“Democracy Now!” Gets Nuclear Ban Vote Totally Wrong
By Sam Husseini | October 28, 2016
“Democracy Now” sadly continues its descent, which I’ve alluded to occasionally on twitter. To fully tell this story would require a very long and detailed piece, but the latest chapter of this is worth noting in more than a tweet as it happens. On this morning’s headlines, Amy Goodman claimed:
The United Nations on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to start talks aimed at abolishing all nuclear weapons. The landmark resolution will see the U.N. convene a conference next year to negotiate a legally binding instrument for worldwide nuclear prohibition. The vote was 123-38, with 16 countries abstaining. Voting against were all nine known nuclear states: China, Russia, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea as well as the United States. [Note, this is wording as broadcast, the transcript is minorly different.]
In fact, China, India and Pakistan abstained. North Korea actually voted for the resolution. As even the AP correctly reported: “The United States, Russia, Israel, France and the United Kingdom were among the countries voting against the measure.” See country by country breakdown results from International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. See excellent map from ILPI. If you’re still skeptical, see actual pic of vote board.
As Ira Helfand — past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and currently co-president of that group’s global federation, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War — noted in Nukes and the U.N.: a Historic Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons:
The ‘No’ votes came from the nuclear weapons states, and U.S. allies in NATO, plus Japan, South Korea and Australia, which have treaty ties to the U.S., and consider themselves to be under the protection of the ‘U.S. nuclear umbrella.’
But four nuclear weapons states broke ranks, with China, India and Pakistan abstaining, and North Korea voting in favor of the treaty negotiations. In addition, the Netherlands defied intense pressure from the rest of NATO and abstained, as did Finland, which is not a member of NATO but has close ties with the alliance.
So, what actually happened is that the U.S. and various client states — especially, but not limited to, NATO members — voted against the nuclear weapons ban. China, India and Pakistan abstained — not voted against as “Democracy Now!” claimed. And North Korea actually voted for the resolution — U.S. client state South Korea voted with the U.S. against.
It would be interesting to see how a mistake like this could possibly happen. Icing on the cake is the way it was phrased, even above and beyond the outright falsehoods about China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Goodman claimed “as well as the United States” — as if the U.S. were an afterthought when it’s obvious that the U.S. government has been leading the effort against the vote. As the German Press Agency reported: “Due to U.S. pressure, 27 of the 28 NATO member states voted against the resolution with the Netherlands abstaining.”
Such errors are likely a consequences of a world view that seems to not fully grasp, or perhaps not want to grasp or communicate, the threat the U.S. government poses to much of humanity in terms of the actual nature of U.S. foreign policy.
Israeli Border Guards Who Killed Pregnant Palestinian Mom & Her Brother Will Not Be Charged
IMEMC | October 27, 2016
In April 2016, a 16-year old boy and his 23-year old pregnant sister were shot and killed near the largest Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank, Qalandia. The two Israeli border guards who killed the two family members have faced no charges or discipline, and now, Israeli prosecutors have officially closed the case, and determined that no charges were warranted against the guards.
A gag order was placed on the case by Israeli officials, and only after reporters from the Israeli paper Ha’aretz asked for the removal of the gag order was it discovered that no charges will be filed against the two guards.
According to Israeli prosecutors, there is no proof that the two guards acted improperly when they killed the unarmed child and his older sister.
Maram Taha, 23, and Ibrahim Taha, 16, her brother, were walking near Qalandia checkpoint on April 27th, and were around 65 feet away from the checkpoint when the guards claim that they seemed to be acting suspiciously, and shot them both.
Their bodies were held by Israeli officials for over a month, preventing the family from carrying out burial rites.
Maram was five months pregnant, and a mother of two children; Sarah, 6, and Remas, 4.
While Israeli prosecutors claimed that surveillance video footage at the checkpoint showed Maram attempting to throw a knife, they have refused to make the alleged video public.
Initially, on the day that she was killed, Israeli officials told the media that Maram was wearing an explosive belt. But when this was clearly not the case, when it was shown that she was pregnant, they simply stopped repeating the claim. They never officially retracted that claim, but it was not mentioned when the case was submitted to the military court system for review.
Over the past year, Israeli soldiers have been witnessed planting knives on or next to Palestinians that they have killed. This has led to suspicions among Palestinians in the case of Maram and Ibrahim Taha, particularly since Israeli officials have refused to release the surveillance video of this killing.
The case against the two Israeli border guards who shot the young mother and her little brother was submitted to prosecutors with a recommendation that no charges be brought against the guards.
Israeli prosecutors apparently agreed with this assessment, and decided not to prosecute the two unnamed Israelis who killed Maram and Ibrahim.
The Taha family has no legal recourse to appeal this decision by the Israeli military authorities, which govern the Palestinian Territories with martial law.
Washington Making ‘Extremely Weird Mistakes’ in Syria
Sputnik – 27.10.2016
Washington is making “extremely weird” mistakes in Syria and Iraq, Russian defense analyst Konstantin Sivkov, President of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, told Radio Sputnik, adding that what some describe as errors are in fact “planned” steps aimed at helping US-backed radical forces.
Sivkov mentioned “accidental” airstrikes, as well as Washington’s inability to separate so-called moderate groups from al-Nusra Front as prime cases in point.
“All of these mistakes are extremely weird since they work for the benefit of those forces whom [Washington] backs. Any claims that they are fighting against al-Nusra Front are a myth. They are not really tackling [Daesh] as well. This is an instrument of [America’s] geopolitics. This is why [the US] is not particularly addressing the issue of destroying [these groups] but rather taking them under control to use for other tasks,” he explained.
The defense analyst pointed out that the Pentagon has helped the militants to move from Mosul to Syria at a time when Iraqi security forces, US-led coalition and Kurdish fighters are trying to push terrorists out of the second largest city in the country that has served as Daesh’s stronghold since June 2014. “This is why all of these ‘mistakes’ are, let’s say, planned,” he noted.
In Sivkov’s opinion, the US military and intelligence communities are behind this strategy.
“The US military does not have comprehensive intelligence on Syria. They mainly receive information [on the embattled country] from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This is how separation of duties works there. It is the CIA that is occasionally making these so-called mistakes. I think one should not blame solely the Pentagon. It is much rather a matter of a concerted stance of America’s political, military and intelligence leadership.”
Sivkov further commented on the Pentagon’s apparent decision to launch an operation to free Raqqa in the coming weeks. Earlier, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter suggested that the US had enough resources for two major overlapping anti-Daesh operations, but the Russian defense analyst pointed to another possible explanation.
“At the moment all field personnel is located near Mosul as part of an operation to free the city. This is why Americans do not have enough resources to secure a lasting blockade of Raqqa. What they need is a pretext to justify additional deployment of foreign occupational forces, including those from Turkey, the United States and other countries that have sent their ground troops to Syria without authorization from the Syrian government.”
Initially, Washington intended to focus its efforts on helping Baghdad retake Mosul, with Raqqa taking a back seat. However, since the US’ “minions,” as Sivkov put it, referring to Al-Nusra Front and similar organizations, have increasingly struggled on the Syrian battlefield, the US “needs to take perhaps a large part of Syria under control and deploy its forces to the area.”
CNN Celebrates Iraqi Housewife Who ‘Beheaded and Then Cooked the Skulls of ISIS fighters’
Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well | October 4, 2016
When Islamic State beheads someone it is terrorism. When an Iraqi housewife beheads an ISIS fighter and cooks his skull, it is freedom. That is the CNN doctrine.
CNN reports the story of 39-year-old Wahida Mohamed aka Um Hanadi, an Iraqi woman who supposedly leads a tribal militia force of around 70 men south of Mosul. She and her band allegedly helped “government forces” drive Islamic State out of a small town.
“I began fighting the terrorists in 2004, working with Iraqi security forces and the coalition,” she told CNN. CNN cites no other source other than Um Hanadi herself and Facebook in its coverage.
As a result, Um Hanadi said, she attracted the wrath of what eventually became al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which later morphed into ISIS. “I received threats from the top leadership of ISIS, including from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself,” she says. “I’m at the top of their most wanted list, even more than the [Iraqi] Prime Minister.”
Um Hanadi stated al Qaeda/AQI/ISIS planted car bombs outside her home in 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013, and 2014.
Along the way, her first husband was killed in action. She remarried, but ISIS killed her second husband. ISIS also killed her father and three brothers. They also killed, she added, her sheep, her dogs and her birds, and tried to otherwise assassinate her six times.
Where Has Um Hanadi Been Hiding All These Years?
Despite her claim to have worked with the U.S. coalition, to be higher on the ISIS hit list than the Prime Minister, to have been the target of multiple bombing attempts, and to be a very, very, very rare example of a Muslim woman leading Muslim men in combat, I could not find any references to Um Hanadi that predate the CNN report. Um Hanadi does have a self-created social media presence which she updates between battles.
In addition, Um Hanadi may be the luckiest person in Iraq, apparently cheating death on a near-daily basis.
CNN did not explain in its coverage how it came to locate and interview Um Hanadi amid the chaos of present-day Iraq.
The Beheadings
Now, on to the beheadings.
CNN quotes Um Hanadi as saying of ISIS “I fought them. I beheaded them. I cooked their heads, I burned their bodies.” CNN states “She made no excuses, nor attempted to rationalize this. It was delivered as a boast, not a confession.”
“This is all documented,” she said. “You can see it on my Facebook page.”
The CNN reporter wrote that he indeed checked her Facebook page and saw photos, and though he could not verify them, still “got the point.”
Comment
This is propaganda of the worst, and most infantile, kind. In addition to the broad question of whether or not any of this is even true, the question of who set CNN up to meet with Um Hanadi is left unanswered. That CNN would run this story on its television news, and website, is a shameful descent into the decaying corpse of the First Amendment. Media around the globe, including the once venerable New York Times, have reprinted the story.
Lastly is the horrific idea that atrocities such as beheading people are somehow right when an anti-ISIS person does it, and justification for an entire undeclared war by the U.S. when ISIS does it.
CNN have you no shame? Hah, trick question, you bast*rds really don’t, do you?
Obama should be investigated over Clinton’s emails: Trump
Press TV – October 26, 2016
US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says President Barack Obama should be “investigated” over his role in Hillary Clinton’s private email scandal.
Trump said Tuesday that Obama knew about Clinton’s email arrangements while she served as secretary of state during the president’s first term in office from 2009 to 2013.
“That’s why he stuck up for Hillary, because he didn’t want to be dragged in. Because he knew all about her private server,” Trump told Reuters. “This means that he has to be investigated.”
The White House did not give any comments about Trump’s accusations, but Press Secretary Josh Earnest said earlier on Tuesday that Obama did not know where Clinton’s server had been located or other details, although he did have her personal email address.
Clinton has said her decision to use the private server installed at her home at Chappaqua, New York, for official government business was a mistake and has apologized.
New documents released last month by the FBI showed at least one State Department official had told investigators that there was pressure by senior department officials to mislead the public about the presence of classified information in Clinton’s emails ahead of their public release.
This added fuel to Republicans’ claims that officials in the Obama administration had sought to protect Clinton from criminal liability as she seeks to succeed Obama.
In a March 2015 television interview, Obama said that he had learned of the private email server through news reports.
On Tuesday, WikiLeaks, which has been releasing hacked emails in chunks for several weeks, disclosed a batch of emails from the account of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, which showed how her campaign reacted following Obama’s televised interview.
“We need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov.,” Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton aide, wrote in an email to Podesta after Obama made the comments.
“State.gov.” is the State Department’s internet domain name, and its presence in the sender’s email address would prove it came from an official account.
In January, the State Department said it had found 18 instances of messages exchanged between Clinton and Obama among some 30,000 work emails Clinton sent back to the department in 2014.
None have been released due to a law that protects presidential communications from becoming public for years.
Gambia announces intention to withdraw from International Criminal Court
Press TV – October 26, 2016
Gambia has followed in the footsteps of Burundi and South Africa by declaring its intention to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The West African country’s Information Minister Sheriff Bojang announced the decision on television Tuesday night, accusing the ICC of being biased against Africa.
Bojang said that the court — set up to pursue some of the world’s worst crimes — had been used “for the persecution of Africans and especially their leaders” while ignoring crimes committed by the West.
He singled out the case of Tony Blair, a former British prime minister, whom the ICC failed to indict over the 2003 Iraq war.
“There are many Western countries, at least 30, that have committed heinous war crimes against independent sovereign states and their citizens since the creation of the ICC and not a single Western war criminal has been indicted,” the Gambian minister said.
He said the tribunal was an “international Caucasian court for the persecution and humiliation of people of color, especially Africans.”
The minister said Gambia has begun the process of withdrawing from the ICC, which involves notifying the United Nations secretary general and takes effect a year after the notification is received.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, is ironically a former Gambian justice minister.
Only Africans have been charged in the six ICC cases that are ongoing or about to begin, though preliminary investigations have opened elsewhere, too.
The ICC has opened probes involving Kenya, the Ivory Coast, Libya, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Uganda and Mali.
The International Criminal Court was set up in 2002 to try war criminals and the perpetrators of genocide.
Last Friday, the South African government gave a formal notice of its intention to pull out of the ICC. Earlier that week, Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza had signed a decree to quit the court’s jurisdiction.
Russia only country in Syria acting under int’l law – German statesman Willy Wimmer
RT | October 25, 2016
The UN is not free in its opinion; it is playing a part in the game on the side of the US, says Willy Wimmer, former State Secretary of the German Christian Democratic Party.
Some 80 aid and humanitarian organizations, including Human Rights Watch, claim Russia – the only country operating militarily in Syria legally – is no longer “fit” to hold its position in the body.
The move, prompted by Russia’s anti-terror actions in Syria – actions that have attracted the ire of some Western countries – appear to be yet another effort on the part of particular countries to denigrate Russia.
Russia’s presidential spokesman says the condemnation should be directed at extremists in Syria instead.
Meanwhile, German foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is calling for another humanitarian pause in Aleppo like the one that took place last week.
RT sat down with German politician Willy Wimmer for his views on the issue.
RT: Do you think another humanitarian pause will produce any progress, given that there’s no pressure on the Western-backed rebels to stop their shelling of civilian areas?
Willy Wimmer: I think it is vital and necessary to look for relief for the humanitarian problems we have in Syria. And I think we should stop the killing as soon as possible. That is one thing we have to take into consideration. On the other side, we should never forget who started the civil war in Syria and when these human rights organizations blame one country in particular, we should never forget that the US, Great Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Qatar created a civil war in Syria. I won’t mention Israel because of the situation in the neighborhood.
When we complain about the human suffering in Syria, we have to take into consideration who started everything. And the interesting thing is that everything the West is doing in Syria is against international law; they have no support of the UN Charter, even what the German militaries are doing there is against our Constitution. The only power which is in accordance with international law in Syria is the Russian Federation and because the actual president who had been elected freely, as for the support, it is in accordance with the international law. We have to take this into consideration when it comes to accusations from Human Rights Watch and others.
RT: There are calls to exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. This would undermine one of the founding principles of the United Nations, wouldn’t it? What do you make of such rhetoric?
WW: It is a signal that the UN is on one side. It is not free in its opinion and we see it already for decades that the UN is playing a part in the game on the side of the US. And therefore, we don’t take it serious what the UN representatives tell us.
RT: Last year, Saudi Arabia was elected chair of a key panel on the Human Rights Council. Yet its human rights record has been repeatedly criticized. There have been calls for Saudi Arabia to be suspended from UN Human Rights Council, but do you think this will ever happen?
WW: Never, because of the close relationship between Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US. And therefore, I think they can do what they do without being punished for that (…) I think we have to realize who organized the civil war in Syria, and who is in accordance with international law. When they had a truce between the United States and the Russian Federation three weeks ago, what happened? The Americans killed 100 Syrian soldiers and Russian soldiers as well. There is a development in Washington to make use of the situation where there is no newly elected American president, and this is a complex and extremely dangerous situation for the rest of the world.
Read more:
Russian Ambassador-at-Large Surprised by Active CIA, FBI Role in US Vote
Sputnik – 24.10.2016
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large, Vladimir Churov, said Monday he is surprised by the active role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the US presidential campaign.
“I am somewhat surprised by the active participation in the campaign of specific agencies like the CIA and the FBI,” Churov told RIA Novosti.
He maintained that the US intelligence agencies’ warnings of outside interference in vote rigging or altering vote numbers at precincts could belie the US authorities’ bid to withhold data, including the number of voters, early voters and the election returns.
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MI5 plotted assassination of Irish PM in 1985 – Ulster Volunteer Force
RT | December 29, 2017
Former Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey was warned by loyalist paramilitaries that they were once tasked with murdering him in an assassination plot purportedly dreamt up by the British secret service.
The sensational disclosure was sent in a letter to the Irish government, newly released under the Public Records Act, which requires documents of historical value to be published by the National Archives within 30 years.
Written on Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) signature paper, the warning claims the terrorist organization was asked by an MI5 operative about the prospect of carrying out an attack on Republic of Ireland leader Haughey in 1985.
At the time, Haughey would have been in opposition as head of political party Fianna Fáil, but details of the solicitation did not become known to Irish authorities until 1987.
“In 1985 we were approached by a M15 officer attached to the Northern Ireland Office and based in Lisburn, Alex Jones was his supposed name,” the letter reads, according to the Irish Times. “He asked us to execute you.”… continue
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