Obama’s Childish Climate Claims
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | January 21, 2015
I would like to address this statement made by the President:
Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.
And also his tweet:
97% of climate scientists agree: Climate change is real. Denial from Congress is dangerous.
The problem is that President Obama is listening to scientists that are either playing politics with their expertise, or responding to a political mandate from the administration (probably a combination of both). Not just administrators in government labs (e.g. Schmidt, Karl), but think of the scientist networks of John Holdren and John Podesta: to me the scariest one one is Mann to Romm to Podesta.
So what is wrong with President Obama’s statements as cited above?
- His statement about humans having exacerbated extreme weather events is not supported by the IPCC
- The Pentagon is confusing climate change with extreme weather (see above)
- ‘Climate change is real’ is almost a tautology; climate has always changed and always will, independently of anything humans do.
- His tweet about ‘97%’ is based on an erroneous and discredited paper [link]
- As for ‘Denial from Congress is dangerous’, I doubt that anyone in Congress denies that climate changes. The issue of ‘dangerous’ is a hypothetical, and relates to values (not science).
And speaking of the ‘deniers’ in Congress, did anyone spot any errors in the actual science from Senator Inhofe’s rebuttal?
The apparent ‘contract’ between Obama and his administrators to play politics with climate science seems to be a recipe for anti science and premature policies with negative economic consequences that have little to no impact on the climate.
Maybe some day, in a future administration, we can have a grown up conversation about climate change (natural and human caused), the potential risks, and a broad range of policy responses.
Exonerating the CIA
When the Establishment Investigates Itself
By BINOY KAMPMARK | CounterPunch | January 21, 2015
Exonerating spooks for improper conduct is a regular feature of the establishment. After all, you don’t convict your own, turning your nose at activities pursued under the grand, catch-all term of national security. From the start, the CIA review, established to investigate its own activities into spying on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was always predictably constituted, with predictable outcomes.
The “accountability board” was chaired by former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), along with former Obama White House attorney Bob Bauer and, as anticipated, three senior CIA officers. The originating source of its convening was yet another predictable feature: the CIA itself. (The board was convened in August 2014 by CIA Director John Brennan.)
Its task: to investigate alleged misconduct of five CIA employees who improperly accessed computer data belonging to the SSCI under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Wiretap Act, and make recommendations that “future instances of the miscommunication and confusion that led to this controversy” do not occur again.
The background to the review proved acrimonious. The SSCI had an issue over the CIA prying into its material on the agency’s rendition and torture program. The CIA, in turn, felt that the senators and their staff had obtained unauthorised access to agency documents and improperly dealt with classified material. The Department of Justice, sensing trouble, evaded the issue.
Last March, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) suggested that the CIA search may have violated a range of legal provisions, citing the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Executive Order 12333 prohibiting the agency from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.
The CIA, according to Feinstein, had become a power onto its own, effectively subverting the constitution. From the start, it hired “a team of outside contractors – who otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents – to read, multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced, before providing them to a fully-cleared committee staff conducting the committee’s oversight work.” Naturally, it “proved to be a slow and very expensive process” (Truthdig, Mar 12, 2014).
Wednesday’s redacted report by the review board, termed the “Final Report of the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Network Agency Accountability Board”, concluded in rather bland fashion that the entire affair had been a misunderstanding. That blandness also involved a good deal of hair splitting, riddled by legal dissembling. “The Board determined that while an informal understanding existed that SSCI work product should be protected, no common understanding existed about the roles and responsibilities in the case of a suspected security incident.”
It found that the “core” of that misguided understanding centred on “the establishment of SSCI shared drives that would be walled-off but also accessible to CIA IT staff for the purpose of IT network administration.” While “SSCI work product was often cited as protected… these were not clearly defined or agreed to by both parties.”
Evidently, areas of cognition vary in relationships between the intelligence community and the community that oversees it – understanding differs on whether it is informal, which can lead to breaches of trust, or “common”, in which case, it is assumed to be firmer. Truth be told, the CIA did not particularly like senatorial staff digging in a rather dirty intelligence backyard.
Accordingly, the board found that “none of the five individuals under review by the board was responsible for this mistake, and two of them – the most senior – had expressly counselled that care be taken to avoid accessing [SSCI] work product.”
Read between the lines, and you can only deduce that the senators and staff had to assume that they would be spied upon. (The names of who authorised such conduct have been redacted.) In the pecking order of the Republic, political figures investigating a body for alleged criminal conduct were the ones to be monitored. This attitude is outlined in so far as the CIA had “obligations under the National Security Act”, with a pressing legal duty to search the computers “for the presence of Agency documents to which SSCI staff should not have access.”
Various recommendations were made regarding the use of shared computer networks having classified material, though the agency retains the prerogative to define how those boundaries are to be charted. Expect more misunderstandings in due course. A specific omission from the review is the failure to explain the disappearance of material off the system, including the now famed Internal Panetta Review.
A standout feature that somehow undermines the constitutionally motivated anger of SSCI committee members lies in its inconsistent attitude to surveillance. Bulk gathering of data on US citizens, and non-citizens, has its uses, but keeping an eye on Congress, a body which has also taken its eye off constitutional erosions, doesn’t. The question is one of degree: who are the greater rogues?
The exoneration of CIA employees may well sting, but it has its own institutionalised justifications. Even the president agrees. According to Barack Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, the president expressed “great confidence in John Brennan and confidence in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA” (Truthdig, Mar 12, 2014). The establishment simply got off the hook, again.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
UK’s Iraq war report delayed until after 2015 general elections
Press TV – January 21, 2015
The publication of a long-awaited inquiry into the UK’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath has once again been postponed until after the country’s general elections later this year.
On Wednesday, British media cited government sources as saying that the inquiry chairman, John Chilcot, will in an exchange of letters with Prime Minister David Cameron later in the day explain the reasons for the new postponement.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg reacted angrily to the news, saying the further delay is “incomprehensible.”
Clegg’s Liberal Democrats also suggested that the inquiry report is being “watered down” after those criticized in the report, such as then Prime Minister Tony Blair, were given the opportunity to respond to the findings.
The judge-led inquiry into how Blair led Britain into war in Iraq was ordered by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009 and was expected to publish its findings within 18 months.
The Chilcot report had previously been delayed by rows over its criticism of leading figures in the Blair government. The report had also been delayed due to diplomatic negotiations between the US and the UK about what can be revealed from correspondence between Blair and former US President George W. Bush.
The report is believed to be highly critical of Blair, who is accused of misleading the British public about the reasons for joining the 2003 US-led Iraq war.
The US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law in 2003 over the allegation that the regime of then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). No WMDs, however, were ever found in Iraq.
The FBI’s Dubious Record on Prosecuting Terror Plots
Fake plots get busted, real ones get a pass
By Dave Lindorff | ThisCantBeHappening! | January 19, 2015
If you’re planning to commit an act of terror in the US and want to be left alone by the FBI, make sure your target is something, or someone, that the US government doesn’t like or care about.
Consider these two terrorist plots.
Just last week, on Jan. 14, the FBI announced that it had arrested Christopher Lee Cornell, a guy in Ohio the bureau alleges had plans to attack Congress with pipe bombs and guns. Apparently acting alone, Cornell is alleged by the FBI to have “researched how to make pipe bombs” (there’s no indication that he actually made or tested any actual bombs), and to have purchased a pair of M-15 semi-automatic rifles and ammunition. How Cornell, who is described as a self-styled “jihadist,” but one with no real connection with foreign Islamic militants, planned to get past the metal detectors and tight security at the Capitol Building in Washington, was not explained, and probably was not known to Cornell himself. It also appears that the FBI was watching Cornell all along, and no doubt encouraging him too, as it was working with a snitch — a man facing prosecution who was in communication with Cornell and may well have been a provocateur, given the Bureau’s prior history of luring vulnerable people into planning terror acts which it then busts.
Compare this case with one we reported on earlier here, which was in the works in the fall of 2011. I’m referring to a terrorism plot in Houston, TX, which the FBI never did report publicly, but which was instead disclosed only thanks to some documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2012 by the Washington, DC-based public interest law firm Partnership for Civil Justice, and which involved an apparently well-developed plan to assassinate leaders of the Houston Occupy Movement. Those documents — internal memos sent out by FBI offices in Houston and Gainesville, FL — refer to “one identified [deleted]” that “planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary.”
The initial memo, sent to FBI headquarters in Washington from the Houston FBI office, went on to say that the “identified” plotters “had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas,” and that they “planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”
A second memo, sent out by the Gainesville, FL FBI office, says that the Houston assassination plot, while not executed, was actually just put on hold. As that memo states: “writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.”
That’s a lot of rich detail about an evidently serious plot that never resulted in any arrests.
Yet as we reported in an article which just won a 2015 Project Censored Award, the FBI never pursued this plot and never arrested anyone. Indeed when Paul Bresson, the senior public affairs officer for the Bureau in Washington, was asked by this reporter for an explanation for this bizarre lack of interest in a known plot to murder innocent protesters, and for the identity of the terrorist plotters, he evasively replied, “The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks that you are seeking. Exemptions are cited in each place where a redaction is made. As far as the question about the murder plot, I am unable to comment further, but rest assured if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.”
Actually, the response of the US Homeland Security Department to journalists who looked into the federal government’s involvement in the violent suppression of the 2011 Occupy movement shouldn’t make anyone feel like “resting assured” about anything. In 2014, we learned that our publication, in fact, had been the subject back on Nov. 18, 2011, of an alert sent out by Homeland Security’s Washington Office of Threat Assessment to all Fusion Centers around the country, saying ThisCantBeHappening! had published an article exposing the Homeland Security’s central role in orchestrating the wave of local police violence against Occupy encampments across the country.
The conclusion, hard to avoid, is that the FBI and Justice Department are playing a double game when it comes to terrorism. On one hand they have been aggressively pursuing a campaign of entrapment and outright incitement, actively promoting and assisting in the development of bogus terror plots by naive or mentally unbalanced individuals, so that they can later “bust” those plots, thereby justifying their expansive police-state tactics while keeping the public in a constant state of fear. On the other hand, they are either turning a blind eye towards genuine plots aimed against activists and radical protests, such as the one “identified” in Houston in the fall of 2011, or worse, are maybe actively involved in the development of those plots, which they then do not prosecute or prevent from happening.
This is something we need to keep in mind as we watch the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the only surviving suspect or witness in the Boston Marathon bombing — an actual terrorism act that has many rational people wondering how much the government knew in advance, or wondering if they were just patsies who were set up to look that way.
Charlie Hebdo, Zionism & Media Deception – Interview with Hafsa Kara-Mustapha
Brandon Martinez interviews Hafsa Kara-Mustapha on a January 18, 2015 episode of the Non-Aligned Media Podcast.
Hafsa Kara-Mustapha is a London-based journalist and political commentator who has written extensively about the Middle East for publications such as Middle East Magazine, Jane’s Foreign Report and El Watan newspaper. She also appears frequently on Press TV and Russia Today.
Brandon Martinez is an independent writer and journalist from Canada who specializes in foreign policy issues, international affairs and 20th and 21st century history. For years he has written on Zionism, Israel-Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. Listeners can contact him at martinezperspective[at]hotmail.com or visit his blog.
The Danger of an MH-17 ‘Cold Case’
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | January 19, 2015
Now more than six months after the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine, the refusal of the Obama administration to make public what intelligence evidence it has about who was responsible has created fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root while reducing hopes for holding the guilty parties accountable.
Given the U.S. government’s surveillance capabilities – from satellite and aerial photographs to telephonic and electronic intercepts to human sources – American intelligence surely has a good idea what happened on July 17, 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in eastern Ukraine killing all 298 people onboard.
I’m told that President Barack Obama has received briefings on what this evidence shows and what U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded about the likely guilty parties — and that Obama may have shared some of those confidential findings with the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak when they met on Dec. 24 in Hawaii.
But the U.S. government has gone largely silent on the subject after its initial rush to judgment pointing fingers at ethnic Russian rebels for allegedly firing the missile and at the Russian government for supposedly supplying a sophisticated Buk anti-aircraft battery capable of bringing down the aircraft at 33,000 feet.
Since that early flurry of unverified charges, only snippets of U.S. and NATO intelligence findings have reached the public – and last October’s interim Dutch investigative report on the cause of the crash indicated that Western governments had not shared crucial information.
The Dutch Safety Board’s interim report answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH-17 apparently was destroyed by “high-velocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.” Other key questions went begging, such as what to make of the Russian military radar purporting to show a Ukrainian SU-25 jetfighter in the area, a claim that the Kiev government denied.
Either the Russian radar showed the presence of a jetfighter “gaining height” as it closed to within three to five kilometers of the passenger plane – as the Russians claimed in a July 21 press conference – or it didn’t. The Kiev authorities insisted that they had no military aircraft in the area at the time.
But the 34-page Dutch report was silent on the jetfighter question, although noting that the investigators had received Air Traffic Control “surveillance data from the Russian Federation.” The report also was silent on the “dog-not-barking” issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who may have fired it.
The Obama administration has asserted knowledge about those facts, but the U.S. government has withheld satellite photos and other intelligence information that could presumably corroborate the charge. Curiously, too, the Dutch report said the investigation received “satellite imagery taken in the days after the occurrence.” Obviously, the more relevant images in assessing blame would be aerial photography in the days and hours before the crash.
In mid-July, eastern Ukraine was a high priority for U.S. intelligence and a Buk missile battery is a large system that should have been easily picked up by U.S. aerial reconnaissance. The four missiles in a battery are each about 16-feet-long and would have to be hauled around by a truck and then put in position to fire.
The Dutch report’s reference to only post-crash satellite photos was also curious because the Russian military released a number of satellite images purporting to show Ukrainian government Buk missile systems north of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk before the attack, including two batteries that purportedly were shifted 50 kilometers south of Donetsk on July 17, the day of the crash, and then removed by July 18.
Russian Claims
Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems and why Kiev’s Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.
The Ukrainian government countered these questions by asserting that it had “evidence that the missile which struck the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation,” according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, using Kiev’s preferred term for the rebels.
Lysenko added: “To disown this tragedy, [Russian officials] are drawing a lot of pictures and maps. We will explore any photos and other plans produced by the Russian side.” But Ukrainian authorities have failed to address the Russian evidence except through broad denials.
On July 29, amid escalating rhetoric against Russia from U.S. government officials and the Western news media, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity called on President Obama to release what evidence the U.S. government had on the shoot-down, including satellite imagery.
“As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information,” the group wrote. “As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence. His statements seem premature and bear earmarks of an attempt to ‘poison the jury pool.’”
However, the Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its earlier suppositions. In early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had begun shifting away from the original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible.
A source who was briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that they had found no evidence that the Russian government had given the rebels a BUK missile system. Thus, these analysts concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault and that it appeared Ukrainian government forces were to blame, although apparently a unit operating outside the direct command of Ukraine’s top officials.
The source specifically said the U.S. intelligence evidence did not implicate Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko or Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk but rather suggested an extremist element of the armed forces funded by one of Ukraine’s oligarchs. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shifts”and “Was Putin Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?”]
But then chatter about U.S. intelligence information on the shoot-down faded away. When I recently re-contacted the source who had been briefed by these analysts, the source said their thinking had not changed, except that they believed the missile may have been less sophisticated than a Buk, possibly an SA-6.
What was less clear was whether these analysts represented a consensus view within the U.S. intelligence community or whether they spoke for one position in an ongoing debate. The source also said President Obama was resisting going public with the U.S. intelligence information about the shoot-down because he didn’t feel it was ironclad.
A Dangerous Void
But that void has left the debate over whodunit vulnerable to claims by self-interested parties and self-appointed experts, including some who derive their conclusions from social media on the Internet, so-called “public-source investigators.” The Obama administration also hasn’t retracted the early declarations by Secretary Kerry implicating the rebels and Russia.
Just days after the crash, Kerry went on all five Sunday talk shows fingering Russia and the rebels and citing evidence provided by the Ukrainian government through social media. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked, “Are you bottom-lining here that Russia provided the weapon?”
Kerry: “There’s a story today confirming that, but we have not within the Administration made a determination. But it’s pretty clear when – there’s a build-up of extraordinary circumstantial evidence. I’m a former prosecutor. I’ve tried cases on circumstantial evidence; it’s powerful here.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment.”]
But some U.S. intelligence analysts soon offered conflicting assessments. After Kerry’s TV round-robin, the Los Angeles Times reported on a U.S. intelligence briefing given to several mainstream U.S. news outlets. The story said, “U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 [a Buk anti-aircraft missile] was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery of a Ukrainian ‘Defector.’”]
In October, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, had concluded that Russia was not the source of the missile battery – that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base – but still blaming the rebels for firing it. The BND also concluded that photos supplied by the Ukrainian government about the MH-17 tragedy “have been manipulated,” Der Spiegel reported.
And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to MH-17 just before it crashed, the magazine said, reporting on the BND’s briefing to a parliamentary committee on Oct. 8, which included satellite images and other photography. But none of the BND’s evidence was made public — and I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.”]
So, it appears that there have been significant disagreements within Western intelligence circles about precisely who was to blame. But the refusal of the Obama administration and its NATO allies to lay their evidence on the table has not only opened the door to conspiracy theories, it has threatened to turn this tragedy into a cold case with the guilty parties – whoever they are – having more time to cover their tracks and disappear.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Scottish First Minister leads united call for Iraq war report disclosure
RT | January 19, 2015
Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon has called for a united political movement to demand the immediate publication of the Chilcot Inquiry report into the legality of the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Sturgeon has written to other Scottish party leaders, urging them to unite in favor of immediate publication.
The Chilcot Inquiry, which was set up in 2009 and is expected to cost the taxpayer over £10 million, has come under fire in recent months due to delays in its publication.
The disclosure of secret documents, and disagreements over whether private communications between former leaders Tony Blair and George W. Bush should be made public, has disrupted the progress of the inquiry.
There are now fears that unless the report is published immediately, its release could affect the results of the general election in May.
The leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Jim Murphy, and the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Willie Rennie, have also said they support the earliest possible release of the document.
The House of Commons will debate the release of the findings on January 29.
Last month there was speculation that Tony Blair may face prosecution for war crimes as a result of the report’s findings. Blair said he “resented” claims he was responsible for the delays.
The debate surrounding the release of classified material had presented a large obstacle to the publication of the report, but it was decided in June last year that the “gist” of conversations between Blair and Bush could be published.
Sturgeon said it would be impossible to have a national election without the report’s findings being presented.
“Surely we can’t go through a general election without people having the answers to the questions on the Iraq war that they still don’t have,” she told the BBC.
“That has to happen before some of these MPs that voted for the Iraq war are back up for election.”
Murphy responded to Sturgeon’s call for action, saying it was essential for future governments to learn from the results.
“The Chilcot Inquiry is a crucially important piece of work that must be conducted thoroughly and forensically,” he said. “The inquiry was initiated by Labour in July 2009, because it is vital to identify the lessons that can be learned from the conflict.”
“There is rightly real public interest in the findings of such an important inquiry and I think it is right that there is the earliest possible publication of the report.”
Rennie also expressed his eagerness for the report to be published, saying he agreed with the SNP’s Sturgeon.
“We agree with Nicola Sturgeon. It is important that the lessons learnt from the Chilcot report are learnt whilst there are people involved in Parliament who are in a position to answer for their actions.”
A spokeswoman for the Iraq Inquiry said: “We will not be commenting further on the process or the progress of the report.”
READ MORE:
Cameron has final word on release date of Iraq war report – Downing Street
EU appeals court ruling removing Hamas from terror list
MEMO | January 19, 2015
The European Union decided Monday to appeal a court ruling that says Hamas must be removed from the EU’s list of terrorist organisations, officials said.
The General Court of the European Union ruled Dec.17 that listing Hamas on the 2001 terrorist list was “not based on acts examined and confirmed in decisions of competent authorities, but on factual imputations derived from the press and the Internet.”
However, the European Council, composed of representatives of the 28 EU member states, decided to challenge the court’s ruling.
”This ruling was clearly based on procedural grounds and did not imply any assessment by the court of the merits of designating Hamas as a terrorist organisation,” EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in a press release.
”As a result of the appeal, the effects of the judgement are suspended until a final judgement is rendered by the Court of Justice,” Mogherini said.
In December 2001, the European Council adopted a terrorist list requiring the freezing of the funds of the people and entities listed.
Western Democracy Crusaders are Foes of Democracy
The World Seen Through a “Progressive” Western Keyhole versus a Panoramic Lens
By John V. Walsh | Dissident Voice | January 18, 2015
One of Castro’s closest comrades, the Argentine-born guerilla Che Guevara, had been in Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed the coup against Arbenz. Later he told Castro why it succeeded. He said Arbenz had foolishly tolerated an open society, which the CIA penetrated and subverted, and also preserved the existing army, which the CIA turned into its instrument. Castro agreed that a revolutionary regime in Cuba must avoid those mistakes. Upon taking power, he cracked down on dissent and purged the army. Many Cubans supported his regime and were ready to defend it. (Emphasis, jw)
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War
The stark choice that confronted Castro and Guevara is faced by every nation seeking independence from the U.S., a far more powerful nation with enormous resources in terms of “soft” power, economic power and military power. The more open the society, the more opportunities for CIA-engineered regime change. This was the lesson Arbenz learned in 1954 and Mossadegh before him in 1953, lessons that brought so much pain, death and destruction to their peoples in the decades to follow.
Judged by that outcome, the Castros made the right decision and as a result have presided over a healthy, educated and secure people. The drawback was that the Empire isolated Cuba economically, stifling the possibilities of more development and a higher standard of living. The Empire wants nations charting an independent course to be politically open to the regime change schemes and NGOs of the West but economically closed, shut off from more advanced economies. It is as simple as that.
For some defiant states the sort of regime change operation used against Mossadegh and Arbenz may be the only option which the United States has. This is certainly the case for China and Russia. All out war on these countries is out of reach – although the U.S. is trying to change that. The modus operandi of the Empire for the moment is to put Russia and China on the horns of tried and true dilemma. Open up politically, permit the development of forces that favor regime change – or remain less open and face criticism, especially criticism from Western governments and Western intellectuals, including the “progressive” or liberal intellectuals. This is crucial because “progressives” are the very people who – until Obama – were most likely to oppose imperial warfare – both military and economic. The Democracy Crusade is designed to neutralize them.
This criticism from the West is one lever, and an important one, that is used to force a society to be more open in its governance than its survival permits. Let us be clear. Without a rapacious West at the doorstep, the possibilities of openness and democracy are much greater in scope. Conversely, the more rapacious the West, the more restricted are the possibilities for a besieged nation if it wishes to survive and prosper with its sovereignty intact. Without sovereignty there can be no democracy. Rule conditioned on approval by a foreign source or by a puppet regime is never self-rule. So it is never democracy.
It follows that the best way to crusade for openness and democracy is to work against Western interventionism, whether that interventionism takes the form of armed attack, economic sanctions or the work of NGOs like the NED (National Endowment for Democracy). This is absolutely crucial to understand. A criticism of a besieged country will increase the pressure on that country and hence lead to a decrease in political openness. Paradoxically, this is true even if the criticism is one that calls for more democracy.
The recent events in Hong Kong are but the latest example of this dynamic. There the NED had long been actively involved in promoting “democracy,” along with other U.S. NGOs and the U.S. Consulate, with its staff of 600. These forces recruited very young “activists,” with high school students at the forefront. (A Chinese friend of mine noted with disgust that easily manipulated high school students were also in the forefront of the Cultural Revolution.) The movement sought elimination of the screening of candidates by a committee of 1,200 Hong Kong residents for the next election of the CEO, a position akin to governor. The composition of the committee was open to negotiation. (It went unmentioned in the West that there was no election when Hong Kong was a colony of the UK. The governor was appointed by the Queen – period. It also went unmentioned that there is a similar sort of “screening” of candidates in the U.S., with the major parties serving in the role of screeners. If you do not believe that, ask the Greens or the Libertarians or Ralph Nader.) Most importantly the leaders of the movement and their U.S. backers made no secret of their hope that the disturbances in Hong Kong would spread to the mainland and provoke a movement against the Chinese government. They are advocates of regime change in China as are their mentors at the NED.
What has the current government of China, led by its Communist Party, done for China? It has led China out of colonial domination by the West. It has forged a level of economic development with a rapidity unseen before in all of human history. It has ended poverty for 600 million people and continues on the quest to raise millions more out of poverty. For the world it has meant a power, China, which is sufficiently strong to provide a multipolar world. That in turn means that the countries of the world have an alternative to Western domination, which has been the fate of most of the world for hundreds of years. Russia and Iran, for example, can trade with China when the West slaps sanctions on them. As a result at this moment there is the possibility of genuine decolonization (or de-neocolonization, if you will) – after centuries of the planet’s domination by a small fraction of the world’s population.
In short, the current government of China is the agent of the most stunning defeat of Euro-American colonialism that the world has seen to date. After all the Chinese are almost one-fifth of humanity. One would think that this fact would be part of the evaluation of Western progressives when they looked at the Hong Kong affair. With few exceptions it was not. And this is a big problem. The world is going through a major upheaval as colonialism and neo-colonialism are suffering major defeats. That upheaval, that shift, is a lens through which Western “progressives” should look at the world. They rarely do. In failing to do so, they see the world through the ideological eyes of the West, that is, “the 1%“ at the top of the heap (or at least the 10%) if one may put it that way. China has achieved what the West hates most. It is relatively closed politically to the intrigues and machinations of the West – but economically open. This is the recipe for sovereignty and development.
The difference between the two views is the difference between looking at the world through a panoramic lens, with history in the background, and looking through a keyhole. In the latter case of tunnel vision one may only see a patch of grey through the keyhole, whereas a mighty elephant stands beyond the door.
Afterthoughts: Old China Hand. One “progressive,” and an “Old China Hand” to boot, even charged the minority on the Left with “neocolonialist” attitudes when they criticized him for siding with the NED in Hong Kong. He claimed that the dissidents in Hong Kong were too sophisticated, too “smart,” to be taken in by the NED, NID, U.S. Consulate officials and other detritus with whom they regularly consort.
But what about the cases where we now know that the CIA et al successfully deceived the population – sufficiently to overthrow an anticolonial government, as with Mossadegh or Arbenz or Allende? Does Old China Hand mean to say that the people of Iran or Guatemala or Chile were “stupid”? And is that not neocolonialist arrogance? No, Old China Hand is defending tunnel vision, the view through the keyhole, not the people of Hong Kong. And if ever there were an unwitting agent of neocolonialism, it is sadly the likes of Old China Hand.
John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.
Reflections on MH17
RT Documentary | January 16, 2015
The tragedy of MH17 in which 298 people lost their lives, made the conflict in Ukraine real for many other countries. While the international community awaits the outcome of the crash investigation, speculation in the media continues to fuel the blame game. RTD travels far and wide to interview international experts on what has hindered the investigation, what procedures were needed to collect vital evidence and what might have brought down the ill-fated Boeing 777.
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OCSE monitor mentions bullet holes in MH17
Original source http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/malaysia… – OCSE monitor Michael Bociurkiw mentions bullet holes in #MH17, not able to find any missile so far.
Pseudoscience in the service of policy
By Tom Fuller | Lukewarmer’s Way | January 15, 2015
This week has been an education–reviewing the work of Naomi Oreskes, Anderegg, Prall et al, John Cook et al and Stephan Lewandowsky.
Short version–some people who were (mostly) not scientists and certainly don’t know how to do research properly conducted a series of studies that had foregone conclusions supporting their position on climate policy. For Prall, Cook and Lewandowsky the foregone nature of the conclusions was explicit–they wrote on various websites that they were conducting the studies with a predetermined end. For Oreskes it was implicit, but easy to see, as she structured her research carefully, not to show the breadth of opinion on climate change, but rather to conceal it.
I guess I should address Stephan’s potential concerns first–no, I don’t see a conspiracy in the work I’ve reviewed, even though there is a web of mutual citations in the work involved and collaboration between some of the principals.
Oreskes, the ‘purest’ scientist in the bunch, wrote the original paper (Beyond the Ivory Tower) and it served as a template (and was cited as such) for those who came after.
Her ‘original sin’ was one that has destroyed a lot of research studies unintentionally–sample bias. The literature search on which her work was based omitted relevant studies from skeptics. I say that was intentional, but that’s just my opinion. It was a trivial exercise to find numerous studies by skeptics that would have drastically changed her results. My opinion is she knew those studies were there and carefully crafted a keyword search string that would exclude them.
Anderegg, Prall et al were much sloppier and in addition to sample bias made numerous errors in data collection, analysis and other methodological choices. Their study is garbage. The same is true for Cook et al–their 97% consensus claim is utter nonsense. And when Lewandowsky tried to do in primary research what the others did with secondary research, he only introduced a new class of childish mistakes. I have worked in market research for more than 20 years and I’ve made my share of mistakes. I recognize their mistakes. The difference between these amateurs and professionals is that when professionals make mistakes they admit them and work to correct them. This crew just doubled down on their claims and hoped that nobody would dig very deeply. But when I use words like garbage and nonsense, I am not exaggerating. The quality of work that went into these studies is so bad that if anything I’m understating things.
After Climategate, the actions of those supporting the consensus have been increasingly frantic and in most cases, inept. When the marketing departments of NGOs create flawed iconography of polar bears under threat, videos of people blowing up skeptics and trash treasured archeological sites, it’s easy to dismiss these as the mistaken work of people who have adopted a religion, rather than scientific findings.
But when trash is put before the scientific community as the alleged results of research conducted within the norms of science, it is something else, something much worse. It not only damages the effort to understand how our climate is changing and what we should do about it. It damages science.
Numerous studies have shown a very real tendency for studies to be irreplicable and unreproducible. Fraud has been found as well as mistakes.
Climate change is important and will affect the lives of our children. But science is more important and trashing science to win a policy fight over climate change has the potential to do more damage to the human race than any changes we cause to the climate.
Civil Rights Leaders, Progressives, Family, Will Again Betray Martin Luther King on His Birthday
By Jay Janson | Dissident Voice | January 13, 2015
January 18 is Martin Luther King’s birthday and will occasion another three day official national holiday with TV specials of criminal deception limiting King to having been merely a hero of the civil rights movement period. Another year’s deceitfully erasing from history King’s condemnation of his country’s government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and his having held himself and his fellow Americans responsible for “atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 in order to maintain unjust predatory investments.”
For a near half-century, King’s outrage, King’s hellish description of America’s wars on innocent people in the third world, have been meticulously whisked out of existence. But not without the help of the silence of Kings own family, comrades, fellow civil rights leaders, peaceniks, and progressives, who have mounted no serious effort to expose wars-supporting corporate media’s iron tight blackout of what King said during his last year before receiving that ‘shut him up’ bullet to his brain.
To no avail, did America’s beloved peoples historian, Howard Zinn, for years, end every one of his daily radio programs with a plea to journalists and antiwar organization leaders to quote King continually in order to break the blackout of King’s powerful words and defeat the supporters of US wars.
If the prediction in the title of this article turns out to be wrong, the co-founders of the Martin Luther King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign (former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and yours truly) will of course be thankful beyond words, but astounded as well. For it is nearly forty-eight years since King shook the world, made large type bold headlines in newspapers across the planet with his blistering New York sermon, ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,’ was vilified in US media, and criticized by his fellow leaders of the civil rights movement. With enthusiastic support from Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Ramsey Clark had for some years envisioned a ‘Break the Blackout of MLKjr Condemnations’ event with speeches by luminaries like Harry Belafonte, Jessie Jackson, Andrew Young — now long Representative of Georgia, John Lewis, Cornel West, Joan Baez and others, who had been close to King, but was unable to find any interest in it. I feel it will, however, happen one day.
Since King’s assassination (within a year of King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’ sermon), the silence of his closest comrades and even his own family, a silence that King had called “betrayal,” (King had even agonized over his own previous silence), has been, in effect, a noticeable collaboration with the utter and absolute blackout and erasing of King’s scathing words from popular history by criminal US media, monolithic media that has hyped and justified the US committed holocaust in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and the dozens of subsequent US murderous invasions of dozens of equally innocent nations.
At the 2012 unveiling and dedication ceremony of the King Monument in Washington, the wealthy white elite emoted over how they had been moved by King’s words about equality and freedom, as they pretended to have been deaf to King’s bitter denouncing of the immoral business of inhumane materialism and genocidal violence in desperate accumulation of capital and its twin evil racism. With sour stomach did one listen to the dissimulating, vibrant with emotion, eulogies of King’s daughter, sister, son, African American celebrities, and even the two men who had held the dying King in their arms (and who had gone on to successful political careers in the US war establishment). In these speeches by King’s beloved people, there was not a single world regarding King’s condemnation of Americans putting atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945. Their embarrassing calculated omission of King’s condemnation of US wars on innocent nations was an obvious collaboration with an insane wars-managing elite’s intentions in staging this despicable and farcical event. It was a collaboration, not only by the King family, civil rights leader friends and African American celebrities, who spoke at the monument, but by progressive journalists the next day, who did not rise up with a unanimous commentary of condemnation of their own for the calculated omission of King’s scathing words, poignantly stern warnings and moral demands, which King bravely intended to lead the stopping of the slaughter of the Vietnamese, just as King had led the stopping of legalized death and discrimination of African Americans at home.
It simply does not seem to be important to American dissidents, progressives, African American celebrities and even America’s best anti-imperialist journalists of the left, that citizens in militarized America, and the world audience victims of US media psyop mind control, have been tightly blocked and prevented from hearing or seeing videos of King sounding off with the truth,
The Vietnamese people proclaimed their independence in 1945, after a combined French and Japanese occupation … we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.… For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam…. After the French were defeated, … we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man.… Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops, as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals, children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. … we ally ourselves with the landlords … we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land, their crops. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.
Americans shall never hear these words of King, if the desperate managers of present society have anything to do with it. Knowledge of national hero King having preached to extend the justice he was determined to get of for his African Americans to the infinitely more deadly injustice the Vietnamese had been suffering from his fellow Americans, including forcibly drafted African America soldiers, would be dangerously confusing for tens of millions of young men and women presently participating in, supporting, or indifferent to the dozen ongoing US bombings and invasions and unnerving for older Americans who had participated in, supported, or were indifferent during to all the wars since King was taken out forty-seven years ago. Confusing and unnerving because, after all, Martin Luther King is America’s number one hero, in whose name everyone gets a day or two off work every year.
Perhaps, even more important for the war establishment is that school children now being indoctrinated to look forward to patriotically manning the high tech killing machine that insures future American world domination, be protected from the horrible truth that Martin Luther King spoke of so eloquently and convincingly.
No, not on your sweet life, are speculative investors, who own omnipresent mass media and create mega profitable genocidal wars, going to allow the American public that watches fellow Americans in uniform dispatch thousands of designated ‘bad guy’ men, women, and ‘accidentally their children, in their own beloved countries of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen while America funds goons to do it in Venezuela, Ukraine and Lebanon, Syria, Libya as well, hear King preaching a heart-rending history of the US holocaust in Vietnam and surrounding countries.
Instead this year, as for over forty years, corporate commercial TV channels will be televising King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, the ‘March on Washington’ demanding justice in America, and videos of King leading the civil rights struggle over many years. King will be made to look like someone who today would have been a close friend and supporter of Obama, a documented serial killer, and as outspoken Cornel West, Prof. Cornel West of New York’s Union Theological Seminar and
Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies has often called the President, “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats, now head of the American killing machine and proud of it.”
Our long-shot hope is that during this year’s Martin Luther King high profiled birthday celebrations, one of the various presidents or foreign ministers of nations presently threatened with US overt or covert attack, will think to praise on international media, Martin Luther Kings intensely devastating condemnations of America’s mad and genocidal foreign policy, and thereby throw a self-protecting monkey-wrench into America’s world deceiving criminal media, which projects an image of King as a loyal patriot of an America constantly at war with the world.
Prohibiting us from hearing King’s condemnations, so inconvenient to private investors, who rule society by scam and sword, will backfire in the long run. Words of wisdom have a life of their own, and King’s truthful words will one day be hear in countries on all five continents once bombed by US planes, and his words will promote prosecution of colonial and neocolonial imperialist crimes against humanity.
When that day of reckoning arrives King’s statue will be gazed upon as one of the whole meaningful Martin Luther King Jr., adorned with quotes mentioned in this article that are not there today.
For what it worth, those that know what King cried out against, and are still comfortably silent, might remember, Martin Luther King’s quoting from Inferno by the famous Italian poet Dante, “The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.”
Jay Janson can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com.
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From the Archives
Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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