Wednesday, August 13, 2014

US, Israel wreaking havoc in world: Professor William Cook




US, Israel wreaking havoc in world: Professor William Cook

Press TV has conducted an interview with William Cook, professor with University of La Verne from Los Angeles, about Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki saying that Israel’s war crimes in Gaza will be proven after investigations by a commission appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Cook: Well first thing they have to do of course is to convince the UN Human Rights Council that they have a right to present as a member, they are after all a member state of the Arab League and they are recognized as a nation internationally. So the question is can they get to the actual active committee in the UN that can pursue the actions that they would like to take place?
The difficulty of course is that Israel fears that very action which is why it feared having Hamas signed an agreement with Fatah. They do not wish to have any interference with the impunity that they have been able to acquire over almost fifty some years now through the US veto and that makes it easy for them simply to avoid any kind of international law or have to confront their actions against the International Criminal Court.

So I think that with the introduction by Hamas and Fatah as Palestinian member state to the UN this could produce outstanding results and if you would want me to continue on that I have frankly listening to what [President] Rouhani has said about the Gaza situation and his point of bringing the Non-Aligned Nations to agree to submit on behalf of Gaza, the action that there is criminal activity taking place there but this would be further opening where the world body then not the United States by a single “no” would be able to control events, or at least push the events into the world lap so that the people of the world who are in the streets defending Gaza would have a say in this and the US would be brought along with Israel and whatever they wish to hope to get from bringing Hamas before the International Criminal Court for actions on whether or not they have disobeyed, defied the United Nations charters and rules of regulation in the international legal scene.

Press TV: And of course we know that the United States is giving its full-fledged support for Israel in these offensives and many offensives indeed. Just how much Israel has become a liability for the United States?

Cook: You cannot calculate how much the liability this has become and I would offer to you for example the most recent vote by the Senate of the United States and the House of Representatives of the United States on support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and it was one hundred percent in both legislative bodies.

They are purportedly deliberative bodies that question and raise issues on the primary concerns of American security but what we have learned as a result of going into Iraq and going into Afghanistan is that the benefits to the United States are negative. They are not positive and the world sees us in complicity with Israel as two rogue nations that are causing havoc in the world.  

AHK/HMV

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Ghost of Richard Nixon haunts Hillary Clinton by Wayne Madsen




Ghost of Richard Nixon haunts Hillary Clinton

As the nation reflects on the 40th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon from office, Washington's pundits are wondering aloud about "future Nixons" who might assume the presidency. One name that keeps popping up again and again as a person who has the "air of Nixon" about her is all-but-declared 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 

At a July 30 panel held at The Washington Post building, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and retired Post columnist Elizabeth Drew commented on the similarities between Mrs. Clinton and Nixon and the "air" of Nixon that surrounds Clinton. The major similarity with Nixon is Clinton's tendency to be loose with the truth. WMR's editor was told by the ghost writer for Clinton's 2003 "autobiography," Living History, that the book is packed with falsehoods. Many of Clinton's claims, when fact checked, turned out to be false or hugely embellished. When the ghost writer brought these to Clinton's attention, she barked back, "I'm paying you to write this fucking book, not question it."

And it's not merely Mrs. Clinton's tendency to lie and use foul language that has many observing Nixonian traits in the former First Lady and Secretary of State. In the 1960 presidential election, Vice President Nixon distanced himself from incumbent President Dwight Eisenhower, who dearly wanted to eject Nixon from the ticket in the 1956 election, by suggesting that Ike was soft on communism. The charge stemmed from Eisenhower's refusal to be drawn into the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez to help unseat Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser from power in Cairo and his unwillingness to confront the USSR after its 1956 invasion of Hungary. Nixon was also well aware that Eisenhower secretly offered the Soviets a deal to jointly cooperate in space exploration and end the costly "space race" for both nations.

Similarly, Clinton has openly criticized President Obama over his refusal to militarily back Syrian guerrillas attempting to oust Syrian President Bashar al Assad from power. Obama has reportedly branded the charge that his inaction caused the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or "Islamic State" as "horse shit." Ike reportedly used similar barnyard epithets about his vice president.

Eisenhower, when asked before the 1960 election if he could name one thing Nixon accomplished as vice president, laughed and said, "If you give me a week, I might think of one." The slap by Ike was seen as a boost to the John F. Kennedy campaign and it was used in Kennedy TV ads.

Nixon believed that the presidency was stolen from him in 1960 by Kennedy. Nevertheless, Nixon was convinced that it was his manifest destiny to become president, even after his humiliating defeat for California governor in 1962 by Edmund "Pat" Brown. Similarly, Clinton believes that Obama took away what many considered to be her "coronation" as president in 2008. She and her husband, Bill Clinton, still carry grudges against the many Democrats who, early on, supported Obama. Nixon, as is known from the Watergate tapes and other records, was the supreme grudge keeper, blaming a number of people for his electoral losses in 1960 and 1962. Nixon carried all of his grudges into the White House in 1969 and used them as a basis for his infamous "enemy's list."

Many Washington observers believe that the Clintons also have a list of political enemies that they would bring into the White House in order to exact revenge.

Mrs. Clinton also recently publicly distanced herself from the Obama administration. Clinton endorsed Israel's military occupation of the West Bank even as her successor at the State Department, John Kerry, was attempting to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks in spite of Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza that killed a thousand and a half people, many of them innocent children, women, handicapped, and elderly. Mrs. Clinton essentially came out against a Palestinian state while Obama and Kerry are still pressing Israel to maintain its previously-held commitment to a free and independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza.
     http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/08/08/article-2720212-205E75F700000578-857_306x642.jpg   
Products of the same tide? Hillary Clinton's and Richard Nixon's worrisome similarities.

While Nixon and Mrs. Clinton both made statements that were viewed as "anti-Semitic" over their political careers, the commitment of both to Israel remains unquestioned. Nixon ranted about Jewish influence in the courts, media, and universities but was willing to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union in 1974 in order to save Israel from a joint Egyptian-Soviet military assault. 

Although Mrs. Clinton once referred to Paul Fray, her husband's 1974 campaign manager for a congressional seat in Arkansas, as a "fucking Jew bastard," her loyalty to Israel and its right-wing government is rock solid. Mrs. Clinton was also known for having some choice words, some of them referring to religion, about her husband's White House aide Rahm Emanuel early on in the Clinton administration. It is well known that Mrs. Clinton wanted Emanuel, who once served in the Israel Defense Force and whose father served in an Israeli terrorist outfit fighting the British, fired from the White House staff. But Mrs. Clinton's anti-Semitic outbursts, similar to Nixon's, never shook her support for Israel.

Ironically, before she married Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, then 27, served as an attorney on the Senate Watergate Committee investigating Nixon. Her supervisor, Jerry Zeifman, claimed he fired Rodham and refused to give her a recommendation for employment because he considered her to be a liar and an "unethical, dishonest lawyer." Rodham was accused of removing files on the 1970 impeachment attempt by the House Judiciary Committee of Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice William. The files set a precedent on the ability of an impeachment subject to hire counsel to represent them in the House proceedings. Rodham removed the documents so they would not be available to House and Senate Watergate investigators who were being asked by the White House and congressional Republicans to allow Nixon to have counsel cross examine witnesses in the House impeachment hearings. It was agreed in 1970 that Douglas would have counsel present in the House proceedings to cross-examine witnesses but Rodham had no intention of affording that privilege to Nixon. Rodham's misdeeds were supported by her colleague Bernard Nussbaum, who later became her husband's White House counsel and helped cover up aspects of the alleged 1993 suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. 

Mrs. Clinton and Nixon have one major difference. 

Nixon was a lifelong Republican. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, had been a member of her high school's Young Republican Club and she served as a "Goldwater Girl," championing the 1964 candidacy of Republican Barry Goldwater's right-wing campaign against Lyndon Johnson. Mrs. Clinton later switched to the Democratic Party, supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1968. However, at the same time she was supporting McCarthy, she was interning for House GOP Minority leader Gerald Ford and assisting the Nelson Rockefeller campaign against Nixon at the 1968 Republican National Convention. By claiming to be working for McCarthy and Rockefeller, while also working for Ford, Clinton appears to have been more of a Karl Rove-like political agent of influence than a committed candidate or party loyalist. 

Unlike Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic Party, no one ever questioned Nixon's loyalty to the GOP. And that fact, alone, potentially makes a Hillary Clinton presidency potentially more dangerous than that of Nixon. In the end, it was a delegation of the Republican Party's gray eminences of Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes that convinced Nixon to resign for the good of the country. Mrs. Clinton's chameleon-like loyalties would make her a tougher person for her own Democratic Party to deal with if she decided to violate the Constitution on a Nixonian scale. And that is why some seasoned political observers in Washington are worried about a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Friday, August 08, 2014

Obama's inconsistent foreign policy by Wayne Madsen




Obama's inconsistent foreign policy

President Obama's decision to launch targeted air strikes on Islamic State for Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) forces in northern Iraq comes at the same time his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John O. Brennan is coordinating an increase in weapons and training for ISIL-led Salafist guerrillas in Syria. Obama's foreign policy is akin to President Franklin Roosevelt fighting the German Nazis in northern France while at the same time ordering his Office of Strategic Services to train and arm Benito Mussolini's forces in southern France. 

Northern Iraq's Kurds, Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, Turkomans, Shi'as, and other minorities, as well as Syria's Christians, Alawites, and Kurds, are being massacred because of three major players in the Obama administration: Brennan, who has made no secret of his admiration for Saudi Arabia, the principal financier of ISIL in Syria and Iraq; and Obama's two meddlesome and quite incompetent female foreign policy advisers, national security director Susan Rice and UN ambassador Samantha Power. Rice and Power, who should have never been permitted to smash any gender-pandering "glass ceilings" within the State Department and the White House, have seen the fruits of their George Soros-germinated "Responsibility to Protect" in Syria, Iraq, and Libya play out in the killing fields of all three countries. 

Syria, Iraq, and Libya, once united and string foes of Israel, have been torn asunder, with all the U.S. military deaths and wounded in Iraq now totally meaningless as Takfiri and Salafist radicals seize more territory in Iraq. With Arabs killing Arabs in greater numbers, Israel was given a green light to engage in its own slaughter of Arabs in Gaza.

The success of ISIL in Iraq can be directly linked to the ill-advised "de-Baathification" process initiated by the neocon "Coalition Provisional Authority" imposed on Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion and occupation. Former members of the Ba'ath Party, a socialist secular party, saw no other choice but to align with the radical ISIL members against the unpopular Nouri al-Maliki government in Baghdad. Armed with U.S.-supplied weapons, ISIL stormed across the Syrian frontier into Iraq. With ISIL forcess in Iraq supplemented by the arrival of Muslim mercenaries from Britain, France, Germany, and other countries, the alarmed Baathists broke with ISIL and fierce and bloody battles have been waged between ISIL and Ba'athist Saddam Hussein loyalists of the Naqshbandi Army.

Obama ordered the Department of Defense to launch air strikes against ISIL guerrillas in northern Iraq while, at the same time, Brennan has been coordinating CIA and Saudi military and intelligence support for ISIL-led forces in Syria. Rice and Power continue to demonize the Syrian government of recently-reelected President Bashar al Assad, thus giving a propaganda boost to ISIL. The Obama administration seems to believe that there is a difference between ISIL in Iraq and Syria. In fact, as ISIL's name "Iraq and the Levant" indicates, the group wants to overthrow the governments of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon and impose an Islamic state, with non-Wahhabist minorities being forced to convert to Wahhabism or be slaughtered. 

  

To clean up the mess in the Middle East, two targets must be taken out.

There is only one way for the ISIL juggernaut to be stopped. Brennan, Rice, and Power should be fired immediately. The new CIA director should be authorized, through a Presidential Finding, to arrange for the death, by assassination or "accident," of ISIL's chief promoter, Saudi national security adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan, aka "Bandar Bush." In June, a Qatari official was quoted as saying ISIL was a "Saudi project." Specifically, ISIL is a Bandar project and one that would not have been successful without the support of Brennan, Rice, and Power.

Prior to the Saudi-coordinated 9/11 attack, Bandar reportedly told the head of MI-6, Sir Richard Dearlove, "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally "God help the Shi'a.'" With Bandar's support for ISIL, the time when God must help the Shi'a and the other minorities of northern Iraq has arrived. But Obama's air strikes against ISIL positions are insufficient and meaningless. Brennan, as CIA director, is in a position to inform his Saudi friends of every Pentagon operation directed against ISIL. That is why it is important that Brennan and Bandar must be eliminated from their respective positions of power within their respective intelligence infrastructures.

The "Trojan horse" computer programs pre-installed in sophisticated U.S. weaponry supplied by the United States to Saudi Arabia should be activated. It has long been rumored that the U.S. National Security Agency installed remote-controlled Trojan horse programs in advanced jet fighters, missile systems, radar units, and reconnaissance aircraft supplied to the Saudi armed forces. These "back doors" were designed to be activated in the event the Saudi royal family was overthrown in a coup by anti-U.S. radicals.

There should also be an immediate cessation of U.S. overt and covert support for ISIL-led forces in Syria. U.S. military forces should begin coordinating their clean up operations of Takfiris and Salafists with the armed forces of the Syrian Arab Republic of Assad. The U.S. should provide weapons to Lebanese Hezbollah to clean up Salafist and Takfiri cells operating inside Lebanon. U.S. military aid should be stepped up for the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq and the CIA should establish armed self-defense units among Yazidis, Assyrian Christians, and Turkomans in northern Iraq. The United States should also work with the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran to stamp out Takfiris and Salafists who would try to seek safe haven in the border areas of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Relations should also be established between the CIA and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey to keep in check the radical Sunni Turkish elements that support ISIL.

And, Israeli intelligence assets who have been working with ISIL in Syria and Iraq should be quietly eliminated by CIA sharpshooters and other "wet affairs" operatives. The Middle East can only return to normal by eliminating the twin threats of Salafism and Zionism.


NATO is desperate for war By Pepe Escobar




NATO is desperate for war
By Pepe Escobar 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is desperate; it is itching for a war in battlefield Ukraine at any cost. 

Let's start with Pentagon supremo, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who has waxed lyrical over the Russian Bear's "threat": "When you see the build-up of Russian troops and the sophistication of those troops, the training of those troops, the heavy military equipment that's being put along that border, of course it's a reality, it's a threat, it's a possibility - absolutely." 

NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu could not elaborate if it was "threat" or "reality", absolutely or not, but she saw it all: "We're not going to guess what's on Russia's mind, but we can see what Russia is doing on the ground - and that is of great concern. Russia has amassed around 20,000 combat-ready troops on Ukraine's eastern border." 

In trademark, minutely precise NATOspeak, Lungescu then added that Russia "most probably" would send troops into eastern Ukraine under the cover of "a humanitarian or peace-keeping mission". And that settled it. 

Hagel and his remote-controlled Romanian minion Lungescu obviously have not read this or simply ignored its detailed explanation by Russian Air Force's spokesman: the "threat" or "build-up" happens to expire this Friday, the last day of Russian military exercises announced in advance. 

Fogh of War gets antsy
Right on cue, NATO secretary-general Anders "Fogh of War" Rasmussen arrived in Kiev practically foaming war in his mouth, ready to lay down the groundwork for NATO's summit in Wales on September 4 when Ukraine, enthroned as a major non-NATO ally, could be projected to become, in lightning speed, fully NATO-weaponized. Moreover, NATO is about to seriously "build up" in Poland, Romania, the Baltics and even Turkey. 

But then all sorts of Khaganate of Nulands (as in Victoria Nuland, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs) derivatives started to spin out of control. One can imagine the vain Fogh of War vainly trying to regain his composure. 

That took some effort as he was presented with the spectacle of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko - a certified oligarch dogged by dodgy practices - trying hard to evict the Maidan originals from the square in the center of Kiev; these are the people who late last year started the protests that were later hijacked by the Banderastan (as in Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan)/Right Sector neo-Nazis, the US neo-con masters. 

The original Maidan protests - a sort of Occupy Kiev - were against monstrous corruption and for the end of the perennial Ukrainian oligarch dance. What the protesters got was even more corruption; the usual oligarch dance; a failed state under civil war and avowed ethnic cleansing of at least 8 million citizens; and on top of it a failed state on its way to further impoverishment under International Monetary Fund "structural adjustment". No wonder they won't leave Maidan. 

So Maidan - the remix - has already started even before the arrival of General Winter. Chocolate King Poroshenko must evict them as fast as he can because renewed Kiev protests simply don't fit the hysterical Western corporate media narrative that "it's all Putin's fault". Most of all, corruption is even nastier than before - now with plenty of neo-Nazi overtones. 

With Fogh of War already fuming because "Russia won't invade", the pompously named "Secretary" of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, neo-Nazi Andrey Parubiy - who is the most likely candidate for having ordered the hit last month on the MH17 civilian aircraft - decided to step out; a certified rat abandoning a sinking ship move mostly provoked by the fact he did not get an extended ethnic cleansing overdrive in Eastern Ukraine, and had to endure a ceasefire. Poroshenko is not an idiot; after loads of bad PR, he knows his nationwide "support" is evaporating by the minute. 

Compounding all this action, a US missile cruiser enters the Black Sea again "to promote peace". The Kremlin and Russian intel easily see that for what it is. 

And then there's the horrendous refugee crisis building up in eastern Ukraine. This past Tuesday, Moscow during a UN Security Council meeting requested emergency humanitarian measures - predictably in vain. Washington blocked it because Kiev had blocked it ("There is no humanitarian crisis to end"). Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin dramatically described the situation in Donetsk and Luhansk as "disastrous", stressing that Kiev is intensifying military operations. 

According to the UN itself, at least 285,000 people have become refugees in eastern Ukraine. Kiev insists the number of internal refugees is "only" 117,000; the UN doubts it. Moscow maintains that a staggering 730,000 Ukrainians have fled into Russia; the UN High Commission for Refugees agrees. Some of these refugees, fleeing Semenivka, in Sloviansk, have detailed Kiev's use of N-17, an even deadlier version of white phosphorus. 

When Ambassador Churkin mentioned Donetsk and Luhansk, he was referring to Kiev's goons gearing up for a massive attack. They are already shelling the Petrovski neighborhood in Donetsk. Almost half of Luhansk residents have fled, mostly to Russia. Those who stayed behind are mostly old-age pensioners and families with small children. 

Humanitarian crisis does not even begin to describe it; there's no water, electricity, communication, fuel and medicine left in Luhansk. Kiev's heavy artillery partially destroyed four hospitals and three clinics. Luhansk, in a nutshell, is the Ukrainian Gaza. 

In a sinister symmetry, just as it gave a free pass to Israel in Gaza, the Obama administration is giving a free pass to the butchers of Luhansk. And there's even a diversion. Obama was mulling whether to bomb The Caliph's Islamic State goons in Iraq, or maybe drop some humanitarian aid. He opted for (perhaps) "limited" bombing and arguably less limited food and water airdrops

So let's be clear. For the US government, "there might be a humanitarian catastrophe" in Mount Sinjar in Iraq, involving 40,000 people. As for at least 730,000 eastern Ukrainians, they have the solemn right to be shelled, bombed, air-stricken and turned into refugees. 

The new Somalia 
Moscow's red lines are quite explicit: NATO out of Ukraine. Crimea as part of Russia. No US troops anywhere near Russia's borders. Full protection for the Russian cultural identity of southern and eastern Ukraine. 

Yet the - real - humanitarian crisis (which Washington dismisses) is another serious matter entirely. Kiev's forces are not equipped for prolonged urban warfare. But assuming these forces - a compound of regular military; oligarch-financed terror/death squads; the neo-Nazi-infested "voluntary" Ukrainian national guard; US-trained foreign mercenaries - decide to go for mass carnage to take Donetsk and Luhansk, arguably Moscow will have to consider what NATO types spin as a "limited ground intervention" in Ukraine. 

NATO spinsters are foolish enough to believe that if Putin can disguise the intervention as a peacekeeping or humanitarian mission, he may be able to sell it to Russian public opinion. In fact Putin has not "invaded" because Russian public opinion does not want it. His popularity is at a staggering 87%. Only an - improbable - Kiev-perpetrated mass carnage would change the equation, and sway Russian public opinion. Considering this is exactly what NATO wants, Fogh of War will be working overtime to force his vassals to bring about such carnage. 

Still, considering the latest developments, what facts on the ground point to is the current oligarch dance in Kiev already unraveling - as in this example here. Moscow won't even have to bother to consider "invading". Meanwhile, Poroshenko's slow motion genocide in Eastern Ukraine, as well as his crackdown of Maidan remix in Kiev, will keep getting a free pass. All hail Ukraine as the new Somalia; a fitting Frankenstein created by the exceptionalist Empire of Chaos. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
 

You wanna be Uncle Sam's bitch? Pay the price! by THE SAKER



You wanna be Uncle Sam's bitch? Pay the price!

Dear friends,

I just took a short break from my life in "meatspace" to comment upon the great news of the day:  Russia is introducing a full 12 months embargo on the import of beef, pork, fruits and vegetables, poultry, fish, cheese, milk and dairy products from the European Union, the United States, Australia, Canada and the Kingdom of Norway.  Russia is also introducing an airspace ban against European and US airlines that fly over our airspace to Eastern Asia, namely, the Asia-Pacific Region and is considering changing the so-called Russian airspace entry and exit points for European scheduled and charter flights. Furthermore, Russia is ready to revise the rules of using the trans-Siberian routes, and will also discontinue talks with the US air authorities on the use of the trans-Siberian routes.  Finally, starting this winter, we may revoke the additional rights issued by the Russian air authorities beyond the previous agreements.  This is such an interesting and major development that it requires a much more subtle analysis than just the crude calculation of how much this might cost the EU or US.  I will attempt no such calculation, but instead I would point out the following elements:

First, this is a typically Russian response.  There is a basic rule which every Russian kid learns in school, in street fights, in the military or elsewhere: never promise and never threaten - just act.  Unlike western politicians who spent months threatening sanctions, the all the Russians did was to say, rather vaguely, that they reserve the right to reply.  And then, BANG!, this wide and far-reaching embargo which, unlike the western sanctions, will have a major impact on the West, but even much more so on Russia (more about that in an instant).  This "no words & only action" tactic is designed to maximize deterrence of hostile acts: since the Russians do not clearly spell out what they could do in retaliation, God only knows what they could do next! :-)  On top of that, to maximize insecurity, the Russians only said that these were the measures agreed upon, but not when they would be introduced, partially or fully, and against whom.  They also strongly implied that other measure were under consideration in the pipeline.

Second, the sanctions are wonderfully targeted.  The Europeans have acted like spineless and brainless prostitutes in this entire business, they were opposed to sanctions from day 1, but they did not have the courage to tell that to Uncle Sam, so each time they ended up caving in.  Russia's message to the EU is simple: you wanna be Uncle Sam's bitch?  Pay the price!  This embargo will especially hurt southern Europe (Spain, France, Italy, Greece) whose agricultural production will greatly suffer from it   These countries also happen to be the weakest in the EU.  By hitting them, Russia is maximizing the inevitable friction inside the EU over sanctions against Russia.

Third, not only will EU carriers suffer from much higher costs and flight times on the very important Europe to Asia route, but the Asian carriers will not, giving the latter a double competitive advantage.  How is that for a way to reward one side while hurting the other?  The EU got one Russian airline in trouble over its flights to Crimea (Dobrolet) and for that the entire EU airlines community could end being at a huge disadvantage vis-à-vis its Asian counterparts.

Fourth, Russia used these sanctions to do something vital for the Russian economy.  Let me explain: after the collapse of the USSR the Russian agriculture was in disarray, and the Eltsin only made things worse.  Russian farmers simply could not compete against advanced western agro-industrial concerns which benefited from huge economies of scale, from expensive and high-tech chemical and biological research, which had a full chain of production (often through large holdings), and a top quality marketing capability.  The Russian agricultural sector badly, desperately, needed barriers and tariffs to be protected form the western capitalist giants and, instead, Russia voluntarily abided by the terms of the WTO and then eventually became member.  Now Russia is using this total embargo to provide a crucially needed time for the Russian agriculture to invest and take up a much bigger share on the Russian market.  Also, keep in mind that Russian products are GMO-free, and that they have much less preservatives, antibiotics, colors, taste enhancers, or pesticides.  And since they are local, they don't need to be brought in by using the kind of refrigeration/preservation techniques which typically make products taste like cardboard.  In other words, Russian agricultural products taste much better, but that is not enough to complete.  This embargo now gives them a powerful boost to invest, develop and conquer market shares.

Fifth, there are 100 countries which did not vote with the US on Crimea.  The Russians have already announced that these are the countries with which Russia will trade to get whatever products it cannot produce indigenously.  A nice reward for standing up to Uncle Sam.

Sixth, small but sweet: did you notice that EU sanctions were introduced for 3 months only, "to be reviewed" later?  By introducing a 12 months embargo Russia also sends a clear message: who do you think will benefit from this mess?

Seventh, it is plain wrong to calculate that EU country X was exporting for Y million dollars  to Russia and to then conclude that the Russian embargo will cost Y million dollars to EU country X.  Why is it wrong?  Because the non-sale of these product with create a surplus which will then adversely affect the demand or, if the production is decreased, this will affect production costs (economies of scale).  Conversely, for a hypothetical non-EU country Z a contract with Russia might mean enough cash to invest, modernize and become more competitive, not only in Russia, but on the world market, including the EU.

Eighth, the Baltic countries have played a particularly nasty role in the entire Ukrainian business and now some of their most profitable industries (such as fisheries), which were 90% dependent on Russia, will have to shut down.  These countries are already a mess, but now they will hurt even more.  Again, the message to them is simple: you wanna be Uncle Sam's bitch?  Pay the price!

Ninth, and this is really important, what is happening is a gradual decoupling of Russia from the western economies.  The West severed some of the financial, military and aerospace ties, Russia severed the monetary, agricultural and industrial ones.  Keep in mind that the US/EU market is a sinking one, affected by deep systemic problems and huge social issues.  In a way, the perfect comparison is the Titanic whose orchestra continued to play music while the sink was sinking.  Well, Russia is like a passenger who is told that the Titanic's authorities have decided to disembark him at the next port.  Well, gee, too bad, right?

'clock' by Josetxo Ezcurra
Last, but most definitely not least, this trade-war, combined with the West's hysterical russophobia, is doing for Putin a better PR campaign than anything the Kremlin could have dreamed of.  All his PR people need to tell the Russian population is the truth: "we did everything right, we played it exactly by the book, we did everything we could to deescalate this crisis and all we asked for was to please not allow the genocide of our people in Novorussia - and what was the West's response to that? An insane hate campaign, sanctions against us and unconditional support for thegenocidal Nazis in Kiev".  Furthermore, as somebody who carefully follows the Russian media, I can tell you that what is taking place today feels a lot like, paraphrasing Clausewitz, the "a continuation of WWII, but by other means", in other words a struggle to the end between two regimes, two civilizations, which cannot coexist on the same planet and who are locked in struggle to death.  In these circumstances, expect the Russian people to support Putin even more.

In other words, in a typical Judo move, Putin has used the momentum of the the West's Russia-basing and Putin-bashing campaign to his advantage across the board: Russia will benefit from this economically and politically.  Far from being threatened by some kind of "nationalistic Maidan" this winter, Putin's regime is being strengthened by his handling of the crisis (his ratings are higher than ever before).

Yes, of course, the USA have shown they they have a very wide array of capabilities to hurt Russia, especially through a court system (in the US and EU) which is as subservient to the US deep state as the courts in the DPRK are to their own "Dear Leader" in Pyongyang.  And the total loss of the Ukrainian market (for both imports and exports) will also hurt Russia.  Temporarily.  But in the long wrong, this situation is immensely profitable for Russia.

In the meantime, the Maidan is burning againAndriy Parubiy has resigned, a the Ukies are shelling hospital and churches in Novorussia.  What else is knew?

As for Europe, it is shell-shocked and furious.  Frankly, my own Schadenfreude knows no bounds this morning.  Let these arrogant non-entities like Van Rompuy, Catherine Ashton, Angela Merkel or José Manuel Barroso deal with the shitstorm their stupidity and spinelessness have created.

In the USA, Jen Psaki seems to be under the impression that the Astrakhan region is on the Ukrainian border, while the Russian Defense Ministry plans to "open special accounts in social networks and video hosting resources so that the US State Department and the Pentagon will be able to receive unbiased information about Russian army’s actions".

Will all that be enough to suggest to the EU leaders that they have put their money on the wrong horse?

The Saker 

PS: have to leave again.  Will be back on Saturday afternoon.

Thursday, August 07, 2014

London turns up propaganda effort ahead of Scottish independence referendum by Wayne Madsen




London turns up propaganda effort ahead of Scottish independence referendum

With just six weeks before Scottish voters head to the polls to vote on their country restoring its once cherished independence from the United Kingdom, British government authorities are turning up the heat on the pro-independence forces led by Scotland's ruling Scottish National Party and First Minister Alexander Salmond.

Not only has London ensured the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) toe an anti-independence editorial line but the American media dutifully got behind President Barack Obama's anti-independence statement while he was in Europe meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Obama said the United Kingdom should remain "united," clearly a tip of Obama's hat to London's "Better Together" campaign against a September 18 yes vote on Scottish independence. The British and American media are working together to paint Scottish independence as a fanciful pipe dream that is unrealistic on a number of fronts. However, an independent Scotland would be a left-leaning nation that would support true social democracy and justice for Palestine, all points enunciated by Salmond, and that prospect has the London bankers and the Zionist-owned and controlled media worried.

Rallying to the Scotland remaining in the UK cause have been Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, both longtime maidens for the House of Rothschild and its multi-billionaire avatar in "progressive" politics, George Soros.

On August 5 there was a televised debate between Salmond and the chief of the "No" vote campaign, Scottish Labor Party member Alistair Dowling, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for Scotland who has the backing of the Tory Party of Cameron, the Labor Party of Ed Miliband, and the Liberal Democrats under deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. Just before the independence debate was broadcast, STV (the Scottish branch of the BBC) saw its website crash. After the debate, Britain's establishment and corporate media, which includes the BBC, panned Salmond's performance as poor against the erstwhile lackluster Dowling.

On June 5, Obama, who was in France marking the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, was asked by a BBC reporter about the Scottish independence vote. Former British diplomat Craig Murray wrote that the question was prepared in advance by Number 10 Downing Street and the BBC reporter was carrying out government instructions by asking the question -- a question for which Obama had been pre-briefed by Cameron.

The London government has enlisted the support of J.K Rowling, the author the Harry Potter series, to its anti-independence cause. She joins Eddie Izzard, a has-been transvestite comedian and actor, to lead the cause against Scottish independence. As reports of English organized pedophilia reach closer to Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street, having a transvestite as the leading spokesman against Scottish independence has not seen any bounce for the "No" vote in Scotland. To the contrary, support for independence, while still not a majority, has increased into the 40 percentile range from the mid-30s.



Ironically, according to our British intelligence sources, the greatest support for Scotland remaining a part of the United Kingdom comes from the Scottish elite class, which, through the years, has been rewarded with senior positions in Britain's civil service, including science, education, electrical power, medicine, medicine, the royal family, and, most importantly, intelligence. These Scots, who have become comfortable in their subservience to the UK state, fear the loss of special privileges if Scotland votes to break free of its English chains. Therefore, these anglophile Scots are doing everything possible to ensure that the "Yes" vote in the referendum fails.

Salmond has accused London of waging a "fear campaign" against Scottish independence. This campaign is enabled by the half of the members of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI-6, and the MI-5 Security Service, MI-5, who are Scottish. These Scottish members of Britain's intelligence and defense nomenklatura class will stop at nothing to ensure that a "No" vote on independence wins out next month. Our sources report that the outcome of the vote will be skewed against independence even if the yes vote appears to be heading for a majority. The method used by MI-6 and MI-5 against a yes vote will be similar to the hacking by the federal and state governments of voting machines and tabulating computers in the United States to ensure pre-determined outcomes.


Wednesday, August 06, 2014

CIA's history of dividing the Arab World by Wayne Madsen



CIA's history of dividing the Arab World

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which also calls itself the "Islamist State" and is led by former Abu Ghraib prison detainee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, released from U.S. detention in 2004, would not be existence had the CIA abandoned its policy of creating Islamic extremist groups to sow dissension in the Middle East. After training and arming Sunni Islamist guerrillas in Turkey, Jordan, and post-Muammar Qaddafi Libya to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, CIA- and Saudi-nurtured jihadist insurgents have taken over large portions of eastern Syria, northern Iraq -- including Kurdish regions -- and are now moving into Lebanon. Targets of the ISIL forces are Kurds, Yazidis, Turkomans, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, and Shi'a Muslims. These minority religious groups are witnessing their members being slaughtered and their religious shrines and places of worship destroyed by the ISIL radicals who hew to the Wahhabist line dominant in Saudi Arabia.

Islamist mercenaries from the West would not be flocking to join the ranks of ISIL if it were not for the support given them by Saudi national security adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan, whose fingerprints are all over the 9/11 false flag attack on the United States. Nor would Kurdish towns and dams on the Euphrates River be falling to ISIL forces if it were not for the tacit support given umbrella jihadist guerrilla groups in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey by CIA director John Brennan. Brennan is probably the only senior member of the Obama administration who has been to Islam's holiest shrine in Mecca, something that is only permitted for devout Muslims or "special guests" of the Saudi monarch. Brennan is a former CIA station chief in Riyadh and he is a confirmed Saudophile, a close friend and supporter of the misogynistic and arcane Saudi kingdom.

Brennan's operations on behalf of anti-Christian and anti-Shi'a Islamist radicals would not have been possible without the diplomatic cover provided to him by the female duo of national security adviser Susan Rice and UN ambassador Samantha Power, both students of the George Soros "responsibility to protect" (R2P) school of thought. R2P, in reality, is nothing more than a baked-over neoconservative interventionist foreign policy trimmed with "humanitarian" intentions.

A formerly SECRET CIA reference guide titled "Islam and Politics: A Compendium," dated April 1984, outlines the agency's divide and conquer policies in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Issued when Brennan was a junior-ranking CIA case officer fluent in Arabic, the CIA document, produced by the Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis branch, stressed the importance of the most radical of Muslims being natural allies of the CIA in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Middle East and South Asia. America's dalliance with extreme Islam reached its pinnacle in the mujaheddin war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The CIA's involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s gave rise to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the latter spawning various Islamist groups now wreaking havoc in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Mali, Somalia, and other countries.



America's first Wahhabist CIA director: John Brennan

The CIA document's description of fundamentalist Islam could have been drafted by the pro-Wahhabist Brennan himself. The adoption of draconian Shariah law by Muslim countries is described by the CIAS as "constitutional reform." The CIA states that fundamentalists merely "want society restructured to protect the underprivileged and to institutionalize an equitable distribution of the fruits of labor." In reality, it was the socialist government in Afghanistan supported by the USSR that assisted the underprivileged and provided gender and ethnic equality to the Afghan people. On the other hand, it was the Saudi-supported mujaheddin that wanted Afghanistan transformed into a backward fundamentalist "emirate" practicing Shariah law. And that is exactly what Afghanistan became when the CIA-supported Taliban seized control of the country in the early 1990s. Now, the CIA is watching over the same "Talibanization" process, financed by Saudi Arabia, taking place in Iraq and Syria.

The CIA document also refers to Islamist fundamentalist leaders as the "just ruler" who serves his populace. Fundamentalists are also described as condemning "lax morals of contemporary society" and standing in opposition to the "breakdown of family unity, deviation from the dietary prohibitions of Islam, the immodest dress of females, and the mingling of the sexes in school and commerce."

No where in the CIA document is it mentioned that senior Taliban leaders, many schooled in England's best universities, never gave up their liking for Scotch whiskey, particularly Johnnie Walker Black. Nor does the CIA's "intelligence" primer discuss the drunken debauchery that younger male members of the Saudi royal family often engaged in while visiting London, Paris, Rome, and Marbella on the Spanish Costa del Sol. In fact, the CIA manual of political Islam appears to have been drafted by Saudi Arabia's senior imams.

Rather than pointing out that the CIA's royal friends in the Persian Gulf financially supported the radical Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East and abroad, the CIA document states: "We have little evidence that the innumerable groups of religious revivalists calling themselves the Muslim Brotherhood that exist not only in the Arab states but in such non-Arab countries as West Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Malaysia are linked in any way. It many only be the name that is the common feature."

In fact, the CIA, itself, was a major link between such radical groups as part of its recruitment and support efforts for the mujaheddin forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, operations that involved Brennan. The name of the CIA analyst who wrote the monkeyshine about the Muslim Brotherhood, which is described as a "secret society," is redacted, however, such a bogus analysis could have easily come from the pen of John Brennan.

In its discussion of Islamic Sectarianism, the CIA document only refers to two branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, even though there are a number of others. Moreover, the following is how the CIA viewed the Islamic split: "To the Sunni (which the CIA describes as "more flexible," as if the Saudi Wahhabis could be "flexible" to any degree) or secular leadership in countries such as Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Kuwait, Shias have been perceived as a politically destabilizing threat that must be dealt  with -- sometimes delicately, sometimes with political repression." Sufism is dismissed by the CIA as a "heretical" form of Islam, even though it had strong roots in West Africa, particularly in Mali and northern Nigeria, before the CIA-enabled radical Sunni groups like Ansar Dine and Boko Haram, armed with weapons captured from the CIA-instigated civil war in Libya, destroyed Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal and killed Sufi adherents.

The CIA also wrongly attributed militant Islam to Iran and Libya while ignoring the support of Saudi Arabia for the most militant forms of Sunni Islam. In fact, Libya in 1984 was a socialist and largely secular regime that opposed the Wahhabist Islam then being exported by the Saudis.

The document also focuses in on the major factor that attracted the CIA to radical Sunni Islam: "The Arab secular regimes, which have never recognized Islam as a basis for government -- the Ba'thist socialists of Syria and Iraq, the embattled regime of divided and war-torn Lebanon, and Marxist South Yemen -- all face in varying degrees the threat of politicized Islam undermining their unpopular regimes."

The CIA wrongly concluded that secular and socialist regimes were "unpopular" with their people, when, in fact, the opposite was true. The CIA's tilt to Sunni radicalism as opposed to secular governance in the Arab world was a result of the Cold War "black-and-white" view of the world by the neo-conservatives who penetrated the Ronald Reagan administration from top to bottom. In the world of the neocons, there was but one form of Islam -- the most radical variety -- that was the ally of the United States against monolithic communism and socialism. That mindset would continue to destabilize the world long after the end of the Cold War.

The CIA's doctrine, as seen in the 1984 reference guide, has been pro-radical Sunni and very anti-Shia. The overthrow of moderate Sunni regimes in Libya and Iraq, followed by CIA support for anti-Shia and anti-Alawite jihadists supported by the Saudis and Muslim Brotherhood elements funded by Qatar and Turkey is a direct outgrowth of the CIA's misguided analysis of political Islam from the Cold War era. The CIA has provided Saudi, as well as Zionist propaganda, to U.S. policy makers in the guise of "intelligence." And, today, the Middle East burns because of the CIA's erroneous intelligence.

Saturday, August 02, 2014

THE ROVING EYE - Western plutocracy goes bear hunting By Pepe Escobar



THE ROVING EYE
Western plutocracy goes bear hunting
By Pepe Escobar

The post-Cold War status quo in Eastern Europe, not to mention in Western Europe, is now dead.

For Western plutocracy, that 0.00001% at the top, the real Masters of the Universe, Russia is the ultimate prize; an immense treasure of natural resources, forests, pristine water, minerals, oil and gas. Enough to drive any NSA-to-CIA Orwellian/Panopticon war game to ecstasy. How to pounce and profit from such a formidable loot?

Enter Globocop NATO. Barely out of having its collective behind unceremoniously kicked by a bunch of mountain warriors with Kalashnikovs, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is now fast
"pivoting" - that same old Mackinder to Brzezinski game - to Russia. The road map will be put in place at the group's summit in early September in Wales.

Meanwhile, the MH17 tragedy is undergoing a fast metamorphosis. When the on-site observations by this Canadian OSCE monitor (watch the video carefully) are compounded withthis analysis by a German pilot, a strong probability points to a Ukrainian Su-25's 30 mm auto-cannon firing at the cockpit of MH17, leading to massive decompression and the crash.

No missile - not even an air-to-air R-60M, not to mention a BUK (the star of the initial, frenetic American spin). The new possible narrative fits with on-site testimony by eyewitness in this now famously "disappeared" BBC report. Bottom line: MH17 configured as a false flag, planned by the US and botched by Kiev. One can barely imagine the tectonic geopolitical repercussions were the false flag to be fully exposed.

Malaysia has handed out the flight recorders to the UK; this means NATO, and this spells out manipulation by the CIA. Air Algerie AH5017 went down after MH17. The analysis has already been released. That begs the question of why it is taking so long for MH17's black boxes to be analyzed/tampered with.

Then there's the sanctions game: Russia remains guilty - with no evidence - thus it must be punished. The EU abjectly followed His Master's Voice and adopted all the hardcore sanctions against Russia they were discussing last week.

Yet there are loopholes. Moscow will have reduced access to US dollar and euro markets. Russian state-owned banks are forbidden from selling shares or bonds in the West. Yet Sberbank, Russia's largest, has not been sanctioned.

So Russia in the short and medium term will have to finance itself. Well, Chinese banks could easily replace that kind of lending. Don't forget the Russia-China strategic partnership. As if Moscow needed another warning that the only way to go is to increasingly bypass the US dollar system.

EU nations will suffer. Big time. BP has a 20% stake in Rosneft, and it's already freaking out on the record. ExxonMobil, Norway's Statoil and Shell will also be affected. Sanctions don't touch the gas industry; now that would have propelled the EU's counterproductive stupidity to galactic levels. Poland - hysterically blaming Moscow for everything under the sun - gets more than 80% of its gas from Russia. The no less strident Baltic states, as well as Finland, get 100%.

The ban on dual-use goods - civilian and military applications - will badly affect Germany, the top EU exporter to Russia. On defense, the UK and France will suffer; the UK has no less than 200 licenses selling weapons and missile launching gear to Russia. Yet the French 1.2 billion euro (US$1.6 billion) sale of Mistral assault ships to Russia will go ahead.

Meanwhile, in the demonization front ...

This is what Associated Press spins as "analysis" and distributes to papers around the world; a collection of cliches desperately in search of a thesis. Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, faithful to who pays his bills, gets a few things right and most things wrong. David Stockman at least has a ball deconstructing the lies of the Warfare State.

But the real thing is definitely Putin's economic adviser Sergei Glazyev. One of his key theses is that European business must be really careful to protect their interests as the US attempts to "ignite a war in Europe and a Cold War against Russia".

This, though, is the ultimate bombshell - delivered by a cool, calm and collected Glazyev. Watch it carefully. A detailed reappraisal of what Glazyev has been saying for weeks now, mixed with some outstanding comments here leads to a inevitable conclusion: key sectors of Western plutocracy want a still ill-defined war with Russia. And journalism's Holy Grail - never trust anything until it's officially denied - confirms it.

NATO's Plan A is to install missile batteries in Ukraine; that is already being discussed in detail in the run-up to NATO's summit in Wales in early September. Needless to say, if that happens, for Moscow, that's way beyond a red line; it implies a first strike capability at Russia's western borderlands.

Washington's short Plan A, meanwhile, is to organize a wedge between the federalists in Eastern Ukraine and Russia. This implies progressive, direct funding of Kiev in parallel to building up, via American advisers already on the ground, and vast weaponizing, a huge proxy army (nearly 500,000 by the end of the year, according to Glazyev's projection). Endgame on the ground would be to seal the federalists off into a very small area. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshensko has been on the record saying this should happen by early September. If not, by the end of 2014.

In the US, and a great deal of the EU, a monstrous grotesquerie has developed, packaging Putin as the new Stalinist Osama bin Laden. So far, his strategy on Ukraine was to be patient - what I called Vlad Lao Tzu - watching the Kiev gang hang themselveswhile trying to sit down with the EU in a civilized manner working for a political solution.

Now we may be facing a game changer, because the mounting evidence, which Glazyev and Russian intel relayed to Putin, points to Ukraine as a battlefield; a concerted drive for regime change in Moscow; a concerted drive aiming for a destabilized Russia; and even the possibility of a definitive provocation.

Moscow, allied with the BRICS, is actively working to bypass the US dollar - which is the anchor of a parallel US war economy based on printing worthless pieces of green paper. Progress is slow, but tangible; not only the BRICS but BRICS aspirants, the G-77, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the whole Global South is absolutely fed up with the Empire of Chaos's non-stop bullying and want another paradigm in international relations. The US counts on NATO - which it manipulates at will - and mad dog Israel; and perhaps the GCC, the Sunni petro-monarchies partners in the Gaza carnage, which can be bought/silenced with a slap on the wrist.

The temptation for Putin to invade Eastern Ukraine in 24 hours and reduce the Kiev militias to dust must have been super-human. Especially with the mounting cornucopia of dementia; ballistic missiles in Poland and soon Ukraine; indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Donbass; the MH17 tragedy; the hysterical Western demonization.

A bear with limited patience
But Putin is wired for playing the long game. The window of opportunity for a lightning strike is gone; that kung fu move would have stopped NATO in its tracks with a fait accompli, and the ethnic cleansing of 8 million Russians and Russophones in Donbass would never have developed.

Still, Putin won't "invade" Ukraine because Russian public opinion doesn't want him to. Moscow will keep supporting what is a de facto resistance movement in the Donbass. Remember: in give or take two months, General Winter starts to set in those broke, IMF-plundered Ukrainian pastures.

The leaked German-Russian peace plan will be implemented over Washington's collective dead body. This New Great Game, to a great extent, is also about preventing Russia-EU economic integration via Germany, part of a full Eurasian integration including China and its myriad Silk Roads.

If Russia's trade with the EU - about US$410 billion in 2013 - is due to take a hit because of sanctions, then that also spells out a Go East movement. Which implies a Russian fine-tuning of theEurasian Economic Union project. No more a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok - Putin's original idea. Enter the Eurasian Union as a brother in arms of China's myriad Silk Roads. Still, this spells out a strong Russia-China partnership at the heart of Eurasia - and still this is absolute anathema to the Masters of the Universe.

Make no mistake, the Russia-China strategic partnership will keep evolving very fast - with Beijing in symbiosis with Moscow's immense natural and military-technological resources. Not to mention the strategic benefits. A case could be made this has not happened since Genghis Khan. But it's not like Xi Jinping is pulling a Khan to subdue Siberia and beyond.

Cold War 2.0 is now inevitable because the Empire of Chaos will never accept Russia's sphere of influence in parts of Eurasia (as it doesn't accept China's). It will never accept Russia as an equal partner (exceptionalists don't do equality). And it will never forgive Russia - alongside China - for openly defying the creaking, exceptionalist, American-imposed order.

If the US deep state, guided by those nullities who pass for leadership, in desperation, goes one step beyond - it could be a genocide in Donbass; a NATO attack on Crimea; or worst case scenario, an attack against Russia itself - watch out. The Bear will strike.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
 

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

THE ROVING EYE - Crime (Israel) and punishment (Russia) By Pepe Escobar




THE ROVING EYE
Crime (Israel) and punishment (Russia)
By Pepe Escobar

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining it ...

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic
 -George Orwell1984

So Obama, Merkel, Cameron, Hollande and Italian Premier Matteo Renzi - let's call them the Fab Five - get on a video
conference call to muster their courage and "increase pressure" asking for a cease-fire in Gaza. Later in the day, Israel's Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu delivers his answer, in plain language: he remains dead set on achieving his version of a Final Solution to Gaza. [1] With or without "pressure".

So what's left for the Fab Five after having their illustrious Western collective behinds solemnly kicked? They decide to dump Gaza and instead sanction Russia - again! How brilliant is that as an exit strategy?

Spectacular non-entity Tony Blinken, who doubles as deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, was keen to stress to Western corporate media that the unruly Eurotrash mob is now "determined to act". No, not against Israel because of Gaza; against Russia because of Ukraine. Such a lovely Orwellian symmetry: the extended Two Minutes Hate from Israel towards Gazans morphs into the extended Two Minutes Hate from the "West" towards Russia, mirroring the extended Two Minutes Hate from Kiev towards Eastern Ukrainians.

Not even Hollywood could come up with such a plot; Israel gets away with unlawful premeditated mass murder of civilians, while Russia gets framed for a (smaller-scale) airborne mass murder of civilians that has all the makings of being set up by the Kiev vassals of Russia's Western "partners".

Here I have exposed how sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is the one and only official Obama administration "policy" on Russia. On top of the next European Union sanctions, coming soon, the US will be piling up - what else - more sanctions. After all, Washington is so "concerned" that Moscow will sooner or later invade Ukraine; that would certainly, and finally, answer all those In God We Trust prayers.

Where we stand now
Let's follow the facts. Washington from the get-go said it was Russian President Vladimir Putin's missile that downed MH17. They swore they had evidence. Like in "We know. Trust us". The historical record for the past 60 years at least shows they cannot be trusted. There was never any evidence. Just spin.

Moscow, via the Defense Ministry, presented hard evidence. And called for an unbiased international investigation. Washington ignored it all - the call and the hard evidence.

The US Navy, crammed with state-of-the-art missile defense radars, has been in the Black Sea for weeks now. As much as the Russians, they have tracked every particle flying over Ukraine. The NSA goes for signals intelligence; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency goes for phenomena in the imagery realm; the Defense Intelligence Agency adds Humint; there's the CIA; and there's the all-seeing, all-knowing Director of National Intelligence. How come all this trillion-dollar Full Spectrum Dominance apparatus cannot come up with a single, conclusive piece of evidence?

The only risible "evidence" presented so far pictures the acronym salad of US intel agencies spending their time reading blogs and Twittering. As in the State Department head in Kiev twittering satellite imagery that the New York Times parroted "proved" Russia is shelling Ukraine from across the border. The proverbial "senior US officials" even had to tersely admit on the record they have no proof whatsoever about "Putin's missile". If they had, NATO would be ready to flip burgers in Red Square.

Based on the wealth of info now in the open, the top probability of what caused the MH17 tragedy was an R-60M air-to-air missile shot from a Ukrainian Su-25 - and not a BUK (there's also the possibility of a double down; first an R-60M and then a BUK). The R-60M is very fast, with an ideal engagement distance of up to five kilometers. That's how far the Su-25 detected by the Russians (they showed the graphics) was from MH17.

SBU - Ukrainian intel - for its part confiscated the recordings of Kiev control tower talking to MH17. That would certainly explain why MH17 was overflying a war zone (Malaysian Airlines revealed they were forced to). Hefty bets can be made the recordings are now being "doctored".

Then there are the black boxes, which will not de decoded by the Malaysians or by the Dutch, but by the Brits - acting under Washington's orders. As The Saker blogger summed up the view of top Russian specialists, "the Brits will now let the NSA falsify the data and that falsification will be coordinated with the SBU in Kiev which will eventually release the recordings who will fully 'confirm' the 'authenticity' of the NSA-doctored recordings from the UK." To make it more palatable, and erase suspicions about Anglo-American foul play, the Dutch will announce it. Everyone should be forewarned.

NATO heads, for their part, are droolin'. Kiev's forces/militias will hold "joint exercises" with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Ukraine in slightly over a month from now, on September 1; red alert applies, because this is when Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the slow motion ethnic cleansing of Donbass will be finished.

As for the R2P ("responsibility to protect") angle, it sounds quite improbable. True, Moscow can always say that unless the slow motion ethnic cleansing of Donbass stops they will recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics. In that case, Moscow would be replaying Abkhazia and South Ossetia; a de facto R2P backed by military muscle.

Under international law - which Washington never respects, by the way - this is not the same as "invading" Ukraine. The frankly scary Samantha Power, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, would obviously freak out - but that's a dose of her own medicine. It would indeed be comparable to what the Americans are doing to the benefit of those Salafi-jihadis in Syria; and better yet, to what the US did in Kosovo.

The $50billion vultures
And now, on top of sanctions, Moscow also has to contend with a massive US$50 billion theft attempt. The International Arbitration Court in The Hague found that the Kremlin's pursuit of Yukos and its main shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a decade ago was politically motivated. Moscow can't appeal - but it will pursue all legal avenues for trying to get this ruling "set aside".

Well, it's The Hague's decision itself that is political. Khodorkovsky was found guilty not only by the Russian judicial system but also by the European Court of Human Rights. Yukos and Menotep shareholders were and remain a bunch of oligarch gangsters - to put it mildly.

So here's the Empire of Chaos once again in action, manipulating a Dutch court after literally stealing Germany's gold and fining France for selling warships to Russia. In this case though, the "West" has more investments in Russia than the Russian government in the West. Payback could be a bitch - as in Moscow, for instance, freezing all US and EU energy investments especially in the new ultra-profitable frontier, the Arctic oil fields. Western Big Oil will never allow this to happen.

This could go on forever. The bottom line: the Russian state simply won't allow itself to be robbed by a dodgy ruling on behalf of a bunch of oligarchs. In parallel, a case can be made that not only the Return of the Living (Neo-Con) Dead but also substantial sections of the deep state in Washington DC and environs - as well as "Western" plutocracy - want to provoke some sort of NATO war against Russia, sooner rather than later.

And in another parallel line, Moscow rumor has it that the Kremlin finds this protracted post-Yukos battle just an afterthought compared to the economic war about to convulse Europe and eventually pit Europe against Russia: exactly what the Empire of Chaos is praying - and working - for. "Two Minute" Hate? Talk about hours, days, weeks, and years.

Note:
1. Netanyahu: We're prepared for an extended operation in Gaza, The Jerusalem Post, July 28, 2014.


Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
 

Monday, July 28, 2014

Israel is the Middle East's apartheid South Africa - Wayne Madsen Report



Update: Israel is the Middle East's apartheid South Africa

Like the apartheid regime, Zionist Israel should be consigned to the ash heap of history

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa has demanded that South African expel the Israeli ambassasdor and recall its own ambassador in Tel Aviv. Today's South Africa knows an apartheid regime when it sees one. Although the West Bank now resembles discontiguous South African bantustans, nothing like Gaza ever appeared in apartheid South Africa. Gaza mirrors the worst ghettos of Nazi Germany. WMR is republishing the following article by the editor from 2012:

Israel adopting apartheid Bantustan model for Palestinians

By Wayne Madsen

The Israeli government calls them Areas A, B, and C of “Judea and Samaria.” To the rest of the world, the areas are known as Palestine, a nation that has state observer status in the United Nations and is a full member of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Arab League.

No other country in the world recognizes the existence of “Judea and Samaria” but 142 nations recognize the independence and statehood of Palestine.

Area C of the West Bank of Palestine is under full Israeli political and military control and there are plans underway to annex Area C to Israel. The Israeli military has security control over Area B, largely Palestinian rural land and in danger of being gobbled up by Israeli annexation if the expansionist Israel Home Party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and the right-wing of Likud have their way. Area A is under the control of the Palestinian Authority and includes its administrative headquarters city of Ramallah and other Palestinian population centers.

When one looks at a map of the Israeli area boundaries in the West Bank one can only be reminded of the patchwork quilt of majority African “Bantustans” created by apartheid South Africa. In fact, what the Benjamin Netanyahu government has offered to Palestine in the way of independence is for an unarmed and defenseless entity to exist as an unequal part of a greater Israeli zone of influence with Area C being exchanged for Israel’s recognition of Palestine’s faux “independence.” Netanyahu has referred to the co-principality of Andorra as a template for Palestine. Andorra’s actual heads of state are a Spanish Catholic bishop and the French president. Andorra’s actual independence from Spain and France is highly debatable, even though the country is a member of the UN and Council of Europe.

Such contrivances as planned by Israel for Palestine have been seen before in Bantustans with the names of Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana.

And in what should be taught to every African student, Israel was not only a major supporter of apartheid South Africa but it had close trade and security relations with the Bantustans because it saw them as a model for future “Arabstans” in the occupied Palestinian territories. These “Arabstans” now exist in the Gaza Strip and Areas A, B, and C of the West Bank.

Close Israeli-South African relations were capped off by a visit from South African Prime Minister B. J. Vorster to Israel in April 1976, the first by a South African head of government. Israel and South Africa jointly manufactured military hardware and weapons and electronic and signals intelligence systems as a way to bypass UN sanctions imposed on the apartheid state. And the two countries, with the assistance of Taiwan, jointly produced nuclear weapons and the fissionable U-235 uranium isotope, testing an atomic bomb in the South Atlantic near the Prince Edward Islands on September 22, 1979. 
Bophuthatswana Flag

Although South Africa’s self-proclaimed Bantustans were only recognized by South Africa, Israel maintained de facto relations with the four entities. Transkei, Ciskei, and Bophuthatswana maintained trade missions in Tel Aviv staffed by Israelis. In fact, these Israelis were using passports from the “republics,” as well as other diplomatic contrivances, to support the illegal side of Mossad and international Jewish lobbying and Israeli influence-peddling operations worldwide.

With Transkei, Israel maintained close intelligence and counter-insurgency ties. Its Prime Minister George Matanzima, a nephew of then-imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, visited Israel in 1984, along with four Transkei Cabinet ministers.

But it was Ciskei, headed by President Lennox Sebe, which provided Israel with its closest Bantustan ally. Sebe traveled to Israel, supported illegal settlements in occupied Palestine, and received Israeli assistance, especially for his brutal police force. Relations were so close between the Bantustan and Israel, the Ciskei capital of Bisho had a sister city relationship with Ariel, an illegal Israeli settlement on the West Bank. A number of Israeli companies, many led by Likud officials, established themselves in Ciskei. Mossad and Israel Defense Force personnel helped Ciskei establish paramilitary units and an intelligence service. Ciskei’s flag shared its light blue and white colors with those of Israel’s flag.

Bophuthatswana resembled Palestine’s Area A and B territories. The Tswana “homeland” consisted of eight non-contiguous enclaves within South Africa. The Bantustan’s Sun City casino not only attracted top Western entertainers who did not want to run afoul of the sanctions on the apartheid regime, but also a fair number of Israeli-South African dual national organized crime figures who ran casino operations and opened up nearby strip clubs and bordellos catering to inter-racial sex.

Bophuthatswana maintained an unofficial embassy in Israel and the Bantustan’s President Lucas Mangope was received by a number of Israeli officials, including the famed General Moshe Dayan. Israel provided Bophuthatswana’s official armed forces with training and equipment and, in 1994, when Mangope was overthrown, he could only rely on the support of the white racist Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB), which was also believed to have received covert support from Israeli trainers and equippers. North West University in the former capital of Bophuthatswana, Mafikeng, honored the late Mangope in 2010. Unsurprisingly, the university also maintains close ties with Ben Gurion University in Israel.

Venda also received security assistance from Israel and its president, Patrick Mphephu, paid an official visit to Israel in 1980. In 1983, Israel hosted a large delegation from the Venda Chamber of Commerce.

Israel showed every intention of supporting other Bantustans after they became fully independent. In 1985, Israel received KwaZulu Bantustan’s Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. There were low-level Israeli links, mostly by Israeli military intelligence operatives in the guises of tourists and backpackers, with the Bantustan governments of Lebowa and Qwa Qwa in South Africa and Kavangoland, Ovamboland, and East Caprivi in then-Southwest Africa.

The Bantustans disappeared after the end of apartheid and were incorporated back into South Africa. Today, South Africa has implemented plans to boycott any goods originating from Israeli businesses in the occupied territories. Israel, the second-most ardent supporter of the Bantustans, after apartheid South Africa, has cried foul and is accusing South Africa of anti-Semitism. However, Israel stands guilty of racism and pro-segregation in Africa. It is a shameful history that Israel should not be permitted to run away from.