The long history of CIA penetration of Danish intelligence by Wayne Madsen

 The long history of CIA penetration of Danish intelligence
by Wayne Madsen
Although he was named as the gunman who attacked a freedom of speech conference and a synagogue in Copenhagen, Danish police were still reticent to name Danish national Omar Abdel-Hamid El-Hussein as a member of a global jihadist network or even, as of February 17, a suspect in the attack.

El-Hussein, a Danish-Palestinian, grew up, from the age of 15, as a violent gang member in Denmark. In 2013, while said to be high on heroin, El-Hussein began stabbing other passengers and served time in prison. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service (PET), which is officially part of the national police, usually follows the orders of its closest allies: First and foremost, the Central Intelligence Agency, and secondly, Israel's Mossad.

The Danish Prison Service, which admitted it sent a report on El-Hussein's radical thoughts he was said to have picked up in prison, to the PET. As with similar reports maintained by French police on its own alleged Muslim radical assassins, no action was taken by authorities to monitor the future "terrorists." The PET claims that it did not believe that El-Hussein's reported "radicalization" in prison merited any type of special surveillance of him after his release.

The PET statements, themselves, are providing ammunition for those who believe that European police have developed "patsies" to take the blame for a number of terrorist attacks that are being used to justify more intrusive police surveillance in Denmark, France, Belgium, Germany, and other countries outside of Europe, including Canada and Australia.

A review of recent killings in Europe, as well as at the Boston Marathon, which were blamed on Islamist radical supporters of the "Islamic State" and other such groups have yielded a number of similarities. First, those accused of the killings were already known to various intelligence agencies either from their time in prison or from travels to the Middle East, particularly to Syria, and in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two Boston bombers, to the Republic of Georgia, a NATO applicant, and Dagestan, a primarily Islamic autonomous republic of Russia in the Caucasus.

Tamerlan was included on the Central Intelligence Agency's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) and the Russian Federal Security Bureau notified the FBI of his ties to jihadist terrorists. No action was taken by either agency to forestall the Boston bombing. In addition, the Tsarnaev brothers' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni (née Tsarnaev) was the son-in-law of retired CIA official Graham Fuller whose interests included liaison with anti-Russian Islamists in places like Dagestan and Georgia, where Tamerlan had spent time before returning to the United States to allegedly carry out the Boston Marathon bombing.

Franco-Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, arrested in Marseille, was charged with carrying out the May 30, 2014 shootings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. He denied the charges through his attorney. French authorities knew Nemmouche traveled to Syria to fight against the Damascus government in 2013. In fact, Nemmouche's travels were known to about a half dozen intelligence agencies before is is said to have carried out the Brussels attack. French and Turkish intelligence tracked Nemmouche to Istanbul in 2013. In February 2014, Nemmouche traveled to Malaysia and Singapore, where Malaysian and Singaporean intelligence picked up his trail. Nemmouche arrived in Frankfurt in 2014. German federal police passed Nemmouche and his arrival to French intelligence agencies.
Amedy Coulibaly, the chief suspect in the hostage-taking and shooting at the Hyper Cacher Jewish market in Paris was well-known to French police. He had spent time in prison for an attempt to free from French penal detention the Franco-Algerian Islamist cleric Smain Ait Ali Belkacem. While in prison, Coulibaly met one of the accused Charlie Hebdo shooters, Cheriof Kouachi, another Franco-Algerian, who was serving three years in prison for assisting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner of ISIL. French authorities were aware of the "radicalization" of Coulibaly and Cherif Kounachi in prison but took no special precautions when both were released.

In 2009, Coulibaly, an employee of Coca Coca, met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace.

Kouachi's brother Said, traveled to Yemen between 2009 and 2011 where he met and befriended Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who was permitted to board Northwestern flight 253 at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in 2009 without a passport but special "refugee" papers provided to him at Schiphol, where security is overseen by an Israeli company, by an unknown English-speaking interlocutor. Abdulmutallab later tried to detonate explosives in his underpants as the plane began its descent to Detroit International Airport.

In March 2012, Franco-Algerian Mohammed Merah, who, like El-Hussein of Denmark and Coulibaly, served time in prison for criminal behavior not tied to any religious extremism, was accused of killing French troops in Montauban and Toulouse and three children and their teacher at a Jewish day school in Toulouse. A French intelligence document stated that Merah was under surveillance by French authorities since 2006. French intelligence concluded that Merah led a "double life" that allowed him to drin alcohol at nightclubs while secretly visiting Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan in order to plot attacks for Al Qaeda. In 2008, Merah is said to have tried to join the French military but was rejected because of his criminal past. However, he also tried to join the French Foreign Legion, where one's criminal past is no detriment. It was after Merah tried to enlist in the Foreign Legion that he became the subject of French intelligence surveillance. Or was he being monitored for his loyalty to the counter-espionage arm of the Foreign Legion?

On December 11, 2010, Swedish-Iraqi national Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly was said to have died when the bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely in downtown Stockholm. Al-Abdaly is said to have carried out a previous bombing in Stockholm, reported around the world to be the first Islamist "suicide" attack in Scandinavia. In 2010, Al-Abdaly named his son "Osama," yet the Swedish security police (SAPO) supposedly took no notice.


Similarities between "Islamist" attacks and young Muslim men

Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly	28	Stockholm: Killed by prematurely exploded suicide bomb
Mohammed Merah	23	Toulouse: Killed in a police raid. Took videos of his shootings with a Go-Pro camera. Attempted to enlist in French Army and Foreign Legion.
Said Kouachi	34	Dammartin-en-Goële: Killed in police raid.
Cherif Kouachi	32	Dammartin-en-Goële: Killed in police raid.
Amedy Coulibaly	32	Paris: Killed in police raid. Took videos of his shootings with a Go-Pro camera.
Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein	22	Copenhagen: Killed in police standoff.
Mehdi Nemmouche	29	Marseille: Arrested by police.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev	26	Boston: Killed by police.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev	21	Boston: Injured in police shootout. Currently on trial.

As seen in the chart above, out of nine Islamist terrorist incidents, seven of the assailants were killed in police encounters. Only Nemmouche, who has declared his innocence, and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, who pled not guilty to 30 criminal charges brought against him, remain alive. Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. would seek the death penalty against Tsarnaev.

As for the Danish PET providing cover for a set of CIA-inspired false flag attacks in Copenhagen, the Danish agency has long had a subservient role with the CIA since the days of the Vietnam War. In those days, Denmark became a refuge for U.S. servicemen who went AWOL rather than be transferred to duty in South Vietnam. Copenhagen also became the host for a diplomatic office of the Viet Cong's National Liberation Front. Danish public pressure forced the Social Democratic government of Prime Minister Anker JØrgensen and the center-right "VKR" government of Liberal Prime Minister Poul Hartling to allow Denmark to become a headquarters for the anti-Vietnam War movement in Europe. The CIA was not happy about this and it relied on the PET to infiltrate the U.S. servicemen organizations and anti-war Danish Vietnam Committees in the country. All this time, the PET was acting directly against the policies of the Danish government. The CIA set up an infiltration office a Kastanievej Number 5 in Copenhagen manned by three non-official cover CIA agents.


Dead men tell no tales: El Hussein lies dead on pavement in Copenhagen's NØrrebro district, once the nexus for CIA operations in the Danish capital

The CIA office was, on paper, Interland Marketing Research, Inc. (IMR), with its headquarters in Frankfurt, West Germany and was said to track the financial liquidity of companies. However, the firm showed up nowhere on the Danish government's listing of registered companies and it did not even have an office telephone. IMR was as much a CIA proprietary company as was Business International Corporation of New York, which employed a young Columbia graduate named Barack Obama in 1983.

Ironically, the center for the CIA's surveillance of the anti-Vietnam War movement in Copenhagen was NØrrebro, the very same neighborhood where Omar Abdel-Hamid El-Hussein was shot dead by police outside an Internet café. 

ISIL selling human organs from its victims -- but to whom? by Wayne Madsen

 ISIL selling human organs from its victims -- but to whom?

by Wayne Madsen
Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations Mohamed Alhakim has made a startling announcement: the bodies of victims of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have been found by Iraqi authorities buried in mass graves and they show surgical incisions where kidneys and other body parts have been removed.

Alhakim also stated that a dozen doctors were executed by ISIL in Mosul for refusing to engage in organ harvesting. Outgoing UN envoy to Iraq Nikolay Mladenov confirmed there have been increasing reports of ISIL engaged in human organ harvesting but he would say no more on the subject. The reason is simple. Mladenov, the foreign minister of Bulgaria from 2010 to 2013, was, between 1996 and 1998, the program director of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation in Sofia. Thereafter, Mladenov took a job with the World Bank in Sofia. Discussing human organ harvesting in such trouble spots as the West Bank of Palestine and the Balkans is a political "death sentence" for many journalists and politicians, especially someone like Mladenov who once suckled from the bank account teats of Soros. The reason is simple: the global headquarters for human organ harvesting is Israel.

On February 22, 2008, WMR reported:

"Dr. Francis Delmonico is Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and practices transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the director of medical affairs for the Transplantation Society and an adviser on human transplantation for the World Health Organization (WHO) . . .
Delmonico said there were practical reasons to oppose the commercial marketing of human organs. They include the fact that current transplant resources are shifting away from younger people with 'longer life years from transplant' (LYFT) to older persons with limited longevity and that if a commercial market for kidneys takes shape the "market" will shift away from post-death donors of hearts, pancreas, lungs, and livers, thus impacting the altruistic donor population in favor of the commercial sales of kidneys market.

Delmonico decried the fact that Israel is outsourcing kidney and liver transplants to Colombia and the Philippines. Israel has, in the past, been a center for dubious human organ trafficking operations. It is also the case that Palestinian prisoners in Israel have sought to sell their kidneys to feed their children. The Israel Medical Association is opposing a bill that would allow the donors of certain organs to be reimbursed by the state. The group claims this will 'open the door' to organ sales."A year after our report, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that Palestinian prisoners who died at the hands of Israeli troops had their organs harvested. The Swedish report was met with howls of "blood libel," "anti-Semitism," "hate speech," and other typical histrionics from Jewish groups around the world, which can always be expected to act on cues from their deep-pocketed financiers. Aftonbladet withstood the Jewish onslaught and stuck by its story. It was later vindicated when a 2000 interview with
Yehuda Hiss, then director of Israel's L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, saw him admit that he had harvested organs from dead Palestinians in the 1990s and that the permission of the Palestinian families was never requested. The transplants began with corneas, expanded to skin, and then included kidneys and other organs.

Now comes the charges from Iraq's ambassador that ISIL is removing human organs from its victims. But who are the buyers? Given Israel's tacit support for Syrian rebels, including ISIL and groups like the Al Nusra Front that are allied with it, Israel is the likely customer for the Iraqi body parts in a quid pro quo that only a Dr. Frankenstein could admire. For a nation like Israel that is full of anti-Arab zealots and racists, that sort of animosity does not seem to extend, even under bizarrely antiquated Jewish religious laws, to placing Arab kidneys, livers, and pancreas into the bodies of Israeli Jews in need of organ transplants.


Are one or possibly two Israelis now sporting Kayla Mueller's kidney or kidneys, courtesy of ISIL?

Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and Mossad agents have been witnessed transferring weapons to ISIL units in Iraq's western Anbar province as well as in the area around Quneitra, near the Golan Heights of Syria. In addition, wounded Syrian rebels fighting the government of Bashar al Assad, have been medically evacuated across the Israeli border for treatment in Israeli hospitals. Many of these wounded rebels are either members of ISIL or sympathizers with Al Nusra. In return for Israeli support, ISIL never trains its long-range weapons at Israeli positions but keep them focused on Syrian government forces.  There have also been credible reports that Mossad and the IDF have supplied ISIL with intelligence on Lebanese Hezbollah units in Syria in order that the jihadist radicals launch attacks on the Shi'a Lebanese positions. In fact, ISIL religious dogma instructs its followers that the Shi'as are worse enemies of ISIL than are Jews. U.S. intelligence sources claim that American sources, mostly signals intelligence intercepts of Israeli government communications [carried out by the National Security Agency "special Arabic" linguists, named as such because NSA does not want Jewish members of Congress criticizing it for eavesdropping on Hebrew language communications] have yielded information on Israel's grand design to assist ISIL in Syria in order to destroy Hezbollah.Abdul-Ilah al-Bashir al-Noeimi, the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Council (SMC) of the Free Syrian Army, which has refused to expel Al Nusra, Al Qaeda, or ISIL members from its ranks, secretly trained in Israel in 2013 under the guise of his being admitted to thec ountry to undergo medical treatment for wounds he is alleged to have received in Syria.

On a visit to South Africa, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir said that it was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel that provided support to ISIL and Boko Haram. Bashir told Euronews: "I said CIA and the Mossad stand behind these organizations [ISIL and Boko Haram] . . . There is no Muslim who would carry out such acts." Bashir's information on Israeli support for ISIL is complemented by a number of Syrian military statements confirming the Jewish state's support for takfiri radicals, including ISIL, fighting in Syria. Israel has also refused repeated Jordanian requests for the IDF to attack ISIL positions in Syria.

Bashir is adding his voice to those who claim that ISIL is not even Muslim but a death cult crafted by Western and Israeli intelligence to split apart the Arab and Muslim worlds so that Israel can take advantage of the chaos.

Some right-wing American Jews insist that the Obama administration uses the term "ISIL" in reference to the Islamic State because the administration covertly wants to stress the similarities of the names "ISIL" and "ISRAEL." If so, the Obama administration deserves much credit for subliminally telling the world who and what is actually behind the rise of ISIL.

ISIL now stands ready to supply Israel with a commodity more precious to Israelis than diamonds or gold: fresh human organs from prisoners executed by ISIL.

So, for the members of the U.S. Congress who will continue to travel to Israel to pay fealty to the Zionist state, remember one thing. One of those Israelis you meet who is all for colonizing the West Bank and who relish in Arab on Arab violence may have inside them the kidney of Kayla Mueller, the U.S. aid worker in Syria kidnapped by ISIL and who also helped the Palestinians in the West Bank, or a liver from an Egyptian Copt executed on a beach in Libya. Think about that before you enjoy your free buffet of kreplach, kneidlach, and kishka.

CIA bought up its own WMD-related weapons in Iraq by Wayne Madsen

CIA bought up its own WMD-related weapons in Iraq
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has successfully spun a story to, among other media outlets, The New York Times, that claims that in its highly-classified Operation AVARICE it bought from the black market in Iraq weapons of mass destruction components, including nerve-agent rockets. AVARICE is said to have started in 2005 and ended in 2006. The CIA claimed the U.S. destroyed 400 Borak rockets, procured in the 1980s, that were capable of carrying chemical weapons.

However, the CIA's real interest in buying up WMD-related components was to mask its earlier role, along with that of then-President Ronald Reagan special envoy Donald Rumsfeld, in supplying Saddam Hussein with the WMDs used to commit genocide against Iraqi Kurds and Iranian troops fighting against an Iraqi border invasion. The sudden revelation about "Iraqi WMDs" is more about cleaning up George W. Bush's record with WMDs in Iraq ("Bush Lied, People Died") for his brother Jeb Bush's anticipated 2016 presidential run. What the CIA purchased from Iraqi souks and junk yards were evidence of the CIA's own role in providing Iraq with WMDs in the 1980s.

Information about AVARICE is nothing new and, in fact, the U.S. discovered poison gas canisters in Iraq long before 2005. On November 14, 2005, WMR reported: "U.S. military intelligence personnel discovered VX gas canisters at the Bilad weapons site. The Iraqi official who took U.S. military intelligence officers to Bilad even had the American bills of lading for the nerve gas shipments." Our report continued: "The Clinton and Bush 2 administrations never paid much attention to the presence of VX nerve gas in Iraq, according to a Defense Department intelligence source. This was because the nerve gas was sent by the Reagan and Bush 1 administrations and nerve gas has a 'shelf life,' whereby the U.S. maintained it could not be counted as a weapon of mass destruction under United Nations and U.S. definitions."

On November 20, 2005, WMR followed up our initial report: "The CIA, according to U.S. military intelligence agents, never considered the U.S.-supplied VX nerve gas to be a WMD after Desert Storm. Their reasoning was that because of its binary nature, it had a shelf life and oxidization rendered it harmless after the outbreak of Desert Storm. In reality, the U.S. military sources said the CIA's admission that Iraq possessed harmless VX was a way for it to protect itself and its former deputy director [Frank] Carlucci while admitting to the fact that the Bush administration had, in fact, supplied the deadly agent to Saddam Hussein. The CIA's main mission in the 1990s was regime change and Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs was merely a causa sina qua non for continued hostilities, overt and covert. A British colonel who was the head of the special operations team that removed the VX weapons from Bilad said his detection kit registered a positive reading."


Rumsfeld in 1984 shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. On Washington's table was deadly VX nerve gas that Saddam used against the Kurds and Iranians. Rumsfeld says knew Saddam had WMDs because he sold them to the Iraqi leader. Now, the CIA spins for the Bush family by asserting it "bought" the WMD evidence in 2005 and 2006.

To bolster the point that canisters and other nerve and mustard gas, as well as other chemical weapons supplied to Iraq by the U.S. and other countries, had long since deteriorated by the time the CIA "bought" the components, U.S. Representative John Hammerschmidt (R-AR) said that in a classified briefing in 1980, the U.S. Army admitted that it possessed 730,000 rounds of deteriorated and obsolete chemical weapons rounds.

However, with Jeb Bush planning his White House run it now becomes necessary for the CIA to reveal that it discovered WMD components.

If the CIA wanted to release something of interest in Iraqi WMDs, it might start with 1980s contract documents signed between then-Secretary of State George P. Schultz's old firm Bechtel Corporation and Saddam Hussein that saw a number of precursor WMD production facilities built by the U.S. construction giant. Bechtel made most of its fortune building atomic plants under then-Atomic Energy Commission Chairman John McCone, the founder of Bechtel-McCone, Bechtel's predecessor company. In 1961, after President John F. Kennedy fired CIA director Allen Dulles, McCone became CIA chief and he continued to take care of Bechtel both at Langley and in post-CIA employment. A March 4, 1977 confidential Bechtel memorandum, titled "International Job Strategy," identifies Iraq's petrochemical and other infrastructures as a top priority, along with Indonesia, Malaysia, Algeria, and Nigeria, for Bechtel's business.

McCone died on February 14, 1991, just two weeks before George H. W. Bush, also a former CIA director, launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. The U.S. military assault attempted to destroy as much of Iraq's chemical weapons infrastructure as possible to obliterate Bechtel's, Rumsfeld's, Carlucci's, and the Bush family's role in it.

Redacted Pentagon report on Israel's H-bomb released by Wayne Madsen

Redacted Pentagon report on Israel's H-bomb released

The federal government decided to release in a heavily-redacted form a 1987 Pentagon-commissioned report on Israel's and NATO nation's critical military technology. The move came after a litigation brought about by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy three years ago and a law suit filed for the release of the report in September 2014.

The 386-page report, prepared by the Pentagon think tank, Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), states that Israel's key nuclear weapons facilities were similar to those at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Specifically, the report states at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, near Yavne, and the Dimona/Beer Sheva facilities are equivalent of Oak Ridge and Los Alamos and that Soreq had access to the same technologies developed at the American nuclear laboratories. This is a clear indication that U.S. nuclear technology was being provided by the U.S. to Israel either willingly or through espionage, or possibly, both. Soreq was also said to resemble the nuclear facilities at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

The report states: "The capability of SOREQ to support SDIO [Strategic Defense Initiative Operations] and nuclear technologies [emphasis added] is almost an exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories."

Furthermore, the report states: "They [the Israelis] use the same types of Lagrangian hydrodynamic codes using elastic-plastic deformation as are used by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. These, of course, find utility in studying the implosion of nuclear devices as well as studying spallation."

The report states that in 1987, Israel was at the same stage of fission nuclear weapons development where the United States was between 1955 and 1960 and that they were developing fusion or hydrogen bomb capabilities but still lacked the necessary codes and calculations to produce H-bombs.

It is noteworthy that while information on critical weapons technology of Italy, France, West Germany, and other NATO countries is redacted in the released report, Israeli technology did not receive as much blacked out paragraphs by military censors.

This editor, while working for the National Security Agency in 1987, discovered that Israel's Mossad targeted a number of sensitive NSA and other military operations, including the U.S. Navy's Trident submarine communications suite, for espionage. A number of American Jewish engineers at RCA, Raytheon, and various sub-contractors were discovered to have been sharing sensitive compartmented information (SCI) with Israeli "engineers" working on other signals intelligence projects outside of the NSA-DoD SCI framework. However, the FBI chose not to prosecute any of the Jewish engineers becase of the threat of being charged with "anti-Semitism." With the exception of Jonathan Pollard, no other Jewish spies for Israel were pursued by the FBI in the 1980s, including, as the 1987 IDA report indicates, those who were passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Israelis from Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore.

Read the IDA report here.

SPECIAL REPORT. Aprés Paris: False flag in Copenhagen? bt Wayne Madsen

SPECIAL REPORT. Aprés Paris: False flag in Copenhagen?

After having shot up a free speech debate at Copenhagen's Krudttonden Cultural Center that was chaired by Swedish Prophet Mohammed cartoonist Lars Vilks, and killing a Danish film director, an unnamed man said to look like an Arab was tracked down by police, using CCTV footage, to Copenhagen's heavily-Middle Eastern NØrrebro distict. The unnamed 22-year old gunman, said to have been involved in a criminal gang, was then reported to have been killed in a shootout with police, however, not before the gunman made what has become an almost predictable stop at Copenhagen's main synagogue where he shot and killed a Jewish security guard named Dan Uzan, a dual Israeli-Danish citizen. 

Still, without initially disclosing the identity of the killer, police were able to conclusively state that the man was a "lone wolf" who was responsible for the attacks on the cultural center and the synagogue. The Copenhagen attacks began to take on the same air of "false flag" stench as did the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher kosher market in Paris. Some Danish news reports stated that the gunman had been hired from the ranks of a Danish skinhead motorcycle gang to commit the murders, a wrinkle that would dispel any notion of a "lone wolf" attack.

Those charged with carrying out the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, the Franco-Algerian brothers Kouachi and Franco-Senegalese-Malian Amedy Coulibaly, it turned out, were well-known to French police and intelligence as was Mohammed Merah, charged in the 2012 slayings of French soldiers in Montauban and three children and their teacher at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse. And sure enough, Danish police and intelligence files did turn up the name of the alleged Copenhagen shooter, one Omar Alhamid Alhussein, a Danish national and criminal with a violent record who was released from a Danish prison just two weeks prior to the twin attacks. 

Echoing the "glittering generality" rhetoric of French President Francois Hollande in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt called the aftermath of the Copenhagen attacks “a fight for freedom against a dark ideology." Thorning-Schmidt is the daughter-in-law of former British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock and a promoter of European federalism. 

There was no surprise that French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who is as staunchly pro-Israeli as Prime Minister Manuel Valls, whose wife is an ardent Zionist, flew off to Copenhagen after the twin attacks to show solidarity with the Danish people. Immediately, Danish police said the Copenhagen attacks were linked to the Charlie Hebdo slayings. A new meme, similar to "Je suis Charlie" (I am Charlie), spread aorund the Internet: "We are all Danish tonight." The predictable signage with such trite mottos followed in short order on the web.

The head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste (PET), Jens Madsen, said, without giving the alleged terrorist's name, that the dead assailant was "inspired by Islamic radicalism." The script, as previously written in similar cases in Paris, Montauban, and Toulouse, appears to have been previously written. As with the alleged French terrorists, Alhussein's radicalization in prison was passed on to PET by Michael Gjorup, the head of Denmark's prison and probation service. Madsen verified that Alhussein had "been on the radar" of the PET prior to the attack. Veering away somewhat from the "lone wolf" theory, the Danish authorities decided to arrest two initially unnamed men who were said to have been accomplices of Alhussein.

But few recall that it was Cazeneuve who was reportedly under investigation by 45-year old French Police Commissioner Helric Fredou, the second in command of the French Judicial Police in Limoges, for links with Jeanette Bougrab, the so-called girlfriend of slain Charlie Hebdoeditor Stephane Charbonnier or "Charb." Bougrab claimed to have been Charb's girlfriend and even insinuated that he fathered her daughter. However, other French news reports claim that Charb was gay and that Bougrab made up her relationship out of whole cloth. Fredou is said to have committed suicide at the height of his investigation of a link between Bougrab and Cazeneuve. And, according to French news reports, Fredou had Cazeneuve under suspicion since the police commissioner's days as Cherbourg police commissioner. Cazeneuve has been mayor of the town of Cherbourg-Octeville since 2001 and it was during his time as police commissioner that Fredou first became aware of Cazeneuve's links with Mossad and his relationship with Bougrab and her cabal of anti-Muslim and Zionist provocateurs.

Fredou is said to have shot himself in the head after becoming despondent after meeting the family of one of victims of the French attacks. However, Fredou's family and friends discounted reports that Fredou was depressed. Furthermore, they pointed out that he had cracked open a major lead in the terrorist attacks a move that placed him at loggerheads with Cazeneuve and Israeli Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu, who intended, as his display of arrogance in Paris indicated, to make as much political hay out of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks as possible. After the Copenhagen attacks, Netanyahu called on all European Jews to emigrate to Israel. He made the same call after the Paris attacks. 

In addition to the suspicions around Fredou's alleged, but unlikely "suicide," came word from a Dutch on-line publication Quote that Charlie Hebdo, in addition to the French newspaper Libération, was purchased byÉdouard Baron de Rothschild shortly before the attacks. Charlie Hebdo, while publishing blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, Jesus, and Pope Francis, took a decidedly cautious road in criticizing Judaism or important figures of world Jewry. In fact, in 2009, Charlie Hebdocartoonist Maurice Siné was fired for publishing a cartoon in the satirical magazine for making fun of Jean Sarkozy, the son of Nicolas Sarkozy, for "marrying up" when he wed Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, the Jewish heiress of the large consumer electronics company, Darty Group. Siné was accused of "inciting racial hatred" but Siné had the last laugh when a French court in 2010 awarded him €40,000 from Charlie Hebdo's coffers for wrongful termination.

Michael Emsalem, the CEO of Hyper Cacher, conveniently sold his shares of stock in Hyper Cacher the day before Coulibaly allegedly stormed the market and shot several hostages after a standoff with police. Emsalem announced plans to move to Manhattan's Upper East Side, where his wife and daughters had already been living before the attack on the Paris market. Emsalem and his family have applied for U.S. green cards as a result of purported rampant "anti-Semitism" in France. Emsalem's dumping of his firm's stock was reminiscent of Wall Street insiders placing put options on American and United Airlines a day before the 9/11 attack. 

For Denmark, the recent attacks smelled of the same psychological operations that were employed by PET's previous chief, Jakob Scharf, a Danish Jew who never missed an opportunity of linking Danish terror events to global "jihadism." In January 2011, Scharf, who has close connections to Israel, led a joint Danish PET-Swedish SAPO security service law enforcement team in self-congratulating themselves for rounding up a group of five alleged Islamist terrorists who were charged with planning to attack the Copenhagen offices of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in a Mumbai-like attack planned for the same month. Scharf stated, "It is our assessment that this is a militant Islamist group and they have links to international terrorist networks," adding that the group could have been linked to David Headley, an American charged with aiding in the Mumbai attacks. Scharf conveniently left out the fact that Headley was covertly working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at the time of the Mumbai attacks and may, himself, have been a false flag terrorist operative working for U.S. intelligence.

The Mossad's Danish "PET" partner-in-crime for false flag attacks

Jyllands-Posten sparked outrage among Muslims worldwide when it published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed considered blasphemous by Muslims. The newspaper's cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who approved the publication of the cartoons, was identified as being linked to various neocon and Israel Lobby operatives in Washington, including the propagandists at the neocon American Enterprise Institute. While Scharf, who has moved Denmark's PET closer to Mossad more than his predecessors have done, talks of international Islamist conspiracies to carry out terrorism, he is silent on the international conspiracy by Israeli propagandists to incite violence by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The neocon Mohammed cartoon operation, which incited violence that resulted in deaths from riots staged in cities in the Muslim world, never registered on Scharf's "criminal conspiracy meter" since he is part and parcel of it. Rose's columns have been welcomed by the neocon and Israel Lobby-owned and operated Wall Street Journal.

Scharf's operation against the alleged terrorists, lauded by the Obama administration, began to fall apart shortly after it started. One of the five charged, Abdullah Muhammed Salman, an Iraqi immigrant, was released after his arrest due to lack of evidence. He said that he merely rented an apartment to three of the accused in the plot and was unaware of their "plans."


Scharf's fingerprints were on past fale flag events in Denmark while he headed the PET

Scharf resigned as the head of the PET in December 2013 amid charges that he spied on the then-leader of the right-wing People's Party and Member of Parliament Pia Kjærsgaard. A number of Scharf's staff resigned after they said they lost confidence in his leadership abilities. However, Scharf has remained as National Police Commissioner in an unpaid leave status since his departure as the head of the PET. In a complaint, five PET employees said Scharf abused his position as head of Danish "homeland security" by ordering agents to access Kjærgarrd's private calendar to prevent her from visiting the "independent" Copenhagen hippie/anarchist commune of Christiana ub her capacity as a member of the parliamentaryJudicial Commission. Was Scharf concerned that the anti-immigration leader might have discovered that Scharf was using Christiana to recruit all sorts of ne'er-do-wells for his Al Qaeda false flag operations?

Scharf's Al Qaeda "Ugly Duckling"
One such ne-er-do-well reportedly recruited by Schard was Al Qaeda infiltrator Morten Storm. The blond-haired Storm convinced Al Qaeda that he was a fellow jihadist. However, Storm said he was recruited by Scharf to send the PET, as well as the CIA, plans of Al Qaeda's next moves. Storm, in a book, said he helped the CIA target several al Qaeda leaders for assassination, including the American Islamist leader Anwar a-Awlaki, killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Given the close relationship between PEWT and Mossad, made stronger under Scharf's tenure, Storm was also accused of working for the Mossad as a triple agent. Storm did admit that he also acted as an agent for Britain's MI5. Storm appeared on CBS News's 60 Minutes to hype his "exploits" as the "Danish James Bond" who successfully infiltrated Al Qaeda. Scharf was secretly patting himself on the back for the success of the operation that put him on the intelligence "A-list" in Langley.

Scharf denied having recruited Storm or having any relationship with him. However, Scharf's predecessor as the head of the PET, Hans JØrgen Bonnichsen corroborated Scharf's role in Storm's book, "Agent Storm: My Life Inside Al Qaeda and the CIA."

  
Al Qaeda's Danish "Ugly Duckling" Morten Storm. Left as an Al Qaeda jihadist. Right as celebrity spy.

The newspaper that helped hype Storm's "exploits" was none other thanJyllands-Posten, the same Zionist-connected paper that spurred on the first Prophet Mohammed cartoon violence. The newspaper wasted no time in cashing in on the Copenhagen shootings in stating, "Unfortunately, it is difficult to claim surprise at the attacks in Copenhagen . . . [the attack] was not a question of if, but when." The neoconservatives relish in their self-fulfilled prophecies.

The Three "Jakobs" of Copenhagen

Meanwhile, Scharf has started a private security firm, Certa Intelligence and Security A/S with his partner Jakob Dreyer. Scharf's status as a National Police Commissioner within the Ministry of Justice continues until January 2016, which gives him continued access to police business, including the investigation of the attack on the freedom of speech conference and the Copenhagen synagogue. Scharf's special status also allows him to recruit for Certa from his former PET agents. A third board member of Certa's board is Jakob Shank-Pedersen. Scharf says that Certa's main mission is to convince countries around the world that the Islamist radical threat is real. Schard recently said in an interview, "We are also more exposed than before because of the militant Islamist environments that have allies and sympathizers in all countries." It is the same scare tactics that have successfully been used by former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to drum up business for their post-9/11 security businesses. The recent attacks in Copenhagen should certainly increase business for Certa.

While the Danish police, along with INTERPOL and the FBI, are looking for Muslims and "Arab-looking" terrorists running around Denmark, perhaps they should be paying closer attention to the recent activities of the "Three Jakobs of Copenhagen."

While there is definitely "something rotten in the state of Denmark," to quote Marcellus in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," it is not the cheese or the halal butcher shop but something that was thrown from the top rung of "Jakobs' ladder." But this ladder is not the fabled staircase to heaven but an express elevator to the top floor of Mossad headquarters.

Israel's latest attempt to steal American high tech communications technology by Wayne Madsen

 Israel's latest attempt to steal American high tech communications technology

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's controversial trip to the United States, where he will address a joint session of the Congress over the wishes of the White House and with a partial Democratic boycott of the speech, has brought up once again the age-old question that afflicts those who support Israel: Are they more loyal to the Jewish State or the United States?

According to information received by WMR, a small company called Demodulation is charging that the U.S. government, the State of New York, the State of Israel, the State University of New York, Alfred University, Corning Glass, the Department of Energy-Oak Ridge, Babcock and Wilson, and other parties have conspired to defraud the firm of its proprietary microwire technology, the core technology for which was originally acquired under an exclusive license from a post-Communist Romanian enterprise. Specifically, the company is charging that the conspirators, called "the Enterprise," are guilty of patent infringement and trade secret violations.

Demodulation reveals the history of its technology from what was then the Communist bloc:

"Critical aspects of the supporting core ų microwire science originated under a patent issued by a Romanian scientist, Dr. Horia Chiriac after 1996 during the fall of the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Dr. Chiriac was of interest to the intelligence community because of his numerous technical publications. He was one of a hand full of technologists in the world that possessed extensive knowledge of amorphous metal materials and their processing. Accordingly, he was a person of enormous interest by the military and intelligence apparatus of many technologically advanced countries. For example, during and after the fall of the FSU, the United States mounted major intelligence efforts to identify and clandestinely acquire FSU technologies of military and intelligence significance. It was during this period, that U.S. military and intelligence agencies first became interested in Dr. Chiriac’s work and clandestinely acquired critical aspects of the supporting core ų microwire science. The core ų microwire science, however, was only one critical part of a complete technology package necessary for the U.S. Federal Government and the other members of the Enterprise to practically apply the ų microwire fiber technology for intelligence and military applications."

The ų wire technology, as described by Demodulation, is based on a glass-coated wire the size of a human hair. There are many commercial, as well as national security, applications. Microwire can be inserted into packages that can be remotely monitored using hand held detectors or even by satellites in space.

Demodulation has presented a case to the FBI that reeks of intelligence agency intrigue. The company even alleges that a murder occurred of an Alfred University employee who discovered financial irregularities at the school. A statement by Demodulation on the case reads: "During the course of our investigation, we discovered probable cause to believe that a homicide was committed at Alfred University in the State of New York. A mid-level accounting official at Alfred University was  accused  of  embezzling  cash  funds from  the  Admissions  Office  and was  later  reported  by  the  University  as having committed suicide. Our interviews of eight individuals either directly or tangentially involved in the matter provided contradicting testimony concerning the circumstances surrounding the death. This testimony includes reports that the Alfred University accounting official was aware of financial irregularities taking place in the University. For example, one witness testified that he, 'wouldn’t be surprised if she found out something and was murdered.'"

Demodulation alleges that it was at Oak Ridge where the Department of Energy and Babcock and Wilson Technical Services began turning over the company's proprietary technical details to other members of the group of patent violators, including the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the intelligence service of Israel, the Mossad.

Demodulation discovered a link between the theft of its technology and the espionage case brought against U.S. Army employee Ben-Ami Kadish, an employee of the Picatinny Army Arsenal in New Jersey and a spy for Israel. Demodulation states:
"Our investigation reveals that two 155 mm Howitzer shells and detonators were stolen from Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey in 2007. The theft of these munitions from a U.S. Government reservation was allegedly masterminded by a U.S. Army official in collusion with a U.S. Government contracted agent. Our inquiry shows probable cause to believe that the contracted agent involved in the theft may have been an unregistered agent of the State of Israel. The purpose of the theft appears to relate to the application of Demodulation technology for Israeli military purposes. The U.S. Army official who allegedly masterminded the theft is a cleared employee who still works at Picatinny Arsenal. Demodulation attorneys have presented the U.S. Government with a subpoena to compel the sworn testimony of the U.S. Army official but the U.S. Government is refusing the subpoena."

Picatinny: another hive of Israeli intelligence activityThe Demodulation claims and the Kadish case together point to a major Israeli intelligence operation in northern New Jersey aimed at illegally acquiring U.S. dual civilian-military use technology. On April 24, 2008, WMR reported on the Kadish affair:

"The arrest of of former U.S. Army engineer Ben-Ami Kadish by the FBI on charges of providing classified information, including nuclear data, to Israeli spy Yosef Yagur is part of a wider Israeli espionage ring operating deep within the U.S. government for some four decades. The Israeli espionage and agent-of-influence ring has penetrated U.S. intelligence and the U.S. nuclear command-and-control chain of command.

Kadish was a mechanical engineer who worked at the U.S. Army's Armament Research, Development, and Engineering Center at the Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey. Kadish's handler was Yosef Yagur, assigned as the Consul for Science Affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in Manhattan. In the criminal complaint filed by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York on April 22, 2008, Kadish is referred to as 'CC-1', a co-conspirator not named as a defendant. The complaint states that Kadish took home a classified document concerning nuclear weapons marked 'Restricted' and permitted Yagur to photograph the document in the basement of Kadish's home. Yagur previously worked for Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI) along with Kadish's brother. Yagur and Israel's science attache in the Washington embassy, Ilan Ravid, both handled convicted U.S. Naval intelligence spy Jonathan Pollard. Both Yagur and Ravid were hastily recalled in November 1985 after Pollard's arrest.

Yagur and Ravid both reported to Israeli master spy Rafi Eitan, the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry's Lakam—Lishka LeKishrei Mada (Liaison Bu­reau for Scientific Affairs), considered a rival to Mossad. Eitan, now 82, is the had of Israel's 'Gil' pensioners' party.

The arrest of 84-year old Kadish and his reported willingness to cooperate with the FBI may eventually lead to the identification of a Jewish-American spy who was a senior member of the Reagan administration. The agent-of-influence is code-named "Mega," although some reports call him 'Mr. X.' Israel maintained at the time of Pollard's conviction for espionage that he was a lone case and that Israel would never again spy on the United States. The Kadish arrest puts to rest the Israeli claim and the FBI is reportedly doggedly pursuing others in the Israeli spy ring, including the elusive "Mega."

There is reportedly a group of FBI agents who are graduates of Fordham University who have never been happy about Israeli intelligence operations in the United States. During the height of the power of the neocons in the George W. Bush administration, these agents were forced to take a back seat as Israeli intelligence influence grew within U.S. military and intelligence circles. However, with the decline in influence of the neocon
cabal,' the Fordham group is making its move against the Israeli spies.

Kadish also provided Yagur with a Secret document on a modified version of the F-15 fighter the United States sold to another country, reportedly Saudi Arabia. Another Secret document handed over by Kadish to Yagur was on the Patriot missile defense system.

On March 20, 2008, Kadish and Yagur had a phone conversation, during which Yagur told Kadish to lie to FBI agents. Yagur told Kadish: 'Don't say anything. Let them say whatever they want. You didn't . . . do anything . . . . What happened 25 years ago? You didn't remember anything.' The conversation took place in Hebrew.

The following day, Kadish denied to FBI agents that he had spoken to Yagur. However, WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted the phone call between Kadish in Monroe Township, New Jersey and Yagur in Tel Aviv, Israel. There is also communications intelligence (COMINT) evidence of Yagur's phone calls between at least 1980 through 1985 from his Riverdale, Bronx, New York residence to Kadish's residence in Clifton, New Jersey arranging for visits to Kadish's basement to photograph classified documents.

Kadish's emails to Yagur were also intercepted and in 2004 Kadish traveled to Israel to meet with Yagur. The criminal complaint against Kadish also specifies that there is a current Grand Jury investigation in New York City of Israeli espionage agents in the United States.

Kadish received a Secret security clearance on October 22, 1963, from the Picatinny Arsenal. From August 23, 1979 to July 15, 1985, Kadish signed at least 24 Classified Document Accountability Record (CDARs) forms showing that he borrowed at last 35 classified documents from the library at the Picatinny Arsenal.

Kadish admitted to FBI Special Agent Lance Ashworth that he did not have the required clearance or need-to-know for the nuclear weapons document he gave Yagur. Kadish admitted he provided 50 to 100 documents to Yagur, all of which were classified. Kadish maintained he gave Yagur the documents in the belief that they would "help Israel."

Another member of the Israeli ring that ran Pollard and Kadish was Israeli Air Force Colonel Avi Sella. Sella gave Pollard a laundry list of classified documents wanted by Israel from Pollard's place of work at the Naval Investigative Service's Anti-Terrorist Alert Center in Suitland, Maryland. WMR previously reported at the Pollard-Sella contacts occurred around the same time that current Air Force cyber-security 'czarina' and anti-Iran Operation Checkmate strategist Dr. Lani Kass arrived in at Booz Allen with a top secret clearance after having just left the Israeli Air Force as a major. WMR has previously reported that Kass is a key member of a rival nuclear chain-of-command that was responsible for moving six nuclear armed cruise missiles from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. WMR has learned from knowledgeable sources that the US law enforcement and intelligence are looking at connections in the Israeli Air Force and since between Sella and Kass.

WMR has also learned that contacts between former Pentagon Policy and Plans chief Douglas Feith and Israeli military intelligence officers is also getting a fresh look by investigators. Feith lost his National Security Council job in 1982 after it was discovered that he was passing classified material to Israeli embassy officials. Feith's 1980s connections to Yagur, Ravid, and Sella are also getting a new look by federal investigators."
After pleading guilty to "failing to register as a foreign agent of Israel," a sweetheart deal often extended by the U.S. Justice Department to Israeli agents, U.S. Judge William Pauley merely fined Kadish $50,000 and said it would do know good to put such an old man in prison. Kadish died on July 16, 2012. His various interlocutors continue to spy for Israel.

On the Brink of WWIII, A Primer on Russian History-- Facts and Fantasy by Deena Stryker

On the Brink of WWIII, A Primer on Russian History-- Facts and Fantasy by Deena Stryker

When today's pundits talk about Russia as the greatest threat since Hitler's Germany, it's time for a look at Russian history.

The first crucial piece of information in the present context is the fact that Russia began in Kiev. Kievan Rus was "a loose federation^[3] of East Slavic tribes in Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century,^[4] under the reign of the Rurik dynasty. The modern peoples of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia all claim Kievan Rus' as their cultural ancestors," Wikipedia reports. No rational discussion of the present crisis is possible without this knowledge.

Image taken from page 457 of 'Russia, Past and Present. Adapted from the German (.Das heutige Russland.) of Lankenau and Oelnitz by Henrieta M. Chester. With map and illustrations'
(image by The British Library)

Now picture the world's largest landmass, (nine time zones to the US's three), much of which lies in the same northerly latitudes as Canada, but, in a crucial difference, with access to the ocean only on its Eastern tip, while the areas bordering on southern seas are inhabited by Muslim peoples. Add now that Russia is the seat of Orthodox Christianity, which in the 13th century was repeatedly attacked from the Roman Catholic and Protestant North and West. (Sergei Eisenstein made a famous film about the attacks by the Teutonic Knights, titled Alexander Nevsky.) According to Wiki, to the Orthodox Church and most princes, the fanatical Northern Crusadersseemed a greater threat to the Russian way of life than the Mongols, who protected and assisted Alexander Nevsky in fighting them.

Russia had been subjugated by Ghengis Khan's Golden Horde's from 1223 to 1240, to which it paid tribute for another four hundred years. For more on the lasting impact of that subjugation see my book review of TIbor Szamuely's The Russian Tradition . (In a similar scourge, the Ottoman empire took over half of Europe, their advance only halted with an unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1529. More on that later in this article.)

Starting with Kievan Rus, Russia, Poland, the Baltic princes, Sweden and Iran fought each other for centuries, so there is no historical record of a specifically 'aggressive' Russia. For hundreds of years, today's Baltic countries, facing onto the northern sea, were Russian principalities, as were Ukraine - and at times, Poland. Following are excerpts devoted to Russia's interactions with its neighbors, from the Wikipedia article on Russian history:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia:

In the 15th century, the grand princes of Moscow went on gathering Russian lands to increase the population and wealth under their rule. The most successful practitioner of this process was Ivan III^[41] who laid the foundations for a Russian national state. Ivan competed with his powerful northwestern rival, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for control over some of the semi-independent Upper Principalities in the Dnieper andOka River basins.^[45][46]

Ivan refused to pay further tribute to the Tatars and initiated a series of attacks that opened the way for the complete defeat of the declining Golden Horde. Ivan and his successors sought to protect the southern boundaries of their domain against attacks of the Crimean Tatars and other hordes.^[49] Although his longLivonian War for the control of the Baltic coast and access to sea trade ultimately proved a costly failure,^[54]Ivan managed to annex the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia.^[55] ". Through these conquests, Russia acquired a significant Muslim Tatar population and emerged as a multiethnic and multiconfessionalstate. Also around this period, the mercantile Stroganov family established a firm foothold at the Urals and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonize Siberia.^[56]

At the end of Ivan IV's reign the Polish--Lithuanian and Swedish armies carried out a powerful intervention in Russia, devastating its northern and northwest regions.^[60] During the Polish--Muscovite War (1605--1618), Polish--Lithuanian forces reached Moscow. The Seven Boyars, a group of Russian nobles recognized the Polish prince WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw IV Vasa as the Tsar of Russia on 6 September [O.S. 27 August] 1610.^[63][64] The Poles entered Moscow on 21 September [O.S. 11 September] 1610, setting the city on fire.^[65][66][67] This "Time of Troubles" resulted in the loss of much territory to the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Russo-Polish war, as well as to the Swedish Empire in the Ingrian War. Fortunately for Moscow, its major enemies, the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, were engaged in a bitter conflict with each other, which provided Russia the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and to sign a truce with the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619. Recovery of lost territories started in the mid-17th century, when the Khmelnitsky Uprising in Ukraine against Polish rule brought about the Treaty of Pereyaslavconcluded between Russia and the Ukrainian Cossacks.

According to the treaty, Russia granted protection to the Cossacks state in the Left-bank Ukraine, formerly under Polish control. This triggered a prolonged Russo-Polish War which ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo(1667), where Poland accepted the loss of Left-bank Ukraine, Kiev and Smolensk.^[41]

Peter the Great's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His aim was to establish a Russian foothold on the Black Sea by taking the town of Azov.^[76] Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea, whose harbor was frozen nine months a year. Access to the Baltic was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambitions for a "window to the sea" led him in 1699 to make a secret alliance with the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden resulting in the Great Northern War.

The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing his coveted access to the sea. Russian intervention in the Commonwealth marked" the beginning of a 200-year domination of that region by the Russian Empire. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of emperor as well as tsar, and Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.

By this time, the once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to its south was heavily declining. Taking advantage of the profitable situation, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723) in order to be the first Russian emperor to increase Russian influence in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea. After considerable success and the capture of many provinces and cities in the Caucasus and northern Persia, the Safavids were forced to hand over the territories to Russia. However, 9 years later they would be ceded back to Persia, as part of a Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire.^[77]

^{Catherine the Great extended Russian political control over the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth and} successfully waged war against the decaying Ottoman Empire^[80] advancing Russia's southern boundary to the Black Sea. Then, by allying with the rulers of Austria and Prussia, she incorporated the territories of the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth, and during the Partitions of Poland, pushed the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe. Catherine waged a new war against Persia in 1796 after they had again invaded Georgia, expelling the newly established Russian garrisons in the Caucasus. By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had made Russia into a major European power. This continued with Alexander I'swresting of Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and of Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812.

After the Russian armies liberated allied Georgia from Persian occupation in 1802, they clashed with Persiaover control of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Dagestan, and also got involved in the Caucasian War against the Caucasian Imamate. To the south west, Russia attempted to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, using Georgia at its base for the Caucasus and Anatolian front. In the 1828-29 Russo-Turkish War Russia invaded northeastern Anatolia and occupied the strategic Ottoman towns of Erzurum and Gumushane and, posing as protector and savior of the Greek Orthodox population, received extensive support from the region's Pontic Greeks. Following a brief occupation, the Russian imperial army withdrew back into Georgia.

In 1826 another war was fought against Persia, acquiring Armenia, Nakhchivan, Nagorno-Karabakh,Azerbaijan, and IÄŸdır\. By the 1830s, Russia had conquered all Persian territories and major Ottoman territories in the Caucasus.^[91] In 1831 Nicholas crushed a major uprising in Congress Poland; it would be followed by another large-scale Polish and Lithuanian revolt in 1863.

One can see this history as that of a conquering power, or more accurately, as that of powerful neighbors vying for control over various parts of the great Eurasian plain. Europe was no different, the problem being the presence on a very small peninsula of some fifty different nationalities and languages, but Americans do not study either European or Russian history. When the US reluctantly entered the first world war, the common wisdom was that the Europeans couldn't stop squabbling, and the same was true in spades with the Second World War. Although Germany was fingered in both as the aggressor - and by the French as the aggressor in the war of 1870 - Russia was never seen as 'the aggressor' of the Eurasian plain. And for Russians, the problem has always been that of encirclement and access to warm waters.

Napoleon attempted to conquer Russia in the early nineteenth century, courting an ignominious defeat. In the early twentieth century, Russia lost a war with Japan over access to the warm water port of Port Arthur in southern Manchuria. The West tried to roll back the Russian revolution in a war that lasted in various phases and fronts from 1917 to 1925 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War. 

It was invaded by Hitler in World War II, prompting it to hold on to the Baltic States and the countries of Eastern Europe that had been his allies. It was because of the history of attacks on Russia that Roosevelt and Churchill agreed at a meeting with Stalin in Yalta that Eastern Europe, through which these attacks came, would be a Soviet sphere of influence after the war. 

(Notwithstanding today's revisionist allusions, Russia did not 'conquer' Eastern Europe, but rather liberated it from the Nazi occupation. Most historians now admit that without Russia, Germany would not have been defeated.)

At present, 'fears' of Russian 'aggression' center on Poland, the Baltic states, and Moldova (Bessarabia), all of which were the locus of wars in centuries past. With the end of the Cold War, the Baltic States were let go, and the countries of Eastern Europe resumed the task of building independent polities they had started after World War I. Rule by the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, had contributed in no small measure to their economic and political backwardness with respect to Western Europe. I witnessed the psychological effect of that history first hand when I lived in Poland, then in Hungary, from 1965 to 1971. Poland carries the added burden of having been literally carved up by its European neighbors no fewer than three times over the centuries. All the European countries I have lived in had an acute sense of history, but none so much as Poland. Poland's current attitude toward the conflict in Ukraine is as much tributary of that history as it is of European Union politics, which is why it is so contradictory, ultimately coming down on the side of Ukraine, yet unable to resist bashing it at the same time.

This brings us to the crux of the fabricated dispute that currently risks turning into World War III, complete with nuclear weapons: the accusation, repeated enunciated by President Obama and Secretary Kerry, that by respecting the referendum of the inhabitants of Crimea in favor of rejoining Russia, Vladimir Putin has arbitrarily modified the post-World War II borders. The border between Crimea and Russia was modified in 1954 when Khruschev 'gave it' to Ukraine, which at that time was one of the Soviet Socialist republics that constituted the Soviet Union. As the above history shows, Crimea had been part of Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, AND IT REMAINED SO AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II. So the return of Crimea to Russia cannot be construed as a modification of the borders agreed upon by the US, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, the latter maintaining a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, while Great Britain retained an upper hand over Greece, preventing that country's strong Communist Party from gaining power.

Notwithstanding these historical facts, the Putin-bashing continues. On Fareed Zakaria's GPS Sunday, Christa Vreeland, a journalist who is also a member of the Canadian Parliament, painted a picture of a struggling Russia, claiming that Putin had thought Yanukovich would bring the Ukraine into his Eurasian customs union and 'all would be fine'. But the coup put intolerable internal pressures on Putin, 'his cronies were unhappy, the bourgeoisie destroyed. He didn't want this crisis.' We are expected to believe that without notoriously backward and corrupt Ukraine, Russia would be doomed! Apparently, Vreeland hasn't heard of the BRICS, the Silk Road, and the deepening Russia/China alliance".

On the same program, Bill Browder, grandson of the one-time leader of the American Communist Party and (no small irony) Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, had this to say: 'Putin is entirely rational but he has no morality. He will kill, start wars if it makes him wealthier, or saves him from being arrested. He started a war in Crimea, and says the Ukrainian leaders are fascist nazis backed by US, provoking nationalist fervor.'

To decide how much credibility to grant this man's testimony, starting with his apparent ignorance of the weight of the Neo-Fascist Right Sektor and Svoboda parties within the Ukrainian government, notwithstanding the many videos featuring their thuggish behavior, I suggest you read the lengthy interview he gave to Barrons

http://online.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580437562326826610 in which he details his business dealings in Russia starting in the nineteen-nineties. Readers will be familiar with the death of Barron's lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison, but whatever the circumstances of that death, they do not change Barron's participation in the rape of that country, which he relates with undisguised gusto. Claiming that he wanted Russia to become a normal country where 'the valuations (of stocks) were the same as the West', he is not talking about the rule of law. And this is the man who accuses Putin of being an oligarch!

Finally, as France, Germany and Russia try to resolve the Ukraine crisis through diplomacy, Washington, oblivious to the fact that it is the Europeans who would be on the front-line in a war with Russia, continues to insist that it must 'protect' these allies from Putin's 'aggression'! Possible presidential candidate and uber hawk ally of John McCain, Senator Lindsey Graham made the following astonishing statement a few days ago, referring to his colleagues who are against arming the Kiev government: (They) "don't see how arming those who are willing to fight and die for their freedom makes things better (my emphasis)."

On RT this morning, anticipating tomorrow's crucial meeting in Minsk between Ukraine, Russia France and Germany, a retired Deputy Ambassador to NATO and Ambassador to Germany, John Kornblum, echoing Victoria Nuland's famous quip "F.. the EU!", affirmed that 'the real power lies in Washington'. But it doesn't look like a convincing sign of power to claim, as Washington is currently doing, that Vladimir Putin suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, a mental condition whose main symptom is an inability to read social cues! Distancing itself from this latest 'stupid stuff', the psychiatric community is probably wondering why Washington failed to diagnose the severe alcoholism of Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, to whom the Browders of this world are beholden.