© Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty ImagesOn the ground, it has meant the rise of Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Azov battalion, now preparing to ‘defend’ Mariupol from its own people.
A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the "Russian threat" is unmistakably back. Vladimir Putin, Britain's defence secretary Michael Fallon declares, is as great a danger to Europe as "Islamic State". There may be no ideological confrontation, and Russia may be a shadow of its Soviet predecessor, but the anti-Russian drumbeat has now reached fever pitch.
And much more than in Soviet times, the campaign is personal.
It's all about Putin. The Russian president is an expansionist dictator who has launched a "shameless aggression". He is the epitome of "political depravity", "carving up" his neighbours as he crushes dissent at home, and routinely is compared to Hitler.
Putin has now become a cartoon villain and Russia the target of almost uniformly belligerent propaganda across the western media.
Anyone who questions the dominant narrative on Ukraine - from last year's overthrow of the elected president and the role of Ukrainian far right to war crimes carried out by Kiev's forces - is dismissed as a Kremlin dupe.
Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long - it must wake up to the danger
--Volodymyr Ishchenko
That has been ratcheted up still further with the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.
The Russian president has, of course, been blamed for the killing, though that makes little sense. Nemtsov was a marginal figure whose role in the "catastroika" of the 1990s scarcely endeared him to ordinary Russians. Responsibility for an outrage that exposed the lack of security in the heart of Moscow and was certain to damage the president hardly seems likely to lie with Putin or his supporters.
© Poor Richard's News
CNN finds some hypocrisy piled on top of
Hillary Clinton's criminal activity (see video below).
Jake Tapper points out a very important detail in all of this. Hillary Clinton and her staff have only turned over a limited number of emails from her time as Secretary of State, but the Federal Records Act requires
all communication conducted by cabinet officials to be permanently archived.
Clinton may claim that the remainder of emails on her private server (many of which are now likely destroyed) were just personal communications not related to her official duties, but this is an unacceptable excuse because she created this elaborate secret email account on the day of her Senate confirmation hearings.
The email server was designed from the beginning to hide her official communications from the public record.
© www.redicecreations.com
The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington.
Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.There are
roughly 1,000 such drone pilots, known in the trade as "18Xs," working for the U.S. Air Force today. Another
180 pilots graduate annually from a
training program that takes about a year to complete at Holloman and Randolph Air Force bases in, respectively, New Mexico and Texas. As it happens, in those same 12 months, about
240 trained pilots quit and the Air Force is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. (
The better-known U.S. Central Intelligence Agency drone assassination program is also flown by Air Force pilots loaned out for the covert missions.)
On January 4, 2015, the
Daily Beast revealed an undated internal memo to Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh from General Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle stating that
pilot "outflow increases will damage the readiness and combat capability of the MQ-1/9 [Predator and Reaper] enterprise for years to come" and added that he was "extremely concerned." Eleven days later, the issue got top billing at a special high-level briefing on the state of the Air Force. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James joined Welsh to address the matter.
"This is a force that is under significant stress -- significant stress from what is an unrelenting pace of operations," she told the media.
In theory, drone pilots have a cushy life. Unlike soldiers on duty in "war zones," they can continue to live with their families here in the United States. No muddy foxholes or sandstorm-swept desert barracks under threat of enemy attack for them. Instead, these new techno-warriors commute to work like any office employees and sit in front of computer screens wielding joysticks, playing what most people would consider a glorified video game.
© imgarcade.comMilitary pilots control a reaper drone.
Each of these combat air patrols involves three to four drones, usually Hellfire-missile-armed Predators and Reapers built by southern California's General Atomics, and each takes as many as 180 staff members to fly them. In addition to pilots, there are camera operators, intelligence and communications experts, and maintenance workers. (The newer Global Hawk surveillance patrols need as many as 400 support staff.)
The Air Force is currently under orders to staff 65 of these regular "combat air patrols" around the clock as well as to support a Global Response Force on call for emergency military and humanitarian missions. For all of this,
there should ideally be 1,700 trained pilots. Instead, facing an accelerating dropout rate that recently drove this figure below 1,000, the Air Force has had to press regular cargo and jet pilots as well as reservists into becoming instant drone pilots in order to keep up with the Pentagon's enormous appetite for real-time video feeds from around the world.
Comment: The Scoreboard: Technology 1 / Human Evolution 0
"You never know who you're killing, because you never actually see a face. You just have a silhouette."
The Department of Justice White Paper "sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qa'ida or an associated force of al Qa'ida - that is, an al Qa'ida leader actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans." What it doesn't justify is all the hits and misses (U.S. pre-emptive strikes) involving innocent men, women and children of foreign countries, or for that matter, innocent Americans abroad. As in the al-Zawarhiri strike(s), mentioned in the article, a total of 76 children and 29 adults paid the price of this particular pursuit. Track record for drone success of limiting the hit to the "suspected" target of a "suspected attack on Americans" seems to be murder first and see if the suspect was amongst the dead. "Oops, sorry." Why isn't this sort of preplanned "terror with deadly consequences" qualified as a terrorist operation? War crime? (Hint: Technically we're there, "technically" we're not. Rather convenient.)
"We are the ultimate voyeurs, the ultimate peeping Toms. I'm watching this person, and this person has no clue what's going on. No one's going to catch us. And we're getting orders to take these people's lives."
One thing is clear: Drone wars are not going away. They give an aggressor nation, such as the USA, access to places that are not officially American war zones and provide attack capabilities from safe and secret war-room offices half-a-world away. They destroy, maim, kill and, as we see from this article, the track record is appalling. This form of warfare is a one-way trajectory. How many other countries, terror organizations, psychopaths can we imagine getting on board with this type of warfare/entertainment? Why play video games when you can blow something up or kill someone with an airborne assassinator, never to be traced or suffer the consequences? Drones are being sold by the U.S. all over the world. This genie has left the bottle! The psychologically sick pilots who have walked off the job--maybe they're the ones who still have a conscience.
© picture-allianceVictoria Nuland, the face for the sponsored cleansing of Ukraine
Ukrainian hacking collective CyberBerkut has reported that they have obtained a series of documents from the Ministry of Information Policy in Mariupol, featuring correspondence about the need for a pro-Ukrainian social-psychological propaganda campaign, and noting that a "sweep" of the city is taking place.
According to the group, over 100 people have been arrested over the past few days.CyberBerkut claims to have obtained correspondence belonging to Ukrainian Ministry of Information Policy Minister Tatyana Popova, one of which recommends a "pilot project of military-civilian administration" in the embattled city.
Comment: Cyberberkut also leaked US
plans to arm Ukraine, and the possibility that
false flags have been carried out in order to damage separatist credibility. Kiev is filled with, and supported by, fascist lunatics:
Will Turkey take its place in the new Eurasian century?
The future of the European Union lies in at least three fragmented alliances around influential centerpieces, Sanda Raskovic Ivic, President of the Democratic Party of Serbia, told Sputnik.
"The EU will one day eventually fall apart on at least three alliances," Raskovic Ivic said.The official's forecast comes amid increasing disagreement within the 28-nation bloc. Raskovic Ivic projected current differences of opinion in the European Union will lead to further division lines.
Comment: There has been evidence that France and Germany planned to
use financial collapse to cram a 'superstate' down the throats of the rest of the EU. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is
also evidence that the entire notion of a 'European Union,' as we see it today, was created in order to prevent a larger Eurasian integration.
The big question is, has the recent impact of the sanctions against Russia, along with the Ukrainian 'F*** the EU' crisis sponsored by the US State Department, woken up EU officials to their fate under the weight of the US' chains?
For more info, check out:
© AP Photo/ Sergei Chuzavkov
Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council spokesman Andrei Lysenko has confirmed that the DPR has restored the railway junction in Debaltseve in a matter of 12 days, following earlier reports that it had been completely destroyed and turned into "the surface of the moon."
"The Debaltseve railway junction has been restored. On March 3rd, ammunition was seen being unloaded from trains," Lysenko stated on Friday, cited by Ukraine's Podrobnosti.ua.On February 19, Lysenko had reported that the Debaltseve railway junction had been destroyed. "The strategic Debaltseve railway junction has ceased to have any significance for the local region. The entire railway hub has been turned into the surface of the moon: everything has been destroyed."
Renee Maltezou
ReutersTue, 03 Mar 2015 11:59 UTC
Athenians, once enjoying an ordinary life, are now homeless
Greece's government submitted a bill to offer free food and electricity to thousands of poverty-stricken Greeks as its first legislative act in parliament, in a symbolic move to address what it calls a "humanitarian crisis".
Athens, which got a four-month extension of a financial rescue from the
euro zone last month, has sought to assure its lenders that such measures will not burden the budget while showing Greeks that it is sticking to pre-election pledges.
"
The deep recession due to austerity policies and the economic crisis in the past six years had a dramatic social impact," said the bill, which was tabled late on Tuesday. "
This draft law aims at tackling the humanitarian crisis through measures which ensure access to basic goods."
During a cabinet meeting last week, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that
improving living conditions of those hurt by the crisis was the government's "foremost duty", but reiterated Athens was still committed to a balanced budget.
The government's first bill foresees the restoration of electricity connections in primary residences by the end of 2015. The long-term unemployed and families with young children will have priority. About 300,000 Greeks will get food vouchers.
A rent allowance of up to 220 euros a month for 30,000 households is also included in the bill, whose total cost is estimated by the government at about 200 million euros.
RTThu, 05 Mar 2015 15:26 UTC
© radixjournal.com
The US is increasing its claims against Moscow to a new level -
with fresh accusations about thousands of Russian troops in Ukraine. At a congressional meeting, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland stated as fact that there had been an invasion.
RT's Gayane Chichakyan has the details.
Comment: The lies spewing from Nuland's mouth are jaw dropping.
Harrison Koehli
Sott.netThu, 05 Mar 2015 22:23 UTC
I reported on Ukraine's new 'information army' last month,
here. Launched by Kiev's Ministry of Information Policy to combat the alleged "Russian occupation on the information front", it's hard to decide whether to laugh or cry.
While the source in that article says the number of recruits for the first day couldn't have topped 13,000, in the eyes of Ukraine's minister of information policy Yury Stenets, that's close enough for horseshoes to
35,000. For some strange reason, in Kiev a small or non-existent number (like the number of Russian troops in Ukraine) is always large, while a large number (like the number of their troops killed or wounded in action) is always small.
In a 'country' whose media has led the vanguard in total disconnection from reality - presenting outright lie after outright lie as indisputable truth - it's still a shock to read something like the following from Stenets:
We are not going to create fake news, we are not going to talk nonsense and we will not speak untrue things. As soon as one starts doing that, it becomes ineffective.
Puhleeze! But then, he's kind of right. So far, Kiev's policy of just making shit up has proven itself to be totally ineffective. Their ass-like stubbornness against publicly admitting that thousands of their troops were trapped in Debaltsevo resulted in the loss of the vast majority of their
heavy weaponry there, not to mention the deaths of
thousands of the troops. (But Kiev doesn't care much about the troops - that's why they had troops to kill the troops trying to escape from the non-existent cauldron. Just more
cannon fodder in the epic battle against evil Russia.)
Today the National Bank of Ukraine announced new capital controls on currency transactions. All
Interbank Transactions Over $10,000 are Banned.
The national Bank of Ukraine has expanded the list of administrative restrictions for stabilization of the hryvnia, in particular, completely prohibiting the withdrawal of foreign dividends and limiting the purchase of foreign currency on the domestic markets.
Resolution No. 160 is effective from March 4, 2015 and is valid until June 3, 2015.
Previously, prohibitions did not target dividends on securities that are traded on stock exchanges.
The NBU has also introduced limits on the balance of banks' operations on the interbank market at the end of the day and banned financial institutions from using currency derivatives on stock exchanges.
These restrictions apply to customer's accounts over $10,000 as valued by the official rates.
Gold Buying Prohibited
In addition, the NBU banned precious metal transactions in amounts over 3,000 UAH [about $125], and also the transfer of currency abroad in excess of 15 thousand UAH [about $625].
Comment: Ukraine seems to be in a death spiral.
Comment: The Scoreboard: Technology 1 / Human Evolution 0
"You never know who you're killing, because you never actually see a face. You just have a silhouette."
The Department of Justice White Paper "sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qa'ida or an associated force of al Qa'ida - that is, an al Qa'ida leader actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans." What it doesn't justify is all the hits and misses (U.S. pre-emptive strikes) involving innocent men, women and children of foreign countries, or for that matter, innocent Americans abroad. As in the al-Zawarhiri strike(s), mentioned in the article, a total of 76 children and 29 adults paid the price of this particular pursuit. Track record for drone success of limiting the hit to the "suspected" target of a "suspected attack on Americans" seems to be murder first and see if the suspect was amongst the dead. "Oops, sorry." Why isn't this sort of preplanned "terror with deadly consequences" qualified as a terrorist operation? War crime? (Hint: Technically we're there, "technically" we're not. Rather convenient.)
"We are the ultimate voyeurs, the ultimate peeping Toms. I'm watching this person, and this person has no clue what's going on. No one's going to catch us. And we're getting orders to take these people's lives."
One thing is clear: Drone wars are not going away. They give an aggressor nation, such as the USA, access to places that are not officially American war zones and provide attack capabilities from safe and secret war-room offices half-a-world away. They destroy, maim, kill and, as we see from this article, the track record is appalling. This form of warfare is a one-way trajectory. How many other countries, terror organizations, psychopaths can we imagine getting on board with this type of warfare/entertainment? Why play video games when you can blow something up or kill someone with an airborne assassinator, never to be traced or suffer the consequences? Drones are being sold by the U.S. all over the world. This genie has left the bottle! The psychologically sick pilots who have walked off the job--maybe they're the ones who still have a conscience.