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CIA, FBI and NSA produce joint report, jointly prove nothing

By Ricardo Vaz | Dissident Voice | January 10, 2017

The recent hysteria surrounding Russia’s alleged interference with the November presidential elections saw another episode after an intelligence report, jointly elaborated by the CIA, FBI and NSA, was released on Friday, January 6th.

After weeks of bombshell headlines based on statements from anonymous intelligence officials, western media finally had an official intelligence report to support their bombshell headlines. Unsurprisingly, all headlines look very similar, with the Guardian even changing the title of their main story after realising it was not menacing enough.

The problem is that, much like the old stories, the new ones do not contain any evidence to support the claims, because the report itself does not have anything in that regard. The report says that the “evidence” remains highly classified. These outlets are just being fed the same (non-)information in a new package, and reporting it as “remarkably blunt” (WaPo) and “damning and surprisingly detailed” (NYT) does not change the fact that there are no facts to back this thesis that there was a campaign orchestrated by the Russian state which decided the American presidential elections. Repeating the same accusation time and again is not a way of proving it, and given their track record, we cannot just take intelligence agencies at their word.1

Because threatening foreign leaders don’t “work”, they “order”!

The report: little substance, but lots of irony!

And in contrast to the dramatic style of the media headlines, the report itself has very little in terms of substance. It is a 25-page document, containing a 15-page report. The main part is a 5-page “assessment” from the three intelligence agencies, which they felt needed to be summarised in a page of “key judgements”.2 Furthermore, if we look in detail, the charges levelled against Putin are very hypocritical given that they come from the self-proclaimed beacon of freedom of the world. In the “key judgements” we read:

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order […]

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.

First of all, it’s laughable that Putin is blamed for developing a “clear preference” when one of the choices promised better relations with Russia and the other promised a more aggressive approach, to say the least. Secondly, it’s beyond ironic that the US is aggrieved that someone tried to influence elections in a foreign country.3 Finally, if in the above statement we make the following changes:

  • Russia/Putin/Moscow→United States/US president/Washington
  • undermine → spread
  • Trump → pro-US puppet; Clinton →other candidate
  • US election/democratic process → any other country’s election

we end up with something resembling the mission statement of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Funded primarily by the US government, the NED channels funds to US-aligned political parties and NGOs around the world, under the slogan of “promoting democracy”.

The rest of the report is filled with an annex detailing the grave menace that RT (formerly Russia Today) is supposed to be. RT is accused of terrible propaganda, such as covering the Occupy protests or highlighting the environmental risks of fracking. Unfortunately, this annex seems to be an outdated report from 2012, so the 2016 election result ends up being blamed on Abby Martin’s “Breaking the Set”, even though she stopped doing it in 2015.4 Once again, accusing RT of being a propaganda tool of the Kremlin reeks of hypocrisy, when the US has created dozens of TV and radio stations all around the world to echo their own propaganda. And even the mainstream outlets, not just in the US but in Europe as well, hardly ever deviate from the official narrative when it comes to foreign policy matters.

When real life overtakes fiction – exchange from HBO’s satirical show Veep

“The Russians are coming”

This episode comes on the heels of another paranoid “the Russians are coming” episode. Panicked media outlets reported that the Russians had hacked the electricity grid in Vermont, meaning its inhabitants were only a Vladimir Putin click away from freezing to death this winter. Of course, in reality nothing of the sort had happened. A single computer, which was not connected to the electrical grid, had Russian-made malware found in it after Homeland Security sent a notice to utility companies about the malware found in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) software. So the story is probably that someone had used his/her work computer to visit inadvisable websites. The story got so surreal that the electricity company itself had to come out and clarify it, but even this most mundane of stories kept its catastrophic headlines. Beyond that, anyone can buy Russian-made malware, so its presence hardly proves anything about Russian state involvement, in this case or any other. Claiming so is the equivalent of blaming the Russian government for everyone killed by a Russian-made Kalashnikov rifle.5

Finally, the crux of the matter remains the Wikileaks publication of the DNC and Podesta (Clinton’s campaign manager) emails. I will not talk about the alleged Russian origin of these contents, but refer to Craig Murray’s6 writing on the subject. Murray has claimed that this hack was, in fact, a leak from inside the Democratic Party. While his word is not the gospel, he has far more credibility on these matters than the aforementioned intelligence agencies combined. What is more astounding is to see Democratic Party officials and journalists blaming the release of this information, which revealed how the party sabotaged Bernie Sanders and some of Hillary Clinton’s sordid dealings, for Trump’s victory. Saying that “our candidate was terrible, but people were not supposed to know” does not make for a very convincing case.

All of this would make for amusing satire or comedy if it weren’t for the fact that we are talking about two nuclear-armed superpowers. It is disgusting that high-ranking figures are raising the stakes in this game of nuclear chicken in order to justify an unexpected defeat. Intelligence agencies are made of professional liars, whose budgets and careers depend upon the existence of grave threats. This takes us to the role of the media, which should be to question the motives of known/anonymous officials and scrutinise grave claims such as these in the absence of evidence. The fact that the mainstream media have become pure propaganda machines is extremely dangerous and only highlights the importance of having an independent press and free access to information.

• Source: Investig’Action

  1. Despite all the innuendo, nobody is accusing the Russians of having hacked the voting machines or interfered with the vote tallying. That is the only clear statement in this report.
  2. The content is really stretched, for example the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of the “key judgements” are repeated almost verbatim in the beginning of the “assessment”.
  3. In 2011, the US famously ordered the Haiti electoral commission to move Michel Martelly to the second round of the 2010-11 election, even though he had come in third in the first round.
  4. Abby Martin became an overnight hero of western pundits when she criticized Russia’s actions in Crimea during her show on RT. Of course, these pundits were probably unaware of the content of her show, and it’s fair to guess that they are not fans of her recent work for TeleSur, “The Empire Files”.
  5. On this and all other matters concerning intelligence agencies and poor journalism standards, there’s no better source than Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept.
  6. A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, he lost his career for exposing the use of torture in the “war on terror”. He has been a staunch activist and supporter of whistleblowers ever since.

January 11, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

US senators introduce bill to impose new sanctions on Russia

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Press TV – January 11, 2017

A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced legislation to impose sweeping new sanctions on Russia over its alleged attempts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.

Five Democrats and five Republicans unveiled the new punishments on Tuesday after the intelligence community concluded in a report that the Russian government had sought to influence the outcome of the November election through cyberhacking and a smear campaign.

The proposed legislation would solidify many of the sanctions President Barack Obama’s outgoing administration has imposed against Russia and limit President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to improve relations with Moscow.

The new sanctions include visa bans and financial asset freezes against those the US intelligence claimed were behind the cyberattacks against US Democratic organizations and officials.

The hacked emails, which were allegedly provided to WikiLeaks by individuals working for the Russian government, were a regular source of embarrassment to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the presidential race and may have contributed to her defeat.

“We should all be alarmed by Russian attacks on our nation,” Sen. John McCain told reporters, as he criticized the Obama administration for a lack of a comprehensive strategy on cyber deterrence.

“This appearance of weakness has been provocative to our adversaries,” the Arizona Republican said.

Sen. Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who co-sponsored the bill, said, “We have been attacked by Russia. It cannot be business as usual.”

The measure, called “Countering Russian Hostilities Act of 2017,” would also target Russia’s vast energy sector and companies that invest in or help develop its civil nuclear projects.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said, as a co-sponsor of the bill, he was “not trying to undermine the legitimacy of President-elect Trump’s victory” by highlighting Russia’s intention to meddle in the US election. “My advice to him is that… it is now time to push back.”

Other Republican co-sponsors include Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Rob Portman of Ohio and Ben Sasse of Nebraska.

The measure would give the White House the ability to waive the sanctions, however it would have to certify that Russia’s behavior has improved.

It was not clear on Tuesday whether the legislation was likely to pass in Congress in time for President Obama to sign it, or wait for Trump to take office on January 20.

Trump has repeatedly called for better relations with Russia, arguing that only “stupid” people or “fools” would think close ties were unwise.

The Republican president-elect has rejected the implications that Russia’s alleged hacking of Democratic offices helped him win the election.

January 11, 2017 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Something is Rotten in Sweden

By Kristoffer Larsson | CounterPunch | October 18, 2007

Ever heard of a roundabout-dog? They are artificial dogs which started appearing in roundabouts in Sweden last year. Most likely meant as a joke, a Swedish cartoonist figured this phenomenon could be used in a funny way to provoke Muslims anger. The Swedish artist Lars Vilks made three silly drawings portraying a dog standing in a roundabout, with Prophet Muhammad’s head. The political implications aside, the quality of his work is-to say the least-far below even mediocre. Three art galleries decided not to exhibit these drawings, which is perfectly understandable. Nor do they have any obligation to do so, especially when the art is of poor quality and only meant to insult. Vilks has openly admitted this:

“Of course it was a provocation and an insult to the Muslims. But it was an empty provocation. I am not promoting any idea such as kicking all the Muslims out of Sweden.” Getting attention was also a part of it: “All artists gun for attention, and there is jealousy among those in the business of attracting much attention,” he asserted.

It could have ended there. An obnoxious, obscure artist making silly drawings of Prophet Muhammad–who cares? But this was just the beginning. A Swedish newspaper, Nerikes Allehanda, published Vilks’s drawings this August, describing the art galleries’ decision not to exhibit the drawings as “unacceptable self-censorship,” saying it must be permissible to ridicule the symbols of another religion. A staff writer at the paper compared it to Monty Python’s film Life of Brian:

In Norway, Life of Brian was banned, in reference to the law against blasphemy. In the United States voices were raised to have it banned. John Cleese pointed out that God could certainly take care of himself. I am myself an active Christian and I think Life of Brian is an extremely funny movie.

Fine. But what he fails to see is that Life of Brian was made by people of Christian origin, while this is an attack by a Christian on Islam. Also, while Life of Brian was a comedy, these drawings had no other purpose than to insult and provoke. Not exactly comparable.

And it didn’t take long before Muslims raised voices to protest the publication. Not only in Sweden; 200 people went to the streets in Pakistan, burning a doll representing the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and the Swedish flag (which is yellow and blue, not yellow and green as the demonstrations thought). Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the “Zionists,” who (unlike Jews) “only pretend to believe in religion,” were behind the publication. Protestors also hit Swedish streets, though peacefully.

Instead of discussing the issues as to why many Muslims became upset-always seeing Islam slandered, exposed to threats, and having their Mosques vandalised-the affair was made into a matter of freedom of speech. Journalists, commentators, politicians and others all defended the publication in the name of freedom of speech. Truth is, it was never under threat; only a very low number among the opponents of publishing the drawings said this should be criminalised.

One of them, the Egyptian Ambassador Samah Mohamed Sotouhi, declared that “We must try to bring about a change in the law. The Muslims need legal protection against the defamation of the Prophet Muhammad, similar to [the protection] that Jews and homosexuals enjoy.” But except for some efforts made by Muslim countries, no politician or journalist spoke out in favour of the state outlawing such a practise, including the vast majority of those objecting to the publication. (It is interesting to notice that the very same people, who care so much for freedom of speech when defamation of Muslims is the case, had nothing to say when a Swedish computer teacher, Jan Bernhoff, was sacked from his job for attending the holocaust conference in Iran. Bernhoff, not Vilks, was the one who needed their support.)

The publication brought the affair to a whole new level. Two Swedish-Muslim organisations made an effort to cool things down by trying to engage in a dialogue with Vilks (after all, they are the ones who will suffer in the end). One of the two organisations even wanted to exhibit the drawings in order to be able to have a real debate on the issue. But the project came to an end when Vilks, having so far been criticised only for defaming Muslim symbols, posted another silly drawing on his blog, this time a pathetic portrait of a so-called Jew-sow. Faced with Vilks’s newest creation, representatives of the two Muslim organisations, Mohamed Omar and Hooman Anvari, decided a dialogue with Lars Vilks was simply no longer possible. They wrote:

[With] Vilks now publishing an explicitly and undoubtedly anti-Semitic scurrilous portrait (signed as a “Jew-sow” by the artist himself), the discussion has now entered a different phase. From a purely ethical one to one of jurisprudence.

In other words, they cut it short not because of his anti-Muslim work but because of his anti-Semitic drawing. It may seem odd, but reflects the current sentiment in the Western world: insulting Muslims is a matter of freedom of speech, while defamation of Jewish symbols is never tolerated.

As the days went by and everything was petering out, a death-threat was pronounced against Lars Vilks which quickly made things more tense. Things like these happen all the time, many artists receive threats. The difference was the sender; a supposed al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, generously promised $100,000 to whoever kills Lars Vilks ($150,000 if he is “butchered as a lamb”). The editor of the newspaper wasn’t worth as much–only $50,000. However, all we know for sure about al-Baghdadi is that there are different perceptions of who he is. Some sources claim he was a leading al-Qaeda fighter killed in May this year-three months before the publication!-while others say it’s just a name used by a rebel group in Iraq. Hence, should anyone kill Vilks or the editor, it might be hard to claim the reward. But the death-threat again Vilks was taken seriously and he was given police-protection.

A few days after the pronounced death-threats, a list of over 100 Swedish companies was published which Islamists say should be punished just for being of the same nationality as Vilks. “Take revenge,” these fanatics urged. However, when journalists rang some of these companies for a comment, they were surprised. “We have received no indications of any threat,” a spokesperson of one of the companies said. In fact, it turns out, these companies haven’t received any direct threats. The list of companies, as well as the death-threats against Vilks and the editor, all originate from one source: The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute. Founded in 2002 by Rita Katz and Josh Devon, SITE is a Zionist propaganda institute which, among other things, offers its “Monitoring Service, which provides numerous daily translations of terrorist propaganda and multimedia from primary source terrorist websites.” Katz and Devon claims for instance that Yahoo! has become one of al-Qaeda’s most significant ideological bases of operation. Utilizing several facets of Yahoo!’s service, including chat functions, e-mail, and most importantly, Yahoo! Groups, al-Qaeda and its supporters have inserted themselves like a cancer into a company that screams, “American pop culture,” and made it as much their own as a training camp in Khost [in Afghanistan].

When Osama Bin Laden and his gang are not using Yahoo!’s chat service, however, they spend their time surfing more protected sites. SITE brags on its first-page as being described in the following way by an author:

“By monitoring terrorist and extremist websites and penetrating password-protected al-Qaeda linked sites, SITE provides a state-of-the-art intelligence service to both practitioners and analysts to understand the adversary.”

It makes you wonder how the SITE Institute, with a small staff of only two people (at least no other is mentioned) can find its way into “password-protected al-Qaeda linked sites” which, apparently, the FBI and the CIA, with all its resources, seem to be incapable of finding and infiltrating. What is even more noteworthy is that SITE, in its own words, works regularly with and provides important and often unique information to journalists, law firms pursuing civil litigation, major corporations, law enforcement, U.S. Congress, and numerous federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), the FBI, Customs, and the Department of Justice.

As can be expected of an institute of this kind, there is a Zionist connection. And that is co-founder Rita Katz, who was born to a wealth Jewish family in 1963 in Basra, Iraq. When she was 6-years-old her father was hanged on the charge of spying for Israel. Two years later the family emigrated to Israel, where she stayed until the mid-90s, when she left for the US with her husband. In an interview with The Jewish Journal it is revealed Katz also worked on the case against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which is on trial accused of channelling money to Hamas.
Katz answered an ad and was hired by a Middle Eastern research institute. (Because of her lawsuit, she doesn’t want to reveal the institute’s name.)

On her first day on the job – much of her work entailed “administrative stuff and copying,” her new boss had told her – she started reading documents in English and Arabic about the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF).
“I saw differences in the translations,” Katz recalled. “The Arabic list was longer, and I recognized that some organizations mentioned in Arabic and not in English were Hamas front organizations.”

That realization propelled her to start doing research on that group, collecting Arabic documents and eventually going undercover.

Her work, through her SITE Institute, which is funded by various federal agencies and private groups needing to know about radical Muslim groups operating in the United States, has led to closures of organizations, deportations and ongoing investigations. She also has provided the media with information.

This is very interesting, considering the evidence used against the HLF is highly questioned. In an article published in the LA Times on the 25th of February, reproduced by Information Clearing House, staff writer Greg Krikorian points to discrepancies in the proof put forward against the HLF. Krikorian wrote:
Additional anti-Semitic comments the FBI summary attributed to Baker or Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land’s former board chairman, included:

* “Their [Jews’] only purpose here in the U.S. is to purchase as many politicians as possible and to warp the way the American Christians feel and think not just about the Christian religion but mainly about the Palestinian people and to rob as much money as possible from American taxpayers for the illegitimate excuse of protecting and preserving the chosen people of God.”

* “Even Jesus Christ had called the Jews and their high priests the sons of snakes and scorpions.”

* “I am confident that in the end justice, and not the Jews, will prevail. I believe that there is still justice in America.”

None of those quotes was contained in a 13-page transcript of the conversation, defense lawyers said in their motion to expand access to classified evidence. ()
Because the court records are heavily redacted, it could not be determined who provided the summaries of the FBI wiretaps.

Other alleged discrepancies also have dogged the case. Holy Land lawyers challenged the accuracy of an FBI memo, for example, that quoted a foundation office manager as telling Israeli authorities that charitable funds were “channeled to Hamas.”

But defense lawyers told the court the translation from Arabic to Hebrew to English distorted the official’s original statement, and that he should have been quoted as saying, “We have no connection to Hamas.”

A former U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, Edward Abingdon, when asked if he found the information Israel provided reliable, answered with a straightforward “No.” He added, “I feel the Israelis have an agenda … they provide selective information to try to influence US thinking.”

Indeed, the trial against the HLF is just one example of how Israelis are the ones persecuting Muslim organisations in America. As made clear in the above-quoted sentence, the translation was made “from Arabic to Hebrew to English.” The Zionists have the upper hand, and going to the bottom with cases like this is close to impossible. They provide the evidence, and not much can be done to prove them wrong. The veracity in the accusations made by propaganda institutes of SITE’s ilk should be strongly questioned. As for the threats against the Swedish cartoonist, editor and the 100 Swedish companies, all we can know for sure is that no attack has yet taken place.

Two months after the publication, the matter has gotten cold. But it is clear that for the first time, through a Zionist institution in America, supposed death-threats by al-Qaeda found their way to a country once known for its peaceful attitude and solidarity with the oppressed, creating fear of Muslim fundamentalism which is now said to live in our midst. Clear also is that sending soldiers to Afghanistan and being silent as neoconservatives and Zionists are creating havoc in the Middle East is not the road to saving our good reputation.

KRISTOFFER LARSSON is a Swedish theology student occasionally commenting on political issues. He works with the Bethlehem-based International Middle East Media Center and is a Director of Deir Yassin Remembered. He appreciates constructive feedback: kristoffer.larsson@sobernet.nu

January 10, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Clinton email investigation not going away’ – House Oversight chair

RT | January 10, 2017

Hillary Clinton’s problems aren’t going away, according to House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz, who has vowed to continue the investigation into her use of a private email server.

The Republican congressman told CNN: “Just because there was a political election doesn’t mean it goes away.”

Chaffetz described Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state as “the largest breach of security in the history of the State Department.”

“It cannot, and should not be repeated ever again,” said Chaffetz, whose committee possesses subpoena power. After reopening the investigation weeks before the presidential election in November, FBI Director James Comey told Congress that they had failed to unearth any new information that would warrant bringing charges against Clinton.

President-elect Donald Trump continuously attacked Clinton over her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, claiming he would prosecute her if elected. Following his election success, the president-elect changed his attitude toward Clinton, claiming she had already “suffered greatly.”

Chaffetz said his committee would be open to investigating issues arising from Trump’s administration too, claiming his job “is not to be a cheerleader for the president.”

When questioned about possible conflicts of interest arising from Trump’s businesses, Chaffetz admitted that the laws regarding conflicts and the president “should be tightened up,” but declined to comment on specific cases.

Along with the Clinton investigation, the committee will continue other outstanding investigations, including the ATF gunwalking scandal where guns were allowed to be sold to straw buyers to track them.

An investigation into Mylan, the manufacturers of EpiPen whose price increased dramatically will also continue, according to Chaffetz, who said the company “fed us a bunch of bull.”

January 10, 2017 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Washington Invented Hacking and Interfering in Elections

Weaponized hacking all began with Stuxnet

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • January 10, 2017

Is the United States the victim of an unprovoked cyber and media attack by Russia and China or are the chickens coming home to roost after Washington’s own promotion of such activity worldwide? On Thursday Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asserted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that while no foreign government had been able to interfere with actual voting machines, “U.S. agencies are more confident than ever that Russia interfered in America’s recent presidential election. And he called the former Cold War foe an ‘existential threat’ to the nation.” Pressed by Senator John McCain whether the “attack” constituted an “act of war,” Clapper demurred, saying that it would be a “very heavy policy call” to say so. He also said that he could not judge if the election outcome had been changed due to the claimed outside interference.

Clapper also claimed that the Russian effort included including the creation and dissemination of fake stories, explaining that “While there has been a lot of focus on the hacking, this is actually part of a multifaceted campaign that the Russians mounted.” Clapper singled out Russian state funded TV channel RT, previously called Russia Today. “Of course RT… was very, very active in promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system.” [Full disclosure: I have been on RT numerous times.]

Apart from the nonsense about foreign broadcasters being part of a conspiracy to “disparage our system” and destroy our democracy, I confess that I was willing to be convinced by what seemed to be the near-unanimous intelligence and law enforcement agency verdict but, any such expectations disappeared when the 17 page report on the hack was actually released on Friday. Entitled Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, the report is an exercise in speculation minus evidence indicting alleged Russian interference in the recent election. It even came with a significant caveat, “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

So I am still waiting to see the actual evidence for the Russian direct involvement and have to suspect that there is little to show, or possibly even nothing. Saying that Russian government agents were employed in passing the stolen emails from the DNC server to WikiLeaks raises more questions than it answers, particularly as it is now clear from media leaks that the parties involved were using what is referred to as cut-outs to break the chain of custody of the material being passed. Does the intelligence community actually know exactly who passed what to whom and when or is it engaged in reconstructing what it thinks happened? Does it really believe that intercepted unencrypted phone calls among Russian officials expressing pleasure over the election result equate to an actual a priori conspiracy to determine the outcome? And based on what evidence do they know that conspiracy was “ordered” by President Vladimir Putin as is now being alleged? Or are they only assuming that it must have been him because he is head of state?

And what about the possibility that activity of Russian intelligence agencies to penetrate computers in the United States was little more than routine information collection, which Clapper conceded is normal activity for Washington as well? And above all, where is a truth and consequences analysis of America’s global role as a contributor to the tit-for-tat, obscured by a prevailing mainstream media narrative that prefers to see everything in terms of good guys versus bad guys?

One can reasonably argue that Washington started the practice of cyber-warfare and has been a long-time practitioner of both regime change and election tampering in its relationship with much of the world. The Snowden papers indicate that NSA hacking of targets in China has been going on for many years as has routine interception of cell phones of allied European and other world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the UN Secretary General. The NSA has deliberately sought to have the capability to penetrate nearly every electronic communications network in the world, frequently in real time, and has come close to achieving that ability under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The information obtained in the huge dumps of intelligence obtained by NSA is, at least in theory, used to confront possible threats to the United States and to obtain competitive advantage over both adversaries and competitors. But the intrusion into systems has also been weaponized, witness for example the creation of the Stuxnet worm in collaboration with the Israelis. Stuxnet was intended to disable key elements in Iranian nuclear research but it also went beyond that, creating dysfunction in other economic and industrial systems unrelated to its laboratories. The assault on Iran was more of an act of war than the hack of the DNC computers. And the damage was not limited to Iran. There have also been concerns that the Stuxnet virus had migrated from the Iranian systems and become viable on other civilian use computers.

There have been numerous military interventions in Latin America ever since the U.S. became involved in the region in the wake of the Spanish-American War. The subsequent interventions in the so-called Banana Wars by U.S. Marines in Central America and the Caribbean were on behalf of United Fruit Company and other commercial interests. The cynical use of force to support American business moved the highly-decorated Marine Major General Smedley Butler to describe himself as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers … a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism” while declaring that “war is a racket.” More recently, the CIA arranged for the removal of populist Jacopo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, initiating 60 years of political instability in that country while the Agency role in the military coup in Chile that ousted Salvador Allende and its involvement with the Nicaraguan contra rebels subsequently are similarly notorious.

When I was in Europe with CIA the U.S. government regularly interfered with elections, particularly in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal, all of which had active communist parties. The Agency would fund opposition parties directly or indirectly and would manage media coverage of the relevant issues to favor the non-communists. The end result was that the communists were indeed in most cases kept out of government but the resulting democracy was frequently corrupted by the process. Italy in particular suffers from that corruption to this day.

The United States has directly interfered in Russia, using proxies, IMF loans and a media controlled by the oligarchs to run the utterly incompetent Boris Yeltsin’s successful campaign in 1996 and then continuing with more aggressive “democracy promotion” projects until Putin expelled many of the NGOs responsible in 2015. More recently there have been the pastel revolutions in Eastern Europe and the upheaval in Ukraine, which came about in part due to a $5 billion investment by the United States government in “democracy building” supplemented by regular visits from John McCain and the State Department’s activist Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.

And then there are Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria as well as endorsement of the ongoing carnage in Yemen. The Congress meanwhile continues to call for regime change in Iran. So it leads to the question “Who is actually doing what to whom?”

One can well understand the anger at Russian actions but much of the sentiment is being fueled by a hostile press and deliberate U.S. government fear mongering orchestrated by the Obama Administration as its parting gift to the American people. A new Cold War would be good for no one. Stepping back a bit, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that anything Russia did or is suspected of doing in 2016 pales in comparison to what the United States has been doing for much longer and on a much wider scale. The Defense Department runs a cyber warfare command with a budget of $7 billion and the White House has ordered military interventions to bring about regime change in four Muslim majority countries while also interfering in a number of others since 9/11. The Obama response to an alleged Russian conspiracy that has yet to be demonstrated has been to send more soldiers to the Baltics while ordering a massive politically motivated retaliation that included the persona non grata expulsion of 35 Russian officials and their families. Moscow did not retaliate and instead invited U.S. diplomatic families to a Christmas celebration at the Kremlin. Sure, it was political theater to a certain extent but it has to make one wonder who was actually the adult in the room whenever Obama and Putin would meet.

January 10, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Donald Trump is ‘winning hacking battle with spies’

By Alexander Mercouris | The Duran | January 10, 2017

An opinion piece in The Financial Times by its commentator Gideon Rachman represents the first admission by a member of the mainstream media of what is becoming increasingly obvious to me…

Donald Trump is winning the war with the spies:

… the intelligence community has every reason to fear the Trump White House. Mr Trump will appoint their leaders, he will control the trajectory of their careers and, judging by congressional Republicans’ efforts to loosen civil service protections, he may soon have the power to fire them at will… The furore over Russian hacking forced the president-elect to give the current intelligence chiefs an audience. But once he is firmly installed in the White House, he will be in a much better position to impose his will and views on the CIA, the NSA and the FBI. After all, he will be the boss.

It would have been different if the report the US intelligence community had provided contained convincing evidence of the US intelligence community’s claims of Russian interference in the US election. Had there been strong evidence of that Trump would not have been able to disregard it, his legitimacy as President would have been in question, and his authority would have been damaged.

In the event, after making very strong claims on this issue, and after promising to “push the envelope” on what could be revealed, the US intelligence community was unable to support its claims with evidence. This is because that evidence doesn’t exist.

That has put Donald Trump in a winning position despite the continuing attempts of some people to make trouble for him.

Gideon Rachman has incidentally disclosed a key fact about Trump’s meeting with the intelligence chiefs on Friday of which I was previously unaware.  This is that Trump went to the meeting with his choice of National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn.

The point about General Flynn is that he is himself a former intelligence chief, having previously been the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency.  Moreover it is know that there is little love lost between him and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan.

As a former intelligence chief Flynn would have able to spot immediately the many obvious problems with the US intelligence community’s report and tell Trump about them, helping Trump to prepare his response.

As I have said previously, the statement Trump made following his meeting with the intelligence chiefs on Friday was clearly drafted by a lawyer, showing that Trump is being careful to get legal advice.  The fact Trump brought Flynn with him to the meeting with the intelligence chiefs on Friday shows that Trump also sought expert advice advice from a senior former intelligence officer.

In other words Trump is being careful throughout to seek the advice of professional and experts, something which in part explains his skillful handling of this scandal.

It is something which incidentally also shows that contrary to his maverick reputation Trump is someone who seeks and listens to expert advice.  Since that is what he must have done as a businessman, that should not be surprising.

January 10, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

‘DNC emails could have come from internal leak – not Russia hackers’

RT | January 10, 2017

There is no sourced information in the US intel report alleging Russian involvement in hacking DNC offices, says retired CIA official Larry Johnson. Former CIA director James Woolsey, and MI5 officer turned whistleblower Annie Machon, also joined.

In live debates hosted by RT on Monday, Woolsey, Johnson and Machon gave their expert opinions on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report entitled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” which was released on January 6.

The unclassified ODNI report was anticipated to reveal the full scope of Russian involvement in the DNC leaks and provide evidence supporting serious claims made by the US intelligence community.

Instead, the report has proven to be wanting in content, with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange saying it has “zero evidentiary weight.”

RT: Mr. Woolsey, throughout this damning report we see the words ‘high confidence’. But it also says “high confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments may be wrong.” So does this report, in fact, prove anything at all?

James Woolsey: Not to prove a certainty can still be very useful. As far as I am concerned, there is no certainly in most intelligence. So I think it is really a kind of debating trick to say that since it is not certain it is worthless.

RT:The most notorious example of US intelligence using the word ‘high confidence’ was back in 2003 with Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction – as we remember it all ended up in an invasion, however, no weapons of mass destruction were found. Could we be seeing the same thing all over again?

JW: Actually, weapons of mass destruction of two of the three kinds were found. The chemical weapons, the three kinds of weapons of mass destruction in our terminology, which I think was originally a Soviet agitprop phrase: chemical, bacteriological and nuclear. Chemical weapons were absolutely found – Saddam [Hussein] used them against the Kurds. Biological weapons were well-known – their location, because Saddam’s brother-in-law was the head of the biological weapons program and he defected to us. The ones that were not there were nuclear. But any parsing of the language would make clear what I have said.

RT: Annie, what do you make of the claims presented in this report?

Annie Machon: Well, it seems very ‘intelligence-light,’ shall we say. They are going to claim that they need to cut out the actual smoking gun, the evidence from this report. I don’t think anyone would be surprised at the depth of the penetration of the internet, the gathering of information that is done across the internet. As the former technical director of the NSA [William Binney] the whistleblower has said publically many times: if indeed there had been hacking, there would be traces that could be found. The fact that those traces have not been found – have not been reported without any particular scientific methodology behind it – does make the report very evidence light. Also, there has been a lot of other information coming out as well, which does indicate this could be a leak inside, rather than an external attack from outside.

RT: On the other hand, American Intelligence services have vast resources and experience – surely, staff must care about their reputations enough not to make claims that they believe to be wrong?

Larry Johnson: I would just encourage all of your viewers to go back and pull the 2002 white paper that was produced based upon the National Intelligence estimate. Read through that – you will see from an intelligence standpoint, how evidence is presented. And while Director Woolsey is correct that you don’t want to divulge sources and methods, there are a variety of ways that you can identify or at least phrase a source. You say, for example, “according to multiple, reliable sources with known access”… There is a way to phrase it, but you can at least look that the 2002 document and see that there is page, upon page, upon page of evidence. It turned out that most of it was either misleading or misunderstood. So just the fact that you can just source evidence doesn’t make something right.

What is striking about this report that was issued on Friday: not one shred of evidence. As a former analyst, and if I were detailed to the cyber account, I would have been following every day the information that would come out in intelligence reports – wherever it was from the NSA, or from a human source, or from DIA, or from State Department reporting. And at some point in that process, we should have seen either an electronic or human source that said: “Vladimir Putin or someone in his government had directed the cyber-command in Russia to start a program or a plan to collect.” We never saw any of that. There is not one sourced information in that report. That is what makes it ridiculous.

January 10, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Israeli UK Embassy Scandal: Officer Who Sought to Destroy Tory Leader Worked for Strategic Affairs Ministry

gil erdan shai masot

Israeli minister Gil Erdan meets with Conservative Friends of Israel MPs during the London visit, when he also met with Shai Masot
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | January 10, 2017

The Guardian has uncovered a major element of the Shai Masot scandal. I speculated in my last post about this story that Masot worked for an Israeli intelligence agency. No one I consulted found it likely it could be the Mossad.  Masot was too public and too pushy to be Mossad. Others speculated that he worked for the IDF intelligence unit, AMAN, since he had until recently been an IDF Major. But his LinkedIn account noted that he’d left the IDF.

Now the Guardian has put two and two together and gotten closer to key elements of the story. He worked for the Strategic Affairs ministry headed by ambitious Likud pol, Gil Erdan. His agency has been tasked with mounting a global campaign against BDS. At a conference in Israel, one of Erdan’s fellow ministers even threatened BDS activists with “civil elimination,” a term dangerously close to ‘assassination’ in colloquial Hebrew. Erdan’s budget is huge ($34-million devoted to fighting BDS alone) as the latter has become the bête noire of the Israeli state–named as Public Enemy Number 1; the new “existential threat” to the “Jewish state” and Jewish people.

The Israeli foreign ministry, according to the Guardian story, recognized the danger of what Masot was doing and its London staff wrote a cable warning that freelancing of the type Masot was engaged in was extremely dangerous because funding UK organizations directly with Israeli state funds would jeopardize the non-profit status of any UK non-profit who accepted them. In videos, Masot boasts about founding pro-Israel astro-turf groups which were local in name only. Masot pulled the strings both financially and politically. He also boasts about collaboration with Conservative Friends of Israel and offers 1-million pounds to a Labour Friends of Israel MP in order to encourage other MPs to participate in junkets to Israel. Joan Ryan, the MP before whom he dangled this bauble didn’t seem to have a clue as to the danger it posed to her. She merely joked to Masot that she didn’t expect he was carrying the 1-million in a bag on his back!

One telling passage from the MFA cable confirms that the Israeli government is far more aggressive in creating such astroturf groups in the U.S. than it has been so far in Britain:

“Attempts to act behind our back have happened before and will happen again, but ‘operating’ Jewish organisations directly from Jerusalem, with no coördination and no consultation, is liable to be dangerous,” it said. “Operating like this could encounter opposition from the organisations themselves, given their legal status: Britain isn’t the US !”

This calls to mind the multitude of Israel Lobby groups which closely coördinate their activity with the Israeli government, and perhaps more. They include StandWithUs, The Israel Project, Christians United for Israel, CAMERA, and many others. In fact, then-deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon boasted on an Israeli TV show that his ministry was funding a SWU lawsuit against the Olympia Food Coop.

This reinforces my strong impression developed over the years that many of these groups, which are ostensibly independent U.S.-based groups are either fully or partially “operated” by the Israeli government. I have even reported on several projects of these NGOs which were explicitly funded by the government. This should endanger their non-profit status and force them to register as agents of a foreign government. But our IRS hasn’t chosen to tangle with the Israel Lobby or even the settler lobby (though it should).

Returning to the Strategic Affairs ministry, it released this statement in response to the September MFA cable. It indicates that the ministry either lied or was totally ignorant about what its own operatives like Masot were doing in Israel’s name:

“We work in coordination with the Israeli embassy in Britain and the Foreign Ministry. Every action is done according to the law and in accordance with government decisions and the ministry’s authority. We regret there are elements in the Foreign Ministry who don’t understand the division of responsibilities between the ministries and prefer to deal with struggles of honor instead of focusing on our goals.”

Someone back in Tel Aviv should be eating crow about now. But given the abysmal lack of accountability in virtually everything done in the government, it’s doubtful anything will come of it. … Full article

January 10, 2017 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Europe’s Mixed Feelings About Trump

By Andrew Spannaus | Consortium News | January 9, 2017

Few in Europe expected Donald Trump to win the U.S. Presidential elections last November. The picture painted by the media and political class was convincing: despite the pent-up anger being expressed through protest candidates, Hillary Clinton was headed towards a decisive victory, as the majority of Americans couldn’t stomach someone as outrageous and unconventional as the reality TV star turned politician.

That’s not what happened, of course, as Trump earned an Electoral College victory by winning enough votes in key Midwestern states that have suffered from a loss of manufacturing jobs in recent decades. His victory has shaken the Western world to its core, making it clear that business as usual is no longer possible in terms of both economic and foreign policy.

In Europe the signs of the anti-establishment sentiment that dominated the U.S. election campaign have been present for some time. The most obvious example was the Brexit vote in June 2016, in which the population of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. But protest movements have actually been on the rise for several years now, driven by the same basic issues as in the United States: a sense of economic and social insecurity – accompanied by a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment – driven by an economic policy that has made life harder for the middle class while enriching those at the top.

The growing anger against the institutions of the European Union, considered the main culprit for the failed economic policies, has made the élites desperate for some sense of stability, to help them weather the storm. As a result, a potential Clinton victory was openly welcomed by most political leaders.

After Trump’s victory, there were numerous press reports of worries among European governments regarding the incoming Administration’s foreign policy. Trump is understandably seen as unpredictable, but the key point revolves around his attitude towards Russia, the same issue that is currently dominating the institutional fight in the United States right now.

Just after the election The New York Times ran a story entitled “For Europe, Trump’s Election is a Terrifying Disaster,” suggesting that under the new President, the United States may embrace authoritarianism and no longer defend democracy. It was a theme that other mainstream news outlets also pushed.

On Nov. 17, The Associated Press wrote: “NATO members and other European countries are worried that under Trump, the U.S. will stop trying to police Russia’s behavior the way it has under Obama. Most concerning to U.S. allies are Trump’s effusive comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin, one of the first world leaders he spoke to after winning the election.”

Seeing Benefits

While it is true that former Soviet bloc countries such as Poland and Latvia would prefer to maintain the current hardline position towards Russia, the reality is that the largest E.U. members – France, Italy and Germany – actually stand to benefit from the diplomatic approach promised by President-elect Trump.

This doesn’t mean they supported his candidacy, though. First of all, they were told that he couldn’t win; and second, a Trump victory would seem to encourage the anti-establishment movements already on the rise in Europe, which threaten both the E.U.’s status quo and the jobs of key leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Hillary Clinton was seen as representing continuity, and for the many politicians who seek to curry favor with the transatlantic elites, it was best to show their Clinton bona fides in view of the upcoming change in power. For example, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi – now out of office due to a stinging anti-establishment vote in a referendum on proposed constitutional reforms – repeatedly broke diplomatic protocol and publicly criticized Trump during the election campaign.

However, over the course of 2016 it became clear that Clinton’s foreign policy was far more aggressive than Barack Obama’s, as the President had actually been seeking collaboration with Russia for several years on issues, such as constraining Iran’s nuclear program and negotiating an end to the Syrian conflict, despite heavy opposition from within his own administration.

Indeed Trump’s openness towards Vladimir Putin seems even more heretical now because most have chosen to forget that Obama himself had sought close cooperation with Putin on several key issues. For instance, Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomacy last year on Syria almost succeeded in implementing intelligence sharing and joint airstrikes by the two powers, before being effectively thwarted by the Pentagon and other U.S. institutional opposition in September 2016.

Now Obama seems to have forgotten his former position, and decided to fully toe the anti-Russian line, apparently convinced that he must do his part in the campaign to weaken Trump and prevent him from being an effective president, even in areas where their positions are not far apart.

It is possible that Trump will accelerate the timid attempts of his predecessor to abandon the “regime change” policies that have led to numerous disasters in the Middle East, and heightened tensions with Russia. The President-elect seems determined to pursue this path more openly than Obama, who worked slowly towards this goal while seeking to placate his critics with more bellicose language in his public statements.

Doubts About the U.S. Hardline

Although European nations have been heavily involved in recent regime change adventures (the U.K. in Iraq and France in Libya, for example), there is a widespread preference in Western Europe for avoiding further conflict with Russia. The U.S. position on the events in Ukraine, for example, is often seen as one-sided, and the notion of NATO expansion to Russia’s borders seems like an unnecessary and dangerous provocation that can only makes things worse.

Western sanctions against Russia, and Russia’s retaliatory sanctions on food imports, have cost European economies over $100 billion in trade, according to some estimates, hitting the agricultural sector especially hard. In addition, Russia has been concluding more economic agreements with countries such as China, leading to fears of permanent consequences for Europe.

For this reason, France, Italy and Germany have all repeatedly stated their desire to reduce or remove the sanctions altogether. The hope is that an agreement can be reached to defuse tensions in Ukraine, based on support for the Kiev government but broad autonomy for the ethnic Russian areas in eastern Ukraine.

Despite this desire to head off further conflict, European governments are usually careful not to openly break with U.S. policy; they are key members of NATO and have no desire to distance themselves from the leader of the alliance. However, if Donald Trump follows through on his stated goal of working “together with Russia,” the countries of Western Europe in particular may welcome the opportunity to advance their own economic interests and avoid finding themselves in the middle of a new Cold War.

Andrew Spannaus is a freelance journalist and strategic analyst based in Milan, Italy. He is the founder of Transatlantico.info, that provides news, analysis and consulting to Italian institutions and businesses. His book on the U.S. elections Perchè vince Trump (Why Trump is Winning) was published in June 2016.

January 9, 2017 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Political Prisoners Remain Behind Bars as Obama’s Term Nears End

By Matt Peppe | American Herald Tribune | January 9, 2017

As we enter the last full week of Barack Obama’s eight year tenure as President of the United States of America, dozens of political prisoners still sit in cages across the nation’s prisons, rotting away as Obama consciously chooses not to exercise the power to simply free them with the stroke of a pen. Many activists for Puerto Rican independence, Native American and African American rights, and other causes were targeted by the political police’s illegal COINTELPRO program and convicted in sham trials. Now elderly, some in poor health, they may effectively be facing death sentences unless Obama’s decides within the next two weeks to grant their appeals for clemency.

Among the most well known political prisoners are Oscar López Rivera, Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal, who have all been locked up for at least three and a half decades. Many others including The Move 9 and The Holy Land Five have spent years or decades in jail for their political action and views. Many, like Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Sterling, have been denied their freedom for their roles in exposing government crimes and misdeeds.

But you won’t ever hear this in the mainstream media. The corporate media hypocrisy is best demonstrated by the debate regarding political prisoners during Obama’s trip to Cuba in March 2016.

The U.S. government pretends that it always promotes human rights around the world and opposes human rights violations by other countries it considers adversaries. Hence, part of the propaganda narrative on Cuba is that it unjustly holds political prisoners as part of its campaign to repress the Cuban people – something that would never occur in the United States itself.

During a joint press conference with Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked Castro why the Cuban government held political prisoners and whether he would release them. Castro responded by asking for the names of people Acosta was referring to, and said that if he was given a list, they would be free by that evening. The headlines from some of the most popular US new organizations declared that Castro “skirts question on political prisoners” and “President Obama and Cuban President Clash on Political Prisoners in Cuba.”  The New York Times challenged Castro’s claim by citing Twitter responses naming Cubans  purportedly imprisoned for their political beliefs and quoting a U.S. spokesman saying the U.S. had previously shared lists with the Cuban government.

The press coverage treated it as self-evident that only the Cuban government should have to defend itself against allegations of human rights abuses. That the U.S. President would not have to answer the same question was taken for granted.

But by the time the meeting between Obama and Castro took place in Cuba, all prisoners considered by Amnesty International prisoners of conscience had already been released. Meanwhile, Amnesty has directly called on Obama to free Leonard Peltier and produced multiple reports about his case.

However, no news organization questioned why an American reporter who covers the U.S. President every single day had never bothered asking Obama – before or during the press conference in Cuba – about U.S. political prisoners.

When I asked Acosta via Twitter why he was silent about U.S. political prisoners and whether he would call on Obama to free Peltier, he did not respond. In the following months, he has not responded a single time when questioned about his refusal to ask the same questions of his own President that he does of leaders of foreign (enemy) countries. It is easy to see why.

Journalists working in the American mainstream media see themselves as being on the same team as their own government, safely staying on the side of U.S. power by acting as a mouthpiece to promote the government’s own narrative and opposing those countries and leaders that the U.S. government does.

As the American press refuses to acknowledge that the U.S. has political prisoners, it is left to grassroots groups to demand justice. Recently, separate petitions calling for clemency for López and Peltier were created through the White House’s We the People web site, where citizen petitions that receive 100,000 signatures receive a response from the White House.

Both petitions exceeded the threshold and received the same dismissive response, passing the buck to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney and refusing to comment on the individual cases:

“The President takes his constitutional power to grant clemency very seriously, and recommendations from the Department of Justice are carefully considered before decisions are made. The White House does not comment, however, on individual pardon applications. In accordance with this policy and the We the People Terms of Participation – which explain that the White House may sometimes choose not to respond to petitions addressing certain matters – the White House declines to comment on the specific case addressed in this petition.”

Translation: The President doesn’t actually respect citizens’ right to participate in decision making, and feels free to ignore them whenever he chooses. The We the People web site is merely a propaganda tool to give the illusion that the president is responsive to the citizens he purportedly serves.

Indeed, Obama has closed his eyes and ears and shut out the voices of millions of people who have spent his entire presidency calling on him to show basic human decency and stop the perpetration of historic injustices against López, Peltier, Abu-Jamal and the many other political prisoners.

Throughout his term, Obama has been called on by fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates, foreign leaders, Puerto Rican politicians and others to free López Rivera. The case has become perhaps the most important political issue on the island, as well as among Puerto Ricans and allies in the diaspora.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who commuted the prison sentences of four Puerto Rican nationalists, including Lolita Lebron and Rafael Cancel Miranda, who participated in attacks on the Blair House and the U.S. House of Representatives in the early 1950s, asked Obama to free López Rivera, as he himself had done for Puerto Rican prisoners convicted of more serious charges. (Carter’s Dec. 13 letter to Obama was not reported in any American corporate media, only in the Puerto Rican press such as the island’s largest newspaper, El Nuevo Dia.)

Despite years of being ignored, the people of Puerto Rico, who are denied their right to self-determination by the U.S. government and relegated to second-class citizenship without the democratic right to representation in federal government, have been unrelenting in continuing to demand Obama grant López Rivera his freedom.

Massive rallies have been held annually in San Juan and across the island on the anniversary of López Rivera’s incarceration each May. The group 35 Mujeres por Oscar (35 Women for Oscar) holds regular gatherings, the most recent on Jan. 6 for López’s birthday.

In a demonstration in October in front of the White House, in which nearly 1,000 people – many who took buses from Philadelphia and New York City – rallied for López Rivera, Puerto Rican recording artist René Pérez (AKA Residente of the band Calle 13), summed up the view of many people that it should be the government of the United States itself that be seeking forgiveness from Oscar López and the people of Puerto Rico. His speech is worth quoting at length:

“We’re here in the United States of America, in front of the government that has enslaved us for more than 100 years. The government that in exchange for a passport took our families to its wars. The government that experimented with our people, since they came implanting its language by force. The government that performed medical experiments on our grandparents injecting them with cancerous cells. The government that experimented with anticonceptive pills on our island. We, who understand [López Rivera’s] fight, are here to tell this government – the only government in the history of humanity to fire atomic bombs – that they have in prison a hero much braver than Washington. That this hero has been imprisoned longer than Mandela. That this hero became a hero without hoping for anything in return. We, who understand the fight of Oscar López are in front of the White House to tell this government that every additional second Oscar López spends in prison converts him in a hero much bigger than any of the heroes the United States has had. We are here to tell this government that even though the history books don’t tell us the real history that includes heroes like Oscar López, we will take charge of telling it. We, who understand the fight of Oscar López, are here to tell this government that we will never ask forgiveness for defending our right to be free. So we don’t ask them to forgive Oscar, but that they recognize the true history of the world, that they recognize the history of Puerto Rico, and maybe some day, after they free Oscar, we will forgive them.”

Obama has chosen to ignore the massive injustice committed against political prisoners in American gulags, likely because he refuses to acknowledge that the system he leads can – and often does – seek to silence and intimidate people into submission, using the legal system as a weapon to destroy the lives of those whose resistance of government power most threatens its perpetuation of the status quo. As Pérez said, perhaps someday people will forgive him.

January 9, 2017 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

US will ‘shoot down’ North Korean missiles: Pentagon chief

Press TV – January 9, 2017

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has described North Korea’s ballistic missiles program as a “serious threat” to the United States, threatening to shoot down any such missiles aimed at targets in the country.

The Pentagon chief said in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that North Korean missiles would be shot down if they approach American territory, after Pyongyang said it could test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at any time from any location set by the country’s leader Kim Jong-un.

The United States would be prepared to shoot down a North Korean missile launch or test “if it were coming towards our territory, or the territory of our friends and allies,” Carter said.

North Korea announced on Sunday it could test-launch an ICBM capable of striking the US mainland, saying Washington’s “hostile” policy towards the country forced Pyongyang to develop such missiles.

“The US is wholly to blame for pushing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to have developed (an) ICBM as it has desperately resorted to anachronistic policy hostile toward the DPRK for decades to encroach upon its sovereignty and vital rights,” North Korea’s state-run news agency KCNA reported.

“Anyone who wants to deal with the DPRK would be well advised to secure a new way of thinking after having clear understanding of it,” it said, using the acronym for the country’s official name.

Despite sanctions and international pressure, Pyongyang has been attempting to strengthen its military capability to protect itself from the threat posed by the presence of US forces in the region.

North Korea says it will not give up on its nuclear deterrence unless Washington ends its hostile policy toward Pyongyang and dissolves the US-led UN command in South Korea. Thousands of US soldiers are stationed in South Korea and Japan.

According to the US military’s recent declaration, the United States has 806 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missile), and heavy bombers as well as 1,722 deployed nuclear warheads.

The Pentagon is also equipped with a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV), a highly advanced version of the intercontinental nuclear missile carrying several independent warheads.

The South Korean Defense Ministry on Monday called North Korea’s statement a “provocative announcement.”

However, instead of issuing a fresh statement on North Korea’s announcement, the Obama administration on Sunday referred to the January 3rd comments by White House spokesman Josh Earnest in which he said the US military could protect the country against threats coming from North Korea.

If North Korea could fully develop an ICBM, it could target the United States. The shortest distance between the two countries is about 9,000 km. ICBMs can travel up to 10,000 km or farther.

US President-elect Donald Trump said last week that North Korea would not be able to build a nuclear missile that can reach the United States.

“North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the US,” Trump tweeted on January 2. “It won’t happen!”

January 9, 2017 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

McAfee breaks down inconsistencies in FBI’s Grizzly Steppe report

RT | January 5, 2017

Despite recent allegations against Russia, the FBI never actually accessed the allegedly hacked DNC servers. Cyber security expert John McAfee joins ‘News With Ed’ to discuss evidence in the report which supposedly pointed to Russian involvement, which according to McAfee actually vindicates Moscow.

January 9, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video | | Leave a comment

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