If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality. We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities - particularly in communities of color. - Thomas Nolan, criminology professor and former police officer

Should police officer Darren Wilson be held accountable for the shooting death of unarmed citizen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014?

That the police officer was white and his victim black should make no difference. In a perfect world, it would not matter. In an imperfect world such as ours, however, racism is an effective propaganda tool used by the government and the media to distract us from the real issues.

As a result, the national dialogue about the dangers of militarized, weaponized police officers being trained to act like soldiers on the battlefield, shooting first and asking questions later, has shifted into a largely unspoken debate over race wars, class perceptions and longstanding, deep-seated notions of who deserves our unquestioning loyalty and who does not.

Putting aside our prejudices, however, let's not overlook the importance of Ferguson and this grand jury verdict. Tasked with determining whether Wilson should stand trial for Brown's shooting, the grand jury ruled that the police officer will not face charges for the fatal shooting.

However, the greater question - whether anything will really change to rein in militarized police, police shootings, lack of accountability and oversight, and a military industrial complex with a vested interest in turning America into a war zone - remains unanswered.

Ferguson matters because it provides us with a foretaste of what is to come. It is the shot across the bow, so to speak, a warning that this is how we will all be treated if we do not tread cautiously in challenging the police state, and it won't matter whether we're black or white, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat. In the eyes of the corporate state, we are all the enemy.

This is the lesson of Ferguson.

Despite earlier claims that US had no intention of supplying Ukraine with weapons, a recent leak of government documents has revealed plans to supply weapons to Kiev. The leak was published online by Ukrainian hackers group CyberBerkut.

The Ukrainian hacker group CyberBerkut published on Tuesday documents showing, in particular, that the Ukrainian military are receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Washington.

According to the hackers, the information was obtained during the visit of US Vice President Joe Biden to Ukraine last week, when they were able to access confidential State Department documents via a mobile device of a US delegation member.

"After examination of just a several files there is the impression that the Ukrainian army is the branch of US Armed Forces. The volume of US financial assistance amazes with its scale. They also show the highest level of degradation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Besides, thousands of dollars go on personal accounts of military personnel and used by certain officers in personal needs. What will the American taxpayers say?" the statement published on the official CyberBerkut web page said.

Other documents published by the hackers indicate that Washington is ready to supply Ukraine with "400 units of sniper rifles, 2,000 units of assault rifles, 720 hand grenade launchers, nearly 200 mortars and more than 70,000 shells for them, 150 stingers and 420 anti-tank missiles."

The United States said earlier that it had no intention of supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons.


Click here to see the full list of US military aid to Ukraine (English transcript included).

The most remarkable development in the management of America's relations with other countries during the quarter-century since the end of World War II has been the assumption of more and more control over military, financial and diplomatic operations at home and abroad by men whose activities are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities as often as not are secret -- in short, by a Secret Team whose actions only those implicated in them are in a position to monitor and to understand...

The Secret Team (ST) being described herein consists of security-cleared individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to those data, when it seems appropriate to them, with paramilitary plans and activities, e.g. training and "advising" -- a not exactly impenetrable euphemism for such things as leading into battle and actual combat -- Laotian tribal troops, Tibetan rebel horsemen, or Jordanian elite Palace Guards...

- L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team

On October 21st, 2001, America invaded Afghanistan under the false pretext of waging a "War on Terror". They toppled the Taliban government, itself a reaction to the mujahadeen America had placed in power to fight the Soviets, placed their puppet Karzai in power, and chaos has ensued ever since.

Due to the chaos, pathological individuals have had a heyday in the production and selling of drugs, constant bombings, and the inability of the central government to enforce the rule of law across the country. The most recent developments in the country continue to reek with the involvement of "Secret Teams" using the chaos to play their pathological games with the people of Afghanistan.

Barack Obama, the obsequious errand boy for the financial and corporate plutocrats who own the U.S. government, made a pathetic appearance on national television to try to persuade the "natives" to remain peaceful in response to the non-indictment of the Ferguson killer-cop. His inane comments extolling the value of non-violence and the rule of law seemed strangely incongruent with the militaristic rhetoric and policies of his administration over the last few years.

Yet, Obama's positions on law and violence are not as contradictory as they might appear when these positions are resituated within the context of imperial logic and the framework of power. Legitimate violence is always determined by history's dominant powers and employed as a weapon to maintain and extend that dominance. Over the last five hundred years Europe emerged from the backwaters of history and cultural backwardness to predominance as a result of genocide and land theft in the Americas, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and colonial/capitalist development. The violent establishment of capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy enabled the West to impose its definitions of legitimacy, including "legitimate" violence.

Thus when Palestinians resist the theft of the their land and the killing of their people by Israeli colonists, their response is defined as illegitimate violence that sparks support for Israel's "right to defend itself." When Africans waged national liberation struggles to free themselves from European colonial domination in places like Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the West condemned their efforts as illegitimate. Furthermore, because those struggles were determined to be illegitimate colonial powers felt justified to viciously attack those efforts with the support of the U.S. government. And when African Americans organized against police violence and for self-determination and our own definitions of liberation in the 60s, our efforts were deemed illegitimate. We were brutally suppressed with the full range of state terror tactics including beatings, deaths, infiltration, surveillance, and the jailing of activists for decades.

Therefore, we should understand the State's response to our discontent in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown in this context. The heavy-handed use of violence to deny the people the human rights to peacefully assemble and freedom of association is consistent with the historical uses of violence to control and suppress opposition. And the state's determination that more militant forms of popular resistance are illegitimate helped to shift the attention of the capitalist media to black resistance and away from the issue of impunity for yet another law enforcement official who literally gets away with murder.

Introduction: There are clear signs that a major war is about to break out in Ukraine: A war actively promoted by the NATO regimes and supported by their allies and clients in Asia (Japan) and the Middle East (Saudi Arabia).

The war over Ukraine will essentially run along the lines of a full-scale military offensive against the southeast Donbas region, targeting the breakaway ethnic Ukraine- Russian Peoples Republic of Donetsk and Lugansk, with the intention of deposing the democratically elected government, disarming the popular militias, killing the guerrilla resistance partisans and their mass base, dismantling the popular representative organizations and engaging in ethnic cleansing of millions of bilingual Ukraino-Russian citizens. NATO's forthcoming military seizure of the Donbas region is a continuation and extension of its original violent putsch in Kiev, which overthrew an elected Ukrainian government in February 2014.

The Kiev junta and its newly 'elected' client rulers, and its NATO sponsors are intent on a major purge to consolidate the puppet Poroshenko's dictatorial rule. The recent NATO-sponsored elections excluded several major political parties that had traditionally supported the country's large ethnic minority populations, and was boycotted in the Donbas region. This sham election in Kiev set the tone for NATO's next move toward converting Ukraine into one gigantic US multi-purpose military base aimed at the Russian heartland and into a neo-colony for German capital, supplying Berlin with grain and raw materials while serving as a captive market for German manufactured goods.

An intensifying war fever is sweeping the West; the consequences of this madness appear graver by the hour.

While Western mainstream media concentrates attention on the emissions agreement signed by US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi at the recent APEC Beijing Summit, Russia's Putin and China's Xi quietly signed major new energy agreements that will have enormous geopolitical significance in bringing about the very nightmare that US strategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski warned about way back in 1997 when America seemed indomitable as sole Superpower.

The impetus, ironically, to the array of strategic Russia-China deals are the very economic and financial sanctions the rather stupid strategists at the US Treasury and National Security Council devised to "punish" Putin beginning last May for allegedly "invading" Crimea.

China to be Russia's major gas customer

On November 9 in meetings on the periphery of the Beijing APEC summit, Putin and Xi signed 10 agreements. Far the most significant is the one for the so-called West Route gas pipeline that will connect gas fields in western Siberia with northwest China through the Altai area of Xinjiang Autonomous Region. They also agreed on provisions for possible second and third sections to be added later that would bring capacity to a staggering 100 billion cubic meters a year. West Route is designated a priority and to be finished in six years. Initially it will give China another 30 billion cubic meters of gas annually over 30 years.

Anacronista: Today the contrast between Russian and US foreign policies is striking: on one side moderation, common sense, respect for sovereign states; on the other side coups d'etat, threats, sanctions and lies. Is the contrasting behaviour of the two powers due to incidental political calculations or to a different underlying view of life?

The Saker: The first thing to point out is that Lavrov and Putin are extremely well educated men who come from elite institutions: Lavrov from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Putin from the former external intelligence directorate of the KGB. They are far better educated that modern US diplomats. In the past the US also had distinguished diplomats like James Baker, but now they are either total idiots (like Psaki) or arrogant liars (like Powers). The second thing is that the USA truly does not have a "diplomacy". After all, US "diplomacy" is just a combination of demands, promises, threats and bombings which do not require any real diplomatic skills. Third, Russia has greatly suffered from the costs of empire, both under the Czars and under the Soviet rule. As a result, Russia does not want to be an empire, or a super power, or a world policeman or a hegemon. All Russia wants is to be a *normal* but, and this is important, a *truly sovereign* country. In order to achieve that Russia has a few basic fundamental rules she really believes in:

Lithuania has decided to provide limited military aid to Ukraine following a meeting between Presidents Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine and Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania in Kiev. The move aims to bolster military cooperation between the two states.

"We have agreed on the supply of armaments for the Ukrainian armed forces," Poroshenko said, after talks with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite on Monday.

Poroshenko added that the aid constituted "real help," though he did not clarify if it was for lethal or non-lethal equipment.

Grybauskaite said the deal would entail providing Ukraine with the necessary knowhow for building modern armed forces. More Ukrainian representatives will be invited to study at the Military Academy of Lithuania, and there will be an increase in joint exercises with the goal of completing "the formation of the trilateral Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian Brigade," the Lithuanian president said.

Ted Cruz (R - Texas) begins his speech delivered on the Senate floor Nov. 20th, 2014 with "The words of Cicero - powerfully relevant 2,077 years later," and then proceeds to recite Cicero's speech "In Catilinam (Against Catiline)" delivered to the Roman Senate in 63 B.C. with some modifications to fit his purpose. During this period in Roman history there was martial law, accusations of high treason, and the specter of civil war.

America today is increasingly becoming like the - now lost - Roman empire.

After Lucius Sergius Catiline lost an election to Marcus Tullius Cicero for Rome's highest office of consul, Cicero claimed that Catiline conspired to murder him and attempt a coup d'état. Cicero presented to the consul a letter, allegedly written by Catiline, that was found and presented as evidence of the conspiracy. Martial law was declared, and Catiline was denounced in the Senate - a triumph about which Cicero never tired of reminding his peers and readers (Catiline went into exile and soon after died in battle with his army). This is the official version of events where Cicero is generally hailed as a remarkable orator and a model for democracy that is still widely taught to this day.

There is much more to this Cicero character and how the Cataline conspiracy became Rome's 9/11. You can listen to a discussion on the subject on this SOTT Talk Radio broadcast. A more in depth analysis of the situation will be featured in the next installment of Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Secret History series.

Anyway, back to Ted Cruz. Catiline, a Popularis, was an advocate for the poor. He called for the cancellation of debts and openly backed land redistribution. Cicero, on the other hand, was aligned to the Optimates ("Best Men") who wished to preserve the aristocracy's power. Cicero created a law banning such populist gestures. In Cruz's speech, he aligns himself with Cicero and paints Obama as a modern day Catiline. As if Obama was not (s)elected by, and is not working for the 1% that enjoys the fruit of the labours of the masses of ordinary humanity.

Cruz delivers quite the inflammatory speech and makes sure to include the threats implied in Cicero's original speech.

Three of Israel's most senior ex-defense officials came out last week, almost simultaneously, with blistering attacks on the security policies of the Netanyahu coalition. Appearing in separate forums, the three - former Mossad director Shabtai Shavit, former Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin and former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi - each charged that the government is endangering Israel's future by allowing right-wing extremists to sabotage prospects for a two-state solution, putting the country on a path toward a single, binational state that will be plagued by continuing ethnic strife.

Two of the attacks appeared as op-ed essays in last Friday newspapers. One, by Diskin, appeared in the mass-circulation Yediot Ahronot. Titled "What lies ahead for Israel" (in English here), it argues that the current "Jerusalem intifada" is a "microcosm" of what awaits Israel if it does not resume serious peace negotiations with the Palestinian leadership. Diskin is particularly critical of the "inflammatory propaganda" and "brainwashing" that depicts Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as an obstacle rather than a partner, when in fact, he writes, Abbas is strongly opposed to terrorism and maintains a "clear policy" of security cooperation with Israel.

The second, by Shavit, appeared in the liberal-leaning Haaretz. Titled "Blindness, Stupidity, Cause for Concern" (here, Hebrew only), it worries about the "haughtiness and arrogance" among "central factors in religious Zionism,"

together with more than a bit of the messianic thinking that rushes to turn the conflict into a holy war. If this has been, so far, a local political conflict that two small nations have been waging over a small and defined piece of territory, major forces in the religious Zionist movement are foolishly doing everything they can to turn it into the most horrific of wars, in which the entire Muslim world will stand against us.

I also see, to the same extent, detachment and lack of understanding of international processes and their significance for us. This right wing, in its blindness and stupidity, is pushing the nation of Israel into the dishonorable position of "the nation shall dwell alone and not be reckoned among the nations" (Numbers 23:9).