Tuesday marked the 35th anniversary of the October 23, 1983 terrorist truck bombings of buildings containing US and French forces in Beirut, Lebanon. In the attacks’ aftermath, Washington accused Tehran of involvement, froze nearly $2 billion in Iranian assets, and decided to seize and appropriate these funds in 2016.
As a result of the barracks blast, 241 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers were killed, along with 6 Lebanese civilians. A group called Islamic Jihad Organization claimed responsibility for the blast, but Israeli and US officials have claimed Iranian involvement.
In 2016, the US Supreme Court ordered Iranian assets frozen in US banks to be paid out to the families of the US servicemen killed in the blast. Iran decried the decision, calling it “theft,” and took its case to the International Court of Justice. Earlier this month, US lawyers urged the ICJ to dismiss the Iranian suit, arguing that its appeal was “legally flawed.”
Speaking to Sputnik Persian about the anniversary of the blast, and US authorities’ decision to seize and appropriate Iranian assets, Dr. Seyed Hadi Afgahi, renowned expert on Middle East affairs and former diplomat at Iran’s embassy in Lebanon, said Tehran was unlikely to get its money back.
Commenting on the US claims against Iran, Afgahi said that the Beirut bombing was not the first time that the US has baselessly accused Iran of carrying out actions directed against US interests, citizens, military and diplomatic personnel, and certainly wouldn’t be the last.
“The US is filing lawsuits against Iran, but is forming these courts themselves, and making the rulings themselves. Where else in the world can one see a situation where the investigation is carried out by the same people who file the lawsuit, and the ruling is made by the same people, as well?” the observer asked, pointed to the multiple suits filed in US courts over the years accusing Iran of involvement in various terror acts.
“Recently, for example, the International Court of Justice ruled in Iran’s favor and demanded that the US lift some of its sanctions against Iran. The response from the US was that this decision means nothing to them. This is Washington’s logic at its core – the logic of unilateral claims,” Afgahi added.
As far as the Beirut bombings case is concerned, the former diplomat suggested that whatever Tehran does in international courts, it can’t force Washington to adhere to the courts’ decisions. “The International Court of Justice in the Hague is an organ controlled by the UN, but the US simply refuses to comply with its decisions,” he lamented.
Regarding the real perpetrators standing behind the 1983 blast, Afgahi said that it’s necessary to take a broader view, accounting for US actions, and not just those of the terrorists. “The Americans were the ones who attacked the people of Lebanon, killed them, bombed them, with their ships regularly bombing Beirut’s coast. They placed a base in the city, seizing buildings, landing their forces without the permission of the Lebanese authorities,” the observer recalled. “This is the same thing that they’re doing today – invading, killing and bombing,” he argued.
Ultimately, Afgahi believes that in the present circumstances, Iran will be unlikely to achieve justice and the return of its assets, particularly after the unilateral US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal and the introduction of new, aggressive sanctions against Tehran.
October 24, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Iran, Lebanon, Sanctions against Iran, United States |
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If Russia had actually “hacked” the DNC emails then the National Security Agency would have had proof of such activity. In fact, the NSA could have tracked such activity. But they did not do that. That lack of evidence did not prevent a coordinated media campaign from spinning up to pin the blame on Russia for the “theft” and to portray Donald Trump as Putin’s lackey and beneficiary.
Any effort to tell an alternative story has met with stout opposition. Fox News, for example, came under withering fire after it published an article in May 2017 claiming that Seth Rich, a young Democrat operative, had leaked DNC emails to Julian Assange at Wikileaks. The family of Seth Rich reacted with fury and sued Fox, Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, but that suit subsequently was dismissed.
Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange. While the content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich “dropped boxed” the emails to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC.
If Seth Rich was just a normal kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, his murder and untimely death would only have been a minor blip in the news cycle. Blip or not, it was a terrible loss for his family and friends. But Seth was not an ordinary kid. He worked for the Democratic National Committee aka the DNC and described himself as an “experienced and impassioned data analyst” keen on making the world a better place.Rich met a sudden and brutal end in a neighborhood near the U.S. Capitol in Washingtion, DC in the early hours of July 10, 2016. The initial report about the murder did not raise any political antanae in the United States. The CNN reporting of the murder was representative of the coverage at the time:
A Democratic National Committee employee died this weekend after he was shot in Northwest Washington.
Seth Rich, 27, suffered multiple gunshot wounds early Sunday morning in Washington’s Bloomingdale neighborhood, according to law enforcement officials.
D.C. police said officers who had been patrolling the area responded to the sound of shots fired, ultimately finding Rich at the scene both “conscious and breathing.” He was then transported to an area hospital, where police said he “succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead.”
Rich worked as voter expansion data director for the DNC since 2014, the DNC confirmed. A 2011 graduate of Creighton University, Rich’s resume is filled with various jobs in Democratic politics and political consulting.
But the circumstances and facts surrounding the murder were strange. Seth was shot in the back. Nothing was taken from his body—not his watch, not his wallet and not his credit cards. There was no obvious answer to the questions—who shot Seth and why?
The interest in Seth’s death took a dramatic turn when Wikileaks dumped the contents of DNC emails on its website on July 22, 2016. In order to put the Wikileaks theory regarding Seth’s death in proper perspective, we must review events in the prior months connected to the Hillary Clinton and DNC email controversies.
Seth Rich will go down in history, fairly or unfairly, linked to the debate surrounding Hillary Clinton’s missing and/or classified emails. During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary used a private server and sent thousands of messages over that server. This included emails containing Top Secret material.
In May 2016, the State Department Inspector General added further fuel to the controversy by concluding that Hillary had violated State Department protocols and policies:
The Inspector General was unable to find evidence that Clinton had ever sought approval from the State Department staff for her use of a private email server, determining that if Clinton had sought approval, Department staff would have declined her setup because of the “security risks in doing so.”[54] Aside from security risks, the report stated that “she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”[57]
Public interest in Hillary’s emails grew on June 12, 2016 when Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, stated during an ITV interview that his outfit had more Hillary emails:
“We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct,” Assange said.
Two days later (June 14) came news that the DNC computers had been “hacked” by the Russians. Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by a computer security company hired by the DNC—Crowdstrike–, wrote:
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
The Nakamura piece marked the first salvo in the Russian hacking meme. But the claim was not backed up by independently verified forensic evidence—it rested solely on the conclusions of a computer security company—Crowdstrike. The pro-Ukrainian politics of Crowdstrike’s founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, and his strident opposition to Russia cast a pall of bias over the findings of Crowdstrike. No U.S. Federal Law Enforcement official or agency was given access to the DNC servers. Neither the FBI nor Homeland Security were permitted to examine the servers and the alleged evidence of a hack.
Crowdstrike revealed that not one but two groups of hackers believed to be based in Russia had done just that. The intruders, according to Crowdstrike and the DNC officials who spoke to the Washington Post, fully accessed the campaign organization’s emails and chats, and stole opposition research on Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. . . .
In a blog post detailing the attack, Crowdstrike pointed to two groups of known Russian government-aligned hackers, one dubbed Cozy Bear and another called Fancy Bear. According to Crowdstrike, the two teams seemingly worked independently, either unaware of each others’ existence or even vying for dominance within the strange, internally competitive intelligence apparatus of Vladimir Putin’s regime.
The most bizarre aspect of Crowdstrike’s claim is that it started its “investigation” of the so-called hacking on the 7thof May and supposedly immediately discovered it was “the Russians.” Yet Crowdstrike waited more than a month to do what should have been done on 7 May—shutdown the network. Vicky Ward reported in Esquire on 24 October 2016 that Crowdstrike waited until June 10 to take steps to protect the DNC network:
Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office.
For the next two days, three CrowdStrike employees worked inside DNC headquarters, replacing the software and setting up new login credentials using what Alperovitch considers to be the most secure means of choosing a password: flipping through the dictionary at random. (After this article was posted online, Alperovitch noted that the passwords included random characters in addition to the words.) The Overwatch team kept an eye on Falcon to ensure there were no new intrusions. On Sunday night, once the operation was complete, Alperovitch took his team to celebrate at the Brazilian steakhouse Fogo de Chão.
This was a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse had escaped. Crowdstrike started work in early May 2016 but failed to prevent the DNC emails from making their way to Wikileaks. The DNC emails that were released on July 22, 2016 by Wikileaks covered the period from January 2015 thru 25 May 2016. Crowdstrike started work on 7 May at the DNC. If this was truly a hack from an outside computer network then it should have been impossible for any outsider to electronically hack the DNC network. But the information on the DNC network was taken around the close of business on the 25thof May.
The day after Ellen Nakamura reported that the Russians had hacked the DNC, Guccifer 2.0 surfaced and took credit for the hack. Guccifer 2.0 made a point of specifically denying that he was Russian in an interview with Motherboard:
“I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia,” he said, adding that he was from Romania, just like the first Guccifer.
Guccifer 2.0 said he hacked into the DNC in the summer of 2015. He claimed that he used an unknown vulnerability in NGP VAN, which is a software provider for the DNC, to hack into the DNC servers, which have a Windows architecture. (There’s no evidence whatsoever that the hacker really broke through via NGP VAN.)
“Then I installed my Trojans on several PCs. I had to go from one PC to another every week so CrowdStrike couldn’t catch me for a long time,” he said. “I know that they have cool intrusion detection system. But my heuristic algorithms are better.”
Guccifer’s claim to be something other than Russian immediately was derided by those invested in the blame Russia meme. Motherboard, for example, published a piece on June 16 labeling Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian front, but that conclusion was based solely on circumstantial, stylistic evidence:
. . . considering a long trail of breadcrumbs pointing back to Russia left by the hacker, as well as other circumstantial evidence, it appears more likely that Guccifer 2.0 is nothing but a disinformation or deception campaign by Russian state-sponsored hackers to cover up their own hack—and a hasty and sloppy one at that.
Guccifer 2.0 surfaced again the end of June with more documents:
On June 30, Guccifer 2.0 posted additional documents from the Democratic National Committee’s servers on the WordPress blog. The post again denied Russian links, and spoke admiringly of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks; Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who leaked archives of surveillance documents; and Chelsea Manning, the Army private who sent a huge trove of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in 2010.
Guccifer 2.0 faded into the woodwork when Wikileaks released the DNC emails on the 22 of July. Although Wikileaks protected the source of the DNC material, Julian Assange insisted that Russia had anything to do with putting the DNC trove into his hands.
Following the Wikileaks dump, Donald Trump made news on the campaign trail by sarcastically calling on the Russians to provided Hillary’s missing 30,000 emails:
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’ll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said, referring to deleted emails from the private account Hillary Clinton used as secretary of State. “I think you’ll probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”. . .
“If Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I’ve got to be honest with you. I’d love to see them,” he said later, declining to back down.
Experts suspect that Russian agents are behind the hack and release of Democratic officials’ emails last week that showed officials discussing ways to undermine Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign against Clinton.
Trump often has praised Putin and has claimed to have met him, but on Wednesday, he denied that they have met. He also denied multiple media reports that he is in debt to Russian lenders.
Trump clearly was joking. He was riffing on the fact that the DNC emails had been published on Wikileaks and that Russia was being blamed. But the Democrats, never known for their keen sense of humor, seized on this moment as an opportunity to introduce the meme that Trump and Russia were collaborating to stop Hillary’s quest for the Presidency. The Hillary team understood the fundamentals of good drama–i.e., a solid story needs a good villain. Donald and Vladimir Putin became the villains of this tale:
Hillary Clinton . . . accused Russian intelligence services of hacking into the Democratic National Committee computers and she said her Republican rival Donald Trump has shown support for Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin,” Ms Clinton said in an interview with Fox News, as reported by Reuters.
US officials and cyber security experts have previously said they believed Russia had something to do with the release of the emails in order to influence the election.
In reviewing the media coverage of the DNC “hack” during June and July the name of Seth Rich does not surface even as a minor concern. This all changed on August 9, 2016 when Wikileak’s Julian Assange announced via Twitter “a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Rich’s killing on July 10 in the 2100 block of Flagler Place NW.” Assange subsequently discussed the murder of Seth Rich during an interview with Dutch TV:
WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange suggested that the Democratic National Committee staffer shot dead last month in Washington, DC, was killed because he was a “source.”
“Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington,” he told Dutch TV, referring to Seth Rich, who was gunned down in the early morning hours of July 10 while walking to his apartment in Bloomingdale.
The interviewer followed up by asking, “That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?”
The WikiLeaks founder cryptically replied, “No, there’s no finding … I’m suggesting that our sources take risks.”
Rather than address the substance and facts of what Wikileaks and Assange were saying and doing with respect to Seth Rich, most of the media concentrated on dismissing the Seth Rich story as a crazed conspiracy theory.
The only media outlet that tried to tell this story–Fox News–soon found itself in a media and legal maelstrom. Fox released a well-sourced article in May 2017. Written by Malia Zimmerman, the article reported that Seth had downloaded the Wikileaks documents, uploaded them to a DropBox account and passed them on to Julian Assange. Malia wrote:
The Democratic National Committee staffer who was gunned down on July 10 on a Washington, D.C., street last July just steps from his home in the cozy Washington DC’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, leaked thousands of highly controversial emails to WikiLeaks that were generated internally between DNC party leaders, Fox News has confirmed after a 10-month investigation.
A federal investigator who reviewed an FBI forensic report detailing the contents of DNC staffer Seth Rich’s computer generated within 96 hours after his murder, said Rich made contact with Wikileaks through Gavin MacFayden, a famous American investigative reporter and director of Wikileaks.
“I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and Wikileaks,” the federal investigator told Fox News, confirming the MacFayden connection. But he said the whole case was put to rest after the FBI initial audit, and agents were told not to investigate further. The emails sit inside the FBI today, said the federal agent, who asked to remain a confidential source.
The Fox News piece was solid and well sourced. In addition to the Federal agent who confirmed Seth Rich had made contact with Wikileaks using a cut out, two other people with direct access to Julian Assange also told Fox reporters that Seth was the source for the DNC emails.
The DNC sprang into action and moved aggressively to shut down the Fox story. Fox, along with Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, were sued by the Rich family and by investigator Rod Wheeler claiming that some or all elements of the story were false. The lawyers behind these suits were tied to the Democrats. In the face of this pressure, Fox News folded like a cheap tent in a hurricane and pulled the Malia Zimmerman story.
Too bad Fox lacked the courage to back Malia Zimmerman because the lawsuit fell apart. The cases were dismissed in August 2018:
A federal judge in Manhattan dismissed a lawsuit Thursday that was brought against Fox News by the parents of Seth Rich, the young Democratic aide whose unsolved murder was turned into fodder for a lingering right-wing conspiracy theory.
In his dismissal of the lawsuit, Judge George B. Daniels said he sympathized with Mr. Rich’s parents, but added that they had not been personally defamed by the story — despite the fact that it included “false statements or misrepresentations.”
Who killed Seth Rich remains a mystery. It is unfortunate that the Fox News story intermingled the speculation that Seth’s murder was a deliberate hit with the actual factual statements identifying him as the source of the DNC emails.
But now there is new information that may corroborate what the human sources quoted in the Fox article claimed about Seth’s role in getting the DNC documents to Wikileaks. Borne from a FOIA request filed in November 2017 by attorney Ty Clevenger, who requested any information regarding Seth Rich and and Julian Assange. The NSA informed Clevenger in a letter dated 4 October 2018 that:
Your request has been processed under the provisions of the FOIA. Fifteen documents (32 pages) responsive to your request have been reviewed by this Agency as required by the FOIA and have found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 13526. These documents meet the criteria for classification as set forth in Subparagraph (c) of Section 1.4 and remains classified TOP SECRET and SECRET.
If NSA had come back and said, “No, we do not have anything pertaining to Seth Rich,” that would have been news. It would have been especially unwelcome news for those who believe that Seth was the source on the DNC emails. But now the opposite is true. The NSA says that it has documents that are classified TS and S. What do those documents say or prove? That remains to be seen.
But there is other evidence that buttresses the claim that the DNC emails were physically downloaded and then transferred to Wikileaks rather than being taken via an electronic intrusion of the DNC network. This is not a matter of opinion. It is a simple matter of science and math.
As noted earlier, Guccifer 2.0 took credit in mid-June 2016 for “hacking” the DNC and published documents as proof of his culpability. Those documents contain meta data. Bill Binney, who served with distinction as a Technical Director at the NSA, has written extensively on this issue:
We stand by our main conclusion that the data from the intrusion of July 5, 2016, into the Democratic National Committee’s computers, an intrusion blamed on “Russian hacking,” was not a hack but rather a download/copy onto an external storage device by someone with physical access to the DNC.
That principal finding relied heavily on the speed with which the copy took place – a speed much faster than a hack over the Internet could have achieved at the time – or, it seems clear, even now. Challenged on that conclusion – often by those conducting experiments within the confines of a laboratory – we have conducted and documented additional tests to determine the speeds that can be achieved now, more than a year later.
To remind: We noted in the VIPS memo that on July 5, 2016, a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied 1,976 megabytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device. That yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second. (https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/20/more-holes-in-russia-gate-narrative/)
The meta data does not prove that Seth Rich did it or that it occurred at the DNC headquarters. But the meta data does conclusively show that the material provided by Guccifer 2.0, which the US DOJ now insists was a Russian front, could not have been obtained via a computer hack.
So what do we know for certain?
First, no one in the Federal Governemnt—law enforcement or intelligence—was granted access to examine the computer servers and files on the DNC server even after the DNC claimed they had been hacked by a foreign government.
Second, the steps that Crowdstrike allegedly took to shutdown computer hacking by Russia do not match the timeline of the actual download of the documents from the DNC server.
Third, Seth Rich worked at the DNC and had access to the computer server and systems.
Fourth, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange identified Seth Rich as a “source” and posted a $20,000 reward for information concerning his murder.
Fifth, a Federal law enforcement agent told two witnesesses that Seth Rich had email exchanges with Wikileaks.
Sixth, two people with direct access to Julian Assange told three separate sources that Seth Rich was the source of the DNC material published by Wikileaks.
Seventh, the documents published by Guccifer contain meta data that establish that the documents were physically downloaded onto a device like a thumb drive.
Eighth, the NSA has confirmed that it has Top Secret and Secret documents responsive to a FOIA request for information concerning contact between Seth Rich and other people including Julian Assange.
October 24, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CrowdStrike, DNC, Seth Rich, United States, Washington Post |
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The history of ideas provides us with the names of those few men and women who challenged the boundaries of tolerance. Professor Robert Faurisson was one such man. Faurisson, who died last Sunday at age 89, was a French academic who didn’t believe in the validity of parts of the Holocaust narrative. He argued that gas chambers in Auschwitz were the “biggest lie of the 20th century,” and contended that deported Jews had died of disease and malnutrition. Faurisson also questioned the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank many years before the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright to the famous diary “alerted publishers that her father (Otto Frank) is not only the ‘editor’ but also legally the ‘co-author’ of the celebrated book” (NY Times ).
In the France of the late 1960s-1970s Faurisson had reason to believe that his maverick attitude toward the past would receive a kosher pass. He was wrong. Faurisson may have failed to grasp the role of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish politics and culture. And he did not grasp that Jewish power is literally the power to silence opposition to Jewish power.
In 1990 France made holocaust revisionism into the crime of history denial. Faurisson was repeatedly prosecuted, beaten and fined for his writings. He was dismissed from his academic post at Lyon University in 1991.
I am bothered by the question of why Jews and others attached to their politics are desperate to restrict the story of their past. This question extends far beyond the holocaust. Israel has enacted a law that bans discussion of the Nakba – the racially motivated ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people that occurred a mere three years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Similarly, exploring the role of Jews in the slave trade will cost your job or lead to your expulsion from the labour party. My attempt to analyse the true nature of the Yiddish Speaking International Brigade in the 1936 Spanish Civil War outraged some of my Jewish ‘progressive’ friends.
Jean-François Lyotard addressed this question. History may claim to relate what actually occurred, but what it does more often is operate to conceal our shame. The task of an authentic historian is, according to Lyotard, similar to that of the psychoanalyst. It is all about removing layers of shame, concealment and suppression to try to uncover the truth.
It was the work of Faurisson that helped me to define the historical endeavour in philosophical terms. I define history as the attempt to narrate the past as we move along. To deal with history for real, is to continually re-visit and revise the past in light of our cultural, social and ideological changes. For instance, the 1948 Nakba came to be thought of in terms of ethnic cleansing in the early 2000s when the notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ entered our vocabulary (and our way of understanding a conflict) following the crisis in Kosovo. The real historian reevaluates the past and embraces adjustments that place our understanding of that past in line with our contemporaneous reality and terminology.
Professor Faurisson and the controversy around his work illuminates the distinction between real history and religion. While history is a vibrant dynamic matter subject to constant ‘revision,’ the religious approach to the past is limited to the production of a rigid unchanging chronicle of events. Authentic history invokes ethical thinking to examine the past in light of the present and vice versa, religious history often operates by denying or rejecting increasing ethical insight – it judges actions and events according to set predefined parameters. The question at stake is not what happened in the past but the freedom to research and evaluate the past without being threatened by ‘history laws.’ In the same manner I support ‘progress’ in cancer research, although I do not produce scholarly comments on related scientific findings, I support the past being continually re-examined although I offer no judgment of any kind regarding the validity of those historical findings. For history to be a valid and an ethical universal pursuit, history laws must be abolished.
In 2014 I met Robert Faurisson and discussed with him different questions about the meaning of history and what the past meant to him.
https://dailymotion.com/video/x2e7359
October 23, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | France, Human rights, Zionism |
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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s decision to scrap the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty will be welcomed by the US nuclear weapons industry and major defense contractors, veteran Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney told Sputnik on Monday.
“The trashing of the INF treaty is simply another step down a slippery slope that is being greased by the nuclear arms contractors,” said Spinney, a senior Department of Defense analyst for more than 30 years.
Trump said on Saturday that his administration was preparing to withdraw from the INF.
Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn on Monday, the US president also claimed that Russia had not done enough to adhere to the treaty. However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied on Monday that Moscow was in violation of the landmark agreement.
Spinney said Trump’s decision to scrap the INF was an anticipated and expected consequent of his predecessor, President Barack Obama’s approval of a colossal $1.5 trillion US nuclear modernization and expansion weapons program over the next 30 years.
“In my view, this evolution was almost inevitable. We unilaterally pulled out of the missile defense treaty and effectively launched a new arms race when Obama caved into the nuclear weapons industry and launched his across the board nuclear modernization plan,” he said.
Spinney recalled that Obama had been praised for negotiating the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after only one year in office, but that his huge nuclear weapons program contradicted those claimed achievements.
“Trump’s strategy and nuclear posture review essentially sealed Obama’s actions,” he said.
Trump has also refused to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate concern about the potential offensive capabilities of the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems that the United States has deployed in Poland and was also setting up in Romania, Spinney pointed out.
“Russians claim the BMD capabilities placed in Eastern Europe could be used to offensive purposes and their ‘new’ missile may well be a response to that,” he said.
Terminating the INF treaty would be a heavy blow for the entire international legal system of nonproliferation and arms control, the Russian Security Council said on Monday.
The INF was signed in 1987 and was pivotal in eliminating thousands of missiles from the American and Russian arsenals. Ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who signed the treaty along with then-US leader Ronald Reagan called Trump’s planned withdrawal from it very irresponsible.
October 22, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | INF treaty, Obama, United States |
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For decades, the Finnish state has run a eugenics-like program that pressured an unknown number of deaf women to undergo sterilization before marriage and forced pregnant women to get abortions, a topic that largely remains taboo even today.
Members of the Finnish sign language society have argued that the state should take responsibility and acknowledge the abuses and encroachments on private life committed over the course of decades.
“(Forced) sterilization is a violent act and a serious human rights violation that has been tacitly accepted,” Maija Koivisto, a teacher at the Deaf Folk High School, told the daily newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, in her call for a reconciliation process.
According to the Marriage Act of 1929, the deaf were not allowed to marry each other without special permission from the president. This law remained in force until 1969. According to Koivisto, many deaf women were slapped with an ultimatum: get sterilized or forget about marriage.
However, it’s now being acknowledged that some doctors continued to recommend sterilization to patients for several more decades. “Until now, I have assumed that the sterilizations continued until the 1950s and 1960s. But I have heard of a case in the 1990s when a doctor suggested sterilization for his deaf patient,” Koivisto told Hufvudstadsbladet.
According to Koivisto, the church may have had a role in forcible sterilizations, something that has not been talked about so much. In Deaf magazine, two women testified that church staff had exerted pressure on them to get sterilized.
At present, no exact data is available on exactly how many deaf women were sterilized in Finland, a mistake Koivisto intends to rectify. The Sterilization Act of 1935 led to devastating consequences for at least 7,530 Finnish women.
Koivisto suggested that many circumvented the marriage laws by becoming pregnant, thus forcing priests to wed them. Nevertheless, some had to agree to sterilization after that. Others chose to ‘live in sin’; cohabiting and giving birth to children out of wedlock was considered unacceptable at that time.
Koivisto ventured that the topic of sterilization has long been a taboo due to society’s attitude involving shame. Additionally, sterilized women were often seen as “whores” as they could have sex without having to worry about getting pregnant.
Koivisto noted a general tendency to disregard the needs of the deaf in the past. In Finland, sign language was forbidden in schools during the epoch of “oralism” between 1880 and 1970, when deaf children were encouraged to read lips and articulate. According to Koivisto, this matter may be gender-related, as most politicians and all priests at that time were men.
According to Koivisto, the Finnish state should give the deaf victims financial compensation for the abuse.
“I think the state should promise that we can participate in all decisions that concern us and will work to improve the status of the sign language. The state should also grant funds for investigations within the deaf community, for instance for therapeutic purposes,” she added.
Previously, Finland officially apologized for the mistreatment of children at orphanages and boarding schools. Last autumn, it was decided to form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to gather information about the forced “Finnization” and discrimination that the Sami people have suffered. The Commission received over $1.7 million from the state budget.
Neighboring Sweden sterilized almost 63,000 people between 1935 and 1975, but later apologized and compensated the victims in 1997.
This year, the Japanese victims of a state-run sterilization program that targeted tens of thousands of people to prevent the birth of “inferior descendants,” demanded an apology from the state.
READ MORE:
Sweden to Make Peace With Forced Sterilization Victims Through Indemnities
October 22, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Finland, Human rights, Sweden |
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Robrecht Vanderbeeken, the cultural secretary of Belgium’s ACOD trade union
A Belgian official’s remarks that Israel steals the organs of Palestinian children, whom it kills, have made headlines again after the news website which published them decided to stick to the story.
Robrecht Vanderbeeken, the cultural secretary of Belgium’s ACOD trade union and a philosophy of science scholar, had made the comments back in August in a column published by Belgian website De Wereld Morgen.
The population of the Gaza Strip is being “starved to death, poisoned, and children are kidnapped and murdered for their organs,” he wrote then.
The website recently received a complaint by Belgian watchdog, the Interfederal Center for Equal Opportunities, over the story.
De Wereld Morgen, however, stuck to the assertion that Israel “kidnapped” and “murdered” Palestinian children and used organs belonging to the Palestinians its forces killed.
In November 2015, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations said Israel harvested the organs of the Palestinians it killed.
In a letter to the UN secretary general, Riyad Mansour said the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces “were returned with missing corneas and other organs, further confirming past reports about organ harvesting by the occupying power.”
The New York Times also said in an August 2014 report that transplant brokers in Israel had pocketed enormous sums of money. Based on the newspaper’s analysis of major organ trafficking cases since 2000, Israelis had played a “disproportionate role” in organ trafficking.
The issue of organ theft by Israel was first brought to the fore in a report published by Sweden’s most highly-circulated daily Aftonbladet in 2009.
Back in 2000, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, the former head of Israel’s forensic institute, divulged that Israeli pathologists at the institute would harvest skin, corneas, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Palestinians and others often without permission from relatives.
The interview was, however, released no later than 2009 by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, who had conducted it as part of her investigation into the institute, in response to a row created between Israel and Sweden over Aftonbladet’s report.
October 21, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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No state established on land seized by force from the people living on that land can claim moral legitimacy and a ‘right’ to exist.
A purported ‘right’ to exist is not central to the existence of states anyway, let alone colonial settler states established amidst the wreckage of the genuine rights of another people.
States exist because they have strong armies because their enemies are too weak to destroy them, because they have good relations with near and far neighbors whose respect they have earned and because they have the consent of the people they govern.
They do not exist because of an imagined ‘right’ to exist. Were that to be the case, no state would ever have risen and then fallen in history. They would all still be here.
Israel understands this as well as anyone. It makes a lot of noise about its right to exist and its legitimacy but this is bluster. It knows why it exists and why it believes it will continue to exist. It has a strong military. It has nuclear weapons. It can destroy anyone who threatens to destroy it. These are the constituent elements of its existence, not morality and the ‘rights’ of which it endlessly talks.
‘Rise up and kill first” is not just the motto of Mossad but of the state. This is what it has done repeatedly ever since 1948. It has risen up and killed first, but with declining efficiency and herein lies the danger to its existence.
Its enemies are catching up. It has these enemies, not because of opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. They certainly did oppose it but had this been followed with admissions of moral responsibility and legal liability, accompanied by material measures to make up for the damage done. Israel might have achieved a measure of consent within the Arab world.
It does have some but in a vacuous form. The treaty with Egypt has prevented war but the people of Egypt are as resolutely opposed to Israel as they were the day it was signed. This is not blind animosity but born of the fact that instead of working for a just peace, Israel has done its best to secure an unjust peace. It wants peace entirely on its own terms, which of course can never be achieved when two parties are in dispute if a serious peace really is the desired objective.
Israel’s bona fides are not genuine and never were. It has deceived not just its enemies but its partners. It has taken them for a ride. The Oslo ‘peace process’ was all process and no peace and was never designed, in the official Israeli mind, to lead to a genuine peace. It was aimed at achieving through an endlessly stretched-out ‘peace process’ what otherwise would have had to be achieved through war and it worked perfectly.
The trade-off for a genuine peace, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, are now densely settled. Facts always matter and nothing has mattered more to the Zionists from the beginning than creating facts on the ground that could not be removed because they were facts, irrespective of what the law said.
About a million settlers now live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank colonies. How can all these facts possibly be reversed, Netanyahu and his cohorts say with the palms of their hands extended helplessly as if they had nothing to do with this process and can’t do anything about it anyway.
Of course, they can be removed, as the French settlers in Algeria were in the 1960s, after 130 years of French occupation. Israel should have been made to remove its West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers long ago, apart from the fact that they never should have been there in the first place.
In any case, this should be regarded as Israel’s problem, instead of various governments accepting Israel’s justification of an illegal presence. One punishes the lawbreaker. One does not allow it to get away with the stolen goods.
The fact of settlement was intended to smother the question of illegality and in some minds, the American in particular, the strategy has succeeded. In the official US view the territories taken in 1967 are no longer occupied but ‘administered’ or ‘contested,’ enabling the next step, the shifting of the embassy to Jerusalem.
If Israel annexes all or most of the remainder of occupied Palestine the US will not oppose it and in time it will accept it, underlining the first point that the achievements of raw power, diplomatic, economic and military, are what is important to the Zionists and not the ephemera of legitimacy and the ‘right to exist.’ These phrases are fictions, distractions, the cover for a deeply immoral and deeply illegal process.
For Palestinians the state is illegitimate. There is absolutely no reason why they should think otherwise. There is no reason why they should have accepted a recommendation of the UN General Assembly in 1947 that was only passed because of threats by the US to vulnerable delegations.
There is no reason why they should accept their expulsion from their homeland, even if they have to deal somehow with the fact of Israel’s existence. No resolution gave Israel the right to take the land and drive out the people and no resolution could have given Israel such a right. Palestinian rights are inalienable.
The Palestinians have both law and morality on their side. Israel has neither. Even while claiming legitimacy and the ‘right to exist,’ it has never abided by the UN resolutions laid down as the conditions for its acceptance as a UN member.
But for the protective arm of the US, it may well have been suspended or expelled from the UN long ago. After all, what club accepts the membership of those who are warned time and again but still refuse to obey its rules?
States often violate international law. Israel is the only state in the world that lives in permanent, continuing violation of international law, not at one but many levels. This is not incidental or accidental but the necessary condition of its existence. To live within the law, to respect the law, would mean that Israel could not be what it wants to be and could not have what it wants to have.
To be what it wants to be, at least what every government has wanted it to be since 1948, Israel must live outside the law. The law is not relevant anyway. Israel sneers at the UN and has no respect for international law when it comes to Palestinian rights. It only respects its own laws, which of their nature are occupier’s laws and thus inconsistent with and indeed in violation of international law.
Israel’s strong right arm is all that really counts. ‘Friendships’ and pseudo-alliances, such as the ‘unbreakable bond’ with the US, are important but only for as long as they serve Israel’s interests. There is no sentiment here. Israel flattered Britain with fine phrases before jumping in the direction of the US when Britain had no more to give. For seven decades the US was the gift that kept giving but now that it is running out of steam as a global power, Israel has to hedge its bets, hence Netanyahu’s currying of favor with Vladimir Putin and the ramping up of its relations with China.
In the end, Israel’s ultimate defense is not questionable ‘friendships’ and ‘mutual interests’ that never last forever in the game of nations but its own strong right arm. So how strong is it?
Well, Israel has nuclear weapons and thus the ‘Samson option,’ the ability to pull down the roof on everyone’s head as well as its own. Whether, in the final resort, it will use these weapons is a question for the future but Israel’s possession of them has not deterred its enemies.
Rationally, perhaps it should have, but who is being rational here, a government and movements that resist occupation, as is their right in international law, or a government that continues an occupation, in defiance of law, morality and against the possibility of one day being able to call the people whose land it has taken and the states around its non-declared borders genuine ‘neighbors’? Against the possibility, it might be said, of one day really being able to call the Middle East home.
Whether or not the nuclear threat is a bluff, and given the extreme nature of Zionism, it probably is not, the resistance continues. With its nuclear weapons, yes, Israel has the capacity to destroy all life in the Middle East, but short of this, what about its conventional weaponry and military strength? Is this enough to hold its enemies at bay and beat them on every occasion?
The answer has to be probably not. In 1967 Israel caught Egypt and Syria napping. With their air forces destroyed on the ground, they were rendered almost helpless from the first day but it is most unlikely that there will be another 1967.
Since then Israel’s conventional military superiority has been slowly but perceptibly declining. In the size of the territory it has taken and the size of its population it lacks strategic depth. It must fight short wars. Thus, in 2006, after only a month of fighting Hizbullah, a guerrilla organization, not a regular army, it had to withdraw. The longer a war continues the less likely it is that it will be able to win it.
Its ‘victory’ in 1973 came about because Anwar Sadat stopped his army from fighting. In the first week of the war, the Israeli forces on the east bank of the Suez Canal were routed. Sadat never intended to defeat Israel because he knew the US would not allow it, so he declared an ‘operational pause’ after nine or ten days and handed Israel the opportunity to recover and cross the canal to the western side.
With Egypt sidelined militarily because of the 1979 ‘peace treaty’, Israel was free to go on the rampage elsewhere, mainly against Lebanon, a virtually defenseless target against the operations of a large army and air forces.
‘Incursions’ ending in thousands of civilian deaths led up to the invasion of 1982. What were the consequences? For Lebanon and the Palestinians, about 20,000 dead civilians, including the thousands killed in Sabra and Shatila. For Israel, yes, the defeat of the PLO was an achievement, but not much of one compared to the establishment of a far more dangerous enemy, Hizbullah.
By 2000 Hizbullah had driven Israel out of Lebanon and in 2006 it drove it back again. All Israel could do was use its air power to devastate cities, towns, and villages, but on the ground in the south, its highly rated Merkava tanks were destroyed and its troops outfought by Hizbullah’s part-time soldiers. This was a humiliating outcome for an army touted as one of the best in the world. Borrowing from Hizbullah, the Israeli military then increased the intake of ideologically committed recruits into the ranks of its officers, many of them from West Bank settler colonies.
Since then Israel has been itching to have another go at Hizbullah but this time the deterrence factor is working against it. It knows Hizbullah has built up an armory of missiles that can cause devastation across occupied Palestine. It knows its anti-missile defenses will not be able to stop many of them. In the meantime, while weighing up its chances and while preparing the blows that it says will destroy Lebanon as well as Hizbullah, it has a softer target to pick on, Gaza.
There, its onslaughts over the years, vicious in the extreme, brutal and inhumane, have killed many thousands of Palestinians. Hundreds of Palestinians, mostly very young, have been shot dead by snipers along the Gaza fence just in the past few months, without the Palestinian will to resist being destroyed.
The Israelis are now fighting balloons carrying fire into the occupied land, while Palestinians continue to strike at settlers occupying their land on the West Bank, despite the terrible consequences to themselves and their families.
Through all of this, Israel’s actions and reactions are becoming more hysterical, exposing psychological fragility and nervousness within the shell of outward confidence. It cannot shut down Palestinian resistance, its intimidation of Iran and Hizbullah has not worked and in the US there is a growing awareness that Israel is a violent racist state that does not merit by any means the large-scale support the US has always given it.
It is fighting back with all the weapons at its disposal, including hasbara, the attempt to criminalize the BDS movement and attacks on individual academics but the tide is running against it.
States need flexibility but Israel has none. Its power is brittle and like the oak against the willow, when the storm comes it is more likely to fall. After more than seven decades, it has no friends and allies in the Middle East worthy of the name. It uses Arab governments up just as they use it up but the Arab people are just as strongly opposed to this western colonial-settler implant in their midst as they always were. To repeat, this is not because they can’t adjust but because Israel can’t. In terms of being accepted by the Arab masses, it has not moved an inch forward.
History worked once for Israel but it is not working for it now. The wheel is turning against it. All it has on its side is armed might. By no means is this to be underrated but time does not stand still and neither do enemies convinced they have a just cause standing against a state that within itself knows it does not have a just cause.
Israel is always preparing for the next war but against a real enemy, not just defenseless civilians reduced to fighting back with fire balloons, it is going to take casualties unprecedented in its history next time around.
This is the very least that is going to happen, and all because of the determination to create a Jewish state on territory populated by people who are not Jewish. In the arrogant, twisted mindset of Netanyahu, Naftali Bennet, Ayelet Shaked, Avigdor Lieberman and the racist rabbis and settlers urging them on, it is the ideology that matters and not the peace and security of the Jewish people living in Palestine. Legitimacy is not the point. The point of the sword is the point and just as Israel has lived by it, so must it live with the possibility that one day it will die by it.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).
October 19, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Hezbollah, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism |
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Watch at Bitchute
Or Rumble
Ed Mays October 11, 2018
Investigative journalist and best selling author Chris Bollyn makes the case for why he believes the Israeli Zionist government was behind the 9/11 attack in order to trick the US into carrying out it’s agenda in the Middle East.
Recorded 9/22/18 Pirate TV is a 58 minute weekly TV show that provides the book talk and lecture content for Free Speech TV.
Pirate TV challenges the Media Blockade, bringing you independent voices, information and programming unavailable on the Corporate Sponsor-Ship. These posts are for YouTube and are usually longer than the broadcast versions.
You will notice that I don’t monetize my videos. I’m irritated by constant interruptions as I’m sure are you. If you would like to pitch in to support this work, consider a donation: http://www.edmaysproductions.net/pira…
October 19, 2018
Posted by aletho |
False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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The mainstream media reported today that Twitter suspended hundreds of accounts after users on the pro-Trump Reddit forum r/The_Donald coordinated efforts to use Twitter to set up ‘Non-Player Character’ (NPC) profiles mocking liberals.
The artistic campaign was born out of their characterisation of liberals as uncritical characters – automatons, name callers not capable of independent authentic thinking.
The BBC reported that within 24 hours there were more than 30,000 uses of the term NPC on Twitter, and Facebook pages dedicated to the trend amassed tens of thousands of followers.
The term NPC is borrowed from the digital games industry. It refers to characters managed by artificial intelligence whose behavior is limited to certain scripted responses and actions.
The NPC meme began as a satirical attempt to ridicule the New Left’s sound-bite, cliched culture. The BBC quoted one poster saying, “If you get in a discussion with them it’s always the same buzzwords and hackneyed arguments…It’s like in a when you accidentally talk to somebody twice and they give you the exact lines word for word once more.”
21st Century Wire’s Patrick Henningsen commented this morning on his Facebook page that “the ‘NPC’ meme is pure art, much more illustrative and reflective than the Pepe meme, and opens a whole new level of social commentary. By definition, this is what art does.”
But for some reason parts of the mainstream media are not enthusiastic about the new artistic adventure. Henningsen continues, “the MSM reaction is telling and so is Twitter’s ban. Ironically, Twitter proves they are ‘NPC’ by banning these memes after decreeing them to be ‘political manipulation’.” According to Henningsen, the recent panic over the NPC meme “… proves the insecurity of the Latte Left, that they can’t even tolerate laconic gamer satire.”
I believe that the negative reaction to the NPC meme is one more piece of evidence of the Judaisation of our social, political and cultural landscape.
Judaism is very strict in its opposition to icons and artistic imagery. The Torah contains a number of verses that specifically prohibit the creation of icons and images. The strongest Judaic anti artistic segment is provided by the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” (Exodus 20:3-6)
Why should the Jewish God prevent his most favourite people from exploring the inspirational human facility to create and contemplate artistic beauty? The Almighty’s reasoning is explicit. Because “for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” Pretty scary God that the Jews invented for themselves although he can be kind to those who follow his orders. The Jewish God promises to “ show[ing] love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Judaic aniconism supports a rejection of authentic thinking and doesn’t allow for the possibility of doubt. This restriction is spread throughout the entire Old Testament. The Judaic message is unambivalent – Do not think for yourself, do not be creative or artistic.
Knowingly or not, the ‘NPC’ meme ridicules the Judaization of America and the West. It points at our removal from the Athenian ethos of pluralism, aesthetics and critical thinking. It points at the Jerulamisation of the liberal political discourse, burdening open debate with a tyranny of correctness sustained by strict terminology and a list of the politically correct mitzvoth.
October 18, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, NPC, Twitter |
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Our Vexed and Bitter Masters Seek Regime Change Again
Back in April of this year, a journalist in Gaza wearing a vest marked “PRESS” was deliberately shot and killed by IDF snipers. That brings the total number killed to 18 since the start of the Second Intifada. No one of consequence called for regime change in Israel.
As of July this year, there had already been six journalists killed in Mexico by drug cartels linked to Mexico’s corrupt government and our own intelligence services. The last one beaten to death in a horrific murder. Last year the number of journalists murdered set a new record for the country at 42. As far as I know, the MSM and Lindsey Graham have yet to call for sanctions and regime change.
In Columbia there have been two murdered for covering things the rulers didn’t want covered. But we like Columbia’s neoliberal government so for now, not a peep about changing it.
What makes the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi so different? This is a question a few writers and researchers have been asking themselves and a couple of us have come to some honest, sensible, business-oriented answers… since of course the U.S. and her allies are all about Business.
Now let’s be clear. I write about Khashoggi’s disappearance because the only hard evidence that we have before us is this…
CCTV image of the missing Saudi Journalist Jamal Khashoggi entering the Saudi consulate
That is a blurry image of a middle aged man walking toward the door of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. It is not proof of a murder. It is proof someone walked toward a door and then entered the building.
Everything else is speculation or statements from “anonymous sources close to the investigation” meaning it’s all baseless rumor, innuendo or deliberate disinformation.
It is entirely possible that the man in the image is not Jamal Khashoggi. And it is entirely possible that it is.
Therefore it is also entirely possible that Khashoggi is not dead by the hands of the Saudis and simultaneously… it is.
But it is not definitive by any stretch of the imagination in either way… unless all of a sudden you take our intelligence assets at face value as if they never lied to us before. Which is quite a leap of faith in my opinion.
All of the journalist murders I listed above have definite proof of their demise. Bodies. DNA. Causes of death. Death certificates. Coroner’s reports. Things of that nature. Here there is only that grainy image taken from a grainy video of about 4 seconds in length. And that, boys and girls, is it.
So why all the pressure being put on Saudi Arabia to essentially foment a regime change in the Kingdom of Saud over a grainy picture of a man who set up a Saudi Regime change NGO in Delaware back in January of this year? A regime change NGO promoted by the National Endowment for Democracy.
Why are MSM outlets and even so-called “alternative anti-war” (Common Dreams, Moon of Alabam and others) ones suddenly parroting the likes of Bernie Sanders and Lindsey Graham in calling for Mohammad bin Salmon’s removal from office?
Was the murder so brutal that it offended even the hardest regime change advocates in D.C. and their allies in the Washington Post? Do they not know the UAE hired a for-profit death-squad based in the U.S. to kill political rivals in Yemen in vicious brutal ways from 2015-2017?
In one case the American former Special Ops mercs put a big bomb on the door of a building they thought their one target was holding a meeting with a whole bunch of others. They hoped to kill EVERYONE in the building but were too late. So later they developed a methodology of using bikes to put bombs on cars in busy traffic intersections killing their targets that way. Them and anyone else who happened to be close.
Have you ever seen someone die slowly after a bomb goes off and blows off their legs or arms or rips open their guts? It’s horrible. And they weren’t even the target.
And yet this hit squad operated with impunity for a favored nation of ours and most involved with the operation find it hard too believe our military and political leadership didn’t know about it. Notice, it started under Obama and continued under Trump. What a shock huh?
You think the alleged abduction, torture, murder and dismemberment was so shocking to those folks they just HAD to do SOMETHING?
Or do you think it was because Khashoggi was pretending to be a journalist at the Washington Post as he fought for regime change in Saudi Arabia?
As some journalists , some news agencies and bloggers have pointed out, Khashoggi’s disappearance perfectly coincides with a number of international events that make this case rather suspect. Unfortunately that number is relatively low.
Khashoggi had extensive ties to Lockheed Martin, the old guard of Saudi royalty, the CIA and other intelligence assets… and of course… his very own regime change focused NGO.
We also know that the deal President Trump made with MbS and Saudi Arabia last year for 110 billion dollars worth of weapons sales was falling through and a deadline for them to purchase the horribly untrustworthy THAAD missile defense system came and went on Sept. 30th of this year with no purchase by MbS.
And we know that the Saudi ambassador to Russia was worried about the U.S. imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia as recently as Sept. 21 due to them buying the Russian S-400 system instead.
Add to all that the Davos in the Desert meeting taking place this week which the risk of sanctions would seriously screw up… and you have a perfect storm of motive for someone OTHER than Saudi Arabia to either kidnap, kill or “send into early retirement” one Jamal Khashoggi. Right?
Now, 110 billion dollars in deals promised to the MIC is a lot of money, that is for sure. But the question kept rattling around in my feeble little brain… is that really enough to motivate every sector of American empire support, including the fake “alt-right and alt-left” outlets to go all out calling for YET ANOTHER regime change operation in the Middle East?
Seems like a damn good question doesn’t it?
And my answer was “no”
Then I started digging again and what I found makes that 110 billion dollars look like something I give to the local homeless guy every morning when he shows up lightly rapping, rapping upon my chamber door.
Try 4 trillion on for size. Four Trillion spread across every facet of our glorious business community and stretching into every pocket of every director sitting on both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the for-profit Central Bank system.
Now THAT is something that EVERYONE can get behind, huh?
Yes, MbS is on the outs as they say but it’s not entirely due to his reluctance to buy U.S. made crappy weapons of war (though that is part of it)
What is really at play here is his apparent reneging on an even bigger deal and an ideological shift that made him the darling of all neoliberals in D.C., New York, London and Tel Aviv.
You see, MbS was installed by our intelligence assets for one purpose: he was finally going to be the Saudi royal family member to fully neoliberalize Arabia on behalf of our hot money speculators and Big Business interests.
The plan was called Vision 2030 (put together by globalist neoliberal technocrats from McKinsey in 2014) and when he first signed on for it (open financial markets to hot money speculators and Wall Street, privatization of everything from nationalized oil company to healthcare) MbS immediately became the DARLING of the Middle East. Man, the right and left of the Business Party loved him to death. Lindsey Graham drooled over him right along side Chris Mathews. Obama praised him as did Trump and everyone in between.
They coupled that with some bullshit about letting women drive cars so the left would get on board and suddenly the brutal dictatorship in Saudi Arabia was something left of Sesame Street. Bert and Ernie would still get beheaded for being gay, the Grouch would have his trash-can privatized and Big Bird would still loose his head for asking too many questions… but the facade was going to hold and a Saudi Arabia would be the new Shining City on the Hill.
All was great in the land Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to neoliberalization: the vulture capitalists kept being told … to wait till the feeding frenzy could begin.
The oil company IPO was the biggest single disappointment for the masters of the universe but there were many others detailed in the Vision 2030 plan. The IPO, the largest single offering of it’s kind in history, was supposed to have already taken place, making folks like Exxon, Goldman Sachs and BP shareholder in Saudi Arabia’s massive oil business. But it never happened and from the looks of it, the owners of all things planet Earth are getting tired of waiting around for the feast.
Mohammad bin Salmon was raised up and made the heir apparent to the throne in Saudi Arabia ahead of older, more established royal family members for one reason and one reason alone: he was willing to allow the West to roll into the country and chop it up and sell it off for profits.
Keep in mind… by 2014 the glorious captains of industry and banksters had already digested their latest consumables found in places like Libya, Ukraine and Iraq. Syria was resisting and the Russians and Iranians were making it hard for them to anticipate when they would get their next mergers and acquisitions meal fed to them so they needed something to tide them over so to speak. They needed new markets to exploit and pillage and Obama apparently refused to invade Venezuela so something had to give.
Then along came a power struggle in a country they have coveted for decades. A nation with tons of state-owned property and businesses and services they could consume.
Saudi Arabia.
All they needed was a front-man on the inside they could promote and then control.
Prince Mohammad bin Salmon fit the bill perfectly.
He was young, would be their man for decades to come and his youth made him seem like something they could promote as the new face of the old kingdom.
But something has changed in him and thus, in our masters’ opinion and trust of him.
Hell hath no fury like a globalist spurned and what we see now is clearly a ramification of that love lost and turned to hatred.
Is it a coincidence that all of these things are coming to a head at the exact same time a man committed to removing MbS from power goes “missing” at the consulate in Istanbul?
Possible I assume.
But I quit believing in geo-political coincidences right around the same time I quit believing in our two party “democracy” so for me, this seems like the beginnings of another neoliberal regime change operation.
Only this one will be fueled by the fire of an unrequited love and the desperation of vulture capitalists starving for another carcass upon which too feed.
October 18, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Saudi Arabia |
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Running out of space to store water contaminated by fuel that escaped during the Fukushima meltdown, the Japanese government is preparing to release it into the Pacific Ocean – despite the presence of radioactive elements.
Currently, 1.09 million tons of contaminated water is stored in 900 tanks near the Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, which suffered a catastrophic release of fuel following an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
The government claims that radioactive material is being reduced to non-detectable levels through the Advanced Liquid Processing System procedure, but there is evidence that this process does not remove many radioactive elements, including antimony, cobalt, iodine, rhodium, ruthenium, strontium, and tellurium. Tepco, which operates the plant, admits the water contains tritium, but insist the levels are “safe.”
The UK Telegraph has obtained documents from Japanese government sources indicating that authorities are aware ALPS, developed by Hitachi, is not actually eliminating radioactive elements to non-detectable levels. Tepco was forced last month to admit that 80 percent of the water still contains radioactive substances after local residents and fishermen protested plans to dispose of it in the ocean.
Tepco admits that 65,000 tons of ALPS-cleansed water retain more than 100 times the amount of strontium-90 legally permitted. Strontium-90 accumulates in teeth and bones and can cause leukemia and bone cancer.
Tritium, too, is not harmless, despite Tepco’s assurances. According to nuclear specialist Shaun Burnie, beta particles of the element are more harmful than X-rays and gamma rays.
The government initially planned to release the contaminated water in 2016, but was surprised by the strength of local opposition. In March 2016, Tepco executives were charged with contributing to deaths and injuries in relation to the Fukushima meltdown after a judicial panel said they had ignored a 2008 internal report warning the plant could be struck by 15-meter waves in the event of a tsunami.
October 17, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | Japan |
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The idea of “whistleblowing” has been in the news a great deal.
Is the anonymous author of a recent New York Times op-ed eviscerating the president a whistleblower?
Is the victim of an alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh a whistleblower?
I’m fortunate to have access to the media to talk about torture after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s program. I think Ed Snowden, Tom Drake and others would say the same thing about the aftermath of their own whistleblowing.
Cost of Doing the Right Thing
The problem is that we are the exception to the rule. Most whistleblowers either suffer in anonymity or are personally, professionally, socially and financially ruined for speaking truth to power. Darin Jones is one of those people. He’s one of the people silenced in Barack Obama’s war on whistleblowers. And he continues to suffer under Donald Trump.
Jones was an FBI supervisory contract specialist who in 2012 reported evidence of serious procurement improprieties to his superior. Jones maintained that Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) had been awarded a $40 million contract improperly because a former FBI official with responsibility for granting the contract then was hired as a consultant at CSC. Jones said, rightly, that this was a violation of the Procurement Integrity Act. He made seven other disclosures alleging financial improprieties in the FBI, and he was promptly fired for his troubles.
Remember, the United States has a Whistleblower Protection Act. Any federal employee who brings to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety is protected under federal statute.
The FBI didn’t care, though. Jones was a troublemaker. He was talking about his fellow FBI agents. And he had to be silenced.
Immediately upon his firing, Jones appealed. He was not reinstated, however, because he had made his revelation to his supervisor and not to one of the nine people on the FBI leadership-approved list of who could hear a whistleblower complaint. Jones appealed again, beginning a more than four-year odyssey.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is the champion of whistleblowers on Capitol Hill, whether you like his politics or not. Jones contacted Grassley and asked for help. His dismissal was clearly retaliation for his revelations and was illegal, according to the whistleblower protection law. Grassley agreed and wrote three separate letters to then-FBI director James Comey and then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. None were answered.
Grassley urged the Justice Department to reinstate Jones, saying that his dismissal was a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2016, which strengthened the original whistleblower protection law. He added that when Yates appeared before his Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearings earlier in the year, she promised “to improve the process for adjudicating claims of retaliation, including expanding the list of persons to whom a protected disclosure may be made.”
She never did that. In fact, Yates ordered the director of the Justice Department’s “Professional Misconduct Review Unit” to write to Jones and to tell him, “The Deputy Attorney General’s review is complete and her decision is final. Your case is no longer pending. You should not expect to receive any future communications that you or any other organization or individuals may submit with regard to your whistleblower reprisal case.” In other words, the official policy of the Justice Department was to ignore the law and to give the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and the whistleblower himself the middle finger.
The FBI’s response was equally bad, albeit predictable. The FBI’s Office of the General Counsel wrote to Jones, “The FBI has advised you that it will not conduct further investigation into your allegations that the FBI removed you from employment because you reported a compliance concern and retaliated against you in violation of applicable whistleblower retaliation protection regulations. The FBI has met its legal obligations and considers this matter closed without any basis for further review or reopening. Please be advised that the FBI will not respond to any additional correspondence or emails related to or arising from the termination of your employment.”
That’s another middle finger.
Note also that the FBI refers to “whistleblower regulations.” It’s not a regulation. It’s a law. And the FBI, too, has to respect and follow the law even when they don’t want to.
End Victimization of Whistleblowers
The bottom line here, though, is that Darin Jones did the right thing. He did the honorable thing. He did the ethical, legal, and moral thing. And he paid for it with his career. Like other federal whistleblowers, he’s ruined financially. Friends and family members have walked away from him. He can’t find a job. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the psychological weight of the fallout from whistleblowing is sometimes too much to handle.
Jones’ friends and supporters are creating a GoFundMe campaign to help him through this horrible period.
We also need to keep up the heat on the FBI, the CIA, NSA, TSA, and every other governmental organization that victimizes whistleblowers.
We have to support Chuck Grassley and others on Capitol Hill who are trying to protect whistleblowers.
We have to force our own elected officials to do the same. After all, they work for us.
Our goal should be a simple one. Work hard to ensure that Darin Jones is the last federal whistleblower to be treated this way.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
October 17, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Timeless or most popular | FBI, United States |
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