Biden pledges Ukraine additional $335mn in military assistance
RT | April 1, 2016
The US has promised Kiev an additional $335 million in security aid to help Ukraine boost its military strength. Washington also made it clear to the Ukrainian president that to unlock the next tranche of IMF money, Kiev should push ahead with political reforms.
US Vice President Joe Biden held a luncheon with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who is currently visiting Washington as part of a nuclear summit comprising more than 50 world leaders. Poroshenko seized the rare opportunity to touch base with Obama administration officials.
According to an official statement on Poroshenko’s website, Biden has indicated Washington’s readiness to provide Kiev with additional $335 million in security assistance, which would be used to reform Ukraine’s Armed Forces, National Guard and border control.
Last year, the House Armed Forces Committee suggested providing some $300 million aid on the Ukrainian government and offered to “provide appropriate security assistance and intelligence support, including training, equipment, and logistics support, supplies and services, to military and other security forces.”
At the same time, Kiev also heavily relies on a financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Having received $6.7 billion from the fund’s $17.5 billion bailout package in 2015, the third tranche has now been stalled.
Plagued by corruption and deep political crisis, Kiev has been failing to fulfill reforms to unlock the next tranche of the loans worth $1.7 billion. To secure its lenders’ confidence, Ukraine must implement reforms and made scant progress in stamping out corruption.
Meeting with Poroshenko Thursday, Biden reminded that Kiev would not receive international economic assistance unless it forms a new government, “oriented on reforms and cooperation with the IMF,” Poroshenko’s office said.
For his part, Poroshenko responded that setting up “an effective anti-corruption system” was his government’s priority.
Ukraine’s corruption was one of the main topics of Biden’s trip to Kiev in December 2015.
“Corruption siphons off resources. We know this. You know this,” he told Ukrainian MPs, saying that “corruption eats Ukraine like cancer.” At the time, he assured Kiev of the Washington’s support and announced allocation of additional $190 million from the US budget to help conduct structural reforms in Ukraine and fight corruption in the first place.
While in Washington, Poroshenko also tried to lure more investment to his country’s economy while meeting with US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.
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The French Malaise: ”National security” but for which nation?
By Gearóid Ó Colmáin | American Herald tribune | March 31, 2016
Since the Belgian attacks on March 22nd, there has been much talk of Europe’s need to increase security and modernize methods of mass surveillance and control in all public transport, particularly airports and underground trains. One country in the world has received a considerable degree of publicity in this regard: Israel. The Jewish State is now being held up by the French media as a ‘model of security’ which should be emulated by the European Union.
Henceforth, Israeli security methods are to be employed in our Airports. Travelers parking their cars will be interrogated by police and secret service personnel; passengers will be questioned about their destination and further interrogations will ensue if they are perceived to be engaging in prevarication or showing signs of anxiety or stress. Passenger profiling is to become the norm rather than the exception. People’s travel records will be taken into consideration in assessing whether or not they pose a ‘threat’. This ultimately means that all citizens will be treated as though they were terrorists.
The French media have not been embarrassed about suggesting Israeli security methods be introduced throughout Europe, notwithstanding the fact that Israel is a racist and criminal entity which cruelly keeps over a million people locked up in an open air concentration camp, subjecting the native population of the occupied territory to constant state terror and torture. The pro-Israeli propaganda is being aggressively pushed through both national and regional newspapers throughout France.
An article appeared in Quest France on Sunday March 27 with the headline: L’aéroport de Tel-Aviv, modèlede sécurité- ‘Tel-Aviv Airport, model of security’.
The report describes the interrogation methods mentioned above which are routinely carried out in Tel -Aviv’s Ben Gourion airport. We are also informed that Israeli security experts from the EL AI airline visited Zaventem Airport in Bruxelles shortly after the terrorist attacks in order to assess the site’s security; they were apparently ‘outraged’ by the lax security at the airport. But the reader is not told who was in charge of surveillance at Zaventem Airport. Security at the airport is in fact provided by ICTS, an Israeli company which was set up by former operatives of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic spy agency. So Israeli experts were ‘outraged’ by the lack of security provided by Israeli intelligence? http://www.ictseurope.com/global-locations/belgium
According to Sott.net :
‘ICTS uses the security system employed in Israel, whereby passengers are profiled to assess the degree to which they pose a potential threat on the basis of a number of indicators, including age, name, origin and behavior during questioning’.
ICTS provided security at Logan Airport in 2001 when the infamous ’19 hijackers’ allegedly boarded their flight to New York on their way to the World Trade Centre. A few months later in December 2001, Richard Reid, who had previously spent time in Israel, boarded a flight in Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport heading for Miami. He was carrying explosives which he unsuccessfully attempted to detonate on the plane. ICTS, who were in charge of security at Charles De Gaulle airport, failed once again.
ICTS was in charge of London’s bus security system in 2005 during the terrorist attacks there and on Christmas Day 2009 at Schipol Airport, Amsterdam, the Israeli company failed to prevent ‘knicker-bomber, Nigerian ‘terrorist’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the wealthy son of a former Nigerian MP, who boarded a flight from to Detroit without a passport, while carrying explosives. According to US attorney Kurk Haskel who was an eye-witness, Abdulmutallab was escorted on board the plane by a ‘well-dressed’ man of ‘Indian’ origin who told ticket officials that “the man was from Sudan and that it was typical (to let him on the plane without a passport).”
This strongly suggests the terrorists had security clearances.
So now we have a barrage of media sound bites about the effectiveness of Israeli security and the necessity of introducing further police-state measures in Europe, in spite of the fact that Israeli companies are already providing ‘security’ here and doing a spectacularly dismal job at preventing terrorism!
After the March 22nd attacks in Brussels, a video circulated on the Internet drawing attention to the suspicious behavior of an ”eyewitness’ on France 24 news station after the bombs in Zaventum airport. The ”eye-witness” named Alexandre claims to be a Belgian living in America but his accent is unusual. Alexandre, who is supposed to be in shock and trauma after a brutal terrorist attack, suggests that perhaps European authorities will be forced to adopt security measures similar to those in Israel. Although this ”eye witness” experienced a terrorist attack, he admits that he has ‘ no idea’ what the other victims in the Brussels metro bombs went through. The statements are odd and suspicious but there is no way of proving whether the character is a Mossad agent as the video caption implies.
Nonetheless, it is particularly surreal to find the mass media in France promoting the ‘Israeli security model’ when it is Israeli security companies who are responsible for ‘failing to prevent’ so many terrorist attacks. Of course, the Zionist entity is the only real and long term beneficiary of the War on Terror. As Benjamin Netanyahu himself put it in 2007: ” We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
There is no reason to suppose that this recent wave of terrorist attacks in Europe is not also ”benefiting” the Zionist entity.
Promoting emigration and multiculturalism in Europe, propping up Zionist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey who are Wahhabising Europe’s youth, while at the same time fomenting Islamophobia among European citizens, all these policies serve Israel’s imperial ambitions to rule over all the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East, while maintaining support in Europe and America by reminding its people every time there is an ‘Islamist’ terrorist attack that this is what Israel is fighting every day.
In his new book Palestine, le malaise Français Franco-Camerounian investigative Journalist Charles Onana shows how the Jewish Lobby in France harassed and demonised President Francois Mitterand for insisting on Yasser Arafat’s visit to France in 1989.
Onana’s study of French government archives prove that the influence of the Jewish Lobby on French foreign policy is deeper and more far-reaching than commonly understood.
Mitterand’s defiance of the Jewish Lobby was continued to a certain extent by President Chirac when he refused to participate in the Zionist-orchestrated war on Iraq in 2003. Since the accession of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French presidency in 2007 and the current regime of François Hollande, Zionism has become almost inseparable from French ruling class ideology. From arch-Zionist Bernard-Henri Lévy’s war on Libya to the war on Syria and a whole series of artificially engineered destabilizations in Africa involving Takfiri Muslims murdering Christians, France has become the bellicose avant-garde of Zionism, carrying out a strategy of chaos which is making the world dangerous for the many but safe for the ‘chosen ones’ and their ever expanding Zionist entity.
Mitterand and Chirac were certainly no friends of French workers nor of the African nations writhing under the yoke of French neo-colonialism, but both leaders had, on the contrary, the merit of setting some limits to Zionist omnipotence. Mitterand’s haughty refusal to ‘apologise’ to Israel on behalf of the French people for the crimes of the Vichy regime, and Chirac’s imperious reprimand of Israeli troops during his visit to Palestine.
[This] contrasts poignantly with the craven, sycophancy of President Hollande’s abasement of the French nation before Israel, when at Netanyahu’s Israeli residence in November 2013 the French president, like a court jester, nauseatingly offered to ” sing a song of love for Israel”.
None of the articles in the French press, published since the Paris and Belgium terrorist attacks mention the criminal ‘negligence’ of ICTS. Instead, we are being told Israeli security is a model we should follow when in fact, we are already living under ‘Israeli security’, the same security agencies who have boasted about committing false flag terrorism against the French public.
In 1979, Israel bombed a factory in France making parts for a nuclear reactor in Iraq. The attack was blamed on ecologists. The Israeli Secret Intelligence Service ( ISIS or Mossad) then proceeded to issue death threats to French engineers working on the project, threatening to kill them and their families if they returned to Iraq. The death threats were issued in the name of an ‘Islamist’ group. All of this was admitted by the Mossad agents themselves in a documentary aired on French television entitled: ‘Droit d’Inventaire: quand le Mossad frappe en France’.
Israel is the only foreign state to have bombed France since the German occupation of the Second World War, a terror campaign admitted by the Zionist entity’s government, yet Israeli companies are providing ‘security’ for French citizens.
Israel’s global role as a pariah state operating outside the norms of international law, flouting all international conventions on human rights, repeatedly committing heinous war crimes and waging wars of aggression, while functioning as a veritable shadow government within the corridors of Western imperial states, this is a problem no nation can continue to ignore. But the few who refuse to ignore it risk their lives.
On March 26 French senator Natalie Goulet received death threats on social media after she wrote a letter to the secretary of state in charge of the budget, requesting clarification for the French government’s policy of giving a 60 percent tax deduction to families who make donations to the Israeli Defense Forces. Although banned in Israel, Betar, the Zionist terrorist militia, regularly issue death threats to their enemies with total impunity from the French state.
But perhaps we should feel ‘safer’ now that the ‘Israeli security model’ is being reinforced as the metropolitan world, our world, slowly metamorphoses into a vast, sprawling Gaza-zone.
Gearóid Ó Colmáin, AHT Paris correspondent, is a journalist and political analyst. His work focuses on globalization, geopolitics and class struggle. His articles have been translated into many languages. He is a regular contributor to Global Research, Russia Today International, Press TV, Sputnik Radio France, Sputnik English, Al Etijah TV, Sahar TV Englis, Sahar French and has also appeared on Al Jazeera. He writes in English, Irish Gaelic and French.
CIA leaves explosives on school bus borrowed for training
RT | April 1, 2016
For at least two days a school bus in northern Virginia has been carrying students with explosive material hidden in its engine compartment. The explosives fell out of a container, which was used by the CIA for training last week.
“During the exercise, explosive training material was inadvertently left by the CIA K-9 unit in one of the buses used in the exercise,” the CIA said in a statement. The agency attested that the explosives were “incredibly stable” and “benign” and didn’t put anyone in danger.
The explosive was discovered on Wednesday during a routine maintenance check. It had been unnoticed for nearly a week since March 24.
The CIA was called to retrieve the material. Neither the federal agency nor local authorities would go into detail about what kind of explosive was involved.
“The exact nature of the training material used in this exercise is not being released at the request of the CIA so as not to compromise its training techniques,” Loudoun County officials said.
Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde Byard described the explosive as a “putty-type” material designed for use on the battlefield and which requires a special detonator. Putty or plastic explosives, including the well-known C-4, are easily shaped and well-suited for demolition works.
The Briar Woods High School, which provided its premises to the CIA for the spring break training, said the vehicle was used for eight runs on Monday and Tuesday before the explosives were discovered. It carried 26 students attending Rock Ridge High School, Buffalo Trail Elementary School and Pinebrook Elementary School.
The CIA said the training was routine and part of exercises its agents do with local law enforcement. The container with explosive was designed to see how good sniffer dogs would be at finding it.
