attached — indeed, with a noose around Greece’s neck. Germany and France would be crazy to commit their scarce euros to a bail-out of Greece since they face both internal threats from their own taxpayers and external threats from financial vampires who are looking for yet another nation to attack.
Here’s a more appropriate action: declare war on Goldman Sachs and other global financial firms that created this mess. Send the troops, the planes, the tanks, and the ships. Attack every outpost of the saboteurs on European soil. Blockade the airports and ports. Make Wall Street traders and CEOs fear for their lives, or at least for their freedom to travel. Build some Guantanamo-like facility to hold these enemy financial combatants until they can be tried, convicted, and properly punished.
OK, if a literal armed attack on Goldman is too far-fetched, then go after the firm using the full force of the regulatory and legal systems. Close the offices and go through the files with a fine-tooth comb. Issue subpoenas to all non-clerical staff for court appearances. Make the internal emails public. Post the names of all managers and traders on Interpol. Arrest anyone who tries to board a plane, train, or boat; confiscate their passports; revoke their visas and work permits; and put a hold on their bank accounts until culpability can be assessed. Make life at least as miserable for them as it now is for Europe’s tens of millions of unemployed workers.
We know that the Obama administration will not go after the banksters that created this global financial calamity. It has been thoroughly co-opted by Wall Street’s fifth column-who hold most of the important posts in the administration. Europe has even more at stake and has shown somewhat more willingness to take action. Perhaps our only hope for retribution lies there.
Some might believe the term “banksters” is too mean. Surely Wall Street was just doing its job-providing the financial services wanted by the world. Yes, it all turned out a tad unfortunate but no one could have foreseen that so many of the financial innovations would turn into black swans. And hasn’t Wall Street learned its lesson and changed its practices? Fat chance. We know from internal emails that everyone on Wall Street saw this coming-indeed, they sold trash assets and placed bets that they would crater. The crisis was not a mistake-it was the foregone conclusion. The FBI warned of an epidemic of fraud back in 2004-with 80% of the fraud on the part of lenders. As Bill Black has been warning since the days of the Saving and Loan crisis, the most devastating kind of fraud is the “control fraud”, perpetrated by the financial institution’s management. Wall Street is, and was, run by control frauds. Not only were they busy defrauding the borrowers, like Greece, but they were simultaneously defrauding the owners of the firms they ran. Now add to that list the taxpayers that bailed out the firms. And Goldman is front and center when it comes to bad apples.
Lest anyone believe that Goldman’s executives were somehow unaware of bad deals done by rogue traders, William Cohan reports that top management unloaded their Goldman stocks in March 2008 when Bear crashed, and again when Lehman collapsed in September 2008. Why? Quite simple: they knew the firm was full of toxic waste that it would not be able to continue to unload on suckers-and the only protection it had came from AIG, which it knew to be a bad counter-party. Hence on March 19, Jack Levy (co-chair of M&As) sold over $5 million of Goldman’s stock and bet against 60,000 more shares; Gerald Corrigan (former head of the NY Fed who was rewarded for that tenure with a position as managing director of Goldman) sold 15,000 shares in March; Jon Winkelried (Goldman’s co-president) sold 20,000 shares. After the Lehman fiasco, Levy sold over $6 million of Goldman shares and Masanori Mochida (head of Goldman in Japan) sold $56 million worth. The bloodletting by top management only stopped when Goldman got Geithner’s NYFed to produce a bail-out for AIG, which of course turned around and funneled government money to Goldman. With the government rescue, the control frauds decided it was safe to stop betting against their firm. So much for the “savvy businessmen” that President Obama believes to be in charge of Wall Street firms like Goldman.
From 2001 through November 2009 (note the date-a full year after Lehman) Goldman created financial instruments to hide European government debt, for example through currency trades or by pushing debt into the future. But not only did Goldman and other financial firms help and encourage Greece to take on more debt, they also brokered credit default swaps on Greece’s debt-making income on bets that Greece would default. No doubt they also took positions as the financial conditions deteriorated-betting on default and driving up CDS spreads.
But it gets even worse: An article by the German newspaper, Handelsblatt, (”Die Fieberkurve der griechischen Schuldenkrise”, Feb. 20, 2010) strongly indicates that AIG, everybody’s favorite poster boy for financial deviancy, may have been the party which sold the credit default swaps on Greece (English translation here).
Generally, speaking, these CDSs lead to credit downgrades by ratings agencies, which drive spreads higher. In other words, Wall Street, led here by Goldman and AIG, helped to create the debt, then helped to create the hysteria about possible defaults. As CDS prices rise and Greece’s credit rating collapses, the interest rate it must pay on bonds rises-fueling a death spiral because it cannot cut spending or raise taxes sufficiently to reduce its deficit.
Having been bailed out by the Obama Administration, Wall Street firms are already eying other victims (and for allowing these kinds of activities to continue, the US Treasury remains indirectly complicit, another good reason why one shouldn’t expect any action coming out of Washington). Since the economic collapse is causing all Euronations to run larger budget deficits and at the same time is raising CDS prices and interest rates, it is easy to pick off nation after nation. This will not stop with Greece, so it is in the interest of Euroland to stop the vampires now.
With Washington unlikely to do anything to constrain Goldman, it looks like the European Union, which is launching a major audit, just might banish the bank from dealing in government debt. The problem is that CDS markets are essentially unregulated so such a ban will not prevent Wall Street from bringing down more countries-because they do not have to hold debt in order to bet against it using CDSs. These kinds of derivatives have already brought down an entire continent — Asia — in the late 1990s , and yet authorities are still standing by and basically doing nothing when CDSs are being used again to speculatively attack Euroland. The absence of sanctions last year, when we had a chance to deal with this problem once and for all, has simply induced even more outrageous and fundamentally anti-social behavior. It has pitted neighbor against neighbor-with, for example, Germany and Greece lobbing insults at one another (Greece has requested reparations for WWII damages; Germany has complained about subsidizing what it perceives to be excessive social spending in Greece).
Of course, as far as Greece goes, the claim now is that these types of off balance sheet transactions in which Goldman and others engaged were not strictly “illegal” under EU law. But these are precisely the kinds of “shadow banking transactions” that almost brought down the global financial system 18 months ago. Literally a year after the Lehman bankruptcy — MONTHS after Goldman itself was saved from total ruin, it was again engaging in these kinds of deals.
And it wasn’t exactly a low-level functionary or “rogue trader” who was carrying out these transactions on behalf of Goldman. Gary Cohn is Lloyd “We’re doing God’s work” Blankfein’s number 2 man. So it’s hard to believe that St. Lloyd did not sanction the activities as well in advance of collecting his “modest” $9m bonus for last year’s work.
If these are examples of Obama’s “savvy businessmen“, then heaven help the global economy. The transaction highlighted, if reported that way in the private sector, would be accounting fraud. Fraud – “Go to jail, do not pass Go” fraud. That senior bankers had no problem in structuring/recommending/selling such deals to cash-strapped governments should probably not surprise us at this point. However, it would be interesting to know if the prop trading desks of those same investment banks, purely by coincidence of course, then took long CDS (short the credit) positions in the credit of the countries doing the hidden swaps. A proper legal investigation by the EU could reveal this and certainly help to uncover much of the financial chicanery which has done so much destruction to the global economy over the past several years.
In this country, we have had a “war on terror” and a “war on drugs” and yet we refuse to declare war on these financial weapons of mass destruction. We all remember Jimmy Carter’s “MEOW”-the attempt to attack creeping inflation that was said to sap the strength of the US economy in the late 1970s. But Europe-and indeed the entire globe-faces a much more dangerous and immediate threat from Wall Street’s banksters. They created this mess and are not only profiting from it, but are actively preventing recovery. They are causing unemployment, starvation, destruction of lives, and even violence and terrorism across the world. They are certainly more dangerous than the inflation of the 1970s, and arguably have disrupted more lives than Osama bin Laden-whose actions led the US to undertake military actions in at least three countries. That should provide ample justification for Greece’s declaration of figurative war on Manhattan.
However, in an ironic twist of fate, it was just announced that Petros Christodoulou will take over as the head of Greece’s national debt management agency. He worked as the head of derivatives at JP Morgan, and also previously worked at Goldman-the firm that got Greece into all this trouble!
Dimitri Papadimitriou has recently made what we consider to be an important plea for moderation of the hysteria about Greece’s debt. Writing in the Financial Times, he complained that “The plethora of articles in your pages and others, some arguing in favour and other against a bail-out, contribute to market confusion and drive the country’s financing costs to record levels. It is not yet clear that a bail-out is even needed, but this market confusion is rendering the government’s ability to achieve its deficit goals ever more difficult.”
Indeed, we suspect that the same financial firms that helped to get Greece into its predicament are profiting from — and stoking the fires of — the hysteria. He goes on, “what Greece really needs now is a holiday from further market confusion being created by contradictory, alarmist public commentary”.
Greece, Euroland in general, and the rest of the world all need a holiday from the manipulation and destruction of our economies by Wall Street firms that profit from speculative bubbles, from burying firms, households, and governments under mountains and debt, and even from the crises that they create. Governments all over the globe should use all legal means at their disposal to ferret out the bad faith and even fraudulent deals that global financial behemoths are foisting on us.
Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.
L. Randall Wray is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Economics | European Union, Greece |
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Germany’s DWD National Weather Service has developed a nasty habit of putting out warmed up press releases for announcing monthly mean data, and then later very quietly revising the data downwards.
Result: the public believes that warming is happening when in fact there really isn’t any.
German skeptic site wobleibtdieglobaleerwaermung (whereistheglobalwarming) writes a post titled: “What’s wrong with the DWD? Once again a downward correction. June 2015 was 0.2° Celsius colder than reported in the press releases”.
It describes how the June 2015 mean temperature for Germany was overstated by 0.2°C in its press release. It adds:
Also in the two earlier months of May and April, and the entire spring of 2015, the press releases reported a mean temperature that was elevated 0.2°C. DWD correction: May and spring 2015 were 0.2°C less ‘warm’ than announced in the press releases – spring 2015 now 1.4°C colder than a year earlier.
The overly hasty DWD press release announcing the June 2015 data states:
”… The first month of the summer with a nationwide mean temperature of 16.0 °C was 0.6°C above the international valid reference period of 1961 to 1990. Using the 1981 to 2010 reference period the deviation was still 0.3°C…”
Here the wobleibtdieerderwaermung site also points out yet another sloppy error made by the DWD: the difference between the two reference periods for June is in fact 0.4°C, and not 0.3°C, citing a 2014 DWD press release here.
So, did the DWD issue a correction to inform the public of the true June 2015 result, that it was in fact cooler then they had claimed earlier? The wobleibtdieerderwaermung writes:
At the DWD homepage http://www.dwd.de/ one finds at a well hidden location, after a total of seven (7) clicks, the value of 15.8 °C for June in Germany – all the way down, to the right.”
In other words, the DWD made sure to bury the real results, to keep them as much out of sight from the public as they could.
wobleibtdieerderwaermung suggests that the DWD ought to issue a new press release with the following content so that the public can be properly informed:
… The first month of the summer with a nationwide mean temperature of 15.8 °C was 0.4°C above the international vaild reference period of 1961 to 1990. Using the 1981 to 2010 reference period the deviation was only 0.0°C, and thus was exactly the mean for the WMO reference period… a climate warming in Germany’s June 2015 is thus not detectable over the last 35 years.”
So what’s compelling the DWD to engage in the habitual deceptive behavior? wobleibtdieerderwaermung speculates that all this probably has nothing to do with error and has more to do with “political intentions”.
Yet another government institution that we can no longer believe. Little wonder trust in government is near an all-time low.
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Germany |
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An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse – 4 billion euros more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.
These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.
“Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory”, declared a Guardian headline on January 25. “Radical leftists” the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades. They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a “rock star of economics”. It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label, neither were they “anti austerity”.
For six months Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centres of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy – in accordance with European “neo-liberal” values — and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece’s scalp.
Greece’s debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, “is illegal, illegitimate and odious”. Proportionally, it is less than 30 per cent that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks whose “bailout” in 2007-8 was barely controversial and unpunished.
For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: a tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even the Pope pronounces it “intolerable” and “the dung of the devil”. The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency.
In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor “leftists” nor even honest social democrats, but as two slightly upstart supplicants in their pleas and demands. Without underestimating the hostility they faced, it is fair to say they displayed no political courage. More than once, the Greek people found out about their “secret austerity plans” in leaks to the media: such as a 30 June letter published in the Financial Times, in which Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF to accept their basic, most vicious demands – which he has now accepted.
When the Greek electorate voted “no” on 5 July to this very kind of rotten deal, Tsipras said, “Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek people”. Greeks had not voted for “better terms”. They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.
The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the “illegal and odious” debt – as Argentina did successfully — and expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be “at the table” seeking “better terms”.
The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media it is no more than “leftist” or “far left” or “hardline” – the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza’s international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these “radicals”? What do they believe in?
In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote: “Should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism …
“I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated …. Yes, I would love to put forward [a] radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the [error of the British Labour Party following Thatcher’s victory].
“What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher’s neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself …?”
Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain “scorned socialist change” – when they were given no real opportunity to bring about that change – he echoes Blair.
The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind – but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as “liberal” or even “left”, Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, “schooled in postmodernism”, as Alex Lantier wrote.
For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.
This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight.
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics | Alexis Tsipras, European Union, Greece, SYRIZA, Yanis Varoufakis |
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Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels have come to a landmark agreement to de-escalate fighting in the country, sources say.
The Colombian government pledged in the Sunday deal to halt its military action against the rebels, who last week announced a one-month unilateral ceasefire starting from July 20, both parties said in a joint statement.
“The national government, from July 20, will launch a process of de-escalation of military action, in response to the suspension of offensive actions by the FARC,” said the statement issued in the Cuban capital, Havana, and read by Cuban and Norwegian diplomats, who have been mediating the talks.
The agreement will come into force if FARC fulfills its promised unilateral truce.
The FARC’s top negotiator in Havana expressed hope that the ceasefire would lead to the resumption of bilateral negotiations.
“This is undoubtedly a strong, promising, and hopeful re-launch of the dialogue process,” said Ivan Marquez.
His government counterpart, Humberto de la Calle, said the accord indicates that “the opportunity to end the conflict is alive.”
FARC will later decide if it will extend its ceasefire, while both sides will revisit the agreement in four months, mediators said.
Also on Sunday, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos hailed the deal, calling it an “important step” toward a total peace agreement.
It is the first time the Colombian government has agreed to curtail its military actions against the rebels since peace talks began in November 2012 in Havana.
The negotiations have produced partial agreements on several issues, but have not resulted in a final deal.
FARC is Latin America’s oldest rebel group and has been battling the government since 1964.
Bogota estimates that 220,000 people have been killed and more than 4.5 million others have been displaced due to the FARC insurgency.
~
Background: Colombian President Santos Announces New Military Leadership
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Colombia, FARC, Latin America, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia |
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Oil prices fell in Asia on Monday as Iran and major western powers said they were closer than ever to a landmark nuclear deal that would lift sanctions and see Tehran’s crude exports return to global markets.
A forecast by the International Energy Agency (IEA) for slower world oil demand next year was also weighing on the market, analysts said.
US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for August delivery was down 86 cents to $51.88 and Brent crude tumbled 96 cents to $57.77 a barrel in late-morning trade.
“We have come a long way. We need to reach a peak and we’re very close,” Iranian President Sheikh Hassan Rouhani said in Tehran on Sunday.
“I hope we are finally entering the final phase of these marathon negotiations. I believe it,” said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who cancelled a trip to Africa to stay at the talks in Vienna.
Any deal to stop what the West suspects as Iranian efforts to build an atomic bomb will result in the lifting of punishing economic sanctions, allowing the country to resume oil exports.
More Iranian oil however will add to a supply glut, which has depressed prices.
The IEA has forecast that global oil demand would grow by 1.2 million barrels per day next year, slower than the 1.4 million projected this year.
However, global output grew by 550,000 barrels a day in June alone to 96.6 million barrels, IEA added.
This is up on average by 3.1 million barrels from a year ago, boosted by increased production from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
OPEC’s output climbed in June to a three-year high of 31.7 million barrels, the IEA said.
Source: AFP
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | Sanctions against Iran |
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Covert warfare is progressive, according to Prime Minister David Cameron, who will on Monday unveil plans to ramp up military spending on drones, spy planes and Special Forces operations.
Cameron will visit UK drone base RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, following Chancellor George Osborne’s recent pledge to peg the UK defense budget at 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The PM is expected to say he will task defense and security chiefs to examine how Britain can do more “to counter the threat posed by ISIL [Islamic State] and Islamist extremism.”
“This could include more spy planes, drones and special forces. In the last five years, I have seen just how vital these assets are in keeping us safe,” he will say.
This trend of using drones and engaging in Special Forces operations has grown steadily in recent years – largely as a result of Britain’s military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Responding to the British Prime Minister’s call for increased spending on drones, Kat Craig, legal director at international human rights organisation Reprieve said:
“If the Prime Minister is going to call for more spending on drones, he needs to give us some answers on how they are being used. There is overwhelming evidence that the UK is closely involved in the US’ secret drone war, which risks turning the whole world into a battlefield. Yet ministers have never once answered questions from Parliament or the public on the role Britain plays. Drone technology has enabled a vast expansion of secret bombing campaigns which take place without the knowledge or approval of the public. We need a full debate on these sinister aspects of this new technology before we go any further down this road.”
RT asked Chris Cole of Drone Wars UK on Monday about the rationale behind what he termed “remote warfare.”
“The use of drones, special forces and private security companies has become the favored means of military interventions as the public has grown increasingly war-weary,” he said.
Cole said that public outrage over dead and wounded soldiers has changed the face of warfare in Britain.
He argued the “political cost” of warfare can be whitewashed in incidences where the state employs “remote systems” like drones.
“If you take away that potential political cost by using remote systems like drones, it much easier for our politicians to be seen to be doing something as it is perceived as ‘risk free’,” he said.
Cole stressed the use of drones is not a humanitarian pursuit. The appearance of diminished risk is an illusion, he said.
“Rather we are transferring the risk of war from our troops, on to the heads of innocent civilians on the ground in the countries we are bombing, and also on to our civilians who have become the targets for reprisals,” he added.
Cole’s view appears to be in line with some the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) own internal discussions.
In September 2013, following a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by the Guardian newspaper, it was revealed that an internal MoD discussion paper had argued that less overt forms of warfare would be required to pursue British strategic aims.
The report by the MoD’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), suggested that the armed forces try to “reduce public sensitivity to the penalties inherent in military operations.”
It said the ministry should “inculcate an attitude that service may involve sacrifice and that such risks are knowingly and willingly undertaken as a matter of professional judgment.”
The paper added that the use of drones and mercenaries – which it called “contractors” – were less likely to lead to a public outcry in the face of bloody battles.
The report also cited the case of a group of Special Forces killed in 1982, saying that “the loss of 19 SAS soldiers in a single aircraft accident during the Falklands campaign did not arouse any significant comment.”
Asked what the specific impacts of extended Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) warfare could be, Cole said, “Increased drone and air strikes are bound to increase civilian casualties.”
“Observers report that between 500 and 1,000 civilians have already died in coalition bombing in Iraq and Syria and if the number of strikes increase this will only rise.”
July 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | Human rights, Middle East, Syria, UK, Violence, War |
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