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zondag 22 november 2015

Ukraine Military Saber-Rattling

21.11.2015 UKRAINE MILITARY REPORT

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After several weeks of apparent troop withdrawals and drawdowns, there are once again ominous military developments in Ukraine which might herald either preparations for a renewed saber-rattling to draw attention back to Ukraine following the Paris terror attacks which have led to the intensification of the Russian air campaign against ISIS and prompted the French president Hollande to seek to improve his country’s relations with Russia. This situation gives Poroshenko a considerable incentive to attempt to escalate the conflict in order to prevent a Franco-Russian improvement in relations.
There are reports that Ukraine will ban males 45 years old and younger from leaving Ukraine starting in January 1, 2016 in preparation for the 7th wave of mobilization. There are also reports that Ukraine is no longer releasing individuals mobilized under previous waves of mobilization whose term of service has expired. Likewise contract soldiers who have been signed up for 6-month terms of service are not being released from service. The atmosphere of war hysteria is being kept up by Ukrainian officials with Aleksandr Turchinov in the lead are claiming that Ukraine’s top 2016 priority will be its air defenses, due to the demonstrated Russian air capabilities over Syria.
The UAF has stepped up demonstrative operations near the border with Russia in the Crimea, ostensibly to “rehearse defending the border against Russian invasion”. There are also reports of sizable Ukrainian troop movements near the border with Novorossia, which raises the possibility the earlier troop withdrawals were simply part of a major regrouping of UAF forces, possibly in preparation for a renewed offensive. Ukraine has also taken receipt of two US Firefinder counter-battery radars, which were delivered to Lvov. US instructors have begun training Ukrainian soldiers in their operation.
Still, would the junta really want to risk an escalation under these conditions? UAF units’ morale remains at rock bottom, with most of their casualties coming from “non-combat” incidents which are usually alcohol and even drug-related, like the recent deaths of four mechanized brigade soldiers who have just returned from a training exercise and were killed in a drunken shoot-out.
Ukraine’s defense industry is continuing its downward spiral, with the Motor Sich, a key engine manufacturer, being reduced to making…meatgrinders. Which is a curious metaphor for the current state of Ukraine…
However, whether or not Ukraine decides to start another round of fighting, one thing is certain: Russia Is Watching.
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Lessons We Learned Too Late



To France from a Post-9/11 America: Lessons We Learned Too Late


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By John W. Whitehead
November 16, 2015

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ― Benjamin Franklin
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”—Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor
For those who remember when the first towers fell on 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Paris attacks.
Once again, there is that same sense of shock. The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.
Now the drums of war are sounding. French fighter jets have carried out a series of “symbolic” air strikes on Syrian targets. France’s borders have been closed, Paris has been locked down and military personnel are patrolling its streets.
What remains to be seen is whether France, standing where the United States did 14 years ago, will follow in America’s footsteps as she grapples with the best way to shore up her defenses, where to draw the delicate line in balancing security with liberty, and what it means to secure justice for those whose lives were taken.
Here are some of the lessons we in the United States learned too late about allowing our freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.
Beware of mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.
Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they're fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which has resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.
War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $1.6 trillion on “military operations, the training of security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, weapons maintenance, base support, reconstruction, embassy maintenance, foreign aid, and veterans’ medical care, as well as war-related intelligence operations not tracked by the Pentagon” since 2001. Other estimates that account for war-related spending, veterans’ benefits and various promissory notes place that figure closer to $4.4 trillion. That also does not include the more than 210,000 civilians killed so far, or the 7.6 million refugees displaced from their homes as a result of the endless drone strikes and violence.
Advocating torture makes you no better than terrorists. The horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, continue to shock those with any decency. Photographs leaked to the media depicted “US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.” Adding to the descent into moral depravity, the United States government legalized the use of torture, including waterboarding, in violation of international law and continues to sanction human rights violations in the pursuit of national security. The ramifications have been far-reaching, with local police now employing similar torture tactics at secret locations such as Homan Square in Chicago.
Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. A byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers such as Google that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We are all becoming data collected in government files. The chilling effect of this endless surveillance is a more anxious and submissive citizenry.
Don’t become so distracted by the news cycle that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.
If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.
Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.
As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
If you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
To sum things up, the destruction that began with the 9/11 terror attacks has expanded into an all-out campaign of terror, trauma, acclimation and indoctrination aimed at getting Americans used to life in the American Police State. The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time, but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has transitioned us to life in a society where government agents routinely practice violence on the citizens while, in conjunction with the Corporate State, spying on the most intimate details of our personal lives.
The lesson learned, as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, is simply this: once you start down the road towards a police state, it will be very difficult to turn back.


War and State of Emergency

MH 17 Mystery 95




Dear all,

Most of October I was in Ukraine "rebel controlled territory" and from the moment the Malaysian plane crashed spent countless hours studying any information available on this subject. My new article:

MH17 - Lying for Justice

Best regards,
Max van der werff

Washington's Great Lie

America’s Great Lie. Europe’s Great Shame. Russia’s Great Case

Eric ZUESSE | 21.11.2015 | 00:00
 
The West owes Russia a hell of a lot; but what it owes Russia first is a deep apology, and a welcome into Europe, of which Russia has been and is an extremely important nation, and very unjustly denied its rightful place there. What doesn’t belong in Europe is the U.S., not in any way whatsoever, especially since the U.S. is now a dictatorship. (Anyone who says it’s not a dictatorship and who doesn’t click onto that link to find out that he’s been snookered to think it’s still a democracy, should just stop reading here right now, because this aricle is going to be suitable only for people with open, critical, inquiring minds — not for closed-minded or stupid readers.)
Why does America’s anti-Russia military club NATO still exist, after the Soviet Union’s equivalent Warsaw Pact disbanded in 1991 when the Soviet Union and its communism voluntarily ended?
NATO is nothing but America’s anti-Russia military club, against Russia and against any nation (such as Iraq, or Libya, or Syria) that supports Russia.
We killed Gaddafi in Libya because he supported Russia in international relations. We produced the failed state and jihadist mayhem that now exists there; we destroyed Libya and now the refugees from there are flooding into Europe, along with the refugees from our attacks to bring down Assad in Syria.
We overthrew (via a bloody coup and no ‘democratic revolution’ such as the West lies to assert) Yanukovych in Ukraine allegedly because he turned down the EU’s offer to Ukraine after learning that the price-tag for Ukrainians would be $160 billion if Ukraine were to comply with the EU’s demands. But the U.S. was already organizing the coup against him starting a year before the coup, and nine months before Yanukovych turned down the EU’s offer.
We are trying to overthrow Assad in Syria because he supports Russia in international relations.
This isn’t bullying?
This is ‘democracy’?
This is dictatorship: totalitarianism in the West, against Russia and any other nation that isn’t buckling to the U.S. aristocracy and its allied aristocracies in Europe, and (especially with the new bellicose nationalistic Abe government), also in Japan.
This is ugly.
Here is how it started — the original sin of the post-Cold-War West, which has produced the problems of today and the future:
Let’s start with the results of a 2009 investigation by Germany’s Spiegel, or Mirror, magazine, which is a mainstream German news site, that’s a bit more honest than America’s equivalents:
They identified what that «promise» was, which Russia claims was violated, and which Spiegel  was investigating: «that NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe violated commitments made during the negotiations over German reunification». The next sentence in Spiegel’s  report states unequivocally their conclusion: «Newly discovered documents from Western archives support the Russian position».
The question Spiegel’s  article discusses isn’t whether NATO’s continued existence is an evil, but instead whether NATO should have extended eastward up to Russia’s own borders — whether, to make this matter quite clear now, if the USSR had won, and its Warsaw Pact and not NATO had continued (though neither should have continued), the Warsaw Pact should have extended itself all the way to including Mexico and/or Canada? 
How would the American people have felt about that possibility — nuclear missiles aimed against them at their own border?  It’s so obviously disgusting (vile, actually — and what was John F. Kennedy determined to do if the USSR had placed nuclear millies in Cuba?), but do you learn in Western ‘news’ media that this is what the United States has done and is doing to Russia, and to Russia’s allies?
Here is how even Spiegel  concluded that the West lies about this history, though Spiegel  is itself a Western mainstream medium and so avoids saying it outright that directly, and instead veils the truth so that only the few people with brains and open minds will get the important point:
Spiegel  makes clear that their investigation of the actual paper record shows that the then merely West German side, which was negotiating reunification of Germany with the then merely Eastern half of Germany, is exactly in accord with what Russia’s allegations have been saying all along, and exactly the opposite of what West Germany’s Foreign Minister then, Hans Dietrich Genscher, has been asserting to have been the case. Here is how we learn this from Spiegel:
Jack Matlock, the US ambassador in Moscow at the time, has said in the past that Moscow was given a «clear commitment». Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister in 1990, says this was precisely not the case.
After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m., Genscher spoke with Shevardnadze. According to to the German record of the conversation, which was only recently declassified, Genscher said: «We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east». And because the convers[at]ion revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: «As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general».
Never does Spiegel  state outright that Genscher was lying; but, an intelligent person recognizes that if «the non-expansion of NATO… applies in general», then the promise made was excluding any eastward expansion of NATO at all. Not only «NATO will not expand to the east», but NATO will not expand. How much clearer can it be than that?
In other words: Genscher lies when he says that there was no «clear commitment».
For some reason, Russian officials don’t accuse the West of having «lied». Perhaps they feel that it would only exacerbate relations even further than the West itself has already done by its constant lying. However, wouldn’t it be better for the confrontation to come upon the battlefield of truth, than upon the battlefield of war?
The U.S. and its allies have been lying through their teeth in order not only to continue NATO, but to extend it up to Russia’s borders — in other words: for conquest.
For more about this key historical reality, the reader can click here, to see that there’s lots more than just the record disproving Genscher’s lies, but especially the record disproving the lies by U.S. officials.
Let me then summarize that here: George Herbert Walker Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev were the principals (Bush for the U.S. aristocracy; Gorbachev for the populations of the Soviet Union). Genscher and James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze, etc. were merely agents; and Bush had his agents lie to Gorbachev’s agents, to say that NATO would not expand at all eastward. But he then, only later, instructed them not to follow through on what they had said, not to behave truthfully — but instead to set things up so as to allow the U.S. military alliance to extend right up to Russia’s borders. Here is how he instructed them to perform in this shameful (and potentially catastrophic) manner in private:
West German transcripts from the two leaders’ February 24–25 summit at Camp David show [that] Bush made his feelings about compromising with Moscow clear to Kohl: ‘To hell with that!’ he said. ‘We prevailed, they didn’t.’… In April, Bush spelled out this thinking in a confidential telegram to French President François Mitterrand… Bush was making it clear to Mitterrand that the dominant security organization in a post–Cold War Europe had to remain NATO.
The puppetmaster, Bush, sprung upon Kohl and Mitterrand the instruction for them to just keep up the lie, but that it would be  a lie. They had believed what they had said when they said it, but were now instructed not to fulfill on it. What they had said would be a lie; they were instructed about this, only after they had said what they had believed to be true. From that point on, the anti-Russia thrust of the U.S. aristocracy, which controls the aristocracies (such as Europe’s) that are its allies, was clear; and the only way to disobey would be to become blackballed and trashed. Their careers would have been destroyed if they had disobeyed Bush.
Both in my own article there, and in the Spiegel  one, the ancillary questions, such as why this promise had never been made in writing (though Gorbachev wanted it to be), are also discussed. However, something should be pointed out here regarding the Spiegel  article, namely that Gorbachev’s Foreign Minister Shevardnadze was also shown there to be lying to Spiegel’s  reporters, and not noted there to have been lying to them. Shevardnadze, «speaking in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, says that there were no such assurances from the West». In other words: he told, toSpiegel, a thing that was contradicting what Spiegel  found in their own examination of Genscher’s papers from the period of the negotiations. Genscher had been negotiating then with Shevardnadze, and according to Genscher’s papers, Shevardnadze had indeed been informed by Genscher that NATO wouldn’t expand, at all. What Shevardnadze’s motive was for this, is not known, and Spiegel’s  reporters didn’t even bring up to Shevardnadze the fact that what he was telling them was in direct contradiction of the written record. (Perhaps Shevardnadze, now retired after having become Georgia’s President, was hoping in 2009 to be favorably viewed by aristocrats in the West. Keeping up the lie would have fit for that purpose. But, even if he had been asked, he wouldn’t have given that explanation.) 
George Herbert Walker’s having instructed his agents to lie and to avoid any signed treaty on this crucial historical matter, was the West’s Original Sin.
Europe’s remaining allied with the U.S. and participating in NATO, especially after having been instructed by America to lie, and to have deceived Gorbachev, who behaved honorably throughout and afterward, is Europe’s great shame.
And truth is Russia’s great case.
The U.S. is, in fact, Europe’s enemy — not merely Russia’s enemy. Not merely the truth’s enemy. Not merely democracy’s enemy.




Het Joodse Raadslid Naomi Italiaander en de Zionistische Terreur

Ik las in  het  Joodse propaganda-orgaan NIW dat " Het kersverse Amsterdamse gemeenteraadslid Naomi Italiaander," zowaar " J...