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Best of the Web: Serbian arms are being trafficked to Ukraine: Evidence of contraband mortars used against Donbass

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva
Arms Watch
Thu, 21 Nov 2019 17:33 UTC
serbian arms donbass
© DNR Ministry of Defense, 9 November 2019This Serbian mortar shell 60 mm M73 HE manufactured by the Serbian arms factory Krusik in 2016 was found on the front line in Donbass.
New evidence has emerged of Ukraine's Army using contraband Serbian weapons in the war in Donbass. Serbia officially has not exported weapons to Ukraine since the beginning of the armed conflict between Ukraine and the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR). However, Serbian weapons manufactured in 2016 appear to be used by Ukraine's Army in the war in Donbass.

This is not the first documented case of alleged Serbian mortar shells being fired by the Ukrainian Army.

Comment: Another great investigative effort by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva and Arms Watch. Here are some of her other reports holding illegal arms manufacturers and traffickers to account:

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Hourglass

Best of the Web: Now that Assange is safely locked up, Sweden drops its 'investigation'

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Thu, 21 Nov 2019 13:21 UTC
hands off assange
Now that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is safely locked up in Belmarsh prison awaiting a US extradition hearing, Sweden has, for a third time, dropped its rape investigation.

"After conducting a comprehensive assessment of what has emerged during the course of the preliminary investigation I then make the assessment that the evidence is not strong enough to form the basis for filing an indictment," said deputy chief prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson at a press conference in Stockholm on Tuesday.

This decision comes days after the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer began making noise about the Swedish government's refusal to answer his questions on the many enormous, glaring plot holes in the investigation which began in 2010. These plot holes include "proactive manipulation of evidence" with the testimony of the alleged victim, a condom provided as evidence that had neither the DNA of Assange nor of the alleged victim on it, complete disregard for confidentiality rules and normal investigative protocol from the earliest moments of the investigation onward, disregard for conflicts of interest, Sweden's refusal to provide assurance that Assange would not be extradited to the US if he went there to answer questions, statements made by the alleged victims which contradict the allegations, unexplained correspondence between Swedish prosecutors and the FBI, and many others.

Comment: Assange's father, after a recent visit, reported that he needed to face the bitter truth that his son may die in jail. So if we want to help Assange (and what thinking, feeling human wouldn't?) we must act NOW, before it's too late.

Let's share articles about him, write to him to support him, write to our governments, write to everyone in power in the UK where he is being held, sign petitions... Time is running out.

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USA

Best of the Web: Veterans to Congress: End forever wars

Hunter DeRensis
The National Interest
Mon, 18 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
Veteran for peace
George W. Bush's War on Terror began eighteen years ago, with no initiative on the part of the U.S. government to bring it to a conclusion. In those two decades, Americans have spent $6.4 trillion and lost seven thousand soldiers.


Comment: See: The cost of war: The so-called 'war on terror' has killed over 801,000 people and cost taxpayers $6.4 Trillion


While the U.S. House of Representatives played domestic politics with the first open impeachment inquiry hearing last Wednesday, a new veteran's organization, Bring Our Troops Home, held its first conference in Washington, DC. After a series of panels and speeches, 120 veterans traveled to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Force and end the "forever wars."

George W. Bush's War on Terror began eighteen years ago, with no initiative on the part of the U.S. government to bring it to a conclusion. In those two decades, Americans have spent $6.4 trillion and lost seven thousand soldiers. Polling this year indicates that a majority of War on Terror veterans now feel that it, and its military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, were not worth fighting at all.

Comment: Good on these devoted men and women for having the courage to speak out against what is probably the biggest crime of this or any other generation: the 'war on terror'.

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Cult

Best of the Web: Bi-partisan police state: While all eyes were on impeachment hearing, House quietly re-authorized PATRIOT Act


RT
Wed, 20 Nov 2019 21:21 UTC
NSA Building
© Getty ImagesSince 2007, the NSA has been under court orders to preserve data about some of its surveillance efforts.
House Democrats have slipped an unqualified renewal of the draconian PATRIOT Act into an emergency funding bill - voting near-unanimously for sweeping surveillance carte blanche that was the basis for the notorious NSA program.

A three-month reauthorization of the notorious PATRIOT Act was shoehorned into a last-minute continuing resolution (CR) funding the US government, bundling measures needed to avert yet another government shutdown with a continuation of the wildly-intrusive surveillance powers passed after the 9/11 terror attacks. Democrats voted almost unanimously for it, granting the far-reaching surveillance capabilities to the very same president they're trying to impeach.

Comment: Not the first time our overlords have pulled this off. From 2001 on, every legislator has bent the knee to the Deep State's surveillance juggernaut.

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Attention

Best of the Web: The OPCW and Douma: Chemical weapons watchdog accused of evidence-tampering by its own inspectors

Jonathan Steele
CounterPunch
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:01 UTC
OPCW logo
Claims that President Bashar al-Assad's forces have used chemical weapons are almost as old as the Syrian civil war itself. They have produced strong reactions, and none more so than in the case of the alleged attack in April last year on the opposition-controlled area of Douma near Damascus in which 43 people are said to have been killed by chlorine gas. The United States, Britain and France responded by launching airstrikes on targets in the Syrian capital.

Were the strikes justified? An inspector from the eight-member team sent to Douma has just come forward with disturbing allegations about the international watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was tasked with obtaining and examining evidence.

Involved in collecting samples as well as drafting the OPCW's interim report, he claims his evidence was suppressed and a new report was written by senior managers with assertions that contradicted his findings.
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USA

Best of the Web: It's Trump Vs. The Deep State Vs. The American Citizens

Ryan McMaken
MISES Institute
Sat, 16 Nov 2019 08:42 UTC
Brennan
© Pete Souza / The White House, Wikipedia CommonsFile photo of John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
One of the best side effects of the Trump presidency has been the hostility of the so-called "deep state" or "intelligence community" directed at the president.

This, in turn, has led many Americans to realize that America's powerful, un-elected secret police agencies serve an agenda all their own, and that they choose sides in political controversies. Consequently, polls show one's views of the CIA and the FBI depend largely on one's ideological bent. Polls from Fox News and NBC news in recent years show that as various government bureaucracies have ratcheted up their hostility to Trump, more Democrats and Hillary Clinton voters have said they trust the CIA and the FBI.

Why the president and this deep state should be at odds has never been obvious to casual observers. Last month, however, in an article titled "Trump's War on the 'Deep State' Turns Against Him," the New York Times at last explained that there is indeed very real enmity between Trump and agencies such as the CIA and the FBI. The Times contends that Trump "went to war with the professional staff" of the intelligence agencies and the State Department.

The Times notes Trump has condemned "deep state bureaucrats," and claims Trump's "hostility toward government was strong from the start. He blamed the leak of the so-called Steele dossier of unverified allegations against him on intelligence agencies and never trusted their conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election on his behalf."

Trump was right to be defensive, of course. But that controversy over Russia was never really about what the Russians were up to. The focus was always largely about how much Trump colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election.

Ultimately, the evidence was so non-existent, that after a nearly-three-year investigation, Robert Mueller was unable to establish evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians. As Glenn Greenwald has noted: "not a single American — whether with the Trump campaign or otherwise — was charged or indicted on the core question of whether there was any conspiracy or coordination with Russia over the election."
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Whistle

Best of the Web: I'm the Google whistleblower. The medical data of millions of Americans is at risk

Anonymous
The Guardian
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 16:36 UTC
google logo
© Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images‘I was worried too about the security aspect of placing vast amounts of medical data in the digital cloud.’
I didn't decide to blow the whistle on Google's deal, known internally as the Nightingale Project, glibly. The decision came to me slowly, creeping on me through my day-to-day work as one of about 250 people in Google and Ascension working on the project.

When I first joined Nightingale I was excited to be at the forefront of medical innovation. Google has staked its claim to be a major player in the healthcare sector, using its phenomenal artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to predict patterns of illness in ways that might some day lead to new treatments and, who knows, even cures.

Here I was working with senior management teams on both sides, Google and Ascension, creating the future. That chimed with my overall conviction that technology really does have the potential to change healthcare for the better.

Comment: See: Google's 'Project Nightingale' secretly gathers personal health information on millions of Americans

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Black Magic

Best of the Web: Reporter uncovers history-changing Manson family connections to CIA, mind control and Hollywood

John Vibes
The Mind Unleashed
Sat, 09 Nov 2019 15:25 UTC
Charlie Manson book Chaos
The crimes of the Manson family resulted in one of the most famous murder trials in history, but new research has come to light that could totally change the history of the case.

Much of what was believed to be true about the Manson murders and the cult that carried them out comes from a narrative that was spun by prosecutor Vince Bugliosi, both during the trial and in his book Helter Skelter — the best selling true crime novel of all time.


Comment: And even that is fake!


Nothing about the murders made any sense. There was a strange cult of hippies that were killing celebrities for apparently no reason, and the young people carrying out the crimes seemed to be under the spell of a charismatic lunatic and failed musician named Charles Manson. Bugliosi created a narrative that Manson and his followers had no personal motive in the killings, but were attempting to instigate a race war by framing the Black Panthers for the crimes.

However, in the years since, many researchers have had trouble making sense of the story that was established by Bugliosi. Manson was certainly a racist and problematic in a variety of other ways, but there is ample evidence that the story we have come to accept about the cult and their crimes is a total fabrication.

Comment: For an in-depth look at how the CIA infiltrated, influenced and controlled the culture of the California music scene at the same time as the Manson family's exploits, see the extensive series on Laurel Canyon. After doing so, you'll likely never view hippies, rock music or the CIA in quite the same way again.

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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Top Bolivian coup plotters trained by US military's School of the Americas and FBI programs

Jeb Sprague
The Grey Zone
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:41 UTC
Bolivian commanders
The United States played a key role in the military coup in Bolivia, and in a direct way that has scarcely been acknowledged in accounts of the events that forced the country's elected president, Evo Morales, to resign on November 10.

Just prior to Morales' resignation, the commander of Bolivia's armed forces Williams Kaliman "suggested" that the president step down. A day earlier, sectors of the country's police force had rebelled.

Though Kaliman appears to have feigned loyalty to Morales over the years, his true colors showed as soon as the moment of opportunity arrived. He was not only an actor in the coup, he had his own history in Washington, where he had briefly served as the military attaché of Bolivia's embassy in the US capital.
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Bullseye

Best of the Web: 'A classic coup': Bolivia's new government is a 'military regime with no constitutional authority' - Max Blumenthal


RT
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 16:50 UTC
bolivian soldiers
© REUTERS/Henry Romero
The political upheaval in Bolivia is a textbook coup that was carried out through violence and intimidation, Max Blumenthal told RT. The journalist marveled that some still deny the unconstitutional nature of the power grab.

Opposition politician Jeanine Añez declared herself interim leader of Bolivia on Wednesday, after President Evo Morales was urged by his country's military chief to step down. But her legitimacy has already come into question. As the editor of the Grayzone Project pointed out, Añez is a fringe figure who garnered only 1.7 percent of the votes cast in Bolivia's last elections.

Realizing that there was no popular support, threats of violence were used to ensure that senators who opposed Añez would not be able to vote on a motion declaring her Bolivia's acting president. According to Blumenthal, politicians belonging to Evo Morales' Movement for Socialism Party, which has a majority in both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, "had guns to their heads, their families were threatened, and if they showed up they could have been arrested and killed."
There's absolutely no way that Áñez would have obtained power without the help of the Bolivian military and the police... You essentially have a right-wing dictatorship, a military regime in power now in Bolivia, with no constitutional authority.
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