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On Nazis, Jews & Ukraine 'de-escalation'

Pepe Escobar
RT.com
Sat, 19 Apr 2014 15:43 UTC
Meeting
© Reuters/Jim Bourg
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton (in red) smiles at the start of a quadrilateral meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (3rd L) and Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Deshchytsia (3rd R) in Geneva, as representatives of the U.S., Ukraine, Russia and the European Union about the ongoing situation in Ukraine, April 17, 2014.

There are many potentially worrying signs in the 'de-escalation' process in theory agreed by the US, Russia, EU and Ukraine this Thursday in Geneva.

For starters; the regime changers in power in Kiev did not commit themselves, explicitly, to constitutional reform (the draft language is slippery, to say the least); they did not commit, explicitly, to leaving Ukraine out of NATO; and a minor but still significant point - this was not a joint press conference by the two key players, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Arguably, the US State Department is bound to interpret 'de-escalation' as a sort of ultimatum to every anti-fascist, pro-autonomy and pro-Russia group in eastern Ukraine, as in 'disarm or else'. That's the same logic behind the nefarious March 2011 UN approval of a no-fly zone over Libya.

By negotiating directly with the Kiev regime changers in Geneva, Moscow in fact took a step back - recognizing them as a legitimate government (until then that was an absolute no-no.) Moscow also implicitly recognized groups in eastern Ukraine - be they independent-ist, pro-autonomy or pro-Russia - as the only ones to be disarmed (what about Nazi-style or neo-fascists groups in western Ukraine?)

And the key problem; there's no way to verify for sure the neutrality of OSCE peace missions, which can be easily infiltrated by Western intelligence and even facilitate the weaponizing of neo-fascist, pro-Kiev outfits.
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Dollars

Bankers love war because it creates massive profits


Washington Blog
Sat, 19 Apr 2014 13:57 UTC
War Makes Banks Rich

War
© Reuters
Bankers are often the driving force behind war.

After all, the banking system is founded upon the counter-intuitive but indisputable fact that banks create loans first, and then create deposits later.

In other words, virtually all money is actually created as debt. For example, in a hearing held on September 30, 1941 in the House Committee on Banking and Currency, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Mariner S. Eccles) said:
That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.
And Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said:
If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve.

We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.
Debt (from the borrower's perspective) owed to banks is profit and income from the bank's perspective. In other words, banks are in the business of creating more debt ... i.e. finding more people who want to borrow larger sums.
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Light Saber

Ukrainian soldiers surrender tanks to pro-Russian separatists


ABC News
Thu, 17 Apr 2014 12:10 UTC
Image
© Reuters/Gleb Garanich
Armoured personnel carriers (APCs) operated by Ukrainian armed forces are now believed to be in the control of pro-Russian separatists after Ukrainian soldiers surrendered their vehicles.

Amid escalating rhetoric between Moscow and Kiev, the incident highlighted defiance by pro-Russian separatists, undermining central government efforts to push armed rebels out of captured buildings in 10 eastern towns without bloodshed.

Ukrainian troops had driven the APCs, flying the Ukrainian flag, into the town of Kramatorsk after securing control of a nearby airfield from the rebels on Tuesday, prompting Russian president Vladimir Putin to warn of the risk of civil war.

But the APCs were later seen under the control of pro-Russian separatists in the centre of Slaviansk.
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Penis Pump

Post, Guardian share Pulitzer for Snowden-NSA coverage

Paul Farhi
The Washington Post
Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:40 UTC
Image
© Kathrine Frey/Washington Post
Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow, center, is applauded by Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron and editor David Finkel after the Pulitzers were announced in the newsroom in Washington. Eli Saslow won the Explanatory Reporting prize for a series of stories about the challenges of people living on food stamps.
Update: This article has been updated to include the work of several beat reporters who contributed to the NSA reporting.

The Washington Post won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, including the prestigious public service medal for a series of stories that exposed the National Security Agency's massive global surveillance programs.

A team of 28 Post journalists, led by reporter Barton Gellman, won the public service award, as did Guardian US, which also reported extensively about the NSA's secret programs. Gellman and Glenn Greenwald, then the Guardian's lead reporter on the NSA pieces, based their articles on classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who has fled to exile in Russia, lending a controversial edge to this year's awards.
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No Entry

Russia says reinforced troops on Ukraine border as precaution against military-coup Ukrainian govt

Christian Lowe
Reuters
Sat, 19 Apr 2014 09:42 UTC
peskov

Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman
The extra Russian military forces near the border with Ukraine have been deployed there in response to instability in Ukraine, a Kremlin spokesman said, in a departure from the previous explanation that they were on routine exercises.

"We ... have forces in the region of the Ukrainian border. Some of these forces are based there permanently, others are there to reinforce, against the backdrop of what is happening in Ukraine itself," Dmitry Peskov, spokesman to Russian President Vladimir Putin said on the Rossiya 1 television station.

"Forgive me but, it (Ukraine) is a country where there has just been a military coup, so naturally any country is going to take particular precautionary measures in terms of ensuring its security."

He said as a sovereign state, Russia was free to deploy troops anywhere on its territory without restrictions. He denied allegations that the Russian military was interfering in events inside Ukraine territory. Those assertion were, said Peskov "completely wrong."

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin)
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Eye 2

Harry Reid, under scrutiny for cronyism & complicity in ranch siege, labels Bundy supporters "domestic terrorists"

Jay Syrmopoulos
Ben Swann Newsletter
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 08:04 UTC
Sen. Harry Reid - Dem NV

Sen. Harry Reid - Dem NV
In a sensationalist move Senator Harry Reid has labeled supporters of Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy "domestic terrorists" during an event held in Las Vegas on Thursday.

While speaking at the 'Hashtags & Headlines' event, Reid called Bundy supporters:
"Nothing more than domestic terrorists" saying, "I repeat: what happened there was domestic terrorism."
He accused the Bundy supporters of inciting violence claiming, "There were hundreds, hundreds of people from around the country that came there," adding, "They had sniper rifles in the freeway. They had weapons, automatic weapons. They had children lined up. They wanted to make sure they got hurt first ... What if others tried the same thing?"

These claims were made in reference to the standoff, reported on by us last week, in Clarke County, Nevada at the Bundy Ranch, in which the feds brought in over 200 armed agents with sniper teams to confiscate cattle, allegedly due to unpaid grazing fees. Perhaps Senator Reid had forgotten that the only violence that commenced during the standoff was when BLM agents tazed Bundy supporters, threw a 57-year-old woman recovering from cancer to the ground, and attempted to allow a dog to attack a pregnant woman.

The mischaracterization of the Bundy supporters as "domestic terrorists" is the continuation of a narrative that has been forwarded by the federal government for a number of years. First there is the MIAC report, which claimed that potential terrorists include people who own gold, Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, and even people who fly the U.S. flag. Then in 2012 there was a leaked Homeland Security study that claimed Americans who are "reverent of individual liberty," and "suspicious of centralized federal authority" are possible "extreme right-wing" terrorists.

Reid has promised that the BLM fight with the Bundy family is "not over." Perhaps his possible complicity in the BLM siege that has been reported extensively, questions of cronyism, as his longtime senior advisor Neil Kornze was confirmed by the Senate last Tuesday as the Director of the BLM, along with his involvement in the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project, which is about 35 miles from the Bundy homestead in Bunkerville, Nevada, is causing him consternation.
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Dollars

Senator Harry Reid's trail of corruption in Utah

Stephanie Mencimer
Mother Jones
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:46 UTC
Image

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
Utah may be best known for its clean-living, teetotaling Mormon culture, but the state has long had a reputation as the home for less savory activity: financial fraud. Long known as the "scam capital" of the world, Utah has the dubious distinction of producing large numbers of con artists, penny stock scammers and other charlatans - so many that the Securities and Exchange Commission has an office in Salt Lake City (which is unusual for the agency). Yet another one of these sordid stories is underway in the state right now, and this time, an accused scammer has said he tried to bribe a big name: the highest ranking Democrat in the US Senate, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), himself a Mormon with many ties to Utah.

The tale is a convoluted one. But it starts with Jeremy Johnson, a St. George businessman and high-profile political donor in the state who has been indicted on a variety of fraud charges stemming from his running of an internet marketing company. In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission sued Johnson's company, iWorks, alleging it had engaged in a far-reaching scam to defraud consumers through bogus money-making offers online. The company was the source of lots of those ads promising free money from government grants after the 2009 stimulus bill passed. Instead of making money, the FTC has alleged, consumers who responded to the ads ended up with unwanted charges on their credit cards that netted iWorks and its principals more than $275 million in ill-gotten gains. (The case is still ongoing.)
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Bad Guys

Psychopath James Mitchell: CIA psychologist who developed torture program defends tactics


RT
Sat, 19 Apr 2014 03:38 UTC
Guantanamo Bay
© AFP Photo / Michelle Shephard

The Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba

A psychologist considered integral to crafting the CIA's post-9/11 "enhanced interrogation" tactics slammed an unreleased Senate report on CIA torture as inaccurate while defending his role in working with the spy agency amid a volatile era in US history.

In his first interview in seven years, James Mitchell told freelance reporter Jason Leopold, writing for the Guardian, that he has nothing to apologize for regarding his place in the post-9/11 abuse of prisoners that, as he points out, was legal at the time.

"The people on the ground did the best they could with the way they understood the law at the time," he said. "You can't ask someone to put their life on the line and think and make a decision without the benefit of hindsight and then eviscerate them in the press 10 years later."

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's vast, unreleased report on the CIA's capture and interrogation program, Mitchell, along with another contractor, psychologist Bruce Jessen, is responsible for developing the torture program by "reverse engineering" coercive interrogation tactics that US airmen are taught to resist through the military's survival evasion resistance escape (SERE) training.

"The whole Guantánamo issue that came up...all of the abuses that they did in Guantánamo they tried to attribute to me and Bruce," Mitchell said. "It wasn't us. We didn't do any of that stuff. We didn't have a damn thing to do with that. I think that what happened was the Senate armed services committee believed that the agency [CIA] was behind it."

Mitchell denies involvement in abusive practices, as was alleged by a Senate Armed Services Committee report in 2009.

"We didn't have a damn thing to do with that," Mitchell said. He blames Pentagon contractors and civilian staff "who wanted to help out and made some dumb mistakes."
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Better Earth

Putin and Russia: The thing which everybody seems to be missing

The Saker
The Vineyard of the Saker
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 18:53 UTC
putin thinking

Does Putin have a grand plan? What is it?
Okay, I decided to squeeze in one more post before taking time off for Holy Paskha, this is well worth it.

Some of you have asked about China's role in all this, in what the real interests of the USA are, how the EU is positioning itself and what Russia does or does not want. And, somehow, bogged down by the minutiae of the unfolding events I managed to never mention something which Putin, Lavrov and many other top Russian politicians have repeatedly said:

What is happening today before our eyes is the end of one international system and the birth of a qualitatively different one.

Interestingly, Putin has declared that for him the point of no return was reached when the USA and its allies at the UNSC and NATO clearly and grossly twisted the intention of the UNSC on Libya and "upgraded" what should have been a "no fly" zone to a free-fire zone to attack and bomb Libya [of course, it was pretty darn clear to Putin that the "all necessary means to protect civilians" of the resolution was an open ended invitation for the AngloZionists to "interpret" it in any way they wanted; now his says that Russia was "lied to" in order to not blame Medvedev for walking into a 10 foot wide hole. But that is irrelevant here]. Putin says that from then on he had acquired the conviction that the West could not be negotiated with and had to be simply stopped. Then Syria happened: for the first time since the end of WWII the USA had decided to do something and was stopped by an outside power in the most humiliating way possible.
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Propaganda

More Ridiculous Propaganda: Snowden defends Putin question

Hadas Gold
Politico
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 18:45 UTC
Image
Edward Snowden defended his participation in an annual Russian telecast with Vladimir Putin on Thursday, a move that many described as a clear propaganda effort by the Russians, with Snowden as their pawn.

In an op-ed for The Guardian, the newspaper that originally published his first leaks, Snowden said he asked about Russia's surveillence in order to push the conversation and Putin's response into the public dialogue.

"I expected that some would object to my participation in an annual forum that is largely comprised of softball questions to a leader unaccustomed to being challenged," he wrote. "But to me, the rare opportunity to lift a taboo on discussion of state surveillance before an audience that primarily views state media outweighed that risk. Moreover, I hoped that Putin's answer - whatever it was - would provide opportunities for serious journalists and civil society to push the discussion further."
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