NATO and the West Just Became Irrelevant

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By F. William Engdahl

The dual summits that took place in Russia’s Ufa beginning 9 July were anything but routine. In fact it may be seen by future historians as a signal event that marked the definitive decline of the global hegemony of European civilization including North America. This is no small event in human history. It’s the most significant shift in relative global economic relations since the Fourth Crusade in 1204 when the Republic of Venice emerged as a world power following their brutal, disgraceful capture and sacking of Constantinople, marking the demise of the Byzantine Empire.

First a look at what transpired. Russia was host to two overlapping summits of emerging alternative organizations, the annual meeting of the BRICS nations as well as the annual meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The larger significance has been all but entirely blacked out by western mainstream media such as the New York Times.

First we look at the results from the BRICS meeting where Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are the five member states. The BRICS formally put their New Development Bank (NDB) into operation. It has world headquarters in Shanghai, China’s banking and financial center with a branch in South Africa to serve the African region.

It is explicitly operating as an alternative to the post-1945 domination of the IMF and World Bank, the heart of Washington’s Dollar System. It has member contributions of $50 billion for infrastructure projects mainly, but not exclusively, in the BRICS states. As well it has created a $100 billion financial defense fund, a so-called Contingent Reserves Arrangement, in event of speculative attacks such as were launched by Washington with the Soros Quantum Fund in 1997 to destroy the independent Asian Tiger economies.

The NDB bank is in business one year after the last BRICS summit agreed to its creation, and the meeting announced that first approved infrastructure projects will begin at the beginning of 2016. That’s an impressive testament to the mutual will to create an alternative to the IMF and World Bank, both of the latter controlled by Washington where they are headquartered. Notably BRICS agreed for the first time to institute formal cooperation with the leaders of the Eurasian Economic Union of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.

As well they agreed to meet the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)–Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

SCO adds major security dimension

For its part, the nations of the SCO–Shanghai Cooperation Organization–in addition to formally admitting both India and Pakistan, agreed to increase its role combating terrorism in the region. The SCO was established in 2001 originally to settle border conflicts between China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in the years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It is now undergoing an organic metamorphosis into something quite different and, in combination with China’s One Belt, One Road New Economic Silk Road high-speed rail network crisscrossing Russia and all Eurasia, potentially the kernel of an economic region whose growth over the next century and more can pale anything the debt-bloated OECD economies of the west are capable of.

This year the SCO members admitted Pakistan and India as full members, a move that undercuts some seventy years of Anglo-American geopolitics on the Indian Subcontinent by bringing the two bitter enemies into a forum dedicated to resolving border conflicts diplomatically. The Ufa BRICS declaration also stressed the importance of reaffirming the UN Charter and condemned unilateral military intervention, a clear reference to guess who?

That enlargement to include India and Pakistan into the Eurasian SCO has huge implications for China’s New Economic Silk Road high-speed rail infrastructure network across all Eurasia as well as potential gas and oil pipeline routes in the region. Significantly, for an Obama Administration that wants to pit Iran against Russia and China with the signing of the latest nuclear Geneva 6-power deal, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani attended the BRICS/SCO summits and held private talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tehran will likely join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization after the embargo is withdrawn, perhaps as early as 2016, something that will give the SCO a major presence in the Middle East geographically.

With the planned lifting now of US economic sanctions on Iran, this could mean a huge economic deepening of the Eurasian economic space from Shanghai to St. Petersburg to Teheran and beyond, the nightmare scenario of US geopolitical actors like Zbigniew Brzezinski or Henry Kissinger.

Notably, the BRICS final declaration also pledged greater cooperation on combating terrorism and dealing with security problems of member states. This overlaps the Russia-initiated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), created in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union to provide some semblance of security from rampant CIA monkey business using veterans of the CIA’s Afghani Mujahideen to “stir up” (to use Brzezinski’s term for it) the peoples of former Soviet states with large Muslim populations across Central Asia, especially Azerbaijan and the Caucasus.

Today, the CSTO is emerging as a far more serious organization and a means by which Russia can legitimately provide direct security expertise to weaker states inside the Eurasian Economic Union such as Kyrgyzstan or Armenia, both of whom have been targets of new US-sponsored Color Revolutions to spread chaos across the emerging Eurasian economic space.

What is notable about the joint BRICS-SCO-Eurasian Economic Union summit hosted by Russia’s Putin in Ufa, a city of some one million at the foot of the Ural mountain range near to Kazakhstan, is not only the degree of harmonizing that is taking place among the three vast organizations. It is also the fact that Russia uniquely is a member of all three, facilitating the harmonization of the three in terms of strategic goals. Moreover the member states have everything and everyone necessary to be fully independent of the dollar world and the dying EU with its misbegotten Euro sham.

As The Saker pointed out in a recent perceptive piece, “the full list of BRICS/SCO members will now look like this: Brazil , China , India , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Pakistan , Russia , South Africa , Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The BRICS/SCO will thus include 2 Permanent UN Security Council, 4 countries with nuclear weapons (only 3 NATO countries have nukes!), it’s members account for a full third of the world’s land area: they produce 16 trillion dollars in GDP and have a population of 3 billion people or half of the global world population.”

A new architecture of Eurasia is being formed, something which, were they of a mind to, the nations of the EU, above all Germany, France, Italy, could hugely benefit from cooperating with. Yet, what is the response of Washington and her “vassals” in European NATO, to use the term of Brzezinski?

The NATO Washington response

The response of Washington and NATO to all this is a bleak, pathetic contrast to put it mildly.

The new Obama nominee to become US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, declared Russia to be America’s greatest threat in his Congressional testimony some days ago. Conveniently forgetting all about the “existential threat” from ISIS, an organization US and Israeli intelligence brought into being to spread their chaos, Dunford declared, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia.” The alarming thing is there was scarcely a peep of protest aside from blog remarks by retired Congressman Ron Paul and a few others. The tom-toms of bellicosity are pounding louder along the Potomac these days.

The war rage in Washington goes deeper than just one general. The Pentagon just released its Military Strategy of the United States, 2015. There the focus has clearly shifted away from “non-state actors” such as ISIS as being the greatest threat to the US and refocuses on “state actors” that are “challenging international norms.” The Pentagon strategy document goes on to name Russia, China, Iran, North Korea as the greatest threats. What they do not admit is the “threat” is to the continued sole Superpower hegemony of a United States that insists its will is the only valid one as self-appointed guardian of “democracy” and “human rights,” their New World Order as George Bush senior termed it in 1991.

On the economic front, what is emerging across the vast expanse of Eurasia is the greatest infrastructure investment in real physical infrastructure, which in turn will create new markets where today the remote regions of Siberia or Mongolia remain virtually untouched. By contrast, Obama’s Washington, a once-hegemon that has lost its soul, can only offer the US-dominated secret free trade pact, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), for Asian states absent China, as a way to contain china economically, and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that offers the same geopolitical dead end for the economies of the EU. Both trade proposals are a desperate attempt by Washington strategists and their corporate backers in agribusiness such as Monsanto or the pharmaceutical industry to dominate world trade and finance.

Just as an individual can lose themselves through a trauma, so it’s possible for entire nations, even nations as large and apparently mighty as the United States of America, to lose its soul. Once a nation loses its soul, it loses its ability to do good, to be good. That tragically describes America today. The process has been a slow-motion rot from within, much as the Roman Empire in the Third and Fourth centuries AD. The rot has proceeded over decades.

There were many seminal events we as a people let pass without acting. One such over the past century or more was the US Congress’ surrender of the Constitutional responsibility to control the issue of money, handing it over to a private cabal of Wall Street bankers who named it the Federal Reserve. Another was the perfidy of our turning on our wartime allies in Russia and making them the “new Hitler,” so that Nelson Rockefeller’s national security state, complete with a CIA, could be built to justify the devaluation of the essence of the US Constitution. Another was the decision, well, perhaps you can fill in the blanks there are so many, each seemingly minor, but as a cumulative totality toxic to genuine respect for human life and individual freedom. Then, following the events of September 11,2001 we as a nation, crippled by our fear, stood by silently as the Bill of Rights went into the paper shredder of George W. Bush with the misnamed Patriots Act and other police state laws.

Once a people as once-wonderful as the American people lose all that that made them good, it takes a conscious decision and determination to regain that goodness. The first essential step is to become conscious of what is bad in us as a people today. David Rockefeller or George H.W. Bush or Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush did not do this. We did, and they merely took the use out of our action. There we must begin if we wish to take ourselves seriously again as a nation and as a people. Seeing ourselves as “victims” regardless of what or whoever is a dead end, literally.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

US fall from virtuous republic to tragic-comic empire described exactly by Roman historians

Posted on August 2, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Carl Herman

Source: The Daily Censored

The ancient Greek historian, Polybius, celebrated the Roman republic of ~ 150 BC under its constitution with balance of powers among the Senate, two elected consuls, and the general citizens:

“Such being the power that each part has of hampering the others or co-operating with them, their union is adequate to all emergencies, so that it is impossible to find a better political system than this.” – The Histories, Book VI, Section V: On the Roman Constitution at its Prime

Americans and people around the world were equally proud of the United States Constitution as “impossible to find a better political system than this.”

About 100 years after Polybius’ account, Rome’s republic had descended into oligarchic competition for power. Contemporary to Julius Caesar, the Roman historian and government insider Sallust blasted the decline of virtue in government:

“To those who had easily endured toils, dangers, and doubtful and difficult circumstances, ease and wealth, the objects of desire to others, became a burden and a trouble. At first the love of money, and then that of power, began to prevail, and these became, as it were, the sources of every evil. For avarice subverted honesty, integrity, and other honorable principles, and, in their stead, inculcated pride, inhumanity, contempt of religion, and general venality. Ambition prompted many to become deceitful; to keep one thing concealed in the breast, and another ready on the tongue; to estimate friendships and enmities, not by their worth, but according to interest; and to carry rather a specious countenance than an honest heart. These vices at first advanced but slowly, and were sometimes restrained by correction; but afterwards, when their infection had spread like a pestilence, the state was entirely changed, and the government, from being the most equitable and praiseworthy, became rapacious and insupportable.” – Conspiracy of Catiline, The Argument

The most prolific Roman historian, Livy, witnessed Rome’s transition into dictatorial empire with Augustus Caesar as first emperor. In his preface to address 700 years of Roman history:

“I have no doubt that the earliest origins and the immediately succeeding period will give less delight to the majority of readers who are hurrying to these recent times in which the might of a most powerful people has long been destroying itself.

… I shall seek this additional reward for my labor (recounting all Rome’s history) so that I may turn away from the contemplation of the evils that our age has seen for so many years.” – The History of Rome, Preface

Tacitus wrote ~ 100 AD, a century into empire. Emperors proclaimed to the public that their government still upheld the highest ideals of their Republic, claiming expanding empire was only and always in “self-defense.”

Emperor Domitian’s assassination in 96 AD (among ~22 murdered emperors), allowed Tacitus to write The Agricola, a biographical text of his father-in-law contrasting claimed virtue of Roman military and citizenry with the emperor’s utterly corrupt despotism.

Importantly, this text describes the problem of virtuous Romans within a psychopathic government. Tacitus describes Agricola attempting to uphold virtue; but without recognition of any evil in serving an expanding dictatorial empire. Tacitus seems to assume the ideal of mos maiorum, “custom/virtue of Roman forefathers” will eventually triumph over the evil of present “leadership.”

In Agricola’s campaign as military and political leader of Roman Britain to expand the empire to modern Scotland from 78 – 84 AD, Tacitus recorded a speech he attributes to Scottish rebel-leader, Calgacus, to voice how those of virtue characterized Roman empire under corrupt emperors:

“It is no use trying to escape their arrogance by submission or good behavior. Robbers of the world, having by universal plunder exhausted the land, their drive is greed. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if poor, they lust for domination. Neither rule of the East nor West can satisfy them. Alone among men, they crave with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To plunder, slaughter, seize with false pretenses, they give the lying name ‘empire.’ And where nothing remains but a desert, they call that ‘peace.’ ” – Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania (analyses here, here)

Roman imperialists called Calgacus and those who preferred independence from evil empire a name: barbarus. This is translated today as “barbarian,” but its context for using unconventional warfare to oppose the most powerful military in its day is better translated in today’s language with a different word:

Terrorist.

Indeed, Obama combines these terms to call ISIS “barbaric terrorists.”

American Founders created the US Constitution in light of Roman Republic design (here, here, among dozens), and aware previous republics had always self-destructed from corruption within their own nations. Among many of the Founders’ admonitions, James Madison was clear that citizen responsibility was essential to maintain a republic, no matter how well the Constitution was designed:

“A mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits (of government) is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.” – James Madison, Federalist Paper #48, 1788.

On September 18, 1787, just after signing the US Constitution, Benjamin Franklin met with members of the press. He was asked what kind of government America would have. Franklin warned: “A republic, if you can keep it.” In his speech to the Constitutional Convention, Franklin admonished: “This [U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism… when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.” – The Quotable Founding Fathers, pg. 39.

These warnings extend to all social science teachers of the present:

“As educators in the field of history–social science, we want our students to… understand the value, the importance, and the fragility of democratic institutions. We want them to realize that only a small fraction of the world’s population (now or in the past) has been fortunate enough to live under a democratic form of government.” – History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools, pgs. 2, 7-8

US/UK/Israel today: Current Middle East armed attacks are proclaimed by US/UK/Israel “leaderships” as self-defense, just as Rome claimed. US “leaders” claim to uphold America’s highest ideals of freedom while removing almost all Constitutional Rights, as did Roman emperors. Corruption today, as in Rome, is rampant.

US/UK/Israel wars today are not even close to legal, and based on lies known to be false as they are told. Engaging in unlawful Wars of Aggression is the very opposite of a virtuous republic limited in power under its constitution. This is easy to verify for those with about an hour to look:

Solutions learned from the past applied to the present: Tacitus’ argument was to wait-out tyranny in confidence public virtue of past ideals would triumph.

Tacitus was wrong.

A stronger solution would be critical mass recognition by the public of corruption in an Emperor’s New Clothes analogy, arrests, and a clear forum for whistleblowers to disclose the full extent of corruption.

In today’s world of tragic-comic US/UK/Israel corrupt empire, I propose the solution of:

public demand for “leader” arrests. An arrest lawfully stops crimes.
Truth & Reconciliation to encourage criminal minions to become whistleblowers so we can best discover the extent of the crimes waged by the .01% upon the 99.99%.
With removed criminal oligarchs and corporate media who “covered” these crimes, we’d have honest opportunity for available economic solutions that would transform our beautiful, but historically dominated planet.

Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board, public audiences of these articles, and international conferences. I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants.

Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu

Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).

25 Signs That The Global Elite’s Ship Is About To Sink

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Lance Schuttler

Source: The Mind Unleashed

Make no mistake about it. The tide has turned on the global elite and there will be no going back. A new day is rising for humanity as those who have planned for complete control are now being exposed, cornered and investigated from many different angles. There is no need to buy into the fear-based propaganda the major media and even several alternative media outlets dispense. Very good things are happening and even better things are coming. Let’s take a look at some of the major stories that have occurred in the last 8 weeks alone. Piecing the puzzle together, we see that the jig is up and the events surrounding it are growing in size and speed.

1. 57 Nations approved as founding members of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Notable countries who signed on June 29th, 2015 include Russia, India, Iran, Switzerland, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Indonesia, the UK, Italy and Austria. Notables who did not join are the U.S. and Japan.

2. May 12th, 2015: Russia asks Greece to join the BRICS Alliance. Notice the BRICS trend in the stories to follow.

3. May 24th, 2015: The Pentagon released documents to Judicial Watch, a government watchdog law firm,
proving that the US Government played a central role in creating ISIL. Interestingly, the mainstream media failed to cover this story. A few weeks later, ex US Intelligence officials confirm the report.

4. May 31st, 2015: Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras writes an open letter, warns European leaders they are “making a grave mistake,” and suggests they re-read Hemingways’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls.”

5. June 2nd, 2015: The U.S. Federal Government was hacked as the personal data of 4 million current, former and prospective employees believed to have been breached. 3 weeks later FBI Director James Comey told US Senators the actual number could be 18 million. Some believe the hack was coordinated to gather further evidence
of crimes by certain government officials. More on that further down.

6. June 2nd, 2015: Kentucky Senator Rand Paul calls for the U.S. Government to declassify 28 pages in the 9/11 attack report that the Bush Administration blacked out.

7. June 3rd, 2015: Famous musician Akon announces his Solar Academy will bring solar power to over 600 million people in Africa. A major victory for clean energy and humanity.

8. June 4th, 2015: Whistle-blower Edward Snowden says a “profound difference” had occurred since releasing the NSA documents and that the balance of power has shifted in our world. Is he referring to the BRICS Alliance?

9. June 5th, 2015: “There Will Be A Reset of The Financial Industry.” The International Monetary Fund says the Chinese yuan is no longer undervalued. This sets the stage for the yuan to be recognized as a global reserve currency, something the U.S. Dollar (which is backed by war and oil) does not like.

10. June 7, 2015: Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s largest banks, co-CEO’s Jain and Fitschen resign. Two days later, German prosecutors raided the Bank’s headquarters in a criminal tax-fraud probe.

11. June 15, 2015: China says the G-7 Summit in Germany was a “gathering of debtors.” They mean this literally as the Bretton Woods western financial system is based on debt. And in fact, the entire western financial system has been running illegally and is technically bankrupt. For more on the real history of Bretton Woods and its connection to JFK, The Global Collateral Accounts and the gold standard, read here.

12. June 17th, 2015 is quite the day with the next four stories all being reported at that time. First, JP Morgan’s number 2, the Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee, suddenly and unexpectedly passes over. Since late 2013, the list of high-level banking officials to have passed over has grown to 70. Clearly, something is happening.

13. June 17, 2015: Russia and China announced that all natural gas and crude oil sales between
the two countries will now be done in Chinese yuan( formerly the U.S. Dollar) and will be convertible into Russian Rubles. The U.S. Dollar hegemony is waning.

14. June 17, 2015: The State of Texas has signed a bill that calls for the repatriation of their gold from the Federal Government. When asked what would happen if the government tried to steal back the gold, State Representative Giovanni Capriglione said this: There is a motto in the office of almost every state legislator in Texas, and it’s a flag that we have [from the Texas Revolution], it’s below a cannon and what the motto says is, “Come and Take it.”

15. June 17, 2015: Greece’s Hellenic Parliament’s Debt Truth Committee released a report stating that the debt Greece “owes” is illegal, illegitimate and odious, according to international law. Further, they stated the IMF and ECB ( European Central Bank) having illegally and knowingly imposed these illegitimate debts upon Greece and other nations. A direct call out to the global banking cartel.

16. June 18th, 2015: Baron David de Rothschild has been indicted by a French court over financial fraud. French police have been ordered by the court to track down Baron. The Rothschild family has long been viewed as the family sitting atop the global financial ponzi scheme. Lawyer Antonio Flores told reporters, ” it’s a real breakthrough moment for everyone involved.”

17. June 18, 2015: In a 2-1 ruling, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals says Bush era officials can be held liable for detaining innocent people after the 9/11 attack. Will this lead to some major arrests?

18. June 19, 2015: While European leaders try to save face on the debt crisis, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras was in Russia and gave a speech at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, stating that “the economic center of the planet has already shifted” and that new powers are playing an “important role on an economic and geopolitical level.” * Reread story header number 8…BRICS, anyone? Oh, and Greece and Russia signed a €2 billion gas pipeline deal that day too…a strategic economic and geopolitical game-changer.

19. July 5th, 2015: Greece votes “NO” to the creditors’ bailout offer. This is a massive stance for humanity that Greece just took against the banking elite. As of this writing, a “deal” has been reached but is expected to fall apart in the coming days. Kicking the can down the road does not solve the issue, but rather speeds up the revolution mindset of many frustrated Greek citizens. September/October is when many financial experts are saying that some fireworks are to be expected.

20. July 7th, 2015: The BRICS Bank officially opens for business.

21. July 8th, 2015: On this day, several strange events occurred. The NYSE was taken down for multiple hours, the Wall Street Journal was taken offline just after the stock exchange went down, United Airlines was forced to ground all of its flights nationwide due to computer “issues,” and 2,500 people losing power in Washington D.C. This whistle-blower journalist just wrote that his Pentagon sources said the Pentagon/BRICS Alliance took it down as a “dry run.”

22. July 7th, 2015: Backing up one day we see that the hacking group Anonymous tweeted this on the evening prior to the stock exchange hack: Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street….we can only hope.
David Wilcock has previously written a detailed document stating that Anonymous is working with certain patriotic US Military forces to legally take down the banking elite.. This aligns nicely with what the whistle-blower journalist, Benjamin Fulford, just wrote this week about the Pentagon and BRICS Alliance in the previous story.

23. July 14th, 2015: Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. reach a historic deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Entire books could be written on the geopolitical, financial and technological implications of this move. There are also reports that the reality of this situation is that Iran has free energy technology and will be using this to help bring down the banking/political/oil industry elite. This would make sense as the strongest opponents to this deal have been Israel and its Prime Minister and several American politicians like the Bushes, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

24. July 15th, 2015: Santa Cruz County votes to stop doing business with 5 major banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS. Watch this set off a chain reaction in those who will follow suit.

25. Now: You are here on the planet at this time to make a wonderful contribution. Please continue playing your role for the benefit of us all.

It is clear that something big is happening. Use this information to move forward with optimism and hope. Share with your friends. Discuss with your friends. Continue to search and dig for the truth. Two people I strongly suggest the reader looking into are Benjamin Fulford, the whistleblower who was the Asia Pacific Bureau Chief for Forbes Magazine and is listed in stories number 21 and 22, and Neil Keenan, who is working with many well connected sources to open up the global collateral accounts. These accounts are what President Kennedy was assassinated over and are what the banking elite does not want the public to know exists. This revolution WILL NOT be televised.

The Human Aversion to “Doing the Right Thing”

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Does Anyone Want to Make the World a Better Place?

By John Kozy

Source: Global Research

Does anyone want to make the world a better place? Do you know anyone who does? Have you known of anyone who has? Think carefully about these questions, because things are not always as they seem.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued an Executive Order as a wartime measure freeing the slaves in the ten states that were in rebellion. It freed about three quarters of the four million slaves in the United States at the time. The remainder were not freed until the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1865. The order did not outlaw slavery and did not confer citizenship on those freed. It was merely a strategic measure, not a humanitarian gesture. Nevertheless, Lincoln has become known in American history as the Great Emancipator.

The war during which the order was issued resulted in the deaths of approximately three quarters of a million people, and the freedmen, as the former slaves were called, were left to fend for themselves. Many joined the army and after the war were sent West to fulfill America’s Manifest Destiny by killing Indians. What a magnificent event the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation was. Men were freed from slavery so they could become Indian slayers. What a great contribution to the improvement of the human condition that was!

Yet in 1861, two years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Tsar Alexander II, a brutal Russian Autocrat, abolished serfdom in Russia by merely signing a document. Lincoln’s order freed about three million slaves; the Tsar’s edict freed 23 million without firing a single shot, without killing a single person or causing a single person to have to fend for himself. How dastardly! What a barbarian! You would think that he could have killed at least half a million. After all, he was the Tsar! He was a brutal Russian, not a benevolent American!

Really? Who was the greater humanitarian? The Great Emancipator or the Tsar? Did either make the world a better place? Were people any better off after the edicts were issued than before? Did being freed sate any person’s hunger?

Lincoln was elected president of “a house divided.” He went to war to preserve the house, to preserve the union. He succeed marvelously. The house has been divided ever since! Was the world made any better by the war? Was the world any better after the war than it was before? Judge for yourselves. Were America’s Blacks any better off? Are they better off today? These questions are not easy to answer.

In 1889, Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany enacted the world’s first old-age social insurance program which was designed by Germany’s arch-conservative Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. In a letter to the German Reichstag. Wilhelm wrote: “. . . those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state.” How reactionary! Imagine a Kaiser caring about the well-being of workers? What in the world can we make of that?

A short time later—well, quite a bit later in 1935—Franklin Delano Roosevelt basically copied the German program and induced the Congress to enact it. Roosevelt may have been a man of the people, although he was not quick to come to that position, but he was no original thinker. Yet he has an endearing place in the hearts of Americans. German Kaisers do not! Humanitarianism just oozes out of the hearts of America’s political leaders, doesn’t it? Did Roosevelt make the world a better place? If so, did the autocratic Kaiser make it a better place too?

Between 1939 and 1941 New Zealand created the first universal health care system. Other nations soon followed: The United Kingdom in 1948, Sweden in 1955, Iceland and Norway in 1956, Denmark in 1961, Finland in 1964, Japan in 1961, Canada between 1968 and 1972, the Soviet Union in 1969, Australia in 1974 and 1984, Italy in 1978, Portugal in 1979, Greece in 1983, Spain in 1986, South Korea in 1989, Taiwan in 1995, Israel in 1995, the Netherlands in 1986 and 2006, and Switzerland in 1996. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Western European countries of Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Luxembourg expanded their social health insurance systems to provide universal coverage. The United States of America? Well, not yet. Maybe someday. Perhaps never. Obama believes his reform of private health insurance has rendered universal healthcare unnecessary. America’s leading from behind—way behind—does not extend to improving the human condition, and America does not boast of belonging to this international sommunity.

These examples provide evidence for the assertion often inaccurately attributed to Winston Churchill that “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” But things are really much worse than that. When Americans do set out to do the right thing, they often do it so badly and so ineffectively that the pathos of the human condition is hardly improved at all. Healthcare in America is so poorly distributed that many people lack access to it under any conditions and every physical ailment is not covered by medical insurance. Many communities lack even one primary care physician; others boast of scores, and vision, hearing, and dental problems are not covered by most medical insurance plans, not even Medicare! But of course not! Why do people, especially the elderly, need to see, hear, or chew? Making the world a better place is not an American forte. Nor is it a forte in many other countries.

In trying to judge the value of something, the Romans often asked, “Cui bono?” Who benefits? is an important question. So is the question, Who suffers? For instance, when an elderly person whose hearing is impaired is denied a hearing aid, who benefits? Anyone at all? When an unemployed person is denied unemployment compensation, who benefits? Anyone? When a family with little or no income is denied nutritional assistance, who benefits? When an ill person is denied medical care, who benefits? And who benefits when a homeless family is denied a domicile? Who benefits when a school child is denied a lunch? Does anyone benefit? Yet who suffers is obvious, isn’t it? Helping no one and making many suffer is merely cruel, and being cruel is a moral fault. America and many other nations are not people-countries; they do not exist for the welfare of people. Making the world a better place is not something human beings do easily.

When people are denied these benefits, the deniers are engaged in simple cruelty. No, gratuitous cruelty inflicted gratuitously! The Earth is awash in it, and most of it is inflicted by human beings, many of whom are content to do nothing in the face of it. The American Congress has traditionally been know as a “do nothing” institution. And Edmund Burke, a very conservative political philosopher said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” When the American Congress or any political institution anywhere is content to do nothing to alleviate human suffering, it follows that the institution is aiding and abetting “the triumph of evil.” But something else follows as well. Those who do nothing are not good people! That, above all, needs to be made obvious. Bad people do nothing and aid and abet the triumph of evil in the world. So much for making the world a better place!

I asked above whether the American Civil War made the world a better place. Now the world is in a continuous war. The Western world is at war with most of the nations in the Middle East, North Africa, and is promoting war in Ukraine. The Sunnis are now are even being encouraged to kill other Sunnis. How can it possible end well? When the Kurds, who are being encouraged to kill Sunnis too and who live in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, want to form a nation of their own, Kurdistan, and Turkey objects, who is the West going to support? The Kurds or a NATO partner?

Will there be no end to this killing? Is any human being’s life anywhere made better by all this killing? Was the life of any American bettered when Osama bin Laden was assassinated? Did that assassination sate any child’s hunger? Did the American economy suddenly awaken from the doldrums? Can’t you just see how much better off everyone is because of the killing frenzy? Apparently no one but the world’s leaders can.

Abba Eban, an Israeli diplomat, said in June 1967 at the United Nations that “The question is whether there is any reason to believe that . . . a new era may yet come to pass. If I am sanguine on this point, it is because of a conviction that men and nations do behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Surely the other alternatives of war and belligerency have now been exhausted.”

How “hope springs eternal” even in the hearts of those who blankly stare into the abyss. The West, following America’s lead has proven that the alternatives of war and belligerency have not yet been exhausted. So let peoples everywhere be warned: if you are willing to follow America to the gates of Hell, be prepared to enter it. Those gates swing in only one direction!

The world will not become a better place until human beings want it to. Those who deny benefits to needy people and promote orgies of killing do not want it to. They want to protect the status quo. But denying benefits to the needy and promoting continuous war define the status quo. At least since Alexander the Great, war has been the instrument of what is now called foreign policy. They also comprise domestic policy in most nations. States can just as easily wage war against their own citizens as foreigners. Is this cruelty the essence of human nature? Will it ever be different?

Not until the questions, “Who benefits?” and “Who doesn’t?” are being answered, “The needy!” and “Nobody!”. The goal of human endeavor must become the welfare of human beings. Nothing good comes of doing otherwise.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.

The Eurasian Big Bang

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Reid Mukai

How China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington

By Pepe Escobar

Source: TomDispatch.com

The several hundred Republicans who have thrown their hats into the ring for the 2016 presidential race and the war hawks in Congress (mainly but hardly only Republicans) have already been in full howl about the Vienna nuclear deal with Iran. Jeb Bush took about two seconds to label it “appeasement,” instantly summoning up the image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain giving in to Hitler before World War II; former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee spared no metaphor in labeling the agreement “a deal that empowers an evil Iranian regime to carry out its threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ and bring ‘death to America’”; Senator Lindsey Graham called it a “possible death sentence for Israel”; this year’s leading billionaire candidate, Donald Trump, summed up his opinion of the deal in one you’re-fired-style word, “ridiculous”; Senator John McCain described Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the deal, as “delusional”; and Senator… I mean, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mockingly turned Chamberlain’s infamous “peace in our time” into “peace at any price,” dismissed the deal as a catastrophe filled with “absurdities,” and then appeared on every American media venue imaginable to denounce it. And that’s just to start down the usual list of suspects. Even Senator Rand Paul swore he would vote against the agreement (though his father called it “to the benefit of world peace”), while Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was typical of Republican presidential candidates in swearing that he would personally scuttle the deal on his first day in the Oval Office.

This, in short, is the mad version of international policy that makes Washington a claustrophobic echo chamber. After all, the choice isn’t actually between Iran having no nuclear “breakout” capacity or regaining that capacity 15 years from now (as the present deal seems to offer); the choice is between an agreement for 15 verifiably non-weaponized years and a guarantee of nothing whatsoever. And if you’ve just checked off that nothing-whatsoever column, the alternative is to somehow crush the Iranians, to force them into submission. It is, in other words, some version of war. Two questions on that: How successful has war in the Greater Middle East been as an American policy weapon these last 13 years? And what makes anyone think that, when even Dick Cheney and crew couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger on Iran, Jeb B. or any of the other candidates will be likely to do so in an ISIS-enriched world in 2017?

When you’ve satisfied yourself on those two questions, consider the seldom-discussed larger context within which twenty-first-century nuclear politics has taken place. In these last years, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Russians, and the Americans, to name just four nuclear powers, have either been expanding or “modernizing” their nuclear stockpiles in significant ways. And god knows what the Israelis were doing with their super-secret, never officially acknowledged, but potentially civilization-busting atomic arsenal of 80 or more weapons, while the North Koreans were turning themselves into a nuclear mini-power. Nonetheless, the focus of nuclear attention and the question of “disarmament” has remained almost exclusively on a country that had no such weapons, has officially disavowed them, and at this point, at least, doesn’t even have a weapons program. And note that no one who is anyone in Washington considers any of this the least bit strange.

In this context, that irrepressible TomDispatch regular Pepe Escobar offers another kind of lens-widening exercise when it comes to the Iranian deal. He focuses on a subject that Washington has yet to fully absorb: changing relations in Eurasia. Few here have noticed, but while the Vienna deal was being negotiated, Russia and China, countries the Pentagon has just officially labeled as “threats,” have been moving mountains (quite literally in some cases) to integrate ever larger parts of that crucial land mass, that “world island,” into a vast economic zone that, if all goes as they wish, will be beyond Washington’s power and control. This is a remarkable development that, despite the coming two months of sound and fury about Iran, won’t be at the top of any news report, which is why you need a website like TomDispatch to keep up with the times. Tom

The Eurasian Big Bang
How China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington
By Pepe Escobar

Let’s start with the geopolitical Big Bang you know nothing about, the one that occurred just two weeks ago. Here are its results: from now on, any possible future attack on Iran threatened by the Pentagon (in conjunction with NATO) would essentially be an assault on the planning of an interlocking set of organizations — the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), the AIIB (the new Chinese-founded Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), and the NDB (the BRICS’ New Development Bank) — whose acronyms you’re unlikely to recognize either. Still, they represent an emerging new order in Eurasia.

Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad, and New Delhi have been actively establishing interlocking security guarantees. They have been simultaneously calling the Atlanticist bluff when it comes to the endless drumbeat of attention given to the flimsy meme of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” And a few days before the Vienna nuclear negotiations finally culminated in an agreement, all of this came together at a twin BRICS/SCO summit in Ufa, Russia — a place you’ve undoubtedly never heard of and a meeting that got next to no attention in the U.S. And yet sooner or later, these developments will ensure that the War Party in Washington and assorted neocons (as well as neoliberalcons) already breathing hard over the Iran deal will sweat bullets as their narratives about how the world works crumble.

The Eurasian Silk Road

With the Vienna deal, whose interminable build-up I had the dubious pleasure of following closely, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and his diplomatic team have pulled the near-impossible out of an extremely crumpled magician’s hat: an agreement that might actually end sanctions against their country from an asymmetric, largely manufactured conflict.

Think of that meeting in Ufa, the capital of Russia’s Bashkortostan, as a preamble to the long-delayed agreement in Vienna. It caught the new dynamics of the Eurasian continent and signaled the future geopolitical Big Bangness of it all. At Ufa, from July 8th to 10th, the 7th BRICS summit and the 15th Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit overlapped just as a possible Vienna deal was devouring one deadline after another.

Consider it a diplomatic masterstroke of Vladmir Putin’s Russia to have merged those two summits with an informal meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Call it a soft power declaration of war against Washington’s imperial logic, one that would highlight the breadth and depth of an evolving Sino-Russian strategic partnership. Putting all those heads of state attending each of the meetings under one roof, Moscow offered a vision of an emerging, coordinated geopolitical structure anchored in Eurasian integration. Thus, the importance of Iran: no matter what happens post-Vienna, Iran will be a vital hub/node/crossroads in Eurasia for this new structure.

If you read the declaration that came out of the BRICS summit, one detail should strike you: the austerity-ridden European Union (EU) is barely mentioned. And that’s not an oversight. From the point of view of the leaders of key BRICS nations, they are offering a new approach to Eurasia, the very opposite of the language of sanctions.

Here are just a few examples of the dizzying activity that took place at Ufa, all of it ignored by the American mainstream media. In their meetings, President Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi worked in a practical way to advance what is essentially a Chinese vision of a future Eurasia knit together by a series of interlocking “new Silk Roads.” Modi approved more Chinese investment in his country, while Xi and Modi together pledged to work to solve the joint border issues that have dogged their countries and, in at least one case, led to war.

The NDB, the BRICS’ response to the World Bank, was officially launched with $50 billion in start-up capital. Focused on funding major infrastructure projects in the BRICS nations, it is capable of accumulating as much as $400 billion in capital, according to its president, Kundapur Vaman Kamath. Later, it plans to focus on funding such ventures in other developing nations across the Global South — all in their own currencies, which means bypassing the U.S. dollar. Given its membership, the NDB’s money will clearly be closely linked to the new Silk Roads. As Brazilian Development Bank President Luciano Coutinhostressed, in the near future it may also assist European non-EU member states like Serbia and Macedonia. Think of this as the NDB’s attempt to break a Brussels monopoly on Greater Europe. Kamath even advanced the possibility of someday aidingin the reconstruction of Syria.

You won’t be surprised to learn that both the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the NDB are headquartered in China and will work to complement each other’s efforts. At the same time, Russia’s foreign investment arm, the Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), signed a memorandum of understanding with funds from other BRICS countries and so launched an informal investment consortium in which China’s Silk Road Fund and India’s Infrastructure Development Finance Company will be key partners.

Full Spectrum Transportation Dominance

On the ground level, this should be thought of as part of the New Great Game in Eurasia. Its flip side is the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Pacific and the Atlantic version of the same, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, both of which Washington is trying to advance to maintain U.S. global economic dominance. The question these conflicting plans raise is how to integrate trade and commerce across that vast region. From the Chinese and Russian perspectives, Eurasia is to be integrated via a complex network of superhighways, high-speed rail lines, ports, airports, pipelines, and fiber optic cables. By land, sea, and air, the resulting New Silk Roads are meant to create an economic version of the Pentagon’s doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” — a vision that already has Chinese corporate executives crisscrossing Eurasia sealing infrastructure deals.

For Beijing — back to a 7% growth rate in the second quarter of 2015 despite a recent near-panic on the country’s stock markets — it makes perfect economic sense: as labor costs rise, production will be relocated from the country’s Eastern seaboard to its cheaper Western reaches, while the natural outlets for the production of just about everything will be those parallel and interlocking “belts” of the new Silk Roads.

Meanwhile, Russia is pushing to modernize and diversify its energy-exploitation-dependent economy. Among other things, its leaders hope that the mix of those developing Silk Roads and the tying together of the Eurasian Economic Union — Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan — will translate into myriad transportation and construction projects for which the country’s industrial and engineering know-how will prove crucial.

As the EEU has begun establishing free trade zones with India, Iran, Vietnam, Egypt, and Latin America’s Mercosur bloc (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela), the initial stages of this integration process already reach beyond Eurasia. Meanwhile, the SCO, which began as little more than a security forum, is expanding and moving into the field of economic cooperation. Its countries, especially four Central Asian “stans” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) will rely ever more on the Chinese-driven Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the NDB. At Ufa, India and Pakistan finalized an upgrading process in which they have moved from observers to members of the SCO. This makes it an alternative G8.

In the meantime, when it comes to embattled Afghanistan, the BRICS nations and the SCO have now called upon “the armed opposition to disarm, accept the Constitution of Afghanistan, and cut ties with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations.” Translation: within the framework of Afghan national unity, the organization would accept the Taliban as part of a future government. Their hopes, with the integration of the region in mind, would be for a future stable Afghanistan able to absorb more Chinese, Russian, Indian, and Iranian investment, and the construction — finally! — of a long-planned, $10 billion, 1,420-kilometer-long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline that would benefit those energy-hungry new SCO members, Pakistan and India. (They would each receive 42% of the gas, the remaining 16% going to Afghanistan.)

Central Asia is, at the moment, geographic ground zero for the convergence of the economic urges of China, Russia, and India. It was no happenstance that, on his way to Ufa, Prime Minister Modi stopped off in Central Asia. Like the Chinese leadership in Beijing, Moscow looks forward (as a recent document puts it) to the “interpenetration and integration of the EEU and the Silk Road Economic Belt” into a “Greater Eurasia” and a “steady, developing, safe common neighborhood” for both Russia and China.

And don’t forget Iran. In early 2016, once economic sanctions are fully lifted, it is expected to join the SCO, turning it into a G9. As its foreign minister, Javad Zarif, made clear recently to Russia’s Channel 1 television, Tehran considers the two countries strategic partners. “Russia,” he said, “has been the most important participant in Iran’s nuclear program and it will continue under the current agreement to be Iran’s major nuclear partner.” The same will, he added, be true when it comes to “oil and gas cooperation,” given the shared interest of those two energy-rich nations in “maintaining stability in global market prices.”

Got Corridor, Will Travel

Across Eurasia, BRICS nations are moving on integration projects. A developing Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor is a typical example. It is now being reconfigured as a multilane highway between India and China. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia are developing a transportation corridor from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the Caspian Sea and the Volga River. Azerbaijan will be connected to the Caspian part of this corridor, while India is planning to use Iran’s southern ports to improve its access to Russia and Central Asia. Now, add in a maritime corridor that will stretch from the Indian city of Mumbai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and then on to the southern Russian city of Astrakhan. And this just scratches the surface of the planning underway.

Years ago, Vladimir Putin suggested that there could be a “Greater Europe” stretching from Lisbon, Portugal, on the Atlantic to the Russian city of Vladivostok on the Pacific. The EU, under Washington’s thumb, ignored him. Then the Chinese started dreaming about and planning new Silk Roads that would, in reverse Marco Polo fashion, extend from Shanghai to Venice (and then on to Berlin).

Thanks to a set of cross-pollinating political institutions, investment funds, development banks, financial systems, and infrastructure projects that, to date, remain largely under Washington’s radar, a free-trade Eurasian heartland is being born. It will someday link China and Russia to Europe, Southwest Asia, and even Africa. It promises to be an astounding development. Keep your eyes, if you can, on the accumulating facts on the ground, even if they are rarely covered in the American media. They represent the New Great — emphasis on that word — Game in Eurasia.

Location, Location, Location

Tehran is now deeply invested in strengthening its connections to this new Eurasia and the man to watch on this score is Ali Akbar Velayati. He is the head of Iran’s Center for Strategic Research and senior foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Velayati stresses that security in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the Caucasus hinges on the further enhancement of a Beijing-Moscow-Tehran triple entente.

As he knows, geo-strategically Iran is all about location, location, location. That country offers the best access to open seas in the region apart from Russia and is the only obvious east-west/north-south crossroads for trade from the Central Asian “stans.” Little wonder then that Iran will soon be an SCO member, even as its “partnership” with Russia is certain to evolve. Its energy resources are already crucial to and considered a matter of national security for China and, in the thinking of that country’s leadership, Iran also fulfills a key role as a hub in those Silk Roads they are planning.

That growing web of literal roads, rail lines, and energy pipelines, asTomDispatch has previously reported, represents Beijing’s response to the Obama administration’s announced “pivot to Asia” and the U.S. Navy’s urge to meddle in the South China Sea. Beijing is choosing to project power via a vast set of infrastructure projects, especially high-speed rail lines that will reach from its eastern seaboard deep into Eurasia. In this fashion, the Chinese-built railway from Urumqi in Xinjiang Province to Almaty in Kazakhstan will undoubtedly someday be extended to Iran and traverse that country on its way to the Persian Gulf.

A New World for Pentagon Planners

At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month, Vladimir Putin told PBS’s Charlie Rose that Moscow and Beijing had always wanted a genuine partnership with the United States, but were spurned by Washington. Hats off, then, to the “leadership” of the Obama administration. Somehow, it has managed to bring together two former geopolitical rivals, while solidifying their pan-Eurasian grand strategy.

Even the recent deal with Iran in Vienna is unlikely — especially given the war hawks in Congress — to truly end Washington’s 36-year-long Great Wall of Mistrust with Iran. Instead, the odds are that Iran, freed from sanctions, will indeed be absorbed into the Sino-Russian project to integrate Eurasia, which leads us to the spectacle of Washington’s warriors, unable to act effectively, yet screaming like banshees.

NATO’s supreme commander Dr. Strangelove, sorry, American General Philip Breedlove, insists that the West must create a rapid-reaction force — online — to counteract Russia’s “false narratives.” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter claims to be seriously considering unilaterally redeploying nuclear-capable missiles in Europe. The nominee to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Commandant Joseph Dunford, recently directly labeled Russia America’s true “existential threat”; Air Force General Paul Selva, nominated to be the new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, seconded that assessment, using the same phrase and putting Russia, China and Iran, in that order, as more threatening than the Islamic State (ISIS). In the meantime, Republican presidential candidates and a bevy of congressional war hawks simply shout and fume when it comes to both the Iranian deal and the Russians.

In response to the Ukrainian situation and the “threat” of a resurgent Russia (behind which stands a resurgent China), a Washington-centric militarization of Europe is proceeding apace. NATO is now reportedly obsessed with what’s being called “strategy rethink” — as in drawing up detailed futuristic war scenarios on European soil. As economist Michael Hudson has pointed out, even financial politics are becoming militarized and linked to NATO’s new Cold War 2.0.

In its latest National Military Strategy, the Pentagon suggests that the risk of an American war with another nation (as opposed to terror outfits), while low, is “growing” and identifies four nations as “threats”: North Korea, a case apart, and predictably the three nations that form the new Eurasian core: Russia, China, and Iran. They are depicted in the document as “revisionist states,” openly defying what the Pentagon identifies as “international security and stability”; that is, the distinctly un-level playing field created by globalized, exclusionary, turbo-charged casino capitalism and Washington’s brand of militarism.

The Pentagon, of course, does not do diplomacy. Seemingly unaware of the Vienna negotiations, it continued to accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons. And that “military option” against Iran is never off the table.

So consider it the Mother of All Blockbusters to watch how the Pentagon and the war hawks in Congress will react to the post-Vienna and — though it was barely noticed in Washington — the post-Ufa environment, especially under a new White House tenant in 2017.

It will be a spectacle. Count on it. Will the next version of Washington try to make it up to “lost” Russia or send in the troops? Will it contain China or the “caliphate” of ISIS? Will it work with Iran to fight ISIS or spurn it? Will it truly pivot to Asia for good and ditch the Middle East or vice-versa? Or might it try to contain Russia, China, and Iran simultaneously or find some way to play them against each other?

In the end, whatever Washington may do, it will certainly reflect a fear of the increasing strategic depth Russia and China are developing economically, a reality now becoming visible across Eurasia. At Ufa, Putin told Xi on the record: “Combining efforts, no doubt we [Russia and China] will overcome all the problems before us.”

Read “efforts” as new Silk Roads, that Eurasian Economic Union, the growing BRICS block, the expanding Shanghai Cooperation Organization, those China-based banks, and all the rest of what adds up to the beginning of a new integration of significant parts of the Eurasian land mass. As for Washington, fly like an eagle? Try instead: scream like a banshee.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for RTand Sputnik, and a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Empire of Chaos. Follow him on Facebook by clicking here.

Countering the Neo-Cold Warriors

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Shortly, the «gruesome twosome» of U.S.-Russian relations, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and NATO Supreme Commander General Philip Breedlove, will be joined by a third neo-Cold Warrior, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, the prospective Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to become the «terrible troika» of American officials clamoring for a military showdown with Moscow.

During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Dunford said he viewed Russia as the greatest threat to America. But not just any «threat». In language that could have been pulled out of a U.S. newspaper from the 1960s, Dunford testified, «If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia», adding, «and if you look at their behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming».

While Dunford’s Cold War rhetoric warmed the cockles of the hearts of leading Senate committee war hawks such as John McCain, McCain’s eyelash-batting pal Lindsey Graham – a 2016 presidential candidate – and Texas Joseph McCarthy lookalike Ted Cruz, it was not well-received at the White House or the State Department. White House Press Secretary John Earnest distanced President Obama from Dunford’s views, stating at a press conference that Dunford was expressing «his own view and [it] doesn’t necessarily reflect the . . . consensus analysis of the president’s national security team».

State Department spokesman Mark Toner, in commenting on Dunford’s remarks, was more emphatic when stating that Secretary of State John Kerry rejected the general’s comments, «The secretary doesn’t agree with the assessment that Russia is an existential threat to the United States, nor China, quite frankly». Toner was referring to Dunford’s testimony that China was second only to Russia in posing a significant threat to the United States.

However, it was Kerry who promoted Nuland, who is married to arch-neoconservative and Project for the New American Century (PNAC) architect Robert Kagan, to the position that placed her in charge of U.S.-Russian relations. Previously, Nuland served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s press spokeswoman. And if Mrs. Clinton’s penchant for «standing by her women» is any indication, a Hillary Clinton presidency could see Nuland, who once worked for Vice President Dick Cheney, promoted to a higher-level position, including Secretary of State or National Security Adviser. Obama and Kerry can distance themselves from Dunford’s alarming comments all they want, however, it is they who have permitted individuals like Nuland, Breedlove, Dunford, and the saber-rattling Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to become major policy officials within the Obama administration.

Dunford and Breedlove appear to have been pulled from central casting for a remake of the 1960s Stanley Kubrick noire comedy film, «Dr. Strangelove». Dunford, who bears the problematic nickname «Fighting Joe» and has been described as a «fervent Catholic», sounds like the blusterous General Buck Turgidson, who, after a wayward B-52 continues on to Russia, against orders, to drop its nuclear payload on a missile base, tells a bewildered president, «It is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless ‘distinguishable,’ postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed». Breedlove, on the other hand, is just as much an ideologue as is the fictional General Jack Ripper, who in «Dr. Strangelove» tells his British liaison officer, «Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought».

Dunford, Breedlove, Nuland, and Carter could very well push the United States and Russia to the brink of a hot war. Breedlove championed the creation of NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, or VHRJTF as it is known to the acronym- and abbreviation-addicts of the Pentagon. VHRJTF brings ground forces from nine NATO nations to Russia’s borders. The new rapid-response unit took part in the first «live fire» exercise in Poland, code-named NOBLE JUMP, since the end of the Cold War. VHRJTF also consists of U.S.-supplied drones. The possibility that an unmanned drone could bring about a replay of the 1960 U-2 incident, in which a manned American spy plane was shot down over Russia, this time with a drone straying into Russian airspace from one of the Baltic countries, cannot be ruled out.

Obama and Kerry were quick to distance themselves from «Fighting Joe» Dunford’s saber rattling before the Senate committee. However, if they wanted to truly reset relations with Russia, Kerry could fire Nuland, Obama could pull Dunford’s nomination, and both could ask NATO to request a new Supreme Commander. However, as President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 Farewell Address about the menace of the «military-industrial complex», Obama and Kerry are powerless to get rid of those who were placed in power by what has now become a «military-intelligence-contractor» complex.

What is even more troubling is that Breedlove, Dunford, Nuland, and Carter appear prepared to not only take on Russia and China in a new Cold War, but are willing to confront the new «anti-NATO», the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which just wrapped up its summit in Ufa, the capital of the Russian Federation’s autonomous republic of Bashkortostan. If the «gruesome twosome» of Nuland and Breedlove, soon to become the «terrible troika» after Dunford is confirmed by the Senate, have their way, NATO and the United States will not only be willing to face off militarily against SCO members China and Russia but also the new members of Pakistan and India, in addition to charter members Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

Russia has savaged the West’s attempts to isolate it and China has broken America’s attempt to establish a military containment «cordon sanitaire» around China by welcoming Belarus as a new observer nation of SCO, joining Afghanistan, Mongolia, and Iran as prospective full members of the alliance. Cambodia, Nepal, Armenia, and Azerbaijan joined the organization as dialogue partners, supplementing existing partners Sri Lanka and Turkey. Egypt, Bangladesh, and Syria are also prospective members of the organization that is a counter to the ever-expanding NATO. SCO’s geopolitical security mission, coupled with the emerging economic power of the BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, equates to a majority of the world’s population rejecting America’s military and economic dominance and NATO’s and the Pentagon’s menacing swagger. It is as if Dunford, Breedlove, and Nuland have never heard of SCO, BRICS, or the Eurasian Economic Union.

It is amazing that Dunford and Breedlove can issue challenges to their perceived enemies when Carter has announced a 40,000 troop strength cut for the U.S. Army. Instead, Carter plans to supplement NATO forces in Europe with more Bradley Fighting Vehicles and tanks that would be manned by a smaller number of U.S. troops. Like the Roman Empire, the United States has over-extended itself around the world.

It is not Russia nor China that maintain troops in 150 countries around the world. That dubious distinction falls on the United States. Fighting Joe Dunford and General Breedlove can talk all they want about the Russian and Chinese «threat». But for the rest of the world, which sees SCO and BRICS as welcome foils to the plans for further NATO expansion, it is America and its policy of fostering «color revolutions» and displaying military shows of force that represent the true threats to global stability.

The Mess that Nuland Made

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

As the Ukrainian army squares off against ultra-right and neo-Nazi militias in the west and violence against ethnic Russians continues in the east, the obvious folly of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has come into focus even for many who tried to ignore the facts, or what you might call “the mess that Victoria Nuland made.”

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

To sell this latest neocon-driven “regime change” to the American people, the ugliness of the coup-makers had to be systematically airbrushed, particularly the key role of neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists from the Right Sektor. For the U.S.-organized propaganda campaign to work, the coup-makers had to wear white hats, not brown shirts.

So, for nearly a year and a half, the West’s mainstream media, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, twisted their reporting into all kinds of contortions to avoid telling their readers that the new regime in Kiev was permeated by and dependent on neo-Nazi fighters and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who wanted a pure-blood Ukraine, without ethnic Russians.

Any mention of that sordid reality was deemed “Russian propaganda” and anyone who spoke this inconvenient truth was a “stooge of Moscow.” It wasn’t until July 7 that the Times admitted the importance of the neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists in waging war against ethnic Russian rebels in the east. The Times also reported that these far-right forces had been joined by Islamic militants. Some of those jihadists have been called “brothers” of the hyper-brutal Islamic State.

Though the Times sought to spin this remarkable military alliance – neo-Nazi militias and Islamic jihadists – as a positive, the reality had to be jarring for readers who had bought into the Western propaganda about noble “pro-democracy” forces resisting evil “Russian aggression.”

Perhaps the Times sensed that it could no longer keep the lid on the troubling truth in Ukraine. For weeks, the Right Sektor militias and the neo-Nazi Azov battalion have been warning the civilian government in Kiev that they might turn on it and create a new order more to their liking.

Clashes in the West

Then, on Saturday, violent clashes broke out in the western Ukrainian town of Mukachevo, allegedly over the control of cigarette-smuggling routes. Right Sektor paramilitaries sprayed police officers with bullets from a belt-fed machinegun, and police – backed by Ukrainian government troops – returned fire. Several deaths and multiple injuries were reported.

Tensions escalated on Monday with President Petro Poroshenko ordering national security forces to disarm “armed cells” of political movements. Meanwhile, the Right Sektor dispatched reinforcements to the area while other militiamen converged on the capital of Kiev.

While President Poroshenko and Right Sektor leader Dmitry Yarosh may succeed in tamping down this latest flare-up of hostilities, they may be only postponing the inevitable: a conflict between the U.S.-backed authorities in Kiev and the neo-Nazis and other right-wing fighters who spearheaded last year’s coup and have been at the front lines of the fighting against ethnic Russian rebels in the east.

The Ukrainian right-wing extremists feel they have carried the heaviest burden in the war against the ethnic Russians and resent the politicians living in the relative safety and comfort of Kiev. In March, Poroshenko also fired thuggish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky as governor of the southeastern province of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Kolomoisky had been the primary benefactor of the Right Sektor militias.

So, as has become apparent across Europe and even in Washington, the Ukraine crisis is spinning out of control, making the State Department’s preferred narrative of the conflict – that it’s all Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fault – harder and harder to sell.

How Ukraine is supposed to pull itself out of what looks like a death spiral – a possible two-front war in the east and the west along with a crashing economy – is hard to comprehend. The European Union, confronting budgetary crises over Greece and other EU members, has little money or patience for Ukraine, its neo-Nazis and its socio-political chaos.

America’s neocons at The Washington Post and elsewhere still rant about the need for the Obama administration to sink more billions upon billions of dollars into post-coup Ukraine because it “shares our values.” But that argument, too, is collapsing as Americans see the heart of a racist nationalism beating inside Ukraine’s new order.

Another Neocon ‘Regime Change’

Much of what has happened, of course, was predictable and indeed was predicted, but neocon Nuland couldn’t resist the temptation to pull off a “regime change” that she could call her own.

Her husband (and arch-neocon) Robert Kagan had co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1998 around a demand for “regime change” in Iraq, a project that was accomplished in 2003 with President George W. Bush’s invasion.

As with Nuland in Ukraine, Kagan and his fellow neocons thought they could engineer an easy invasion of Iraq, oust Saddam Hussein and install some hand-picked client – in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi was to be “the guy.” But they failed to take into account the harsh realities of Iraq, such as the fissures between Sunnis and Shiites, exposed by the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

In Ukraine, Nuland and her neocon and liberal-interventionist friends saw the chance to poke Putin in the eye by encouraging violent protests to overthrow Russia-friendly President Yanukovych and put in place a new regime hostile to Moscow.

Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy, explained the plan in a Post op-ed on Sept. 26, 2013. Gershman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward toppling Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

For her part, Nuland passed out cookies to anti-Yanukovych demonstrators at the Maidan square, reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” declared “fuck the EU” for its less aggressive approach, and discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the new leaders of Ukraine should be. “Yats is the guy,” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

Nuland saw her big chance on Feb. 20, 2014, when a mysterious sniper – apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor – shot and killed both police and protesters, escalating the crisis. On Feb. 21, in a desperate bid to avert more violence, Yanukovych agreed to a European-guaranteed plan in which he accepted reduced powers and called for early elections so he could be voted out of office.

But that wasn’t enough for the anti-Yanukovych forces who – led by Right Sektor and neo-Nazi militias – overran government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. With armed thugs patrolling the corridors of power, the final path to “regime change” was clear.

Instead of trying to salvage the Feb. 21 agreement, Nuland and European officials arranged for an unconstitutional procedure to strip Yanukovych of the presidency and declared the new regime “legitimate.” Nuland’s “guy” – Yatsenyuk – became prime minister.

While Nuland and her neocon cohorts celebrated, their “regime change” prompted an obvious reaction from Putin, who recognized the strategic threat that this hostile new regime posed to the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. On Feb. 23, he began to take steps to protect those Russian interests.

Ethnic Hatreds

What the coup also did was revive long pent-up antagonisms between the ethnic Ukrainians in the west, including elements that had supported Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War Two, and ethnic Russians in the south and east who feared the anti-Russian sentiments emanating from Kiev.

First, in Crimea and then in the so-called Donbas region, these ethnic Russians, who had been Yanukovych’s political base, resisted what they viewed as the illegitimate overthrow of their elected president. Both areas held referenda seeking separation from Ukraine, a move that Russia accepted in Crimea but resisted with the Donbas.

However, when the Kiev regime announced an “anti-terrorism operation” against the Donbas and dispatched neo-Nazi and other extremist militias to be the tip of the spear, Moscow began quietly assisting the embattled ethnic Russian rebels, a move that Nuland, the Obama administration and the mainstream news media called “Russian aggression.”

Amid the Western hysteria over Russia’s supposedly “imperial designs” and the thorough demonizing of Putin, President Barack Obama essentially authorized a new Cold War against Russia, reflected now in new U.S. strategic planning that could cost the U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars and risk a possible nuclear confrontation.

Yet, despite the extraordinary costs and dangers, Nuland failed to appreciate the practical on-the-ground realities, much as her husband and other neocons did in Iraq. While Nuland got her hand-picked client Yatsenyuk installed and he did oversee a U.S.-demanded “neo-liberal” economic plan – slashing pensions, heating assistance and other social programs – the chaos that her “regime change” unleashed transformed Ukraine into a financial black hole.

With few prospects for a clear-cut victory over the ethnic Russian resistance in the east – and with the neo-Nazi/Islamist militias increasingly restless over the stalemate – the chances to restore any meaningful sense of order in the country appear remote. Unemployment is soaring and the government is essentially bankrupt.

The last best hope for some stability may have been the Minsk-2 agreement in February 2015, calling for a federalized system to give the Donbas more autonomy, but Nuland’s Prime Minister Yatsenyuk sabotaged the deal in March by inserting a poison pill that essentially demanded that the ethnic Russian rebels first surrender.

Now, the Ukraine chaos threatens to spiral even further out of control with the neo-Nazis and other right-wing militias – supplied with a bounty weapons to kill ethnic Russians in the east – turning on the political leadership in Kiev.

In other words, the neocons have struck again, dreaming up a “regime change” scheme that ignored practical realities, such as ethnic and religious fissures. Then, as the blood flowed and the suffering worsened, the neocons just sought out someone else to blame.

Thus, it seems unlikely that Nuland, regarded by some in Washington as the new “star” in U.S. foreign policy, will be fired for her dangerous incompetence, just as most neocons who authored the Iraq disaster remain “respected” experts employed by major think tanks, given prized space on op-ed pages, and consulted at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

[For more on these topics, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s True Foreign Policy Weakness” and “A Family Business of Perpetual War.”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

FBI Tracked Chattanooga Shooter’s Family for Years

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

Once again, another convenient shooting has helped supercharge anger, hatred, fear, and division across the Western World after an alleged “Islamist extremist” opened fire on and killed 4 US Marines at a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Without any knowledge of how the US has in fact created Al Qaeda and its many global affiliates, including vicious terrorist groups plaguing Southeast Asia, and the most notorious to date, the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), the American public will predictably react in a manner that will simply further justify America’s meddling across the globe amid its self-created and perpetuated “War on Terror.” It will also help in efforts to further tighten control over the American public itself, with increased justifications for expanding police state measures and future pushes to disarm the American people.

Yahoo News would report in their article, “Shootings at Chattanooga military facilities leave 4 Marines, gunman dead; act called ‘domestic terrorism‘,” that:

A U.S. official told the Associated Press that Abdulazeez had not been on the radar of federal law enforcement before Thursday’s shooting.

But also added:

His father had been investigated several years ago for “possible ties to a foreign terrorist organization” and added to the U.S. terrorist watch list, according to a report in the New York Times, but that probe did not surface information about Abdulazeez, the paper said.

This means that yet another case of “domestic terror” has involved someone either investigated by the FBI, entrapped by an active FBI operation where FBI investigators posed as terrorist leaders and walked a patsy through every step of a terrorist attack before arresting them and thus “foiling” the attack, or linked directly to someone the FBI was investigating.

Ironically, the immense omnipresent police state the West has erected to combat the so-called “terrorist” threat, including the total surveillance of all communications online and across all telecommunication networks, at home and abroad under the National Security Agency (NSA) will only expand, despite it once again apparently failing, and despite attempts by special interests on Wall Street and in Washington to claim this latest attack “again” somehow circumvented these already sweeping measures.

Meanwhile, The US Continues Supporting Extremists Abroad

And while this latest attack is passed off as a “domestic terrorist attack” and the result of “Islamic extremists,” rather than a false flag event, the US continues to openly support the very “terrorists” it claims threatens its homeland and has inspired these sort of attacks.

Just recently, the Washington Post literally allowed a spokesman of Al Qaeda to defend his faction’s role in the fighting in Syria, and his condemnation of the United States for not rendering more aid for the cause of overrunning and destroying the Syrian nation – a goal the US itself is likewise pursuing.

Labib Al Nahhas, “head of foreign political relations” for terrorist organization Ahrar al-Sham, wrote in his Washington Post op-ed titled, “The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries,” that:

Stuck inside their own bubble, White House policymakers have allocated millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support failed CIA efforts to support so-called “moderate” forces in Syria. But these “moderate” groups have proved to be a disappointment on nearly every count, not least of all in confronting the Islamic State.

He also states:

That question should prompt Washington to admit that the Islamic State’s extremist ideology can be defeated only through a homegrown Sunni alternative — with the term “moderate” defined not by CIA handlers but by Syrians themselves.

Essentially, the Washington Post afforded a terrorist organization space to make an appeal to the American public for military support. Ahrar al-Sham regularly coordinates with and fights within operations led by Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front, a US State Department designated terrorist organization from which ISIS itself sprung.

Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are described as the “closest” of allies by Western think-tanks and media reports. It is also revealed that Ahrar al-Sham worked along side ISIS itself.

A Stanford University report under “Mapping Militant Organizations” explained (emphasis added):

Ahrar al-Sham quickly became one of the largest military organizations operating in Syria, and it has been active in efforts to unite the Islamist opposition under a single banner. It rejects the idea of Western intervention but sometimes works alongside Free Syrian Army brigades. It routinely cooperates with al-Nusra and, until relations soured in 2013, also worked with ISIS. In February 2014, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence called Ahrar al-Sham one of the three most effective rebel groups in Syria.

The Washington Post isn’t the only voice in the Western media promoting Al Qaeda. Foreign Policy in 2012 abhorrently proclaimed, “Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists: So the rebels aren’t secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is concerned, it doesn’t much matter.” As much as an admission that the US is backing what is essentially terrorism in Syria, the Foreign Policy article attempted even then to promote the alleged “pragmatism” of supporting Al Qaeda to eliminate America’s foreign enemies.

And while Foreign Policy and terrorists writing in the pages of the Washington Post demand more weapons and support from the West, it is already a documented fact that immense and constantly flowing supply convoys are streaming out of both NATO-member Turkey and US-ally Jordan’s territory, into Syria and Iraq, for the purpose of resupplying ISIS. This explains ISIS’ otherwise inexplicable ability to not only maintain its impressive fighting capacity as it simultaneously wages war against both the Syrian and Iraqi armies, but to expand its fighting to all fronts opposed to US regional hegemony.

This includes Yemen, Libya, and even Egypt where ISIS most recently managed to hit an Egyptian naval vessel with a missile. Foreign Policy would again weigh in. Their article, “Islamic State Sinai Affiliate Claims to Have Hit Egyptian Ship With Missile,” states:

The use of a guided missile to strike an Egyptian ship represents a higher level of technological sophistication than what has been previously observed in Sinai attacks. It is unclear, however, exactly what kind of missile was used in the attack, beyond the militant group’s claim that it was a guided munition.

Militant groups in the region have in the past used guided missiles to attack government ships in the Mediterranean. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian anti-ship missile fired by the militant group struck the Israeli warship Hanit, badly damaging the vessel and killing four crew members.

Of course, Foreign Policy and others across the Western media will be quick to point out that Hezbollah is a state-sponsored militant organization which receives its weapons from Syria and Iran. The question then becomes how ISIS replicated this level of “technological sophistication,” and which state-sponsors put the missiles into their hands.

The US supporting Al Qaeda is not really news. Al Qaeda was initially a joint US-Saudi venture to create a mercenary army to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. This mercenary army would again fight Russian interests in Serbia and Chechnya before eventually being used as the pretext for US invasions and occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 onward. In 2007, it was revealed that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel sought to use the terrorist organization to raise a proxy military front to overthrow Syria and Iran. The resulting bloodbath in Syria beginning in 2011 is the operational execution of this documented conspiracy.

Al Qaeda and its various affiliates serve both as a proxy mercenary front to strike where Western forces cannot, and a pretext to invade abroad. It also serves as a constant justification for increased tyranny at home. With the most recent shooting carried out by yet another target of the FBI’s “investigations,” and the predictable divisive backlash that will follow, it is assured that the American public will be further blinded to the fact that this so-called “Islamic extremism” was born in Washington and on Wall Street, in Riyadh and Tel Aviv, not in a mosque or springing forth from the pages of the Qu’ran.

In fact, the vast majority of the world’s Islamic people are locked in mortal combat with the West’s mercenary terrorist forces, with tens of thousands of them having shed their blood fighting Al Qaeda everywhere from Libya to Egypt, to Iraq and Syria. While the US attempts to pose as the leading power in the fight against extremism, its token airstrikes deep within Syrian territory are quickly undone by the torrent of supplies it itself oversees flooding into Syrian territory. For every fighter killed by a US airstrike, 10 more are being trafficked in through US and NATO-run networks stretching as far afield as Xinjiang, China.

The US presence in Iraq and Syria serves simply as one of several planned stepping stones to eventually and directly intervene militarily in toppling either or both governments, before moving on to Tehran.

The “War on Terror” is a fraud, and each “terrorist attack” a carefully orchestrated means of further perpetuating that fraud.

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