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Former advisor to the State Dept.: Victoria Nuland and the war party's answer to everything is 'it's all Putin's fault'


Sputnik
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 20:23 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/ Pablo Martinez Monsivais
It seems that the US war party's primary goal is to forever ruin US-Russian relations, former advisor to the US-Russia Presidential Commission at the US State Department James Carden notes.

A hearing held by the House Foreign Affairs Committee last Wednesday has indicated clearly that the US war party is determined to drive a wedge between the United States and Russia, according to James Carden, a Washington-based expert and former advisor to the US-Russia Presidential Commission at the US State Department.

The war party's stand, or goal, is to forever ruin US-Russian relations. But rather than being preoccupied by Russia's much-decried invasion of Ukraine, it is now focused on Russia's 'escalation' over Syria," Carden pointed out in his article for the Nation.


Comment: It would be more accurate to say that the war party's stand or goal is not merely "forever ruin US-Russian relations" but to ruin and subugate Russia period. But, of course, Mr. Carden cannot go that far writing for a fairly mainstream publication, even if he believes it.

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Arrow Down

Pentagon and Co. epic fail: Why U.S. weapons systems are worse than Russia's

Jacob Dreizin
Russian Insider
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 18:10 UTC
US F-35 fighter jet

The F-35: Insanely expensive, its costs keep soaring - and it's worse than Russian planes which cost 20 times less
The US military is in serious trouble, unable to compete with Russia, and unlikely to change going forward. Two reasons: complexity, and too much money.

Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia's demonstrated competence in Syria.

So we have the "what" of the issue, but how about the "why"?

As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of "defense" contractors anywhere in America—I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)

First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.

We don't even have to look to the F-35 on this one.

Just consider the most basic item, the M-16.

Comment: It would seem that Russia has indeed called the US bluff, both politically and militarily, in the most decorous of diplomatic terms, possibly privately gaping in wonder at Washington's clownish ineptitude.

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Attention

Unyielding global supply glut taking place off the coast of Galveston, TX

Tyler Durden
Zerohedge
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 17:53 UTC
Oil tanker
Having exposed the world yesterday to the 2-mile long line of tankers-full'o'crude heading from Iraq to the US, several weeks after reporting that China has run out of oil storage space we can now confirm that the global crude "in transit" glut is becoming gargantuan and is starting to have adverse consequences on the price of oil.

While the crude oil tanker backlog in Houston reaches an almost unprecedented 39 (with combined capacity of 28.4 million barrels), as The FT reports that from China to the Gulf of Mexico, the growing flotilla of stationary supertankers is evidence that the oil price crash may still have further to run, as more than 100m barrels of crude oil and heavy fuels are being held on ships at sea (as the year-long supply glut fills up available storage on land). The storage problems are so severe in fact, that traders asking ships to go slow, and that is where we see something very strange occurring off the coast near Galveston, TX.
Iranian oil ships
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Radar

Bombing campaign in Syria - Russian technology makes the difference

Daniel Fielding
Russia Insider
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 16:59 UTC
SU-34 cockpit

Cockpit of the SU34 - the most advanced bomber deployed by the Russians in Syria
Advanced aircraft and targeting systems combined with clever tactics have the jihadis on the run.

As the Syrian army continues its advances, a Syrian officer has explained to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti why Russian air strikes are so effective.

He is reported to have said the following:
"Syrian aircraft are easily detectable in the sky and militants have time to hide. Russian warplanes launch attacks from higher altitudes since they are equipped with cutting-edge sighting and guidance systems. They also use guided bombs."
This claim is undoubtedly true and explains why the Russian intervention has proved in military terms so decisive.The aircraft the Syrian air force uses are old Soviet machines dating from the 1960s to 1980s.Aircraft like the MiG21 and MiG23 were designed as air to air fighters. They cannot carry heavy bomb loads. The MiG21 is limited to 1,000 kgs. The MiG23 to 3,000 kgs.

This compares with the much heavier bomb loads the Russian aircraft can carry: 4,000 kgs in the case of the SU25s, 8,000 kgs in the case of the SU24s and 12,000 kgs in the case of the SU34s.The heavier loads the Russian aircraft can carry don't just mean they can carry more bombs.It means they can carry much bigger bombs - capable of far more destruction than the much smaller bombs the Syrians use.

Comment: Russia is making efficient use of all its resources, even psychological pressure.

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Blue Planet

The great global change game: Our civilization is headed for the fate of the Bronze Age - destruction

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Sott.net
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 18:20 UTC
world burning
I haven't written anything for SOTT in quite a while, mainly because, as far as I could see, I had said everything that I thought needed to be said in dozens of articles over the years. It's not that I gave up, I just turned my attention to my historical research in an effort to find the key that might possibly unlock a system for change. I haven't found it. In fact, historical research has convinced me more today than ever that there is no good outcome for the human race if the present conditions continue along their defined trajectory. If human beings don't kill billions of other human beings rather soon, it seems the planet itself, or the cosmos, will do it for us.

Oh, indeed, Vladimir Putin has tossed a monkey wrench into the works of the Global Elite's drive for full-spectrum dominance, but the last person who did that from within what could be called an equivalent empire was Julius Caesar, and look what happened to him.

At present I'm working my way through a detailed account of the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization and the comparisons are so interesting that I think I'd like to bring them to your attention. At the end of the Bronze Age, there was a perfect storm of conditions and events that took the Mediterranean peoples - possibly the peoples on the entire planet, if the data could be collected - into a dark age that they did not come out of for about 300 years. If humanity survives at all, I think we are facing something similar.

Comment: Recommended reading: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline.

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Eye 1

Israeli 'security' disguised as Arabs burst into West Bank hospital, kill Palestinian


RT
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 15:48 UTC
Image
© Hazem Bader/AFP
A Palestinian doctor shows a bullet hole at al-Ahli hospital in the West Bank town of Hebron after a man was shot dead during a raid by Israeli undercover agents on November 12, 2015.
Israeli security service operatives infiltrated a hospital in the Palestinian West Bank on Thursday, killing a bystander while attempting to detain a suspect who allegedly carried out a stabbing, local sources say.

Jehad Shawar, director of Al Ahly Hospital in the West Bank city of Hebron, told Palestinian radio around 30 men arrived at the scene in two vans and entered the hospital building with a person pretending to be pregnant, Reuters reports. The Israeli forces infiltrated the hospital to arrest a Palestinian named Abdallah Azzam al-Shalalda, 27, who allegedly stabbed an Israeli settler near Hebron two weeks ago.

CCTV footage from the hospital shows armed men, all dressed as Arabs, some of them bearded or covering their faces, bursting into the corridor, aiming guns at medical personnel. "They held the staff at gunpoint and stormed the room of al-Shalalda," Shawar said, as cited by Reuters.

Al-Shalalda's brother Bilal was reportedly in the same room and was tied to the bed by the Israeli operatives. Another man, al-Shalalda's cousin, was shot dead moments later. "As soon they entered the room they tied me to the bed. [My cousin] was inside the bathroom and wanted to wash for prayer. As he was exiting the bathroom, one of the undercover men shouted at him to stop and they opened fire," Bilal told Reuters TV.

Afterwards the Israeli operatives captured Al-Shalalda himself, put him in a wheelchair and got out of the room while not allowing medical aid for the man who was shot. "[The cousin] remained on the ground bleeding and they hit [Al-Shalalda] my brother on his head and took him away," according to al-Shalalda's brother Bilal as quoted by Reuters.


Comment: Zionist savagery.

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Pirates

How Natalie Jaresko (U.S. citizen) now Ukraine's finance chief, robbed US taxpayers blind

Robert Parry
Consortium News
Tue, 10 Nov 2015 16:19 UTC
Jaresko Ukraine finance chief

Some for me; Some for you....
With her high-finance crook credentials, she fits right in at the top of Ukraine's government.

Before becoming Ukraine's Finance Minister last December, Natalie Jaresko collected $1.77 million in bonuses from a U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund where her annual compensation was supposed to be limited to $150,000, according to financial documents filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service this year.

The near 12-fold discrepancy between the compensation ceiling and Jaresko's bonuses, paid in 2013, was justified in the IRS filing from the Jaresko-led Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF) by drawing a distinction between getting paid directly from the $150 million U.S. government grant that created the fund and the money from the fund's "investment sales proceeds," which were treated as fair game for extracting bonuses far beyond the prescribed compensation level.

Using this supposed loophole, Jaresko and some of her associates enriched themselves by claiming money generated from U.S. taxpayers' dollars while avoiding any personal financial risks. She and other WNISEF officers collected the bonuses from what they deemed "profitable" exits from some investments even if the overall fund was losing money and shrinking, as it apparently was in recent years.

Comment: It appears that Ukraine is adhering to the corrupt, cronyistic "European values". Contrast that with Putin's steady efforts at cleaning up his own country


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Eye 2

Syria's civil war and the uprising against Assad was engineered in Washington

Eric Zuesse
Strategic Culture Foundation
Wed, 11 Nov 2015 17:00 UTC
Image
A terrific news report by Jonathan Marshall at Consortium News provides the first-ever presentation in the West of the event that sparked the demonstrations that sparked the Syrian civil war, and of the entire origin of that war.

Unlike so many online 'news' reports that are merely authoritarian trash because they don't link to any of their sources (they rely instead upon dumb readers' faith or trust in the 'reporter' or in the publisher, such as The New York Times or Fox News), this one from Marshall is top-notch: not only does it provide intelligently skeptical readers with instantaneous access to documentation for each one of its key points, but those sources are credible ones. Taken all together, the sources, and Marshall's presentation of them, constitute a solid historical account of how the war to bring down Syria's leader, Bashar al-Assad, actually started.

It didn't start by Assad's dumping (as U.S. President Barack Obama loves to claim) "barrel bombs," upon merely peaceful protesters in Syria. It started actually in Washington, years before that. The Obama Administration itself was taking advantage of not only the "Arab Spring" protests throughout much of the Arab world, but, specifically, of an ongoing economic catastrophe in Syria that had started five years before the anti-Assad demonstrations did: an extended drought. Here is how the source that Marshall linked to describes it, two years before the "Arab Spring" even began:
In the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have been abandoned near Aleppo as crop failures have forced over 200,000 rural Syrians to leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough, but when put into a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these villages have been continuously farmed for 8000 years.
That source had been published on 16 January 2010. The drought continued on; the situation only got even worse right into 2011 and up through the public demonstrations in Aleppo that started the war. There were no "barrel bombs" then. There was instead surging economic dislocation. Obama merely took advantage of it. He knew that it was coming, and he planned so as to exploit it.
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Attention

US-led anti-IS coalition airstrikes help Kurds launch offensive in Iraq, Turks consider ground operation in Syria


RT
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 16:12 UTC
Army
© Ako Rasheed / Reuters
US-led anti-IS coalition airstrikes in support of the Kurdish offensive operation in Iraq have killed from 60 to 70 Islamists, the US military reports.

American military personnel aren't taking part in the siege of the city of Sinjar, but military advisers are stationed near Sinjar Mountain, staying in contact with Kurdish commanders, US military representatives in Iraq report.

Kurdish forces lave launched an offensive to retake northern Iraq's city of Sinjar, controlled by Islamic State for over a year. The Turkish government has announced plans to send 10,700 soldiers to Syria in mid-December to make a buffer zone for refugees.

Through all of the time that Islamic State (IS, former ISIS/ISIL) has controlled Sinjar, since early August 2014, the onslaught on the Yazidi population of the city continues with people, including women and children, being killed and enslaved.

Comment: So what is going on here? The US has been planning this operation since last year. And now with Russia's success in Syria while Iraq mulls asking Russia for help, the US and Turkey are helping the Kurds in Iraq. Is the US just trying to save face or do they want to prevent Russia from helping other Middle East nations?

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Light Saber

Russian TV station accidentally leaks "nuclear torpedo" design


RT
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 16:17 UTC
Image
© Alexei Druzhinin / RIA Novosti
The Kremlin has confirmed "some secret data" was accidentally leaked when Russian TV stations broadcast material apparently showing blueprints from a nuclear torpedo, designed to be used against enemy coastal installations.

During President Vladimir Putin's meeting with military officials in Sochi, where the development of Russia's military capabilities were being discussed, a number of TV crews were able to capture footage of a paper that was certainly not meant for public viewing.

The presentation slide titled "Ocean Multipurpose System: Status-6" showed some drawings of a new nuclear submarine weapons system. It is apparently designed to bypass NATO radars and any existing missile defense systems, while also causing heavy damage to "important economic facilities" along the enemy's coastal regions.

The footnote to the slide stated that Status-6 is intended to cause "assured unacceptable damage" to an adversary force. Its detonation "in the area of the enemy coast" would result in "extensive zones of radioactive contamination" that would ensure that the region would not be used for "military, economic, business or other activity" for a "long time."

Comment: It's no wonder Ash Carter and the rest of the military brass in the Pentagon are freaking out. This leak may not have been as accidental as it appears. It could be a message to Washington that Russia has plenty of weapons at their disposal that could do major damage, if the US were stupid enough to engage with them in a war.

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