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Posted by admin in INTERNATIONAL, International Law, INTERNATIONAL MEDDLERS, Russia & Ukraine on September 11th, 2022
Global Leaders lack an Understanding of Nature, Peace, and Human Security
Posted by admin in INTERNATIONAL, Russia & Ukraine on March 6th, 2022
In an age of Reason, the cause of humanity calls for peace, freedom and respect for human dignity. In a hybrid geo-political culture – part human and part vulture, we are witnessing a forgotten wisdom of human courage and foresight to stand for the protection of human rights, state sovereignty and national freedom as we continue to see a catastrophic evolving war in Ukraine. The man-made emerging war against the innocent people has no place in an inexplicable antiquity and immense scale of irrational purpose for individualistic glory – all appear to be covered in mystery and unfolding irrational policy behavior in global affairs. To ensure and safeguard the vital geo-political interests of global mankind, this unwarranted war must stop on all sides. Leaders on both sides need to acquire an enlightened understanding that in crisis management, effective leaders do not rush to hasty reactionary judgments and naïve conclusions of belligerency and warmongering.
A reflective snap shot of a critical moment in time pulse and movement of history reveals absence of reasoned dialogue for the prevention of the on –going conflict causing massive human casualties, displacement of millions of Ukrainian civilian refugees across Europe, destruction of essential civic infrastructures and furious competitive edge for success in an ugly war between Ukraine and Russia. The latest being an attack on the European biggest nuclear establishment in Ukraine. Its consequences could lead to catastrophic disruption and wipe out an entire population and progress of human civilization simply to satisfy the few sadistic political minds. To glance ahead of the emerging horrifying events coming out of Ukraine, We, The People of global humanity must call for immediate halt to all war machines and lingering suspicion of one-sided peace and triumph. The sudden and inexplicable plunge into insanity of war will not produce any military or psychological gains for violent assumptions plagues with hatred, bias and false claims and counter claims of military superiority, defeats and occupation.
Reference: Image Courtesy NY Post
There are wild and inhuman sciences of Ukrainian people’s suffering and forced displacement to neighboring Poland, Hungary, Moldova and other locations. WE, the People of the globe enjoin immense bonds of understanding for equal rights, friendship and freedom and respect for national integrity of all people and states within the world systems of political affairs. Regardless of geography and history, we are One Humanity and pain inflicted on any parts of the human body gives pain and anguish to the whole body. We, the People cannot be detached from what is happening between Russia, Ukraine NATO and Europe. We must emphasize and enhance our moral and spiritual bonds to remain contacted in solidarity of the suffering masses and refocus on peace and ending the conflict through reason and dialogue. There is no reason to opt for ruthless purging of a democratically elected leader or political governance in Ukraine or Russia or elsewhere in Europe. We, the People of global consciousness must reject politically indoctrinated cynicism becoming an endemic to change the political governance in Ukraine by violent actions of military actions and unwanted war. If Ukraine and Russian political elite could face each at a table and pursue the urgent need for a reasoned dialogue to cure the sickness of military triumph, it will be a welcomed evolutionary development to foresee the end of the current conflict.
Human progress and future-making are jeopardized when lessons of history are deliberately misinterpreted and ignored by the so called intelligent people. If war is the only avenue to seek peace, we are on the wrong side of history and thinking of our future. There are fearsome and ferocious flows of blame game as often used in conflict-making and conflict -keeping situations. NATO and America are implying extensive financial and other sanctions against Russia to halt the on-going war in Ukraine. The action and reaction gamble will result in unthinkable economic, social and political consequences for Russia and America and the EU and others on this planet. Most rational analysts would agree that sanctions would not deter Russia from its stated aims and priorities of the current conflict. Russia appears to be as competent and viable militarily and politically as is America or the EU and NATO in their pursuit of political strategies and goals. The conflict envisages mutual suspicion and distrust in official policies and behavior across the board. To a perceptive eye, this is the real reasoning for the emerging war in Ukraine. It reflects a treacherous mindset to imagine that any one country is powerful enough to dominate another sovereign entity.
Is NATO being managed by people who lived in the distant past and perhaps post WW2 historic culture is still alive and flourishing? Is there any glimpse of hope for change and new reasoned relationships between America, Russia and West Europeans? The future of violence and nationalistic resentment looks embedded into the distorted strategic necessities of the current affairs, be it the argument of Russia or American-led NATO and or the EU on its own. NATO is run by the wrong people, glued to wrong thinking and doing the wrong things without any rational sense of time, people’s interest and history. The waking consciousness and wisdom would demand that Russia, America and NATO and the EU – all active actors in this perplexed game should critically analyze their strength and weaknesses, their aims for freedom and respect for state’s sovereignty, should know who they are and where they are and that global humanity is watching them if they will act wisely for peace or demonstrate abhorrent and ruthless behavior in ensuring a peaceful resolution of the current naive aims of disastrous consequences for all the living mankind.
Global news media represents the pains and sufferings of Ukrainian masses forcibly evicted from their homes and towns moving to take asylum across Eastern Europe. There could be few millions on the move without knowing any safe place or destination or hope for safety. It is self-evident unambiguous experience of human aggressive connotation by the few against the many and all – as it happened during the 2nd World War. Should America, Russia and the EU not learn lesson from the formative and living history? The unreal embodiment of good intentions and piety showed by all in this war, reminds us all that we are not inhabitants of a rational and 21st century knowledge-based civilized world. Perhaps, we are living in a dangerous world of our own making – not differentiating between evil and virtue in human thoughts and behavior. It is fast becoming clear that NATO and the EU failed to grasp the reality of the current conflict and appears unable to help Ukraine for its rights to a be free member of global political systems of states.
Russia and its leaders must realize the humane urgency to agree for an immediate ceasefire and try to resolve the issues through peaceful dialogue and certainly not by conquest of Ukraine. Any violations of mutual relationship will have volcanic consequences to dehumanize the civic Russian principles and values. When noble ideals are misinterpreted, it could drain out all the good qualities of people and leaders. Political reasoning is a shared enterprise within the global systems of governance to which America, Russia and NATO failed to observe. The sanctity of peace and values of human life will encompass open-mindedness and readiness to listen and learn from each other concerns and experience for peace, harmony and viable neighborly relationships. What if President Putin, President Biden and the EU leaders would meet in person and hold dialogue for peace-making and conflict resolution? The violent assumptions of NATO outreach to Eastern Europe and outrageous hypothesis of military confrontations will lead nowhere – certainly not to peace-making or conflict resolution. Who could gain in these mindless and extravagant ideas of power and military warfare? Certainly None. Rationality dictates objective reasons for the good of people, societies and nations. The sudden plunge to cataclysmic destruction of human societies and civilizations by the few is a misleading notion and aims, no matter how powerful they claim to be.
The equality of human beings and states sovereignty synthesizes an equal consideration and treatment of all involved in this warfare. The global awakening of human soul and consciousness demands an immediate ceasefire and return to face to face negation between Russia, Ukraine, NATO and the EU. If they reject, surely, a debacle could swept unthinkable catastrophic consequences and ends for all on this planet.
Isn’t true that intelligent leaders and people always readily accept reasoned advice?
Posted by admin in INTERNATIONAL on December 12th, 2020
The MSNBC reporter said the Chinese government was conducting experiments aimed at producing super-soldiers with enhanced capabilities. Dilanian apparently based his report on statements by outgoing Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which Ratcliffe declared that China was “National Security Threat No. 1.”
But Dilanian’s report, and comments he made in an interview with his own channel, contained details that didn’t appear in Ratcliffe’s op-ed, including that China is trying to develop hyper-snipers who can “see twice as far as ordinary humans” and “super-strong commandos.”
This begs the question: where did Dilanian get this idea, and was his report shaped by his close relationship with US intelligence?
In 2014, Dilanian was outed by online ‘adversarial’ platform the Intercept as having a close relationship with the CIA’s office of public affairs, leading to him being disowned by the L.A. Times. The Intercept’s investigation, based on released CIA emails, found Dilanian routinely sent his articles to the Agency for vetting prior to publication, promised it positive coverage, and sometimes rewrote his pieces at their behest.
In one email, he told them he was working on a story about congressional oversight of drone bombings, saying it “presents a good opportunity for you” and that his story would be “reassuring to the public.” He included in the article the claim that a drone strike that killed Al-Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi hadn’t killed any civilians, and even sent these sentences to the CIA for approval.
In reality, early news reports, an investigation by Amnesty International and another by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, all pointed to several civilian deaths in the initial strike, as well as follow-up strikes on civilians and rescue workers.
How often does this happen, and how long has the CIA been involved in American news media, currying favour with journalists to protect their public image?
The CIA established a close working relationship with major news figures almost from their inception. Carl Bernstein’s seminal 1977 article ‘The CIA and the Media’ outlined how more than 400 journalists and media figures had worked with the CIA over the preceding decades. They included executives at CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, and the New York Times. In some cases, journalists were actually on the CIA payroll; in others, they acted as agents of influence out of loyalty to the Agency and the country.
Bernstein explained: “In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents, to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments.” He elaborated: “On other occasions, their assignments were more complex: planting subtly concocted pieces of misinformation, hosting parties or receptions designed to bring together American agents and foreign spies, serving up ‘black’ propaganda to leading foreign journalists at lunch or dinner, providing their hotel rooms or bureau offices as ‘drops’ for highly sensitive information moving to and from foreign agents, [and] conveying instructions and dollars to CIA-controlled members of foreign governments.”
This relationship extended to domestic propaganda and censorship. In 1956, the CIA became aware that a New York company called Flamingo Films was planning to make a series of TV documentaries about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s predecessor organization. According to a high-level memo, the Agency found out about the Flamingo Films project via CBS Vice President Larry Lowman, a former OSS man and an unofficial CIA asset.
The CIA wanted to keep a lid on old OSS covert operations, because the majority of its staff had worked there during World War II. It engaged the help of CBS – founded by another OSS veteran, William Paley – to develop a competing TV documentary series to bigfoot Flamingo Films out of the market. The CIA then pulled the plug on the CBS series, ensuring both documentaries were spiked.
The Agency also carried out illegal surveillance of journalists who wrote critical stories about the CIA. These included famed investigative reporter Jack Anderson, who wrote multiple stories on the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, among other potentially illegal CIA activities.
The ‘Family Jewels’ documents list 18 issues that CIA director William Colby discussed with the deputy attorney general, Laurence Silberman, in late 1974, including, “Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott,”“Physical surveillance of muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including current Fox News anchor Brit Hume,” and “Physical surveillance of then Washington Post reporter, Michael Getler.”
The CIA were simultaneously cosying up to journalists and newspaper proprietors to try to generate more positive reporting on the Agency. A 1965 memo reveals efforts made over several years by Ray S. Cline, at the time the deputy director for intelligence, to get American journalists to aid the CIA’s efforts to restore “diminishing faith in the Agency’s competence.”
This included regular contacts with syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop and his brother Stewart, yet another OSS veteran. The memo lists 20 journalists and newspaper publishers who “have had the benefit of Mr Cline’s viewpoints,” and details dozens of meetings with them over the years.
Another unofficial asset in the media was Bernstein’s former editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee. In 1951, Bradlee got his first writing gig as a press attaché to the US Embassy in Paris. The following year, he joined the US Information and Education Exchange (later the USIA, US Information Agency) – a propaganda unit within the embassy that worked closely with the CIA. According to a Justice Department memo that surfaced during the trial of the Rosenbergs, two Americans convicted of spying for the Soviets in the early 50s, “Bradlee promulgated CIA-directed European propaganda urging the controversial execution of the convicted American spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.”
In 1957, having officially left government service and now working for Newsweek, Bradlee interviewed members of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the Algerian insurgents who were rebelling against the French government of Charles de Gaulle – a government with which the US had many disagreements. According to Deborah Davis, who later wrote a biography of Washington Post proprietor Katharine Graham, Bradlee’s interviews with the FLN had all the “earmarks of an intelligence operation [sic].” Following the interviews, Bradlee was forced to leave France.
The CIA’s CREST database (‘CREST’ stands for CIA Records Search Tool) includes media coverage of Bradlee’s expulsion, as well as articles he wrote on the Rosenbergs. It also includes a number of internal documents on Bradlee, and letters between him and several directors of the CIA from his time as editor of the Washington Post.
One memo, from 1961, to director Allen Dulles, notes how Bradlee became bureau chief at Newsweek, and provided an update on a story that profiled Dulles and assessed the effectiveness of the Agency. The implication is that Bradlee was still working for the CIA at this point and was providing updates on the development of the article.
Years later, it seems the CIA-Bradlee relationship was still intact. A memo from 1977 to director Stansfield Turner suggested the CIA use Bradlee as an informal consultant to help it better understand how information was being leaked to the press.
The CIA-Bradlee relationship appears to have continued into the 1980s, as outlined by Nicholas Schou in his book ‘Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood’. In 1982, Bob Woodward was investigating a story about the CIA arming and training the Contras – an ultra-right-wing terrorist organisation fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. As recorded by Schou, this story was never published because Bradlee nixed it, telling Woodward “the story was only news if the Agency was doing so behind Reagan’s back.”
By the early 1990s, CIA documents record how its Office of Public Affairs “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories … In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories.”
As Schou explains in ‘Spooked’, it was this network of friendly reporters across the US that helped the CIA trash investigative journalist Gary Webb after his ‘Dark Alliance’ series exposed the Agency’s role in allowing the Contras to flood the US with cocaine during the 1980s. Webb’s reputation was ruined and his reporting criticised and contradicted by an army of CIA-associated journalists, including the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, himself a former CIA informant. This vicious character assassination destroyed Webb’s family and his career and, ultimately, led to his suicide. However, Schou points out, a CIA inspector general’s report into the CIA-Contra-cocaine question published in 1998 “revealed far more Agency complicity with drug dealers” than Webb’s reporting had done two years earlier, effectively admitting Webb was right all along.
The willingness of the US news media to kowtow to the CIA continues. In 2011, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was writing about the CIA’s support for the movie ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and asked her colleague, Mark Mazzetti, to look over it before publication. Mazzetti sent the whole column to the CIA for approval, after the Agency let him know they would like to see it. Mazzetti’s email to CIA public affairs officer Marie Harf said, “This didn’t come from me … and please delete after you read. See, nothing to worry about.”
In another episode recounted by Schou, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein had worked up a story that the CIA, not Israeli intelligence, as had been widely presumed, were behind the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyah. After running the story past the CIA, which asked them to kill it, Stein’s editors sat on the article for over a year. Then the Washington Post got the same story, prompting the CIA to ask Newsweek if it intended to publish what it had. When Newsweek said it did intend to run it, the CIA let the Washington Post know, allowing it to scoop Newsweek as punishment for Stein having got the story in the first place.
More recently, a CIA document released to me under the Freedom of Information Act that details the activities of its office of public affairs contains numerous references to journalists being invited to the CIA HQ at Langley and other venues for special briefings. These covered everything from Boko Haram to nuclear security to Russia and Libya. Among the journalists invited to an August 2014 briefing on ‘the rise of ISIL and its impact on the global jihad’ were David Ignatius, Eli Lake, Barbara Starr and – of course – Mark Mazzetti and Ken Dilanian.
All of which sparks the question as to how we should interpret Dilanian’s recent article and interview on Chinese super-soldiers. Was he encouraged by the Agency to pursue this aspect of Ratcliffe’s op-ed to help maintain the image of China as a major – or possibly the major – threat facing America? If so, that would explain why Dilanian’s comments completely failed to draw comparisons with the US military’s own super-soldier programs including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s biological technologies office, which was founded in 2014.
By focusing solely on China’s alleged efforts in “enhanced human operations,” Dilanian was able to present an exceptionally one-sided version of the military deployment of transhuman technological developments. Perhaps more importantly, it also allowed him to push the fear factor, and continue the US media’s steady ramping-up of mutual paranoia and hostility between the US and China.
Posted by admin in Russia & Ukraine on December 11th, 2020
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH-17), that was shot down on July 17, 2014 in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine, killed all passengers onboard and was immediately blamed on pro-Russia Donbass volunteer militias fighting against henchmen of the Maidan civil unrest, the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and the Ukrainian military. The blame was assigned against the Donbass militias with no investigation occurring and many questions remaining unanswered.
The responsibility for investigating the tragedy was given to a Dutch-led joint investigation team with the Dutch Safety Board, who claimed that MH-17 was downed by the Donbass volunteers with a Buk surface-to-missile. Prozorov challenges this assertion and questioned why Malaysia, which owned MH-17, was pushed to the periphery of the investigation and priority was given to the Dutch side. This in itself is not damning and does not disprove that the Donbass volunteers were not responsible, but it does demonstrate that there is a clear agenda when a country with direct interest in this tragedy is cast aside.
Interestingly, the Dutch investigators completely disregarded declassified Russian Ministry of Defense information that the missile used to down MH-17 was sent to the Lviv region in Western Ukraine near the Polish border during the Soviet era, the opposite end of the country to Donbass. Prozorov was able to even reveal the serial number of the missile (8-8-6-8-7-2-0). This revelation is complemented by the fact that the Ukrainian military 156 Anti-Aircraft Regiment were operating in Donbass and had BUK vehicles in service in the region, as corroborated by two interviewees who served in the regiment, bringing into question why Dutch investigators ignored such critical information. This comes as it has now been proven, as explained in the documentary, that the alleged Russian Buk movement in Ukraine was faked, with a single still photo being used with a picture of a tractor, a trailer and a Buk vehicle being inserted into the picture.
However, the Ukrainian Security Service using the 156 Anti-Aircraft Regiment had not acted alone, and there were significant joint efforts with external states, primarily Britain, but also Australia. The documentary reveals that Ukrainian Major General Valery Kondratyuk and Lieutenant Colonel Vasily Burba, in which Prozorov knew the latter, was with two British secret service agents on June 22, 2014 in the battle zone some weeks before the MH-17 tragedy. Prozorov claims that Burba remained with the British agents in the region and plotted together with Ukrainian Security Services to bring down MH-17. As this was spearheaded by the British intelligence, there was no surprise that Englishman Elliot Higgins, a former lingerie retailer, who has not studied politics or journalism, had his obscure blogging elevated into the Bellingcat website, with monetary backing from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, just days before the tragedy. Higgins was promoted to such an extent that he began to closely collaborate with the Atlantic Council, which Edward Curtins describes as “a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies, and the National Endowment for Democracy, another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world.” Higgins has also spearheaded disinformation campaigns on chemical weapon allegations against the Syrian government.
The MH-17 tragedy also strangely involved Australia, according to Prozorov, with Australian intelligence agent Peter Kalver, likely belonging to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation if Prozorov’s allegations are correct, having a British phone number beginning with +44 and ending with 575, despite operating in Ukraine and being Australian, in which the national phone code of his home country is +61.
With these revelations, Prozorov explains that “we collected enough information and documents that allow us to draw a firm conclusion. The Boeing crash was a provocation that had been planned and realized by the Ukrainian top leadership and the Western intelligence agencies.”
Prozorov lists the main culprits in this tragedy:
It is highly recommended that the documentary is viewed as all the information, in which all of it is relevant, cannot be confined into a single article. The insights and information provided by Prozorov thoroughly examines and concludes that MH-17 flight downing was an aggressive action taken by Ukraine with the backing of foreign intelligence agencies, particularly British, to discredit the Donbass militias.
I would argue this was also done to legitimize a Western intervention in Ukraine. Just as Bellingcat’s disinformation campaign against Syria has failed, Higgins and other peoples campaign to blame the Donbass volunteers for MH-17 tragedy is also crumbling apart.
Posted by aka in INTERNATIONAL, International Law on April 12th, 2018
Do the Western powers hope to put an end to the constraints of International Law? That is the question asked by the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergueï Lavrov, at the Moscow conference on International Security [1].
Over the last few years, Washington has been promoting the concept of « unilateralism ». International Law and the United Nations are supposed to bow to the power of the United States.
This concept of political life is born of the History of the United States – the colonists who came to the Americas intended to live as they chose and make a fortune there. Each community developed its own laws and refused the intervention of a central government in local affairs. The President and the Federal Congress are charged with Defense and Foreign Affairs, but like the citizens themselves, they refused to accept an authority above their own.
Bill Clinton attacked Yugoslavia, blithely violating Internal Law. George Bush Jr. did the same by attacking Iraq, and Barack Obama by attacking Libya and Syria. As for Donald Trump, he has never hidden his distrust of supra-national rules.
Making an allusion to the Cebrowski-Barnett doctrine [2], Sergueï Lavrov declared: « We have the clear impression that the United States seeks to maintain a state of controlled chaos in this immense geopolitical area [the Near East], hoping to use it to justify the military presence of the USA in the region, without any time limit, in order to promote their own agenda ».
The United Kingdom also seem to feel quite comfortable with breaking the Law. Last month, it accused Moscow in the « Skripal affair », without the slightest proof, and attempted to unite a majority of the General Assembly of the UN to exclude Russia from the Security Council. It would, of course, be easier for the Anglo-Saxons to unilaterally rewrite the Law without having to take notice of the opinions of their opponents.
Moscow does not believe that London took this initiative. It considers that Washington is calling the shots.
« Globalisation », in other words, the « globalisation of Anglo-Saxon values », has created a class society between states. But we should not confuse this new problem with the existence of the right to a veto. Of course, the UNO, while it declares equality between states whatever their size, distinguishes, within the Security Council, five permanent members who have a veto. This Directorate, composed of the main victors of the Second World War, is a necessity for them to accept the principle of supra-national Law. However, when this Directorate fails to embody the Law, the General Assembly may take its place. At least in theory, because the smaller states which vote against a greater state are obliged to suffer retaliatory measures.
La « globalisation of Anglo-Saxon values » ignores honour and highlights profit, so that the weight of the propositions by any state will be measured only by the economic development of its country. However, over the years, three states have managed to gain an audience to the foundations of their propositions, and not in function of their economy – they are the Iran of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (today under house arrest in his own country), the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez, and the Holy See.
The confusion engendered by Anglo-Saxon values has led to the financing of intergovernmental organisations with private money. As one thing leads to another, the member states of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), for example, have progressively abandoned their propositional power to the profit of private telecom operators, who are united in a « consultative committee ».
« Communication », a new name for « propaganda », has become the imperative in international relations. From the US Secretary of State brandishing a phial of pseudo-anthrax to the British Minister for Foreign Affairs lying about the origin of Novitchok in the Salisbury affair, lies have become the substitute for respect, and cause general mistrust.
During the first years of its creation, the UNO attempted to forbid « war propaganda », but today, it is the permanent members of the Security Council who indulge in it.
The worst occurred in 2012, when Washington managed to obtain the nomination of one of its worst war-hawks, Jeffrey Feltman, as the number 2 of the UNO [3]. From that date onward, wars have been orchestrated in New York by the very institution that is supposed to prevent them.
Russia is wondering today about the possible desire of the Western powers to block the United Nations. If this is so, it would create an alternative institution, but there would no longer be a forum which would enable the two blocks to discuss matters.
Just as a society which falls into chaos, where men are wolves for men when deprived of the Law, so the world will become a battle-field if it abandons International Law.
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