Exclusive: Official Washington treats whatever comes out of Russian President Putin's mouth as the ravings of a lunatic, even when what he says is obviously true or otherwise makes sense, as the New York Times has demonstrated again, writes Robert Parry.

When reading the New York Times on many foreign policy issues, it doesn't take a savant to figure out what the newspaper's bias is. Anything, for instance, relating to Russian President Vladimir Putin drips of contempt and hostility.

Rather than offer the Times' readers an objective or even slightly fair-minded account of Putin's remarks, we are fed a steady diet of highly prejudicial language, such as we find in Saturday's article about Putin's comments at a conference in which he noted U.S. contributions to chaos in countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

That Putin is correct appears almost irrelevant to the Times, which simply writes that Putin "unleashed perhaps his strongest diatribe against the United States yet" with his goal "to sell Moscow's view that American meddling has sparked most of the world's recent crises."

Rather than address the merits of Putin's critique, the Times' article by Neil MacFarquhar uncritically cites the "group think" of Official Washington:

"Russia is often accused of provoking the crisis in Ukraine by annexing Crimea, and of prolonging the agony in Syria by helping to crush a popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow's last major Arab ally. Some analysts have suggested that Mr. Putin seeks to restore the lost power and influence of the Soviet Union, or even the Russian Empire, in a bid to prolong his own rule."

The chief Dutch prosecutor investigating the MH17 downing in eastern Ukraine does not exclude the possibility that the aircraft might have been shot down from air, Der Spiegel reported. Intelligence to support this was presented by Moscow in July.

The chief investigator with the Dutch National Prosecutors' Office Fred Westerbeke said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel published on Monday that his team is open to the theory that another plane shot down the Malaysian airliner.

Following the downing of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 flight in July that killed almost 300 people, Russia's Defense Ministry released military monitoring data, which showed a Kiev military jet tracking the MH17 plane shortly before the crash. No explanation was given by Kiev as to why the military plane was flying so close to a passenger aircraft. Neither Ukraine, nor Western states have officially accepted such a possibility.

Westerbeke said that the Dutch investigators are preparing an official request for Moscow's assistance since Russia is not part of the international investigation team. Westerbeke added that the investigators will specifically ask for the radar data suggesting that a Kiev military jet was flying near the passenger plane right before the catastrophe.

The Internal Revenue Service has been seizing bank accounts belonging to small businesses and individuals who regularly made deposits of less than $10,000, but broke no laws. And the government is refusing to return all the money taken.

The practice ‒ called civil asset forfeiture ‒ allows IRS agents to seize property they suspect of being tied to a crime, even if no charges are filed, and their agency is allowed to keep a share of whatever is forfeited, the New York Times reported. It's designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking cash deposits under $10,000, which is the threshold for when banks are federally required to report activity to the IRS under the Bank Secrecy Act.

It is not illegal to deposit less than $10,000 in cash, unless it is specifically done to avoid triggering the federal reporting requirement, known as structuring. Thus, banks are required to report any suspicious transactions to authorities, including patterns of deposits below that threshold.

"Of course, these patterns are also exhibited by small businesses like bodegas and family restaurants whose cash-on-hand is only insured up to $10,000, and whose owners are wary of what would be lost in the case of a robbery or a fire," the Examiner noted.

Carole Hinders, a victim of civil asset forfeiture, owns a cash-only Mexican restaurant in Iowa. Last year, the IRS seized her checking account ‒ and the nearly $33,000 in it. She told the Times she did not know of the federal reporting requirement for suspicious transactions, and that she thought she was doing everyone a favor by reducing their paperwork.

"My mom had told me if you keep your deposits under $10,000, the bank avoids paperwork," she said. "I didn't actually think it had anything to do with the I.R.S."

And her bank wasn't allowed to tell her that her habits could be reported to the government. If customers ask about structuring their deposits, banks are allowed to give them a federal pamphlet. "We're not allowed to tell them anything," JoLynn Van Steenwyk, the fraud and security manager for Hinders' bank, told the Times.

The President of CRIF, France's largest Jewish Lobby that specializes in harassing and terrorizing the French political elite was indicted on Monday for defamation. Roger Cukierman was cited for remarks he made in an interview on Europe 1 in which he called Dieudonne Mbla Mbla, - France's No 1 comedian, a "professional anti-Semite."

On Monday, the elder Zionist announced the indictment himself on CRIF's website. "So I am being indicted for having stated on Europe 1 that Dieudonne is a professional anti-Semite. Isn't that funny? For once, Dieudonne is actually comical."

It seems as if the people who imposed 'correctness' on the rest of us, may have to start policing their own language. This may be a positive development.

Watch Gilad on Dieudonne and the quenelle:

The following is an introduction to the Polish edition of The Great Deformation:The Corruption Of Capitalism In America. By Fijorr Publishing, 2014.

"From Adam Smith to David Stockman"

By Jerzy Strzelecki

There is no doubt that The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David Stockman, the Polish translation of which has been made available to the Polish reader by Fijorr Publishing, is a real chef's d'oeuvre, a magnum opus. There should also be no doubt that its importance, with more and more people having an opportunity to read it, will grow in time, similar to the quality of wine resting in oak barrels.

Although Paul Krugman, the foremost representative of Keynesian doctrines in the United States, in his review of Stockman's book in the New York Times called it "an old man's rant" - immediately contributing to a big leap of the book on the NYT bestsellers list - most of other reviews of The Great Deformation have been much more positive, if not laudatory.

Michael Levin, for example, on the pages of Huff Post Books called The Great Deformation "the most important book about the American economy and the world economy published in the last 50 years", adding that it should become "required reading" and "a requirement for voting." The Washington Post, although critical, and calling Stockman America's "serial apostate", does not question, however, that what he wrote, in his diagnosis of the state of the nation, is an excellent description of "the burdens imposed on 'our children and grandchildren' we were warned about by our parents and grandparents." Lew Rockwell, spiritus movens of the American chapter of the Austrian School, called Stockman's book "the book we have been waiting for and we owe David Stockman a great debt." The most laudatory review of The Great Deformation, however, may be found on the Mergers & Inquisitions web portal which in the very title of an analysis of the book authored by the former head of Reagan's Office of Management and Budget called it "the most important book on economics since The Wealth of Nations."

Investigative journalist and former NSA contractor Wayne Madsen told Press TV on Monday the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa may be a resurfacing of an earlier infection linked to the CIA.

"We see a year [1976] when the US was violating a Senate law that forbid the US from engaging in the Angolan Civil War and we saw Zaire being used as a bait for the CIA and then we saw the outbreak of Ebola in Zaire. The same year that George H. W. Bush was the director of the CIA," Madsen said.

"In 1980 we saw the outbreak of HIV in Zaire and Angola where the CIA was operating," he said.

"I think what we need to see is an investigation of how intense the CIA biological warfare program was in Zaire and Angola between 1976 and 1980, and what has hit in Sierra Leon and other countries is the Zaire strain of Ebola."

Madsen said the militarization of the U.S. Ebola effort in West Africa is suspicious. "It's very peculiar that the US is sending the military in when obviously health workers, doctors, and other health care professionals are needed," he said.

CIA and U.S. military involvement in the use of biological pathogens as weapons is well documented. In the 1970s, evidence was revealed by the Church Committee.

"The position of the American Psychological Association is clear and unequivocal: For more than 25 years, the association has absolutely condemned any psychologist participation in torture."

- Statement by the APA, November 2013

"The American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization for psychologists, worked assiduously to protect the psychologists who did get involved in the torture program."

- James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, October 2014

New information may soon be revealed by the Senate Intelligence Committee's yet-to-be-released report on the CIA's post-9/11 abusive and torturous detention and interrogation operations. But what already has been clear for a long time - through reports from journalists, independent task forces, congressional investigations, and otherdocuments - is that psychologists and other health professionals were directly involved in brutalizing "war on terror" prisoners in U.S. custody. Of particular note, contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen have been identified as the architects of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques," which included waterboarding, stress positions, exposure to extreme cold, sensory and sleep deprivation, and isolation.

The Israeli government has approved plans to build over 1,000 new settler homes in East Jerusalem. It will expand two existing Israeli settlements on part of the territories seized in 1967.

An official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office declined to comment on the possible political and diplomatic impact. He said on Monday that "The government has decided to advance the planning of more than 1,000 units in Jerusalem - roughly 400 in Har Homa and about 600 in Ramat Shlomo," as cited by Reuters.

He also said that plans would be "advanced for infrastructure projects in the West Bank that will include roads for the Palestinians."

It is a sidestep by Netanyahu's office, as the ultranationalist Jewish Home party and its leader Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, has been pressing the Prime Minister to call for 2,000 new building tenders.

"The water department is determined to solve its financial problems - and change the city's demographics - by ejecting the poor from the grid."

The two United Nations Special Rapporteurs have seen human rights violations around the world, but Detroit's massive water shut-offs are uniquely upsetting. "We were deeply disturbed to observe the indignity people have faced and continue to live with in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and in a city that was a symbol of America's prosperity," said Catarina de Albuquerque and Leilani Farha, in a joint statement. An "unprecedented" 27,000 households have been disconnected from the pipes that sustain life and dignity - most of them Black and poor, according to the rapporteurs' observations, although the city doesn't bother to maintain records on the race and income of those it casts into purgatory. The water department is deliberately blind to the shut-offs' "disproportionate impact on low-income African Americans."

Detroit, an 82 percent Black city, run for four decades by Black mayors and Black city councils, and presided over for the past year and a half by a Black state-appointed emergency financial manager, may well be in violation of the United Nations Convention on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, "which explicitly prohibits and calls for the elimination of racial discrimination in relation to several human rights directly affected by water disconnections, including the right to housing and the right to public health," wrote Albuquerque and Farha.

The poor are not asking for a free ride, said Albuquerque. "In the three days we were here, nobody asked us for free water. People want to pay their bills within their possibilities...they want affordable and fair bills." However, the water department is determined to solve its financial problems - and change the city's demographics - by ejecting the poor from the grid. Albuquerque was compelled to remind Detroit that the city's bankruptcy drama "doesn't exempt it from human rights obligations."

As Russia continues to assert itself and lay claim to its rightful place as a leading global power, Western governments and their media whores, in a desperate attempt to preserve their faltering hegemony, are resorting to increasingly outrageous anti-Russian stunts and manipulations that surpass even the worst propaganda of the Cold War era.

The most recent episode in the ongoing absurd anti-Russian theater occurred 10 days ago when the Swedish Svenska Dagbladet paper declared that the Swedish military had "intercepted a distress call in Russian on a radio frequency reportedly used by Russia for emergency calls" off the Swedish coast.

Citing unnamed "sources" the newspaper claimed that the call was "encrypted radio traffic between a location outside of Stockholm and Russia's Baltic enclave, Kaliningrad" and that it "indicated a damaged Russian submarine."