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Human Rights Defender Arrested During Cycling Marathon

International Solidarity Movement | May 15, 2016
Photo Credit: www.taz.de

Photo Credit: http://www.taz.de

Bil’in, Occupied Palestine – On Friday the 13th of May 2016, the internationally recognized human rights defender and coordinator of the Bil’in popular committee against the wall and settlements, Abdullah Abu Rahma, was arrested during the Alwada Cycling Marathon, which took place in the West Bank Friday. Abdullah Abu Rahma is currently still being held under detention by the Israeli military and his case will be brought to the military court in Ofer Military Base tomorrow.

Abu Rahma, who is from the West Bank village Bil’in, was arrested, after the Alwada Cycling Marathon had reached Bil’in. After reaching Bil’in the attending cyclists were met by approximately 150 heavily armed soldiers, who immediately started showering the cyclists with tear gas and blocked the road, where their route was going. During this attack on the peaceful demonstrating cyclists, Abu Rahma was arrested along with an international activist from Israel. The Israeli activist was released shortly after her arrest.

The Alwada Cycling Marathon’s intention was to demonstrate against the illegal Israeli occupation and the apartheid system, that Israel is enforcing on the Palestinians through a healthy and peaceful cycling route from Ramallah to Bil’in. By Israeli Forces attacking the peaceful demonstration and arresting Abu Rahma, they once again show the world, that they do not accept the right to protest peacefully and that they do not comply with the international law, that does not allow Israeli Forces to be on Palestinian controlled areas, which the area of Bil’in is.

Abu Rahma is an important activist for the village of Bil’in and a symbol of peaceful resistance all over the West Bank. For now, he is left waiting for his next sentence, after he has already been imprisoned for his nonviolent resistance multiple times, and has in the past been charged with both “incitement” and “organizing and participating in an illegal demonstration.” Till now, there has not been declared a charge against him in the current case, but the military court will determine his fate, after having held him in detention for 4 days, even though he did not commit any crime whatsoever.

For more information about friday’s Alwada Cycling Marathon:

https://www.facebook.com/haytham.alkhateeb/posts/10208232017891106?pnref=story

https://www.facebook.com/haytham.alkhateeb/videos/vb.1022320161/10208230395770554/?type=2&theater

May 16, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

North Korea, Following China and India, Pledges No-First-Use of Nuclear Weapons–So Could Obama

By John Laforge | CounterPunch | May 16, 2016

North Korea’s May 7 declaration that it would not be first to use nuclear weapons was met with official derision instead of relief and applause. Not one report of the announcement I could find noted that the United States has never made such a no-first-use pledge. None of three dozen news accounts even mentioned that North Korea hasn’t got one usable nuclear warhead. The New York Times did admit, “US and South Korean officials doubted that North Korea has developed a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile that would deliver a nuclear payload to the continental United States.”

Nuclear “first use” means either a nuclear sneak attack or the escalation from conventional mass destruction to the use of nuclear warheads, and presidents have threatened it as many as 15 times. In the build-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf bombing, US officials including then Def. Sec. Dick Cheney and Sec. of State James Baker publicly and repeatedly hinted that the US might use nuclear weapons. In the midst of the bombardment, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., and syndicated columnist Cal Thomas both explicitly promoted nuclear war on Iraq.

In April 1996, President Bill Clinton’s deputy Defense Secretary Herald Smith publicly threatened to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear Libya — which was a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — for allegedly building a secret weapons plant. When Clinton’s Defense Secretary William J. Perry was questioned about this threat he repeated it, saying, “[W]e would not forswear that possibility.” (The Nonproliferation Treaty forbids a nuclear attack on other state parties.)

In “Presidential Policy Directive 60” (PD 60) of Nov. 1997, Clinton made public the nuclear first use intentions of his war planners. US H-bombs were now being aimed at nations identified by the State Department to be “rogues.” PD 60 alarmingly lowered the threshold against nuclear attack possibilities. The Clinton doctrine “would allow the US to launch nuclear weapons in response to the use of chemical or biological weapons,” the Los Angeles and New York Times reported. (Arguing that we need H-bombs to deter chemical attacks is like saying we need nuclear reactors to boil water.) Throwing deterrence policy under the bus, Clinton then “ordered that the military … reserve the right to use nuclear arms first, even before the detonation of an enemy warhead.”

Clinton’s order was an imperious rebuke to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) — the nation’s highest scientific advisory group — which recommended six months earlier, on June 18, 1997, that the US, “declare that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons in war or crisis.” In April 1998, Clinton’s US Embassy reps in Moscow coldly refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq, saying, “… we do not rule out in advance any capability available to us.”

Again, in January and February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer declined to explicitly exclude nuclear weapons as an option in a war on Iraq, saying US policy was not to rule anything out, Wade Boese of the Arms Control Association reported. Additionally, Def. Sec. Donald Rumsfeld said at a Feb. 13 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that official policy dictated that the US, “… not foreclose the possible use of nuclear weapons if attacked.”

Putting an end to these ultimate bomb scares would bring US action in line with Presidential speechifying which has regularly denounced “nuclear terrorism.” An international agreement on “non-nuclear immunity,” adopted by five nuclear-armed states May 11, 1995, has not quelled charges of hypocrisy made against them. The pact is full of exceptions – e.g., PD 60 — and is nonbinding. Only China has made this unequivocal pledge: “At no time and under no circumstances will China be the first to use nuclear weapons and [China] undertakes unconditionally not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries and nuclear-free zones.” India has made a similar no-first-use promise.

A formal US renunciation of first use would let cooler heads prevail by ending the debate over so-called “threshold” use of the Bomb. It would also end the blatant public duplicity of proclaiming that nuclear weapons are only for deterrence while preparing for attacks “before the detonation of an enemy warhead.”

Pledging “no first use” would save billions of dollars in research, development and production, as well as the cost of maintaining first-strike systems: B61 H-bombs, Trident submarine warheads, Cruise and land-based missile warheads.

Significantly, nuclear war planners who have used their first-strike “master card” believe they were successful — the way a robber can get a bag of cash using a loaded gun but without pulling the trigger. They want to keep their ghastly “ace” up their sleeve, and they have manufactured a heavy stigma against formally renouncing nuclear first use, since to do so might further call into question the official “winning” reasons for having tested radiation bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The US should embrace China’s unambiguous language and promise never to use nuclear weapons first or against non-nuclear states. If President Obama wants to ease world tensions without apologizing for Hiroshima when he visits the iconic city, he could replace Clinton’s presidential directive with his own, declaring that the US will never again be the first to go nuclear.

John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.

May 16, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Battleground Europe: The Real Reason US Wants to Invest More in Propaganda

TV Man in the Autumn - Stencil

© Flickr/ sualk61
Sputnik – May 16, 2016

The United States is contemplating investing into additional propaganda efforts targeted against Russia as mainstream Western media does not seem to be doing a very good job of getting Washington’s message across to Europe and preventing the continent from getting closer to Russia, former US diplomat Jim Jatras told RT.

The analyst was referring to a recent initiative aimed at establishing a new federal agency that will be tasked with countering Russian and Chinese “propaganda.”

The bill, known as Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016, has been in fact designed “to insure that there is no corrective to the information put out by [the US] government and then dutifully picked up by the Western media,” Jatras observed.

American media outlets, he added, “pick up like bulletin boards from government agencies very uncritically and just simply put it out there. And no other points of view are really entertained.”

The initiative is primarily focused on Europe and its warming relations with Russia, he added. US policymakers are apparently concerned that Europeans are increasingly disappointed in Washington’s stance on Russia, with some urging to lift the restrictive measures that were imposed on Moscow following the outbreak of the Ukrainian civil war.

“What I think the fear is, especially if you look at the changing mood in Europe towards, for example, the sanctions on Russia, I think that the people here in Washington feel they are losing that argument,” Jatras said.

The US policymakers’ logic, according to the analyst, is the following:

“Rather than reexamine their policy and think: ‘Well, maybe there is something wrong here, maybe we should change our course,’ they are saying: ‘They just don’t understand us well enough. We just have to make our propaganda better than it has been.'”

The bill, introduced by Senator Rob Portman, has been referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations. If passed, it would create the Center for Information Analysis and Response, armed with a $20-million budget for 2017 and 2018.

“This is especially, it seems, targeted toward Europe where there will be a $20 million over the next two fiscal years made available in the form of grants to unspecified people in Europe that one assumes in the European media to carry a story that is more in line with US policy,” Jatras explained.

Read more:

US, NATO, EU ‘Obsessed’ With ‘Highly Efficient Russian Propaganda’

May 16, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

Peace, Not Russia, Is Real Threat to US Power

By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | 16.05.2016

or-37320The monstrous US military budget is a classic illustration of the proverb about not seeing the wood for the trees. It is such an overwhelming outgrowth, all too often it is misperceived.

In recent years, Washington’s military expenditure averages around $600 billion a year. That’s over half of the total discretionary spending by the US government, exceeding budgets for education, health and social security. It’s well over a third of the total world military annual spend of $1.7 trillion.

The incipient military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of in his farewell speech in 1961 has indeed become a central, defining feature of American society and economy. To talk of «American free-market capitalism» is a staggering oxymoron when so much of the country’s economy is wholly dependent on government-funded militarism.

Or put it another way: if the US military budget were somehow drastically reduced in line with other nations, the all-powerful military-industrial complex and the American state as we know it would collapse. No doubt something better would evolve in time, but the impact on established power interests would be calamitous and therefore is trenchantly resisted.

This is the context for the escalation in Cold War tensions with Russia this week, with the deployment of the US missile system in Romania. The $800 million so-called missile shield is set to expand to Poland over the next two years and eventually will cover all of Europe from Greenland to southern Spain.

Washington and NATO officials maintain that the Aegis anti-missile network is not targeted at Russia. Unconvincingly, the US-led military alliance claims that the system is to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles or from other unspecified «rogue states». Given that Europe is well beyond the range of any Iranian ballistic capability and in light of the international nuclear accord signed last year between Tehran and the P5+1 powers, the rationale of «defense against Iranian rockets» beggars belief.

The Russian government is not buying American and NATO denials that the new missile system is not directed at Russia. The Kremlin reproached the latest deployment as a threat to its security, adding that it would be taking appropriate counter-measures to restore the strategic nuclear balance. That’s because the US Aegis system can be reasonably construed as giving NATO forces a «first-strike option» against Russia.

A couple of things need to be clarified before addressing the main point here. First, European states are chasing Iranian business investments and markets following the breakthrough P5+1 accord signed last July. Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Austria are among the Europeans who have been vying to tap Iran’s huge economic potential. The notion that Iran is harboring a military threat to such prospective partners is ludicrous, as Russian officials have pointed out.

Secondly, the US protestations of innocent intentions towards Russia are a contemptible insult to common sense. They contradict countless statements by Washington, including President Obama and his Pentagon top brass, which have nominated Russia as an aggressive threat to Europe. Washington is quadrupling its military spending in Europe, increasing its troops, tanks, fighter jets, warships and war exercises on Russia’s borders on the explicit basis of «deterring Russian aggression».

In other words, Russia is viewed as a top global enemy – an existential threat – according to Washington. So, the deployment of the US Aegis missile system this week in Eastern Europe is fully consistent with Washington’s bellicose policies towards Russia. It would thus be irrational and foolishly naive to somehow conclude otherwise, that the US and its NATO allies are not on an offensive march towards Russia.

The depiction of Russia as a global security threat is of course absurd. We can also include similar US claims against China, Iran and North Korea. All such US-designated «enemies» are wildly overblown.

Western claims – amplified relentlessly in the Western news media – of Russia «annexing» Crimea and «invading» eastern Ukraine can be easily contested with facts and indeed counterpoised more accurately as belying Washington’s covert regime change in Kiev.

Nevertheless, Western fear-mongering supported by unremitting media propaganda has to a degree succeeded in conflating these dubious claims into a bigger specter of Russia menacing all of Europe with hybrid warfare. It is, to be sure, a preposterous scare story of a Russian bogeyman which has racist undertones and antecedents in Nazi ideology of demonizing Slavic barbarians.

But this demonizing of Russia, as with other global enemies, is a necessary prop for the American military-industrial complex and its essential functioning for the US economy.

The $600 billion-a-year military spend by Washington is roughly tenfold what Russia spends. And yet, inverting reality, Russia is presented as the threat!

The US military budget is greater than the combined budgets of the world’s next nine big military spenders: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, India, Japan and South Korea, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Arguably, the US economy as we know it – dominated by Pentagon, corporate, Wall Street and congressional interests – would cease to exist were it not for the gargantuan government-subsidized military budget.

Structurally, the US economy has ossified into a war economy and the only way for this to be maintained is for the US to be continually placed on a war footing, either in the form of a Cold or Hot conflict. Historians will note that out of its 240 years of existence as a modern state, the US has been in war or overseas conflict for more than 95 per cent of its history.

During the former Cold War with the Soviet Union, a recurring theme in Washington was the alleged «missile gap» which purported to portray the US as losing its military edge. This resulted in relentless military expenditure and an arms race that in part led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Washington’s self-ordained privilege to run up endless debt (currently nearly $20 trillion) because of its dollar dominance as the world’s reserve currency has permitted the US to escape a day of reckoning for its ruinous military profligacy.

This madcap situation continues to prevail. A quarter of a century after the official end of the old Cold War, US military spending continues at the same profligate, unsustainable pace.

What Washington needs in order to keep the fiasco going is to whip the rest of the world into a frenzy of fear and loathing. That’s why the Cold War with Russia and China has had to be rehabilitated in recent years. Swords cannot be turned into plowshares because the US power interests that command its economy have no use for plowshares.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has on several occasions invited global cooperation on security matters, and with the US in particular. Moscow has also recently said that it does not want to embark on a new arms race. The latter wariness is understandable given the deleterious experience for the Soviet Union from runaway military spending.

However, that is precisely what the US wants and needs to induce: a global arms race which it can then invoke as justification for its own monstrous military.

According to SIPRI, both China and Russia have significantly increased their military budgets, by about 7.5 per cent each in 2015.

Russia may not want to engage in an arms race, mindful of the warping pressure that can inflict on its national resources and development.

But when the US installs a new missile system on Russia’s doorstep, the impetus for Russia to likewise scale up military commitments is onerous.

And that is what Washington is driving at. It is not that Russia is an objective security threat to Washington or its allies. The real threat to Washington is peaceful international relations which would make its military-industrial complex redundant.

It is a disturbing reality that world peace is antithetical to the very foundation of America’s corporate capitalist power.

Shamefully, the world is subjected to the risk of war and even annihilation all for the purpose of maintaining elite American power privileges. And among those who suffer this diabolical injustice are none other than the majority of American citizens, who have to endure poverty and misery while their corporate elite siphon off $600 billion a-year in military obscenity.

May 16, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Turkish MP tweets of ‘downing another Russian plane’ over basketball match outcome

RT | May 16, 2016

An MP in the Turkish ruling AKP party has tweeted about ‘downing another Russian plane.’ It was his reaction to a Turkish basketball team losing to a Russian outfit in a major game. The politician later said the tweet was a joke.

Islanbul’s Fenerbahce basketball team lost to Moscow’s CSKA 101-96 in overtime in the Euroleague final on Sunday.

“Another Russian jet should be dropped,” Samil Tayyar, MP from Turkey’s ruling AKP party, tweeted following the match.

The phrase was retweeted more than 8,000 times and garnered more than 9,000 ‘likes’. However, not all the retweets were an endorsement, as quite a number of negative and even insulting comments ensued.

On Monday, Tayyar took to Twitter again, explaining that his words were a joke made to “take the heat off.”

In the MP’s opinion refereeing at the CSKA-Fenerbahce match was warped, which influenced the outcome of the game.

Russian-Turkish relation have been frosty since November 24, 2015, when a Turkish F-16 fighter ambushed and downed a Russian Su-24 bomber taking part in anti-terrorist operations in Syrian airspace. One of the pilots was shot dead from the ground after he ejected, allegedly by Turkmen militants fighting Syrian troops.

The operation to rescue the other pilot was successful, but a marine from the rescue party was killed by the militants, who also damaged and later destroyed a Russian Mi-8 transport helicopter on the ground.

Turkey has never apologized for the incident, insisting that the Su-24 violated its airspace. Ankara has recently released the alleged killer of the Russian pilot from custody.

After the attack, Russia introduced a set of economic measures against Turkey, restricted Turkish business activities in Russia, banned employment of Turkish citizens, and canceled all charter flights to Turkey. This move has decreased the flow of Russian tourists to Turkey 10 times. A ban on practically all Turkish food imports was also put in place.

Russia’s agriculture watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor announced plans to halt imports of fruit and vegetables from Turkey this week.

The “basketball incident” is the second of its kind lately. A Russia-Turkey women’s volleyball match in Istanbul in March saw a display of hatred from Turkish fans, who showered the guest team with rubbish. The host team’s coach went as far as flipping the bird to the Russian girls and staff.

May 16, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Defense Bill Coming This Week: A Boost for War and Tyranny

By Ron Paul | May 15, 2016

For many of us concerned with liberty, the letters “NDAA” have come to symbolize Washington’s ongoing effort to undermine the US Constitution in the pursuit of constant war overseas. It was the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012 that introduced into law the idea that American citizens could be indefinitely detained without warrant or charge if a government bureaucrat decides they had assisted al-Qaeda or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States.” No charges, no trial, just disappeared Americans.

The National Defense Authorization bill should be a Congressional mechanism to bind the president to spend national defense money in the way Congress wishes. It is the nuts and bolts of the defense budget and as such is an important oversight tool preventing the imperial executive from treating the military as his own private army. Unfortunately that is no longer the case these days.

Why am I revisiting the NDAA today? Unfortunately since 2012 these bills have passed the House with less and less scrutiny, and this week the House is going to vote on final passage of yet another Defense Authorization, this time for fiscal year 2017. Once again it is a terrible piece of legislation that does great harm to the United States under the guise of protecting the United States.

Unless some last minute changes take place, this latest NDAA will force young women for the first time to register to be drafted into the US military. For the past 36 years, young men have been forced to register with Selective Service when they turn 18 or face felony charges and years in prison. Under a perverted notion of “equality” some people are cheering the idea that this represents an achievement for women. Why cheer when slavery is extended to all? We should be fighting for an end to forced servitude for young men and to prevent it being extended to women.

The argument against a draft should appeal to all: you own your own body. No state has the right to force you to kill or be killed against your will. No state has a claim on your life. We are born with freedoms not granted by the state, but by our creator. Only authoritarians seek to take that away from us.

Along with extending draft registration to women, the latest NDAA expands the neocons’ new “Cold War” with Russia, adding $3.4 billion to put US troops and heavy weapons on Russia’s border because as the bill claims, “Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security.” This NDAA also includes the military slush fund of nearly $60 billion for the president to spend on wars of his choosing without the need to get Congress involved. Despite all the cries that we need to “rebuild the military,” this year’s Defense Authorization bill has a higher base expenditure than last year. There have been no cuts in the military. On the contrary: the budget keeps growing.

The Defense Authorization bill should remain notorious. It represents most of what is wrong with Washington. It is welfare for the well-connected defense contractors and warfare on our economy and on the rest of the world. This reckless spending does nothing to defend the United States. It is hastening our total economic collapse.

May 15, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Escalations in a New Cold War

By Jonathan Marshall | Consortium News | May 14, 2016

If the United States ever ends up stumbling into a major conventional or nuclear war with Russia, the culprit will likely be two military boondoggles that refused to die when their primary mission ended with the demise of the Soviet Union: NATO and the U.S. anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program.

The “military-industrial complex” that reaps hundreds of billions of dollars annually from support of those programs got a major boost this week when NATO established its first major missile defense site at an air base in Romania, with plans to build a second installation in Poland by 2018.

Although NATO and Pentagon spokesmen claim the ABM network in Eastern Europe is aimed at Iran, Russia isn’t persuaded for a minute. “This is not a defense system,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday. “This is part of U.S. nuclear strategic potential brought [to] . . . Eastern Europe. . . Now, as these elements of ballistic missile defense are deployed, we are forced to think how to neutralize emerging threats to the Russian Federation.”

Iran doesn’t yet have missiles capable of striking Europe, nor does it have any interest in targeting Europe. The missiles it does have are notoriously inaccurate. Their inability to hit a target reliably might not matter so much if tipped with nuclear warheads, but Iran is abiding by its stringently verified agreement to dismantle programs and capabilities that could allow it to develop nuclear weapons.

The ABM system currently deployed in Europe is admittedly far too small today to threaten Russia’s nuclear deterrent. In fact, ABM technology is still unreliable, despite America’s investment of more than $100 billion in R&D.

Nonetheless, it’s a threat Russia cannot ignore. No U.S. military strategist would sit still for long if Russia began ringing the United States with such systems. That’s why the United States and Russia limited them by treaty — until President George W. Bush terminated the pact in 2002.

President Reagan’s famous 1983 “Star Wars” ABM initiative was based on a theory developed by advisers Colin Gray and Keith Payne in a 1980 article titled “Victory is Possible”: that a combination of superior nuclear weapons, civil defense programs, and ballistic missile defenses could allow the United States to “prevail” in a prolonged nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Such nuclear superiority, Gray argued, could back up “very large American expeditionary forces” fighting in a future conflict “around the periphery of Asia.” By limiting damage to the U.S. homeland, missile defenses would neutralize Russia’s nuclear deterrent and help the United States “succeed in the prosecution of local conflict . . . and — if need be — to expand a war.”

Gray published that latter observation in a 1984 volume edited by Ashton Carter, who as President Obama’s Secretary of Defense now champions the new missile shield in Europe. So it should come as little wonder that Moscow is going all out these days in a sometimes ugly campaign to remind the world of its nuclear potency, lest NATO take advantage of Russia’s perceived weakness.

Russian Tough Talk

Moscow spokesmen have warned that Romania could become a “smoking ruins” if it continues to host the new anti-missile site; threatened Denmark, Norway and Poland that they too could become targets of attack; and announced development of a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to penetrate the U.S. missile shield.

Secretary Carter responded this month that “Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling raises troubling questions about . . .  whether they respect the profound caution that nuclear-age leaders showed with regard to brandishing nuclear weapons” — even as he announced new details of a $3.4 billion military buildup to support NATO’s combat capabilities.

U.S. military leaders say they are drawing up even bigger funding requests to send more troops and military hardware to Eastern Europe, and to pay for new “investments in space systems, cyber weapons, and ballistic missile defense designed to check a resurgent Russia.”

Speaking in February at security conference in Munich, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called for an end to such confrontation, noting that “almost every day [NATO leaders] call Russia the main threat for NATO, Europe, the U.S. and other countries. It makes me wonder if we are in 2016 or in 1962.”

But stepped-up conflict comes as a godsend to the Pentagon and its contractors, which only a few years ago faced White House plans for major cutbacks in funding and troop strength in Europe. It allows them to maintain — and increase — military spending levels that today are greater than they were during the height of the Cold War.

U.S. and other NATO leaders justify their buildup by pointing to Russia’s allegedly aggressive behavior — “annexing” Crimea and sending “volunteers” to Eastern Ukraine. They conveniently neglect the blatant coup d’état in Kiev that triggered the Ukraine crisis by driving an elected, Russian-friendly government from power in February 2014. They also neglect the long and provocative record of NATO expansion toward Russia’s borders after the fall of the Soviet Union, contrary to the pledges of Western leaders in 1990.

That expansion was championed by the aptly named Committee to Expand NATO, a hot-bed of neoconservatives and Hillary Clinton advisers led by Bruce Jackson, then vice president for planning and strategy at Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest military contractor. In 2008, NATO vowed to bring Ukraine — the largest country on Russia’s western border — into the Western military alliance.

Cold War Warnings

George Kennan, the dean of U.S. diplomats during the Cold War, predicted in 1997 that NATO’s reckless expansion could only lead to “a new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one, and the end of the effort to achieve a workable democracy in Russia.”

Last year, former Secretary of Defense William Perry warned that we “are on the brink of a new nuclear arms race,” with all the vast expense — and dangers of a global holocaust — of its Cold War predecessor.

And just this month, President Obama’s own former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that NATO’s plans to deploy four battalions to the Baltic States could result “very quickly in another Cold War buildup here, that really makes no sense for either side.”

If “we continue to build up the eastern flank of NATO, with more battalions, more exercises, and more ships and more platforms,” he told an audience at the Atlantic Council, “the Russians will respond. I’m not sure where that takes you.”

Nobody knows where it takes us, and that’s the problem. It could take us all too easily from small provocations to a series of escalations by each side to show they mean business. And given the trip-wire effect of nuclear weapons stored on NATO’s soil, the danger of escalation to nuclear war is entirely real.

As foreign policy expert Jeffrey Taylor commented recently, “The Obama administration is setting the stage for endless confrontation, and possibly even war, with Russia, and with no public debate.”

Returning to the days of the Cold War will buy less security and more danger. As President Obama contemplates what he will say about the lessons of nuclear war in Hiroshima, he should fundamentally reconsider his own policies that threaten many more Hiroshimas.

May 15, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Azerbaijan to perform military drills with Turkey, Georgia

Press TV – May 15, 2016

The Republic of Azerbaijan has declared joint military drills with Turkey and Georgia, a move which is likely to increase tensions with neighboring Armenia prior to talks with Yerevan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“To increase the combat capabilities and combat readiness of the Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia, we deemed it worthwhile to carry out joint military exercises,” Azerbaijan’s Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov said on Sunday, without specifying when the exercises would be carried out.

At least 46 people have been killed since April 1, when fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Karabakh.

On Friday, Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said an Azeri soldier had been killed by Armenian fire on Thursday.

On the Armenian side, a serviceman died of wounds on Saturday after reportedly being targeted by an Azeri sniper near southwestern Armenian border.

On April 3, Baku announced a “unilateral” ceasefire as a gesture of goodwill, warning, however, that it would strike back if its forces came under attack. Bouts of fighting were reported soon afterward.

The landlocked Karabakh region, which is located in the Azerbaijan Republic but is populated by Armenians, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian militia and Armenian troops since a three-year war, which claimed over 30,000 lives, ended between the two republics in 1994 through mediation by Russia.

The presidents of the Republic of Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as diplomats from Russia, the US and France, are to meet in the Austrian capital of Vienna on Monday to discuss the situation in the volatile Nagorno-Karabakh.

May 15, 2016 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

NYT Editors Obsessed with Getting Clinton Elected President

By Stephen Lendman | May 15, 2016

She’s recklessly pro-war, pro-business, anti-populist, a threat to world peace and stability. Her deplorable public office record shows she opposes equity, justice, rule of law principles and democratic values.

Her agenda is frightening, electing her president unthinkable, a neocon war goddess, supporting endless conflicts, deploring peace, risking direct confrontation with Russia and China.

Her finger on the nuclear trigger leaves humanity’s fate up for grabs. NYT editors support the most recklessly dangerous US presidential aspirant in modern memory while bashing Trump relentlessly.

He’s over-the-top like all duopoly power presidential aspirants, supporting the same dirty business as usual agenda. Unlike Clinton, he’d rather make money than start WW III.

The Times went to extraordinary lengths to bash his womanizing history, making “unwelcome advances,” conducting “unsettling workplace conduct over decades.”

It assigned unknown numbers of reporters to locate and interview over 50 women who worked with, dated or interacted with him socially “since his adolescence” – without explaining how any of this relates to affairs of state if he’s elected president.

Numerous past presidents had extramarital affairs, including Washington, Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, among others.

Little or nothing was said about their private lives while campaigning or throughout their tenure.

Instead of focusing solely on issues and where candidates stand, the Times dwelled on where it had no business going. Nothing it reported suggested wrongdoing.

Countless hours spent locating and interviewing dozens of women found nothing more than a “portrait of a wealthy, well-known and provocative man and the women around him, one that defies categorization,” said the Times.

“Some women found him gracious and encouraging.” Some got high-level positions in his enterprises. The Times called it “a daring move for a major real estate developer at the time.”

Who cares if he made “romantic advances.” He didn’t rape or molest anyone. “A lot of things get made up over the years,” he said. “I have always treated women with great respect. And women will tell you that.”

About all the Times could conclude was saying he had power and women he came into contact with didn’t. He had and still has “celebrity… wealth (and) connections.” Some women sought his help with their careers and stuck with him.

The lengthy article isn’t worth the time or trouble to read. It reveals more about the Times’ deplorable agenda than Trump’s.

Political reporting should focus solely on issues and pinning down candidates on where they stand. America’s money-controlled system features horse-race journalism.

Duopoly power is ignored. So is a sham political process too debauched to fix. Whether Trump or Clinton succeeds Obama, ordinary people lose.

The biggest unreported issue is avoiding global nuclear war. With Trump there’s a chance, likely little at best with Clinton.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

May 15, 2016 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 1 Comment

Student Arrested, Loses Scholarship for Speaking Kurdish

Pinar Cetinkaya was not allowed to return to her dorm because she was accused of being a suicide bomber.

Pinar Cetinkaya was not allowed to return to her dorm because she was accused of being a suicide bomber. | Photo: DHA
teleSUR – May 15, 2016

A Kurdish student lost her scholarship and housing for speaking Kurdish to her parents and was released after being questioned for terrorist propaganda.

Her roommates called police after hearing her speak Kurdish on the phone, the only language that her parents understand.

“We’ve had several fights over the same issue in the past few months,” Pinar Cetinkaya told Dogan news agency, adding that she did not expect them to take it so far. “I’m facing a very big injustice. They played with my life, with my future.”

Cetinkaya, a 20-year-old college student, lived on the street for two days after being kicked out. When she returned to gather her belongings, she was not allowed to enter and treated as a suicide bomber, reported DHA on Friday.

She said she has never engaged in terrorist activity and was victim of ethnic discrimination.

Since the Turkish government broke a ceasefire with the Kurdish militant PKK in July, it has cracked down on university students for alleged terrorist propaganda. “Some universities have become separatist terrorist organization camps,” said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a university speech on Friday. “Do not tolerate these organizations using force.”

May 15, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

On Jewish projection…

By Gilad Atzmon | May 15, 2016

The Israeli fear of being thrown into the sea is  a projection.

The Israelis are afraid of being pushed into the sea because they themselves pushed the Palestinians into the sea (picture above). The Israelis tend to attribute their own genocidal inclinations  to  Arabs (in particular)  and Goyim (in  general).

‘Jewish fear,’ as such, is self-inflicted — the more brutal the Israelis are, the more fearful they become of the  possibility that the Palestinians may be equally murderous. Similarly, the more the Jew hates the ‘goy,’ the more the Jew is mortified by the possibility that the goy may also express some animosity in return.

Jewish fear better be grasped  as a war against terror within. Jews are too often tormented and haunted by their own racism and supremacy which they attribute to others by means of projection.

May 15, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

Panama Papers: Should the Corporate Media Have Been Trusted?

By Joe Emersberger – teleSUR – May 14, 2016

“John Doe” made a bad call when he leaked the Panama papers to the corporate media.

“Can a corporate media system be expected to tell the truth about a world dominated by corporations?” the Media Lens editors once asked rhetorically.

Assuming the best of intentions on the part of whoever leaked the Panama Papers, trusting hundreds of corporate journalists to wage war on income inequality was a bad mistake. However, the corporate media can be trusted to wage war on the enemies of income inequality, in particular progressive governments in Latin America, and use the Panama Papers to do so even if the ammunition they have is pitiful.

Consider an article in the Miami Herald that ran with the mocking headline, “Ecuador’s leader demands release of Panama Papers, and learns he’s in them.” A very similar article with an almost identical headline ran in the UK Independent, and in many other outlets. The article in the Herald began:

“… Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa called out his country’s journalists and boasted that, unlike other countries, he and his government weren’t found in the leak.

However, the secret documents show that he and his estranged brother, Fabricio, caught the attention of anti-corruption authorities in Panama in 2012.”

Anyone who follows Ecuadorian politics will find this very underwhelming. Fabricio Correa is a long-time bitter foe of his brother’s government. Fabricio is also a businessman who has long been accused of being less than ethical by his brother and many other people. That’s old news and it is hardly surprising that it would have “caught the attention” of investigators years ago. How could it not have? A book was written in 2010 – “El Gran Hermano” – alleging that Rafael Correa was complicit with his brother’s corruption and in 2012 Correa won a defamation suit against the authors.

The article in the Herald is convoluted and often unclear, but that actually serves its purpose. It is padded with details that ultimately fail to land a blow against Fabricio Correa, never mind President Correa, but readers unfamiliar with Ecuador, even if left confused by the article, will probably still come away thinking that something damning has been uncovered.

The use of meaningless statistics is another way the article is padded. It says “searching the word ‘Ecuador’ yields more than 160,000 secret documents. Guayaquil, the wealthy coastal city, shows up in 109,000 documents,” as if that refutes Correa’s observation that hostile Ecuadorean journalists who have had access to the documents for a year have not found anything to discredit his government. Correa would be the last person to deny that corruption, in particular tax avoidance by his elite opponents, is still a big problem in Ecuador. That’s one reason why Correa demanded that all the information be released rather than cherry-picked by corporate journalists. Ecuador’s private media led a very dishonest propaganda campaign last year against tax reforms that would have almost entirely impacted Ecuador’s wealthiest 2 percent. Moreover, Guayaquil’s mayor for the past 16 years has been Jaime Nebot, a right-winger who is arguably Correa’s most prominent opponent. Applying the shoddy logic suggested by the article, Nebot and his right wing allies – including his many allies in Ecuador’s private media – are discredited by how often the word “Guayaquil” appears in the Panama Papers.

Reporters are not always so sloppy. When a journalist I recently corresponded with found a Venezuelan opposition member mentioned in the Panama Papers he explained to me that “he was simply mentioned in newspaper articles passed around by IMF staff.”

The article in the Herald also cited an NGO as follows:

“Last year, Transparency International ranked 168 countries and territories on its government corruption index. It found that 106 nations were less corrupt than Ecuador.”

It neglected to mention that the head of the groups’ Chile branch just resigned after being linked to offshore firms. Much more importantly, it has been obvious for many years that a little transparency does not flatter Transparency International (TI).  In 2008, Calvin Tucker wrote a hard hitting piece about a shockingly dishonest report that TI published about Venezuela’s state oil company. He reported “TI says that they ‘stand by their report’ and stand by the person who compiled the data, an anti-Chávez activist who backed the 2002 military coup against democracy.”

The Miami Herald also used the Panama Papers as an excuse to rehash the farcical “suitcase scandal” of 2008.  It was a comical example of the US government using its prosecutors and a more than cooperative media to smear governments it didn’t like – in this case the left governments of Venezuela and (at the time) Argentina. How could the United States possibly claim jurisdiction over a case based on far-fetched allegations that the Venezuelan government had tried to smuggle a suitcase full of cash into Argentina to influence an election? The U.S. government weaseled in by alleging that an “unregistered agent” of Venezuela’s government had come to the United States to convince one of the people involved to keep quiet. There had never been an indictment under this law unless there was an espionage or national security accusation to go along with it. Mind you, several years later the Obama Administration would officially declare Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States – and then defend the insane declaration by saying it didn’t mean it. The U.S. media responded with some timid criticism. That should be unsurprising. Media outlets owned by the rich and powerful, whose most influential customers, advertisers, are rich and powerful are not going to lead movements for serious reform, never mind revolution.

None of this is to say that the Panama Papers will not be of any help in the fight against income inequality. Time will tell. There must be a very small number of journalists working in the private media who are genuinely interested in fighting inequality, but one can easily imagine how much more positive impact these leaks may have had. Recall how wisely Edward Snowden singled out Glenn Greenwald as a journalist he could trust. Remember where Julian Assange, a real thorn in the side of the most powerful and violent people in the world, ended up seeking refuge; and never forget how viciously the corporate media turned on him.

The battle against inequality, which is a crucial part of the battle for meaningful democracy, requires a struggle against the corporate media, a real movement to democratize the means of communication, not (a few exceptional corporate journalists aside) collaboration with it.

RELATED:

Panama Papers: The Caribbean Connection

May 15, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

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