TOKYO MASTER BANNER

MINISTRY OF TOKYO
US-ANGLO CAPITALISMEU-NATO IMPERIALISM
Illegitimate Transfer of Inalienable European Rights via Convention(s) & Supranational Bodies
Establishment of Sovereignty-Usurping Supranational Body Dictatorships
Enduring Program of DEMOGRAPHICS WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of European Displacement, Dismemberment, Dispossession, & Dissolution
No wars or conditions abroad (& no domestic or global economic pretexts) justify government policy facilitating the invasion of ancestral European homelands, the rape of European women, the destruction of European societies, & the genocide of Europeans.
U.S. RULING OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR TO SALVAGE HEGEMONY
[LINK | Article]

*U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR*

Who's preaching world democracy, democracy, democracy? —Who wants to make free people free?
[info from Craig Murray video appearance, follows]  US-Anglo Alliance DELIBERATELY STOKING ANTI-RUSSIAN FEELING & RAMPING UP TENSION BETWEEN EASTERN EUROPE & RUSSIA.  British military/government feeding media PROPAGANDA.  Media choosing to PUBLISH government PROPAGANDA.  US naval aggression against Russia:  Baltic Sea — US naval aggression against China:  South China Sea.  Continued NATO pressure on Russia:  US missile systems moving into Eastern Europe.     [info from John Pilger interview follows]  War Hawk:  Hillary Clinton — embodiment of seamless aggressive American imperialist post-WWII system.  USA in frenzy of preparation for a conflict.  Greatest US-led build-up of forces since WWII gathered in Eastern Europe and in Baltic states.  US expansion & military preparation HAS NOT BEEN REPORTED IN THE WEST.  Since US paid for & controlled US coup, UKRAINE has become an American preserve and CIA Theme Park, on Russia's borderland, through which Germans invaded in the 1940s, costing 27 million Russian lives.  Imagine equivalent occurring on US borders in Canada or Mexico.  US military preparations against RUSSIA and against CHINA have NOT been reported by MEDIA.  US has sent guided missile ships to diputed zone in South China Sea.  DANGER OF US PRE-EMPTIVE NUCLEAR STRIKES.  China is on HIGH NUCLEAR ALERT.  US spy plane intercepted by Chinese fighter jets.  Public is primed to accept so-called 'aggressive' moves by China, when these are in fact defensive moves:  US 400 major bases encircling China; Okinawa has 32 American military installations; Japan has 130 American military bases in all.  WARNING PENTAGON MILITARY THINKING DOMINATES WASHINGTON. ⟴  
Showing posts with label Operation Gladio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Operation Gladio. Show all posts

July 20, 2016

WikiLeaks: AKP E-mails Released (Erdogan Ruling Party, Turkey)




WikiLeaks


Turkey ruling party AKP e-mails released


If you go into a translation site like Google translate, you can key in a search term and translate it to Turkish:

CIA casus gözetim
CIA spy surveillance

Then you can pull up the e-mails that contain the search term & do translations of the e-mails.

I've found reference to the CIA's Gladio operation, where it refers to Turkish gunmen shedding more blood to lend legitimacy to some coup (I think); some of those involved were imprisoned and some sent abroad for new tasks.

That was about the second e-mail I looked at.  Sounds like a background sketch, filling someone in on history, or something like that.  Related to Ruzi Nazar, American-Turkestani scumbag who worked for the CIA against the Soviet Union.

Ruzi, with some fellow Central Asians, joined the newly formed CIA when the former chief of the Nazi military intelligence department, Reinhard Gehlen, changed sides [edit: betrayed his nation] - along with his network in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Nazar took an active part in establishing two radio stations sponsored by the CIA near Munich: Radio Free Europe, which targeted Eastern Europeans and Russians, and Radio Liberty, which targeted the Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Hurriyet Daily News 6 Jul 2016
I desperate need a shower and have a massive Chilli con Carne cook-up to do, so my searching for juicy CIA references in the AKP e-mails might have to wait ...  LOL


Hell Hath No Fury Like a Teflon Sultan
Military Coup Attempt in Turkey



Pepe Escobar


EXTRACT


Ankara’s official version is that the coup was perpetrated by a small military faction remote-controlled by exiled-in-Pennsylvania cleric Fethullah Gulen, himself a CIA asset. As much as responsibility remains debatable, what’s clear is the coup was a Turk remix of The Three Stooges; the actual stooges in fact may have been the already detained 2nd Army Commander Gen. Adem Huduti; 3rd Army Commander Erdal Ozturk; and former Chief of Air Staff Akin Ozturk.

As over-excited former CIA ops were blaring on US networks – and they do know a thing or two about regime change — rule number one in a coup is to aim at, and isolate, the head of the snake. Yet the wily Turkish snake, in this case, was nowhere to be seen. Not to mention that no top generals sounding convincingly patriotic went on the TRT state network to fully explain the reasons for the coup. 


[...]
 
The head of the snake must have been 100% sure that to board his plane and stay on Turkish airspace was as safe as eating a baklava. What’s even more startling is that the Gulfstream managed to land in Istanbul in absolute safety in the early hours of Saturday morning – despite the prevailing notion that the airport was occupied by the “rebels”.




LINK | Sputnik News




January 11, 2015

Charlie Hebdo Massacre, France - War on Terrorism - Free Press & Mass Surveillance & Fascism




#Assange and #Snowden are not to blame for Paris bloodbath.

Sat Jan 10 18:19:36 UTC 2015

In today’s Daily Mail, “Sir” Max “I have always loved Israel” Hastings claimed that me and Mr. Snowden are responsible for the bloodbath in Paris: “Traitors… Assange and Snowden have damaged the security of each and every one of us, by alerting the jihadis and Al Qaeda, our mortal enemies, to the scale and reach of electronic eavesdropping”. That a state security vampire like Hastings has pounced on the still warm corpses strewn about Paris is as grotesque as it is predictable.

Secrecy breeds corruption, but it also breeds incompetence and the French secret services are no exception to this rule. Currently the French security state has tried to present the killers as super villains in order to hide its own incompetence — something the media has been only too willing to aid and abet. The reality is the Charlie Hebdo killers were bumbling Keystone terrorists, no-hopers, who crashed their car, left their ID, co-ordinated over the phone and swiftly died. To lose nearly two dozen people to them is unforgivable.

That double digits were killed is no mark of super powers. A single idiot can do it. In Australia’s Port Arthur massacre, a man with the IQ of 66, literally an idiot, shot 58 people over the course of several hours—because he was armed with an AR-10 semi-automatic and his victims were not.

The tragedy in Paris is another example of where competent targeted surveillance, not mass surveillance, was needed.

The attackers were well known jihadis. This is not a case of needing to collect a global interception haystack in order to find a needle. The alleged needle in question, Cherif Kouachi, had already been convicted of terrorism offences and served 18 months in prison for it. Both brothers were already on terrorism lists. Far from hiding messages under rocks or using encryption, the alleged conspirators communicated hundreds of times before and during the attacks — on regular phones. The offices of Charlie Hebdo had received many death threats and had been firebombed in 2011 a week after publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The French mass surveillance system is already one of the most pervasive; its primary purpose, like all such systems, is geopolitics.

Mass surveillance addiction doesn’t come for free. In France it thieved skilled human and financial resources from targeted monitoring of obvious—the front of the Charlie Hebdo building and people walking out of prison with a terrorism conviction in one hand and numerous jihadi contacts in the other.

Yesterday French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said “There was a failing, of course” on French television, “That’s why we have to analyse what happened.”. Valls is right, Hastings is not.

So conspicuous is the failure in the Charlie Hebdo killings that serious questions must be asked. Cherif Kouachi had previously been involved in furthering the Sunni insurgency in the Levant. Were the brothers protected by the French services as part of French adventurism in Syria, Libya and elsewhere—as a conduit to funnel money, guns and militants into Africa and the Middle East? Were the brothers protected because they were witting or unwitting informers? Were the brothers protected in order to conduct a mediagenic, budget-boosting arrest seconds before the attack began — but the attack was moved forward? Why was the security architecture of the Charlie Hebdo building so poor? How is it that semi-automatic weapons found their way into France and into the hands of known jihadis? And most of all why has France’s crazed Sunni adventurism in Syria, Libya and other parts of Africa been tolerated despite the inevitable destabalization, radicalization and blowback?

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/1671459_insight-military-intervention-in-syria-post-withdrawal.html


ASSANGE


SOURCE - Twitter.


Couldn't resist copying this over. 
Nice response to Max Hastings' assertion in Daily Mail, which (in my opinion) could also serve as a notice to others trying to shift blame away from the issue of long-standing Western & European government policies and practices -- including imperialism, colonialism and interventions in the Middle East (and elsewhere) --  which I believe are some of the factors at the root of the Islamic extremist violence that Europe is experiencing.
Disturbances caused in the Middle East and elsewhere are responsible for large movements of people from their homelands, which leads to issues associated with identity, religion and culture, resistance to assimilation versus assimilation, and difficulty integrating a clash of cultures, identity and values, which is exploited by nationalists, fundamentalists and extremists in host countries and elsewhere, for political and other gain.

This is just my overall impression at the moment, based on my limited knowledge at this time.


In an article in Haaretz, I found it interesting that the 'free press' as a whole, are clubbed together as Assange and Snowden supporters.
The Haaretz article starts off with a statement posing as question.  It questions:
(a) whether 'closer state surveillance' could have prevented the Charlie Hebdo massacre and, if so, it asks:
(b) would the 'free press', who have supported Snowden and Assange (presumably the free press as a whole, because the author is not referring to specific publications or journalists), feel like crap (implication), if 'closer state surveillance' could have prevented the massacre (which is contentious, given that experts in that field argue that mass surveillance is *not* the answer, that it is a hindrance and that targeted surveillance is required). 
Article Haaretz strikes me as casting very subtle aspersion on free press, as well as Assange and Snowden,  as figures supporting or representing freedom of press (Assange) and freedom from mass surveillance (Snowden & Assange).
The Haaretz article also characterises Charlie Hebdo publication as follows:
The target can, in Charlie Hebdo, be seen as a kind of marker of the ideology of secular France.
That's quite sweeping statement to make about a satirical magazine, even if it is couched in 'can ... be seen' terms.
So satire has become a representation or symbol of 'ideology' and this 'ideology' is depicted as a prevailing one in secular France, so presumably the target of Islamist extremist violence is the 'ideology' of  'secular France', is the gist of that sentence?

Difficult for me to come to grips with the statement because I don't see the content of a satirical magazine as being a representation of secular cultural 'ideology'; rather, it is (in my view) social or political comment made by the originators of the material, who are entitled to a voice in society that values freedom of expression.
The article continues:
The big question in the wake of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo is whether the slaughter will bring France out of its corner in the war on Islamist terror. France has seen some appalling crimes – including attacks against Jews – that could be linked, broadly, to the global war against Islamist terror.

... the Internet appears to capture gunmen shouting "Allahu Akbar"("God is greatest" in Arabic) – all eyes will be on France to see what happens next. It’s not that France has been entirely out of the fight on Islamist terror. A few hours before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Agence France Press reported that the Charles de Gaulle, the aircraft carrier that is the flagship of the French fleet, would be deployed to the Gulf to take part in operations against the Islamist State.

France, though, has always seemed to hang back a bit. Gurfinkiel calls this a “tradition,” with the French authorities “hoping to know more” by leaving hostile elements at large in France while keeping an eye on them. That starts to look like a risky strategy in an era of so-called “lone wolf” terrorist attacks.
[Gurfinkiel, referred to above, is "Michel Gurfinkiel, a Paris-based pro-Israel journalist"]

The focal point seems to be the "global war against Islamist terror" but there are a number of factors beyond that which are not discussed (eg corporate imperialism in the Middle East, the arming of 'moderate'-designated 'rebels', the regime changes in the Middle East that the West is responsible for (eg Libya and, now, pushing for a regime change in Syria), which can be viewed as actually fostering Islamist terror organisations in the region (and, by extension, extremism in regions beyond).
The article states:
The press has sought largely to stay neutral in the global war on terrorism or has tilted against the hawkish camp.
and that view of the supposedly 'neutral' (and/or anti 'war on terrorism') press, is then linked to the original question/statement regarding the position of the press (in light of what amounts to the earlier Assange and Snowden negative association), tied in with the supposed antidote that 'could' have prevented the massacre:  'closer state surveillance'.
So the agenda here is to accuse the press of not supporting 'war on terrorism' by (a) not supporting mass surveillance (and by extension, a police or a totalitarian state solution, and therefore large-scale violation of civil liberties) and, presumably, (b) accuse the press of not putting 'war on terrorism' promotional spin on the news; as well as pointing out how lax France tends to be, before committing to military intervention in regions beyond its borders, in addition to dragging its feet implementing law enforcement type controls within its borders.  Therefore, it could be seen as an article perhaps lobbying for pro totalitarian and interventionalist action by (a) France and (b) the press (who is expected to support this).
I think that's a reasonable inference to make, but this is just my impression of what I read in Haaretz and I am new to looking at politics, so this is an amateur point of view.  Someone else may see the article and this whole scenario entirely differently. 

Here's the Haaretz article headline and link:

Will the Charlie Hebdo attack bring France out of its corner in the war on Islamist terror?

And how will the free press feel, after it supported Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, if it discovers that closer state surveillance could have foreseen the Paris massacre?

Jan. 7, 2015 | 7:58 PM | 5
Final word on the conclusion (below):
But what position will the newspapers take after having expressed support for Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, if it turns out that this attack could have been foreseen by more aggressive collection and mining of the metadata?
Thought it was clever to raise a 'question' (but really make a statement) at the beginning of an article and reinforced at the end, kind of 'tarnishing' Snowden and Assange (and the press freedom and freedom from surveillance push), without getting one's hands dirty by bothering to construct an argument that aggressive collection of metadata (mass surveillance) is a proven extremist violence preventative measure (see William Binney, who argues otherwise).

Getting back to the Assange post, I'm going to have to pass on the attack 'moved forward' proposition, because I simply cannot believe that this happened.  Way too hard to believe that whoever is running intelligence in France would protect these these guys and, effectively, become a co-conspirator plotting a staged media event that went wrong.
On the other hand, CIA were involved in bombing attacks in Italy (Operation Gladio), so anything's possible, and the idea can't be totally ruled out, I suppose.

Not sure why there's no mention of the rocket launcher (unless it was a false initial report).  The report that these guys had a rocket launcher blew me away. 

Anyway, I thought this might be of interest.  Too bad I can't articulate my impressions clearly.

.........................................................................................
LINKS

Sir Max Hastings
  • Journalist, foreign correspondent, editor.
  • Cousin:  war hero, MI6 operative (Stephen Hastings)
  • August 2014: Hastings one of 200 public figures / signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence.
Plan Vigipirate
  • France's national security alert system. 
  • Created in 1978.
  • Regularly gets updated whenever there's 'terror bombing campaigns' in France.
The fact that this alert system was introduced in the late 70s, gets updated and continues to be required in France, surely poses some questions related to French foreign policy.
 * Daily Mail Article:   "MAX HASTINGS: Why the liberals who defended traitors like Snowden and Assange should look at this photo and admit: We were deluded fools"
DAILY MAIL
EXTRACTS:
The price of living in an open society, with the precious freedoms we take for granted, is that all of us, great and small, are vulnerable to attackers consumed by hatred for our culture, its values, and manifest superiority to those from which they come.

Globalisation places a disturbing number of such people in our midst, rather than far away in Somalia or Iran.
Ummm, I somehow don't think that those who take to enacting terrorist activities merely do so because they hate our manifest cultural superiority.  While 'globalism' did get a mention, what's missing is corporate imperialism combined with geopolitical imperialist ambition.
Jihadism, he says, represents a response to ‘the challenge of a secular, urban civilisation that threatens to destroy their traditional values and beliefs
Yes, but does this pertain to all fundamentalist extremists in all circumstances, or is this just a facet of the fundamentalist extremism? 
Also, why is the West arming extremists -- eg currently arming and training Syrian 'moderate rebels', and the West is known to have armed and supported the Mujahadeen.
Our principal weapons against terrorists are not tanks, Typhoon fighter jets or warships, but instead intelligence officers using electronic surveillance.

Much cant has been peddled recently about the supposed threat to liberty posed by government eavesdropping on our lives.
Here we go again.  Another pusher of mass surveillance, which has been given a legal nod in Britain, anyway.

I'm starting to get the impression that those who argue for mass surveillance are just closet fascists demanding a totalitarian state -- not because totalitarian mass surveillance is going to prevent terrorist attacks, but because it serves the purposes of those in power.
In truth, Assange and Snowden have damaged the security of each and every one of us, by alerting the jihadis and Al Qaeda, our mortal enemies, to the scale and reach of electronic eavesdropping.
Don't know why Assange has been dragged into the 'electronic eavesdropping' alerting of mortal enemies argument; it was Snowden who released the NSA mass surveillance information rather than Assange (although Assange is opposed to mass surveillance).

Seeing that mass surveillance didn't even prevent the Boston bombing (which the Russians warned the Americans about), we can give the mass surveillance cheering routine a rest:  mass surveillance is not effective.  But its a great tool when it comes to political assassination:  see General Petraeus.
Public safety demands a perpetual balancing act between collective security and the rights of the individual.
And it is terrific for surveilling members of the 'free press'.  Also, you'll hear a lot about 'safety' and 'national security' when it comes to government trying to erode civil liberties.
Old Max goes on to talk about WWII situation (has anyone declared WWIII yet?), and plays a accompanying violin, romantically depicting brutal wartime assault on civil liberties as:  50 million British people against Hitler.  Yeah, Max, all well and good in WWII Britain, but there's been no declaration of WWIII to justify the gross violations perpetrated by Western totalitarianism.

This is the most disgusting war-drums propaganda piece ever.

What this guy wants is a totalitarian state and, quite possibly, seeing he would have insider knowledge, that state is perhaps really preparing for outright war (rather than 'war on terrorism').

Here's a reminder of pre-WWII Britain:


British Union of Fascists
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.


Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet
Leader of British Union of Fascists
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.

Looks like fascism tends to precede war.

October 15, 2014

Perversion and Poetry

PERVERSION & POETRY


1.  US Surveillance of entire foreign populations


US spies on multiple, whole populations worldwide ... depriving entire nations of their privacy & freedom.

USA spying on Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, Philippines + one other (likely violent unnamed) >> 

Article

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas/

2.  US Criminal Activities - Gladio B

"... Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001." [ceasefiremagazine.co.uk]

"... memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior [US] government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia." [ceasefiremagazine.co.uk]

"In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations." [ceasefiremagazine.co.uk]

Source - Article - ceasefiremagazine.co.uk:

Special Report | Why was a Sunday Times report on US government ties to al-Qaeda chief spiked?

FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds was described as "the most gagged person in the history of the United States" by the American Civil Liberties Union. Was the Sunday Times pressured to drop its investigation into her revelations? 
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/whistleblower-al-qaeda-chief-u-s-asset/
3. Operation Gladio > Secret Stay-behind Fascist Paramilitary - Europe
Operation Gladio is the codename for a clandestine NATO "stay-behind" operation in Europe during the Cold War. Its purpose was to continue armed resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion and conquest. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organizations. [Wikipedia] 
The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to right-wing terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the "Years of Lead" (late 1960s to early 1980s) and other similar clandestine operations, is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter. [Wikipedia]

Source:  Wikipedia >>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

4. Gary Webb - CIA-backed Contra Drug Ops - Media Corruption

‘The New York Times’ Wants Gary Webb to Stay Dead | The Nation thenation.com/blog/181940/ne


GARY WEBB >"dead from 2 gunshot wounds to the head, which the coroner's office judged a suicide" >exposed CIA-backed Contra drug ops - #USA


#USA >> Contras, CIA, crack cocaine, crimes of state, media power & media corruption >> Power of the Internet >> whale.to/b/mighty__wurl



>>Collusion b/w the press & the powerful: "national news orgs. have had a long .. history of playing footsie with the CIA"



WashingtonTimes (.. helped finance ..Contras, hosting fund-raisers & speaking engagements 4 .. leaders while supporting .. cause editorially)
5.  US Whistle-blower Harassment
MUST READ: Applebaum, WikiLeaks, Snowden & USA harassment -

http://www.exberliner.com/features/people/jacob-appelbaum-on-the-usa-and-nsa/
What they did to Applebaum's mother is disgusting.

6.  Australia - Absence Accountability & Transparency, Extension of Govt (& Govt agency) Powers, Suppression, & Threat to Free Press






>>> Brandis ... an easy 'out' not commenting on anything. Not a good look. Busy ducking behind 'inaccurate' paraphrasing.

#Auspol >>> Edward Snowden a traitor, Attorney-General George Brandis tells Washington think tank >>>

>> Snowden had the guts to take on the biggest criminal enterprise in the world: USA. Snowden's a hero.

Note:  Centre for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) - Washington foreign policy 'think tank' is where Brandis made the Snowden pronouncements. 

7.  'Democracy' Lobbying Propaganda - Europe


"Khodorkovsky for caution in anti-Russian sanctions in Prague
Prague - The EU and the USA can influence the situation in Russia, but their use of sanctions should be cautious, Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was recently released from prison, said at the opening of the 18th Forum 2000 international conference in Prague today.

The EU and the USA can help Russia on its road to democracy, Khodorkovsky said.

Rather, the Russian democratic movement needs a cultivated influence of the Western countries, he added.

International sanctions can be a precarious instrument, said Khodorkovsky, who now lives in Switzerland from where he supports opposition and democratic changes in Russia.

In the summer, the EU imposed sanctions against Russia over its policy in the Ukrainian conflict.

The conference, initiated by the late Czechoslovak and Czech president Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), is this year entitled "Democracy and Its Discontents: A Quarter-Century After the Iron Curtain and Tiananmen" to mark 25 years of the communist regime collapse and the massacre on Tiananmen Square in Beijing."
http://www.ceskenoviny.cz/zpravy/khodorkovsky-for-caution-in-anti-russian-sanctions-in-prague/1134199
"The EU and the USA can help Russia on its road to democracy, Khodorkovsky said." [ceskenoviny/cz] 

"Democracy & Its Discontents: A Quarter-Century After the Iron Curtain & Tiananmen" > Not USA, Kissinger, Contras + Cocaine?

 >>Given above was @ Forum 2000 international conference in Prague, this fits in very nicely:   http://www.chomsky.info/letters/19900301.htm
On Vaclav Havel Speech

Noam Chomsky

Excerpted from Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age Is In Us, Verso, 1995, pp. 149-151 [March 1, 1990]
" ... It's also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks -- not an unusual discovery. 

Of course, it could be argued in Havel's defense that this shameful performance was all tongue in cheek, just a way to extort money from the American taxpayer for his (relatively rich) country. I doubt it, however; he doesn't look like that good an actor."
[Source:  http://www.chomsky.info/letters/19900301.htm]

COMMENT


Although I knew there was NSA and FVEY mass surveillance, I must have missed the bit where the NSA conducts surveillance on entire populations of FOREIGN (non-FVEY) nations, as I was of the impression that surveillance was kept it 'in the family'.  Wrong.

Surveillance extends to the USA spying on the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, Philippines and another country (likely violent if named).  But the odds are it's not limited to these countries.

Why on earth would they be conducting surveillance on the population of Kenya?  Which country is the mysterious 'unnamed' country?

No idea about the interest in Kenya, but I'm going to go with Pakistan for the unnamed country.

Anyway, the enormity of this revelation totally blew me away.  

The populations of entire nations are subject to US surveillance and are not only deprived of privacy, but are also, therefore, deprived of liberty.

So how is it that this is swept under a rug and that nobody's concerned about a deed that, in my view, amounts to worldwide criminal activity by a major government?

Take into consideration the 'Operation Gladio' and US 'Gladio B' activities, and the US government attempts to suppress that information.  

Find the information difficult to absorb and might need to revisit the topic some time. 

Nonetheless, here we have yet another example of  the US engaged in what amounts to criminal activity. 
Judging by earlier disclosures (eg Gary Webb), the US has a long history of involvements in criminal activity, exposure, persecution of whistle-blowers and suppression of press and whistle-blower disclosures.

Yet we have Australia's attorney-general, George Brandis, addressing a US 'echo chamber' 'think tank' (Centre for Strategic & International Studies) earlier in the year, pronouncing a whistle-blower, Snowden, a 'traitor', according to the screaming SMH headline.

Brandis is the same guy who is aggressively ducking Senator Ludlam's questions in a parliamentary committee (video above), doing democracy a disservice in more ways than one, in my view.

Meanwhile, in Europe, we have a stripped Russian oligarch speaking about the holy grail of 'democracy' to be installed in Russia by Europe and USA, broadcast from some US agenda NGO platform, before a rapt audience of Cuban dissidents and assorted other US ass-kissers.

I don't have the mental skills, the language skills or the patience to sit here trying to find the words to articulate just how perverse I find all of the above.

As I see it, you have a criminal, or rogue, gargantuan, super-government seeking to control the rest of the world by whatever means and without any limits; you have those within its trade and military treaty sphere (which is enormous), not only standing by without question, but also aggressively smearing those that stand up and disclose wrongdoing; there's a long a pattern of those beyond control or influence (or dissidents) and members of the press that dare reveal the truth, being vilified, hunted down, harassed and shut down; there's a corrupt or fearful press, that is either part of the established order, or else otherwise controlled, by authorities; there's a topsy-turvy world where 'good' is 'bad' and 'bad' is 'good'; a thousand sly GO and NGO platforms from which to evangelise about the holy grail of 'democracy', had by none but to be exported to all;  there's the abuse of power and totalitarianism (that's hypocritically decried elsewhere), and this abuse is pervasive and entrenched.
Somewhere along the line, there's also denial of the important role whistle-blowers play -- or are supposed to play -- in keeping the crooked straight.
And Australian whilstle-blower publisher, Julian Assange, is still held without charge by the Sweden-UK-US trio blocking his political asylum to Ecuador, while his nation stands by unconcerned about this injustice.
Noam Chomsky's letter was the only breath of fresh air.  It's beautiful.  Poetry.