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Gary Edwards

There Are No Coincidences - 3 views

This commentary is currently making the rounds of the Bay Area Patriots circles: ITS ALL TRUE :: Any one of these 'coincidences' when taken singularly appear to not mean much, but when taken as a ...

Obama-coincidences Marxism Marxist-Muslim

started by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 13 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Failed NATO Invasion of Moldova SITREP, by Scott | The Vineyard of the Saker - 0 views

  • It’s hard to overestimate the value of planning in advance, especially when it comes to getting reservations in popular restaurants and invading countries by military force. In the week of the May 9th Victory Day two significant failures took place  each one remarkable in its own way. Each event went completely unreported by the Western corporate and government media, but discussed on Social Media.
  • In the following three weeks after the incident with the USS Florida, while Russia was preparing for Victory Day celebrations and all eyes were on Moscow, attention of Ukrainians was fully concentrated on the visit of Victoria Nuland to Kiev on April 26th allegedly to discuss the implementation of the Minsk II Agreement and the future elections in Donetsk and Lugansk republics. Since the day when President Putin said that the republics can have their elections anytime they want, the question of these elections ceased to be a subject of blackmail toward the Kremlin.   It appeared that the true reason for Nuland’s visit could be located to the west of Kiev, rather than the east. Just recently, Robert D. Kaplan, a former Stratfor’s Chief Geopolitical Analyst, and currently a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has published a book “In Europe’s Shadow” where he lays out a plan to reunite Romania with “its lost province of Moldova.” Nuland visited Moldova back in January, with the task to coerce Moldova’s government and its oligarchs to change the country’s Constitution provision of neutrality. Before she left, she gave a short speech at the American Embassy in Bucharest after a private dinner with PM Ciolos and President Klaus. “We powerfully support the desire of the people in Moldova to have responsible leaders who can implement reforms. This is the best way to assure the future of Moldova. Romania and the United States, in conjunction with NATO, have support programs in place to assure the security of Moldova but the government has to work to implement these programs.”
  • Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Eastern Europe, and its economy heavily relies on Russia. According to the CIA Fact Book: Moldova’s annual remittances of about $1.12 billion comes from the roughly one million Moldovans working in Europe, Russia, and other former Soviet Bloc countries; Moldova imports almost all of its energy supplies from Russia and Ukraine; Moldova’s dependence on Russian energy is underscored by a more than $5 billion debt to Russian natural gas supplier Gazprom; Moldova signed an Association Agreement and a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU during fall 2014, however its biggest trade partner remains Russia. Everyone understands that a NATO membership will cut all economic ties with Russia, including jobs, and it will turn Moldova into a failed state, or in the CIA doublespeak, the country would stop being vulnerable to “Russian pressure.” Apparently, the failure of Moldova as a state, and its disappearance as a nation is also what the EU wants. On January 6, the new Moldovan Ambassador to Germany was presenting his credentials when, out of the blue, the German president asked the new ambassador what the procedure was for Republic of Moldova to formally unite with Romania. On May 4th, the Katehon reported on Vladimir Plahotniuc’s (the infamous Moldavian oligarch and mafia boss) visit to the US and his meeting with Victoria Nuland there. As the Victory Day celebration was approaching, we all fully anticipated from the US to conduct terror acts, military excursions/drills, and political and legal attacks on Russia as the US and the EU always do to harass Russia during its major national and Church holidays.
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  • Starting with April 21st,  we saw a flurry of “news” about Ukraine and Romania joining NATO Black Sea flotilla and the organization of Romanian-Ukrainian-Bulgarian brigade similar to that created by Poland. On April 26, Georgia (Gruzia) pitched in via the Georgia Today: “creation of NATO Black Sea Fleet Gains US Support” and praising Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania for calls to expand the Western military. All what Russia said to all this NATO generated noise was a brief statement of  Russia’s envoy to NATO Alexander Grushko. “NATO should be in a position to know that all necessary steps will be taken from our side to neutralize the emerging threats.” With all these  preparations for the war on Russia going on, NATO also planned military drills in neutral Moldova, chosen to start on May 2nd, the day of remembrance for the victims of the Odessa Massacre. Meanwhile, the patriots of Moldavia who worked together regardless of their political views, discovered something interesting and saved Moldova. NATO reported that for drills they would be entering Moldova in four formations, and that the total of motorized units will be 50+. However, the very first formation that made an attempt to enter the territory of Moldova contained 100+ unites. This was just one formation. And there was expected three more formations.
  • The plan of NATO was to enter the country with too large for this tiny country forces, to stage a bloody false flag attack during the Victory Day celebration in Moldova with the participation of Ukrainian Right Sector terrorists masquerading as “pro-Russia separatists.” This plot worked in Ukraine, so it should work in Moldova, right? That’s the true reason why Nuland was in Kiev two weeks prior. After this false flag attack, a Romanian fleet was planned to enter Ukrainian territorial waters “by invitation of the Ukrainian government” and arrive to Odessa in order to block Russian fleets from interfering and helping Transnistria. But… Coming back to the bizarre incident near Gibraltar, when one NATO member’s tiny 20 tone Costal Guards’ boat was attacked by another NATO member for interfering with the 18,000 tones behemoth of a submarine  of the third NATO member. The NATO plan apparently was to stealthy and quietly position the Ohio-class ballistic guided-missile submarine USS Florida (SSGN 728) in the Mediterranean or even in the Black Sea so it would be able to shoot into Moldova to overwhelm Moldovan minuscule defense forces. We have to remember that it was the USS Florida “that opened up the Libya intervention,” firing more than 90 cruise missiles to destroy Libya’s air defenses and clearing the way for NATO air strikes. “Never before in the history of the United States of America has one ship conducted that much land attack strikes, conventionally, in one short time period,” Rear Adm. Rick Breckenridge had said.
  • However, thanks to Spanish Costal Guards the submarine was discovered and talked about all around the world via social media and the press. The USS Florida had no other options but to retreat and return to home base. In fact, there were TWO incidents on the same April 16th  day involving the USS Florida. First, it was  the Spanish patrol boat belonged to the Servicio de Vigilancia Aduanera, at whom the British Navy opened  fire.  A bit later,  the Guardia Civil vessel Rio Cedeña tried to cut across the submarine’s bow and was photographed  by multiple witnesses.
  • According to V.V. Pyakin, a political analyst with the Concept Technologies Foundation, a think tank located in St. Petersburg, NATO was in a process of conducting a full-scale invasion of Moldova with the annexation of a Southern part of Ukraine including Odessa to construct a NATO Navy base there. Moldova was supposed to become a part of Romania automatically with the US military forces arriving to the capital and taking  over the government of Moldova. That’s why NATO needed all those military “drills” in the Black Sea region and in the Baltics simultaneously. When the patriotic forces of Moldavia discovered that NATO was about to enter the territory of Moldova in four formations, 100+ motorized units each, they protested loudly and blocked the entrance of NATO troops on the border. Meanwhile, the biggest political fraction in Moldova threatened with the impeachment of the president for treason, if  NATO troops would be allowed to enter the country. Reports from Moldova at the time disclosed that American troops stopped at the border crossing didn’t have proper ID and other papers. Moldovans came to greet them with the banners “Moldova is a neutral country” and “Stop bases of NATO,” “Stop NATO” and “NATO go home.” As the result, on April 28th only about 60 units and 200 servicemen the U.S. Army 2nd Cavalry Regimental Engineer Squadron were allowed to enter the country.
  • When a formation of American military crossed the Romanian-Moldova border allegedly to take part in  Dragon Pioneer 2016 NATO military drills, Moldavian opposition leaders expressed protests. Several members of the Parliament blocked the road.  They reported to Russian and international media and news outlets that the US troops didn’t have an international agreement signed by the defense ministers of Moldova and USA. They also lacked a legal government agreement on the entrance of the heavy military equipment and weaponry to the territory of the country. 60% of American servicemen didn’t have valid military IDs. According to a TASS report,  “To prevent collisions, officers from the Fulger (Lightning) police battalion of special purpose intervened, which were specially delivered from Chisinau. After checking the documents, a column of military vehicles followed the US to the place of temporary location at the site of Negresht,” said the inspectorate.” “The initiative to invite the US troops into the country and hold the exhibition of American technology belongs to the Minister of Defense of Moldova Anatol Șalaru, who is famous for the organization of the “Museum of Soviet occupation” in Chisinau, calls to repeal neutrality and make the country a member of NATO, and the fight against monuments of the Soviet era.” This move was harshly criticized by Igor Dodon, whose party has the largest faction in Parliament and controls a quarter of the seats.
  • He stated: “We believe military exercises involving US troops on Moldovan territory is a flagrant violation of the constitutional principle of neutrality of Moldova. In this regard, the deputies from the Party of socialists have already initiated a number of procedures. They will continue, and this will be one of the reasons for introducing in May the initiative to dismiss the government.” By Victory Day it became apparent that the Nuland-Kogan-NATO plan for invasion of Moldova was foiled. All Americans could do was   to “crush” a Victory Day parade in the center of Moldova’s capital by coming uninvited and bringing their motorized vehicles to it. And that’s where NATO troops and Moldovan patriots came face to face. Pindos lost their freaking mind:  An American Colonel demands from the citizen of Moldova to leave the central square ПИНДОСЫ ОХРЕНЕЛИ В КОНЕЦ! Американский полковник предлагает покинуть центральную площадь Кишинева гражданину РМ pic.twitter.com/FfECO3NBXi — Серж Высоцкий (@Albertich50) May 12, 2016 An American Colonel demands from the citizen of Moldova to leave the central square
Paul Merrell

Poll Shows Diminishing Support for Two-State Solution - Inter Press Service - 0 views

  • Twenty years of the Oslo peace process between Israelis and Palestinians have made a solution more difficult to attain, rather than easier. That was the conclusion of a poll of Israelis and Palestinians released on Friday. The poll, conducted by Zogby Research Services, showed that barely one-third of Israelis (34 percent) and Palestinians (36 percent) still believe that a two-state solution is feasible. And, while the two-state solution remains the most popular option among both peoples, that support is much stronger among Israelis (74 percent) than among Palestinians (47 percent).
  • Lead pollster and President of both Zogby Research Services and the Arab American Institute, Jim Zogby, sees these results as very troubling and as boding ill for the potential for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to salvage the two-state solution.
  • Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have stated that they would put any agreement to a referendum among their respective peoples. When asked if they held out hope, only 11 percent of Palestinians and 39 percent of Israelis said they did. But, when asked if they would support an agreement if their respective leaders endorsed it, 55 percent of Israelis and 49 percent of Palestinians said they would do so, while only 19 percent of Israelis and 28 percent of Palestinians said they would not.
Paul Merrell

Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks an... - 0 views

  • Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution. The efforts – detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous. One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.
  • Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs. A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices – including the agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center – considered designating WikiLeaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting.” Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.
  • In a statement to The Intercept, Assange condemned what he called “the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency” and GCHQ’s “extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher’s website and its readers.” “News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling,” Assange said. “Today, we call on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA’s criminal activity against the media, including WikiLeaks, its staff, its associates and its supporters.” Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, the documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name. The documents call into question the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.
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  • The system used by GCHQ to monitor the WikiLeaks website – codenamed ANTICRISIS GIRL – is described in a classified PowerPoint presentation prepared by the British agency and distributed at the 2012 “SIGDEV Conference.” At the annual gathering, each member of the “Five Eyes” alliance – the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – describes the prior year’s surveillance successes and challenges. In a top-secret presentation at the conference, two GCHQ spies outlined how ANTICRISIS GIRL was used to enable “targeted website monitoring” of WikiLeaks (See slides 33 and 34). The agency logged data showing hundreds of users from around the world, including the United States, as they were visiting a WikiLeaks site –contradicting claims by American officials that a deal between the U.K. and the U.S. prevents each country from spying on the other’s citizens. The IP addresses collected by GCHQ are used to identify individual computers that connect to the Internet, and can be traced back to specific people if the IP address has not been masked using an anonymity service. If WikiLeaks or other news organizations were receiving submissions from sources through a public dropbox on their website, a system like ANTICRISIS GIRL could potentially be used to help track them down. (WikiLeaks has not operated a public dropbox since 2010, when it shut down its system in part due to security concerns over surveillance.)
  • It is unclear from the PowerPoint presentation whether GCHQ monitored the WikiLeaks site as part of a pilot program designed to demonstrate its capability, using only a small set of covertly collected data, or whether the agency continues to actively deploy its surveillance system to monitor visitors to WikiLeaks. It was previously reported in The Guardian that X-KEYSCORE, a comprehensive surveillance weapon used by both NSA and GCHQ, allows “an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.”
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    "... the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group's publication of the Afghanistan war logs." Sweden promptly launches an alleged rape investigation and Assange is forced by the UK courts to take refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador. Because of urging by the Obama administration aimed at chilling the the First Amendment rights of journalists. That should be grounds for impeachment.  
Paul Merrell

Saudi chameleon: What next, jihad in Crimea? - RT Op-Edge - 0 views

  • The House of Saud may be up to something in Crimea. Let’s pivot back to the desert to see how that could possibly be accomplished. A week ago, Minister of Information and Culture Abdelaziz Khoja proclaimed that the House of Saud “renews its firm position condemning terrorism in all its forms.” That was the preamble to ask all Saudi nationals, jihadists or otherwise, to abandon Syria. They were committing a crime, Saudi King Abdullah, ever closer to meeting his maker, decreed. Then, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain all called their ambassadors from Qatar, under the pretext that Doha continues to support “hostile media,” as in Al Jazeera. Finally Saudi Arabia officially declared the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda’s official Syrian branch) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - the rogue jihadists fighting both the Assad government in Syria and the Maliki government in Iraq - as terrorist organizations. Any Saudi member of any of these outfits not back to the Kingdom in 15 days would be thrown in jail for up to 30 years. By decree, the Saudi Interior Ministry (just in case) also branded as terrorists the Shiite Huthi rebels in northern Yemen, as well as an obscure, Saudi-based outfit called ‘Hezbollah Inside the Kingdom’. None of the above can so much as have a Facebook account.
  • Petromonarchy implosion It’s easy to laugh this off as the epic implosion of that prime collection of what the West calls ‘our’ bastards – the petromonarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), also known as Gulf Counter-Revolution Cub.
  • And yes, soon the whole thing degenerated into a trademark, vicious inter-Arab catfight. For Qataris, for instance - accused by the Saudis of “meddling” - the meddlers are in fact the Saudis, who supported the August 2013 military coup in Egypt and are responsible for the giant mess among fighting outfits in Syria. Predictably, reams of Saudi and Emirati journalists quit assorted Qatari media jobs, many following a ‘polite’ request by the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information. Yet it's more complicated. The Saudi royal decree follows an ultra-hardline counterterrorism law which targets any sort of criticism of the House of Saud. So this is not only about the House of Saud being terrified of blowback from assorted hardcore jihadists, after they hone their skills in the Levant. They are terrified of anything that moves in and around Saudi Arabia. Imagine their feelings about the world at large. They are terrified of young, Westernized Saudis with ‘revolutionary’ ideas. They are terrified of jihad freelancers. They are terrified of Muslim Brothers supported by their cousins in Qatar – which the West, laughably, praises as practicing a ‘more moderate’ brand of medieval Wahhabism. The old Emir Hamad al Thani – who recently deposed himself to the benefit of his son Tamim – had skillfully manipulated the Brotherhood as the key lever of Doha’s wide Middle-Eastern ambitions.
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  • To spice up the Saudi-Qatari melee, there was only one Saudi prince among the royals who was in favor of some accommodation, following the orders of his American exceptionalist masters. Yet Saudi heir apparent Prince Nayef, a perennial Minister of Interior from 1975 to 2012, is now dead. And now it’s wide in the open that Riyadh and Doha virtually come to blows on about everything – from Palestine and Egypt to Syria. After all, every grain of sand in Southwest Asian deserts always knew that the House of Saud is in favor of Salafis while Doha’s state policy was always to support the Ikhwan. Now it’s easy; you’re either with us or you’re a terrorist. Well, the Bush-Cheney regime in the US had thought about this one first. The difference is that with so many freelancers, Jihad Inc. was handed a monster PR problem, and the usual Gulf financiers, mostly Saudi and Emirati, lost control of the pack. Now, following the new order, any commando, mercenary, suicide bomber or beheader must abide by the strict American-Saudi playbook; otherwise he won’t be fully weaponized, or worse, will become a candidate for incineration by one of Obama’s choice Hellfire missiles. The Empire needs you, boys, but you gotta behave.
  • A shuttle to Simferopol? And that brings us, not accidentally, to Crimea. I was told by a very good Saudi source to keep a close eye on the House of Saud’s machinations in Ukraine; they seem to be immensely interested in what’s going on. This follows the destitution of too volatile Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush, from his perch as top intelligence commander of the war on Syria (US Secretary of State John Kerry was crucial in his downfall); Bandar’s replacement by Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who is quite popular in Washington; and the ‘recall’ of Saudi fighters in the Levant. The Tatars in Crimea are Muslims. They are about to ‘celebrate’ the 70th anniversary of their mass deportation by Stalin. They were back to Crimea by the end of the 1980s, and now number roughly 250,000 in Crimea; 13 percent of a largely Russian population, with an unemployment rate of at least 50 percent. Refat Chubarov, the president of the Majlis, the National Assembly of Crimean Tatars, considers the Crimean referendum on March 16 a “threat” to the Ukraine. He is not promoting a jihad, but as many Tatar representatives, already forecasts “serious consequences” if Crimea’s statute is changed. There is certified Tatar backing to the neo-Nazis/fascists of the Svoboda and Right Sector kind in Kiev. From this ‘alliance’ to jihad, it’s just a suicide bombing away. Whatever happens in Crimea, the House of Saud is up to something. Bandar Bush had boasted to President Putin that he controlled Caucasus jihadists and could turn them on and off at will. His successor might as well be tempted to turn them on not in the Caucasus, but in establishing a shuttle from the Syrian desert to Simferopol. What a spectacular favor to his American masters. The emperor, after all, is soon to visit Riyadh.
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    Pepe Escobar, again.
Paul Merrell

To beat ISIS, kick out US-led coalition | nsnbc international - 0 views

  • It’s been a bad time for foes of ISIS. Islamic State scored a neat hat-trick by invading strategic Ramadi in Iraq’s mainly Sunni Anbar province, occupying Syria’s historic gem Palmyra, and taking over Al-Tanf, the last remaining border crossing with Iraq. The multinational, American-led ‘Coalition’ launched last August to thwart Islamic State’s (IS, formerly ISIS) march across Syria and Iraq…did nothing.
  • The Iraqis have shot back. Key MP Hakim al-Zamili blames Ramadi’s collapse on the US’s failure to provide “good equipment, weapons and aerial support” to troops. Deputy Prime Minister Saleh Mutlaq, himself a Sunni from Anbar Province, concluded that the Americans were coming up short in all areas. “The Coalition airstrikes are not enough to eliminate IS.” Furthermore, the US policy of recruiting Sunni tribes for the fight, he added, was “too late” – it is “important but not enough.” If ever there was an understatement, this is it. Washington’s long-stated objective of rallying together a vetted Sunni fighting force – or its equivalent in the form of a National Guard – has always served as a placeholder to avoid facing realities.
  • One thing we have learned from IS gains in small and large Sunni towns alike, is that the extremist group prides itself on sleeper cells and alliances inside of these areas. Sunni tribes and families, both, are divided on their support of IS. And the militants ensure that everyone else falls in line through a brutal campaign of inflicting fear and pain indiscriminately. So the likelihood of a significant, anti-IS, well-trained and equipped Sunni fighting force emerging anytime soon is just about nil. So too is the idea of a US-led Coalition air force that can cripple Islamic State. Washington has run fewer sorties over Syria and Iraq in the nine months since inception of its air campaign, than Israel ran in its entire three-week Gaza blitz in 2008-09. Where were the American bombers when Ramadi and Palmyra were being taken? And why does the US Air Force only seem to engage in earnest when their Kurdish allies are being threatened – as in Kobani (Ain al-Arab), Syria, and Erbil in Iraq?
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  • If actions speak louder than words, then Washington’s moves in the Mideast have been deafening. Forget talk of a ‘unified Iraq’ with a ‘strong central government’. And definitely forget loudly-proclaimed objectives of ‘training moderate forces’ to ‘fight off IS’ across the Jordanian and Turkish borders in Syria. That’s just talk. An objective look at US interests in the region paint an entirely different picture. The Americans seek to maintain absolute hegemony in the Mideast, even as they exit costly military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Their primary interests are 1) access to low cost oil and gas, 2) propping up Israel, and more recently, 3) undermining Russian (and Chinese) influence in the region. Clinging on to hegemony would be a whole lot easier without the presence of a powerful, independent Islamic Republic of Iran, which continues to throw a wrench in many of Washington’s regional projects. So hegemony is somewhat dependent on weakening Iran – and its supportive alliances.
  • But why ignore Sunni groups who are unreservedly opposed to IS? Aren’t they America’s natural constituents inside Iraq? The Takfiri extremist groups serve a purpose for Washington. IS has had the ability – where competing Sunni factions, with their ever-growing lists of demands from Baghdad, have not – to transform the US’ ‘buffer’ project into a physical reality. And Washington has not needed to expend blood, treasure or manpower to get the job done.
  • You only have to look at recent US actions in Iraq to see this unspoken plan in action. Washington’s most intensive airstrikes to date were when Kurdish Erbil and its environs came under threat by ISIS.Washington’s most intensive airstrikes to date were when Kurdish Erbil and its environs came under threat by ISIS. Congress has breached all international norms by ushering through legislation to directly arm Sunni and Kurdish militias and bypass the central government in Baghdad. And despite endless promises and commitments, the Americans have failed at every hurdle to train and equip the Iraqi Army and security forces to do anything useful. A weak, divided Iraq can never become a regional powerhouse allied with Iran and the Resistance Axis. Likewise a weak, divided Syria. But without US control over these central governments, the only way to achieve this is 1) through the creation of sectarian and ethnic strife that could carve out pro-US buffers inside the ‘Resistance states’ and/or 2) through the creation of a hostile ‘Sunni buffer’ to break this line from Iran to Palestine.
  • General Walid Sukariyya, a Sunni, pro-resistance member of Lebanon’s parliament, agrees. “ISIS will be better for the US and Israel than having a strong Iran, Iraq and Syria…If they succeed at this, the Sunni state in Iraq will split the resistance from Palestine.” While Washington has long sought to create a buffer in Iraq on the Syrian border, it has literally spent years trying – and failing – to find, then mold, representative Sunni Iraqi leaders who will comfortably toe a pro-American line. An example of this is the Anbar delegation US General John Allen handpicked last December for a DC tour, which excluded representatives of the two most prominent Sunni tribes fighting IS in Iraq – the Albu Alwan and Albu Nimr. A spokesman for the tribes, speaking to Al-Jarida newspaper, objected at the time: “We are fighting ISIL and getting slaughtered, while suffering from a shortage of weapons. In the meantime, others are going to Washington to get funds and will later be assigned as our leaders.”
  • With the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the US inadvertently extended Iran’s arc of influence in a direct geographic line to Palestine, leaving the Israeli colonial project vulnerable. Former President George W. Bush immediately took on the task of destroying this Resistance Axis by attempting to neuter Iranian allies Hezbollah, Syria and Hamas – and failed. The Arab Spring presented a fresh opportunity to regroup: the US and its Turkish and Persian Gulf allies swung into action to create conditions for regime-change in Syria. The goal? To break this geographic line from Iran – through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – to Palestine. When regime-change failed, the goalpost moved to the next best plan: dividing Syria into several competing chunks, which would weaken the central state and create a pro-US ‘buffer’ along the border with Israel. Weakening the central government in Iraq by dividing the state along Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite lines has also been a priority for the Americans.
  • The DIA brief makes clear that the escalation of conflict in Syria will create further sectarianism and radicalization, which will increase the likelihood of an ‘Islamic State’ on the Syrian-Iraqi border, one that would likely be manned by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). So what did Washington do when it received this information? It lied. Less than one month after the DIA report was published, US Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this about the Syrian opposition: “I just don’t agree that a majority are Al-Qaeda and the bad guys. That’s not true. There are about 70,000 to 100,000 oppositionists … Maybe 15 percent to 25 percent might be in one group or another who are what we would deem to be bad guys…There is a real moderate opposition that exists.” Using the fabricated storyline of ‘moderate rebels’ who need assistance to fight a ‘criminal Syrian regime’, the US government kept the Syrian conflict buzzing, knowing full well the outcome would mean the establishment of a Sunni extremist entity spanning the Syrian-Iraqi border…which could cripple, what the Americans call, “the strategic depth of the Shia expansion.”As US Council on Foreign Relations member and terrorism analyst Max Abrahms conceded on Twitter: “The August 5, 2012 DIA report confirms much of what Assad has been saying all along about his opponents both inside & outside Syria.”
  • Since last year, numerous Iraqi officials have complained about the US airdropping weapons to IS – whether deliberately or inadvertently remains disputed. Military sources, on the other hand, have made clear that the US-led Coalition ignores many of the Iraqi requests for air cover during ground operations. If the US isn’t willing to play ball in Iraq’s existential fight against IS, then why bother with the Americans at all? Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is viewed as a ‘weak’ head of state – a relatively pro-American official who will work diligently to keep a balance between US interests and those of Iraq’s powerful neighbor, Iran. But after the disastrous fall of Ramadi, and more bad news from inside Syria, Abadi has little choice but to mitigate these losses, and rapidly. The prime minister has now ordered the engagement of thousands of Hashd al-Shaabi (Shiite paramilitary groups, commonly known as the Popular Mobilization Forces) troops in the Anbar to wrest back control of Ramadi. And this – unusually – comes with the blessings of Anbar’s Sunni tribes who voted overwhelmingly to appeal to the Hashd for military assistance.
  • Joining the Hashd are a few thousand Sunni fighters, making this a politically palatable response. If the Ramadi operation goes well, this joint Sunni-Shiite effort (which also proved successful in Tikrit) could provide Iraq with a model to emulate far and wide. The recent losses in Syria and Iraq have galvanized IS’ opponents from Lebanon to Iran to Russia, with commitments pouring in for weapons, manpower and funds. If Ramadi is recovered, this grouping is unlikely to halt its march, and will make a push to the Syrian border through IS-heavy territory. There is good reason for this: the militants who took Ramadi came across the Syrian border – in full sight of US reconnaissance capabilities. A senior resistance state official told me earlier this year: “We will not allow the establishment of a big (extremist) demographic and geographic area between Syria and Iraq. We will work to push Syrian ISIS inside Syria and Iraqi ISIS inside Iraq.”
  • Right now, the key to pushing back Takfiri gains inside Syria’s eastern and northwestern theaters lies in the strengthening of the Iraqi military landscape. And an absolute priority will be in clearing the IS ‘buffer’ between the two states. Eighteen months ago, in an analysis about how to fight jihadist militants from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, I wrote that the solution for this battle will be found only within the region, specifically from within those states whose security is most compromised or under threat: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. I argued that these four states would be forced to increase their military cooperation as the battles intensified, and that they would provide the only ‘boots on the ground’ in this fight. And they will. But air cover is a necessary component of successful offensive operations, even in situations of unconventional warfare. If the US and its flimsy Coalition are unable or unwilling to provide the required reconnaissance assistance and the desired aerial coverage, as guided by a central Iraqi military command, then Iraq should look elsewhere for help.
  • Iran and Russia come to mind – and we may yet get there. Iraq and Syria need to merge their military strategies more effectively – again, an area where the Iranians and Russians can provide valuable expertise. Both states have hit a dangerous wall in the past few weeks, and the motivation for immediate and decisive action is high today. Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah is coming into play increasingly as well – its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has recently promised that Hezbollah will no longer limit itself geographically, and will go where necessary to thwart this Takfiri enemy. The non-state actors that make up the jihadist and Takfiri core cannot be beaten by conventional armies, which is why local militias accustomed to asymmetric warfare are best suited for these battles. Criticizing the US’s utterly nonexistent response to the Ramadi debacle yesterday, Iran’s elite Quds Force Commander Qassem Suleimani points out: “Today, there is nobody in confrontation with [IS] except the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as nations who are next to Iran or supported by Iran.” The Iranians have become central figures in the fight against terror, and are right next door to it – as opposed to Washington, over 6,000 miles away.
  • If the US has any real commitment to the War on Terror, it should focus on non-combat priorities that are also essential to undermine extremism: 1) securing the Turkish and Jordanian borders to prevent any further infiltration of jihadists into Syria and Iraq, 2) sanctioning countries and individuals who fund and weaponize the Takfiris, most of whom are staunch US allies, now ironically part of the ‘Coalition’ to fight IS, and 3) sharing critical intelligence about jihadist movements with those countries engaged in the battle. It is time to cut these losses and bring some heavyweights into this battle against extremism. If the US-directed Coalition will not deliver airstrikes under the explicit command of sovereign states engaged at great risk in this fight, it may be time to clear Iraqi and Syrian airspace of coalition jets, and fill those skies with committed partners instead.
  • Related documentation: DIA Doc Syria and Iraq:_ Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.
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    Woh! Things definitely coming to an inflexion point in Syria and Iraq. This is a reprint from RT.com, the Russian video and web page news service. The hint of direct and overt military action by Russia and Iran should not be ignored. The U.S. is sandbagging for ISIL and al Nusiryah. 
Paul Merrell

Violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories - the Guardian briefing | News | The... - 0 views

  • Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories have been convulsed by a wave of escalating violence in recent days. The lethal tensions ratcheted up sharply last Thursday when a married couple, Jewish settlers from Neria in the northern West Bank, were shot and killed in a car in front of their four children near Beit Furik, allegedly by members of a five-man Hamas cell who were subsequently arrested. Two more Israelis were stabbed and killed in Jerusalem’s Old City on Saturday by a Palestinian youth, who was shot dead at the scene. On Sunday, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes near the West Bank town of Tulkarem. The mounting friction has seen attacks by settlers on Palestinians, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces and attempted attacks continue. On Wednesday. there were incidents in Jerusalem, where a Palestinian woman stabbed an Israeli man who then shot and seriously wounded her in the Old City, the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, where a Palestinian was killed after reportedly trying to seize a gun from a soldier and stabbing him, and when a female Israeli settler’s car was stoned near Beit Sahour, which adjoins Bethlehem, in an incident in which it appears other settlers fired on Palestinians, seriously injuring a youth.
  • On the Palestinian side, anger escalated earlier this week after a 13-year-old boy in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper in an incident the Israeli military has claimed was “unintentional” as soldiers were aiming at another individual.
  • Jerusalem has remained tense now for almost a year. Most analysts blame the recent heightened tension on several factors. Key among them has been the issue of the religious site in Jerusalem known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews as the Temple Mount. A long-running campaign by some fundamentalist Jews and their supporters for expanding their rights to worship in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount, supported by rightwing members of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s own cabinet, has raised the suspicion – despite repeated Israeli denials – that Israel intends to change the precarious status quo for the site, which has been governed under the auspices of the Jordanian monarchy since 1967.
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  • Recent Israeli police actions at the site scandalised the Muslim world and raised tensions. Israel has also banned two volunteer Islamic watch groups – male and female – accusing them of harassing Jews during the hours they are allowed to visit. That has combined with the lack of a peace process and growing resentment and frustration in Palestinian society aimed at both Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has complained in recent weeks of an increase in stone throwing and molotov cocktail attacks on West Bank roads and in areas adjoining mainly Palestinian areas of Jerusalem, where an elderly motorist died after crashing his car during an alleged stoning attack. In response, Netanyahu and his cabinet have loosened live-fire regulations over the use of .22 calibre bullets on Palestinian demonstrators. Although described by Israel as “less lethal”, it is this type of ammunition that killed 13-year-old Abdul Rahman Shadi on Monday.
  • Part of the problem is the leadership on both sides. Netanyahu leads a rightwing/far-right coalition with the smallest of majorities. Several cabinet ministers support the settler movement and have publicly criticised him for not cracking down harder on Palestinian protest. Netanyahu’s weakness is reflected on the Palestinian side, where the ageing Abbas is seen as isolated, frustrated and increasingly out of step with other members of the Palestinian leadership, who would like a tougher line against Israel over continued settlement building and the absence of any peace process.
  • In his recent speech to the UN general assembly, Abbas went further than he had ever done before in threatening to end what he claims is Palestine’s unilateral adherence to the Oslo accords, which he said Israel refuses to honour. “We cannot continue to be bound by these signed agreements with Israel and Israel must assume fully its responsibilities of an occupying power,” he said. Abbas, however, stopped short of ending security cooperation between Israel and Palestinian security forces – mainly aimed at Hamas on the West Bank – and asked the UN for international protection. His speech at the United Nations has been seen as a move to placate growing discontents in Palestinian society. Both Abbas and Netanyahu are now both engaged in a delicate balancing act, trying to avoid further escalation that would be detrimental to both while trying not to lose the support of key constituencies. On Abbas’s side, that has meant ordering Palestinian factions and security forces to desist from joining the conflict, while on Netanyahu’s side it has seen numerous warnings of harsh measures – many of which have been repeatedly announced.
  • Nentanyahu does not want to risk a position where Abbas ends security cooperation and in the local jargon “hands back the keys” – in other words revokes the Oslo accords and insists on Israel once again taking full responsibility for administering the occupied territories. For his part, Abbas is said to see a limited popular uprising as useful because of the message it delivers to both Israel and the international community of the mounting risks of a moribund peace process and how serious things could become if security cooperation were to end.
  • At the end of the last round of the peace process last year, US diplomats warned about this potential outcome and Washington has largely withdrawn from a guiding role, exhausted by the lack of progress and frustrated with Netanyahu. Despite the Palestinian desire for a new multilateral international approach, it has failed to materialise as have any US guarantees to Abbas that they intend to advance the peace process. While Syria, migration and Russia are preoccupying western governments, Israel and Palestine have been largely left to their own devices.
  • Flare-ups of violence have a habit of coming and going but hopes that this one is coming to an end appear premature for now. However, the likelihood of the current violence fading away still remains the strongest bet. The biggest risk is a miscalculation by either side, which is out of the hands of either leader, that would alter the dynamics. Individuals on both sides have led some of the worst attacks: Jewish extremists in the summer burning three members of a Palestinian family to death, and “lone wolf attacks” launched by Palestinians angry about al-Aqsa and other issues. With neither side having a clear exit strategy, there is a risk is that Netanyahu and Abbas are being led by events rather than leading.
Paul Merrell

SANTIAGO, Chile: Chilean accused of murder, torture taught 13 years for Pentagon | Nati... - 0 views

  • A member of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal secret police who’s been accused of murder taught for more than a decade at the Pentagon’s premier university, despite repeated complaints by his colleagues about his past. Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in criminal court in Santiago with being the mastermind in the execution-style slayings of seven people in 1973, according to court documents. McClatchy also interviewed an accuser who identified Garcia Covarrubias as the person who sexually tortured him.Despite knowing of the allegations, State and Defense department officials allowed Garcia Covarrubias to retain his visa and continue working at a school affiliated with the National Defense University until last year .Human rights groups also question the school’s selection of a second professor, Colombia’s former top military commander.
  • Some Latin America experts said the hirings by the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies reflected a continuing inclination by the U.S government to overlook human rights violations in Latin America, especially in countries where it funded efforts to quash leftists. But those experts were especially troubled by Garcia Covarrubias’ long tenure at one of the nation’s most renowned defense institutions. “His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,” said Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer from 1982 to 2010 who specializes in Latin America. “If he is in fact guilty of what he is accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell other countries how they should be fighting terrorism?” To his supporters, Garcia Covarrubias is a brilliant thinker with a Ph.D. and purveyor of leadership skills. To his alleged victims, he’s a sadistic torturer with a penchant for horsewhips and perversity.
  • A 2008 Chilean military document reviewed by McClatchy identified Garcia Covarrubias as a member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the feared spy agency known by its acronym DINA.“DINA was simply the most sinister agency in Latin America,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, which secured the release of U.S. government classified documents underscoring the complicit relationship between the U.S. and Pinochet. “Anyone associated with that agency should never have been allowed into this country, let alone given this job.”Officials with the Pentagon, the State Department and the school refused to comment. Garcia Covarrubias is now back in Chile, ordered by an investigative judge in January 2014 to remain in the country while an inquiry continues into his alleged role in the deaths of seven people in Temuco weeks after the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup on Sept. 11, 1973. His case is one of 108 involving tortured, disappeared or murdered supporters of the deposed elected president, Salvador Allende. More than 3,000 people died at the hands of the regime, and in 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell offered regrets for U.S. involvement in the coup, calling it “not a part of American history that we're proud of.”
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  • The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias’ contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him. “We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime,” said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. “He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn’t have anything either or he wouldn’t have been hired.”McClatchy, however, located one of his alleged victims, who described being brutalized by him. “They submitted us to torture, twice a day. We were submerged in feces,” Herman Carrasco, who’s now a real estate agent, told McClatchy in Chile. “They stuck rifle barrels in our anuses.”According to Carrasco, the torture unfolded in October and November 1973 – lorded over by the horsewhip-wielding Garcia Covarrubias – and included electric shock administered to eyelids, genitals and other sensitive areas of the body.“He was the person who tortured us, with his face shown,” said Carrasco, who added that he’d known Garcia Covarrubias from social events before the coup. “He forced us into sexual acts, which shows that besides ferocious cruelty there was a level of psychopathic behavior.”
  • Despite very graphic torture accusations against Garcia Covarrubias, U.S. officials are rallying behind him.
  • As the center supported Garcia Covarrubias, it pushed out Andersen in retaliation, the former communications chief said.Last September, Andersen filed a complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general, with the support of then-Sen. Carl Levin. D-Mich. An inspector general spokeswoman declined to comment. “It’s shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent,” Andersen said. The details uncovered about Garcia Covarrubias have prompted demands from several members of Congress for a Pentagon accounting of how he was hired and retained his job.“The American people deserve to know that adequate vetting of such individuals would be routine,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., author of the “ Leahy Law,” which restricts U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights.
  • While most of the concerns focused on Garcia Covarrubias, the center also took heat in 2006 for hiring Colombian Gen. Carlos Ospina Ovalle. As army commander, he turned the tables in a decades-old guerrilla war while simultaneously crushing drug cartels. Ospina Ovalle left the center last year and took a post at another National Defense University school.He was hired at the request of the Colombian government and was popular with U.S. military leaders, recalls Downie, the center’s director at the time. “The Colombians wanted, for his own safety, to get him out of Colombia,” said Downie. “This is a guy we certainly wanted to have as a professor.”Human rights groups, however, criticized the general’s hiring and continued employment at the National Defense University. They point to his earlier command in Antioquia province, where right-wing paramilitaries ran roughshod and were linked to the military.“Antioquia in the late 1990s . . . is less than one degree of separation from working with the paramilitaries,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate specializing in military matters for the Washington Office on Latin America. “If he has not, it’s some miracle that he managed to be the one clean officer.”“Having officers like that, the implicit message is that human rights takes a backseat,” said Isacson.
Paul Merrell

Angry Birds and 'leaky' phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data | World news ... - 0 views

  • The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect
  • Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets. Exploiting phone information and location is a high-priority effort for the intelligence agencies, as terrorists and other intelligence targets make substantial use of phones in planning and carrying out their activities, for example by using phones as triggering devices in conflict zones. The NSA has cumulatively spent more than $1bn in its phone targeting efforts.The disclosures also reveal how much the shift towards smartphone browsing could benefit spy agencies' collection efforts.
  • Depending on what profile information a user had supplied, the documents suggested, the agency would be able to collect almost every key detail of a user's life: including home country, current location (through geolocation), age, gender, zip code, marital status – options included "single", "married", "divorced", "swinger" and more – income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, and number of children.The agencies also made use of their mobile interception capabilities to collect location information in bulk, from Google and other mapping apps. One basic effort by GCHQ and the NSA was to build a database geolocating every mobile phone mast in the world – meaning that just by taking tower ID from a handset, location information could be gleaned.A more sophisticated effort, though, relied on intercepting Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and using them to collect large volumes of location information.So successful was this effort that one 2008 document noted that "[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system."
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  • One slide from a May 2010 NSA presentation on getting data from smartphones – breathlessly titled "Golden Nugget!" – sets out the agency's "perfect scenario": "Target uploading photo to a social media site taken with a mobile device. What can we get?"The question is answered in the notes to the slide: from that event alone, the agency said it could obtain a "possible image", email selector, phone, buddy lists, and "a host of other social working data as well as location".
  • The latest disclosures could also add to mounting public concern about how the technology sector collects and uses information, especially for those outside the US, who enjoy fewer privacy protections than Americans. A January poll for the Washington Post showed 69% of US adults were already concerned about how tech companies such as Google used and stored their information.The documents do not make it clear how much of the information that can be taken from apps is routinely collected, stored or searched, nor how many users may be affected. The NSA says it does not target Americans and its capabilities are deployed only against "valid foreign intelligence targets".The documents do set out in great detail exactly how much information can be collected from widely popular apps. One document held on GCHQ's internal Wikipedia-style guide for staff details what can be collected from different apps. Though it uses Android apps for most of its examples, it suggests much of the same data could be taken from equivalent apps on iPhone or other platforms.The GCHQ documents set out examples of what information can be extracted from different ad platforms, using perhaps the most popular mobile phone game of all time, Angry Birds – which has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.7bn times – as a case study.
  • Other apps choose to transmit much more data, meaning the agency could potentially net far more. One mobile ad platform, Millennial Media, appeared to offer particularly rich information. Millennial Media's website states it has partnered with Rovio on a special edition of Angry Birds; with Farmville maker Zynga; with Call of Duty developer Activision, and many other major franchises.
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    Don't miss the linked companion articles at New York Times and ProPublica. 
Paul Merrell

After Two Years, White House Finally Responds to Snowden Pardon Petition - With a "No" - 0 views

  • The White House on Tuesday ended two years of ignoring a hugely popular whitehouse.gov petition calling for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon,” saying thanks for signing, but no. “We live in a dangerous world,” Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s adviser on homeland security and terrorism, said in a statement. More than 167,000 people signed the petition, which surpassed the 100,000 signatures that the White House’s “We the People” website said would garner a guaranteed response on June 24, 2013. In Tuesday’s response, the White House acknowledged that “This is an issue that many Americans feel strongly about.”
  • The White House on Tuesday ended two years of ignoring a hugely popular whitehouse.gov petition calling for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon,” saying thanks for signing, but no. “We live in a dangerous world,” Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s adviser on homeland security and terrorism, said in a statement. More than 167,000 people signed the petition, which surpassed the 100,000 signatures that the White House’s “We the People” website said would garner a guaranteed response on June 24, 2013. In Tuesday’s response, the White House acknowledged that “This is an issue that many Americans feel strongly about.”
  • Monaco then explained her position: “Instead of constructively addressing these issues, Mr. Snowden’s dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it.” Snowden didn’t actually disclose any classified information — news organizations including the Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times and The Intercept did the disclosing. And the Obama administration has yet to specify any “severe consequences” that can be independently confirmed.
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  • The Snowden response was one of 20 responses to what the White House called “our We the People backlog.” The White House had been criticized for avoiding uncomfortable topics despite their popular support. On Twitter, the responses to the Snowden response, some from signers of the petition, were highly critica
Paul Merrell

Greek Voters Return Alexis Tsipras to Power in Snap Elections | TIME - 0 views

  • Despite unhappiness with his capitulation to European creditors, Tsipras remains in power after snap elections It was a “victory of the people” said Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as he was swept back to power following a snap general election on Sunday. Despite his failure to rid Greece of the troika as he’d once promised; and instead, dragging the country into a yet another austerity program, Tsipras told a band of over 2,000 Syriza loyalists near Syntagma Square on Sunday night that “justice had been done.”
  • “I’m very happy with the result—Syriza is the only party that will support the poor people and workers rights; he’s one of the best politicians to renegotiate the memorandum,” said 50-year-old Kostas Dianis. Although a former communist, some critics say Tsipras can no longer claim to represent the far left; not after his capitulation in Brussels earlier this summer when he agreed to a third bailout worth over $95 billion based on the demands of European creditors. “Tsipras is an agent for capitalism; he is not from the left; he is part of the system, and will continue the system, rather than changing it”, said 32-year-old Yannis; a taxi driver who voted for Syriza in January, but this time voted for the Communist party because “they’re the only ones that say what they mean.” And although Tsipras was unable to free Greece from austerity, as he had initially promised, the alternative left—the MP’s that split from Tsipras earlier this summer, provided few viable alternatives to Greek voters.
  • In comparison to January’s lightning victory for Syriza, and the defiance and righteousness that emerged during the bailout referendum held n July, celebrations were relatively low-key. And no surprise—the government has a mountain of harsh policies to implement, including full reassessment of the welfare system with savings worth 0.5 per cent of GDP, reconstruction of a broken tax collection system and full liberalization of the energy market. Tsipras told the audience that starting on Monday morning he will “fight corruption”—a key strategy plank during the election campaign. Tsipiras lost of some of his strongest comrades in the run up to the election, including the former president of the parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou who joined several other splitters from Sryiza in a new party called Popular Unity. They were angry about what they saw as Tsipiras’ capitulation to Germany and other creditor nations. But the Prime Minister’s legions of fans remain undeniably behind him. “Tsipras is strong in his game; he’s playing chess and we’re following him”, said 32-year-old Ugur from Athens. “He is a realist, and a leftist; he had to sign the memorandum because we were on the edge and were going to fall over.”
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  • Though she remains personally popular, the strident Zoe Konstantopoulou didn’t win back her seat after Popular Unity failed to reach the 3 per cent threshold. “The mandate of the people on the 5th of July was a clear ‘No’ to the extortion, the violation of human rights and ‘No’ to austerity”, she told TIME in an interview. Many Greek voters may well have agreed with Konstantopoulou, but they were still willing to give Tsipras a chance. “I voted for Tsipras because the others are worse and they got us into this mess” said 43 year old Elaney Depoli. “People in Greece are depressed from 5 years of austerity; this is the best opportunity to get better results. He signed the memorandum to save Greece, and he is saving Greece.”
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    Sounds like no Grexit before the Greek far left reorganizes in a new party separate from Syrisa. And it may be the Communist Party that leads Greece out from under the tyranny of the Eurozone. That would have an anti-communists in the U.S. State Dept. in a true tizzy and might result in NATO intervention. 
Paul Merrell

CIA-backed general makes a bid for power in Libya - 0 views

  • Western backed general Khalifa Haftar is attempting a coup in Libya. On 18 May he attacked the national parliament and rival militias. Haftar was head of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s army during the disastrous war in Chad in the 1980s. He then defected to the US. He is considered a key CIA “asset” with links to Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Haftar returned to Libya during the 2011 revolution to coordinate between armed rebels and the West. He has built a base among fighters and former regime officers. He has declared himself the head of the armed forces.
  • Now he is making a bid for power. He declared war on the militias and launched attacks on Islamist groups in the east of the country. He has won over a section of the population that has becoming deeply alienated by the militias. Depsite popular elections, militias have refused to integrate into a new national army and have often acted against the people they sought to defend. Islamist groups, among them the Al Qaida affiliated Ansar al-Sharia, have not won popular support. Their campaign of assassinations against their critics has helped open the door to Hafter's “war on terrorism". It is unclear whether his coup will succeed, but it points to further retreats from the popular power that was at the heart of the Arab Spring.
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    The article might have mentioned that during the entire time he lived in the U.S., Haftar lived very near the largest office building in Langley, Virginia, occupied by an agency that has a three-letter acronym. 
Gary Edwards

Obama vouches for Ma Clinton | Power Line - 0 views

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    "OBAMA VOUCHES FOR MA CLINTON Barack Obama has emerged as a forceful advocate of Hillary Clinton in the course of the presidential campaign. He is more popular than she is, but they have a lot in common. They both have an equally low opinion of the intelligence of the American voters and they have a lot of evidence to support their opinion. They also share an equally wayward relationship with the truth. Obama's signature domestic program was built on a torrent of demonstrable lies. Clinton has defended her criminally inappropriate use of a private email server to conduct official State Department business on proposition that have proven false in the fullness of time. They are both unregenerate liars. Now Obama has stepped forward as a character witness for Hillary Clinton. Despite what you may have concluded on the basis of your own observations, Obama vouches for Clinton as an upstanding public official. In my view, this is akin to John Dillinger serving as a character witness for Creepy Karpis or, perhaps more aptly, Ma Barker. It's almost funny. The Media Research Center finds an interesting example of Obama testifying on behalf of Hillary at an Ohio campaign event this past Tuesday (video below). Even speaking briefly, as in this 40-second excerpt, Obama is obnoxious and grating. We are invited by MRC to analyze this somewhat ambiguous assertion: "And when she was challenged, she doesn't make things up on the spot. She doesn't double down on lies - that obviously are lies because there's video." What is he saying? MRC's Craig Bannister subjects Obama's assertion to a close reading that probably exceeds what is warranted, asking: * She'll only tell an obvious lie once, but won't "double down" on it if challenged? * She won't keep repeating a lie - if "there's video"? * She'll take her time crafting a lie, not make one up "on the spot"? Bannister concludes: "Regardless of whether Pres. Obama went off-te
Paul Merrell

Putin signs "undesirable NGOs" Bill into Law | nsnbc international - 0 views

  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a bill, enabling the designation of foreign and foreign-funded NGOs as undesirables after the bill passed both the Lower and Upper House of Parliament.
  • The bill authorizes the designation of foreign and foreign funded non-profit as well as for profit NGOs as “undesirables” on grounds of “national security. The bill passed the second reading in Russia’s Lower House of Parliament (State Duma), last week and was approved by the Upper House of Parliament, the Federation Council. The bill had been proposed by legislators of the governing United Russia party of President Vladimir Putin, The passing of the bill in both houses of parliament and the signing of the bill by Putin was no surprise since United Russia has a majority in both chambers. The bill has been heavily criticized by foreign, particularly western media, western politicians and primarily western-based or funded NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, among many others. One of the NGOs that is certain to fall under the provisions of the bill is USAID.
  • he new law follows up on a law that was adopted in 2012 that obliged foreign-funded non-governmental organizations to register as “foreign agents”. The law provides for declaring foreigners and foreign-funded NGOs as“undesirable”. Persons who are violating the newly adopted law could face a fine up to 10,000 dollar to be paid in local currency and up to six years imprisonment. Supporters of the bill are referring to the risk that foreign-funded NGOs could pose to the Russian Federation’s national security while critics maintain that the wording of the legislation and especially the term “undesirable” is ambiguous and opens the floodgates for the abuse of the law to crack down on legal and legitimate dissent.
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  • While the wording and the use of “undesirable” is ambiguous and does pose legal problems as much as it opens the floodgates for the abuse of the legislation, there may be a good reason for keeping the wording ambiguous. Internationally acting NGOs have increasingly become “weaponized”; That is, that they have increasingly been utilized as tool for everything from supporting legitimate dissent to the organization of political violence and coup d’état. Another disturbing fact is that this pattern includes UN organizations such as the UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action (Framework Team). Examples? Doctors Without Borders (MSF) played a key role in accusing the Syrian government for the use of chemical weapons, stating MSF sources. Later on the NGO had to admit that it had no staff in Damascus and exclusively relied on statements by “partners” in “rebel-held territories”.
  • Amnesty International for its part issued a report about alleged war crimes committed during NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011. A 2012 report by Amnesty International claimed that Operation Unified Protector, authorized by UNSC Resolution 1973 has resulted in 55 documented cases of named civilian casualties, including 16 children and 14 women that were killed in air strikes in the capital Tripoli and the towns of Zliten, Majer, Sirte, and Brega. The low figure is utterly inconsistent with casualty figures provided by local NGOs as well as documented eyewitness reports. Two things are worth considering with regard to the Amnesty report. During the first night of the operation NATO forces launched over 100 cruise missiles into Tripoli alone.
  • The Director of Amnesty International at that time was Suzanne Nozzel, who also worked as adviser on U.S. government – NGO relations for the then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
  • While Human Right Watch does, indeed, engage in justified human rights advocacy, it has also been engaged in issuing strongly biased reports, in politicizing that “representatives are denied entry to e.g. Egypt”, while failing to mention that proper visa procedures had not been followed, and so forth. The most disturbing NGO may, however, be the UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action. The Framework Team is largely privately funded with George Soros as one of the primary sponsors. The NGO under UN cover is “coordinating UN, governmental and non-governmental initiatives”.
  • The UN organization could undoubtedly be useful but it has also been sharply criticized for “fanning the flames” of the inter-communal violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, and for its active role in creating rather than preventing ethnic and sectarian disputes and violence in Nepal. In both the case of Myanmar and in the case of Nepal it is easy to establish ties between the Framework Team and Western or Western allied intelligence services. Criticism of the ambiguous wording of the new Russian legislation is, in other words, as justified as criticism of NGOs who prostitute themselves and the best intentions of the members at their base as pawns in geopolitical chess-games.
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    More than understandable given the long history of the U.S. weaponizing NGOs in aid of its "color revolutions" strategy to overthrow governments in secular states and left-leaning democracies. The most recent examples are the successful U.S. coup in Ukraine and the thrice-failed coup attempts in Venezuela.  U.S. NGOs have been attempting to provoke such a coup in Russia for some time but have failed thus far because of Putin's immense popularity and a perhaps better-informed Russian public. The Russian people know they are under attack and have wisely closed ranks rather than falling for a divide-and-conquer strategy. Venezuela recently enacted similar legislation.  
Gary Edwards

The American Spectator : To Save America: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Soc... - 0 views

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    THE OBAMA WATCH Newt Gingrich begins his new book, To Save America: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, rightly describing the grave, mortal threat America faces today due to the left-wing extremism of the Democrats and the vast failures of the Republicans. He writes: This is a book I never expected to write. After the victory of freedom over Communist tyranny, of religious liberty over secular police states, and of American pride over the malaise and cynicism of the 1970s, I fully expected America to follow an upward curve of consistent improvement. I did not expect the Left to ignore the lessons of history and move further into ideological extremism. I did not expect them to react to their meager popular support by seeking to impose a corrupt, Chicago-style political machine on the entire country. After leaving Congress in 1999, I certainly did not foresee Republican failure so vast that it allowed left-wing radicals to take over the House, Senate and Presidency. America as we know it is now facing a mortal threat. This danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991. We stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.
Gary Edwards

Barack Obama's Stimulus Plan Will Get Little Value for Money - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • This is so manifestly false that we doubt Mr. Obama really believes it. He has to know that it matters what the government spends the money on, as well as how it is financed. A dollar doled out in jobless benefits may well be spent by the worker who receives it. That $1 of spending will count as economic activity and add to GDP. But that same dollar can't be conjured out of thin air. The government has to take that dollar away from someone else -- either in higher taxes, or by issuing new debt in the form of a bond. The person who is taxed or buys the bond will have $1 less to spend. If the beneficiary of that $1 spends it on something less productive than the taxed American or the lender would have, then the net impact on growth will be negative.
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    The stage was thus set for the popular President to forge a bipartisan consensus that combined ideas from both parties. A major cut in the corporate tax favored by Republicans could have been added to Democratic public works spending for a quick political triumph that might have done at least some economic good. Instead, Mr. Obama chose to let House Democrats write the bill, and they did what comes naturally: They cleaned out their intellectual cupboards and wrote a bill that is 90% social policy, and 10% economic policy. (See here for a case study.) It is designed to support incomes with transfer payments, rather than grow incomes through job creation. This is the reason the bill has run into political trouble, despite a new President with 65% job approval. The 11 Democrats who opposed it in the House didn't do so because they want to hand Mr. Obama a defeat. The same is true of the Senate moderates of both parties working to trim their $900 billion version. They've acted because they can't justify a vote for so much spending for so little economic effect.
Paul Merrell

Merkel doesn't oppose Greece leaving Eurozone: Syriza surges to 30.4 % in Poll for Janu... - 0 views

  • German Chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t oppose Greece leaving the eurozone. Talks about the possibility of Greece leaving the eurozone have gained renewed urgency after 30.4 % of polled Greeks said they would vote for Syriza, suggesting a chance that the left-wing party that runs on a platform of renegotiating bailout terms and national sovereignty as well as social justice could win the Greek snap parliamentary elections on January 25.
  • German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, that Germany wouldn’t oppose a Greek exit from the eurozone if the people of Greece voted a party to power that opposes the current austerity measures in the country which came as conditionalities along with a EU and IMF bailout. Both Chancellor Merkel as well as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble reportedly believe that such a decision and development would be bearable for Germany as well as for the other eurozone member States. The Chancellor and the Finance Minister were cited as referring to progress made in the eurozone since 2012.
  • EUropean shares and bonds dropped last week after the Greek parliament rejected the current Prime Minister Antonius Samaras’ presidential candidate and set the country on a course towards snap parliamentary elections on January 25. A recent poll showed that the governing PASOK and New Democracy coalition had suffered substantial losses in popular support after they agreed to the EU/IMF bailout and associated conditions that have driven a large percentage of the middle class into abject poverty. Another issue that is hotly debated among Greeks is the loss of sovereignty over the county’s economic and fiscal policy, and domestic affairs, including social policies.
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  • The support for Syriza is by many analysts seen as a clear popular mandate for Syriza and against the austerity measures which have driven impoverished previous members of the middle class to illegally cut down trees for firewood to survive the winter. Many analysts also interpret the results of the recent polls as a clear message to Prime Minister George Papandreou who ruled the country since 2009 and to and PASOK as well as to New Democracy, that “enough is enough”. When UK Prime Minister David Cameron, in 2014, signaled that the UK could leave the EU all together, the majority of polled French said “let them go”. As for Germany and France, a slimmer, more streamlined EU could indeed strengthen a growing continental European consensus against a UK/US economic, political and military hegemony which the Atlantic Axis tries to enforce in Europe. Some analysts say that a Greek departure from the eurozone could be positive for both the EU and for Greece, while a British departure from the EU could put Europe on less hostile course towards Russia and a consolidation of ties between the EU and Russia.
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    Be sure to take your pitchfork along if you're traveling to Greece in the near future. Barbecued bankster is on the menu. Don't forget that Russia is waiting in the wings, with Turkey agreed to supply the Turkey-Greece natural gas pripeline with Russian natural gas. So the E.U. can pay Greece and Turkey pass-through revenues if the EU wants any of that gas. 
Paul Merrell

Ten years on, Iraq Lies in Ruins as New Evidence confirms U.S. used Death Squads to Man... - 0 views

  • Last week, the UK Guardian newspaper published the results of a 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. Euphemistically titled ‘James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq‘, the video report presents fairly damning evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, the US Government and military began to assemble a 10,000 strong ‘Shia militia’ that, under US command, would be used to do three things: Kidnap, torture, murder and maim members of the Iraq resistance and those members of the Iraqi population that supported them. Plants bombs that targeted predominantly Sunni and Shia areas in an effort to divide the population and thereby any unified resistance to the US occupation. Create the impression of a ‘civil war’ in Iraq that could be used by the US and European governments and militaries to justify the continued occupation of Iraq for ‘peace-keeping’ purposes. While the 50 minute documentary is proof enough that Rumsfeld, Cheney, General Petraeus, and all the other NeoCon warhawks and CIA monsters consciously employed the services of former US Army Colonel James Steele in the organisation of death squads against the Iraqi grass-roots resistance (a tactic that he, Steele, had used against resistance movements in South America in the 1970s and 90′s), it panders to the official narrative that ‘sectarianism’ in Iraq was the root cause of the carnage that unfolded.
  • The so-called ‘Shia militia’ used by the American government (with the help and advice of British and Israeli counter-insurgency ‘experts’) were recruited directly by the CIA and people like James Steele to carry out extra-judicial murders of anyone they could loosely identify as ‘resistance’. In order to cloak this strategy, indiscriminate attacks on Iraqi civilians, Shia and Sunni alike, were carried out on a massive scale. Some of these individuals, in another setting, would be called ‘al-Qaeda’. Their usefulness in the employ of US warhawks in the Pentagon was doubly valuable because they both justified continued US occupation and provided ‘proof’ for the American War on Terror mythology, ex post facto, that the US was at war with the perpetrators of 9/11. Whereas before the invasion in 2003 there was absolutely nothing to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the creation of death squads (real) labelled ‘al Qaeda in Iraq’ (fictitious) ‘made real’ the lie that America and all Western civilization was at war against hordes of irrational and violent Muslims, and became the template for instigating terrorism to suppress popular uprisings in Yemen, Mali and elsewhere. Once they have people violent, they can wear down and manage the national popular resistance, ensuring no opposition to the real strategic objectives (namely the control of Middle Eastern oil). The US forces of occupation, along with their British counterparts, had long experience in what actually happens when you militarily invade and occupy a sovereign nation: the people resist, and not just one ethnic or religious group, but more or less the whole population. There is nothing quite like a foreign occupation for uniting a country.
  • In Iraq, these US-controlled ‘Shia’ death squads have been operating in much the same way, and while the media is content to portray them as ordinary Shias motivated by religious bias, they are in fact hired thugs who value only the money they are paid by their US masters and the promise of positions of power in a future Iraqi government. Like the rank and file of the ‘Libyan rebels’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’, these people form the dregs of Arab and Middle Eastern societies. Led by spellbinders who veil their barbaric actions with religious prose, secular leaders in the region, like Ghaddafi and Assad, and Nasser and Arafat before them, struggled in vain to keep them at bay. The reason for this is because the US, Britain, France and Israel have consistently supported – in the form of weapons, money, training and blatant lies – the extremists against the rational voices. Throughout the US occupation of Iraq, the main representative of Shias in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, has repeatedly called for unity among Shia and Sunni Iraqis in the face of foreign occupation and deception in the form of efforts to divide the resistance. These efforts included the bombing of bridges in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in an effort to prevent communication between Iraqis, the use of widespread terror tactics to force Sunni and Shia Iraqis to flee their homes, and the bombing of religious shrines, either Shia or Sunni, in an effort to create the reality of ‘sectarian strife’. Iraq today is in ruins. The country has been ripped apart socially, mainly by way of the literal ripping apart of tens of thousands of civilians, with many being first brutally and systematically tortured by US-sponsored death squads. Hundreds of thousands more have been summarily murdered, either by the bombs of US aircraft, the bullets of US soldiers, or those ubiquitous and very effective ‘car bombs‘ planted by US and British operatives and their hired thugs.
Paul Merrell

Ukraine: One 'Regime Change' Too Many? | Consortiumnews - 0 views

  • Russia’s parliament has approved President Putin’s request for the use of force inside neighboring Ukraine, as the latest neocon-approved “regime change” spins out of control and threatens to inflict grave damage on international relations, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains. By Ray McGovern Is “regime change” in Ukraine the bridge too far for the neoconservative “regime changers” of Official Washington and their sophomoric “responsibility-to-protect” (R2P) allies in the Obama administration? Have they dangerously over-reached by pushing the putsch that removed duly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych? Russian President Vladimir Putin has given an unmistakable “yes” to those questions – in deeds, not words. His message is clear: “Back off our near-frontier!”
  • Unless Obama is completely bereft of advisers who know something about Russia, it should have been a “known-known” (pardon the Rumsfeldian mal mot) that the Russians would react this way to a putsch removing Yanukovich. It would have been a no-brainer that Russia would use military force, if necessary, to counter attempts to use economic enticement and subversive incitement to slide Ukraine into the orbit of the West and eventually NATO. This was all the more predictable in the case of Ukraine, where Putin – although the bête noire in corporate Western media – holds very high strategic cards geographically, militarily, economically and politically.
  • Putin has many other cards to play and time to play them. These include sitting back and doing nothing, cutting off Russia’s subsidies to Ukraine, making it ever more difficult for Yanukovich’s successors to cope with the harsh realities. And Moscow has ways to remind the rest of Europe of its dependence on Russian oil and gas.
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  • There is one huge difference between Prague in 1968 and Kiev 2014. The “Prague Spring” revolution led by Dubcek enjoyed such widespread spontaneous popular support that it was difficult for Russian leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin to argue plausibly that it was spurred by subversion from the West. Not so 45-plus years later. In early February, as violent protests raged in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and the White House professed neutrality, U.S. State Department officials were, in the words of NYU professor emeritus of Russian studies Stephen Cohen, “plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.” We know that thanks to neocon prima donna Victoria Nuland, now Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, who seemed intent on giving new dimension to the “cookie-pushing” role of U.S. diplomats. Recall the photo showing Nuland in a metaphor of over-reach, as she reached deep into a large plastic bag to give each anti-government demonstrator on the square a cookie before the putsch. More important, recall her amateurish, boorish use of an open telephone to plot regime change in Ukraine with a fellow neocon, U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. Crass U.S. interference in Ukrainian affairs can be seen (actually, better, heard) in an intercepted conversation posted on YouTube on Feb. 4.
  • There was a surreal quality to President Obama’s remarks, several hours after Russian (or pro-Russian) troops took control of key airports and other key installations in the Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, and home to a large Russian naval base and other key Russian military installations. Obama referred merely to “reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine” and warned piously that “any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be deeply destabilizing.” That Obama chose the subjunctive mood – when the indicative was, well, indicated – will not be lost on the Russians. Here was Obama, in his typically lawyerly way, trying to square the circle, giving a sop to his administration’s neocon holdovers and R2P courtiers, with a Milquetoasty expression of support for the new-Nuland-approved government (citing Biden’s assurances to old whatshisname/yatshisname). While Obama stuck to the subjunctive tense, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk appealed to Russia to recall its forces and “stop provoking civil and military resistance in Ukraine.” Obama’s comments seemed almost designed to sound condescending – paternalistic, even – to the Russians. Already into his second paragraph of his scripted remarks, the President took a line larded with words likely to be regarded as a gratuitous insult by Moscow, post-putsch.
  • “We’ve made clear that they [Russian officials] can be part of an international community’s effort to support the stability of a united Ukraine going forward, which is not only in the interest of the people of Ukraine and the international community, but also in Russia’s interest.” By now, Russian President Vladimir Putin is accustomed to Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, et al. telling the Kremlin where its interests lie, and I am sure he is appropriately grateful. Putin is likely to read more significance into these words of Obama: “The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine … and we will continue to coordinate closely with our European allies.”
  • There are bound to be fissures in the international community and in the Western alliance on whether further provocation in Ukraine is advisable. Many countries have much to lose if Moscow uses its considerable economic leverage over natural gas supplies, for example. And, aspiring diplomat though she may be, Victoria Nuland presumably has not endeared herself to the EC by her expressed “Fuck the EC” attitude. Aside from the most servile allies of the U.S. there may be a growing caucus of Europeans who would like to return the compliment to Nuland. After all does anyone other than the most extreme neocon ideologue think that instigating a civil war on the border of nuclear-armed Russia is a good idea? Or that it makes sense to dump another economic basket case, which Ukraine surely is, on the EU’s doorstep while it’s still struggling to get its own economic house in order? Europe has other reasons to feel annoyed about the overreach of U.S. power and arrogance. The NSA spying revelations – that continue, just like the eavesdropping itself does – seem to have done some permanent damage to transatlantic relationships.
  • In any case, Obama presumably knows by now that he pleased no one on Friday by reading that flaccid statement on Ukraine. And, more generally, the sooner he realizes that – without doing dumb and costly things – he can placate neither the neocons nor the R2P folks (naively well meaning though the latter may be), the better for everyone. In sum, the Nulands of this world have bit off far more than they can chew; they need to be reined in before they cause even more dangerous harm. Broader issues than Ukraine are at stake. Like it or not, the United States can benefit from a cooperative relationship with Putin’s Russia – the kind of relationship that caused Putin to see merit last summer in pulling Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire on Syria, for example, and in helping address thorny issues with Iran.
  • Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His academic degrees are in Russian and he was an analyst of Russian foreign policy for the first decade of his 27-year career with the CIA.  He is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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    Former CIA Russian analyst Ray McGovern thinks the neocons bit off more than they can chew in the Ukraine. I hope they receive the blowback they so deeply deservie.
Paul Merrell

The Incredible, Shrinking Presidency of Barack Obama » CounterPunch: Tells th... - 0 views

  • According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, Barack Obama now ranks among the least popular presidents in the last century. In fact, his approval rating is lower than Bush’s was in his fifth year in office. Obama’s overall approval rating stands at a dismal 43 percent, with a full 55 percent of the public “disapproving of the way he is handling the economy”. The same percentage  of people “disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president”.  Thus, on the two main issues, leadership and the economy, Obama gets failing grades. An even higher percentage of people are upset at the way the president is implementing his signature health care system dubbed “Obamacare”.  When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling “implementation of the new health care law?” A full 62% said they disapprove, although I suspect that the anger has less to do with the plan’s “implementation” than it does with the fact that Obamacare is widely seen as a profit-delivery system for the voracious insurance industry.  Notwithstanding the administration’s impressive public relations campaign, a clear majority of people have seen through Obama’s health care ruse and given the program a big thumb’s down.
  • Of course, Obamacare is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The list of policy disasters that preceded this latest fiasco is nearly endless,  including everything from blanket pardons for the Wall Street big-wigs who took down the global financial system, to re-upping the Bush tax cuts, to appointing a commission of deficit hawks to slash Social Security and Medicare (Bowles-Simpson), to breaking his word on Gitmo, to reneging on his promise to pass Card Check, to expanding to wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, to droning 4-times as many civilians as the homicidal maniac he replaced as president in 2008.
  • All told, Obama has been bad for the economy, bad for civil liberties, bad for minorities,  bad for foreign wars, and bad for health care. He has, however, been a very effective lackey-sock puppet for Wall Street, Big Pharma, the oil magnates, and the other 1% -vermin Kleptocrats who run the country and who will undoubtedly attend his $100,000-per-plate speaking engagements when he finally retires in comfort to some gated community where he’ll work on his memoirs and cash in on his 8 years of faithful service to the racketeer class.
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  • Everything has gotten worse under Obama. Everything. And, not once, in his five years as president, has this gifted and charismatic leader ever lifted a finger to help the millions of people who supported him, who believed in him, and who voted him into office. These latest poll results indicate that many of those same people are beginning to wake up and see what Obama is really all about.
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    A well-written rant from a progressive about Obama's failure as a President, supported by lots of poll results and statistics. But I find it amusing that Obama's harshest progressive critics mostly choose to view him as a failure rather than recognizing that his campaign promises and claims to be a progressive were lies. Obama has been an incredibly successful president for his real constituency, the banksters, the giant multinational corporations, the military industry, etc. Apparently it's more difficult for progressives to recognize the man for what he really stands for than to accept that they were suckered into voting for another political shyster whose real constituency are corporatist/globalist interests. They'd rather view him as a failed progressive with a still pure heart than believe that his campaign promises were lies.  But to me, Obama's behavior speaks far more loudly about his real goals than his words. 
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