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Prince William’s Trip to Israel

By Michael Dickinson | CounterPunch | July 2, 2018

In spite of British Foreign Office policy that “the Royal Family should not make official visits to Israel due to its historic and grave violations of human rights, international law and UN resolutions,” Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, made just such an official visit last week – the first royal to do so since the establishment of the state in 1948.

A Kensington Palace statement announced: “The non-political nature of His Royal Highness’s role – in common with all Royal visits overseas –allows a spotlight to be brought to bear on the people of the region: their cultures, their young people, their aspirations, and their experiences.”

But surely the visit is especially politically charged, given the aspirations of the over 120 Palestinians massacred and 14,000 injured by the Israeli army during the Great Return March protests in Gaza? British arms exports “almost certainly” were used in the attack, in direct contravention of the UK’s policy that arms exports should not be used in the Occupied Territories.

UK arms export licences to Israel soared to £216m last year. They include “technology for military radars”, grenades, bombs, missiles, armoured vehicles, assault rifles, small arms ammunition, sniper rifles and components for sniper rifles which may have been used by the Israeli military on the Gaza border.  The violence prompted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to call for a review of arms sales to Israel, condemning its “illegal and inhumane” killing and wounding of “yet more unarmed Palestinian protesters”. But Wills, (without his wife Kate), had nothing to say on that subject.

Instead, at the British Embassy Garden Banquet on Tuesday in Tel Aviv he said that he was delighted to be in Israel.  He spoke about his first official engagement visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, which he found a “profoundly moving experience”.

“As I wrote in my message at Yad Vashem,” he said, “We must never forget what was perpetrated against the Jewish people in the Holocaust. I am well aware that the responsibility falls now to my generation to keep the memory alive of that great crime as the Holocaust generation passes on. And I commit myself to doing this.”

I doubt if any of his grateful Jewish Israeli hosts pointed out to Prince William the location of Deir Yassin on the other side of the valley from the Holocaust Memorial, the village where 254 Palestinian men women and children were brutally murdered by Zionist forces in 1948, now bulldozed and covered by a new settlement of Orthodox Jews centered round a mental hospital.

And I doubt if he was informed that Yad Vashem had fired an instructor for comparing the trauma of Jewish Holocaust survivors with the trauma experienced by the Palestinian people in Israel’s War of Independence. Teacher Itimar Shapira admitted that he had spoken to visitors about the Deir Yassin massacre.

“Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation,” Shapira said.

“The Holocaust moved us to establish a Jewish state and the Palestinian nation’s trauma is moving it to seek self-determination, identity, land and dignity, just as Zionism sought these things,” he said.

“I only tried to expose the visitors to the facts, not to political conclusions. If Yad Vashem chooses to ignore the facts, for example the massacre at Dir Yassin, or the Nakba (“The Catastrophe,” the Palestinians’ term for what happened to them after 1948), it means that it’s afraid of something and that its historic approach is flawed.” Shapira said when he was sacked (ten years ago).

Prince William also visited the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, (a title which infuriated Israelis),  shared peace pleasantries with President Abbas and played football with some kids. In Ramallah he spoke to school girls in Jalazone refugee camp, and visited a cultural display and a street food festival, but the continued annexation of land, building of settlements and walls, the killing, systematic repression and displacement of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state remained absent from discussion, and unsurprisingly, the daily lives of Palestinians, which includes checkpoints, an apartheid wall and illegal settlements remained invisible in the official visit.

“You will not be forgotten,” Prince William told his Palestinian hosts as he stepped from the Occupied Territories back into Israel – the real focus of his visit. As he told his Tel Aviv embassy audience: “The United Kingdom stands with you as we work together for a peaceful and prosperous future. The ties between our two countries have never been stronger, whether in our record levels of trade and investment, our cooperation in science and technology; or the work we do together to keep our people safe.”

In Jerusalem, donning a black skullcap at the Western Wall, accompanied by security guards, he placed his right hand on the ancient stones, stuck a note in a crack,  and stood for a full minute while cameras flashed.

“Today we experienced a moment of history which will live long in the memory of Jews around the world,” said the Chief Rabbi of Britain Ephraim Mirvis, who accompanied the prince on his visit. “The Western Wall stands at the epicenter of our faith. To see the future monarch come to pay his respects was a remarkable gesture of friendship and a sign of the duke’s regard for the sanctity of Jerusalem.”

Mission accomplished, Prince William flew back to London on Thursday from Ben Gurion airport, named after David Ben Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency and head of the Zionist workers movement.

In 1938 Ben Gurion is quoted as telling Jewish leaders: “In our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us, but let us not ignore the truth among ourselves.  We are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”

I doubt Prince William knew that.

Michael Dickinson can be contacted at michaelyabanji@gmail.com.

July 2, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

CIA Teams Up With Defense Industry To Undermine Korea Negotiations

By William Craddick | Disobedient Media | June 30, 2018

In a new development that will shock no one, factions within the CIA attempted for the second time in just over a month to undermine President Donald Trump’s peace overtures towards North Korea by leaking information calculated to decrease confidence in Kim Jong Un’s willingness to earnestly negotiate.

On June 29, 2018, NBC News released a report quoting anonymous CIA officials who claimed that North Korea was increasing nuclear production at “secret sites” without providing any actual evidence for such claims. The report’s credibility is further weakened by the fact that it also cited reports from a think tank which has strong connections to the defense industry and other private special interests.

In disseminating their report, the CIA used NBC reporter Ken Dilanian as an outlet for leaks. As Disobedient Media previously reported, Dilanian was outed by the Intercept in 2014 as a CIA asset. In the aftermath of the disclosure, Dilanian’s previous employers at the Tribune Washington and Los Angeles Times disavowed the disgraced journalist. In at least one instance, the CIA’s instructions to Dilanian appears to have led to significant changes in a story that was eventually published in the Los Angeles Times.

Since that time, Dilanian has persisted in pushing articles written by former CIA officials who continue to perpetuate the “Trump-Russia” collusion narrative without any regard to facts, such as Steven Hall’s Washington Post article titled: “I was in the CIA. We wouldn’t trust a country whose leader did what Trump did.”

In the absence of hard evidence from the CIA to back their claims about North Korea, Dilanian cited the opinion of Clinton administration official Joel Wit and reports from 38north.org. 38north is a project run by the Henry L. Stimson Center. The Stimson Center’s Board of Directors includes individuals associated with organizations such as Northrop Grumman, the Boeing Company, Warburg Pincus, the Carnegie Endowment, Mercy Corps, The Council on Foreign Relations, the Department of Defense, the CIA and US Department of the Treasury. Their Partners include the George C. Marshall Foundation, Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Research Center and the Jinnah Institute.

Satellite images circulated by 38north claiming to show improvements to North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center appear to have been obtained from Airbus Defense and Space SAS, a subsidiary of European multinational conglomerate Airbus Group SE. Airbus was the brainchild of Germany’s DaimlerChrysler Aerospace and British Aerospace. The association of a German connected transnational group in efforts to undermine Korean peace negotiations is interesting given the strong connections they held with the now scandalized South Korean government of Park Geun-hye.

The involvement of a think tank in a website that is centered around undermining US confidence in North Korea is hardly a surprise given their connections to the military-industrial complex and internationalist special interest groups. Both Northrop Grumman and Boeing have seen their stock’s value drop in the aftermath of Trump’s Singapore meeting with Kim Jong Un in what analysts saw as a temporary setback to defense stocks. Seeing such corporations use their ties to institutions such as the Stimson Center to collaborate with the CIA in an effort to scuttle commitments to North Korean denuclearization and a peace accord between the Koreas and United States represents a new low.

Despite the best efforts of the CIA, President Trump has stated that there is no current nuclear threat from North Korea, and that the Singapore Summit represented a positive interaction with the leader of the so-called “hermit kingdom.” Trump has repeatedly highlighted the opportunity for Chairman Kim to engage with the world and begin a new era of “security and prosperity” for North Korea. North Korea destroyed portions of their test site at Punggye-ri before a group of foreign journalist observers in the lead up to the US-North Korea summit on June 12.

July 2, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Trade War is Here: Some of the New “Facts of Life”

By Maximilian C. Forte | Zero Anthropology | July 2, 2018

In Madeleine Albright’s new book, dramatically titled Fascism: A Warning, she slams the anti-globalization crowd, claiming yet again that globalization is here to stay—it’s a “fact of life”. It must be another of those facts of life that we are seeing today, like “Donald Trump will never be elected president” or “UK voters will ultimately reject Brexit” or perhaps that there will never be a trade war?

If we believe Albright, humans have finally invented something permanent, nature-like, eternal–not coincidentally, eternity is the classic time of myth. Albright is not alone in being unable to recognize reality, even when staring straight at it: this morning Fox News kept speaking of a “potential” trade war being underway. When actual is pushed away into the zone of the potential, we have a serious reality-recognition problem at work. It means that neoliberal free traders—which unites both Fox News and Madeleine Albright, trivial “resistance” motifs regardless—lack the basic terms for speaking about what they are seeing, even as stock markets resume their plunge. But when is a trade war a trade war for Fox News ? What extreme, draconian conditions of spectacular conflict and destruction need to sweep over cities like a dark toxic fog for them to finally agree that there is a trade war? Were they expecting “shock and awe”?

Yes, the trade war is now on. We are officially in Day #2 of an international trade war that involves the biggest players in the world economy—the US, China, Japan, the European Union—along with Canada, Mexico, Brazil and others.

∗∗∗∗∗
Set everything else aside, this is a time not to be missed:
this is the biggest event since the last “can never happen” event,
that being the election of Donald Trump.
∗∗∗∗∗

In addition to a trade war between the US, Canada, and Mexico, that formally started yesterday (July 1, 2018), another big turn happened: Mexicans elected a populist and left-wing nationalist, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. North America now has two nationalists occupying the highest political office in two of the three nation-states of the continent. NAFTA is almost certain to die at this point.

It’s Canada’s turn next, and all signs are that Justin Trudeau is in very deep trouble. The next national election, which happens next year, will go to the party that sounds the most nationalistic. That almost inevitably strikes out the now ruling Liberal Party of Canada, and almost certainly takes down their ambiguously slightly more “left” twin, the New Democratic Party. It will be up to the Conservatives, who are Canada’s ideological equivalent of John McCain, to change their stripes, reach back decades into the history of Canada’s conservative politics, and rediscover ways of posing as nationalists. If the effort all proves futile, then the provinces are going to be left wondering what the real, material, practical benefits are of remaining within the confederation—and it’s not like there is a strong nationalist cultural and ideological content that holds the country together, so the material side of things matters an awful lot. (Ironically, Canada lacks a system of free trade domestically, between provinces, and if it had one what would be added to the Canadian economy would dwarf the value of agreements like the TPP by a dozen times). Material politics matter most now, because Canada lacks a national identity politics to fall back on. Right now the only identity politics that prevail in Canada are the identity politics of small fractions of minority groups, of niches within niches set in motion against other niches in the competition for rewards, recognition, and special rights. But by all means, keep “marching for women” if you think that is in any way relevant and a meaningful response at this time.

Canada as such is deeply unprepared for what is happening today. Already the ruling Liberals have signaled just how ill-equipped they are to meet this historical moment head on: they have announced a series of palliative, band-aid measures to compensate companies and workers for losses. That is what you do when you expect all of this to blow over soon. However, President Trump already made it clear that if counter-tariffs were slapped on the US, the US would then escalate further. Canada and Mexico have essentially called Trump’s bluff, a dangerous thing to do since they are playing Trump’s game, and you can therefore expect the US to follow through with more measures, and on and on this will go.

Thus the band-aid measures, being conceived by a short-term mentality, will simply not suffice as deglobalization becomes the new “fact of life”. The next party in Canada to win an election would not only need to sound like it is nationalist, if it is really smart it will do what Trudeau failed to do: establish an infrastructure, with incentives and subsidies, for new national industries that are fully protected, operating within a protected domestic market. Canada builds jets, trains, and ships: there is no credible reason it cannot have its own line of automobiles—Canadians need to rush to neutralize Trump’s planned auto tariffs. The Canadian government may need to launch new state-owned enterprises, and would need to decouple the pricing of petroleum from the world market. Canada is self-sufficient in oil, and could go for at least two centuries without imports—it is time to make oil as cheap as possible for Canadian consumers and producers, and it ought to be close to free.

(In my small corner of the world, I already started to work toward reestablishing a Canadian national anthropology, in spite of many criticisms, which would make a true decolonization more practical, because it begins where it needs to begin: by being anti-imperial. If you do not get that point, then you really ought to stop using words like decolonization. Likewise, just as Canadians are only now toying with ideas of boycotting US products and not traveling to the US, I have already been doing so for a decade, regardless of the definite professional costs and consequences.)

What is also quite amazing is how Trump is compelling everyone else to act like Trump. The international response to Trump’s economic nationalism, is the replication of economic nationalism. Tariffs are met by tariffs, protection met by protectionism. Nationalism is coming back, in full force. The defeated elites are right to cry over the loss of a “rules based international order,” what others have called a liberal international order, or what George H.W. Bush heralded as the “New World Order”. While the resurgence of mercantilism does not mean the end of imperialism, because the two are fully compatible (study the history of the British, French, German, Japanese, and American empires to see why), what this new phase in world history signals is the death knell for neoliberal globalism, and for the notion of a US-led global order serving an unmoored transnational capitalist class. Deglobalization will thus be matched by multipolarity. Sure the world can still prove to be a “dangerous” place—it’s not like the world was in any way a safe place under the dominance of neoliberal elites (or do I really need to mention Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Colombia, DR Congo, plus all the debt crises, structural adjustment catastrophes, refugee surges, financial collapses, and 9/11 to make the point?)

Suddenly, I am left with the task of possibly dumping my reassessment of Trump on US empire, and going back to my original assessment, especially as Trump the nationalist of 2016 seems to have come back. Still, deciphering Trump’s position is not without its challenges, especially given the notorious chaos and factionalism in the White House on trade issues. Trump’s assistant on trade and manufacturing, Prof. Peter Navarro, in a fairly reasonable piece, articulated a position of maximum free trade—that is not economic nationalism, as much as it would appear to be unvarnished neoliberalism. However, this might just be a rhetorical tactic: to call out the hypocrisy of free traders given the lack of actually free trade, in order to permanently shut down any more talk of free trade. The fact of the matter is that for the last several years, protectionist measures have been on the rise worldwide, and most of the world had already receded from putting into practice the ideals of free trade. Trump seems to have decided to end with all the pretense, and to accelerate the process towards its logical final conclusion.

Canada is projected to be the number one country to be hit hardest by US tariffs. In the meantime, Canadians are routinely lied to by the Liberal government, the “defence” industry, think tanks and associated academics, which would have citizens believe—as an article of faith—that Russia is the biggest threat. Good call, “Russia,” nice one, real smart.

So welcome to the time of deglobalization. Anyone who is telling you that this time is otherwise, is just not worth your attention. Have a great day.

July 2, 2018 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon test-drops upgraded nuke from B-2 stealth bomber over Nevada

RT | July 2, 2018

The US Air Force has tested the B61-12 nuclear bomb by dropping a dud from a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber over Nevada, as part of an ambitious project to extend the service life of the bomb, introduced in 1968, by another 20 years.

“The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) and the US Air Force completed two non-nuclear system qualification flight tests of the B61-12 gravity bomb on June 9 at Tonopah Test Range in Nevada,” the Department of Energy announced last week. “These tests are the first such end-to-end qualification tests on a B-2A Spirit Bomber for the B61-12.”

The experiments included running trials on “NNSA designed bomb assembly and US Air Force acquired tail-kit,” as part of the effort to evaluate the “aircraft’s capability to deliver the weapon and the weapon’s non-nuclear function.”

Different versions of the B-61 nuclear gravity bomb have been deployed across the US and NATO bases for five decades. While, over the years, the Pentagon produced numerous modifications to the deadly weapon, B61 variants of 3, 4, 7, and 11 remain in service.

The Pentagon is currently in the middle of the $7.6 billion ‘B61-12 Life Extension Program’, which aims to “refurbish, reuse, or replace all of the bomb’s nuclear and non‐nuclear components” and extend the service life of the B61 by at least 20 years. The “first production unit” is scheduled for completion in 2020.

Besides deploying B61-12 on modern and future long range bombers, the Pentagon is making sure the bomb can be easily used by F-15E fighter jets, and wants to integrate it with the F-35 Lightning II fifth generation combat jets, raising concerns it is creeping towards lowering the threshold for tactical use of nuclear weapons.

After former President Barack Obama authorized a nuclear modernization program, Trump revised it into an ambitious 30-year project that would cost at least $1.2 trillion to complete. Some $800 billion will be spent on maintaining nuclear forces, while about $400 billion will be spent on modernizing them, under the pretext of an existential need to deter “revisionist powers” such as China and Russia.

Russia has repeatedly expressed concerns over a loosening of nuclear launch guidelines under Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which says that non-nuclear attacks which result in mass casualties or target key infrastructure constitute enough grounds for a US nuclear retaliation. Moscow also warned that deploying more B61 bombs to NATO bases in Europe would also violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Meanwhile, to justify taxpayer spending on nuclear upgrades, Washington constantly points the finger at Russia, accusing it of threatening its neighbors and US national security. “Russia has demonstrated its willingness to use force to alter the map of Europe and impose its will on its neighbors, backed by implicit and explicit nuclear first-use threats,” the NPR report claims, despite Russian military doctrine clearly stating that nukes can only be used in response to a nuclear attack, or when the state’s very existence is put under threat by a massive conventional attack.

READ MORE:

US nukes in Europe & low strike threshold are direct violations of non-proliferation treaty – Moscow

US lowering threshold for using nukes causes deepest concern – Lavrov

July 2, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Revisiting Litvinenko, What Really Happened?

By Ryan Dawson | ANTI-neocon Report | April 26, 2015

As we all know Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by polonium, a rare radioactive substance. The main narrative blamed it all on Vladimir Putin of Russia. The rationale rested on little other than because Litvinenko was a Putin critic. This was the quick line in mass media, and it was on all the typical war propaganda channels. Thanks in large part to Alexander Goldfarb, a stooge of exiled oligarch Boris Berezovskiy, having twisted the tale of the poisoning into a ‘Putin did it’ cover up for a botched smuggling operation, by declaring this was Litvinenko’s belief, expressed in a death bed letter that he allegedly signed. Really? And he wanted you, Goldfarb, a biologist who worked for the Oligarch, not a lawyer, to witness this letter and read it to the media? Why were you even there? Akhmed Zakayev thought Goldfarb was CIA.

There are many things wrong with the “Putin did it” story. For one, there is no motive, even with Litvinenko being a critic of Russia, he was no threat whatsoever to Putin. The man worked with Chechen terrorists and the Israeli-Russian oligarchs. But assuming that there was a sufficient motive to kill him, think about this: Why would Russia use a very rare, very expensive, and easily traceable radioactive substance to kill him instead of some cheap poison or just shooting him? Why risk smuggling radioactive material into the UK which is an act of war? And why poison someone on the same day Britain signed an accord to make it easier for Russia to extradite high profile criminals.  London has become a central hub for asylum-seeking Russians. The UK has not extradited a single person to face Russian court. Many oligarchs fled to the US and Israel because of their non-extradition status. Israeli-Russian Boris Berezovsky, the former oligarch and media owner, and Ahmed Zakayev, the Chechen leader who was arrested in the UK, got a 50,000GPB bail paid and then got political asylum both landed in Britain.

Yet this murder by radioactive poison scandal is exactly what the UK/US media would have you believe. They want to say that Putin had someone sneak into the UK with polonium and poison Litvinenko with it. It just isn’t plausible. It’s actually absurd. Why would the American media side with the man who worked for terrorists and who worked for one of the exiled oligarchs? Well first off these “Russian” oligarchs are primarily Zionist Israeli-Russians who acquired much of their wealth and techniques from the Israeli Mossad agent Marc Rich. Secondly they have business relationships with the Bush administration. The Israeli-Russian Oligarch Khodorkosky had dealings with Cheney, the Carlyle group, and with UNACOL. Boris Berezovsky is a business partner with none other than President Bush’s brother Neil Bush. Boris invests in Neil’s Ignite! computer software, and Neil Bush met with Boris even after he was a known felon. One of the most wealthy Oligarchs used to be Oligarch Khdorkovsky of Yukos oil. He was worth over 15 billion dollars rivaling Roman Abramovich the richest of them all. Khodorkosky was buying votes in the Duma. Putin cracked down on the oligarchs forcing many to flee and arresting and throwing Khodorkosky in jail. He recently just had further charges placed on him to make his stay in jail all that much longer. 

The Khodorkovsky arrest followed an unpublicized meeting earlier that year on July 14, 2003, between Khodorkovsky and Cheney. Following the Cheney meeting, Khodorkovsky began talks with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, Rice’s old firm, about taking a major state in Yukos, said to have been between 25% and 40% –source

The Washington Post reported “Days before his October 2003 arrest on tax fraud charges, Khodorkovsky had entertained George H W Bush, the representative of the powerful and secretive Washington Carlyle Group in Moscow. They were discussing the final details of the US oil company share buy-in of Yukos…

Yukos had also just made a bid to acquire rival Sibneft from Boris Berezovsky, another Yeltsin-era oligarch. YukosSibneft, with 19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, would then own the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world after ExxonMobil.”

YukosSibneft would be the fourth-largest in the world in terms of production, pumping 2.3 million barrels of crude oil a day. The Exxon or Chevron buy-up of YukosSibneft would have been a literal energy coup d’etat. Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky knew it. Above all, Putin knew it and moved decisively to block it.- William Engdhal 

Sibneft’s Boris Berezovsky just so happens to be the Israeli-Russian oligarch who lives in London who Litvineko worked for. Alexander Litvinenko who was formerly FSB fled to the UK to avoid court prosecution in Russia, worked for a shady Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. Boris Berezovsky just so happens to be the Israeli-Russian oligarch who lived in London after fleeing the Russian judicial system for a multitude of crimes too long to list. He was on Interpol’s most wanted list. Here is the grand prize. After the US and UK press branded Putin with the poisoning despite there being Zero evidence, (something the US is very well known for now) investigators were tracking down the traces of Polonium in the UK. They detected traces of Polonium at Berezovsky’s office and residence! Now I do not know about you, but in my place of work, and certainly in my house, I do not have rare radioactive substances. Polonium is not something you just get at the market or pick up by accident walking through the park.

No experienced mob boss like Berezovsky would be dumb enough to murder an underling in such a manner either. Therefore his death was an accident. It was mostly likely it was a botched smuggling operation. Why was he moving such a dangerous substance? Did he need fast cash? Were they planning to create a dirty bomb? Such a “smoky bomb” would turn the Polonium into powder and kill anyone who ingested it.

Traces of Polonium were found on the planes that Litvinenko had been on. So I think we can deduce what happened. He was a mule. The questions remain, why did he have it?, Where did he get it? What was he going to do with it? Why was it in the offices of Berezovsky and Erinsys Ltd (Britain’s Blackwater)?

The “Putin did it” smear case has never made sense. First of all, the amount of polonium 210 in play would have cost millions of dollars. That amount is too expensive to purchase and too large to go unnoticed if it were stolen. The only way to obtain such a quantity would be on a well organized black market that had a connection to a nuclear facility. It would certainly help organized crime if the nuclear powered supplier they received the Polonium from was not subjected to international inspections or part of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Such a country, (Foreign country A) which denied they even built nuclear weapons for decades, would certainly also deny selling their Polonium byproduct as well.

Is it possible to hide that from the press? Yes. The media would ignore this for the same reason the media ignores them stealing nuclear secrets and building hundreds of nuclear weapons in Dimona, then throwing whistle blowers who took pictures of their warheads, in jail.

Litvinenko was in Israel, where he met Leonid Nevzlin the CEO of Yukos shortly before he died. If you wanted to buy/steal radioactive material that would be the place. What was he negotiating with Nevzlin? We learned Alexander had been an informant in a case that led to the arrest of nine Georgina and Russian Mobsters in Spain, including Alexander Gofstein a lawyer for Yukos who apparently was laundering money.

The downfall began when Georgina Mob Boss Zakhar Kalashov was arrested in May 2006. The scam was similar to what the old Five Families of New York had done, when guys like Meyer Lansky took profits from illegal gambling businesses and funneled them into buying up real estate in Florida. In the European case, the mob was taking illegal funds and buying up real estate in Spain as well as making investments into legitimate businesses.

Litivnenko’s associates, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, who both had met with him the day of the poisoning, were also both hospitalized. They left traces of Polonium in Hamburg as they had taken the trip to Germany before meeting Litvinenko. It appears all three were involved in a smuggling operation, but for who?

Short answer: Russian Oligarch Boris Berezovsky’s employee Alexander Litvinenko died from over exposure to Polonium in a botched smuggling operation. That is why traces of it were at Boris’s house and on the planes Litvinenko was riding to and from Israel. The smear on Putin/Russia using a highly traceable 10 million dollar poison to kill a critic is about as plausible and rational as saying we have “British Intelligence” about Niger…. This transparent bogus lie was a quick and shamelessly sloppy explanation to cover up how and why this man in the UK had a radioactive poison in his body. Polonium only has a half life of 138 days.

Litvinenko had been in Israel to visit Yukos’s CEO, just shortly before he died. And it’s an open secret that Israel has nuclear weapons, the only place without nuclear safeguard or inspections. Traces of polonium were also on the British Airway planes that Litvinenko took to and from Israel. So it they would have the means, location, and the timing fits, but let’s just blame, Putin “The New Hitler” as Neocons have dubbed him?

Why the fuss about a conspiracy claiming that Putin put Litvinenko on a hitlist and poisoned him? Well as wacky as that story is, it was probably the best they could come up with on short notice. Boris knew once the police found out how Litvinenko died that there would be a lot of explaining to do. He also knew that if the investigation went forward that they could find more of this Polonium on his properties. So they just claimed the KGB was trying to kill them all.

Some History

This is not the first time that Berezovsky tried to pin a murder on someone else and claim that all the damning evidence pointing to him was a frame. There are the notorious cases (in Russia) of Ivan Litskevich and Vlad Listyev.

Ivan Listkevich was the general director of the Omsk oil Refinery easily the best refinery in Russia. Abramovich and Berezovsky planned to take over the refinery and make it part of Berezovsky’s Sibnef (which it now is). Listkevich resisted. Ivan had outside investments from LUKoil (10% of the stock) and CS First Boston. So in no way was he threatened to sink. Omsk was in the best location, had the latest equipment, and was well positioned to continue to soar. They serviced the biggest oil producers in Russia. Naturally Ivan did not want to be swallowed by Sibnef. On August 19, 1995 Ivan was found drowned in the Irtysh River. I doubt he went there to swim. Five days later Sibnef (Gazprom) took over. August 24th 1995, using his good buddy Yeltson, Berezovsky got a Presidential Decree №872, to order a transfer of all the state’s share in Omsk as well as 4 other companies to Sibnef. Then in 1996 Boris and Roman privatized Sibnef through a series of Loans-for-Shares’ auctions which were a complete scam run through front companies and offshore banks. Yeltsin approved of it.

The case may leave doubts in the mind until one learns about the murder of Vlad Listyev. In 1994 Boris attacked one of his rivals over control of a media outlet. Part of the attack was broadcast all over TV and came to be known as “faces in the snow” as Boris’s rival’s bodyguard were forced at gun point to lie face down in the snow. Shortly after a 90mph high speed chase and attacking rival Gusinsky’s MOST guards and pinning Gusinsky in his own building, Berezovsky would take control of ORT (channel 1) through an illegal non-public “auction” and gain a near media monopoly.

For details on that I recommend reading “God Father of the Kremlin” if you can still find it. It was written by the senior editor of Forbes in Russia who holds a Ph.D in Russian history Paul Klebnikov. For the record Paul Klebnikov was killed after publishing his book on the Oligarchs, particularly on Boris, who is on the cover. He was shot four times in Moscow while leaving work and then died in the hospital after getting stuck on an elevator.

After the Gusinsky event, Boris had another problem. Vladislav Listyev. Listyev was probably the most popular talk show host in Russia and a TV producer. He was a business partner with Boris but the problem was he was not crooked. As general director of ORT he decided to fix a multi-million dollar leak in the company and in direct way of Boris paying people off in the Mob to do dirty work, as well as paying himself by spending money for ads in other companies he owned where he also ran the advertising sales. He had an offer from Sergei Lisovsky to buy up the sector. Negotiations never went through and Vlad had a different idea.

On Feb 20th 1995 Vlad announced that he would break the monopoly of Boris and Sergei. He called for a moratorium on ORT advertising until they could work out ethical standards. As you can imagine that did not make Boris or the rest of the mob happy. Eight days later Boris personally met with “Nikolai” a mafia boss, and handed him a hundred thousand dollars in cash. This was witnessed by two police officers who were monitoring the Mob. Prior to that Boris’s lacky Badri offered money to a different gangster but that man was arrested before he could do what was asked of him and he confessed this in jail. On March 1st the day after Berezovsky paid a second Mob Boss, Vlad Listyev was shot in the back at the entrance of his home.

Guilty as sin, with a confession against Badri as well as being personally witnessed by two police, offering another mob boss money, Boris was desperate. He was inches away from being arrested. Boris’s TV network was cut out of government subsidies after the police raided it and it was subject to bankruptcy. Fellow Media giant and friend Ruppert Murdoch promised to invest in the network and bail him out. How nice. And we all know where Murdoch stands. This relationship might also explain why Fox News and Sky News in the UK were so blatantly cheerleading the “Putin killed Litvinenko” conspiracy story.

But here is the real kicker. It is just as outrageous and far fetched as the Litvinenko poisoning. Boris concocted a story for Yeltsin which was recorded on video tape produced by Irina Lesnevskaya a producer at ORT and a friend of Yeltsin’s wife. The tape claimed that it was all a big conspiracy against Berezovsky and that the real culprit (who had no motive other than to frame Boris [apparently able to hire a gun to kill Vlad but not Boris?) was none other than bitter rival Gusinsky of Most Bank who Boris had already tried to kill once.

Yeltsin was paranoid of Gusinsky’s political ambitions and Boris knew this. Boris also blamed X-KGB and said Vlad was killed by the MOST group, and not the mob he was witnessed meeting with a week after Vlad was going to break his monopoly. (Sounds like “Iraq moved the nonexistent WMDs to Syria just to make the US look bad.” give me a break) Boris claimed to be set up because he was loyal to Yeltsin as was his new media outlet.

Yeltsin ever a partner in cover ups, not to mention a drunk and a thief, got Boris out of trouble once again by firing the lead investigators in the case which intimidated others to drop it. There was a huge public outcry. A TV personality had been killed. ORT created a new company called ORT advertising with a monopoly to sell ads on commission no less, and the boss-man chosen was none other than Sergei Lisovsky. Wow how utterly shameless.

If you can speak Russian or if you can find an English copy of the Boris/Lesnevskaya tape transcript sent to Yeltsin, it’s going to make you very angry. It is about as plausible as saying Putin risked an act of war with the UK to kill a critic who worked for both a criminal as well as terrorist.

Who Done It?

So we know what didn’t happen. But there still remains a “who done it.” The quickest way to get to the bottom of this is to see who is lying the most and loudest, because that is usually who has the most to hide.

Remember Anna Politkovskaya? She was killed on Putin’s birthday and the alternative press and the ‘mindlessly accepting any conspiracy’ types who fell for it, tried to use that circumstantial “evidence” to blame the murder on Putin.

These are the same types that claim Russia bombed its own apartment buildings to start a war with Chechnya omitting the fact that the apartment bombing took place five months after the war has already started, and the “sources” trying to blame the FSB were none other than Boris’s lacky Litvinenko and well known plagiarist David Satter, who wrote for the PNAC co-founders’ Weekly Standard, which gave the world all the bogus lies about Iraq’s WMD and connection to the September 11th attacks. Robert Kagan, the paper’s cofounder with William Kristol, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Times calling “Speaking of Iraq” which pushes every erroneous prewar scare tactic there was. His wife Victoria Nuland is the same woman who was recorded on the phone saying “F” the EU and openly talking about who would be a good replacement Prime Minister in Ukraine. She chose Arseniy Yatseniuk, who she called “Yatz” and he did become the prime minister of Ukraine a month later after the coup. Everything out of this faction’s mouth has been blindly anti-Russian.

There is a huge difference between conspiracy and kookspiracy. Getting away from the outlandish unsubstantiated claims about Anna’s death, let’s uncover something factual. Anna Politkovskaya was the journalist who had published three different articles on how SOMEONE was testing Polonium on Chechen children. Gee! Where have we seen THAT scenario before? Anna’s articles were published in the Novaya Gazeta in 2006 and she was killed October of that same year.

The Washington Post then makes this clever claim. “Leonid Nevzlin, a former Yukos oil company shareholder and Russian exile currently living in Israel, told the Associated Press in late November that Litvinenko had given him a document related to a dossier on criminal charges made by Russian prosecutors against people connected to Yukos. Nevzlin, who is charged by Russian prosecutors with having organized killings, fraud and tax evasion, claimed Litvinenko’s inquiries may have provided a motive for his poisoning”

Notice who else is in that Washington Post article (Scaramella) and who was planting the ideas that Putin had killed both Litvinenko and Anna. How crazy is that to use polonium to murder someone… Scaramella is a rotten one. After Anna’s lawyer Stanislav Markelov was murdered in 2009 followed by the murder of one of her key informants in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, the same year, there was a retrial in Anna’s case which went to the Supreme Court. Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov stirred up a public disgust when he said about Anna’s informant Natalia Estemirova on Radio Liberty “She was a woman… who had never possessed any honor, dignity or conscience.”

The prosecution cornered Dmitry Pavliutchenkov a former policeman who in turn confessed Lom-Ali Gaitukayev was who negotiated the contract killing and behind him he suspected Boris Berezovsky. Dmitry was sentenced to 11 years in jail. Five men were found guilty in her murder. Three were the Chechen brothers who had been acquitted in the first trial and they went to prison. Rustam Makhmudov and Lom-Ali Gaitukayev got life sentences in 2014. Berevsovsky had died the year before in March of 2013.

They were already testing the poison on Chechens and killed the journalist uncovering the story. Lit overdosed by accident and the Oligarchs had to quickly create a story to explain how it is possible such a shady character had any contact with this stuff. So they do what they did before, blame it on a conspiracy of Boris’s enemies even when there is no motive, no evidence and not even simple logic to it.

The most troubling thing here is not that the mob did something illegal or that the Western press jumped the gun to do an anti-Russian witch hunt. All of that is pretty run of the mill. It’s not even that Israel secretly has nukes and is involved with organized crime. Again, imagine my lack of shock. It’s not even the multiple murders that are most troubling. The most troubling part of this story is what the ultimate purpose of that much Polonium was and why it was in the UK. The potential for a dirty bomb is enormous. With the current climate of ISIS and disgruntled youth in Europe joining the mercenary forces to fight Israel’s enemies in Syria and Lebanon, a dirty bomb in the UK is not an unimaginable scenario. Just having such a thing could also hold leverage over politicians there too. The source of the Polonium should have been traced and potential sources should also be subject to inspection.

July 1, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Sergey Lavrov’s interview with Channel 4

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov interviewed by Cathy Newman on a wide range of issues: Russia-US relations, Syria, Salisbury incident and others

June 30, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

What Would Help the Peace Process in Korea?

By David William Pear | American Herald Tribune | June 30, 2018

It looks like peace is breaking out in Korea. The Koreans themselves are moving fast to mend their nation. When paradigm shifts happen they often happen quickly. In just a little over a year the South Korean people demanded the ouster of the corrupt rightwing Park Geun-hye as their president, and a new election replaced her with the liberal human rights lawyer Moon Jae-in.

Moon brought in a new era with the overwhelming support of the South Korean people. Kim Jong-un of North Korea responded likewise. Since the beginning of this year the normalization of relations between the North and the South have been moving fast. U.S. diplomats cannot keep up with it. So let us look into the deep roots of the Korean War and what would help the peace process.

We can start by answering what caused the Korean War. The conventional wisdom is that the war was started by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) on June 25, 1950 when it invaded the Republic of Korea (i.e. South Korea). But the conventional wisdom is wrong. It is like saying that the Vietnam War started when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam; or asking when did the American Revolution start.

Scholars are coming around to recognizing that the Korean War was a civil war. Bruce Cumings in his book, “Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History”, explains it this way:

“The Korean War did not begin on June 25, 1950, much special pleading and argument to the contrary. If it did not begin then, Kim iI Sung could not have ‘started’ it then, either, but only at some earlier point. As we search backward for that point, we slowly grope toward the truth that civil wars do not start: they come. They originate in multiple causes, with blame enough to go around for everyone—and blame enough to include Americans who thoughtlessly divided Korea and then reestablished the colonial government machinery and the Koreans who served it.”

The Korean War has its roots in the mid 1800’s. There was a scramble for colonies, subjugation and influence in East Asia. The driving force of colonialism was trade. It was a scramble for booty, cheap labor, and markets. The Industrial Revolution and the instability of capitalism caused an excess of production; requiring new markets, and the need for more raw materials to feed the machines. Capitalism must constantly expand trade or growth stops, and the system collapses.

Fortunes were made in trade with Asia: tea, silk, spices, tobacco, sugar, rum, porcelain, cotton, coal, timber, gold and opium. The big powers in Asia were England, France, Dutch, Czarist Russia and the United States of America. Japan got into the game after the U.S. forcefully opened it for trade with the black gunboats of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854.

The Japanese were quick learners in the ways of Western imperialism. Theodore Roosevelt admired them greatly, and considered them to be a “superior” race of Asians. Racial stereotyping was then common and many Westerners considered Asians to be inferior heathens. It was not uncommon for Asians to view rightly foreigners and Christian missionaries as subversives, and wanted to keep them out.

In 1866 the U.S. armed merchant ship the General Sherman tried to force its way into a Korean port despite protests from Korea that it was not open for business. The Koreans attacked the ship, and when it got stuck on a sandbar they killed all the crew and burned the ship.

In 1871 the U.S. used the General Sherman incident as an excuse to launch an invasion of Korea with the aim of getting an apology and establishing trading relations. The U.S. invasion was a success, it taught the Koreans a lesson, but they still refused to establish trading relations.

Later, fearing subjugation by one colonial power or another, Korea decided to make a deal with what it thought would be the lesser evil, and entered into the Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation with the U.S. in 1882. Koreans took some comfort that the U.S. was on the other side of the ocean, unlike Japan.  In exchange for giving the U.S. unequal trading rights, the Koreans got a signed treaty of U.S. protection.

The U.S. broke its promise of protection and delivered Korea into the colonial hands of the Japanese with the Taft–Katsura agreement in 1905. Theodore Roosevelt made a secret pact with the Japanese during his mediation of the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War. The secret deal was that Japan got Korea, and the U.S. got a Japanese guarantee of non-interference with its colony in the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, even though he secretly and cynically double crossed the Koreans.

After World War Two the U.S. denied Korea a chance for independence again.  Instead of liberating Korea, the U.S. was responsible for the division of Korea at the 38th parallel. Russia agreed, and while the Russians ushered in a government of Korean freedom fighters in the North, the U.S. in the South put in place a puppet government of Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese, and the hated right-wing Korean aristocrats known as Yangban.

In both the north and the south Koreans were ready for self-government. In anticipation of the defeat of the Japanese and liberation, they had set up the Korean People’s Republic with grassroots committees all over the country. The head of the KPR in the South was Yo Un-hyong. Yo was a popular left-leaning nationalist and land reformer. He was assassinated 2 years later by the U.S. backed rightwing puppet government of Syngman Rhee

Even though the Korean people had governed themselves for over a thousand years, the U.S. did not consider them ready for self-government.  At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed that Korea be placed in a trusteeship. He said it would take 40 years before Korea would be ready for self-government.

When U.S. troops docked at the Port of Incheon Korea on September 8, 1945 Roosevelt was dead, and Harry Truman was president. Under Truman the ruse of a trusteeship was dropped. The spoils of war go to the victor and the U.S. set about establishing the southern half of Korea as if it was a new U.S. colony.

The Koreans did not even get to celebrate their first night of liberation in 1945. The U.S. military declared martial law and ordered a curfew for all Koreans. The Japanese colonial administrators were kept in place, and American and Japanese officers partied at the Chosen Hotel in Seoul for several drunken days.

The Japanese administrators, military and police simply put on U.S. Army Military Government (AMG) armbands, kept their rifles and patrolled the streets with fixed bayonets until 1946. Similar scenes were taking place in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia “liberated” from the Japanese. It was the beginning of the renewal of the U.S. “special relationship” with Japan that Theodore Roosevelt had established in 1905.

The U.S. befriended the enemy Japan and turned on their former Korean allies who had been fighting the Japanese for over 12 years. The U.S. military occupation government commanded by General John R. Hodge would be the military occupation government for the next 3 years.

In 1946 the Japanese administering southern Korea were replaced mostly with Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese, and the yangban kept their lands. The U.S. feared that communism would take hold in liberated countries. It was the communists who had put up the biggest armed resistance in Asia against the Japanese during World War Two. The U.S. no longer needed or wanted them.

The scene in northern Korea was quite different. The Korean People’s Republic and their grassroots committees took over the government functions. The Japanese war criminals, collaborators, and yangban fled south where the U.S. welcomed them with open arms.

Within 3 years the Russians had pulled out all of their armed forces. The Russians had their own devastated country to rebuild, and they were more concerned about Eastern Europe, which was the historical invasion route to Russia.

The U.S.’s own intelligence had identified the desires of the Korean people. They wanted independence, self-government and land reform. Those were the antithesis of what the U.S. wanted for the Korean people. It was the U.S. that was scrambling all over the world to stem the tidal wave of anti-colonialism.

Kim il Sung was a national patriotic hero that had been fighting Japanese colonialism since the early 1930’s. If the U.S. had not blocked nationwide elections in Korea, he or another leftist reformer would have overwhelmingly won a fair election.

In the Moscow Conference of December, 1945 the U.S. and Russia agreed that Korea would be independent within 5 years after nationwide elections and that all foreign troops would withdraw.  Russia kept its end of the bargain.  The U.S. broke its promise.

Instead the U.S. rigged an election in the South, in which the Communist Party and leftist were not allowed to participate. Later the U.S. would use the same trick in South Vietnam, in order to keep that country divided too. Like Kim il Sung in Korea, Ho Chi Minh was a national hero and would have won in a fair nationwide election in Vietnam.

Turn to 1950. Military clashes had been a regular occurrence along Korea’s 38th parallel for 2 years, many of them initiated by the South. The 38th parallel was not recognized as an international border by either the U.S. puppet government in South Korea or the anti-colonial government in North Korea.

Korea was one country, and each side claimed to be the legitimate government of all of Korea. Therefore, the Korean War was not a war of aggression. There was no invasion of Korea by Koreans. The invaders were the U.S. which was subjugating the South, and backed a little-known transplant named Syngman Rhee, who had lived in the U.S. for forty years.

The Rhee dictatorship went on an anti-communist witch hunt that killed, imprisoned, tortured and disappeared hundreds of thousands of patriotic left-leaning Koreans in the South. Repressive dictatorships continued the persecution of dissidents for the next 40 years.

No one knows exactly what happened on the night of June 25, 1950; both sides said that the other side started the clash. The scenario that has become official U.S. legend raised many questions, most notably by the investigative journalist I. F. Stone in his book “The Hidden History of the Korean War (1950-1951)”.

For Kim il Sung and his compatriots the Korean War was an anti-colonial war. First he fought against the Japanese, just as Vietnam was fighting then against the French and their puppet government. To Kim il Sung, South Korea was a colonial puppet government of the US. The U.S. can be seen as the aggressor in both Vietnam and Korea.

The legal fig leaf of U.S. subjugation and the establishment of a puppet government in South Korea was a U.S. dominated United Nations-backed rigged election in the South. Communists were not allowed to participate so they boycotted it.

For the next 40 years South Korea was ruled by U.S. backed dictators Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo. If one wants to know who controls a country, then look at who controls the country’s military. South Korea’s military is still today under the wartime command of the US military.

Korea and Vietnam have many similarities. Both were invaded by colonial powers in the 1800’s. Would any historian today write something like: The Vietnam War started when the North Vietnamese attacked their French colonial occupiers? Would anybody say that The Vietnam War started in 1957 when Ho Chi Minh’s forces crossed the 17th parallel? South Vietnam, as was South Korea was ruled by a puppet government of the US.

Ho Chi Minh was a freedom fighter just as Kim il Sung was against the Japanese during World War Two. Both were fighting colonialism. The Vietnam War and the Korean War were wars against U.S. occupiers that had replaced colonial rule.

Neither North Korea nor South Korea recognized the 38th parallel as a border. As General MacArthur said when his armed forces crossed the 38th parallel on October 9, 1950, it was just an imaginary line.  MacArthur’s UN mandate was originally to repel the North Korean forces from South Korea. But MacArthur argued that the 38th parallel had no meaning and he ordered his army into one of the worst disasters in U.S. military history.

The Chinese had repeatedly warned that they would intervene if MacArthur crossed the 38th parallel. Had MacArthur heeded that warning it may have saved millions of lives, including tens of thousands of American lives.

When MacArthur’s forces reached the Yalu River separating Korea and China there were 300,000 Chinese volunteers and Koreans waiting in ambush. MacArthur’s forces had to run a bloody gauntlet at the Chosen Reservoir as they retreated back across the 38th parallel. The U.S. forces suffered over 15,000 casualties in that single battle.

*(Retreat from the Battle of the Chosen Reservoir)

The reunification of Vietnam, like Korea, was agreed to be settled by nationwide elections. As in Korea, the U.S. staged a phony election in South Vietnam and established the government of the Republic of Vietnam, under the puppet president Ngo Dinh Diem. Just as in Korea, the U.S. knew that if there were fair elections in Vietnam, then the Communist Party would win. So like in Korea, the U.S. staged a phony election in the south in which communists were not permitted to participate.

Article V, item 60 of the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953 recommended that within 3 months a conference would be held by all sides of the Korean War. All sides were to “settle through negotiation the question of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc. [sic]”.

The conference on Korea was held at the same Geneva Conference of 1954 that temporarily divided Vietnam. Nationwide elections in Vietnam were agreed to be held in 1956. No further agreement was reached on the “peaceful settlement of the Korean question”.

It was the US invasion of Korea in 1871, and Theodore Roosevelt’s betrayal that resulted in Korea being subjugated by Japan in 1905, and annexed in 1910. The U.S. caused much of the suffering, death and destruction of Korea for over a century, and a never ending war.

We cannot turn the clock back to March 1, 1919 when Woodrow Wilson made his 14 points speech that colonial people have a right to self-determination. Nor can we turn it back to 1948, and the promised independence for Korea.

What would help the peace process now in Korea is for the U.S. to get out of the way. All U.S. armed forces should be withdrawn from Korea, as they were supposed to have been in 1948. The US should stop bullying Koreans, stop meddling in the internal affairs of Korea, and let the Korean people settle their own destiny.

***

Reference and suggested reading

“Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom”, by Stephen Gowans.

“Reflections on the Roots of U.S. Involvement in Korea”, by Chang Soon.

“Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History”, by Bruce Cumings.

“The Hidden History of the Korean War (1950-1951)”, by I.F. Stone.

***

David William Pear may be contacted at dwpear521@gmail.com

June 30, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Charles Krauthammer: The Ultimate Armchair Warrior

By Martin SIEFF | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.06.2018

Charles Krauthammer, the eminent US media pundit died in June 2018 at the age of 68, reportedly of cancer of the small intestine.

Krauthammer was the loudest and leading public voice of the neoconservative movement in the United States. He was a lifelong warmonger and proud of it. Needless to say he never donned the uniform of his country when he had the chance and made sure his son never went to serve in the conflicts he so tirelessly demanded either.

Krauthammer championed the relentless and unending expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the efforts to recruit countries across Eurasia into the Atlantic Alliance. He demanded the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the toppling of previously stable governments in Ukraine and Libya. He urged the toppling of the government of Syria, demanding the policies that have so far killed at least 600,000 people and unleashed more than 5 million refugees. He demanded the 1998 bombing of Serbia. He sneered at the very idea of international law.

Krauthammer applauded the toppling of established governments including democratically elected ones across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East in the name of human rights. He relentlessly advocated the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ludicrous attempt to set up a US-designed, Shiite-dominated so-called democracy there. He sneered at and denied in the face of all the evidence the formidable anti-American popular rebellion in Iraq that started in May 2003. For months afterwards, Krauthammer claimed there was nothing to worry about. Later, he claimed that General David Petraeus had brought lasting peace to Iraq with his “Surge” Strategy.

Krauthammer hated and sought to destroy every attempt to bring a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He championed the Free Trade policies that gutted the US industrial base and brought poverty and despair to hundreds of millions of Americans. He fanatically opposed the Six-Plus-One nuclear agreement with Iran.

None of his “solutions” worked. He was oblivious to all consequences in the real world. He never changed. He was incapable of learning anything or ever admitting he had been wrong. He had practiced as a psychiatrist, but no one in the public domain was more in need of sustained therapy than himself.

In his last message on June 8, Krauthammer wrote, “I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.” It was another lie. No one did more to suppress free, balanced and open debate in the US media over four decades. He poured endless hatred and ridicule on everyone who disagreed with him. He was never even an independent voice. Every public position he took was carefully decided and coordinated in advance by the exceptionally close knit coterie of neoconservatives for whom he was the voice.

He appeared endlessly on Fox News and numerous other US media outlets. But no one was ever allowed to seriously criticize him or challenge his assertions in any of those forums. He applauded the passing of the 2001 Patriot Act with its outrageous extension of the already huge power of the US security services and Deep State.

While still in his mid-20s, Krauthammer suffered a bizarre accident that ironically left him immune from criticism for the rest of his life. He shattered his spine diving into a swimming pool which had far too little water in it, leaving him a quadriplegic for life.

He certainly showed an indomitable will and ingenuity in maintaining a full career. However this personal catastrophe had two other crucial effects never publicly acknowledged: It left him immune to the kind of virulent ad hominem personal abuse and contempt he freely showered on everyone else. He claimed to live in defiance of his physical affliction: Another lie. Any vitriol he poured on others was indulgently permitted. No legitimate criticism was allowed against him.

Second, as a cripple, Krauthammer was incapable of actually ever visiting Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine or the American heartland where the policies he demanded inflicted so much suffering. He did not want to know any such inconvenient facts. He did not just suffer from paradigm blindness all his life, he embraced it.

Although a successful psychiatric resident, he was extraordinarily arrogant and narcissistic and treated most people outside his family and closest colleagues with withering contempt. An informal poll carried out among Washington Post op-ed page editors in the 1990s overwhelmingly chose him as the most obnoxious and hated columnist they had to deal with. (Liberal columnist Richard Cohen easily was voted the most popular and the nicest guy.)

Krauthammer was abysmally ignorant of economics, business, practicalities of government, diplomacy, global history, war and strategy. He had never studied or practiced any of them. This ignorance generated the boundless confidence that was the secret of his success.

Krauthammer was never a reporter. He was physically incapable of visiting any country to see things himself and he was manifestly uninterested in anything that ordinary people anywhere had to say. He knew that he and his friends had all the answers. Nothing else was needed. He was convinced he was one of Plato‘s philosopher-kings, the inner elite that should guide the human race for its own good.

In his very last public statement he said, “I leave this life with no regrets.”

It was an unintentionally revealing admission: Charles Krauthammer led his own country down the road to waste, endless suffering, unending wars, misery, drug addiction epidemics and economic ruin and helped put the whole world on a helter-skelter slide towards nuclear Armageddon.

But he had no regrets.

June 30, 2018 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | | Leave a comment

Blair and Brown Governments Gory with Torture

By Craig Murray | June 29, 2018

Even I was taken aback by the sheer scale of British active involvement in extraordinary rendition revealed by yesterday’s report of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. Dominic Grieve and the committee deserve congratulations for their honesty, integrity and above all persistence. It is plain from the report that 10 Downing Street did everything possible to handicap the work of the committee. Most crucially they were allowed only to interview extremely senior civil servants and not allowed to interview those actively engaged in the torture and rendition programme.

Theresa May specifically and deliberately ruled out the Committee from questioning any official who might be placed at risk of criminal proceedings – see para 11 of the report. The determination of the government to protect those who were complicit in torture tells us much more about their future intentions than any fake apology.

In fact it is impossible to read paras 9 to 14 without being astonished at the sheer audacity of Theresa May’s attempts to obstruct the inquiry. They were allowed to interview only 4 out of 23 requested witnesses, and those were not allowed “to talk about the specifics of the operations in which they were involved nor fill in any gaps in the timeline”. If the UK had a genuinely free media, this executive obstruction of the Inquiry would be the lead story. Instead it is not mentioned in any corporate or state media, despite the committee report containing a firm protest:

It is worth reflecting that the Tory government has acted time and time again to protect New Labour’s Tony Blair, David Miliband, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown from any punishment for their complicity in torture, and indeed to limit the information on it available to the public. The truth is that the Tories and New Labour (which includes the vast majority of current Labour MPs) are all a part of the same elite interest group, and when under pressure they stick together as a class against the people.

Despite being hamstrung by government, the Committee managed through exhaustive research of classified documents to pull together evidence of British involvement in extraordinary rendition and mistreatment of detainees on a massive scale. The Committee found 596 individual documented incidents of the security services obtaining “intelligence” from detainee interrogations involving torture or severe mistreatment, ranging from 2 incidents of direct involvement, “13 to 15” of actually being in the room, through those where the US or other authorities admitted to the torture, to those where the detainee told the officer they had been tortured. They found three instances where the UK had paid for rendition flights.

My own evidence to the Committee focused on the over-arching policy framework, and specifically the fact that Jack Straw and Richard Dearlove had agreed a deliberate and considered policy of obtaining intelligence through torture. The report includes disappointingly little of my evidence, as the Committee has taken a very narrow view of its remit to oversee the intelligence agencies. This is the only part of my evidence included:

130. This was not unique to the Agencies. Their sponsoring Departments appear to have adopted the same approach. We heard evidence from a former FCO official, Craig Murray, who suggested that “there was a deliberate policy of not committing the discussion on receipt of intelligence through torture to paper in the Foreign Office”.
In July 2004, when he was Ambassador to Tashkent, he raised concerns about the use of Uzbek intelligence derived from torture in a formal exchange of telegrams with the FCO. Mr Murray drew our attention to FCO documents from the same time, which we have seen, one of which referred to “meetings to look at conditions of receipt of intelligence as a general issue”. He told us that the meetings “specifically discuss[ed] the receipt of intelligence under torture from Uzbekistan” and “were absolutely key to the formation of policy on extraordinary rendition and intelligence”.
Mr Murray told us that, when he had given evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about this, they sought the documents from the FCO which replied that the “meetings were informal meetings and were not minuted ”. He went on to say:
“the idea that you have regular meetings convened at director level, convened by the Director of Security and Intelligence, where you are discussing the receipt of intelligence from torture, and you do not minute those meetings is an impossibility, unless an actual decision or instruction not to minute the meetings has been given.… Were it not for me and my bloody-mindedness, … you would never know those meetings had happened. Nobody would ever know those meetings had happened.”

131. We note that we have not seen the minutes of these meetings either: this causes us great concern. Policy discussions on such an important issue should have been minuted. We support
Mr Murray’s own conclusion that were it not for his actions these matters may never have come to light.

Jack Straw to this day denies knowledge and involvement and famously told Parliament that the whole story about rendition and torture was a “conspiracy theory”.

Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we have not been, and so what on earth a judicial inquiry would start to do I have no idea. I do not think it would be justified.”

In fact I strongly recommend you to read the whole Hansard transcript, from Q21 to Q51, in which Jack Straw carries out the most sustained bravura performance of lying to parliament in modern history. The ISC report makes plain he was repeatedly involved in direct authorisations of rendition operations, while denying to parliament the very existence of such operations.

For over a decade now the British government, be it Red Tory or Blue Tory, has been refusing calls for a proper public inquiry into its collusion with torture. The ISC report was meant to stand in place of such an Inquiry, but all it has done is reveal that there is a huge amount of complicity in torture, much more than we had realised, which the ISC itself states it was precluded from properly investigating because of government restrictions on its operations. It also concluded in a separate report on current issues, that it is unable to state categorically that these practices have stopped.

The Blair and Brown governments were deeply immersed in torture, a practice that increased hatred of the UK in the Muslim world and thus increased the threat of terrorism. Their ministers repeatedly lied about it, including to parliament. The British state has since repeatedly acted to ensure impunity for those involved, from Blair and Straw down to individual security service officers, who are not to be held responsible for their criminal complicity. This impunity of agents of the state is a complete guarantee that these evil practices will continue.

June 29, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Lee Harvey Oswald and Spenser Rapone

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 28, 2018

The U.S. military’s treatment of Army Lt. Spenser Rapone provides additional circumstantial evidence that the official story about accused lone-nut presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is pure bunk.

Rapone is a West Point graduate who was admitted to West Point after serving as an enlisted man in Afghanistan. Recently, the army brass gave him a less-than-honorable discharge. The reason? Rapone believes in communism and opposes U.S. imperialism. He made this clear when he posted on social media a picture of himself at graduation at West Point with a sign on the inside of his hat that said “Communism will win” and another picture of himself wearing a t-shirt under his uniform with a picture of communist Che Guevara.

Florida U.S. Senator Marco Rubio perfectly expressed the mindset of the military establishment: “While in uniform, Spenser Rapone advocated for communism and political violence, and expressed support and sympathy for enemies of the United States.”

None of this should surprise anyone. This is precisely how we would expect the U.S. military to react to a U.S. soldier who believes in communism. After all, let’s not forget: the entire 45 years of the Cold War was driven by the U.S. national-security establishment’s antipathy toward communism and communists.

Which brings up Lee Harvey Oswald, the supposed communist that the U.S. establishment continues to claim assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Who was Oswald? Like Rapone, he was a U.S. soldier, specifically a U.S. Marine. Also, Oswald was supposedly a communist.

Yet, interestingly enough, the military’s treatment of Oswald was totally different from its treatment of Rapone.

Rapone’s ideological evolution to socialism and communism occurred after he had already served in Afghanistan and while he was a student at West Point.

Not so with Oswald. The official story is that he was a communist devotee before he joined the military.

But does that make any sense?

For one thing, why would a communist want to join the Marines, especially soon after the Korean War, during which the U.S. military killed millions of North Korean people, all of whom were considered to be communists? Wouldn’t a genuine communist be angry with the Marines for doing that?

Moreover, since a peace treaty wasn’t signed with North Korea, there was the distinct possibility that the war could again erupt at any time, which necessarily would have involved the United States, given the Pentagon’s insistence on keeping U.S. troops in Korea. Why would a communist join an organization knowing that he could suddenly be called upon to kill his fellow communists?

While he was in the military, Oswald learned fluent Russian and continued studying communist doctrine. His fellow soldiers even came to jokingly calling him “Osvaldovitch.” What are the chances that the U.S. military would permit such a thing to happen within their midst, especially at the height of the Cold War? The military brass and the Marco Rubios of that time would have gone ballistic over a self-avowed communist serving in the Marines.

Oswald asked the Marine Corps to release him early so that, he told them, he could help his ailing mother. The Marine Corps granted the request. But it was lie. Instead, Oswald proceeded to the Soviet Union where he expressed a desire to give up his U.S. citizenship and, even graver, promised to give the Soviets classified information he had acquired while serving in the U.S. military, including his time at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, which housed the CIA’s top-secret spy plane, the U-2.

Oswald later expressed a desire to come home. No problem! U.S. officials paved the way for him, even covering some of his travel expenses. No matter that he had supposedly tried to give up his U.S. citizenship and defect to America’s Cold War “enemy,” the communist Soviet Union. No matter that he was returning with a Red wife. No matter that he had expressed sympathy for America’s foremost Cold War enemy, the communist Soviet Union. No matter that he had lived there for a couple of years. And no matter that he might have given classified information to the Soviets, which theoretically could have enabled them to shoot down U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union.

They didn’t touch Oswald. No Edward Snowden treatment. No John Walker Lindh treatment. No Dalton Trumbo treatment. No Martin Luther King treatment. No McCarthyist treatment. No grand jury indictment. Why, not even a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury. Instead, one of the supposedly most notorious communists in U.S. history saunters across the Cold War stage of history with nary a peep of protest from the U.S. military and the Marco Rubios of that time.

Later, Oswald discovered that the U.S. military had changed his discharge from honorable to dishonorable while he was in the Soviet Union. But why didn’t they do that when “Osvaldovitch” was studying Russian and openly proclaiming himself to be a “communist” while he was serving in the Marine Corps, as they have done with Rapone? Why did they give him an honorable discharge in the first place, even permitting him to leave the military early to supposedly help his mother? When was the last time you saw the U.S. military, especially the Marines, treat any supposed communist with kindness and consideration?

So, what was going on here?

Soon after new President Lyndon Johnson called into existence the Warren Commission to conduct an “investigation” into the Kennedy assassination, the head of the commission, Earl Warren, called a top-secret meeting of the commission. He gravely informed the group that he had received some very disturbing information. The information was that Oswald was actually an informant or asset for U.S. intelligence or the FBI or both.

So, how did the Warren Commission resolve this disturbing information? They simply asked the heads of the FBI and CIA whether it was true. They both denied it, and that was the end of the matter. The possibility that they might have been lying apparently wasn’t given serious consideration. Warren ordered the members of the commission to keep the contents of that meeting permanently secret from the American people. He ordered the court reporter at the meeting to destroy her transcript of the meeting.

But Oswald as U.S. intelligence informant/asset is the only thing that makes sense. When Oswald was young, his favorite television program was I Led Three Lives, which was about a U.S. official who falsely posed as a communist to ferret out communists in American society. It would have made sense that Oswald fantasized about that type of job — a job for a real “patriot.” The fact that he joined the Marines, as his older brother had, would confirm that he viewed himself as a “patriot.” Semper fie!

Where does the CIA recruit from? The Marines are one of the CIA’s primary places for recruitment. That would explain how Oswald learned fluent Russian in the military. They were training him to be an asset and an infiltrator. This would also explain why the military establishment didn’t harass or evict “Osvaldovitch” from active duty, as they have with Rapone. Oswald was being trained to be a communist infiltrator, similar to the assets and informants that the CIA and the FBI were using to infiltrate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the U.S. Communist Party, the civil-rights movement, and other suspect organizations.

It would explain why Oswald tried to get his discharge from the military changed back to “honorable” after he returned from the Soviet Union. After all, why would a real communist care about receiving a less-than-honorable discharge from the U.S. military?

And it would explain why Oswald was positioned as the assassin of President Kennedy. After all, what better patsy than one who is a “communist”?

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

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