Living here in the UK (as I do), I am reminded by Michael Krieger that I am likely to be recorded by CCTV cameras about 300 times every day (on average). Quite believable; they seem to have been erected all over the place in recent years - parks - road corners - walls - all, no doubt, in the fight against crime and terrorism in this obscure Lancastrian backwater.
Veteran investigative reporter Robert Parry takes The New York Times to task for uncritically accepting as evidential photographs from the so-called "Ukrainian government" claiming to "document that the armed men who have taken over government buildings in eastern Ukraine are Russian combatants." Not only is this 'evidence' flimsy (on many counts), writes Parry, but we should also be aware of the role of chief military correspondent Michael R. Gordon in co-authoring this material, whose previous contributions to the false "aluminium tube story" (Iraq) and "vector analysis story" (Syria) should not be forgotten.
In another MUST READ, Seymour Hersh analyses why Washington's proposed military intervention in Syria came to a halt, and considers the possible role of Turkey in the gas attacks within Syria that allowed Washington to make its case against Assad that he had crossed the "red line".
The question is simply this: How is it that NATO sources are saying that "some 35,000- 40,000 Russian troops are massed near Ukraine's eastern border... [with] tanks, mechanised infantry, and special forces... [and] the logistical back-up to keep them there for some considerable time", (BBC) when just a few days before Jim Maceda of NBC, who took his team over to the Ukrainian-Russian border to find out for themselves, reported that they found "no signs of military buildup"? Indeed, far from finding evidence of war, says Maceda, "what we found instead were war memorials." Are we to understand that all those 35,000 troops with all that back-up just managed to slip into place during those intervening few days?
Tyler Durden reports on the recently-leaked conversation between Turkish military and political leaders in which they discuss what seems to be a false-flag attack designed to justify war with Syria. Apparently, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has implicitly confirmed the conversation as genuine by criticising those who leaked the information through YouTube:
Remember what the world used to be like? ...when all our digital details were getting scooped up and stored in massive data silos? Well, now - thanks to Snowden and Greenwald...
"As geopolitical analysts from across the board explain, the Ukrainian coup has been deliberately provoked by outside agents to promote a combination of US, EU, NATO and IMF interests. Perhaps more worrying than the interference itself are its potential implications. As Russia's every move is now being scrutinized for a possible military response to the ongoing crisis, the specter of a larger military operation now hangs over Eastern Europe."
Thanks to Scotland's new Children and Young People Bill - passed by the Scottish National Parliament on February 19th - each child in that land (from birth to 18 years of age) is to have a state-appointed "guardian" to ensure that he or she is growing up in safety. Although the idea is to make it easier for the authorities to spot difficulties such as abuse, critics point to the fact that the "guardians" will have legal access to sensitive information about the child and his/her family, and to the probable fact that the legislation runs contrary to Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Neither a global warming believer, nor a "denier", Charles Krauthammer chastises those who pretend that "the science is settled." It's "a crude attempt to silence critics", he says, as is the term "denier" which he heavily criticises for its abusive and manipulative connation of "Holocaust denial."
The pretense of "settled science" allows every natural disaster, be it "warming and cooling, drought and flood" to be conveniently blamed on "man's sinful carbon burning." But "sinful" against Whom? Now there's a new god on the block: Mother Earth; in some ways fitting, since promoters of the idea of anthropogenic climate change "have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith."
Paul Craig Roberts reports that he is receiving confirmations from his readers that Washington and the EU are helping to finance the violent protests in the Ukraine. This supports his assessments in previous articles, such as: "Washington Orchestrated Protests Destabilizing Ukraine".
"Nuland is the Obama regime official who was caught red-handed naming the members of the Ukrainian government Washington intends to impose on the Ukrainian people once the paid protesters have unseated the current elected and independent government. What Nuland means by Ukraine’s future under EU overlordship is for Ukraine to be looted like Latvia and Greece and to be used by Washington as a staging ground for US missile bases against Russia."
If you've ever tried to tell someone about one of the countless official lies that we're bombarded with on a regular basis, and they've "answered" you before even bothering to listen to what you have to say...
... well, the writer of this proverb said it all thousands of years ago:
"The one who gives an answerbeforehe listens that ishis follyand his shame."
"...[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations..." (p. 324 - emphasis added)
"When wealth captures government policymaking, the rules bend to favour the rich, often to the detriment of everyone else. The consequences include the erosion of democratic governance, the pulling apart of social cohesion, and the vanishing of equal opportunities for all. Unless bold political solutions are instituted to curb the influence of wealth on politics, governments will work for the interests of the rich"
...Floyd notes that if we work "really, really hard... [we] too might one day be able to afford one night on the bottom floor of a hotel where a Saudi prince or a movie star once actually took a dump hundreds of feet above [us]. Now there's something to fire up [our] pathetic little middle-class imagination!"
Old news perhaps, but as we listen to reports of Syrian defector "Caesar" and his 55,000 photographs (whose provenance may, or may not, be questionable), let's pause to remember a previous defector: "Curveball." When Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi was seeking political asylum in Germany in 1999, he claimed that he had overseen the construction of a mobile biological laboratory in Iraq, a testimony that was later used in 2003 by Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, at the UN Security Council to help make the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Later, however, "Curveball" admitted that it was all a lie; when the BBC said to him, "we went to war in Iraq on a lie, and that lie was your lie" his reply was "Yes."
Another MUST READ: Richard Lloyd (former UN Weapons Inspector) and Theodore A. Postol (Professor of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) have produced a persuasive study challenging Washington's accusations that Syrian government forces carried out chemical weapon attacks in August 2013. In a nutshell, the distances between the Syrian government-controlled areas and the targets in East Ghouta exceed the range of the delivery rockets...
If passed, the recently introduced Trade Priorities Act (in the US) would enable Obama to "fast-track" a number of global trade accords, including the controversial TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), and TAFTA (the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement).
Often dubbed "NAFTA on steroids!", and as "corporatist power grabs", these accords, which purport to be all about "free trade" across large areas of the globe, have been heavily criticised for their secrecy, and for the undue power they are likely to give to corporations over nation states. As Washington's Blog puts it, the TPP:
"will increase the cost of borrowing, make prescription drugs more expensive, destroy privacy, harm food safety, and – yes - literally act to destroy the sovereignty of the U.S. and the other nations which sign the bill."
The RT piece concurs, reporting the words of Fight For The Future, that the TPP is poised to:
“restrict, police and censor the Internet, stifling free speech and innovation; radically decrease access to affordable medicine; circumvent protections for workers and the environment; expand economic inequality; prevent corporations from properly labeling genetically modified food.”
On the day of JFK's funeral (25 November 1963), Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent a memo to Bill Moyers (then presidential assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson), calling for a campaign of action to satisfy the public that Oswald was the lone assassin, and that the evidence for this conclusion was compelling, well before the truth of the matter could possibly have been known.
"The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial."
"We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort."
Seymour Hersh: "Whose Sarin?", London Review of Books, 19 December 2013.
A MUST READ - Seymour Hersh dismantles Washington's bogus case for an attack on Syria. Obama "omitted important intelligence" and "presented assuptions as facts." A key omission was this: US Intelligence had assessed that the al-Qaeda-connected al-Nusra Front was capable of producing significant amounts of sarin.
In his Christmas column, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts celebrates the historic role of Christianity in the West in empowering the individual and protecting citizens from tyranny through the rule of law and the right to free speech. These achievements, he insists, "all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice." But, laments Roberts, much of this achievement is being undone as "political correctness" and "the war on terror" combine to destabilise the worldview foundations upon which our civilisation rests... and thus... "Tyranny has re-emerged."
