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The Salisbury Poisonings: 10 Questions for the Authorities to Answer About Their Handling of This Case

By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | July 28, 2018

The two most basic claims made by the Government and investigators regarding the method and the mode in the Salisbury poisoning are these:

  1. That military grade nerve agent was used to poison Mr Skripal
  2. That it was applied to the door handle of his house

These claims raise a number of very obvious questions. For example, how did the assassin(s) apply such a powerful chemical without wearing protective clothing? How did the people who are said to have come into contact with the substance not die immediately, or at the very least suffer irreparable damage to their Central Nervous Systems? How did this military grade nerve agent manage not only to have a delayed onset, but also managed to affect a large 66-year-old man and his slim 33-year-old daughter, both of whom would have vastly different metabolic rates, at exactly the same time?

These are perfectly reasonable questions that deserve reasonable answers. I am aware, however, that no matter how obvious and rational such questions might be, doing so places one – at least in the eyes of the authorities – in the camp of the conspiracy theorist. This is disingenuous. One of the marks of a true conspiracy theorist is that he is someone who refuses to accept an explanation for an event, even after being presented with facts which fit and explain it coherently. But when the “facts” presented in a case do not fit the event they are supposed to explain, and are neither rational nor coherent — as in the Salisbury case — then calling the person who raises legitimate questions a “conspiracy theorist” is a bit rich, is it not?

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this piece, what I’d like to do is work on the assumption that the “Military Grade Nerve Agent on the Door Handle” claim is correct. And working from this assumption, I want to ask some questions about how the authorities have handled the case. The point is this: These questions are not really intended to challenge the official claims; rather the intention is to ask whether the authorities have handled the case correctly on their own terms.


1.  Prior to the investigation’s focus on the door handle, for a period of almost three weeks there were at least nine other theories proposed by the authorities as to where the Skripals came into contact with the poison. These included the restaurant, the pub, the bench, the cemetery, the car, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge and even a drone. During that time, police officers and investigators were entering and leaving the house, by the door, since it was not known to be the place where the poison was located.

Can the authorities explain how these officers and investigators were not poisoned?

 

2.  Once the door handle theory was established, those who had been in and out of the property during the previous three weeks would naturally have been concerned about the possibility that they had been contaminated.

Can the authorities tell us what steps were taken to reassure these officers?

 

3.  Every officer who entered the house after 4th March, and before the door handle became an object of interest, should have been given a medical examination to check for signs of poisoning.

Can the authorities confirm that this took place for every officer?

 

4.  Initial reports about Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey stated that he was poisoned at the bench, after coming to the aid of Mr Skripal and Yulia. However, on 9th March, Lord Ian Blair stated that D.S. Bailey had actually become poisoned after visiting Mr Skripal’s house. Since he was thought to have been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, and since it was thought that this had occurred at Mr Skripal’s house, the immediate next step should have been to seal off the house and set up a mobile decontamination unit outside. However, numerous photographs show officers in normal uniforms standing close to the door long after Lord Blair’s claim.

Can the authorities confirm why the house was not sealed off and a decontamination unit set up immediately after it became known that D.S. Bailey had been there, and why officers with no protective clothing on were allowed to continue standing guard outside the house for the next few weeks?

 

5.  Can the authorities explain how these decisions did not put the health and even the lives of those officers in jeopardy?

 

6.  Before the door handle theory was settled on, the majority of competing theories put out by the authorities tended to assume that Mr Skripal was poisoned long before he went to Zizzis. For example, the flowers, the cemetery, the luggage, the porridge and the car explanations all assume this to be the case. What this means is that according to the assumptions of police at that time, when Mr Skripal fed the ducks near the Avon Playground with a few local boys, at around 1:45pm, he was already contaminated. Yet although this event was caught on CCTV camera, it was more than two weeks before the police contacted the parents of these boys.

Can the authorities explain why it took more than two weeks to track down the boys, who – as the CCTV apparently shows – were given bread by Mr Skripal?

 

7.  Can the authorities comment on why they did not air the CCTV footage on national television, in an effort to appeal to the boys or their parents to come forward, and whether the delay in tracking them down might have put them in danger?

 

8.   If the door handle was the place of poisoning, it is extremely likely that the bread handed by Mr Skripal to the boys would have been contaminated. Certainly, areas that he visited after this incident were deemed to be so much at risk that they were either closed down (for example, The Mill and Zizzis, which are both still closed), or destroyed (for instance, the restaurant table, the bench and – almost certainly – the red bag near the bench have all been destroyed).

Can the authorities comment on how the boys, who were handed bread by Mr Skripal, managed to avoid contamination?

 

9.   It has been said that one of the reasons the Government is/was so sure that the ultimate culprit behind the poisoning was the Russian state, is the apparent existence of an “FSB handbook” which, amongst other things, allegedly features descriptions of how to apply nerve agent to a door handle. Given that the Prime Minister first made a formal accusation of culpability on 12th March in her speech to the House of Commons, the Government must therefore have been in possession of this manual prior to that day. However, claims about the door handle being the location of the poison did not appear until late March (the first media reports of it were on 28th March). What this means is there was a delay of several weeks between the Government making its accusation, based partly on the apparent existence of the “door handle manual”, and the door handle of Mr Skripal’s house being a subject of interest to investigators.

Can the authorities therefore tell us whether the Government’s failure to pass on details of the “door handle manual” put the lives of the officers going in and out of Mr Skripal’s house from 5th March to 27th March in jeopardy?

 

10.   On 17th March, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said:

“We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia’s movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday, 4 March, Sergei’s car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia’s movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before 1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101.”

Now that Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and able to communicate for around four months, these details are presumably now all known to investigators. In the normal course of such a high profile investigation, details such as these would be relayed to the public in the hope of jogging memories to prompt more information. And in fact, many such details have been released to the public in this case. Yet, confirmation of Mr Skripal’s and Yulia’s movements that day remain conspicuous by their absence.

Can the authorities confirm that the movements of the Skripals that day are now understood, and that they will be made known shortly, in order that more information from the public might then be forthcoming?

 

These questions have nothing to do with any conspiracy theory. On the contrary, they are all based on the assumption that the two central claims made by the authorities regarding the mode and the method used in this incident are correct. They are, however, very serious and perfectly legitimate questions about the way the authorities have dealt with this incident, on their own terms and on the basis of their own claims.

We await their explanations.

July 28, 2018 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Twitter Disavows Shadow Banning, But Facts Say Otherwise

Sputnik – July 28, 2018

A Vice exclusive story on Wednesday caught Twitter red-handed engaging in the practice of shadow banning prominent GOP politicians, removing their profiles from drop-down searches. Since then, the social media platform has struggled to provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenon.

“We do not shadowban,” a Twitter spokesperson told Sputnik Wednesday. However, Twitter employees were secretly filmed earlier this year explicitly bragging about doing just that.

Vice’s expose, complete with screenshots forwarded to Twitter, showed prominent Republican Party politicians such as party chair Ronna McDaniel; Republican Congressmen Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz; or Donald Trump Jr’s spokesperson Andrew Surabian being absent from drop-down searches on the site’s main interface. They could still be found through a “full search,” although it’s unclear if Vice meant a TweetDeck search or something else.

​The following day, Twitter Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead Vijaya Gaffe and Product Lead (and co-founder) Kayvon Beykpour posted on Twitter’s blog to try and clear up some of the confusion about what happened. However, their explanation left us with more questions than answers. They simply denied that any bias was behind the selective invisibility and palmed the blame off with vague language and insinuations and insulting leaps of logic.

Because of the baffling nature of their explanation, we will address its parts piecemeal.

Gaffe and Beykpour began by setting the terms of the discussion with an attempt at a definition of the phenomenon in question: shadow banning.

“People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not. But let’s start with, ‘what is shadow banning?’ The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.”

This definition is worded in such a way that it isolates only the specific act of shadow banning and ignores the larger context and purpose behind the shadow banning, which is to decrease the visibility of unwanted behavior by a person in ways that are difficult to detect by the person in question.

This article from Wired in 2009 explains shadow banning as a variety of practices designed to decrease the prominence and visibility of trolls and problematic posters, one of which is, indeed, to render a user’s content invisible to everyone except the user themselves; but also crowdsourced post ranking and allowing the filtering of posts by rank; the removal of vowels in offending language to neutralize it; and other tactics.

“The world’s top discussion moderators have developed successful tools for keeping online miscreants from disrupting conversation. All are rooted in one psychological insight: If you simply ban trolls — kicking them off your board — you nurture their curdled sense of being an oppressed truth-speaker. Instead, the moderators rely on making the comments less prominent,” the Wired article reads. A far cry from Twitter’s selective definition.

“We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).”

Let’s take a moment to take this statement apart. When a user follows someone on Twitter, they do so explicitly for the purposes of seeing that person or organization’s posts appear in their feed. That’s literally the only reason. If that wasn’t how the “follow” feature worked, we would all have to search for and visit the pages of each page we wanted to see the posts of each time we wanted to read them. But you can do that without following a person; you can search for anybody and see their posts so long as they aren’t set to private and they haven’t blocked you, in which case you couldn’t see their posts even if you followed them.

So Twitter is here admitting to disabling the primary functional feature of its platform for select users, a feature designed to make users’ content visible, and then swearing that this isn’t shadow banning.

Imagine if we did this in the real world and unplugged someone’s phone line to their house, then told people trying to call that person that their phone hadn’t been unplugged and if you wanted to speak to the person you would have to “do more work to find them,” like go directly to their house and speak with them. Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the phone line? Wouldn’t we call that censorship?

“And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

This is simply a denial of the evidence. Vice and numerous other publications have provided concrete proof that whatever was happening was only affecting politicians of a certain political party and not politicians of another certain political party, along with a scattering of other figures, too. Denial isn’t disproving, and it isn’t an explanation.

​“We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.”

Again, what is a “healthy conversation?” What is “manipulation?” What is in bad faith? Some might find those questions begging or distracting, but there’s a real question when it comes to interpretation of someone’s facts or their presentation of those facts that leans heavily on the normative bias of the reader. What everyone considers to be useful, relevant or appropriate is not the same, and Twitter has never made clear exactly how they define those terms or judge particular posts or posters against those definitions.

The author of this Sputnik article is a transgender person. Some people might consider speech in the defense of their rights “hate speech” and some people might consider discussions of transgender issues not to be relevant. They might consider the presentation of alternative studies to those that say that gender is determined by genetics or by genitals as being manipulative or detracting from healthy conversation. Does that make them these things? Taking a stance on an issue like that necessarily requires making a political statement.

Further, the very act of discussion necessarily involves manipulation to some extent, does it not? One party seeks to convince the other party that it is right, by undermining its arguments and by casting doubt upon the facts and narratives presented by the other side. As before, the question of who decides which topics and which discussions are fair game and which are not is all-important: it requires making a political statement about what is and is not correct and what is and is not justified discussion.

So if a platform is pruning its content according to political standards, doesn’t that make it a publication and not a neutral social forum?

​Gadde and Beykpour went on to address certain specific aspects of Wednesday’s snafu.

“‘It looks like this only affected Republican politicians. Were Democratic politicians also impacted?’ Yes, some Democratic politicians were not properly showing up within search auto-suggestions as result of this issue. As mentioned above, the issue was broad-ranging and not limited to political accounts or specific geographies. And most accounts affected had nothing to do with politics at all.”

Which Democratic politicians? Certainly not the equivalents of those GOP leaders affected. A city government official with a D next to their name being shadow banned is still an infraction of political discourse, to be sure (although again, we don’t know which Democratic politicians were affected), but it’s also not fair to say that a phenomenon that affected key leaders of a major political party, which controls two-thirds of the US government, but no major figures in the opposition party, is simply a glitch or programming error. There is clearly a problem of bias in how legitimate subjects of searches appear in the system, whether it was specifically designed or not.

“‘OK, so there was a search auto-suggest issue. But what caused these Republican representatives to be impacted?’ For the most part, we believe the issue had more to do with how other people were interacting with these representatives’ accounts than the accounts themselves (see bullet #3 above). There are communities that try to boost each other’s presence on the platform through coordinated engagement. We believe these types of actors engaged with the representatives’ accounts — the impact of this coordinated behavior, in combination with our implementation of search auto-suggestions, caused the representatives’ accounts to not show up in auto-suggestions. In addition to fixing search yesterday, we’re continuing to improve our system so it can better detect these situations and correct for them.”

So in other words, it was a problem that too many people liked certain politicians’ content they post on Twitter, or “boosted” their presence. That sort of goes against Twitter’s own stated goal of “serving healthy public conversation.” Indeed, the statement that Twitter is “serving healthy public conversation” all while selectively trimming that conversation based on some parts of it being too-well-liked, all the while claiming impartiality, insults the reader’s intelligence.

And isn’t the excuse that it was simply a problem with the algorithm basically a version of the “banality of evil” defense? It shoves responsibility for effects caused by a system created by humans for a specific purpose away from the actors that created that system or helped it function and onto an abstract, faceless, nonliving entity: a bureaucracy or, in this case, a computer program.

Twitter hasn’t disproven anything; all it’s proven is how callously it performs its task of being an extended mouthpiece for The Resistance.

Read also:

Twitter Bows to McCarthyist Witch Hunt, Bans RT and Sputnik Ads

Twitter Ascribes Alleged Shadow Banning of Prominent Republicans to Glitch

Rep. Congressman Threatens Twitter With Complaint Over ‘Shadow Banning’

Project Veritas Claims Twitter is Suppressing Pro-Trump, Right-Wing Tweets

July 28, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

How the Media Wove a Narrative of North Korean Nuclear Deception

By Gareth Porter | 38 North | July 26, 2018

Since the June 12 Singapore Summit between US President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the US media has woven a misleading narrative that both past and post-summit North Korean actions indicate an intent to deceive the US about its willingness to denuclearize. The so-called intelligence that formed the basis of these stories was fed to reporters by individuals within the administration pushing their own agenda.

The Case of the Secret Uranium Enrichment Sites

In late June and early July, a series of press stories portrayed a North Korean policy of deceiving the United States by keeping what were said to be undeclared uranium enrichment sites secret from the United States. The stories were published just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was preparing for the first meetings with North Korean officials to begin implementing the Singapore Summit Declaration.

The first such story appeared on NBC News on June 29, which reported:

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months—and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration.

NBC News reporters quoted one official as saying, “There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the U.S.” They further reported that the intelligence assessment “concludes that there is more than one secret site” for enrichment.

The story was highly problematic because it reported the alleged conclusion of the intelligence report as a fact, even though it admitted that NBC reporters had not seen or been briefed in detail on any part of the intelligence assessment in question, but had relied entirely on general statements by unnamed officials. Furthermore, none of the officials on whom they relied were identified as members of the intelligence community.

Significantly, the story did not indicate whether the assessment was endorsed by the entire US intelligence community or, as turned out to be the case, only one element of it. Normal journalistic practice would have made clear that NBC was passing on an unconfirmed conclusion the accuracy of which they were unable to verify. Instead, the NBC reporters played up the alleged conclusion as unambiguous evidence that US intelligence believed the North Koreans intended to deceive the United States by maintaining secret enrichment facilities under a future agreement with the United States.

The Washington Post published a report by national security and intelligence reporters Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick the day after the NBC story that paralleled its main thrust and cited the same unnamed intelligence sources that were cited in the NBC story. But the Post also revealed that the intelligence assessment in question had come from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is generally recognized as an outlier within the intelligence community on most assessments of adversary capabilities and intentions. A former senior intelligence official with extensive experience dealing with DIA assessments explained in an interview with this writer that the DIA “would tend to put a worse-case spin” on any analysis of North Korean intentions.

That makes it all the more important to know whether the rest of the intelligence community agrees with the reported assessment of North Korean intentions. Nakashima and Warrick seemed to suggest that there is no doubt in the intelligence community that the North Koreans “have operated a secret underground enrichment site known as Kangsong,” and they linked to an earlier Post report on that alleged secret enrichment site published May 25.

That earlier Post story quoted a former senior US official as saying that intelligence agencies had “long suspected the existence of such a facility” and believed there were “probably” others as well. But a PowerPoint on the Kangsong issue by David Albright, the founder and CEO of the Institute for Science and International Security, makes it clear that US intelligence lacks hard evidence to support such suspicions. Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, revealed that the original allegation of the secret enrichment plant had come from a North Korean defector who said he had “worked near the site,” clearly implying that he had inferred the purpose of the site without having been inside it.

More importantly, according to Albright, “we have not located this site,” meaning that the US intelligence community still did not have a specific location for the suspected plant eight years after the defector was obviously asked to provide it. Albright further disclosed that some US intelligence analysts and senior officials of at least one foreign government have challenged the belief that the building in question was an enrichment site, because, “some aspects of the building are not consistent with a centrifuge plant.” And he recalled that other alleged covert enrichment facilities had been suggested to his organization, but that he viewed them as “less credible than the information about Kangsong.”

The intelligence community appears to have even less basis for claiming a secret North Korean nuclear site—much less multiple secret sites—today than it did when the US government charged that North Korea had a secret nuclear facility in mid-1998. That was when the Clinton administration informed congressional leaders and the South Korean government privately that US intelligence analysts were convinced that a site with tunnels carved into a mountain at Kumchang-ri was intended to house a new reactor and plutonium reprocessing center, based on satellite photographs and other intelligence.

After months of negotiations, the North finally agreed to US on-site inspections in June 1999 and again in May 2000. The result of those two inspections was that the US government was compelled to acknowledge that the purpose of the tunnel complex at Kumchang-ri had been to vent fumes from an underground uranium milling plant.

At least the intelligence community had identified a specific site in 1998 that it regarded with suspicion, which is not the case today. Nevertheless, a group of officials is promoting the idea that North Korea is planning to keep such sites secret under a negotiated agreement. The timing of the leaked intelligence assessment that prompted these stories suggested that someone in the Trump administration was seeking to sway the White House to adopt the tougher US stance in Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang in early July. Albright appeared to be referring to that effort when he told the Post that intelligence assessment came just when “there’s a worry that the Trump administration may go soft, and accept a deal that focuses on Yongbyon and forgets about these other sites.”

National security adviser John Bolton had been reported as pushing for a hard line in diplomatic talks with North Korea that would threaten their viability. These reports raise the obvious possibility that the officials who conveyed the alleged intelligence conclusion were part of a political effort coordinated with him.

Hyping Yongbyon Improvements to Discredit Diplomacy

During the same time period as the reporting on alleged secret sites, NBC News, CNN and the Wall Street Journal all reported on North Korea making rapid upgrades to its nuclear weapons complex at Yongbyon and expanding its missile production program—all at the very moment when Trump and Kim were agreeing on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula at their Singapore Summit.

In each case, the reports cited analyses of commercial satellite imagery from independent analysts, including contributors to 38 North. But they all employed a common device to create a false narrative about the negotiations with North Korea: by misrepresenting the diplomatic context in which the satellite images were collected, they drew political conclusions about North Korean strategy that were unwarranted.

The series of stories involved more than a mere misunderstanding of the raw information being reported. They all denigrated the idea of negotiating with North Korea on the grounds that it cannot be trusted. The NBC News and CNN stories on improvements at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center cited the analysis of satellite images published by 38 North on June 26. And they were all slanted to lead readers to conclude that the improvements in question signified a nefarious intention by North Korea to deceive the Trump administration.

The headline of the June 27 NBC News story asked, “If North Korea is denuclearizing, why is it expanding a nuclear research center?” And it warned that North Korea “continues to make improvements to a major nuclear facility, raising questions about President Donald Trump’s claim that Kim Jong Un has agreed to disarm, independent experts tell NBC News.”

CNN’s story about the same images declared that there were “troubling signs” that North Korea was making “improvements” or “upgrades” at a “rapid pace” to its nuclear facilities, some of which it said were carried out after the Trump-Kim summit. It cited one facility that had produced plutonium in the past that had been upgraded, despite Kim’s alleged promise to Trump to draw down his nuclear arsenal.

Both the NBC and CBS stories were misrepresenting the significance of the improvements described in the 38 North analysis. They either ignored or sought to discredit the carefully-worded caveat in that assessment, which cautioned that the continued work at the Yongbyon facility “should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s pledge to denuclearize.”

The analysis was referring to the fact that the Singapore Summit’s joint statement did not commit North Korea to immediately halt its activities in their nuclear and missile programs and therefore the improvements at Yongbyon had no bearing on whether Pyongyang would agree to denuclearization. Indeed, during the negotiation of US-Soviet and US-Russian arms control agreements, both sides continued to build weapons until the agreement was completed. It should not have come as a surprise, therefore, that work at Yongbyon was continuing.

NBC News deliberately ignored these crucial contextual facts and instead selectively reported statements from other analysts dismissing the notion that North Korea would ever denuclearize and would continue to try to deceive the US about its true intentions.

On July 1, a few days after those stories appeared, the Wall Street Journal headlined, “New satellite imagery indicates Pyongyang is pushing ahead with weapons programs even as it pursues dialogue with Washington.” The lead paragraph called it a “major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant.”

The images of a North Korean solid-fuel missile manufacturing facility at Hamhung showed that new buildings had been added to the facility beginning in the early spring, after Kim Jong Un had called for more production of solid-fuel rocket engines and warhead tips last August. The exterior construction of some buildings was completed “around the time” of the Trump-Kim summit meeting, according to the analysts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. The Center’s David Schmerler told the Journal, “The expansion of production infrastructure for North Korea’s solid missile infrastructure probably suggests that Kim Jong Un does not intend to abandon his nuclear and missile programs.”

The improvements in North Korea’s infrastructure for missile parts manufacturing documented by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, which began well before the summit, are hardly evidence against North Korea’s willingness to negotiate a comprehensive agreement with the United States. Like any country dealing with a serious military threat from an adversary, North Korea is both hedging against the real possibility of talks failing and signaling that it is not unilaterally surrendering. The United States is doing the same thing, albeit in different ways.

Conclusion

Major media reporting on what is alleged to be intelligence and photographic evidence that North Korea intends to deceive the United States in negotiations on denuclearization has been extraordinarily misleading. It has blithely ignored serious issues surrounding the alleged intelligence conclusions and suggested that North Korea has demonstrated bad faith by failing to halt all nuclear and missile-related activities.

Recent stories do not reflect actual evidence of covert facilities, but rather deep suspicions of North Korean intentions within the intelligence community that have been fed to the media by individuals within the administration who are unhappy with the direction of the president’s North Korea policy following the Singapore Summit. And breathless reports on improvements in North Korean nuclear and missile facilities ignore the distinction between a summit statement and a final deal with North Korea. They have thus obscured the reality that the fate of the negotiations depends not only North Korean policy but on the willingness of the United States to make changes in its policy toward the DPRK and the Korean Peninsula that past administrations have all been reluctant to make.

These stories also underscore a broader problem with media coverage of the US-North Korean negotiations: a strong underlying bias toward the view that it is futile to negotiate with North Korea. The latest stories have constructed a dark narrative of North Korean deception that is not based on verified facts. If this narrative is not rebutted or corrected, it could shift public opinion—which has been overwhelmingly favorable to negotiations with North Korea—against such a policy.

July 28, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Kurds reach deal with Damascus to end Syria conflict

Press TV – July 28, 2018

An alliance of Kurdish and Arab militants in Syria says it has come to an agreement with the Syrian government to develop negotiations to end violence in Syria.

The announcement was made after the so-called Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), sent a delegation to Damascus for talks with Syrian officials earlier this week. The SDF, itself, is a US-backed coalition of mainly Kurdish militants.

The SDC said in a statement Saturday that it had agreed with the government of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to form committees that would “chart a roadmap to a democratic, decentralized Syria.”

The SDC delegation visited Damascus for the first time after President Assad said that he was “opening doors” for negotiations with Syrian Kurds that he said had “apparently become wary” of their unpredictable ally – the United States.

The Kurds then expressed readiness to hand over control of the Eastern Euphrates to the government after Washington withheld its support for the Kurdish militants in the northern Syrian cities of Manbij and Afrin.

The SDC’s co-chair Riad Darar said on Friday the talks with Damascus were aimed at “working towards a settlement for northern Syria,” as it was time to “solve our problems ourselves.”

The group, which is being supported by Washington, has already managed to form an autonomous administration in northern Syria during the country’s seven-year conflict.

Washington’s conflicting plans in Syria, however, have now prompted the Kurdish militants to turn to the government in Damascus.

Their presence in the area near the Turkish border has been a source of tension between the US and Turkey.

Ankara, which considers the Syrian Kurdish militants as an extension of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists, has even threatened to “destroy all terror nests,” near the Syrian border.

It has vowed not to allow Kurdish groups to dominate Turkish border with Syria.

Refugees gather in Shebaa for return to Syria

On Saturday, hundreds of Syrian refugees residing in Hasbaya’s Shebaa and western Bekaa gathered in a schoolyard in Shebaa, waiting for buses departing to Syria, provided by the Syrian government.

The state-run National News Agency estimated that nearly 900 refugees assembled at Shebaa High School at 9 a.m., while General Security was present on site checking the names of the departees.

The buses are set to stop at the Masnaa border point before crossing into Syria. The group marks the fourth to depart from Lebanon.

Several groups had previously departed, particularly from the northeastern town of Arsal in initiatives organized by General Security.

July 28, 2018 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

The US 2019 Defense Budget Bill: Congress Defies the New World Order

By Alex GORKA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 28.07.2018

The House and Senate versions of the draft National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2019 were unveiled by Congress on July 23. Both include a provision to temporarily bar the transfers of F-35 joint strike fighters (JSF) to Turkey. According to the final 2019 defense bill, the Defense Department would be required to submit a report to lawmakers within 90 days about the relationship with Ankara, all its foreign weapons deals, and Turkey’s move to purchase the S-400 air-defense system from Russia before any more sales could go through. Until then the US would sit on any weapons transfers to Turkey. Ankara’s decision to buy the Russian S-400 air-defense system, the “F-35 killer,” has greatly aggravated bilateral ties between the US and Turkey, a relationship that was already clouded by many other issues.

The House is expected to vote on the legislation this month, with the Senate taking it up in early August. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had warned Congress against punishing Turkey by cutting off transfers of F-35s in retaliation for its plans to buy the Russian anti-aircraft system, but his opinion was ignored. The State Department has been putting pressure on Ankara to try to make it reconsider the S-400 deal, in favor of purchasing the less capable, US-made Patriot system.  US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell told the Senate “We’ve been very clear that across the board, an acquisition of S-400 will inevitably affect the prospects for Turkish military-industrial cooperation with the United States, including F-35.” Turkish officials view the US demand as blackmail.

Turkey is one of twelve partner nations in the F-35 program, nine of which have received the fighters through foreign military sales. Ankara has planned to purchase the 100 F-35 aircraft it technically already owns by investing $1.25 billion into the project. US legislators fear that using the F-35 and the S-400 together could compromise the F-35 and allow Russia to gain access to the sensitive technology. As a result, the true owner has been denied access to his property by both houses of US Congress.

The bill includes a compromise waiver under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act  (CAATSA) for the countries purchasing Russian military equipment, as long as they are taking steps to wean themselves from it.

The deal with Turkey is a part of a broader picture. The Philippines, also a long-time ally of Washington that has long relied on the United States as its main source of military hardware,  is at risk of falling under US sanctions if it proceeds with its purchase of grenade launchers from Rosoboronexport, a blacklisted Russian firm. India has been threatened with sanctions should it decide to buy the Russian S-400.

The US State Department’s Office of Cooperative Threat Reduction has announced a tender for the monitoring of open-source information about arms deals involving the Russian Federation and the CIS countries. The information will be used for shaping the sanctions policy.

This policy goes beyond weapons deals to encompass economic issues as well. One can pay off. Take Germany, for instance. It has been threatened by sanctions in the event that the Nord Stream 2 gas project goes through. The English version of the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that plans are afoot for a new LNG terminal in Brunsbüttel, a town in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein.  Once the costly infrastructure to cool and liquefy LNG is in place, the German government can demonstrate that the US is wrong to accuse it of being almost fully dependent on Russian gas. There are plans to invest an estimated €450 million ($530 million). Once built, the terminal cannot sit idle. The shipments of American LNG will be guaranteed.

But indeed there is no such thing as a free lunch. If Berlin wants to get cheap Russia gas, it will also have to spend some time and effort on building the infrastructure to receive Moscow’s LNG, and at that point, paying a lot more for American sea-transported  LNG will hike the country’s overall energy expenditures

Perhaps Turkey could come to some kind of compromise with the Americans on the S-400, if it buys the Patriot as well.  Maybe India will find a way to evade sanctions, if it agrees to the US offer of THAAD..

On July 24, US Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), announced that they are working on comprehensive legislation, which officially is aimed at ratcheting up the sanctions pressure on Russia. The text of the proposed legislation does not say so, but the true goal is to lean on other nations to buy US-made goods or else. Forget about the international rules stipulated by the UN Charter and WTO documents — “arms-twisting” has become an element of US foreign policy.

Nobody likes to be ordered around and blackmailed. In the long run, this policy will encourage other countries to reconcile their differences and unify, in an effort to push back against the US. Today Russia China, the EU, and many other actors face a common problem — the “do as I tell you” approach used by the US to tackle international problems, whatever they are. Those who had doubts about the merits of a multipolar world order are beginning to see things in a different light.  Any state structure needs checks and balances to maintain an equilibrium, and so does the world. The BRICS summit that kicked off in Johannesburg, South Africa on July 25 symbolizes some global changes, in which poles of power outside of the US are emerging to reshape the political world map.

July 28, 2018 Posted by | Russophobia | , , | 1 Comment