NATO supreme commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, warned Russia against any attempt to “annex” Transnistria.
The Foreign Affairs Minister of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, the very glamorous Nina Shtanski, welcomed the outcome of Crimea’s referendum on self-determination and recalled that on 17 September 2006, in an analogous vote, 97.2% of Transnistrians had come out in favor of becoming part of the Russian Federation.
The President of Transnistria’s Parliament, Mikhail Burla, wrote to his Russian counterpart asking him to pass a law on the accession of Transnistria to the Russian Federation emulating, what has been done for Crimea.
The President of Moldova, Nicolae Timofti, asked the European Union to speed up the signing of an association agreement so as to have a lock on Transnistria’s legal attachment to his country.
The President of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, Yevgeny Shevchuk, went to Moscow to discuss the situation of his country’s Russian-speaking population following Kiev’s closure of the Ukrainian border.
Moldova declared its independence on 19 August 1990. Just as, at the time of the USSR, Crimea was administratively attached to Ukraine, Transnistria was attached to Moldova, from which it declared independence one week later, on 1 September. However, Moldova was admitted to the UN, but not Transnistria, which has existed for 24 years as an unrecognized state. In June 1992, NATO tried unsuccessfully to resolve this issue through force, killing more than a thousand people, but had to back off due to the resistance of the population. Since then, the country’s security has been provided by a contingent of Russian peacekeepers.
First Lady Michelle Obama will be accompanied by her children and her mother on her trip to China, which begins on Wednesday. But she won’t be accompanied by the press and she will take no questions from the media.
“Michelle Obama’s trip to China starting on Wednesday will be nonpolitical, the White House says, a ‘people-to-people exchange’ emphasizing the importance that both nations place on education. As if to underscore the point, no reporters are traveling with the first lady, and she does not plan to give interviews while there,” reports the New York Times.
The White House is defending the first lady bringing her family along for the ride by saying it’s what the Chinese would want. “Tina Tchen, Mrs. Obama’s chief of staff and a first-generation Chinese-American, said a multigenerational visit would be appreciated by the Chinese, who value tradition,” says the Times.
‘The most powerful message we can deliver [to the Chinese people] is one of the examples of not just the first lady’s life story but of America and our values,’ Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters during the Monday call.
‘That alone I think speaks to things like respect for human rights that are interwoven into the DNA of the United States of America.’
American and Chinese leaders have not had especially close personal relationships and there is hope among foreign relations experts that Obama and Peng will form a bond.
Obama’s trip comes as fears about China’s economy mount, the country flexes its muscles in disputed areas of the South China Sea and a missing Malaysian plane carrying Chinese nationals.
“In the US, women enjoy equal rights as men in politics,” said Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. “But in Chinese traditional culture, we have a saying: ‘a woman without talent is virtuous’.” While female Chinese business leaders are common, he said, women barely appear at the highest levels of the country’s political elite – only two rank among its 25 top officials.
US officials say they want to spread the “power of American values,” and the importance of education. On her second day in Beijing, Obama will give a speech about cultural exchange at the Stanford Center at Peking University, where she’ll meet with Chinese and American students.
About 200,000 Chinese students are studying in the US, more than from any other country. Only 20,000 American students study in China each year. The Obama administration wants to boost that number.
She won’t meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping, but will visit with his wife Peng Liyuan, visit schools and tourist highlights and eat lunch at a Tibetan restaurant.
Source: The Weekly Standard/Washington Post/The Guardian
High principles dominate the rhetoric on freedom-loving Ukraine, writes JP Sottile. But more mundane realities – like the interests of US oil corporations and Ukraine’s vast shale gas capacity – are part of the volatile equation.
In Ukraine, Chevron’s deal continues a long tradition of intermarriage between ‘national’ and corporate interests under the guise of national security.
Everybody’s got an opinion about the ‘showdown’ with Russia.
Some say it’s about freedom and the right to self-determination. Some say it’s about standing up to aggression and halting a dictator’s march.
Some say it’s about the future of everything-from Syria to North Korea to Iran’s nuclear program – and, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham, it all stems from Obama’s failure to kill the people who killed Americans at Benghazi.
But the most-revealing voice in the chorus is Condi Rice. She penned a tension-filled op-ed on Ukraine for the Washington Post – the newspaper of broken records.
Her nostalgic, “Baby, It’s a Cold War Outside” ditty on the “Ukrainian Problem” came just two days after a Teflon-coated Henry Kissinger opined about the “art of establishing priorities” in his own Ukraine-themed op-ed for the Post.
Why should we care about Condi?
As the world learned through painful experience, Condi Rice, much like Henry Kissinger, was all about establishing priorities. But now that she’s out of power, why should anyone waste any time considering Ms. Rice’s opinion about anything, much less about the ‘crisis’ in Ukraine?
Why? Because it’s telling. Like most American Exceptionalists, her bluster and posturing can be reverse-engineered to find the banal truth about US foreign policy.
For example, her steadfast belief that Ukraine “should not be a pawn in a great-power conflict but rather an independent nation” might have something to do with Chevron’s 50-year lease to develop Ukraine’s shale gas reserves.
It’s the gas, stupid
When that lease was signed on November 5, 2013, it stoked Russian fears about losing its influence on, and a major gas market in, a former satellite.
It also came on the eve of the much-disputed trade deal with the European Union that, once abandoned due to Russian pressure, led to the toppling of Ukraine’s government.
Reuters characterized Ukraine’s “$10 billion shale gas production-sharing agreement with US Chevron” as “another step in a drive for more energy independence from Russia.”
Of course, Ms. Rice knows something about driving for more energy. She sat on Chevron’s board of directors for ten years before resigning to become President Bush’s National Security Adviser in January of 2001.
She was such a titanic figure at Chevron and so beloved by their corporate captains that they even named a 129,000-ton oil tanker ‘Condoleezza Rice’. Do people name tankers after people? People do!
But four months after leaving Chevron, they “quietly renamed” the tanker, apparently sensitive to the implication that she might prioritize their interests in places like Kazakhstan (a de facto dictatorship never targeted by American Exceptionalists) or the Caspian Sea (where Chevron is heavily invested) or Afghanistan (where they’ve long sought a pipeline from the Caspian region to the Indian Ocean).
Corporate Interests Abroad
In the case of Ukraine, Chevron’s deal continues a long tradition of intermarriage between ‘national’ and corporate interests under the guise of national security.
As the International Business Times stated immediately after the deal, “Chevron’s agreement with Ukraine was supported by the US as part of its national security strategy to help reduce Russia’s hold on Europe and Kiev.”
As quoted in the article, US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt said, “I’m very determined to cooperate with the Ukrainian government in strengthening Ukraine’s energy independence.”
That “cooperation” is couched in the language of “independence” – but it’s actually about shifting to financial interdependence with powerful, American corporate interests. It’s not about freedom or self-determination or human rights.
It’s about the ‘Open Door’.
Since the US proposed the Open Door Policy in China at the end of the 19th Century, American ‘soft imperialism’ has exploited resource opportunities for American corporate interests in dozens of ‘friendly’regimes – their commitment to freedom notwithstanding.
We have been there before
Whether it was oil in Iran, bananas in Guatemala or sugar-cane in Cuba, any move to close the door on US business interests has traditionally been met with dire warnings about the dangers of isolationism and specious claims about America’s national interests – which, oddly enough, always seem to be located in another country.
Throughout the Cold War, those ‘endangered’ national interests inspired CIA hijinks around the world. US foreign policymakers supported regime change in places like Chile (calling Dr. Kissinger) and around Central America.
And they doled out generous foreign aid packages to a motley crew of anti-communist ‘strongmen’. If push came to shove, the US military might even get involved.
Since the end of the Cold War, US policy has been kicking open doors around the world and particularly around the edges of the former Soviet Union. Expansion of NATO and US involvement in the former ‘Soviet Stans’ around Afghanistan extended a semi-circle of US military might around Russia.
A declaration of economic war
And the Ukrainian energy independence trumpeted by Ambassador Pyatt amounted to a declaration of economic warfare on Russia’s oil and gas-based economy. Like Condi Rice before him, Ambassador Pyatt’s well-established priority is to ensure that well-connected businesses get in on the ground floor.
Once on the ground floor, they need insurance – either from local clients or from a neighborhood patrol by US forces. Perhaps that’s why Ms. Rice used her Ukraine op-ed as an opportunity to advocate leaving a permanent military force in Afghanistan.
She doesn’t want to hear “talk of withdrawal from Afghanistan whether the security situation warrants it or not.” For her, nothing less than 10,000 troops will do. Otherwise, the US is “not serious about helping to stabilize that country.”
Freedom, liberty, justice … and hydrocarbons
Yet, one wonders if she – like all the professional hand-wringers, truculent think tankers, and once and future policymakers who’ve grandstanded on the showdown with Russia – isn’t quietly more concerned about something more basic than freedom, liberty and justice for all.
Perhaps the former Secretary of State, former Chevron big-wig and former oil tanker is more concerned with the ability of Chevron to realize its Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline dream.
Her old cohorts practicing soft imperialism at the US State Department have certainly been doing their part to help Chevron score that lucrative contract.
The banal truth is that America’s long-standing policy is to help people anywhere and everywhere when those people just so happen to be living on or near valuable resources.
Unless, of course, it’s Bahrain, Nigeria, Kazakhstan or anywhere else repressive and corrupt governments are already interdependent upon US corporate interests.
An international observer from Finland, who sees the referendum on the status of Crimea as absolutely legitimate, has received death threats.
A referendum is due to be held in Crimea on the status of the peninsula tomorrow, on Sunday, March 16, so on Saturday, any campaigning is banned there. An ad-hoc commission is due to see to it that this is strictly observed.
Meanwhile, an international monitor from Finland, Johan Bäckman, has complained at Simferopol airport of pressure that has been brought to bear on him and his colleagues, and also said he’d received death threats, because he supports the referendum.
“It’s all threats and slander. I received a letter with death threats earlier today”, Bäckman said. “The letter is anonymous. The Western media are full of aggression against Russia. I can’t really make out the position of the West that the referendum is allegedly in breach of international law”.
He said the residents of Crimea have every right to determine their future. The US and the European Union are bending every effort to have the referendum cancelled, and are threatening with sanctions. That the EU is considering sanctions is absolutely absurd.
Bäckman said the attempts of western politicians to stop or cancel the referendum are prompted by their desire to downgrade Russia’s authority.
The All-Crimea plebiscite is due on Sunday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time. The minimum voter turnout to consider the referendum valid is 50%. International observers keep arriving in Crimea to monitor the plebiscite.The international observer stressed that he sees the referendum on the status of Crimea as absolutely legitimate.
The situation in Crimea is calm, Deputy of the Belgian parliament Frank Creelman, who arrived to monitor the referendum to be held on March 16, said on Saturday. Everything is very calm and normal, absolutely not the way it is being pictures abroad, he said.
There are many pro-Russian people among residents and many law enforcement officers are at streets, Creelman said.
Creelman said he intended to monitor the referendum on the status of Crimea not just in Simferopol but in relatively small Crimean settlements as well.
The former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched a scathing attack on what he calls a US-backed coup in Ukraine, insisting the Crimean people have the right to align their territory with Moscow and characterising sanctions against Russia as “an act of war”.
“The evidence is pretty clear that the NGOs [non-governmental organisations] financed by our government have been agitating with billions of dollars, trying to get that government changed,” he said. “Our [American] hands are not clean.”
Voice of Russia, Interfax, Life News, The Guardian
The White House Fool has repeatedly declared erroneously and foolishly that it is “against international law” for Crimea to exercise self-determination. Self-determination, as used by Washington, is a propaganda term that serves Washington’s empire but is not permissible for real people to exercise.
On March 6 Obama telephoned Putin to tell the Russian President again that only Washington has the right to interfere in Ukraine and to insist against all logic that only the “government” in Kiev installed by the Washington-organized coup is “legitimate” and “democratic.”
In other words, the elected government in Crimea pushed by the people in Crimea to give them a vote on their future is “undemocratic” and “illegitimate,” but a non-elected government in Kiev imposed by Washington is the voice of self-determination and legitimacy.
Washington is so arrogant that it never occurs to the hubris-infected fools what the world thinks of Washington’s blatant hypocrisy.
Since the Clinton regime, Washington has done nothing but violate international law–Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia.
Does Russia have an Africa Command? No, but Washington does.
Is Russia surrounding the US with military bases? No, but Washington has used the NATO organization, whose purpose disappeared 23 years ago, to organize western, eastern, and southern Europe into an empire army with forward bases on Russia’s borders. Washington is determined to extend the boundaries of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Georgia in central Asia and to Ukraine on the Black Sea. Both Georgia and Ukraine are former constituent parts of both Russia and the Soviet Union.
Washington is doing the same thing to China and Iran. Washington is working to establish new air and naval bases in Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, with which to block the flow of oil and other resources into China. Iran is surrounded by some 40 US military bases and has US fleets standing off its coastline.
In Washington’s propaganda, this rank militarism is presented as “defending democracy.”
The Russian government continues to act as though Washington’s thrusts at Russia’s independence and strategic interests can be defused with good sense and good will. But Washington has neither.
Since the Clinton regime, Washington has been in the hands of a collection of ideologues who are convinced that the US is “the exceptional indispensable country” with the right to world hegemony. Everything that Washington has done in the 21st century is in pursuit of this goal.
Washington intends to break up the Russian Federation itself. Washington funnels huge sums of money into NGOs inside Russia that serve as Washington Fifth Columns and work hand-in-hand with Washington to discredit Russian free elections, to demonize Putin and the Russian government, to spread anti-Russian propaganda and agitation. It is amazing how many Russians actually believe the Western propaganda.
Washington is also working to isolate China with the Trans-Pacific-Partnership, but at this time is primarily focused on destabilizing and isolating Russia. Washington is desperate to break up the BRICS, the emerging organization of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. With the largest countries and half of the world’s population, the BRICS organization is emerging as a political and economic power, especially with the organization’s plan to cease using the US dollar as reserve currency. Ringing Russia with US missile bases on Russia’s borders impairs Russian sovereignty and independence and, thus, weakens the BRICS as a countervailing power to Washington.
Many have been deceived by Washington’s propaganda. The world is slowly waking up, but is it in time?
The US media and much of Europe’s speak with one voice parroting Washington’s propaganda, demonizing Washington’s targets, and preparing insouciant Western populations for more war. The Western media, like Western governments, is devoid of integrity. Liars and whores rule.
Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the “Father of Reaganomics”. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, among others. He has recently published How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds and is coauthor with Lawrence Stratton of The New Color Line and The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Polls show that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. military involvement in:
Ukraine
Syria
Iran
Or anywhere else
Indeed, a poll from Pew in December found that a majority of Americans – more than ever before in Pew’s 50-year history of polling this question – think the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.”
When Victoria Nuland rejected the EU solutions in Ukraine with her “Fuck the EU” comment, the EU went it alone. Germany’s Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier proposed that he and his French counterpart, Laurent Fabius, fly to Kiev and try to reach a resolution of the violence before escalation. Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski was asked to join.
The talks in Kiev included the EU delegation, Yanukovich, the three opposition leaders and a Russian representative. The US was not invited.
Then suddenly snipers began shooting into the crowd in Maidan Square. Panic ensued and riot police retreated in chaos according to eyewitnesses. Vitali Klitschko withdrew from the deal. Yanukovich fled Kiev.
Now that the “opposition” has driven a duly-elected president into exile and dissolved the national riot police, Berkut, Washington has demanded that Ukraine submit to very onerous IMF conditionalities. As Paul Craig Roberts writes:
According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of Washington’s stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor.
The corrupt Western media describes loans as “aid.” However, the 11 billion euros that the EU is offering Kiev is not aid. It is a loan. Moreover, it comes with many strings, including Kiev’s acceptance of an IMF austerity plan.
The austerity plan will cut social services, funds for education, layoff government workers, devalue the currency, thus raising the prices of imports which include Russian gas, thus electricity, and open Ukrainian assets to takeover by Western corporations.
Ukraine’s agriculture lands will pass into the hands of American agribusiness.
The conflict between the US and the EU has thus been exposed.
Meanwhile Vladimir Putin has made it clear that Moscow does not need to “invade” Ukraine. The 1997 Ukraine-Russia partition treaty specifically allows Russian troops in Crimea. No shots were fired and Russian “sons” were welcomed with open arms.
The US should start worrying about the white supremacists they so ardently and openly support in Ukraine, but shun elsewhere. If the Nazi’s take over – which seem more and more likely – the UN’s R2P (responsibility to protect) will come into play. Samantha Power, the architect of R2P, should be proud of herself for crafting the ultimate solution many hawks in the US wish for.
The three war-mongering women who represent the West’s foreign policy apparatus, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and EU official and onetime British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activist Catherine Ashton, and United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samatha Power, have been exposed. The first two by leaked phone calls, and the latter by her R2P plan.
Ashton, actually the grand and feudalistic Baroness Ashton of Upholland, also has an exaggerated view of her own accomplishments. She has scant knowlegde of what transpires in Europe, but flatters herself with the inflated title of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union.
Her title hasn’t lifted her dour expression and gloomy features yet, but it might be as a result of her closeness to the Great Unwashed, the GU.
The Baroness is married to former British journalist Peter Kellner, an executive of the British polling company YouGov. The pollster does political polling as well as the very dull infotainment media charts of Pop Idol and X-Factor, pandering to the GU. Only in Britain could a Labourite sink to such depths of grandeur.
In a phone call between herself and the Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet, Ashton was told what had really happened in Kiev. The High Representative could no wait to throw cold water on the information that the “opposition” – actually a NATO force with looted Libyan weapons some say – was behind the shootings of protesters and policemen.
Ashton quickly defended the new members of the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament. The Estonian Foreign Ministry in the meantime has confirmed that the transcript is authentic.
Essentially, Ashton told the Estonian foreign minister that in the Machiavellian shaping of the fake opposition in the Rada, some “cannon fodder” had been required.
Ashton’s agenda complements that of Nuland whose January phone call with US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt revealed that the Obama administration was hand picking and paying the future government of Ukraine even while Ashton, as well as Nuland’s co-ideologue Jeffrey Feltman, the United Nations Undersecretary General for Political Affairs, were feigning interest in a negotiated solution.
Nuland sounded certain that the US would achieve its political aims with the support of America’s bought-and-paid for UN team of Feltman and his boss, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who was known to South Korean journalists as the “slippery eel” when he served as South Korean foreign minister.
The Calcutta-born Special UN envoy to Ukraine, Dutch diplomat Robert Serry, in which Nuland expressed great confidence must also not be forgotten in the coup plot.
Thanks to the intercept capabilities of loyal and proficient Ukrainian security agents, the world now understands the perfidy of chattering women who are helping lead Europe and, possibly, the rest of the world, into a massive conflagration, possibly a nuclear war.
U.S. military spending is not actually being cut at all, but increasing. Also going up: U.S. nuclear weapons spending. Some of the new nukes will violate treaties, but the entire program violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires disarmament, not increased armament. The U.S. policy of first-strike and the U.S. practice of informing other nations that “all options are on the table” also violate the U.N. Charter’s ban on threatening force.
But do nuclear weapons, by the nature of their technology, violate the U.S. Constitution? Do they violate the basic social contract and all possibility of self-governance? Thus argues a new book called Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom by Elaine Scarry. It’s not unheard of for people to see out-of-control nuclear spending as a symptom of out-of-control military spending, itself a symptom of government corruption, legalized bribery, and a militaristic culture. Scarry’s argument suggests a reversal: the root of all this evil is not the almighty dollar but the almighty bomb.
The argument runs something like this. The primary purpose of the social contract is to create peace and prevent war and other injury. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, clause 11) bans the making of war without the approval of both houses of Congress. This approval was to be required not just for an existing military to attack another country, but for a military to be raised at all — standing armies not being anticipated. And it was understood that an army would not be raised and deployed into war unless the citizen-soldiers went willingly, their ability to dissent by desertion not needing to be spelled out (or, let us say, their ability to dissent by mass-desertion, as desertion in the war that led to the Constitution was punished by death).
And yet, because this point was so crucial to the entire governmental project, Scarry argues, it was in fact spelled out — in the Second Amendment. Arms — that is 18th century muskets — were to be freely distributed among the people, not concentrated in the hands of a king. “Civilian” control over the military meant popular control, not presidential. The decision to go to war would have to pass through the people’s representatives in Congress, and through the people as a whole in the form of soldiers who might refuse to fight. By this thinking, had the Ludlow Amendment, to create a public referendum before any war, passed in the 1930s, it would have been redundant.
Before the 1940s were over, in Scarry’s view, a Ludlow Amendment wouldn’t have been worth the paper it was written on, as the existence of nuclear weapons erases Constitutional checks on war. With nuclear weapons, a tiny number of people in a government — be it 1 or 3 or 20 or 500 — hold the power to very quickly and easily kill millions or billions of human beings, and other species, and very likely themselves in the process. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” said Louis Brandeis. We may have democracy, or we may have thermonuclear bombs, but we can’t have both, says Elaine Scarry.
Economic sanctions against Russia would cause serious damage to Germany’s switch to alternative energy sources, the head of the German Economic Research Institute, Hans-Werner Sinn, said in an interview published in Germany’s Passauer Neue Presse on Friday.
Germany cannot afford such a policy of sanctions, as it considerably depends on Russian gas supply in the process of switching to alternative energy sources, the economist notes. According to him, EU sanctions will only harm the European countries.
Any attempt to bring such countries as Ukraine out of Russia’s influence and link with the West is naive, he believes.
Russia, along with Norway, is an important supplier of gas to Germany, the publication notes.
The United States needs to “write Crimea off” after the invasion of Russian troops following last month’s Ukrainian uprising, retired Maj. Gen. Bob Scales said.
“They are now part of Russia. Paint them red. They have been reintegrated into the Russian republic. And there is absolutely nothing that we can do about it,” Scales, a retired Army major general, told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday, referring to the peninsula in Ukraine.
The important thing at this point was to anticipate what Russian President Vladimir Putin will do next, Scales said.
“From a military perspective, what’s important is what happens next, because of what’s at risk now. You have Russian minorities in Eastern Ukraine. You’ve got Russian minorities in Moldova, in Estonia. And all of those central European leaders are nervous,” he said.
There are numerous options for the United States from a military perspective, but Scales said he did not think President Barack Obama had plans to use forces in the conflict.
“The essence of any type of military activity in this region is to have a viable contingency plan, to have it worked out with your NATO allies. And frankly, that simply hasn’t happened,” Scales said.
Speaking on the crisis in Ukraine, Scales argued that “there should be a military option on the table.”
“Everyone I’ve seen on the news media this whole last few days talks about, ‘well, the first thing we are going to do is we’re gonna take the military option off the table,’” Scales, a former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, said: ”Oh, really? That’s our greatest advantage right now. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin doesn’t care about economic sanctions. He doesn’t care about what the E.U. thinks. The only thing he respects is power and he knows that America still is more powerful than he is.”
“I think we can commit as a demonstration,” Scales elaborated. “For example, let’s start that AMB initiative with the Czech Republic and Poland tomorrow. We have a perfect right to put ships in the Black Sea. Let’s put some ships in the Black Sea. Poland is one of the best maneuver areas in Central Europe. The U.S. military, the U.S. Army, maybe even the Marine Corps, ought to move into Poland to do maneuvers, perhaps stay awhile. We should move tier 1 and tier 2 Special Forces into the Ukraine — if the Ukraine asks for our support — so we can train their troops. Remember October ’73 when we kept Israel from collapsing by flying in high tech gear and high tech weapons? We could do that in the Ukraine.”
A Russian warship was docked in Havana Wednesday, without explanation from Communist Cuba or its state media.
The Viktor Leonov CCB-175 boat, measuring 91.5 meters (300 feet) long and 14.5 meters wide, was docked at the port of Havana’s cruise ship area, near the Russian Orthodox Cathedral.
The Vishnya, or Meridian-class intelligence ship, which has a crew of around 200, went into service in the Black Sea in 1988 before it was transferred seven years later to the northern fleet, Russian media sources said.
Neither Cuban authorities nor state media have mentioned the ship’s visit, unlike on previous tours by Russian warships.
The former Soviet Union was Cuba’s sponsor state through three decades of Cold War. After a period of some distancing under former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, the countries renewed their political, economic and military cooperation.
The ship is reportedly armed with 30mm guns and anti-aircraft missiles.
Its visit comes as isolated Havana’s current economic and political patron, Venezuela, is facing unprecedented violent protests against President Nicolas Maduro’s government.
Cuban President Raul Castro’s Communist government, Americas’ only one-party regime, got a handshake from president Obama recently at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service.
The Dec. 10 handshake signalled a warming of ties between the two nations after decades of animosity.
Fidel Castro congratulated his brother after he greeted the head of the U.S. government in English, saying ‘Mr. President, I’m Castro.’”
Israeli arms dealers tried to send spare parts for F-4 Phantom aircraft via Greece to Iran in violation of an arms embargo, according to a secret probe by the US government agency Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) carried out in cooperation with the drugs and weapons unit of Greece’s Financial Crimes Squad (SDOE).
According to the probe, which Kathimerini has had access to, the operation was carried out in two phases – one in December 2012 and the second in April 2013. In both cases, officials traced containers packed with the F-4 parts on Greek territory. The cargo had been sent by courier from the Israeli town of Binyamina-Giv’at Ada and had been destined for Iran, which has a large fleet of F-4 aircraft, via a Greek company registered under the name Tassos Karras SA in Votanikos, near central Athens. SDOE officials established that the firm was a ghost company, while the company’s contact number was found to belong to a British national residing in Thessaloniki who could not be located.
According to HSI memos, the cargo appears to have been sent by arms dealers based in Israel, seeking to supply Iran in contravention of an arms embargo, and using Greece as a transit nation.
A number of confirmations have come in from readers that Washington is fueling the violent protests in Ukraine with our taxpayer dollars. Washington has no money for food stamps or to prevent home foreclosures, but it has plenty of money with which to subvert Ukraine.
One reader wrote: “My wife, who is of Ukrainian nationality, has weekly contact to her parents and friends in Zhytomyr [NW Ukraine]. According to them, most protesters get an average payment of 200-300 grivna, corresponding to about 15-25 euro. As I additionally heard, one of the most active agencies and ‘payment outlets’ on EU side is the German ‘Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’, being closely connected to the CDU, i.e. Mrs. Merkel’s party.”
As I reported on February 12, “Washington Orchestrated Protests Are Destabilizing Ukraine,” Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a rabid Russophobe and neoconservative warmonger, told the National Press Club last December that the US has “invested” $5 billion in organizing a network to achieve US goals in Ukraine in order to give “Ukraine the future it deserves.” Nuland is the Obama regime official who was caught red-handed naming the members of the Ukrainian government Washington intends to impose on the Ukrainian people once the paid protesters have unseated the current elected and independent government.
What Nuland means by Ukraine’s future under EU overlordship is for Ukraine to be looted like Latvia and Greece and to be used by Washington as a staging ground for US missile bases against Russia.
From the responses I received to my request for confirmations of the information sent to me from Moldova, there is enough evidence that Washington fomented the violent riots for western newspapers and TV channels to investigate. But they haven’t. As we know, the presstitutes are enablers of Washington’s crimes and duplicities. However, the US media has reported that the Ukrainian government is paying Ukrainians to rally in favor of the government.
As Karl Marx wrote, money turns everything into a commodity that is bought and sold. I wouldn’t be surprised if some protesters are working both sides of the street.
Of course, not all of the protesters are paid. There are plenty of gullible dupes in the streets who think they are protesting Ukraine government corruption. I have heard from several. There is little doubt that the Ukraine government is corrupt. What government isn’t? Government corruption is universal, but it is easy to go from the frying pan into the fire. Ukrainian protesters seem to think that they can escape corruption by joining the EU. Obviously, these gullible dupes are unfamiliar with the report on EU corruption issued February 3 by the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs. The report says that a business-political nexus of corruption affects all 28 EU member countries and costs the EU economies $162.2 billion per annum. Clearly, Ukrainians will not escape corruption by joining the EU. Indeed, the corruption will be worse.
I have no objection to Ukrainians protesting government corruption. Indeed, such gullible people could benefit from the lesson they would learn once their country is in the hands of corrupt Brussels and Washington. What I object to is the lack of awareness on the part of the protesters that by permitting themselves to be manipulated by Washington, they are pushing the world toward a dangerous war. I would be surprised if Russia is content to have US military and missile bases in Ukraine.
It was fools like Nuland playing the great game that gave us World War I. World War III would be the last war. Washington’s drive to exploit every opportunity to establish its hegemony over the world is driving us all to nuclear war. Like Nuland, a significant percentage of the population of western Ukraine are Russophobes. I know the case for Ukrainian dislike of Russia, but Ukrainian emotions fueled with Washington’s money should not direct the course of history. No historians will be left to document how gullible and witless Ukrainians set the world up for destruction.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, HOW AMERICA WAS LOST, is now available.
Following decades of a heavily subdued program, Germany is planning to resume counter-espionage against both the US and other Western allies in response to ongoing revelations surrounding NSA’s global surveillance practices, Der Spiegel reports.
Another primary motivation for the resumption of surveillance is US reluctance to agree to a no-mutual-spying treaty desired by Germany, the reports suggests.
The beefed up program will include more active tracking of US agents operating within Germany’s borders. British embassies – as well as those of the US – could also be targeted, according to the report.
“This step would be an about-face from the decades-long practice of systematically monitoring the activities of countries such as China, Russia and North Korea but rarely the activities of Western partners,” read Spiegel’s assessment of the situation.
One of the revelations considered to be most serious was the fact that the US was monitoring a non-governmental cell phone used by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. According to the files leaked by Edward Snowden, the German Chancellor’s mobile phone has been on an NSA target list since 2002 and was codenamed “GE Chancellor Merkel.” Surveillance and communication equipment installed on the roofs of both the US and British embassies in the capital was also deeply criticized.
Head of the German domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Hans-Georg Maassen suggested last November that active operations may be stepped up in the wake of the news. Germany was required to “adjust counter-espionage and take a 360-degree view,” according to Maassen.
In January, Germany called for less rhetoric and more action in the wake of President Obama’s pledge to stop spying on world leaders. While the announcement was greeted with optimism, politicians said it had been “too little, from a German point of view.”
Mere days afterwards, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden chose the German ARD broadcaster to give his first TV interview, stating that: “There is no question that the US is engaged in economic spying.”
Clemens Binninger, part of Merkel’s Christian Democrats party, said that in regards to the discrepancies between countries surveilled, Germany needs to “cease the differentiation and treat them all the same way.”
Chancellor Merkel said on Saturday in her weekly podcast that herself and French President Francois Hollande would review plans to build up a trustworthy data protection network in Europe.
She aired her disapproval of companies such as Google and Facebook, basing their operations in countries with low levels of data protection, while in reality being active in countries with high data protection.
“Above all, we’ll talk about European providers that offer security for our citizens, so that one shouldn’t have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic. Rather, one could build up a communication network inside Europe,” she said.
In the wake of the revelations about US global spying activities, Merkel has become one of the biggest supporters of greater data protection making it mandatory for ministers to use encryption on their phones to secure their communications against intrusion.
However, before the new counter-intelligence plan comes into effect, an agreement must be reached between Merkel‘s office, the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, Der Spiegel reports. – RT
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NATO supreme commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, warned Russia against any attempt to “annex” Transnistria.
