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Minnesota cops ‘trained by Israeli forces in restraint techniques’

Israeli police officers detain a Palestinian protestor on March 12, 2019.
By Jon Collins  – Morning Star– June 1, 2020

Officers from the US police force responsible for the killing of George Floyd received training in restraint techniques and anti-terror tactics from Israeli law-enforcement officers.

Mr Floyd’s death in custody last Monday, the latest in a succession of police killings of African Americans, has sparked continuing protests and rioting in US cities.

At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference* hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.

There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.

The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.

Israeli deputy consul Shahar Arieli claimed that the half-day session brought “top-notch professionals from the Israeli police” to share knowledge with their US counterparts.

It is unclear whether any of the officers involved in the incident in which Mr Floyd was killed attended the conference.

Israeli forces broke necks

But in a chilling testimony, a Palestinian rights activist said that when she saw the image of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Mr Floyd’s neck, she was reminded of the Israeli forces’ policing of the occupied territories.

Neta Golan, the co-founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said: “When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee as he cried for help and other cops watched, I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique of leaning in on our chest and necks when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.

“They started twisting and breaking fingers in a particular way around the same time. It was clear they had undergone training for this. They continue to use these tactics — two of my friends have had their necks broken but luckily survived — and it is clear that they [Israel] share these methods when they train police forces abroad in ‘crowd control’ in the US and other countries including Sudan and Brazil.”

Israeli training of US police is widespread

The training of US police officials by Israeli forces is widespread.

Even Amnesty was compelled to report that hundreds of police from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state and Washington DC had been flown to Israeli for training.

Thousands more have been trained by Israeli forces who have come to the US to host similar events to the one held in Minneapolis. According to the somewhat selective rights organisation, many of these trips are taxpayer-funded, while others are privately funded.

Since 2002 the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), it said.

The Minneapolis Police Department was contacted for comment.

*(embedded links added by If Americans Knew)

[IAK notes: Anoka County (north Minneapolis region) Sheriff James Stuart traveled to Israel last December for a similar training.]

June 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 7 Comments

Are we about to see a Colour Revolution in the United States?

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 2, 2020

It started with peaceful protests. It always does. Oppressed, poor or otherwise desperate people take to the streets because they don’t know what else to do. Because their neighbours are doing it. Because the world is unfair to so many people. Because attention should be paid.

The reasons don’t matter. The peacefulness does.

Nobody who is marching for justice and change really wants to burn down a bakery or steal some trainers from a Nike store.

But then it starts happening.

Windows are broken. Bricks are thrown. Civilians are sprayed with mace. Bystanders are caught up in the throng. People get hurt.

It doesn’t need to happen, but it does.

Sometimes police panic in the face of intimidating crowds. Sometimes protesters let their anger boil over. A small minority of people just enjoy violence and chaos. Others stand to benefit from it, they stoke conflict and spread blame.

Then the molotov cocktails are flying and the snipers are shooting people on both sides. There’s blood in the streets and barricades are going up and the whole thing has its own momentum.

And, through all this, the media is churning out the noise. Partisan and dehumanising. “criminals” on one side “Fascists” on the other. Both sides are called thugs. Fox News and CNN tell the same stories with reversed points of view, slashing society down the centre.

And the chaos builds. The President has to do something, so he calls in the army.

Now the press are calling him a fascist and a dictator. They say he’s violated his office and he has to resign or be removed or be arrested.

I’m not talking about the United States.

I’m talking about Ukraine in 2014. Or Egypt and Syria in 2011. Or Libya in 2010. Or Bolivia just last winter. Or Venezuela every year for decades.

If the events currently unfolding in cities across the United States were happening in any other country in the world, a lot of us would already have said that the US Deep State was behind it. All the hallmarks are there.

The constructed narratives. The handy props. The agents provocateur. The hysterical media. The stench of agenda.

Consider, for a moment, that what is happening in Minneapolis and New York and Los Angeles has been happening in Paris and a host of other French cities for nearly two years.

The Guardian never called Macron a fascist. CNN never had a live stream about that.

Compare the coverage of the Gilets Jaunes to Black Lives Matter, and then to the Maidan protests.

The rubber bullets and tear gas are the same. The headlines are not.

CNN has one host calling Trump a “thug” who’s “hiding in his bunker”, and another saying “Trump declared war on Americans”. Robert Reich, writing in the Guardian, says:

[Trump] is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.

The Washington Post has an op-ed headlined:

Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

Slate magazine:

Remove Trump Now

The corporations are all on board. Every one of them releasing statements of solidarity and heartfelt Instagram posts and sending money to all the right places. Nike had their famous ad.

Because the same companies paying slave-wages to 10-year-old Indonesian kids in vast sweatshops just hate racism and inequality, honest.

We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Doesn’t this look like a play for an exchange of power? A colour revolution in the offing?

I suppose we should ask “why now?” Trump is up for re-election in just five months after all. Biden doesn’t really stand a chance, but they could have him suffer “ill health” and pull out, replace him with a Harris or a Warren or Michelle Obama. Hell, they could just rig it. They’ve done it before.

But then maybe it’s not about Trump per se, maybe it’s about the process of elections and the office of President in general. Maybe it’s about getting martial law in place well before the Covid19 backlash kicks in. Maybe there’s something else coming down the pipe that will make it clearer.

Supposing the plan is to get rid of Trump, what happens next?

Well, maybe one of a few things.

Firstly, it’s possible it all just dies down. But if 2020 has taught us anything it’s that the Deep State doesn’t fold a bad hand, they just up the ante and hope to bluff it out.

Second, there’s the possibility Trump introduces full-on martial law and becomes a quasi-dictator. While I’m sure he has no moral compunctions about that, it’s hard to see he would have the (vital) support of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in that endeavour. They’ve shown their colours throughout the last four years. However useful Trump has been, he is not an insider and he is entirely disposable.

Third, and final, Trump goes. Whether there’s an impeachment or a trial or an early election or a civil war… I don’t know. But it’s hard to see Trump weathering this storm.

If I had to guess, I’d say the protests and pressures mount until Trump does something stupid. If he makes any Yanukovych-style attempts at appeasement (he probably won’t), they will be ignored or minimised or the goalposts will be moved (we already saw that, when the arrest of Derek Chauvin went almost totally unnoticed).

If soldiers fire on civilians – whether Trump orders it or not, or whether mercenaries frame the army (like in Ukraine) – that will be it. The military will resign en masse, turn on Trump and he will be ousted.

From there could emerge an appointed “temporary” President, a middle-of-the-road type with support from both parties, whose job is to “unify the country” and “heal the divides”.

The emergence of a totally unelected President will, of course, be called something like “a triumph of the democratic spirit” in The Guardian.

The riots will be blamed for a constructed “second wave” of Covid19. Just in time for one of the new POTUS’ first announcements to be that “America will start taking Covid19 seriously”. Stronger lockdown rules, mandatory track-and-trace… the full Monty.

This will naturally earn him/her good-boy points all across the mainstream media, with the (totally accidental) bonus that anyone who dares protest the coup will be breaking the law, being selfish and risking lives (and probably a racist).

This is all just my supposition. I could be wrong, I hope I’m wrong. But I can see it heading in that direction. And the idea should worry everyone. Not out of any latent concern for Donald Trump, obviously. Just for the stability of the world. Coups or impeachments or other non-democratic power-changes are not good. They don’t end well.

They don’t end well for the leaders being removed, who almost universally end up exiled or hanged or poisoned or shot. Sometimes worse.

More importantly, they don’t end well for the ordinary people, who always suffer when the Deep State turns society on its head.

And, in this instance, it may not end well for the world, which suddenly has a nuclear-armed superpower in a severe state of flux to worry about.

We should all be concerned.

There’s an old joke:

Q: Why has there never been a military coup in the United States?

A: Because there’s no American Embassy there.

It looks like maybe that no longer applies.

June 2, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | 1 Comment

GCHQ propagandizing kids as young as four in secretive school ‘educational’ programs aimed at recruitment

RT | June 2, 2020

Britain’s GCHQ spy agency is running secretive “educational” programs in dozens of schools and disseminating propaganda to children as young as four years old, without the knowledge of parents, it’s been revealed.

The intelligence agency is running the programs in at least 40 schools with access to 22,000 children who are potentially being spied on, according to an investigation by Declassified UK.

According to the investigative website, GCHQ officers themselves are operating in at least one of the schools and parents of the pupils involved have not been made aware of the extent of the spy agency’s role in the so-called Cyber Schools Hub (CSH) programs also known as ‘CyberFirst’.

GCHQ publicly describes the programs as giving children between the ages of 11 and 17 the chance to experience “new ways of learning” in an “innovative cyber environment” and aims to use the school activities to help recruit kids for the cyber security industry.

Yet, Declassified revealed that the efforts have now expanded into primary schools where GCHQ has access to children as young as four years old – and that while the program literature states it is operational in 23 schools, it is actually running in nearly double that number – 10 of which are primary schools.

One of the primary school level “code clubs” is in fact staffed “entirely” by officers from GCHQ. The agency gains access to schools by offering to provide technology to local libraries and “recruitment teams” field enquiries from schools interested in being part of the program, the website said.

More disturbingly, the investigation revealed, local police worked with GCHQ on a “joint tag team event” to gain access to a student who had been reported to authorities as “very talented” by teachers who were worried he may be about to “cross the line” with his cyber activities – though there was no evidence that the child had done anything wrong.

The revelations about GCHQ’s activities in British schools are unsurprising considering US whistleblower Edward Snowden had previously revealed that one of the spy agency’s “top objectives” was to target children and create a “reporting service on radicalisation.”

Children are told that GCHQ, which conducts unlawful mass surveillance, according to the European Court of Human Rights, is the “heart of the nation’s security” system and has “saved countless lives.”

Asked what information was given to parents about the taxpayer-funded program, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) told Declassified it had “no contact with parents” and that what teachers share with parents is up to them.

Declassified UK was rebuffed by both GCHQ and the schools themselves when trying to glean more information about the projects, with both citing “national security exemptions” in order to block freedom of information requests.

The spy agency is attempting to “drip-feed” children with messages aimed at recruiting them for the field over time, Jen Persson, director of Defend Digital Me, told Declassified.

“There is regulation in other areas to protect [children] from undue adult influence, like online advertising – yet it sounds like spies can walk into schools whenever they want with no transparency or independent oversight,” Persson said.

GCHQ has posted “comments” from children on social media apparently praising the program as “the best thing EVER,” “fabulous” and “masses of fun” – but some of these quotes are seemingly made up.

A newsletter on an event for girls includes an alleged quote from Ella and Chloe in Year 8 (12-13 years old) expressing the need for “diversity in perspectives, leadership and experience.” Aside from “sounding more like language used by GCHQ media relations,” Declassified found that the same quote is attributed to 13-year-old Evie in another CSH blog post. Asked about this curious detail, NCSC told the website that teachers provide the quotes from students.

During an unannounced visit to a GCHQ “hub school,” one principal told Declassified that the program has brought his school no investment or new facilities but has simply made the school put more of a focus on cyber security.

Following a “successful” pilot phase in England, the government is now planning to expand the GCHQ program across the whole UK.

June 2, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | , | 2 Comments

‘Wanton thuggery’: Outraged Australia to probe US police attack on its journalists covering White House protest

Police aim at Reuters TV cameraman during unrest in Minneapolis. © Reuters / Julio Cesar-Chavez
RT | June 2, 2020

The Australian embassy in Washington, DC will investigate an apparent assault by the US police against two Aussie journalists. The pair were roughed up live on air while covering a protest outside the White House.

A crew working for the outlet 7News was targeted on Tuesday while reporting from a demonstration in the US capital against police brutality. Correspondent Amelia Brace and cameraman Tim Myers were battered as the police cleared a protesting crowd, footage of the incident showed. Brace was hit with a baton, while Myers was attacked with a riot shield.

“We have asked the Australian embassy in Washington, DC to investigate this incident,” Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Tuesday, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an investigation into the alleged assault. “I want to get further advice on how we would go about registering Australia’s strong concerns with the responsible local authorities in Washington,” she added.

Craig McPherson, Seven Network’s Director of News and Public Affairs, in turn, said, it was “nothing short of wanton thuggery.”

“They weren’t in anyone’s way – just doing their job,” McPherson said, adding that the company will file its own complaints against the police’s behavior, calling the incident “abhorrent.”

Brace, who returned to cover the news after the attack, said the officers’ actions were indiscriminate and they simply didn’t care that he and Myers were members of the media.

What happened to the Australian crew is one of many instances of journalists reporting from protests in the US being caught up in violence and targeted by police officers. Russia has demanded an investigation into an attack by Minneapolis police on a group of reporters, which included a Russian correspondent who was pepper-sprayed.

The US is currently experiencing nationwide protests and rioting over the death of an African American man, George Floyd. He was arrested by Minneapolis police and pinned to the ground, with one officer putting his knee on the man’s neck. An independent autopsy confirmed that Floyd died as a result of being unable to breathe due to their actions.

June 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , | 2 Comments

Will Italy be the next country to leave EU?

By Paul Antonopoulos | June 2, 2020

On May 27, the political movement Italia Libera submitted a constitutional bill to the Supreme Court of Cassation demanding a referendum for Italy to leave the EU. After years of discussions, the foundation stone was laid for Italians to debate whether they want to remain in the EU or follow the United Kingdom out of the bloc. The draft bill presented by Italia Libera to the Supreme Court of Cassation is entitled “Call for a referendum on the withdrawal of the state from the European Union.”

Effectively, Italia Libera has demonstrated that it is possible to follow an institutional path to allow citizens to decide whether they want to remain in the EU or not – and for those who want to leave, now is the best time considering the massive decline in popularity for the bloc after their abandonment of Italy when it was at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.

Gian Luca Proietti Toppi, a lawyer involved in the bill, said that it is necessary to reach ordinary Italians and “open their eyes to the harmful effects of participating in a Union without a soul and based only on finance. It is clear that with the filing of the 50,000 signatures necessary to start the parliamentary process of the proposal, a broad debate will open on the opportunity to exit the cage of the EU and the Euro.”

He continued to explain that “the effects of liberating the old continent from this bureaucratic and oppressive superstructure will certainly be complex to manage. However, Italia Libera, who is the first promoter of the Committee that collected the signatures needed, has already put experts and academics to work to draw up a plan that will secure the savings of Italians and from the debt.”

Although he did not mention the EU’s abandonment of Italy during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, he did emphasize how the bloc financially exploits Italy, just as it does to all of Mediterranean Europe with the exception of France.

There are many positive aspects to the EU, most notably the free movement of people and a coordinated effort to fight crime through Europol, but these multilateral agreements can exist without a European Parliament and domineering institutions based in Brussels and Strasbourg. As Toppi explained, Italy imagined the EU to be “a community of peoples and not of bankers.” It is for this reason that they announced the bill on the same day an unprecedented European Union Recovery Fund became official. This fund was only established because of the backlash received due to the bloc’s initial disinterest in assisting already struggling economies of the EU that were being further devastated financially by the pandemic.

With widespread southern European dissatisfaction with how the EU abandoned its supposed liberal ideals, particularly Germany, in favour of serving inward self-interests, bloc leaders are now playing catch up. President of the European Commission and Angela Merkel’s right-hand man in previous German governments, Ursula Von Der Leyen, and the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, who was also a former member of the Troika of bankers, announced the unprecedented measures to assist Europe through its financial woes. This time they promised real aid that would not completely decimate state structures and entire economies like what happened to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent Italy, for the entirety of the 2010’s. The Governor of the Bank of Italy expects a 13% drop in GDP in 2020, and for this reason Toppi emphasized that Italy does not need any further indebtedness which will increasingly put Italy in the hands of international speculators.

However, Italians remember that Lagarde announced on March 13, just as coronavirus was truly beginning to overwhelm hospitals, that the pandemic was an Italian problem only. This was the catalyst that saw ordinary Italians begin to remove EU flags from public display and replace them with Russian and Chinese flags in gratitude to the significant assistance that these two countries gave to Italy when it was abandoned by Brussels and Berlin.

An “Italexit” would be a bigger blow to the prestige of the EU then Brexit. Italy, as a G20 country, uses the Eurodollar unlike Britain which maintained currency sovereignty and continued to use the pound. Therefore, to prevent the strong possibility that Italy in the coming years could leave the EU, Brussels and Berlin must take note of its political failures and work to design a new community that has respect for national sovereignty and identity, and on the basis of reciprocity. It is not acceptable that Germany remains the dominant country of the EU and effectively rules over the European Commission, the European Central Banks, the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament.

A Europe free of unscrupulous bankers, self-referential bureaucrats and inadequate politicians is at the forefront of those pushing for their respective countries to exit the EU or call for its reformation. However, for this to be achieved, a major state must lead the charge, and it appears that Italy will take on this mantle and could very well be the first Eurodollar state to leave the EU if drastic reformations are not made. And Italian exit will surely have a domino effect felt all across Europe.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

June 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , | 4 Comments