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Gitmo War Court Orders US General Jailed For Supporting Detainee’s Legal Rights

Sputnik – 02.11.2017

On Wednesday, a judge in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, sentenced a US Marine in charge of a military court’s legal representation to three weeks of confinement and ordered him to pay $1,000 for failure to follow orders concerning a case that involved the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

Brig. Gen. John Baker, 50, chief defense counsel for military commissions, received the sentence from US Air Force Judge Col. Vance Spath.

Spath said Baker failed to follow orders when he excused three Defense Department-paid attorneys — Rosia Eliades, Mary Spears, and Rick Kammen — from a military court case involving the USS Cole, something he did not have the authority to do, the Miami Herald reported. Spath said the decision to excuse them had been declared “null and void.”

The attorneys sought to leave the case on the basis that they should be able to represent and defend clients without government surveillance — the Daily Beast reports that the attorneys believed the government was listening in on what should be privileged communications. Baker, supported their exit, and in standing up for this principle, was found in contempt of the court — a court, he argued, that had no proper jurisdiction over his actions in the first place.

The ruling was the first time the military tribunal in Cuba issued a ruling since 2008.

Appearing in the war court Wednesday, Baker argued that the court was set up to prosecute foreign terrorists and lacked jurisdiction to punish him since he was a US citizen. Baker was apparently denied the ability to defend himself after he made this assertion and was ordered to sit down.

“There are things I want to say, and you are not allowing me to say them,” Baker told the judge, according to the Herald. “This is not a pleasant decision,” the judge replied, adding that the legal proceedings were neither “fun” nor “lighthearted.” Without the judge’s ruling, though, he said there would be “havoc” in the justice system.

The particular case concerns Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a 52-year-old Saudi Arabian national who has been detained at Guantanamo for the past 11 years, two months. In 2008, CIA Dir. Michael Hayden confirmed al-Nashiri was among the al-Qaeda operatives the agency tortured.

Speaking at Georgetown University’s 2016 NATSECDEF conference, Baker said that “put simply, the military commissions in their current state are a farce or as Rick Kammen — lead counsel for Mr. al-Nashiri — stated on the record last week, these commissions are ‘hopelessly flawed.'”

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Zero evidence, but… DOJ source says it ‘knows identities of Russians involved in DNC hack’

RT | November 2, 2017

Just days after the Mueller investigation came up short on Kremlin involvement in the US presidential election, a source in the Department of Justice says the names of the Russians who hacked the DNC computers are known, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In yet another effort to make a connection between the Kremlin and Hillary Clinton’s loss in the November 2016 US presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department “has identified more than six members of the Russian government involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and swiping sensitive information.” The leaked materials divulged a mountain of unsavory information related to the Clinton campaign.

Although relations between the world’s two preeminent nuclear powers hang in the balance over the charges, the accusations about “Russian meddling” in the US democratic process come without the outlet offering any evidence to support the claims. This much was admitted by the authors of the WSJ article early in the report.

“US intelligence agencies have attributed the attack to Russian intelligence services, but haven’t provided detailed information about how they concluded those services were responsible, or any details about the individuals allegedly involved,” authors Aruna Viswanatha and Del Quentin Wilber wrote.

Curiously, the US mainstream media has only shown interest in pursuing the “Russian hack” narrative regarding the release of thousands of the DNC’s emails, which were made public by WikiLeaks last year. Yet there were possible other suspects in this case, not least of all Seth Rich, former Voter Expansion Data Director, who was gunned down on July 10, 2016, in Washington DC.

WikiLeaks offered $20,000 reward for information regarding Rich’s death, while saying their offer should not be taken as implying Rich had been involved in leaking information to them. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, stated emphatically that Russia was not the source of the DNC data leak.

“We can say, we have said, repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” he said in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.

Nevertheless, despite providing zero evidence to support these extremely severe charges, the Obama administration took the unprecedented step of expelling 35 Russian diplomats right before the New Year, and the changing of the presidential guard, as well as imposing sanctions.

Meanwhile, this is not the first time the Wall Street Journal has produced “evidence” allegedly incriminating Russia in some conspiracy, only to be debunked later.

In early October, the influential business newspaper reported that the Russian government used software, created by the Moscow-based company Kaspersky Lab, to “secretly scan computers around the world for classified U.S. government documents and top-secret information.”

Without identifying its sources, WSJ accused the respected anti-virus company of being aware of “an adjustment to its normal operations,” allowing the company to search for terms as broad as “top secret,” as well as the “classified code names of US government programs.”

These accusations were immediately refuted by Germany’s BSI federal cyber agency.

“There are no plans to warn against the use of Kaspersky products since the BSI has no evidence for misconduct by the company or weaknesses in its software,” BSI said in an emailed response to questions about the latest media reports. “The BSI has no indications at this time that the process occurred as described in the media.”

The unsubstantiated report by the WSJ comes as Robert Mueller’s investigation into “Russian interference” in the 2016 presidential election has failed to turn up any evidence.
Attempts by US investigators to find alleged Russian collusion with President Donald Trump’s campaign have led to the discovery of a “Ukrainian trail,” Russia’s FM Sergey Lavrov said, suggesting Washington should now investigate Kiev’s role.

Over the past several years, Washington has attempted to blame any negative world events on Russia, “be it political protests, companies going bankrupt, or man-made disasters,” Lavrov said. “I’ve already heard we’ll soon be not only interfering in elections, but also manipulating the environment in order to create floods,” he added.

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

How Obama and Hillary Clinton Weaponized the ‘Dossier’

By George Szamuely George Szamuely | The Duran | October 31, 2017

The disclosure that the Clinton campaign, using white-shoe law firm Perkins Coie as a cutout, financed the so-called Steele dossier confirms what we have known all along.

The Trump-Russia collusion story was a joint invention of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. It enabled the Obama administration to make use of the nation’s security and intelligence services to spy on Trump and his associates and to use whatever information they thereby gleaned to try to get Hillary into the White House. The failure of the scheme didn’t stop either Obama or the Clintons. Following the election debacle, an enraged Obama administration sought vengeance by disseminating the dossier as widely as possible with a view to undermining the incoming Trump administration and to ensuring that no rapprochement with Russia would be possible. In doing so, Obama and Clinton have thrown American politics into turmoil and have perhaps pushed the United States and Russia toward armed confrontation.

We have known the basic outlines of the Steele dossier story since January. The Steele dossier, we have been told, started off as a piece of opposition research prepared by Fusion GPS and financed by a Republican rival of Trump’s or perhaps a GOP NeverTrumper. Following Trump’s victory in the GOP primaries, the Democrats took over its funding. Fusion hired Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk at MI6 who now ran his own corporate intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. Using the leads Steele had developed during his years at MI6, he reported back to his paymasters his shocking discovery: The Russians had been cultivating Trump for years in preparation for his run for the presidency. So shocked was Steele by this that he rushed to alert the FBI, MI6 and even select reporters.

Most of this story is pure fiction. Neither the GOP nor a primary rival of Trump’s had any involvement with the dossier. To be sure, in October 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, a neo-conservative Web site funded by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, did hire Fusion to undertake opposition research on Trump. However, money for this undertaking dried up by May 2016.

The Steele-crafted Trump-Russia collusion story was from start to finish a Democratic Party operation. Its origins can be traced back to April 2016 and the leak of the Democratic National Committee e-mails. The DNC announced that it had been “hacked.” However, instead of reporting the matter to the proper authorities, the DNC turned to attorney Michael Sussmann, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann got in touch with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Inc. Now, CrowdStrike is no geeky, techno-gee-whiz firm. Its founder is Russian-born Dmitri Alperovitch, a senior fellow at the NATO-funded, intensely Russophobic Atlantic Council. “Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia,” the New York Times wrote. On June 14, CrowdStrike announced that the DNC hack perpetrators were two separate hacker groups employed by the Russian government.

Even though no one other than CrowdStrike had examined the DNC servers, U.S. intelligence agencies immediately declared that they were in agreement and that they had “high confidence” that the “Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents” from the DNC.

It was at this moment that the Clinton people made the strategic decision to tie Trump to Putin and to make the centerpiece of its campaign the idea that a vote for Trump was a vote for the Kremlin. Perkins Coie—yet again—got in touch with Fusion, which, in turn, got in touch with Christopher Steele. Steele had contacts at MI6 and, perhaps more important, contacts at the FBI. He had allegedly worked with the FBI in the takedown of FIFA.

Steele, who had many contacts at the FBI, understood what was required of him. On June 20, six days after CrowdStrike’s announcement, he filed his first report. It was exactly what the Clinton campaign was looking for: lurid, unsubstantiated but nonetheless juicy allegations. Russia had supposedly been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years.” Trump had hired prostitutes to “perform a ‘golden showers’ show in front of him” at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. “Trump’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities… with enough embarrassing material… to be able to blackmail him.”

Steele’s first memo enticed the Clinton people and they eagerly turned on the money spigots. Steele followed up with a memo revealing that the Russians were behind the DNC leak, that Putin “hated and feared” Hillary Clinton and that there existed a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump and the Russians. The recently-indicted Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, managed this co-operation on behalf of Trump by using “foreign policy advisor” Carter Page as an intermediary. “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise U.S./NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”

Carter Page, whom no one had ever heard of and who had never even met Trump, featured prominently in the Steele memos and in subsequent U.S. media coverage of the campaign. A July 19 memo from Steele had Page holding a “secret meeting” with Igor Sechin, executive chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, in which the two men discussed future bilateral energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related” sanctions against Russia.

The Clinton campaign theme was set. By July 23, 2016, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, was telling ABC News on Sunday that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke in to the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites. . . . It’s troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” A couple of days later, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was to lead the post-election “Trump-Russia collusion” charge in Congress, declared:

Given Donald Trump’s well-known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the D.N.C. and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party.

In August, it was reported, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote to FBI Director James Comey demanding disclosure of the contents of the dossier: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government… The public has a right to know this information.” And, of course, Hillary Clinton famously accused Trump of being “Putin’s puppet” during their third presidential debate.

The Steele dossier was now driving the Obama administration’s scrutiny of Trump’s people as well as media coverage of the campaign. Steele, the BBC reported, “flew to Rome in August to talk to the FBI. Then in early October, he came to the US and was extensively debriefed by them, over a week. He gave the FBI the names of some of his informants, the so-called ‘key’ to the dossier.” The FBI went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and obtained an order to “monitor the communications” of Carter Page, as “part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign.” According to the Guardian, the FISA court turned down its first application (an unusual event, if true), asking the agency to narrow its focus. Eventually, the FBI managed to convince the court that “there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.” What was the basis of this probable cause? CNN reported that the FBI based its application on the claims made in the Steele dossier. That’s very serious business. If the FBI was presenting the FISA court unverified material from the dossier as if it were verified then it was clearly deceiving the court in order to obtain a politically-motivated warrant.

By September 2016, U.S. media were reporting that Carter Page had become a person of interests for the U.S. government: “U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials—including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president.” Words straight from the dossier. The same media report had “U.S. intelligence agencies” receiving reports that Page met one Igor Diveykin, who “serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” This too is almost verbatim from Steele’s July 19 memo.

The U.S. government has actually made very little pretense that it didn’t make use of the dossier. FBI Director James Comey admitted to Congress that the dossier had been “one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation.” Then, on Jan. 11, 2017, following Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s meeting with Trump during which he and Comey presented the president-elect a summary of the dossier, Clapper issued a strange statement: The intelligence community “has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.” This was a classic non-denial denial. That he and his friends did not “rely” on the dossier doesn’t mean that they didn’t make full use of it.

Federal investigators also wiretapped Paul Manafort, both before and after the election and indeed right through to the last days of the Obama administration. According to CNN, the FBI launched an investigation of Manafort in 2014 shortly after the Feb. 22, 2014, coup d’etat in Ukraine. Manafort had worked as a political consultant work for former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. However, the “surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence.” In other words, by the time Manafort went to work for the Trump campaign in May 2016, he was no longer under FBI surveillance. The FBI resumed its surveillance at just about the time the first of Steele’s memos started arriving in Washington.

The wiretaps had nothing to do with the charges Special Counsel Robert Mueller has just brought against Manafort. Mueller’s charges involve activities that took place long before Manafort joined the Trump campaign. What the FBI was looking for was evidence that Manafort was a conduit between the Kremlin and Trump.

Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn also featured prominently in the dossier. He too came under Obama administration surveillance. Indeed, Obama’s people used the wiretaps in order to get him ousted from his newly-appointed position. Obama administration holdover, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, listened in on a conversation Flynn had had with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak, on Dec. 29, 2016, and decided that the incoming national security adviser was susceptible to blackmail from the Russians. She never really explained on what grounds the Russians could or would blackmail Flynn. Her argument seemed to be that because Flynn had discussed the possible lifting of sanctions—a policy that would run contrary to that of the Obama administration that was still in office at the time this conversation had supposedly taken place—he had violated the Logan Act, which prohibits private individuals conducting U.S. foreign policy. No one has been prosecuted under this statute for 200 years. Why the Russians would want to invoke an obscure statute to threaten Flynn, an official well-disposed toward them, with a prosecution that could never succeed and thereby to undermine the very policy they were seeking, namely, the lifting of sanctions, was never explained. Nonetheless, armed with this nonsense, Yates rushed over to the White House demanding dismissal of Flynn. He was susceptible to blackmail and was therefore a security risk. It seemed to be a joke, but for reasons that remain baffling, the White House meekly complied with Yates’s demand.

We now know that the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump’s people reached pathological levels following the election. It is almost certain that the FBI did pay Steele to continue his work. The Washington Post reported that the bureau had “reached an agreement with [Steele] a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.” The Post claims that “Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials.” This seems highly unlikely. According to a number of news stories, the Clinton campaign stopped paying Steele sometime at the end of October. Yet Steele continued sending memos through December. Somebody had to have paid him. Steele is not the type to work pro bono.

Obama people such as Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes went on an unmasking rampage during the election and after. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has claimed that the Obama administration made “hundreds of requests during the 2016 presidential race to unmask the names of Americans in intelligence reports, including Trump transition officials.” The requests were made without specific justifications on why the information was needed. More sinister were the activities of the Obama people after the election. Trounced by Trump, they vented their fury doing everything possible to undermine the incoming administration. The New York Times reported that during the last days of the Obama administration “White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential… across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.”

A former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration official, Evelyn Farkas, revealed that she was telling her former colleagues:

Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people that left…. That the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.

The full extent of the Obama administration’s campaign of surveillance, espionage and sabotage has yet to be revealed. The right-wing media have excitedly latched onto the Clinton revelations in order to put out a ridiculous story of their own. Americans are still innocent victims; Russians are still villains interfering with our gloriously pristine elections. The new victim-in-chief is Trump and the new Russian colluder-in-chief is Clinton. As ever, nothing changes in Washington.

George Szamuely, PhD, author of Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia, is Senior Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute of London Metropolitan University.

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

“DoD Owes Families, Nation Information on Niger Action” but NOT on USS Liberty Attack

If Americans Knew | November 2, 2017

“DoD Owes Families, Nation Information on Niger Action” but NOT on USS Liberty Attack

On June 8, 1967 Israeli air and sea forces attacked a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, killing  34 crew members, wounding over 170, and fatally damaging the ship. For 50 years surviving crew members and families of the fallen have called for a full investigation of the attack – without success.

by Joe Meadors, USS Liberty Survivor

The USS Liberty was attacked on June 8, 1967. No investigation of the attack was conducted by the US government.

The USS Pueblo was attacked on January 23, 1968 – 229 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The attack on the USS Pueblo was thoroughly investigated by the US government.  No investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty has been conducted.  No evidence that any investigation has been contemplated by anyone in the US government.

The Marine Barracks in Beirut were bombed on October 23, 1983 – 5,981 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut was thoroughly investigated by the US government.  USS Liberty survivors are still waiting for word that an investigation on their ship is in the works by the US government.

The USS Stark was attacked on May 17, 1987 – 7,286 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The attack on the USS Stark was thoroughly investigated by the US government. USS Liberty survivors are still waiting for an investigation of the attack on their ship.

The USS Cole was attacked on October 12, 2000 – 12,180 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The attack on the USS Cole was thoroughly investigated by the US government. USS Liberty survivors are still waiting.

The Niger attack was on October 4, 2017 – 18,381 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The Niger attack is currently being investigated by the US government. No investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty is on the horizon.

In a DoD Press Release Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Joe Dunford tells us “The Defense Department owes the families of the soldiers lost in Niger and the American people an explanation of what the soldiers were doing in Niger and why it was important.”

Given its refusal to conduct an investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty the DoD obviously doesn’t feel the same about our families, the families of our fallen shipmates and those of us who survived the attack.

Below is an article that expands on this subject and provides a list of questions we’d like to have answered. By no means all of the questions on the table. Arguably not the most important questions.

I respectfully submit that the question on the top of the list is: Why has the US government refused to conduct an investigation of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty?

DOD Says truth on Niger more important than USS Liberty

“DoD Owes Families, Nation Information on Niger Action” but NOT on USS Liberty Attack

By Joe Meadors | Arab Daily News

Four Green Berets were Killed in Action in Niger. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, held a prolonged, public press conference which was covered by every news outlet in the US.

In a DoD Press Release Gen. Dunford tells us “The Defense Department owes the families of the soldiers lost in Niger and the American people an explanation of what the soldiers were doing in Niger and why it was important.”

Given its refusal to conduct an investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty the DoD obviously doesn’t feel the same about our families, the families of our fallen shipmates and those of us who survived the attack.

Not that we haven’t asked.

USS Liberty crew, ignored by U.S. politicians for 50 years.

For over 50 years USS Liberty survivors have been begging the Department of Defense to conduct an investigation of the attack on our ship.

The Department of Defense obviously doesn’t think the American people deserve to hear from American servicemen who:

  • saw the unmarked aircraft as they attacked our ship;
  • heard the jamming of our radios on both US Navy tactical and international maritime distress frequencies;
  • witnessed the deliberate machine gunning of life rafts we had dropped over the side in anticipation of abandoning ship;
  • witnessed the slow circling of our ship by Israeli torpedo boats as they fired from close range at crewmen who were either trapped topside or who ventured topside to help their wounded shipmates;
  • saw the Israeli helicopters filled with armed assault troops hover very close to our ship in an apparent attempt to find a place to allow those troops to rappel down to the ship; and,
  • witnessed the torpedo boats immediate departure from the scene of the attack after cessation of hostilities instead of offering assistance as is their obligation under international law.

What questions have we been asking? I’ll share with you questions a USS Liberty widow asked then-Senator John Warner. Not surprising that he refused to respond to her questions:

  • Why didn’t the Sixth Fleet come to the aid of the Liberty?
  • Why were the rescue aircraft called back by the President of the United States?
  • What involvement did the 303 Committee have in the Liberty‘s deployment and mission?
  • What did Project Cyanide have to do with the Liberty, directly or indirectly?
  • What did Frontlet 615 have to do with the Liberty directly or indirectly?
  • Why wasn’t the USS Amberjack allowed to come to the aid of the Liberty?
  • Where is the film of the attack taken by the Amberjack?
  • Why weren’t violations of the UCMJ investigated?
  • Why were warning and operational messages to the Liberty intentionally mis-routed?
  • Why was the crew told to keep silent regarding the attack?
  • What secret is so volatile that cannot be revealed by our government after 50 years?
  • Why haven’t clear violations of international law been investigated?
  • Why was Admiral Tobin awarded the Bronze Star when he wasn’t even there?
  • Why hasn’t our former ambassador to Lebanon, Dwight Porter, ever been questioned by Congress, when it is known he listened to the attack at our embassy in Lebanon?
  • Why was Commander McGonagle awarded his Medal of Honor, our country’s highest honor, in the Navy Yard instead of in a ceremony conducted by the President at the White House?

These are just a sampling of the many questions that remain unanswered about the attack on our ship.

Questions that the Department of Defense will continue to ignore.

We are reaching out to everyone who believes that the attack on the USS Liberty should be treated exactly the same as the attacks on the USS Pueblo, USS Stark, USS Cole, as well as the 1982 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut and the death of the four Green Berets in Niger.

CLick here

Help us persuade the US government to investigate the attack on our ship – including the War Crimes that were committed by and against the United States during that attack.

For further reading:

The USS Liberty

American Legion calls for full investigation into Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , | 1 Comment

Iran’s snub to US has meaning for India

By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | November 2, 2017

Only Tehran could have punctured US President Donald Trump’s massive ego with just a delicate deflection by the wrist. It all began in the weekend with an innocuous media disclosure in Iran that Trump had sought a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani during the latter’s visit to New York in September to address the UN General Assembly, but the latter spurned the overture summarily. On Sunday Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahran Qassemi commented crisply, “A request indeed was made by the US side, but it wasn’t accepted by President Rouhani.”

Of course, Washington went into a tizzy with White House struggling to deny the Iranian report at first, but belatedly realizing, perhaps, that a lie might boomerang, allowed the State Department spokesperson to tamely confirm it on Tuesday. Trump’s request was apparently transmitted to the Iranian side when the US secretary of state Rex Tillerson and his Iranian counterpart Mohammed Javed Zarif were closeted together on the sidelines of a meeting of the foreign ministers of the P5+1 and Iran to review the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal in September.

The episode speaks volumes about Trump, the man and the statesman – and his times in the White House and the US foreign policies in such extraordinary times. Countries such as India or China must draw appropriate conclusions. Indian analysts, in particular, are still crowing about Tillerson’s recent rhetoric at the CSIS conjuring up from thin air a quadripartite alliance between the US, Japan, India and Australia to contain China, while Trump on the other hand is preparing for a momentous state visit to China looking for some foreign-policy trophy as outcome in his barren presidency.

The point is, Trump could so blithely befool the wily Saudi King Salman and the pompous Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in one go, sending them into wild ecstasy that he is about to go after the jugular veins of the Iranian leaders, while in reality also desiring to cultivate them on the quiet or at least keep open a line of communication to them – and, perhaps, even do some business with Tehran for ‘America First’.

The bad part is that the US is also intruding into India’s Iran policies. Did India have to cut back oil imports from Iran and replace it with US shale oil? For the US (or Israel), it is important that India-Iran relations remain sub-optimal for as long as their own relationships with Iran remain problematic. India’s interests, on the other hand, lie in forging a strategic partnership with Iran that can be highly productive and beneficial for advancing its development strategy as well as for strengthening regional security. To borrow the American expression, Iran is India’s ‘natural partner’.

Nothing brings this home as when Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proposed to the visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Tehran on Wednesday that a transportation corridor could be built connecting the Iranian port of Chabahar with St-Petersburg. India cannot miss the point that Russia and Iran could be meaningful partners in fostering regional connectivity. Simply put, geography dictates geopolitics and geo-economy.

The bottom line is that the Iranian snub to Trump also highlights its strategic defiance of the US’ attempts to (re)impose hegemony in what the Americans call the ‘Greater Middle East’ – stretching from the Levant to the Central Asian steppes. Delhi should pay serious attention to the remark by Khamenei to Putin yesterday when he said that the “good cooperation” between Iran and Russia in Syria has proved “meaningful” and bore “important results”, and above all, “this cooperation showed that Tehran and Moscow can realize common goals in difficult situations.” (Tehran Times )

Khamenei didn’t specifically refer to Afghanistan, but the thought couldn’t have been far from his mind. The US’ plans to consolidate an open-ended military presence in Afghanistan is actually aimed at encircling Iran and Russia and containing them. It is useful to recall in this context that the then Iranian and Russian foreign ministers – Ali Akbar Velayati and Evgeniy Primakov – had worked closely together to bring the Tajik civil war to an end in 1997. Equally, Iran and Russia were on the same page in supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan during 1997-2001.

No doubt, the preference of Tehran and Moscow once again will be to carry Delhi along with them in the struggle for strengthening regional security and stability through regional initiatives – as Khamenei’s remark on connecting Chabahar with St. Petersburg implies.

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , | 1 Comment

US Lawmaker demands RT YouTube ban during Russia hearing

At a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-California) put RT in her crosshairs, asking Kent Walker, the general counsel at Google, why his company has not yet banned RT from YouTube.

Walker said that Google “carefully” reviewed RT’s history on the social media platform and said they have “not found violations of our policies against hate speech and incitement to violence and the like.”

“It’s a propaganda machine, Mr. Walker,” Speier interjected. “The Intelligence Community – all 17 agencies – says it’s an arm of one of our adversaries. I would like for you to take that back to your executives and rethink continuing to have it on your platform.”

Walker responded that Google is looking into ways to increase transparency for “all government-funded sources of information.”

However, when Walker would not agree to the lawmaker’s wishes, Speier asked him if Google would at least consider putting a disclaimer on RT’s YouTube page that would say: “the Intelligence Community in the United States believes it’s an arm of our adversary, Russia.”

Walker said that they would “take a look at all forms of transparency.”

Speier also claimed that during the 2016 election, President Donald Trump’s campaign was “mimicking” stories from RT. Specifically, she referenced a video from CNN that was posted to Trump’s Twitter account on August 31, 2016. The tweet featured Trump speaking before a crowd and questioning former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s “strength and stamina.”

Speier said RT “hammered” the same message, comparing Trump’s tweet to a video posted to RT’s Twitter account, which featured footage of Clinton stumbling at the 9/11 memorial on September 11, 2016. Clinton’s campaign repeatedly changed its story as to the circumstances of Clinton’s fall at the time.

“What I would like to understand is who is mimicking who,” Speier asked, without acknowledging that Clinton’s stumble was covered by every major media outlet.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) also appeared to be grasping at straws during the hearing when he called out RT for reporting an event that was covered by other major news agencies.

Swalwell pointed to a July 2016 report about Ted Cruz being booed at the Republican National Convention (RNC) and suggested that the factual story, which was widely reported, could somehow be interpreted as election meddling or “propaganda.”

Referencing a large poster board display of an RT tweet promoting the story, Swalwell concluded that “if this interference campaign has taught us anything, it’s that the Russians don’t care.”

“They’re not pro-Republican, they’re not anti-Democrat, they’re just pro-Russian,” Swalwell said, warning his Republican colleagues that they could be targeted in the next election.

However, Swalwell failed to mention that the story about Cruz was entirely true and carried by numerous media outlets.

Swalwell also asked if RT made any money on the ads they posted.

“The same is true beyond the internet, of course, because RT is featured on cable stations, satellite stations, hotel television networks, they buy advertising in newspapers, magazines, airports, etc,” Walker said.

Walker then went on to explain that the money comes from advertisers and Google gets a small percentage of that money while the majority goes to the publisher.

House Intelligence Committee members accusing RT of being “fake news” were only able to point to accurate and widely reported stories on the network, during the hearing with social media executives on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

‘Red flag’

Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Alabama) directed most of her questions to Facebook, suggesting that it should have been a “red flag” that some of the ads in question were paid for in Russian rubles.

In response, Colin Stretch, the general counsel at Facebook, said that all ads on the social media platform go through “a combination of automated and manual review.”

Sewell, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, interrupted Stretch at that point, seemingly distracted from the official purpose of the hearing.

Instead of pursuing a line of questioning about Russia, Sewell asked who vets material posted on Facebook and if they are a “diverse group of people.”

Stretch explained that Facebook has vetters speaking a “number of languages” based “around the globe” adding that the company is “committed to building a workforce that is as diverse as the community we serve.”

“With all due respect, I have to stop you there,” Sewell interrupted again. “I don’t know if you know exactly how many racially diverse workforce that you have, what the percentage is, but I can tell you if you don’t know. It’s very low.”

Sewell went on to say that Facebook’s overall racial ethnicity was poor, with black employees making up 8.8 percent of the total workforce and only 2.3 percent of the leadership roles.

Later in the hearing, Sewell asked all three companies if they would agree with legislation that would require them to add a disclosure of who paid for any given ad.

The executives from all three companies responded by saying they were in agreement with the “general direction” of that notion, to which the other two companies agreed.

In October, lawmakers introduced the Honest Ads Act, which would subject social media outlets to the same transparency and disclosure laws as television and radio ads.

Wait, how do Facebook ads work?

When Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) took the floor, he asked how each of the companies helped RT target the audience that would see their ads.

Sean Edgett, the acting general counsel at Twitter, said the company did not have much of an interaction with RT and most of the ads were promoted content.

“So, they take a tweet of a news story and they promote it so that it is seen by users who don’t follow them and potentially want to drive viewership to their own platform or then have them follow back,” Edgett explained.

Edgett went on to explain that RT used “very general targeting,” which included US citizens who follow other media or news organizations. He added that the RT en Español account specifically targets users in California and Florida.

When asked if Facebook was aiding RT, Stretch said that all of the ads that the company has released to the committee were bought through their “self-serve ad platform,” adding that there was “no human interaction with any of the advertisers.”

Read more:

Bi-partisan Senate bill regulates political ads for ‘honesty’ on social media

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

Twitter: Speaking Russian, Having Russian IP Makes You a Kremlin Shill

Sputnik – 02.11.2017

During testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a representative of Twitter admitted that his company discovered alleged Russian election interference on their platform by flagging every account with Russian text, email, phone, IP address and so on as a potential agent of the Kremlin.

It sounds like we’re making this up, but we aren’t. This statement came from the mouth of Twitter’s Acting General Counsel Sean Edgett as he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “We’re looking at things like, whether they registered in Russia, do they have a Russian phone number, are they on a Russian mobile carrier, do they have a Russian email address, are they coming in from a Russian IP, have they ever… logged in at any time from Russia?” Edgett testified.

In other words, Russian shills include anyone who bought a phone in Russia, lives in Russia, used Twitter in Russia, does business in Russia or with Russians. You’re probably a Russian shill just for reading this article, according to Twitter.

Perhaps the most telling comment was in Edgett’s written testimony that was submitted to the Senate. It read that accounts with “Russian language or Cyrillic characters [that appear] in the account information or name” were also flagged as “Russia-linked.” (Emphasis ours.)

Although this should probably go without saying, speaking Russian does not make you Russian — and being Russian does not make you a servant of Vladimir Putin. Virtually every former Soviet Socialist Republic has a large percentage of Russian speakers among their population.

It isn’t just the former Soviet Union. There are 3 million speakers in Germany (a holdover from East Germany) and about 1 million in Israel (a result of the diaspora of Russian Jews after the Soviet Union collapsed.) Some 850,000 Americans have Russian as their primary household language. If any of them thought to type something Russian on Twitter, they are now Kremlin shills. Oops.

But wait, there’s more. Cyrillic is the alphabet used in the Russian language — as well as the national languages of countries such as Ukraine (a US ally) Bulgaria and Montenegro (NATO members alongside the US). It is the alphabet of the languages of dozens of ethnic groups in Central Asia, as well as the Dungan and Uyghur peoples of China.

It’s also the alphabet of the language of the Yupik people — the vast majority of whom live in reservations in Alaska, US of A. Truly, the network of Kremlin interference is frightening, that an entire ethnic group of American Indians have become their election-jacking puppets. There are, of course, already allegations that Russians somehow infiltrated or co-opted the Standing Rock Sioux protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline last year.

Twitter also admitted to censoring (or “taking action… to fight automation and spam on our platform,” in their parlance) hashtags that related to the WikiLeaks release of the private emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in October as well as emails from the Democratic National Committee in July. Twenty-five percent of all tweets tagged #PodestaEmails were automatically hidden, and 48 percent of tweets tagged #DNCLeak met the same fate.

Again, this is not a Pepe Silvia-esque conspiracy theory. These are statements taken directly from sworn testimony from Twitter’s official representative.

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Putin, Trump and Manafort

By Margaret Kimberley | Black Agenda Report | November 1, 2017

The American propaganda campaign being waged against the Russian Federation and its president Vladimir Putin has reached a stage of perverse perfection. It is virtually impossible to put forth a dissenting opinion that will be accepted or considered worthy of consideration. The Democrats are leading the charge to silence and censor and they are getting buy-in from people who otherwise consider themselves to be progressive.

This columnist has been interviewed on Radio Sputnik on two occasions. That fact should not be at all noteworthy but in the current atmosphere of Russophobia being pushed by the corporate media and Democratic politicians, it is a risky statement to make. Sputnik International is a Russian government entity, just as the BBC is “state run media” on behalf of the British government and the CBC for Canada. But anyone and anything connected to Russia gets the double standard treatment and is targeted for attack.

Marcus Ferrell was until recently a campaign staffer for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. He resigned after the Atlanta Journal Constitution revealed that he had been a guest on the program By Any Means Necessary which is hosted by Sputnik. Ferrell didn’t discuss Russia at all. Confederate monuments were the topic of conversation. But the level of fear is so great that he felt compelled to resign. His boss made no effort to fight against the tide and she didn’t defend him either.

Every day a new shoe drops in this faux scandal. Twitter announced that it would not accept advertisements from Sputnik or RT, formerly known as Russia Today. Sputnik had never even paid for ads on Twitter but why be bothered by facts when ginned up phony outrage is so readily available.

It is Democrats who demanded that Facebook and Twitter stop telling the truth about Eastern European click bait schemes and instead join in that party’s witch hunt. Now we are told that Russian social media posts meant to influence American politics reached 126 million people on Facebook over a two-year period. Of course the last paragraphs of that story reveal that only one out of 23,000 pieces of content actually reached anyone. That fact is too inconvenient and makes for a bad headline.

While social media giants are submitting to marching orders, the state and corporate sponsored Public Broadcasting System (PBS) produced its second anti-Putin documentary in as many years. First “Putin’s Way” in 2015 and now “Putin’s Revenge” feature so-called experts who outdo one another in stoking anti-Russian flames. PBS can never seem to find any expert who can make counter arguments.

While the corporate media compete to see who can dumb down the country the fastest, the legal wheels are turning to get Trump out of office and Russia is the pretext for the action. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has been indicted for tax fraud. His indictment is just the beginning of the bipartisan effort to end the Trump presidency. They hope to resume doing the elites’ business without hindrance from the man who is so bad for the neoliberal brand.

Nothing matters to liberals more than getting Trump out of office. Their juvenile political understanding was turned upside down by Hillary Clinton’s defeat and they haven’t been the same since. They are obsessed with the man they hate. They have been fed a steady diet of red meat which explains away their illusions about the failed Democratic Party and the fact that millions of their fellow citizens don’t see the world the way they do.

Paul Manafort was a long time Republican Party operative going back to the days of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. He used his connections to become a lobbyist, a hired gun for governments ranging from Nigeria to the Philippines to Kenya to Romania to Ukraine. Manafort would not be facing serious legal jeopardy if he hadn’t taken on that particular gig.

We are told that Ukraine’s former president Victor Yanukovich was “pro Russian” and that Manafort’s representation proves Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Neither statement is true but no one knows outside of the small circle of people who make herculean efforts to educate themselves about world affairs.

As the old saying goes, the fix is in. Manafort is just the first notch on former FBI director Robert Mueller’s gun. He will go after other Trump connected cronies and relatives who have done shady business but that won’t be the reason for the pursuit. There are many sleazy American lobbyists and business people but no one cares until there is a moment when their downfall is politically useful.

Free speech is being undermined, the left are losing their access to media and prosecutors are going after crooks, but not because they want justice to be done. If Putin was trying to destroy America he couldn’t do a better job than the media, crooked politicians and the deluded liberals who all work together.

Margaret Kimberley can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

November 2, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 1 Comment