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Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg - Donbas conflict not NATO's responsibility


Sputnik
Sun, 15 Mar 2015 04:36 UTC
Image
NATO General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview to Sky News that the conflict in southeastern Ukraine is not the responsibility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The conflict in southeastern Ukraine (Donbas) is not the responsibility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has told Sky News.

"Our main responsibility is to defend and to protect all NATO allies and no NATO ally has been attacked," Stoltenberg said on Friday, reminding that Ukraine is not a member of NATO "so there is a difference between Ukraine and NATO members, because the security guarantee is for NATO allies."

A military conflict started in southeastern Ukraine in April, 2014, when Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters who refused to recognize the new coup-installed government. The Kiev authorities, as well as Western countries and NATO have been accusing Russia of being involved in the situation in Ukraine, going as far as to claim that Russia has sent weapons to Donbas independence supporters.

Stoltenberg told Sky News that adherence to the Minsk truce is crucial to the stabilization of the situation in Ukraine.

"The most important thing now is to support the implementation of the Minsk agreements, meaning respecting the ceasefire, making sure that all their weapons are withdrawn from the frontline," Stoltenberg said.

Meanwhile on Thursday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that Ukraine continues to build up its military potential and defense capability, having resumed regular military training, which will be conducted with the participation of NATO instructors.

Comment: Can there be a more mixed message than this? On the one hand "not NATO's problem" but on the other hand training and arming Ukraine as it prepares to ditch Minsk 2.0. "Believe what we say, not what we do." Psychopathic hypocrisy at its best.

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Star of David

Barney Frank - Israel & AIPAC lobbied Congress to push for Iraq war


MondoWeiss
Sat, 14 Mar 2015 13:46 UTC
Barney Frank

Barnett "Barney" Frank is an American politician who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013.
The Forward's Nathan Guttman reports that the Netanyahu speech has enraged not just liberal Jews but centrist establishment types, who are finally becoming critical of Israel. The hardworking Guttman reports on an explosion in Washington ahead of the speech:
On March 2, [Florida Rabbi David] Paskin, who attended the AIPAC annual conference in Washington that coincided with Netanyahu's speech, was among dozens at a packed closed-door session on pro-Israel outreach to progressives. There, the discussion quickly turned heated when former Democratic congressman Barney Frank (who is [AIPAC operative] Ann Lewis's brother) chided the lobby for not speaking out against Netanyahu's visit and for avoiding any criticism of Israeli policies. According to two session participants, Frank argued that this reluctance causes pro-Israel activists to lose their credibility among progressives.

Tempers flared even more, they said, when Frank claimed that Israel and AIPAC had lobbied members of Congress a decade ago to support the war in Iraq. Similar arguments in the past have been hurled at the lobby by anti-war activists from the left and have always been vehemently denied. Frank, faced with vocal resistance from AIPAC members in the room, clarified that while calling for war was not the lobby's official position, some of its top members advocated for it personally in their meetings with him and other members of Congress.

Efforts to contact Frank to ask about this exchange were unsuccessful.
Remember that Walt and Mearsheimer were tarred as anti-Semites for saying in 2006 that the Israel lobby pushed the Iraq war. I supported the two scholars' argument because I had heard as much myself; in 2002, my brother shocked me when he said, "I demonstrated against the Vietnam War, but my Jewish newspaper said this war could be good for Israel."The Jewish community has never had an honest conversation about this matter; no, Jeffrey Goldberg and Marty Peretz and friends shut it down by calling Walt and Mearsheimer anti-Semites. That conversation would include asking Tom Friedman, David Remnick, Peter Beinart, and Kenneth Pollack if they pushed the Iraq war in part out of concern for Israel's security. And did they believe that Jeffrey Goldberg and Judith Miller were carrying water for Israel when they put out their bogus reports on Saddam's WMD? This is another great benefit of the Netanyahu speech, problematizing the issue of what Joe Klein called divided loyalties inside American Zionist life. Not a witchhunt, an accounting.

By the way, Barney Frank voted against the Iraq war.

Comment: Perhaps. ever so slowly, the tide against Zionism is starting to shift. The crimes of Israel are becoming too large for their supporters in US to ignore. The question is, will there be a Palestine left before it finally does.

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Binoculars

Canadian intel agent linked with getting British schoolgirls into Syria to join ISIS

Brandon Martinez
Non-Aligned Media
Fri, 13 Mar 2015 23:38 UTC
schoolgirls isis

Picture of three British schoolgirls who joined ISIS.
The Ottawa Citizen has reported that an individual who authorities believe helped three British schoolgirls travel to Syria to join ISIS is linked to Canada's intelligence agency, CSIS.

The Citizen noted that, "Turkish news agencies reported Thursday that a foreign intelligence agent detained in that country on suspicion of helping the girls travel to neighbouring Syria to join ISIL was working for the Canadian government."

Turkey's foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that the suspect in question was working for an intelligence agency that is part of the US-led coalition fighting ISIS, adding that it wasn't the US or an EU member.

Turkish media reports later identified the suspect as a CSIS agent, citing sources close to the Turkish government.

Ottawa issued a prototypical denial that one of their operatives was involved.

The story confirms what many analysts have been saying all along, which is that ISIS is an elaborate Western intelligence operation.

Comment: CSIS... ISIS... Maybe the guy was just confused which Western intelligence-related agency he was working for? The mask is falling off the ISIS bogeyman, and we're not shocked at whose face appears beneath it: Perhaps IS/U.S. would be a more apt moniker.

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Pirates

Lithuania jails 84 year old ex-Soviet security officer for 5 years for 'committing genocide' - His real crime? Prosecuting die-hard Nazis

Kaunas
RT
Sat, 14 Mar 2015 21:43 UTC
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Lithuanian 'nationalists' marching to commemorate their forefathers' valiant participation in Hitler's death machine.
An 84-year-old former Soviet state security officer has been found guilty of genocide and sentenced by a Lithuanian court to five years in jail over his participation in a 1956 operation to arrest guerrilla leader Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas.

Court prosecutors in the city of Kaunas asked for a longer sentence - seven years - for Stanislovas Drelingas, who insisted he was innocent.

"Although the defendant denied his direct complicity in genocide, i.e., he denied having taken any part in the operation specified in the indictment, evidence in the case suggests that he was part of the operation and helped other members of the Soviet administration," the court said.

The court ruled on the shorter term due to long-lasting legal proceedings, Drelingas' health problems, and the fact that his role in the crime was secondary. His verdict has not yet come into force and could be moved to a new trial in a Lithuanian appeals court.

Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas - one of the leaders of an anti-Soviet guerrilla troop called "Forest Brothers" - was arrested in 1956 in Kaunas, sentenced to death, and shot after spending a year in a Vilnius jail.

Comment: Strange, we remember a time when ageing Nazis were being prosecuted, not ageing prosecutors of Nazis.

From prosecuting Soviet-era officials, to glorifying Nazis; from barring ethnic Russians from voting, to allowing the US to plant thousands of troops, missiles and tanks on their Russian borders... what is WRONG with these three NATO-stan countries? Can they not SEE what's happening in Ukraine? By indulging their fetish for pathocratic Western authorities, and by encouraging their countries' extremist elements, they are bringing down upon their heads the very thing that would destroy them: baiting the Russian bear into proxy border wars.

Of course they can't see it. Really, some peoples are just not fit to govern themselves.

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Bizarro Earth

Victims of the 'global chessboard': Millions of Syrian refugees 'abandoned' in Lebanon

Andre Vltchek
New Eastern Outlook
Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00 UTC
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© Unknown
With much of Syria's infrastructure and towns decimated by Western-supported ISIL, who knows how long these millions of refugees will have to wait before they can return to Syria to put their lives back together, or even get a little relief.
Syrian refugees. There are several million of them all over the region: in Turkey and Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, even in Egypt.

Clearly, a "Syrian refugee crisis" has been triggered by the West and by its allies, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. For years, all of these countries have been hard at work, destabilizing the secular and socially oriented government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

For two years I have been covering the story, making documentary films and writing reports about the so-called "Syrian opposition" that has been recruited, trained and financed in 'refugee' and military camps in both Turkey and Jordan. That opposition, of course, included ill famed Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) or Daesh, or whatever one wants to call them.

The West has reached perfection in destroying entire countries and in ruining millions of human lives. However, once a country is crushed, both the US and Europe are known to lose interest in the people left 'under the debris'. The West is not interested in dealing with the human tragedies it triggers, be it in Iraq, Libya or in Syria.

*

Comment: Just one of the incredibly high costs - in human suffering - that the U.S. government and allied psychopathic regimes incur on a world-wide scale. And what's to come. It doesn't look like the manufactured 'war on terror' is about to be stopped any time soon.

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Bad Guys

NATO's war propaganda is a crime against humanity not freedom of speech

Christopher Black
New Eastern Outlook
Fri, 13 Mar 2015 21:30 UTC
Nato
© Unknown
The reaction of the media in the Nato countries to the murder of Boris Nemtsov reveals the next phase of the war against Russia. Defeated at Debaltsevo, defied by Russia, lectured by China, the Nato warlords need something immediate and dramatic to guide the imaginations of their peoples towards war. The constant propaganda offensive aimed at Russia is accelerating and is increasingly designed to identify Russia and its people not with the Russian government, but with a single man and, with the murder of Nemtsov, that man is now labelled assassin.

Across the broad spectrum of the "western" media in the past days there has appeared one story after another designed to make the average citizen believe that President Putin was personally involved in the killing. The facts of the case do not matter. The Nato governments deny any involvement in a provocation but their immediate denunciations, the morning following the murder, of Russian democracy, of Russian government, and of President Putin, convict them all on the charge of exploiting the murder as surely as if the assassins' bullets were theirs.

The labelling of resisting leaders as criminals has been used frequently in the west since the days of the Roman Empire and once a foreign leader is so labelled a war soon follows. In recent history the Americans and their Nato lieutenants identified President Milosevic as a criminal for simply refusing Nato's diktats. They did the same with Saddam Hussein, with Muammar Gaddafi and murdered them all, one way or another.

Comment: The lessons of WWII and Nazi Germany are plentiful and applicable to our own times as we see so many of the same dynamics play out today.

See SOTT's Holocaust 2.0 series:

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USA

United States of Europe: American military aggressively invades - er, occupies - Baltic states

Howard Koplowitz
International Business Times
Mon, 09 Mar 2015 21:19 UTC
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© Reuters
An Abrams main battle tank, for U.S. troops deployed in the Baltics as part of NATO's invasion of Eastern Europe aka Operation 'Atlantic Resolve', arrive at the port in Riga, Latvia, on March 9, 2015.
The United States is sending 3,000 soldiers near Russia's doorstep for training exercises with the militaries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Associated Press reported Monday. The deployment by the Pentagon comes amid rising tensions with Russia on the crisis in Ukraine, in which most of the West accuses Moscow of instigating the military conflict between pro-Russia separatists and the Ukrainian military.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are all NATO countries that gained membership in the alliance in 2004. About 750 U.S. tanks, helicopters and other equipment are scheduled to arrive in the Latvian capital of Riga next Monday, Army Col. Steve Warren told the AP. The military exercises are expected to last three months, although Army Gen. John O'Conner said the equipment will stay "for as long as required to deter Russian aggression," according to the Russian news agency Tass.

The exercises were planned as the three countries become increasingly concerned over Russia's aggression in eastern Ukraine, according to the AP. "The presence of our allies in Latvia is a confirmation of solidarity and security in the region," said Latvian Defense Minister Raimonds Vejonis, according to Tass.

Comment: Indeed, it's "a confirmation of solidarity and security" for the ruling elites in the region.

Estonian media is reporting that US tanks have already rolled in to Estonia:

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War Whore

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project: The Pentagon's $1 trillion failure


RT
Wed, 11 Mar 2015 04:29 UTC
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© artizans.com
The laundry list of problems affecting the Pentagon's F-35 fighter jet reportedly includes a high rate of false alarms from its large array of sensors. The expensive defense project is being criticized for producing an unreliable and unaffordable weapon.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has a number of sensitive sensors, and engineers have a hard time teaching its software to interpret the data they provide. The information must be checked against so-called threat libraries, and files of signatures of known threats.

At the moment the fusion between the two is far from being complete, reports Breaking Defense, and the system currently produces many false alarms. The military online magazine cites an Air Force officer familiar with the integration effort for the service's version of the jet, the F-35-A, who said that the problem would not be fixed by the initial operating capability (IOC) deadline of mid-2016.

Comment: Imagine what could be done with $1 trillion, if it was spent on, say, building lovely neighborhoods?


See also:

Join the Campaign to Stop the F-35 Basing

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Passport

Reality check for Nuland: 98% of Crimean Tatars got Russian passports


Sputnik
Sat, 14 Mar 2015 15:50 UTC
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© Flickr/ thisisbossi
Sergei Aksyonov, the head of the Republic of Crimea, has rebuffed Victoria Nuland's recent claims that Crimean Tatars are among those who have refused to surrender their Ukrainian passports.

The absolute majority of the Crimean Tatars still residing in Crimea, totaling between 97 and 98 percent of the ethnic minority, have received Russian passports, according to the head of the Republic of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov.

About 3,000 people living in the Peninsula have refused to exchange their Ukrainian passports for Russian ones since the region's unification with Russia.

Comment: Nothing coming out of Nuland's mouth is based on reality.

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Red Flag

CIA Director says Washington against 'collapse' of Syrian Government


Sputnik
Sat, 14 Mar 2015 15:20 UTC
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© AFP 2015/ Joseph Eid
CIA Director John Brennan has said that the United States does not want to see the collapse of President Al-Assad's government in Syria, which he warned may help Islamist militants seize power.

Washington is unwilling to see the demise of Syria's government because it may finally lead to Islamist militants coming to power in Syria, according to CIA Director John Brennan.

He said that Washington is concerned about a possible ouster of President Bashar al-Assad due to the rise of the Islamic State, which has already seized large areas of Iraq and Syria, forcing millions to flee the country.

"I think that's a legitimate concern, Brennan said, in reference to the White House's fears over who might succeed Assad in the future.

Comment: There doesn't appear to be a consensus in Washington about Assad but they are supplying IS and the Syrian "non-extremists" weapons and food. Assad is being left on his own to defend Syria against the oppositions.

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