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But like some madcap Dr. Seuss character, the Pentagon can’t seem to stop and so, the New York Times recently reported, it has now presented the White House with a plan for a new (or refurbished) “network” of bases in the most “volatile” regions of the planet. These shadowy “hubs” are meant mainly for America’s secret warriors -- “Special Operations troops and intelligence operatives who would conduct counterterrorism missions for the foreseeable future” against the Islamic State and its various franchisees.  This will undoubtedly be news for Times readers, but not for TomDispatch ones.  For several years, Nick Turse has been reporting at this site on the building, or building up of, both the “hubs” and “spokes” of this system in southern Europe and across Africa (as well as on the way the U.S. military's pivot to Africa has acted as a kind of blowback machine for terror outfits). Today, he’s at it again, revealing wars secretly being fought in our name from this country’s ever-changing, ever-evolving empire of bases.

 Guerra also acknowledged bluntly on the witness stand that he had lied in telling Chevron's team that attorneys for the Ecuadoreans offered him $300,000.     "Yes, sir, I lied there," Guerra told Eric Bloom, who represents Ecuador for the firm Winston & Strawn. "I wasn't truthful."     Guerra maintains that other attorneys for the Ecuadoreans, specifically Steven Donziger and Pablo Fajardo, offered money in return for ghostwriting the judgment on behalf of Judge Nicolas Zambrano, the final jurist to preside over the case.     Shifting the details of this supposed arrangement, though, Guerra walked back his allegation that Zambrano offered him 20 percent.     "That was my sworn statement in New York, but what I said is that, because of a circumstance, because of a situation, I mentioned 20 percent when it wasn't true, and I think that, as a gentleman, I should say the truth, and we did not discuss - I did not discuss 20 percent with Mr. Zambrano - but we did discuss that he would share with me from what he received," he said.     In his nearly 500-page ruling, Judge Kaplan pointed to bank records, daily planners, shipping records and airplane tickets as corroborating evidence that outweighed Guerra's credibility problems.

Particularly persuasive for Kaplan was evidence that Ecuador's national airline, Tame, certified delivery of packages between Guerra and Zambrano.     Guerra told the arbitrators this spring, however, that all 11 of these packages "had nothing to do with the [Chevron] case."     As for his plane tickets to the rainforest from Aug. 11 and 12, 2010, Guerra said they occurred during an irrelevant time period.     "If I traveled during those dates, it wasn't for me to provide assistance to the Chevron case," he said.     Guerra testified that Chevron representatives told him that they would have raised his pay if he could provide them with the key physical evidence they were looking for: a draft of the judgment.     "We were unable to find the main document," Guerra recalled them saying. "Had we been able to find it, we would have been able to offer you a larger amount, something like that, we have $18,000 for you, and we're going to take the computer with us."     Though Guerra did not have a copy of the judgment, Ecuador's forensic expert Christopher Racich testified that he found a running draft of the judgment against Chevron on Zambrano's hard drives.

Ecuador now argues that this forensic evidence - which Courthouse News reported exclusively early this year - proves Zambrano painstakingly wrote the ruling and saved it hundreds of times throughout the case.     Chevron has not been able to produce emails between Guerra, Zambrano and the purported ghostwriters, Donziger and Fajardo, Ecuador's forensic expert says.     Guerra acknowledged to the arbitrators that that the bounty of physical evidence he promised Chevron fell short.     There are no calendars and day planners marked with meetings scheduled between Fajardo, Donziger or Guerra, he acknowledged.     While Guerra said he had payments from Zambrano from April 2011 and February 2012, he testified that these "had no connection to the Chevron case."     For Chevron, the thousands of pages of transcripts show that the company "proved its case before the International Arbitration Tribunal."     "Witness and expert testimony confirmed that the Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron was ghostwritten by Steven Donziger and his team and that the Ecuadorian government is responsible for any further remediation," Chevron spokesman Morgan Crinklaw said in a statement. "Chevron also proved that Ecuador breached the U.S.-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty and international law."     Donziger, who still works for the Ecuadorean villagers seeking to collect from Chevron, said in a statement that Guerra's latest testimony "demonstrates once and for all that Chevron's so-called racketeering case has completely fallen apart."

  "Guerra has been the linchpin of Chevron's entire body of trumped up evidence and he now stands not only as an admitted liar, but also as a shocking symbol of how Chevron's management has become so obsessed with evading its legal obligations in Ecuador that it is willing to risk presenting false evidence in court to try to frame adversary counsel and undermine the rule of law," Donziger added.

On Wednesday Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu commented on the incident, saying that Russia would deploy the S-400 Triumf Air Defense System to the Hmeimim Air Base. Shoigu noted that the decision to deploy the system had been made by Russia’s commander-in-chief.

A Game of Geopolitics. It is noteworthy that the incident occurred in northern Lattakia province, in a region that is controlled by a Turkmen militia and Jabhat al-Nusrah. Both are Turkish proxies. Although it is not officially declared policy, most independent analysts agree that primarily Washington and London attempt to establish a Kurdish Corridor in northern Syria, northern Iraq as well as a belt of low-intensity conflicts from the Mediterranean, along Russia’s southern borders to Pakistan. While Turkey is supporting and cooperating with the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq, it is opposed to a larger Kurdish region along its southern border in Syria. Hence Ankara’s support of Jabhat al-Nusrah and Turkmen “rebels” in northwestern Syria. Moscow for its part, is a traditional ally of the Turkish Kurdistan Worker’s Party PKK, using the PKK as a Moscow-version of NATO’s stay-behinds. It is within this geopolitical context that the downing of a single Russian Su-24 attains the perspective it deserves. It is one incident in a regional proxy war, that can only be played out due to the fact that the UN and the UN Security Council are virtually defunct.

The report, compiled by the European Leadership Network, the Russian International Affairs Council, the Polish Institute of International Affairs and the International Strategic Research Organisation in Ankara, was funded by the nonprofit Carnegie Corp. of New York and Nuclear Threat Initiative. "Each side is convinced that its actions are justified by the negative changes in their security environment," the task force concluded. "Second, an action-reaction cycle is now in play that will be difficult to stop." Russia has also sent its combat aircraft dangerously close to American and Canadian airspace in recent years. Earlier this year, for example, the North American Air Defense Command reported that two Russian tu-95 Bear bombers were intercepted flying off the coast of Alaska near key U.S. military facilities. The NATO-Russia Council, which grew out of an agreement between the two former enemies in 1997, has been used successfully in the past to work through several highly sensitive disagreements.

As a nation we are flat broke and most of us are living paycheck to paycheck.  It has been estimated that it takes approximately $50,000 a year to support a middle class lifestyle for a family of four in the U.S. today, and so the fact that 71 percent of all workers make less than that amount shows how difficult it is for families that try to get by with just a single breadwinner. Needless to say, a tremendous squeeze has been put on the middle class.  In many families, both the husband and the wife are working as hard as they can, but it is still not enough.  With each passing day, more Americans are losing their spots in the middle class and this has pushed government dependence to an all-time high.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month. Sadly, the trends that are destroying the middle class in America just continue to accelerate.

With a huge assist from the Republican leadership in Congress, Barack Obama recently completed negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Also known as Obamatrade, this insidious new treaty is going to cover nations that collectively account for 40 percent of global GDP.  Just like NAFTA, this treaty will result in the loss of thousands of businesses and millions of good paying American jobs.  Let us hope and pray that Congress somehow votes it down. Another thing that is working against the middle class is the fact that technology is increasingly taking over our jobs.  With each passing year, it becomes cheaper and more efficient to have computers, robots and machines do things that humans once did. Eventually, there will be very few things that humans will be able to do more cheaply and more efficiently than computers, robots and machines.  How will most of us make a living when that happens?…

For decades, we have been training our young people to have the goal of “getting a job” once they get out into the real world.  But in America today there are not nearly enough good jobs to go around, and this crisis is only going to accelerate as we move into the future. I do not believe that it is wise to pin your future on a corporation that could replace you with a foreign worker or a machine the moment that it becomes expedient to do so.  We need to start thinking differently, because the paradigms that worked in the past are fundamentally breaking down.

For all we know, the NYPD might be bombarding apartment houses with radiation while people are inside or peering inside vehicles on the street as unwitting passersby are exposed to radiation. The city’s position—that New Yorkers have no right to know if that is happening or not—is so absurd that one can hardly believe they’re taking it. These are properly political questions. And it’s unlikely a target would ever notice. “Once equipped, the van—which looks like a standard delivery van—takes less than 15 seconds to scan a vehicle,” Fox News reported after looking at X-ray vans owned by the federal government. “It can be operated remotely from more than 1,500 feet and can be equipped with optional technology to identify radioactivity as well.”

And since the technology can see through clothing, it is easy to imagine a misbehaving NYPD officer abusing it if there are not sufficient safeguards in place. Trusting the NYPD to choose prudent, sufficient safeguards under cover of secrecy is folly. This is the same department that spent 6 years conducting surveillance on innocent Muslims Americans in a program so unfocused that it produced zero leads—and that has brutalized New York City protestors on numerous occasions. Time and again it’s shown that outside oversight is needed.Lest readers outside New York City presume that their walls still stand between them and their local law enforcement agency, that isn’t necessarily the case. Back in January, in an article that got remarkably little attention, USA Today reported the following:

At least 50 U.S. law enforcementagencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance. Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person's house without first obtaining a search warrant. The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.

When Nonviolence Fails Arabesques$ devotes far more attention to Libya, Syria and Yemen than Bensaada’s first book. In the section on Libya, Bensaada zeroes in on eleven key US assets who engineered the overthrow of Gaddafi. Some participated in the same State Department trainings as the Middle East opposition activists and instigated nonviolent Facebook and Twitter protests to coincide with the 2011 uprisings in Tunisian and Egypt. Others, in exile, underwent guerrilla training sponsored by the CIA, Mossad, Chad and Saudi Arabia. A few months after Gaddafi’s assassination, some of these same militants would lead Islamic militias attempting to overthrow Assad in Syria. Between 2005 and 2010, the State Department funneled $12 million to opposition groups opposed to Assad. The US also financed Syrian exiles in Britain to start an anti-government cable TV channel they beamed into Syria. In the section on Syria, Bensaada focuses on a handful of Syrian opposition activists who received free US training in cyberactivism and nonviolent resistance beginning in 2006. One, Ausama Monajed, is featured in the 2011 film How to Start a Revolution about a visit with Gene Sharp in 2006. Monajed and others worked closely with the US embassy, funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). This is a State Department program that operates in countries (such as Libya and Syria) where USAID is banned. In February 2011, these groups posted a call on Twitter and Facebook for a Day of Rage. Nothing happened. When Sharpian techniques failed to produce a sizable nonviolent uprising, as in Libya, they and their allies (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Jordan) were all set up to introduce Islamic mercenaries (many directly from Libya) to declare war on the Assad regime.

Dr. Bramhall is a retired American psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. She has published a free, downloadable non-fiction ebook 21st Century Revolution.

“They fight and they even fight ahead of the peshmerga. They won’t allow anyone to take photos of them, but they take photos of everyone, ” Karwan Hama Tata, a Peshmerga volunteer, told The Guardian reporter after showing him another video of two U.S. soldiers in the middle of an operation with other Kurdish fighters. In an Oct. 28 report by Bloomberg, U.S. and Kurdish officials, not authorized to speak about the matter, said that he U.S. was running an operations center in Irbil city staffed by a special operations task force whose work is so classified its name is a state secret.

The Guardian said that when asked about the videos and the testimonies of the Kurdish fighters, the U.S. Central Command in Baghdad said: “No U.S. or coalition SOF [special operations forces] were engaged in any of these events you listed.” It added “we have no reports of any coalition advise and assist teams becoming engaged during the actions you referenced.”

Reports from Syria suggest that the populations in territories controlled by ISIL, Jabhat Al-Nusrah, The Southern Front, and other brigades increasingly deny cooperation with the self-proclaimed authorities even though such refusal comes at great risk.

“As of now, there are multiple NPP workers who have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported. … “Not only that, they are not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure, such as 50, 60 to 70 mili Sieverts, and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers”.

The Labor Ministry’s admission that “one cleanup worker contacted cancer” can, arguably, be perceived as nothing but a continuum of the cover-up of hard scientific data, the prevention of independent studies and the intimidation and criminalization of journalists who could disclose that thousands of Fukushima cleanup workers have fallen critically ill and/or have died.