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Trump commits to record $750bn defense budget days after saying $716bn was too much – reports

RT | December 10, 2018

Despite tweeting just last week that a $716bn defense budget was ‘crazy’, US President Donald Trump has reportedly reversed course and instead committed to the highest budget in history.

Trump’s unexpected decision to agree to Defense Secretary James Mattis’ request and propose an increased budget, relayed to several media outlets by anonymous officials, appears to stem from a meeting last Tuesday between Trump, Mattis and the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

It appears to have had an effect, considering that the day before the meeting, Trump tweeted that the previous year’s $716bn was “crazy” and a product of “a major and uncontrollable Arms Race” with China and Russia.

“It’s 750. Secretary Mattis secured that over lunch with the president,” an administration official told Politico, who first released the information, although an official announcement is yet to be made.

It’s unclear what exactly changed Trump’s mind. He had been floating a 5% reduction in defense spending, from the originally proposed (and already record-breaking) $733bn to $700bn – but defense officials had told him on Friday that anything less was “a risk”, and could have “disastrous consequences”.

“The Department is committed to ensuring our military remains the most lethal force in the world. We are working with OMB (Office of Management and Budget) to determine the department’s topline number,” a Defense Department spokesman told CNN.

The historically unprecedented numbers further inflate the US’ already world-largest defense budget. Washington is spending as much as the next 7 countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Last year, defense was one of the few increases in a budget which saw cuts to the EPA, Health and Human Services and education departments, to name just a few.

December 9, 2018 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | | 1 Comment

Labour furious over report that anti-Russia charity targeted Corbyn, receives govt cash

RT | December 9, 2018

Labour politicians are outraged and calling for a probe after a report that a McCarthy style charity has received £2 million in government money and targeted Jeremy Corbyn, straying from tackling so-called Russian disinformation.

The Institute for Statecraft, based in Scotland, initially seems to be a small organization which claims to counter alleged Russian propaganda by forming communities of journalists and influencers who use social media to push back on any so-called disinformation.

However, leaked documents provided to the Daily Record show that the organization’s Integrity Initiative isn’t as grassroots as it appears on the surface. In fact, it’s apparently funded with £2 million of Foreign Office cash and run by British military intelligence specialists.

What’s more is that the newspaper has reported that it launched its own investigation which found “worrying evidence” that the organization’s official Twitter account has been used to attack Jeremy Corbyn, his Labour Party, and other officials within the party.

And of course, there were some anti-Russia comments thrown in for good measure – such as one tweet which quoted a newspaper article calling Corbyn a “useful idiot” with “open visceral anti-Westernism [that] helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.”

“What he has done, wittingly or unwittingly, is work with the Kremlin agenda,” a newspaper report retweeted by the Integrity Initiative tweet states.

Although the Integrity Initiative’s apparent mission was first revealed last month, the Daily Record’s Sunday report about its targeting of Corbyn and the Labour party has left the party’s members more than a little angry.

“It is simply outrageous that the clearly mis-named ‘Integrity Initiative’ – funded by the Foreign Office to the tune of £2.25 million over the past two years – has routinely been using its Twitter feed to disseminate personal attacks and smears against the Leader of the Opposition, the Labour Party and Labour officials,” Emily Thornberry MP, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary said in her statement.

Labour MP Chris Williamson also chimed in, calling any such activity “unacceptable in any democracy.”

The question of whether MSM will eventually pick up the story remains unknown, especially since it has a tendency to turn a blind eye to anyone claiming to fight the good fight against “aggressive” Russia.

The Integrity Initiative’s spokesman Stephen Dalziel has said he is “not aware” of any Corbyn attacks on the official social media account. “I’m not the one who controls the Twitter account. If it was criticism of one of our politicians, then that shouldn’t be on there.”

December 9, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

New Docs Reveal Extent of CIA’s Grotesque Mind Control Experiments

Sputnik – 09.12.2018

Earlier this year, the CIA marked the 65th anniversary of the launch of Project MKULTRA, a secret program which engaged in mind control experiments on people. Now, thanks to new documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the public has a chance to learn just how far those carrying out the gruesome experiments were willing to go.

For many decades, the CIA tried to prevent documents related to Project MKULTRA from being released. However, late last week, John Greenewald Jr., founder of The Black Vault, a website specializing in declassified government records, released new documents said to detail the bizarre extent of the project’s experimentation on both people and animals.

The files, added to a trove of materials meticulously collected by Greenewald over the course of over two decades, detail experimentation on controlling the minds of human beings and dogs using psychotropic drugs, hypnosis, surgically-implanted electrical shock devices and radio waves.

Earlier this year, Canadian family members of Project MKULTRA survivors said they were planning to file a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government and possibly McGill University over their role in the program, which was known to have used paralytic drugs, shock therapy, LSD, medically-induced comas, and exposure to repetitive messages for days on end in research aimed at reprogramming the psyche and, possibly, ‘cracking’ enemy spies through forced confessions.

However, according to 800 pages-worth of never-before-seen documents published by The Black Vault late last week, Project MKULTRA’s ‘research’ went much further. The documents show, for example, that the project included elaborate experimentation on ‘remote-controlled dogs’, who were surgically implanted with devices which sent electrical signals to their brains to control their movement at distances for up to 200 yards. “The specific aim of the research program was to examine the possibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggering electrical stimulation of the brain,” one document explains.

The research on dogs was said to have followed up similar experimentation on rats. Discussions were also held on using cats for spy mission field work, as well as elaborate research on the possibility of using “electric fishes” for the “underwater detection, location and identification of objects.”

Another of the documents revealed new details on the use of experimental mind control drugs on unwilling human beings, suggesting experimenting with the use of such drugs on inmates in prison hospitals and drugging suspected criminals awaiting trial.

Yet another document details experimentation with hypnotic speaking techniques to enable mind control over “large audiences.”

The MKULTRA program, which engaged in experiments on unwitting US and Canadian test subjects, was started in the early 1950s, gradually curtailed starting in the mid-1960s, and reported to have been shut down entirely in 1973.

If the new documents presented by The Black Vault are verified, they will serve historians in helping to understand some of the even more grotesque aspects of a CIA project which already has a very dark history.

December 9, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 1 Comment

Injustice – The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five

By Vacy Vlazna | OffGuardian | December 9, 2018

Survive prison I must, for when I come out I would hold no grudges, or hate, or resentment. My belief system tells me that whatever comes upon me is a matter already decreed by Allah. He knows better.”
Shukri Abu-Baker, HLF5

Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five is about a grave and cruel injustice wielded by both the the USA and Israel, and paradoxically the book’s foundations are friendship, human dignity, and trust bound together by the integrity of the author, Miko Peled.

Peled’s credentials, as an Israeli dissident, as uncle of Smadar (13), a victim of a Palestinian suicide bomber and as son of an Israeli General gives compelling credibility to the findings of his comprehensive investigation.

INJUSTICE

A decade of innocence caged. It is now 10 years since a Machiavellian travesty of US justice sentenced, between 15 – 65 years, the innocent Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohammed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdulrahman Odeh, who were senior staff of The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) devoted to “Helping the poor, the orphans, and the widows … one of the pillars of Islamic teachings.”

The HLF was charged with “providing material support for terrorism.” Peled details how the HLF was run with meticulous transparency and with strict adherence to US aid guidelines thus demonstrating that HLF had “no connection to Hamas or any other political or military organizations,”

At the 2007 trial, the prosecution failed to get any convictions.

Undaunted the US government and the FBI mounted a retrial,

The prosecution’s theory was that, by supporting needy Palestinians, HLF had “freed up” Hamas’ own assets to fund terrorist attacks, and that if Palestinians knew that HLF would provide support for their families if assistance became necessary, they would be more likely to become suicide bombers.”

Peled spells out how the spurious charges were backed by questionable documents supplied by Israel, false translations, by cherrypicking ‘documents and phrases until the picture they painted was completely distorted,’ the withholding of ‘secret evidence’ to the defense, unexplained disappearance of crucial records, overt judicial bias towards the prosecution, exploitation of irrelevant and prejudicial testimonies, implausible Israeli ‘experts’, false charges of illegal tax filings, the FBI attempts to recruit collaborators, ‘The FBI even offered me US citizenship and immunity if I testified that HLF was linked to Hamas., ’ and the successful bribing of a key witness for the prosecution by waiving criminal charges of fraud and providing US residency.

Furthermore, the fraudulent manipulations of US justice are mirrored in the injustice that Israel metes out to Palestinians every day. Peled pierces the looking glass to the truth and reality,

I believe that the Palestinian struggle to free all of historic Palestine from the settler-colonialism that is the State of Israel is a just struggle, and I support it wholeheartedly. I accept that the State of Israel in its present form has no legitimacy, and in this I find Hamas’ goal to liberate Palestine completely justified.” Peled

The miscarriage of justice is outrageous. However, when one considers the false evidence the US government made to the UN in the case Iraq’s possession weapons of mass destruction that led to the deaths of half a million-plus innocent Iraqis, one understands that for the government, the collateral damage of 5 innocent Palestinian men sacrificed to further the fake war on terrorism is small potatoes.

FRIENDSHIP & HUMAN DIGNITY

The friendships Peled cultivates with Shukri, Ghassan, Mohammed, Mufid and Abdulrahman are the tour de force that instils intimacy, immediacy and urgency to the injustice they suffer,

I saw how important it is that others come to see them and to understand the background and the context of this story. Only then could anyone understand the travesty and indeed the tragedy that took place here.” ibid.

We accompany Peled on his many visits to the families and to the prisons and thus we empathise with the heartbreaking burden of absence and mutual deprivations suffered by the prisoners and their families; the denial of touch, a kiss, of a father to attend weddings, the burial of a beloved child Sanabel and death of parents, family meals, births of grandchildren.

Peled’s personal accompanying along the journey of injustice generates his moving demonstration of the authenticity of the HLF5’s moral dignity and the raison d’être of their humanitarian work that is grounded in Islam.

Crucially, by sharing respect for Islam embodied in these remarkable men, Peled challenges the the post 9/11 manufactured Islamophobia;

For me, Islam will always be associated with beauty, goodness, and charity. Sadly, the contempt and fear toward Islam, which are a major part of the Jewish-Israeli narrative, has seeped into America and become part of the accepted narrative in the United States as well. Living in the United States, I always felt deprived of the warmth that Islam and the Arab world offer. But when I began working on this book, I met Islam all over again, and in the most unlikely places.”ibid.

Peled repeatedly makes clear the HLF 5 are honourable men. They are not political activists who say ‘No’ to authority, they are activists for Allah-God who say ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ to love, to compassion, to loyalty and to selfless care of the poorest of the poor.

“As Ghassan said to me, “What my friends and I did at the Holy Land Foundation was to help Palestinians who are suffering. They are victims because they find themselves living under a brutal, racist regime that practices apartheid. To be persecuted for such noble work is exactly what the prophets had faced at their time. And being reminded of this is how I get through it.” Indeed, their faith has made them un-enslaveable.”

Their plight is not unlike arresting Mother Teresa for bringing attention to and acting on Third World poverty mainly exacerbated by Western colonial and capitalist exploitation.

The answers to why the US government attacked a soft target humanitarian NGO that did not fund Hamas, become apparent. Firstly destroying NGO’s is a tool of ethnic-cleansing making Palestinian life even more unbearable so that they will leave Palestine.

Similarly Mohammed el-Halabi, the World Vision manager accused of diverting cash to Hamas and though an official Australian investigation found no such diversion, he remains incarcerated by Israel since his 2016 unwarranted arrest. Then there is the escalation of the humanitarian crisis inflicted on Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank by the recent US withdrawal of funding to UNRWA.

Secondly, their mere existence acts as a perpetual accusation against and evidence of Israeli state terrorism.

Hamas, Peled explains emerged from necessity met by the humane ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood that built,

… an infrastructure of social services, medical clinics, and schools, mostly in the impoverished Gaza Strip. These facilities were sorely needed, due to Israel’s grave failure to live up to its responsibilities as the Occupying Power.

But widespread support for Hamas was not only a result of Israeli ineptitude. Hamas leaders came to embody the honesty, altruism, and dedication that are the hallmarks of Islam.”

Peled’s statement of respect simultaneously discredits the US terrorist designation system, that at Israel’s request, named Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

TRUST

This book is about the sanctity of and also the destruction of trust.

Peled’s thoroughness is trustworthy because it is reinforced by his walking the talk with visits, interviews and research.

For years, the HLF5 deservedly won the trust of the thousands upon thousands of their HLF donors and recipients.

Their trust in their faith that informs their every heartbeat with resilience deserves admiration,

La yukalifu Allah nafsan, ila was’aha – God would not burden a soul with a burden that is beyond its capacity. And so believers accept the burden and carry it with devotion.”

Significantly, Peled reveals that we can’t trust the American Justice System because if it can come for five fine men then we must heed Niemöller’s warning that no-one is safe. Unless we stand together.

By the end of the book, I knew action is imperative. In the spirit of J’Accuse I wrote and will continue to write to the US Attorney General demanding the immediate and unconditional release of the innocent Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohammed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdulrahman Odeh.

Miko Peled, Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five is published by Just World Books. Al Jazeera’s two part documentary follows the lawless political trail of the US-Zionist conspiracy to deliberately turn 5 decent innocent family men into political prisoners.

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters and editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

December 9, 2018 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Putin tells Netanyahu of need for ‘strict’ stability in Mideast

Press TV – December 9, 2018

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reminded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the need to maintain stability following the recent Israeli operations near the Lebanese border.

Speaking over the phone, Putin and Netanyahu discussed the Israeli operations, the Kremlin said in a statement on Sunday.

“The president of Russia stressed the importance of ensuring stability in the region,” the statement said.

Ties between Damascus and Tel Aviv have been strained since Russia’s delivery of the S-300 missile defense system to Syria following the September downing of a Russian spy aircraft during an Israeli airstrike.

Russia has blamed Israel for the incident, which killed 15 Russian crew members. The Defense Ministry has said Israeli jets used the Russian plane as cover to attack Syria.

In their late Saturday talks held at the initiative of Netanyahu, Putin told him that Israel must improve its military coordination with Russia, the Kremlin said.

The Russian leader also emphasized the importance of the upcoming talks between their military experts to examine the circumstances of the September incident.

Israel has recently deployed additional troops along Lebanon’s border under the pretext of “cutting off” Hezbollah tunnels near the occupied territories.

Netanyahu has boasted that the Israeli operation was “only a small piece of the big picture” of what he called efforts to ensure its security.

The operation has drawn rebuke and ridicule even from Israeli leaders, with opposition leader Tzipi Livni criticizing Netanyahu for overdramatizing the campaign “for political gain.”

“We are not now in a situation where our soldiers are behind enemy lines. We are talking about engineering activity …,” she said, accusing the Israeli premier of “blowing the incident out of proportion.”

Intelligence and transport minister Israel Katz said Friday that Israeli forces may need to go into Lebanon to deal with the alleged tunnels.

An Israeli incursion into Lebanon would likely spark a major confrontation with Hezbollah. The Lebanese resistance movement has warned that Israel would “regret” invading Lebanon.

In his talks with Netanyahu, Putin “stressed the importance of ensuring stability in the region in strict accordance with Resolution 1701 of the UN Security Council,” the Kremlin statement read.

He was referring to the 2006 UN Security Council resolution issued after the Second Lebanon War, the last major conflict between Israel and Hezbollah which ended with the victory of the Lebanese movement.

December 9, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | 2 Comments