Alarmed at the anti-Russian hysteria sweeping Official Washington - and the specter of a new Cold War - U.S. intelligence veterans took the unusual step of sending this Aug. 30 memo to German Chancellor Merkel challenging the reliability of Ukrainian and U.S. media claims about a Russian "invasion."

MEMORANDUM FOR: Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)


SUBJECT: Ukraine and NATO

We the undersigned are long-time veterans of U.S. intelligence. We take the unusual step of writing this open letter to you to ensure that you have an opportunity to be briefed on our views prior to the NATO summit on Sept. 4-5.

You need to know, for example, that accusations of a major Russian "invasion" of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the "intelligence" seems to be of the same dubious, politically "fixed" kind used 12 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.

The Ukrainian civil war saw yet another decisive turn of events this week as the NAF (the Novorussiya Armed Forces) went on the offensive for the first time in the war. The Response by Kiev and the west was to hype up an imaginary Russian invasion. Once again the US State Department, NATO, and the western press made complete fools of themselves. The information war has also seen a decisive turn as well. To use the terminology of the civil war recent days have seen the mainstream media yet again trapped in a cauldron by their own stupidity. Now they will be hammered away at and discredited yet again by articles such as this one. Sites like Vineyard of the Saker and Slavyangrad.org were vindicated in their analysis while media dinosaurs like the New York Times were exposed once again as liars and incompetents. A lone blogger in Crimea writing under the name Colonel Cassad provided better military analysis then professionals like Janes Defense weekly.

In my last article I predicted based on reading the above mentioned sites that the mainstream media which was foolishly predicting the imminent victory of the Ukrainian army was in for a major embarrassment. The Ukraine Junta's latest offensive had resulted in them being trapped yet again in what the NAF call cauldrons (a trapped pocket of the UA army brought to boil by NAF rocket and artillery strikes). Basically the strategy has been for the Ukraine Junta to launch an offensive, the NAF allow them to enter and once they are deep into Novorussiyan territory they are surrounded, their supplies cut off and they are shelled day after day by distant artillery. The new offensive resulted in the Ukrainian army trapped yet again in a number of different pockets. After months of catastrophic losses the Ukrainian forces no longer had the troops to properly defend their territory. The NAF seized the opportunity to go on the offensive, outflanking and surrounding the forces committed to the assault on Iloviask. Then it launched an attack south and west towards Mauripol which they have since surrounded. Kiev Forces panicked and fled in abject terror. It was this dramatic turn of events which led to the story of a Russian invasion.

Since Kiev and western media had been busy turning truth on its head, how could they explain this sudden reversal? They had been promising victory and the collapse of Novorossiya. Now for the first time Novorossiya was recapturing territory lost months before. In paranoid fascist Kiev people believe that they are being actively betrayed and that their generals are secretly paid by the Russians to intentionally send their troops to their deaths. Actually, in the notoriously corrupt Ukraine this might be possible. After all, the US and NATO frequently bribe generals into betraying their country; many an Iraqi and Libyan general was rewarded with suitcases of cash and safe passage to western Europe or the US. To sort out what is truly going on behind the scenes will take years. War breeds chaos, paranoia, madness. Wild rumors proliferate since no one can trust official information which is invariably mere war propaganda.

A quote about Russian President Vladimir Putin's apparent ability "to take Kiev in two weeks," by European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso earlier in the week, was taken out of context and had a completely different meaning, presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said Tuesday.

"This is incorrect, this goes beyond the framework of diplomatic practice. This is unbecoming of a serious political figure," Ushakov said, referring to Barroso's comment.

Earlier this week, Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that after Barroso's telephone conversation with Putin, the European Commission president claimed that the Russian leader said he could take Ukraine in two weeks.

The Kremlin later responded that Putin's words were misinterpreted and had completely different meaning.

As the Ukrainian crisis escalated, the West continued accusing Russia of meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs, sending troops to Ukraine, and went as far as to claim that Moscow planned to invade Ukraine. However, none of these statements were supported with any evidence.

The Obama Administration is furtively guarding their chosen strategy to deal with ISIL. This is reminiscent of a certain White House Correspondents' dinner where the President calmly played the part of a relaxed president enjoying a moment of levity. Meanwhile, the wheels were set in motion on a daring mission to get Osama Bin Laden once and for all. President Obama is, as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive, entitled to execute the strategy of his choosing. Divulging too much information is ill-advised. The Bin Laden raid showed us just that. The Right just isn't having it. They want to be consulted on any military operation after bankrupting the country and ruining the lives of millions with their pre-emptive wars that were so poorly planned.


Fox's curvy weekend couch-occupants figured who would be better to explain sound military policy than the man who traded arms for hostages and is damned lucky not to be making license plates in a federal penitentiary. Tucker 'Bowtie' Carlson introduced Oliver North with this ballsy statement:

There's none who's respected more by the people who fight wars than our next guest, Colonel North.

Yes, because war is something that should be perpetual and who better than a war profiteer to rally the bloodlust of the xenophobic base?

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk declared his country's intention to join NATO a few days ago, officially flip-flopping from his stance expressed nearly half a year ago. He said that the government was submitting a bill to the Rada to officially change Ukraine's non-aligned status and also de-facto prohibit it from ever joining the Eurasian Union. It is unclear how he plans to pass the bill, considering that the Rada had been unilaterally dissolved earlier this month. Nonetheless, with Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk being the only politicians to still have power after this recent de-facto political purge, it is more than likely that they will make sure their military ambitions are 'legitimized' by hook or by crook, thereby pulling Shadow NATO out of the closet into the limelight.

Military Failures and False Flag Invasions

The timing of Kiev's not-so-unexpected decision to officially announce its intent to join NATO is strongly influenced by its recent string of military failures against the Novorossiya Armed Forces (NAF). This reality is completely opposite to the victory hype that was being prematurely pushed earlier this month. At that time, Kiev was all but claiming victory against the pro-Federalists, completely dismissing any talks of a ceasefire and proclaiming its march on besieged Donetsk and Lugansk. Today, however, NAF is waging a successful counteroffensive against Kiev, has reached the Sea of Azov, and even encircled thousands of Ukrainian troops. So successful has this counteroffensive been that President Putin lauded the NAF and encouraged them to show mercy by opening up a humanitarian corridor to allow Kiev's forces to safely (and without their arms) retreat into Russia. Such are the fortunes of war, and Kiev is likely kicking itself for not having accepted the ceasefire earlier this month.

Many commentators consider what the Fed has done to be akin to providing stimulus, morphine, juice to an ailing economy.

We believe Fed's actions would be more appropriately described as permitted cancerous beliefs to spread throughout the financial system, thereby killing Democratic Capitalism which is the basis of the capital markets.

Today we're going to explain what the "final outcome" for this process will be. The short version is what happens to a cancer patient who allows the disease to spread unchecked (death). In the case of the Fed's actions we will see a similar "death" of Democratic Capitalism and the subsequent death of the capital markets. We are, of course, talking in metaphors here: the world will not end, and commerce and business will continue, but the form of capital markets and Capitalism we are experiencing today will cease to exist as the Fed's policies result in the market and economy eventually collapsing in such a fashion that what follows will bear little resemblance to that which we are experiencing now.The focus of this "death" will not be stocks, but bonds, particularly sovereign bonds: the asset class against which all monetary policy and investment theory has been based for the last 80+ years.

Indeed, basic financial theory has proposed that sovereign bonds are essentially the only true "risk-free" investment in the world. While history shows this theory to be false (sovereign defaults have occurred throughout the 20^th century) this has been the basic tenant for all investment models and indeed the financial system at large going back for 80 some odd years.

The reason for this is that the Treasury (US sovereign bond) market is the basis of the entire monetary system in the US and the Global financial system in general. Indeed, US Treasuries are the senior most assets on the Primary Dealers' (world's largest banks) balance sheets. To understand why this is as well as why the Fed's policies will ultimately destroy this system, you first need to understand the Primary Dealer system that is the basis for the US banking system at large.

A zipping comes across the sky.

A man named Neil Parfitt is standing in a field on a cattle ranch outside Warwick, Australia. A white vehicle appears above the trees, a tiny plane a bit bigger than a seagull. It glides towards Parfitt, pitches upwards to a vertical position, and hovers near him, a couple hundred feet in the air. From its belly, a package comes tumbling downward, connected by a thin line to the vehicle itself. Right before the delivery hits the ground, it slows, hitting the earth with a tap. The delivery slows, almost imperceptibly, just before it hits the ground, hardly kicking up any dust. A small rectangular module on the end of the line detaches the payload, and ascends back up the vehicle, locking into place beneath the nose. As the wing returns to flying posture and zips back to its launch point half a mile away, Parfitt walks over to the package, opens it up, and extracts some treats for his dogs.

The Australian test flight and 30 others like it conducted in mid-August are the culmination of the first phase of Project Wing, a secret drone program that's been running for two years at Google X, the company's whoa-inducing, long-range research lab.

Though a couple of rumors have escaped the Googleplex - because of course Google must have a drone-delivery program - Project Wing's official existence and substance were revealed today. I've spent the past week talking to Googlers who worked on the project, reviewing video of the flights, and interviewing other people convinced delivery by drone will work.

Taken with the company's other robotics investments, Google's corporate posture has become even more ambitious. Google doesn't just want to organize all the world's information. Google wants to organize all the world.

US President Barack Obama is trying to divert attention on his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to cover his poor leadership and his actions across the world, a political commentator says.

You can hear the 3:30 minute Skype interview at Press TV here.

© Unknown

"Nobody accepts any responsibility for terrible mistakes that they make. It's always someone else's fault," Veterans Today editor Jim Dean told Press TV on Saturday.

He made the remarks when asked about the recent announcement by the White House that Obama's next week trip to Europe is a warning to Putin against "messing around" with the Baltic States.

President Obama will travel to Tallinn on Tuesday to meet with the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The visit comes amid escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine.

"Part of the message that the president will be sending is, we stand with you," Charles Kupchan, the administration's senior director for European Affairs, said on Friday.

"Article Five constitutes an ironclad guarantee of your security. Russia, don't even think about messing around in Estonia or in any of the Baltic areas in the same way that you have been messing around in Ukraine," he warned.

Dean also noted that the United States is "very angry that Russia has played their cards so smooth" in Ukraine and that Washington is "messing around" in that region of the world, not Moscow.

In the wake of World War I, erstwhile propagandist and political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined propaganda as "the management of collective attitudes" and the "control over opinion" through "the manipulation of significant symbols."[1] The extent to which this tradition is enthusiastically upheld in the West and the United States in particular is remarkable.

The American public is consistently propagandized by its government and corporate news media on the most vital of contemporary issues and events.

Deception on such a scale would be of little consequence if the US were not the most powerful economic and military force on earth.

© Tim Anderson

A case in point is the hysteria Western news media are attempting to create concerning the threat posed by the mercenary-terrorist army now being promoted as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or "ISIS."

As was the case with the US intelligence asset and bogey publicized as "Al Qaeda," and Al Qaeda's Syrian adjunct, "Al Nusra," such entities are - apparently by design - inadequately investigated and defined by major news media. Absent meaningful historical context they usefully serve as another raison d'ểtre for America's terminal "War on Terror."

A seemingly obvious feature of such terrorist forces left unexamined by corporate media is that they are observably comprised of the same or comparable personnel unleashed elsewhere throughout the Middle East as part of a strategy proposed during the George W. Bush administration in 2007.[2]

With the above observations in mind, ISIS is well-financed, militarily proficient, and equipped with modern vehicles and weaponry. It also exhibits an uncanny degree of media savvy in terms of propagating its message in professional-looking videos and on platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. "Western intelligence services," the New York Times reports, claim to be "worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones, and multilingual Twitter messages."[3]

Along these lines, ISIS even received a largely sympathetic portrayal in a five-part series produced and aired by the Rupert Murdoch-backed Vice News.[4] Indeed, Vice News' "The Spread of the Caliphate" is reminiscent of the public relations-style reportage produced via the "embedding" of corporate news media personnel with US and allied forces during the 2003 conquest of Iraq.

Innocent people's lives are being ruined. Why isn't anyone watching the watchlist?

The US government's web of surveillance is vast and interconnected. Now we know just how opaque, inefficient and discriminatory it can be.

As we were reminded again just this week, you can be pulled into the National Security Agency's database quietly and quickly, and the consequences can be long and enduring. Through ICREACH, a Google-style search engine created for the intelligence community, the NSA provides data on private communications to 23 government agencies. More than 1,000 analysts had access to that information.

This kind of data sharing, however, isn't limited to the latest from Edward Snowden's NSA files. It was confirmed earlier this month that the FBI shares its master watchlist, the Terrorist Screening Database, with at least 22 foreign governments, countless federal agencies, state and local law enforcement, plus private contractors.

The watchlist tracks "known" and "suspected" terrorists and includes both foreigners and Americans. It's also based on loose standards and secret evidence, which ensnares innocent people. Indeed, the standards are so low that the US government's guidelines specifically allow for a single, uncorroborated source of information - including a Facebook or Twitter post - to serve as the basis for placing you on its master watchlist.

Of the 680,000 individuals on that FBI master list, roughly 40% have "no recognized terrorist group affiliation", according to the Intercept. These individuals don't even have a connection - as the government loosely defines it - to a designated terrorist group, but they are still branded as suspected terrorists.