First, passenger airliner MH370 vanished from Planet Earth. Then MH370 vanished from the news cycle. First, MH17 was shot down by "Putin's missile" - as Planet Earth was told. Then MH17 vanished from the news cycle.

Where's Baudrillard when we need him? Had he been alive, the dervish of simulacra would have already deconstructed these two Malaysian planes as mirror images; from absolute vanishing to maximum exposure, then vanished again. They might as well have been abducted - and shot - by aliens. Now you seem them, now you don't.

Black boxes, data recorders - everything MH17 is now floating in a black void.
The British are taking forever to analyze the data - and if they have already done so, they are not talking. It's as if they were singing, I see a black box / and I want it painted black ... void.

The Pentagon, with 20-20 vision over Ukraine, knows what happened. Russian intelligence not only knows what happened but offered a tantalizing glimpse of it in an official presentation, dismissed by the "West". The best technical analyses point not to "Putin's missile" - a BUK - but to a combination of R-60 air-to-air missile and the auto-cannon of an Su-25.

A reader led me to this fair assessment by former USAF and Boeing engineer Raymond Blohm: "With proper vectoring, a Su-25 need not be quite as fast as a Boeing 777 in cruise. It just has to get to a missile-firing position. Since the 777 was not maneuvering, it would be simple to pre-calculate when to get in a certain spot in the sky below the 777. From there, it's the missile that has the speed and altitude capability to hit the 777. (The R-60 is a very capable missile.) After the missile takes out an engine, both the 777's max speed and its max altitude are well within the Su-25 fighter's speed & altitude capabilities. Then, the Su-25 can show off its cannon power."

Canisters of tear gas thrown indiscriminately into crowds, armored vehicles rolling through city streets and men in camouflage wielding machine guns - it seems like a scene from Fallujah or Kabul or perhaps from the dark days of the U.S. civil rights movement.

But as the world knows, this is Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Even as the community struggles to come to grips with the tragic shooting death of yet another unarmed young African-American man, the events unfolding in Ferguson have thrown a spotlight on a second alarming trend: the increasing militarization of local police departments.

In response to protesters expressing outrage over the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown, the St. Louis County and Ferguson police departments have turned the streets of this majority-African-American suburb into a veritable war zone, firing rubber bullets, menacing demonstrators with dogs and in general displaying excessive force for the purposes of security and crowd control.

"This militarization that we are witnessing - police officers dressed as soldiers, using military vehicles and military weapons to engage largely unarmed protesters - is outrageous," said Tom Nolan, chairman of the department of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, who served for 27 years in the Boston Police Department. "It's a disgrace."

But as jarring as the images coming from Ferguson are, experts say the tinderbox situation on the ground was also inevitable, given how the federal government has readily handed over military-grade weapons, armor and equipment to local law enforcement with scant oversight or training.

Back in the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement was one of the hottest political issues in the country. When he was running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton promised that NAFTA would result in an increase in the number of high quality jobs for Americans that it would reduce illegal immigration.

Ross Perot warned that just the opposite would happen. He warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a "giant sucking sound" as thousands of businesses and millions of jobs left this country. Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton. Well, it is 20 years later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong.

But now history is repeating itself, and most Americans don't even realize that it is happening. As you will read about at the end of this article, Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret trade treaty that is being called "NAFTA on steroids", and if Congress adopts it we could lose millions more good paying jobs.

A Russian aid convoy rumbled toward rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, stirring fears of a direct confrontation between Russia and Ukraine after months of hands-off sparring through armed proxies between the two bitterly estranged neighbors.

Warning that Ukraine would deploy "all forces available" to halt the convoy if it refused to submit to inspection by Ukrainian border guards, Ukraine's military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said that "any attempt to introduce any convoy without the permission of Ukraine would be considered an act of open aggression."


The convoy of around 260 trucks, mostly military vehicles that had been recently spray-painted white and covered with white tarpaulins, came within miles of the Ukrainian border on Thursday but then halted its advance, turning onto a long dusty road near a Russian military base on the outskirts of the Russian town of Kamensk-Shakhtinsky.

Ukraine and its Western allies have cast a mistrustful eye on the Russian mission from the start, regarding it more as a cynical ploy to help beleaguered rebel forces stave off defeat and thus extend a war that they say the Kremlin itself has covertly stoked, and is the primary cause of the humanitarian crisis that the aid convoy is supposed to relieve.

Ukraine said Friday that its artillery destroyed part of a convoy of Russian military vehicles that crossed into Ukraine at around the same time as a Russian relief aid convoy was reaching the border area.

The Russian defense ministry flatly denied the report and the Russian Foreign Ministry said it has information that Ukraine was planning to attack the now stalled 262-truck Russian humanitarian convoy.

Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko confirmed the attack on the Russian armored personnel carriers in a telephone call, saying that a "significant" part of the military column had been destroyed, according to the Ukrainian leader's website. "Much of this equipment was destroyed by the Ukrainian artillery at night," the statement says.

Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine's National Security Defense Council, also reported that parts of the armored were "destroyed."


"Appropriate actions were undertaken and a part of it no longer exist," Lysenko told reporters. He said the military convoy had been closely observed since crossing the border from Russia.

NSA whistleblower says he left detectable digital traces of his removal of documents which the agency did not pick up on

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has called into question the competence of the investigation into the aftermath of his disclosures, which was overseen by the NSA's new deputy director, Rick Ledgett.

In a new cover story for Wired magazine, the former NSA contractor provided writer James Bamford with previously unreported allegations of NSA cyberattack tools, including a piece of software, codenamed MonsterMind, that would automate a hostile response when it detected a network intrusion. He also alleged that a 2012 incident that took Syria's internet offline was the fault of the NSA.

Snowden told Bamford, a longtime chronicler of the agency, that he left detectable digital traces of his removal of scores of documents from the technically sophisticated agency, allowing the NSA to know precisely what he did and did not take. Yet making a specific determination of the extent of the data breach has escaped the agency, which has simultaneously made vast and dire claims about the damage Snowden caused.

The head of the NSA's digital forensics investigation into the Snowden disclosures, considered the most extensive in the agency's history, was Ledgett, who has since been promoted to deputy director, its most senior civilian position.

The official MH17 narrative still prevails: the "pro-Russian rebels" shot down Malaysian airlines MH17 with a Buk missile system provided by Russia.

In a new and rather unusual twist, however, according to the Kiev regime, the Donetsk militia did not intend to shoot down Malaysian airlines MH17. What the "pro-Russian rebels" were aiming at was a Russian Aeroflot passenger plane.

The MH17 was shot down "by mistake" according to an official statement by the head of Ukraine's Secret Service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko(Ukraine News Service, August 7, 2014)

According to SBU Chief Nalyvaichenko:

"Ukraine's law enforcement and intelligence agencies have established during the investigation into a terrorist attack on the Boeing... that on that day, July 17, and at that time military mercenaries and terrorists from the Russian Federation planned to carry out a terrorist attack against a passenger aircraft of Aeroflot en route from Moscow to Larnaca... as a pretext for the further invasion by Russia,"

"This cynical terrorist attack was planned for the day when the [Malaysia Airlines] plane happened to fly by, planned by war criminals as a pretext for the further military invasion by the Russian Federation, that is, there would be a casus belli," he added.

Thus, according Nalyvaichenko, the terrorists downed the Malaysian airliner by mistake." (Ukraine Interfax News, August 8, 2014)

Nalyvaichenko said that the Kiev government reached this conclusion "in the course of its own investigation into the downing of MH17″.

Statement of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Connection with the Attempts to Derail the Delivery of Humanitarian Aid to Those Suffering from Hostilities in the Southeastern Region of Ukraine

The attempts to create new and greater obstacles in the way of the delivery of Russian humanitarian aid to the civilian population of Donbass cause deep concern. The implementation of this mission has entered its final stage. In discussions with the representatives of the Ukrainian authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross ("ICRC"), we were able to reconcile practically all the key parameters of the transfer to the intended recipients of food, medicine and other essentials.

At the same time, there are forces that intend not simply to deprive the population of the Southeast of Ukraine of this assistance - which is of urgent, immediate necessity - but also to perpetrate open provocations likely to further complicate the situation in the conflict zone. Whereas, if earlier the humanitarian mission was obstructed through flimsy claims of organization and procedural difficulties, we are now receiving information about direct threats of the use of force against our convoy. Reports are coming in that a saboteur group of the «Aidar» punitive battalion is planning to mine certain sections of the roads in the Lugansk region with the intention of destroying the vehicles carrying the humanitarian cargo and the attending personnel; and then to accuse the Militia of these terrorist acts.

We also draw your attention to the sharp intensification of combat operations by the Ukrainian military, which pursues the obvious objective of cutting off the route - agreed-upon with Kiev - of the humanitarian column from the Russian-Ukrainian border to Lugansk.

Despite the Supreme Court having ruled that videotaping police is legal and protected by the 1st Amendment, citizens all across the country continue to be arrested, charged, and abused by police for doing so.

Generally speaking, those videotaping and subsequently subjected to police harassment or brutality are activists or otherwise concerned and "average" citizens. However, the police state grows bolder and bolder every day in its attempt to crush dissent and instill the concept that challenging the power of the state will not be allowed, regardless of social standing.

Such is the case with the recent arrest of Randy Credico, a Democratic primary candidate in the New York State Governor's race who is challenging corrupt New York Governor Cuomo.

Credico was arrested on August 13, 2014 while on his way to a campaign interview.

Credico, while waiting at the Dyckman Street subway stop in New York City, witnessed two plain clothes men aggressively stopping and harassing a man in the tunnel. At first unaware of the fact that the two men were police, Credico whipped out his cellphone camera and began filming. When the two men, who were actually plainclothes transit police, discovered that they were being filmed, they arrested Credico.

The militarisation of police departments across America has escalated exponentially in the years since 9/11

If Ferguson, Missouri, looks like a war zone, that may be because its police force is armed to the teeth with military equipment. In photographs from this week's protests, officers can be seen toting assault rifles, wearing gas masks and body armour loaded with extra ammunition magazines, and riding around in mine-resistant armoured personnel carriers.

The militarisation of US police departments has escalated exponentially in the years since 9/11, with many local forces increasingly resembling US troops fighting overseas.

And with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wound down, much of the military's surplus equipment has been handed to domestic law enforcement agencies.

According to a recent report by the New York Times, since 2006 US police departments have collectively acquired 93,763 machine guns; 432 mine-resistant trucks; more than 500 aircraft; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night vision gear; and hundreds of thousands of ammunition magazines, all supplied via a Department of Defence programme.