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Syrian Kurds throw Americans under the bus

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | December 28, 2018

The Syrian government forces have entered the northern town of Manbij on the Turkish border earlier today. The Syrian military command announced in Damascus that the operation stemmed from the commitment to “impose sovereignty to each inch of Syrian territories and in response to calls of locals of Manbij city.”

The announcement reiterated Damascus’ twin objective of “smashing terrorism and expelling the invaders and occupiers out of Syrian soil.” The government troops have hoisted the Syrian Arab flag in Manbij.

In a highly significant move, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov promptly welcomed the development. “No doubt, this is a positive step towards stabilizing the situation,” the spokesman said. He added that the expansion of the zone of the Syrian government troops’ control “is a positive trend.”

It stands to reason that Moscow mediated between the Syrian Kurdish leadership and Damascus. There have been reports that Syrian Kurdish delegations visited Moscow this week as well as the Russian military base at Hmeimim in Syria. A senior Kurdish leader in Manbij told Reuters, “We want Russia to play an important role to achieve stability.”

Indeed, Moscow needs no prompting from anyone in this regard. The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday, “The question of fundamental importance is who will assume control of the regions the Americans will vacate. It should be the Syrian government… We believe that the Syrian government is equipped to maintain stability through dialogue and interaction with all the national patriotic forces. This dialogue in the interests of all Syrians can help complete the routing of the terrorists and preclude their reappearance in Syria. It is important not to interfere with the Syrian society’s efforts on the political track.”

The fact of the matter is that while Russia welcomes Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and regards it as “important in that it can promote a comprehensive settlement of the situation” Moscow remains extremely wary of what it entails. So far, even a week after Trump’s announcement, Washington has not contacted Moscow to explain its decision.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov drew attention to this while talking to the media in Moscow today: “To the best of my knowledge… Washington wants its coalition partners to assume responsibility. French, British and German service personnel are also illegally deployed on the ground. Of course, there are also the coalition’s air forces on whom they want to shift an extra financial burden. We hope to receive specific explanations… on the assumption that the end goal of all counter-terrorist operations in Syria is to restore Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The known unknown will be the terms of any Faustian deal between Washington and Ankara with regard to the future of the Syrian territories under American control. A US military delegation is expected in Ankara. Moscow and Damascus (and Syrian Kurds) would not rule out the possibility that Pentagon commanders would work on the “neo-Ottoman” and secretly encourage Turkish revanchism. Meanwhile there are also reports that Turkish forces are moving toward the frontlines facing Manbij in “full readiness… to start military operations to liberate the town, according to Reuters.

Suffice to say, Damascus and Moscow have pre-empted Ankara in the race for Manbij. Put differently, they have created a new fact on the ground, which either Ankara has to learn to live with or use military force to change. The latter course is fraught with immense risk, apart from severely jolting the Turkish-Russian political understanding over Syria. It is unlikely that Turkey will push the envelope.

However, to my mind, Turkish President Recep Erdogan is unlikely to cross lines with the Kremlin. A high-powered Turkish delegation comprising Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Defence Minister Hulusi Akar, Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan and the presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin is expected to travel to Moscow on Saturday. No doubt, Moscow hopes to engage Ankara constructively.

Interestingly, amidst the dramatic developments concerning Manbij today, Russian President’s Special Representative for the Middle East and African Countries, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov disclosed in Moscow today that the Guarantor States of Astana Process (Russia, Turkey and Iran) may hold a summit in Russia next week, depending on the schedule of the three presidents.

Curiously, there has been no reaction from Washington to today’s developments in Manbij. American troops have been patrolling in Manbij town and the tense front line between Manbij and adjacent towns where fighters backed by Turkey were based. Having received the orders from Washington to withdraw from Syria, the local US commanders in northeast Syria will be in a quandary.

Nonetheless, it will be a bitter pill for the Pentagon commanders to swallow that the Syrian Kurds are overnight reconciling with Damascus. This will become additional fodder for Trump’s detractors in the US, too. In fact, sniping has already begun in Washington.

On the other hand, the Syrian Kurds, who have been the US’ main allies in Syria up until recently, have openly declared that they have invited the government forces to enter Manbij. They said in a statement today, “Due to the invading Turkish state’s threats to invade northern Syria and displace its people similarly to al-Bab, Jarablus and Afrin, we as the People’s Protection Units, following the withdrawal of our forces from Manbij, announce that our forces will be focusing on the fight against ISIS on all the fronts east of the Euphrates.”

The statement added that the Syrian government forces are ”obliged to protect the same country, nation and borders” and also protect Manbij from Turkish threats. It leaves the door wide open for the Syrian government forces to eventually regain control of the entire territory vacated by the US.

Assad has offered the integration of the Kurdish fighters into the Syrian Army under separate regiments. The prospects are that Assad’s offer will find acceptance among the Kurds at some point soon. There has all along been a tacit co-habitation between the Syrian Kurdish fighters and the government forces operating in northern regions bordering Turkey. It will be recalled that Assad quietly went to the aid of the Kurdish fighters in February when the Turkish army attacked Afrin region in the northwest in February.

Clearly, it is nonsense to say that the Kurds have been “thrown under the bus”, as Trump’s critics in the US are alleging. The plain truth is that the US created the illusion in the Kurdish mind that the creation of another Kurdistan on Syrian territory, similar to the one in Iraq, could become a possibility. But, fundamentally, Kurds will reconcile with Damascus. The comfort level between the Kurds and the Russians is also appreciable, historically. Moscow has consistently held the view that the Kurds must be represented at the negotiating table in any intra-Syrian peace process. The speed with which Kurds began mending fences with Damascus only underscores that they never quite trusted the Americans and all along had kept their options open.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , , , | 2 Comments

The only ‘Russian bots’ to meddle in US elections belonged to Democrat-linked ‘experts’

RT | December 28, 2018

US cyber-security experts have blamed Russia for meddling in American elections since 2016. Now it has emerged that authors of a Senate report on ‘Russian’ meddling actually ran a “false flag” meddling operation themselves.

A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.

Described by the New York Times as a group of “tech specialists who lean Democratic,” New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military’s advanced research agency. His partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone.

Morgan and Fox have struck gold in the “Russiagate” racket, which sprung into being after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. The dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO and USAID.

It is worth noting that the 600 “Russia-linked” Twitter accounts monitored by the dashboard are not disclosed to the public, making it impossible to verify its claims. This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry journalists, however.

Troll hunters or bot farm?

New Knowledge’s victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama’s 2017 special election for the US Senate.

Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead.

In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan’s other dubious creation, Hamilton 68.

Ultimately, Moore ended up losing the race by a miniscule 1.5 percentage points – making his opponent Doug Jones the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the US Senate in over 25 years.

Money trail and weak apologies

Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Times piece, had known about the meddling for months, because he spoke at an event where the organizers boasted about it!

Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama’s former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge’s campaign to suppress Republican votes, “enrage” Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a “false flag” to hurt Moore. He dubbed it “Project Birmingham.”

The money for the venture came from a $750,000 contribution to AET by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a big Democrat donor. Once that emerged, Hoffman offered a public apology for his connection to the shady operation, but insisted that he didn’t know what his money was going towards.

“I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing,” Hoffman said in a statement.

“For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET — the organization I did support — more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject.”

As for Shane, he told BuzzFeed that he was “shocked” by the revelations, but had signed a nondisclosure agreement at the request of AET, so he could not talk about it further.

Spin and denial

Shane’s spin on the tale was that New Knowledge “imitated Russian tactics” as part of an “experiment” that had a budget of “only” $100,000 and had no effect on the election. Yet these tactics are only considered “Russian” because New Knowledge and similar outfits said so! Moreover, New Knowledge’s budget in Alabama was greater than the reported amount spent by “Russians” on the 2016 US presidential election, yet Moscow’s alleged meddling was supposed to be decisive, while New Knowledge’s failed?

New Knowledge responded to the Times story by insisting that the “false flag” operation was actually a benign research project. In a statement posted on Twitter, the company’s CEO claimed that its activities during the Alabama Senate race were conducted in order to “better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation.”

Morgan emphasized that he in no way took part in an influence campaign, and warned people not to mischaracterize his “research.”

While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his “false flag” more credibility – misleading the public about a “Russian” influence campaign that he knew was fake.

New Knowledge’s protestations apparently didn’t convince Facebook, which announced last week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan’s – had been suspended  for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Meddlers unmasked

The final nail in the coffin of Morgan’s story came on Thursday, when the leaked secret after-action report from “Project Birmingham” was published online, showing that those behind the Alabama campaign knew perfectly well what they were doing and why.

So, it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by “Russian bots.” Except they weren’t run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the “Russiagate” hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

A Reuters Report on Iran That Fueled US Diatribes

By Ivan Kesic | Consortium News | December 27, 2018

When U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave speeches about mega corruption in Iran this year, he did not cite a Reuters’ 2013 article or give credit to its three reporters; Steve Stecklow, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati.

Instead he presented it as the kind of specialized knowledge that only a high-ranking official such as himself might be in a position to reveal. “Not many people know this,” Pompeo told an audience gathered last July at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, California, “but the Ayatollah Khamenei has his own personal, off-the-books hedge fund called the Setad, worth $95 billion, with a B.” Pompeo went on to tell his audience that Khamenei’s wealth via Setad was untaxed, ill-gotten, and used as a “slush fund” for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

But a comparison between the 5-year-old Reuters article and Pompeo’s speech, which was lauded by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board as “truth telling,” shows a type of symbiosis that could only help cast a backward glow over President Donald Trump’s move, last summer, to reimpose all sanctions lifted by the Obama’s administration’s historic nuclear deal with Iran.

The imprint of the Reuters article on Pompeo’s speech was obvious in an anecdote about the travails of an elderly woman living in Europe. “The ayatollah fills his coffers by devouring whatever he wants,” Pompeo said. “In 2013 the Setad’s agents banished an 82-year-old Baha’i woman from her apartment and confiscated the property after a long campaign of harassment. Seizing land from religious minorities and political rivals is just another day at the office for this juggernaut that has interests in everything from real estate to telecoms to ostrich farming.”

The 82-year-old Baha’i woman living in Europe clearly matches Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh, a woman the Reuters team put at the very start of their extensive, three-part investigation. Here’s how the Reuters article begins: “The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.”

While tapping the human-interest aspects of the story, Pompeo’s speech steered clear of some of the qualifications that the Reuters reporters and editors injected into their general profile of corruption. Pompeo referred to Khamenei using Setad as a “personal hedge fund,” for instance, suggesting personal decadence on the part of the Iranian leader. But the Reuters team was careful to note that it had found no evidence of Khamenei putting the assets to personal use. “Instead, Setad’s holdings underpin his power over Iran.”

While stipulating that Khamenei’s greed was not for money but for power, the Reuters team neglected something of timely and possibly greater relevance. Earlier that same year the U.S. admitted its own longstanding greed for power over this foreign country.

Final CIA Admission

In August 2013—three months before the Reuter’s article was published—the CIA finally admitted its role in the 1953 Iranian coup. “Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States’ role in the controversial operation. American and British involvement in Mosaddeq’s ouster has long been public knowledge, but today’s posting includes what is believed to be the CIA’s first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup,” the archive said.

This U.S. aggression led directly to two phases of property confiscation in Iran: first under the Shah and then under the religious fundamentalists who overthrew him. Unaccountably, however, the Reuters team ignored the CIA admission so relevant to their story.

To its credit, the Reuters article does allude, early on, to the two inter-related periods of property confiscation in Iran. “How Setad came into those assets also mirrors how the deposed monarchy obtained much of its fortune – by confiscating real estate,” the article says. But that sentence only functions as a muffled disclaimer since the team makes no effort to integrate that history into the laments of people such as Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh, who emotionally drives the story.

Dubious Figure

For anyone familiar with the history of property confiscations in Iran, this ex-pat widow is a dubious figure. In the article, she claims that she lost three apartments in a multi-story building in Tehran, “built with the blood of herself and her husband.” She also says her late husband Hussein was imprisoned in 1981 because he began working for a gas company that had been set up to assist unemployed members of the Baha’i faith, and finally executed a year later.

The suggestion is that he was killed as part of a widespread persecution of Bahai’i followers.

What the Reuters reporters and editors omitted to mention, however, is that Hussein had been a  lieutenant in the military regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi; the last shah of Iran who was overthrown by the uprising of 1979.

The Shah’s name has become so intertwined with UK and U.S. meddling in Iran that his role in setting a pro-western foreign policy is mentioned in the opening sentence of the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on him. But the Reuters article places this mention at the end of the story, as deep background. By the time the team discloses the Shah’s penchant for confiscating property and flagrant corruption, the reader is in the third section of a three-part article. By that time, the elderly Vahdat-e-Hagh has come and gone. By then, she has cemented herself in the reader’s imagination as an unequivocal victim, even though some obvious questions about her should occur to anyone familiar with the country’s history.

How, for instance, did she and her husband come to own such significant property at the center of Iran’s capital city? Under the Pahlavi regime, most military personnel were provided with one apartment, not three. In the article, Vahdat-e-Hagh says that she and her husband obtained the property themselves, so presumably they did not inherit it. Could her late husband, Hussein, have been of high importance to the Shah’s U.S.-backed regime, which was famous for its lavish handouts to special loyalists?

Such questions float over the article, not only about this particular subject, but many others who are presented to dramatize the ayatollah’s misdeeds. Several sources appear as human rights “experts” and lawyers. They are all Iranians living abroad and many have controversial biographical details that go unmentioned. There are similar well-known credibility issues with people who are introduced as respectable scholars and politicians.

The article offers the story of another aggrieved Baha’i family without ever mentioning how such people, in general, had lost property during the Shah’s White Revolution of 1963 which was intended to weaken those classes that supported the traditional system, primarily landed elites.

One obvious problem with the article is the distance of the three Reuters journalists from the scene of their story. They are based in New York, London and Dubai and do not reveal their information-gathering methods about Iran, a country that admits very few foreign reporters. So far, Yeganeh Torbati, the reporter who presumably wrote the first, human-interest part of the story, has not responded to a message to her Facebook account seeking comment. Nor has she responded to an email. Torbati, now based in Washington, was based in Dubai in 2013.

Story with Long Legs  

In the years since its publication, the Reuters article has been bubbling up in book citations. Suzanne Maloney mentioned it in her 2015 book “Iran’s Political Economy since the Revolution” as did Misagh Parsa in “Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed” published in 2016.

This year Pompeo relied on it in four speeches. Two books published in 2018 place some weight on the Reuters article: “Challenging Theocracy: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics” by David Tabachnick, Toivo Koivukoski and Herminio Meireles Teixeira; and “Losing Legitimacy: The End of Khomeini’s Charismatic Shadow and Regional Security” by Clifton W. Sherrill.

The name Setad, which means “headquarters” in Farsi, has been kicking around Washington for five years, ever since the U.S. imposed sanctions on the group. In June of 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a press release about Setad and its subsidiaries, with a long list of Persian-named properties that were managing to avoid UN sanctions imposed on the country’s business dealings as a means of discouraging Iran’s enrichment of nuclear-weapon grade uranium.

Six months later, in November, Reuters published its extensive, three-part investigative package, which now tops Google searches for “Setad.”

The report was the first piece of important follow-up journalism on the U.S. Treasury press release. But in one key piece of wording, editors and reporters almost seem to be straining to move their story ahead of the government’s rendition, to the primary position it now holds in Google search-terms.

“Washington,” according to the article, “had acknowledged Setad’s importance.” Acknowledged? By journalistic conventions that Reuters editors would certainly know, an acknowledgement indicates a reluctant admission, something a source would rather not reveal. Five months earlier, however, the Treasury Department sounded eager to call attention to Setad as “a massive network of front companies hiding assets on behalf of … Iran’s leadership.”

For hardliners on Iran, the U.S. Treasury press release was important fodder. But it lacked the human drama necessary to stir an audience against the current regime.  When the Reuters article came along, with all its historical omissions, it filled that gap.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Thoughts on Putin, Economic Downturns and Democracy

By Dean Baker | Beat The Press | December 26, 2018

A friend called my attention to this Project Syndicate piece by Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor and former chief economist at the I.M.F. Rogoff  argues that Russia will need major economic reform and political reform in order for its economy to get back on a healthy growth path.

In the course of making his argument, Rogoff makes a quick and dirty case that the fact Putin was able to win re-election despite the economic downturn in 2015-2016 resulting from the collapse of world oil prices, shows that the country is not a western democracy.

“The shock to the real economy has been severe, with Russia suffering a decline in output in 2015 and 2016 comparable to what the United States experienced during its 2008-2009 financial crisis, with the contraction in GDP totalling about 4%. …..

“In a western democracy, an economic collapse on the scale experienced by Russia would have been extremely difficult to digest politically, as the global surge in populism demonstrates. Yet Putin has been able to remain firmly in control and, in all likelihood, will easily be able to engineer another landslide victory in the presidential election due in March 2018.”

First, the I.M.F. data to which Rogoff links, does not support his story of an economic collapse in Russia. The reported decline in GDP is 2.7 percent, not the 4.0 percent claimed by Rogoff. And, it is more than reversed by the growth in 2017 and projected growth in 2018. In other words, there does not seem to be much of a story of economic collapse here.

But the idea that a Russian government could not stay in power through an economic downturn, if it were democratic, is an interesting one. According to the I.M.F., Russia’s economy shrank by more than 25 percent from 1992 to 1996 under Boris Yeltsin, a close U.S. ally. Yet, he managed to be re-elected in 1996 despite an economic decline that was an order of magnitude larger than the one under Putin from 2014 to 2016. By the Rogoff theory, we can infer that Yeltsin should not have been able to win re-election through democratic means.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Economics | | 1 Comment

Since When Did the Irish Words “Sinn Féin” Mean Pro-Empire?

By Aidan O’Brien | CounterPunch | December 27, 2018

Brexit has exposed Ireland as much as it has exposed Britain. In the on and off deal between the UK and the EU, the future of the Irish border, and therefore the future of Ireland, is being decided by faceless bureaucrats in Britain and Brussels. This is yet more proof – if any more proof was needed – of Ireland’s dependent status. After the Irish banking disaster, this is the latest ignominy “Independent Ireland” must bear.

While the subjugation of Ireland by its powerful neighbors is nothing new – the almost cheerful acceptance of this current state of affairs by “rebel Ireland” is something new.

For decades now the Sinn Féin party has been the face of “rebel Ireland”. It fought British rule in the north. And openly defied the comprador capitalists in the south. But today it cheers on Brussels as the latter decides the fate of Ireland. Today Sinn Féin criticizes anyone who wishes to exit the European Union. Today – irony of ironies – Sinn Féin is the Unionist Party par excellence. In the most smug way, it is now loyal to the prevailing Empire.

The Irish words “sinn féin” mean “ourselves”, or in political terms, “ourselves alone” – as opposed to “ourselves following the orders of others”. So in contemporary terms, the words “sinn féin” best describe those arguing for Brexit. While those wishing to remain in the EU are anything but “sinn féin”. Following this semantic line, Ireland’s Sinn Féin party, by defending the EU and mocking Brexit, has turned the meaning of “sinn féin” on its head.

What explains this un-sinn féin like politics within Sinn Fèin? In a few words: out of date Irish nationalism. Rebel Ireland has always been blinded by Britain. It could never see around Britain. For much of history this blindness was logical. For centuries Britain was the rising Empire. And up until recently, it was the greatest Empire the world had ever seen.

Over the centuries, in its struggle against this British behemoth, rebel Ireland has sought the assistance of imperial Spain (1601), imperial France (1798) and imperial Germany (1916). All this was justifiable back then because the British juggernaut was mercilessly crushing Ireland. And right up until the fall of Margaret Thatcher (1990) Britain continued to crush Ireland.

This crushing narrative, however, changed dramatically around the year 2000 and caught the rebel Irish off guard. As imperial Britain faded away and became “America’s poodle” – imperial Europe started to flex its muscles. The crush then was originating in the EU rather than in the UK. Regardless, the Irish rebels continued to focus their ire on Britain. They completely ignored the sinister nature of imperial Europe. The rebel Irish love of Europe was about to become a love of pain – a pain they embrace today.

If the Sinn Féin party could’ve taken its eyes off Britain around 2000 – if it looked at the big European picture – it would’ve seen the writing on the EU Wall. The Single European Act (1987), the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the European Central Bank (1998), the Euro (1999) and the Lisbon Treaty (2007) all pointed to a Europe hostile towards social and international justice.

Considering the fact that the “EU” was, from the get go, a right wing unification of Germany and France – the imperialist nature of contemporary Europe should not be news to anyone. But unfortunately it is – even to left wing Irish rebels. The thought that the EU represents a more menacing threat to Ireland than the UK, seems to be a thought too far for Sinn Féin.

Facts, such as the following, don’t seem to register in the Sinn Féin view of Europe: the EU is a neoliberal nightmare (the primacy of the market is written into the EU constitution), the EU is a bank robber (the bailout of Germany), the EU is a wage robber (the austerity), the EU hates Africa (fortress Europe), the EU is anti-Venezuela, anti-Palestine, and anti-Russia (pro CIA/Zionist/Latin fascism), the EU’s military industrial complex is determined by EUCOM, etc..

But does Sinn Féin know the meaning of EUCOM? Does anyone in Europe know the meaning of EUCOM? The United States European Command and its attack dogs -NATO and AFRICOM – are embedded deep within the EU.

Its time Irish nationalism updated its understanding of Europe. Ireland is no longer living in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries: Europe isn’t automatically the gateway to freedom. Although the EU is trying to turn the clock back to the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Radical inequality is bolstering Europe’s monarchies, aristocracies and crusading armies. Does 21st century Sinn Féin really think that this retrograde monster is reformable?

Just when Britain is redefining itself for the better, “rebel” Ireland has the gall to lecture the British on the goodness of EU backwardness. It is blind to the fact that Brexit plus Jeremy Corbyn equals the best chance for “socialism” right now in Europe. Corbyn will thrive in an independent Britain, whereas in the EU he will be in a free market straitjacket. All of which begs the question: does Ireland’s “rebels” really want anything to do with socialism?

Brexit is exposing the poverty of the rebel Irish vision. Knee jerk worship of Europe, and knee jerk hatred of Britain, has today turned the great Irish rebellion on its head. The Empire has changed its position. A more sophisticated vision would see that the imperialism south of today’s Irish border is more virulent than the traditional kind north of the border.

The Irish border must go. First and foremost, however, the Irish fight is against foreign rule. And that comes in many guises. If Brussels gets its way, Ireland is facing another century or two of foreign rule or just simply foreign annihilation. On the other hand, if Brexit gets its way, there’s a real chance that foreign rule in Ireland may unravel. A weaker EU and a more inward looking Britain (not forgetting the real possibility of a more socialist Britain) would give most meaning to the Irish words “sinn féin”.

Aidan O’Brien lives in Dublin, Ireland.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Afghanistan: Negotiations or a US Military Defeat?

By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – 24.12.2018

While the Trump administration may think otherwise and even take the credit for initiating dialogue with the Taliban on an unprecedented level with a view to pulling the US out of Afghanistan, there can hardly be any doubt that negotiations, after 17 years of continuous war, are nothing short of an uncomfortable acceptance of their inability to defeat the Taliban militarily. How else do we define a military defeat? In the very act of negotiations is implicit an American admission of the ultimate fact that it has become impossible for it to retain its politico-military hold on Afghanistan through its planted government in Kabul and the US-raised and trained Afghan security forces, despite the continued huge financial support and the support of the US/NATO high-tech military forces in the country. It is for this reason that the US had even to drop its previously adamant refusal to hold direct talks with the Afghan Taliban.

If there is no military defeat for the US and even if the US still has got forces on the ground, the question of holding direct talks with the Taliban points to the increasing inability of the US forces to force the Taliban into submission. Importantly enough, the current phase of talks has been initiated by the US, not the Taliban. The Taliban had repeatedly refused to endorse Kabul’s offers of talks, and only agreed to do talks if the US was willing to engage directly. Therefore, with the US now fully engaged in “peace dialogue”, the US military’s self-proclaimed notion of invisibility stands fully exposed.

While some may argue that dialogue is necessary to end the war through non-military means, it is hard to miss the point that the US military still remains deeply entrenched in the war. For example, apart from the fact that there are thousands of soldiers on the ground, the US air force dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2018 than in any other year of the war in 17 years. The number of bombs dropped do not only show that the war basically remains intense, but also that the US military is desperate to change the course of the war to its advantage, an ambition highly unlikely to materialise; hence, the ever more emphasis on dialogue with the Taliban.

And while the US can’t avoid a military defeat, it can still hope to avoid humiliation in Afghanistan. And, for this purpose it is prepared to utilise all available means, including asking Pakistan for help. Even though the Trump administration, ever since it came into power, has cut all military aid and coalition support fund to Pakistan and bi-lateral relations have never been so frosty ever since the beginning of ‘war on terror’, the ever-increasing helplessness against the Taliban has once again forced the US to ‘ask’ for help.

Pakistan, fully aware as it is of the ground realities of Afghanistan and the way the US has already lost the war, is unlikely to ‘help’ the US in turning the table in its favour. In fact, in response to president Trump’s letter to Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, Khan was quick to rebut Pakistani involvement in any relationship with the US “where Pakistan is treated like a hired gun — given money to fight someone else’s war. We should never put ourselves in this position again.”

The request for help came only two weeks after president Trump had actually accused Pakistan of ‘not doing a damn thing’ in Afghanistan for the US. But the letter he wrote only two weeks after this blatant accusation signified increasing US desperation in Afghanistan and its willingness to still cast Pakistan in a friendly role even though it, as the US claims, never did a damn thing for the US. How wise it is for the US to ‘ask’ for help from a country that it thinks has worked against it through-out the war? How else to explain this wayward and self-contradictory approach than by placing it in the context of an imminent military defeat and US desperation to somehow avoid it by making a face-saving deal with the Taliban?

All this proves that no matter how powerful the US military might be, or how hard it might have worked, or how many years it might have committed to building an Afghan army in its own image, and no matter how much air and logistical support that army might have received, it has failed to militarily defeat the Taliban, who are currently directly and indirectly controlling about 44 per cent of the districts and have even established, as reports have shown, a parallel system of governance and administration in many parts where the Afghan officials work in close cooperation with the Taliban.

More than anything else, this reality exhibits another defeat in terms of the failure of its so-called ‘counter-insurgency’ program’s ability to roll back and replace the Taliban networks on the ground. It also means that the US-planted socio-political governance system in Afghanistan has almost reached the brink of a “political defeat”, much like the imminent defeat of the US military and its trained Afghan forces, which are losing more troops every year than the government can recruit, presenting yet another dilemma which the US forces have failed to resolve even after years of training and advising the Afghan security forces.

All this comes down to a single and indisputable reality: the US must withdraw and let the Afghans decide their future. Instead of finding a way to impose its demands on the Afghans, the best course for the US would be to liaise with other regional countries, including Pakistan, Russia and China, to develop such power sharing formula as would ensure an inclusive political system. Of course, any platform of negotiations and any peace plan that is developed without the Afghans themselves directly involved in its making would be meaningless in terms of reconciling the warring factions within the country. The sooner the US accepts this eventuality, the fewer of the US forces, the Afghan troops and innocent lives would be lost.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , | 9 Comments

Trump’s Holiday Gift to America: Hope for a Little More Peace on Earth?

By Thomas L. Knapp | Garrison Center | December 27, 2018

In March, US president Donald Trump promised the American public that US troops would be leaving Syria “very soon.”

Nine months later, he threw Washington’s political establishment into turmoil by finally ordering the withdrawal he’d promised. Politicians like US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who’d never once in four years bestirred themselves to authorize the previous president’s decision to go to war there in the first place, railed against Trump’s decision to bring the bloody matter to a close.

Instead of backing down in the face of opposition, Trump doubled down. Or, rather, decided to draw down the 17-year-long US military presence in Afghanistan.

Then he jetted off for a surprise Christmas visit to Iraq … eliciting, with his usual theatrics, calls from Iraqi lawmakers for US withdrawal from THAT country. I suspect he may concede to that demand as well.

Nothing’s written in stone, and both US foreign policy and Donald Trump are prone to sudden and unexpected turns. But the holiday season is a time of hope. Maybe, just maybe, nearly three decades of US war in the Middle East are coming to the beginning of their end.

Adding to that hope, let’s turn an eye further east.

After significant saber-rattling and then a sudden turn toward personal diplomacy, Trump stood back and let events on the Korean peninsula take their course even as he continued the bellicose rhetoric and sanctions noises demanded of him by Graham and company.

As a result, North and South seem on the brink of ending a 68-year war. They’ve begun removing land mines and guard posts along the Demilitarized Zone. They’ve broken ground on a railway connecting the two countries.

Is it possible that Trump, as some of his supporters like to say, has been playing 4D chess while the rest of us distracted ourselves with checkers?

I’d really like to think so, and I do hope so.

As an advocate for ending US military adventurism, I’ve doubted Trump every step of the way. During his presidential campaign, he alternated between talking peace and pronouncing himself the most militaristic of the GOP’s presidential aspirants.

I’ve generally found it safer to believe the worst, rather than the best, things politicians say about themselves. But at moments like these, his bizarre zigs and zags on the global 4D chess board suddenly seem in retrospect to have taken American foreign policy in the right direction.

If he brings home substantial numbers of the American fighting men and women now in harm’s way around the globe, he will have secured his legacy and deserve the thanks of a grateful nation. I wish him every success in that endeavor.

Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men, and Happy New Year.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , , , | 7 Comments

Trump Extricates Himself from the Trap in Syria, Abandoning the Kurds

By Dmitry MININ | Strategic Culture Foundation | 28.12.2018

It is not only many members of the US establishment who have labeled President Trump’s order to withdraw America’s forces (2,200 troops) from Syria as a betrayal, but also the allies of the United States. They claim that Trump is throwing the Syrian Kurds under the bus and leaving Israel in a state of “strategic isolation.” Also coming in for criticism is the statement by the US administration (the first of its kind) announcing that it has no plans to remove Bashar al-Assad from power.

It may turn out to be Syria’s Kurds (who number about two million) who will face the most dramatic consequences of the president’s decision, for it was they who created the de facto autonomous state of Rojava in northeastern Syria with the Americans’ support. Now Rojava’s very existence is under threat.

Ankara has already stated that it has not given up on its plan for “an offensive against the terrorists” in eastern Syria, but has merely put it on hold for a while (i.e., until the Americans have left). Officially, this has been prompted by the fact that Turkey intends to take over for the US and finish off the remnants of the “Islamic State” (IS) — something over which Trump and Erdoğan have supposedly already reached an explicit agreement. The leader in the White House has already tweeted that this is so. Turkey’s foreign affairs minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, issued the same confirmation on Dec. 21. If left to its own devices, the Syrian government army could handle a few stray IS units even without the Turks, but Ankara isn’t particularly interested in IS. Turkey needs to wipe Rojava off the map.

According to Çavuşoğlu, the vacuum that will be left after the US troops pull out “can be filled by terrorist organizations,” so Turkey is ready to exert control over those territories (which, as a reminder, are Syrian).

Faced with the dilemma over whether to favor as an ally the mythical state of Rojava or Turkey, the leader in the White House did not hesitate to choose the latter. Although the American troops are slated to leave Syria within 60 to 100 days, the State Department advisors who are helping to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure in northeastern Syria are being pulled out within a matter of days. Brett McGurk, the chief advisor and special presidential envoy in Syria — a man whom the Kurds practically viewed as the architect of their statehood — is openly irate. McGurk, who saw himself as a new version of Lawrence of Arabia, accused the White House of “abandoning the US allies in the region.” However, he himself bears much of the responsibility for the chaos there. It was none other than McGurk who was the primary author of the new Iraqi constitution that plunged that country into the abyss of civil war. And he also wooed the Syrian Kurds on behalf of the US, by dangling promises of their own statehood, which never materialized.

The command of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces has already issued a statement condemning the US decision and proclaiming its determination to continue the fight. Kurdish leaders are less concerned with the Americans’ departure than with the deal the Americans reached with the Turks behind the Kurds’ backs. Their statement calls out Turkey’s intentions to take aggressive action against Rojava, in addition to Ankara’s “dirty plans and games.” The Kurds feel that by simultaneously announcing both the withdrawal of their troops as well as the sale of the Patriot missile-defense system to Turkey, the US has green-lighted the plans for a “Turkish occupation” of their territory. However, for some reason they are requesting protection from the UN, although Rojava is legally within the borders of the Syrian state and thus that kind of conversation needs to be held with Damascus.

What awaits Rojava? The only thing that can save it would be the recognition of the sovereignty of Damascus within its borders. If Syrian government troops enter Rojava, the Turks will not risk seriously damaging their relationship with Russia in order to launch an offensive. Nor do they even need northeastern Syria, as they only need assurances that there will be no further moves to create a Kurdish quasi-state and thus no threats to Turkey’s stability. Damascus and Moscow are ready to provide this. Russian representatives have always expressed their readiness to work with Damascus in order to safeguard the national rights of the Syrian Kurds in a mutually acceptable way. If the Kurds had been willing to move in this direction earlier, their negotiations with the Syrian government could have been conducted in a more favorable atmosphere. But better late than never. If the leaders in Rojava don’t find a way to reach a compromise with Damascus, the Syrian Kurds could be looking at a real calamity.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , | 1 Comment

Arab states are making nice with Assad’s Syria. Will the West follow suit?

RT | December 28, 2018

Attempts by Arab states to mend ties with Damascus serve to bolster the Syrian government’s victories on the ground and may well see the West changing its attitude towards the country, Middle East experts have told RT.

The first sign of a thaw between Syria and its Arab neighbors came earlier in December when Sudanese President Omar Bashir visited Damascus. It was followed by Wednesday’s report that the Arab League may readmit Syria into the 22-member bloc sometime next year, and the announcement by the UAE on Thursday that it’s reopening its embassy in the Syrian capital.

Damascus was kicked out of the Arab League in 2011 as President Bashar Assad was accused of atrocities against his people. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Arab states have been actively pushing for the removal of Assad from power during the years of the deadly war, and had been slammed by Damascus on numerous occasions for their support of armed extremists fighting against the Assad government.

Yet, the desire for rapprochement with Damascus now “is not a manifestation of brotherly love to [Syrian president Bashar] Assad,” Sergey Balmasov, of the Institute of the Middle East, believes. Those moves are dictated by the situation on the ground, where Damascus now controls most of the country’s territory.

“They are now thinking: ‘Well, we couldn’t remove Assad and we lost a lot of money on it, but we’ll lose even more if we keep not recognizing him.”

A similar stance was shared by Middle East expert Andrey Ontikov, who said that for the Arab states it’s now “obvious that they’d have to deal with Assad and the current Syrian authorities in any case as they’ll keep playing an important role in the political life of the country.”

Saudi Arabia, UAE and others simply remembered that “when one can’t cope with the problem it’s easier for him to tame it by acting [within] the existing circumstances,” he added.

Yet by mending ties and “bringing their money into Syria, the Gulf States may achieve what they couldn’t do militarily,” Balmasov cautioned.

Syria had previously rejected Arab assistance in post-war reconstruction, saying that the country shouldn’t be rebuilt by those who worked to destroy it. But this may well change, as Damascus may well need any and all help to rebuild the ravaged country. Balmasov pointed out that, with their investment, Arab states might also seek to diminish Iran’s influence in the country.

It’s also no coincidence that the Arab League began moving towards Syria shortly after US President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops, as now there is a “real chance of the Syrian government taking control of almost all of the country’s territory,” Konstantin Truevtsev, of the Center for Arabic Studies, said.

After the Americans depart, those areas in northern Syria will fall under the control of the Kurds, who “would have no other way than to find common ground with Damascus,” Ontikov pointed out. “It’s just a question of time.”

Syrian government forces are already on the outskirts of the city of Manbij in the province of Aleppo, which makes the prospects of a Turkish military operation against the Kurds “very doubtful,” Truevtsev added.

Another reason for the current rapprochement was that “the Arab leaders have perfect understanding that Trump isn’t going to lock horns with [Russia’s President Vladimir] Putin over Syria,” Balmasov said. “It’s just war of words and nothing more.”

“Already now nobody is talking about regime change in Syria… The West has long ago removed the issue of Assad leaving power from the agenda,” Truevtsev pointed out.

Eventual stabilization of the situation in Syria is also “of prime importance” to Europe because of the refugee issue, Ontikov noted. And because of this “the West should give up on its unilateral sanctions against Damascus and take part in the post war reconstruction of Syria without insisting on the completion of the political process in the country. The work must begin now.”

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Obama, ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 25.12.2018

There is a great uproar over the recent decision by US President Trump to pull US troops out of Syria, announcing his reason for doing so is that ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, has largely been defeated. What lies behind the decision and more important, what was behind the surprise emergence of ISIS across Syria in 2014 brings the spotlight to yet-classified documents of the Obama term. If the reorganized Justice Department is compelled to make these documents public in lawsuits or Freedom of Information requests, it could rock organizations such as the CIA and many in the Obama camp.

In 2010 the US Administration under President Barack Obama developed a top secret blueprint for the most ambitious and far-ranging series of US-backed regime change across the Islamic Middle East since World War I and the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement. It was to set off a wave of wars and chaos, of failed states and floods of war refugees unimaginable to the most cynical veteran diplomat, and beyond the belief of most lay persons in the world.

In August, 2010, six months before Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution was launched by the Washington NGOs including the NED, the Soros Foundations, Freedom House and others, President Obama signed Presidential Study Directive-11 (PDS-11), ordering Washington government agencies to prepare for “change.” The change was to be a radical policy calling for Washington’s backing for the secret fundamentalist Islamic Muslim Brotherhood sect across the Middle East Muslim world, and with it, the unleashing of a reign of terror that would change the entire world.

According to US Congressional testimony of Peter Hoekstra, former Chairman of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Obama Administration PSD-11 directive–as of March 2017 still classified Top Secret–“ordered a government-wide reassessment of prospects for political reform in the Middle East and of the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in the process.”

A Grandiose Task Force

To draft the contents of PSD-11, a top secret task force was established within the Obama National Security Council (NSC), headed by Dennis Ross, Samantha Power, Gayle Smith, Ben Rhodes and Michael McFaul.

The PSD-11 Task Force members were remarkable in many regards. Samantha Power, who would go on to become Obama’s UN Ambassador and lead the demonizing of Russia after the CIA’s Ukraine Color Revolution coup in 2014, was to play an instrumental role in convincing President Obama that Libya’s Mohammar Qaddafi must be militarily removed for what she called “humanitarian reasons.” Dennis Ross, accused by Palestinian opponents of being “more pro-Israeli than the Israelis,” co-founded the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-sponsored Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). He was Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director at the NSC for the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia when he was part of the PSD-11 task force.

Gayle Smith would later go on in 2015 to head the USAID, the CIA-linked State Department agency that funneled US taxpayer millions to finance the NGOs of the Arab Spring and other Color Revolution regime changes. Michael McFaul, who once described himself as a “specialist on democracy, anti-dictator movements, revolutions,” was later named Obama’s Ambassador to Moscow where he coordinated opposition protests against Putin.

The Top Secret PSD-11 report that the Task Force drew up was partially revealed in a series of legal Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department. Released official documents revealed that the NSC Task Force had concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “viable movement” for the US Government to support throughout North Africa and the Middle East. A resulting Presidential directive ordered American diplomats to make contacts with top Muslim Brotherhood leaders and gave active support to the organization’s drive for power in key nations like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Syria, at the 2011 outset of the “Arab Spring.” The PDS-11 secret paper came to the bizarre conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of political Islam, combined with its fervent nationalism, could lead to “reform and stability.” It was a lie, a lie well known to the Obama PSD-11 Task Force members.

The True Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan–Arabic for The Brotherhood–is a secret masonic-like organization with a covert  or underground terrorist arm and a public facade of “peaceful doing of charity.” It was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna who developed the cult’s guiding motto. The credo of his Society of Muslim Brothers was incorporated into a chant of six short phrases:

Allah is our goal; The Prophet is our Leader; The Qur’an is our Constitution; Jihad is our Way; Death in the service of Allah is the loftiest of our wishes; Allah is Great, Allah is Great.

Al-Banna created a secret or hidden arm of the Ikhwan in Egypt and later worldwide, known as the Special Section (al-nizam al-khass), or, as it was referred to by the British in Egypt, the Secret Apparatus (al-jihaz al-sirri). That was the military wing of the Brotherhood, in effect, the “assassination bureau.” Al-Banna taught his recruits, exclusively male, that “Jihad is an obligation of every Muslim.” He preached the nobility of “Death in the Service of Allah,” and wrote, Allah grants a “noble life to that nation which knows how to die a noble death.” He preached a death cult in which “Victory can only come with the mastery of the ‘Art of Death.’” For the Brotherhood that “mastery” was perfected in the killing of “infidels” in Jihad or Holy War in the name of Allah. The infidels could be other Muslims such as Shi’ite or Sufi who did not follow Al-Banna’s strict Sunni practice, or Christians.

Hasan Al-Banna called for adoption of the very strict Islamic Shari’a law, the complete segregation of male and female students, with a separate curriculum for girls, a prohibition of dancing, and a call for Islamic states to eventually unify in a Caliphate.

During World War II, leading Muslim Brotherhood figures spent exile from British-controlled Egypt by fleeing to Berlin where, among others, Al Banna’s close Muslim brotherhood ally, Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, worked intimately with the SS and Heinrich Himmler to create special Muslim Brotherhood terror units of the SS, so-called Handschar SS, to kill Soviet soldiers and Jews. In the 1950’s the CIA discovered the Nazi Muslim Brotherhood recruits in exile in postwar Munich and decided they could be “useful.”

Virtually every major Jihadist terrorist organization and leader has come out of the Muslim Brotherhood. Osama bin Laden, who worked for the CIA in Pakistan recruiting Jihadist Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, was a Muslim Brotherhood member who was recruited by the CIA and Saudi Intelligence head Prince Turki al-Faisal, to create what came to be called Al Qaeda. Other known terrorist members of the Ikhwan were Al Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and the blind Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman who recently died in a US prison serving time for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Sheikh Omar was accused of conspiring to assassinate Egypt’s Mubarak and masterminding the Muslim Brotherhood assassination of Anwar Sadat in addition to the bombing of the World Trade Center.

The members of the Obama Administration National Security Council PSD-11 Task Force that recommended a US Government embrace of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood in Islamic countries of the Arab Middle East, knew very well who they were dealing with. Since the 1950’s the CIA had worked with the Ikhwan around the world. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda in Iraq and in Syria, al Nusra Front in Syria, as well as the so-called Islamic State or ISIS all were created out of Muslim Brotherhood networks, changing names as a chameleon lizard changes color to suit its surroundings.

The origins of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria and later of ISIS , the murderous wars and chaos sweeping across the Arab Middle East and into Western Europe since 2010, could all be directly traced back to those Washington Obama policies, their so-called Arab Spring, coming from that August 2010 PSD-11 Presidential Task Force directive. This is what threatens to come out with declassification of US Justice Department files in the coming months. Some in Washington speak of treason, a strong word.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Angela Merkel: Nation States Must “Give Up Sovereignty” To New World Order

Photo Credit: Abdülhamid Hoşbaş – Anadolu Agency
Tapainfo.com – 11/22/2018

“Nation states must today be prepared to give up their sovereignty”, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told an audience in Berlin that sovereign nation states must not listen to the will of their citizens when it comes to questions of immigration, borders, or even sovereignty.

No this wasn’t something Adolf Hitler said many decades ago, this is what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told attendants at an event by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin. Merkel has announced she won’t seek re-election in 2021 and it is clear she is attempting to push the globalist agenda to its disturbing conclusion before she stands down.

“In an orderly fashion of course,” Merkel joked, attempting to lighten the mood. But Merkel has always had a tin ear for comedy and she soon launched into a dark speech condemning those in her own party who think Germany should have listened to the will of its citizens and refused to sign the controversial UN migration pact:

“There were [politicians] who believed that they could decide when these agreements are no longer valid because they are representing The People”.

“[But] the people are individuals who are living in a country, they are not a group who define themselves as the [German] people,” she stressed.

Merkel has previously accused critics of the UN Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration of not being patriotic, saying “That is not patriotism, because patriotism is when you include others in German interests and accept win-win situations”.

Her words echo recent comments by the deeply unpopular French President Emmanuel Macron who stated in a Remembrance Day speech that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism [because] nationalism is treason.”

The French president’s words were deeply unpopular with the French population and his approval rating nosedived even further after the comments.

Macron, whose lack of leadership is proving unable to deal with growing protests in France, told the Bundestag that France and Germany should be at the center of the emerging New World Order.

“The Franco-German couple [has]the obligation not to let the world slip into chaos and to guide it on the road to peace”.

“Europe must be stronger… and win more sovereignty,” he went on to demand, just like Merkel, that EU member states surrender national sovereignty to Brussels over “foreign affairs, migration, and development” as well as giving “an increasing part of our budgets and even fiscal resources”.

Translation by ZeroHedge

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 9 Comments

US offered my family green card if I accused Kremlin of corruption – jailed Russian businessman

RT | December 27, 2018

Russian businessman Viktor Bout, jailed in the US on accusations of being an international arms dealer, said he won’t smear Russia’s honor in exchange for any type of deal with the American justice system.

There was talk about me telling the US authorities about corruption in the Kremlin. I replied: ‘What do I have to do with it at all and how am I supposed to speak about something that doesn’t exist?’

Such offers were made to him “on numerous occasions” by lawyers aligned with the US side, Bout said in a public telephone conversation with TASS.

The legal eagles also “loved talking about this with the family; with my wife, proposing different options, including a green card,” he added.

However, the entrepreneur said that exchanging him for any of the US citizens accused of crimes in Russia was never on the table.

Bout has been in custody for a decade now, after being arrested in 2008 in Thailand during an American sting operation. He was eventually convicted in the US in 2012 on a charge of conspiring to kill American citizens, by allegedly selling weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and was handed 25 years in prison.

As for any deals with the American justice system and what it really is – the American justice system isn’t just deaf and blind, but, apparently, out of its mind.

Before hanging up, Bout expressed “full confidence” that someday he’ll be back in Russia. The 51-year-old has always maintained his innocence and insisted that he has only been involved in legitimate cargo business.

December 28, 2018 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , | 3 Comments