Friday 8th of November 2024
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shock, awe, prostitutes and cattle...

shock, awe, prostitutes and cattle...

This article has adapted texts from a variety of sources — links from RT, Wikipedia and others available.

Image above from Martin Van Meale (circa 1900)

2016 Presidential Elections and beyond...

The miners came in forty-nine,
The whores in fifty-one;
And when they got together
They produced the native son.” 
- 19th century San Francisco song 

US Laws against selling sex are fairly new – just about 100 years old – and came long after the sex trade took root in American cities. Does this mean there was a time when selling sex was tolerated? Even the US constitution does not mention the oldest profession in the world, while it is quite specific about the rights to have weaponry in your trousers for defence.

So what about "selling war" and selling sex? 

The two are somewhat connected. "Le Repos du Guerrier" (the rest of the warrior) is a novel by a French woman, Christiane Rochefort, the misleading title of which underscores the sexual relation of "the" man as a suicidal "warrior" who misunderstand the woman who tried to save him from killing himself, as he betrays her with another woman, saving himself with the classic French neurotic excuses. Relationships can be complicated by lack of trust in a loony environment full of delusions. The French are excellent at delusive neurosis and the study thereof. Unlike the Yanks — who go to their shrink every second day for purging their inner crap with limited success, while keeping the psychoanalyst profession well cashed up — the French like to live out the neurotic dilemma, as if it was a romantic infusion — enjoying the torment of the heart, while plotting another revolution to die in, gloriously. 

Some women sell sex as a very simple transaction, while some men take others to war, with a variety of purpose, from collecting glory, bruises and loot. These days, war for the homeland has nothing to do with defence. It has most to do with profits and control of resources on behalf of the boss: the dollar. 

In general, men are more sociopathic and aggressive than women, but should you scorn a woman you may regret it or do something stupid.

Montgomery Blair Sibley, Deborah Jeane Palfrey's former attorney, wants to release the phone records of her escort business clients because "they are relevant to the 2016 presidential election". But in April this year, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the request to lift the lower court order, in place since 2007, that bars Sibley from releasing any information about these controversial records.

Here, we have just introduced "the" D C Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who "committed suicide" in 2008, to avoid prison a second time after having been convicted of racketeering and money laundering. She had just been framed by agents posing as postal employees. Her conviction was apparently based on the allegation that she had used the mail service to do her money laundering. Her business as a Madam in Washington D C was "legal" but let's say many people wanted to shut her down, possibly the wives of horny politicians. 

Deborah first stint in prison was for pimping. Her suicide was defined as a suicide though some "loonies" still think she was "suicided". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWp6LHY4En0

Now, which character(s), involved in the 2016 Presidential election, could have been customer(s) of Palfrey's escort services, as hinted to by Sibley? 

Accused of running a high-priced prostitution ring that catered to the rich and powerful in Washington, Deborah Jeane Palfrey threatened to name names in 2007 when exposed. But political elites breathed a sigh of relief when a television reporter reviewed an incomplete injucted list of her clients and, save for a couple of exceptions, declared the names to be "of little interest". I would not be surprised if the "news" reporter's employers or the reporter himself had used Palfrey services and others, including politicians, knew this. The whole list may have become like a Mexican stand off. You publish our names — we publish yours. And the list remains behind legal bars... So why did the political elites breathed a sigh of relief to "learn" that "the names on Palfrey's list of clients were of "little interest" if there was such little interest? One would have to expect that some of the elite's name would be on the list otherwise they would not have been "relieved".

Not that this would tarnish the stars and stripes of the clients in the eyes of Gus, but should these character profess good Christian values, their names on the list would make a hypocritical dint in their public brasso, nonetheless. We will never know. 

Or we might be given some clues which are now irrelevant since Donald Trump has trounced the other Republican candidates. An indecent website in April 2016 revealed that the question became how many times did Ted Cruz's name and number appear in the DC Madam’s records?  With Ted Cruz playing the part of the devout Christian to woo Evangelical voters to his Presidential Campaign, his use of whores would have been relevant to the election campaign, though impossible to prove without the list and records. 

This of course is not a truth... For whatever reason, Montgomery Blair Sibley did not like Cruz... He had challenged Cruz’s birth eligibility to run for president, saying that Cruz was not a US citizen, because his father was not an American citizen at the time of his birth and Ted was born in Canada. Apparently, Sibley had also lost his law practising license for trying to release some names on Madam's list. According to some far right-wing republican respectable loony networks, Sibley is mentally unstable. He would be under watch...

Ted Cruz suspended his campaign for President on May 3, 2016, after losing the Republican primary in Indiana to Donald Trump, and only a few days after having been "named" as a client of Palfrey. All silly rumours considering Ted Cruz has always pleaded complete fidelity to his wife. We have to accept that...

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman at the center of this Washington potential scandal, hoped to bolster her defense by hiring a search and data analysis company that would review phone records, Congressional papers and other documents to draw up a much longer official verifiable list of her clients.

“It could be the cornerstone of our defense,” Ms. Palfrey's attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said at the time. 

It was likely to rock Washington.

Palfrey was born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, but spent her teen years in Orlando, Florida. She graduated from Rollins College with a degree in criminal justice, and completed a nine-month legal course at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law. She was not a dummy. 

Working as a paralegal in San Diego, California, she became a sex entrepreneur — though escort business does not immediately mean sex and leather. Here we have to note that such business would not work should there be no clientele. Great demand would have been a reasonable incentive to make cash.

Dismayed at how most services were run, including widespread drug abuse, Palfrey started her own company recruiting mostly women over 25. In 1990, she was arrested on charges of pimping, pandering and extortion; She was captured while trying to cross the Canada–US border and brought to trial. Following a conviction in 1992 she spent 18 months in prison.

After her release, she founded Pamela Martin and Associates. 

Gus thinks that she would have made enemies, including the lords of the drug trade and the pimps who used underaged or girls on drugs... She would also have been the target of other pimps for competition, as her discreet services took all the creme de la creme clientele. 

So the list of her clients is still secret, though some names have been made public: 

David Vitter was one of them. 

In 2007, Vitter, a hardball Republican Senator, pro-gun, anti-abortion, tea party adherent, admitted to and apologized for prior involvement with the DC Madam escort service. Vitter was first accused of soliciting a prostitute by a New Orleans newspaper in 2002. Since the statute of limitations for prostitution had expired when the scandal was uncovered, Vitter was never charged with a crime. Vitter's indiscretion was petty stuff, though hypocritical. Such apologies are on par with those preachers who err with a bit on the side and ask for forgiveness. The devil is usually blamed for the "sin". 

Entering the war-side of business, a customer of the DC Madam who should interest us is Harlan K. Ullman. 

Ullman is presently the Chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of government and business. He is Chairman of CNIGuard Ltd and CNIGuard Inc, engaged in protection of critical infrastructure. He is Senior Advisor of the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. Ullman is on a number of private boards. A former naval officer, he has commanded destroyers as well as Swift Boats in Vietnam in over 150 combat patrols and actions. A man of war with many medals. His name on the list was made public.

Ullman is also the inspiration behind George Bush "Shock and Awe". He created the concept. But thereafter he seems to have had some change of hearts as he wrote in a book, published in 2006: America's Promise Restored: Preventing Culture, Crusade, and Partisanship from Wrecking Our Nation.

The blurb tells us the book is by one of America's foremost military and political thinkers. It shows how, if left unchecked, America's current political culture and historical capacity for crusade — motivated and corrupted by ideology — will prove far more destructive than all of Bin Laden's devilish intentions. 

Contemporary American politics is destroying America's relevance and influence abroad and its democratic values at home. This book shows how these forces evolved and have been transformed, fragmented, and perverted such that America has been broken by old political mindsets and harsh partisanship; how religion, ideological overtones, and excesses prevent rational policy. 

We also see that the forces threatening American democracy are an "antique" form of government that seems to be in permanent gridlock since it is driven, distorted and corrupted by self-interest. These things have engaged the nation in the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as having intruded across inviolable political boundaries; and an extraordinarily dangerous yet misunderstood threat that can draw on tens of millions of converts — many of whom are prepared to die in the process of imposing a political-theological regime on a region rich in oil with access to nuclear weapons.

Written in 2006, I guess, Ullman's criticism would have been aimed at George W Bush cultural idiocy. 

Semi-prophetic words indeed. But Solutions?... We know that there are many institutions in the US which are very strong, well-looked after and interconnected. The institutions, the governments, the secular NGOs and religious NGOs are hierarchically structured so that it gives a solid grounding in traditions and support, but it would not take long for a few new ideas to rock the boat. A new idea — made acceptable like a new advertised line of candies  — can take hold of people's mind, like the shift of the Republicans to Trump and the shift of the Democrats towards Sanders. 

These solid institutions try to prevent revolution by providing well-connected relationships in common values and goals, through habit of rules and order. This is why the Sanders team is suing the management of the Democratic party for having impeded Sanders. These connections can often border on nepotism and corruption — as well as become political fascist maintenance of the streets. For example when the Occupy movement was camped in Wall Street, many politicians and commentators told the occupiers to go and "occupy a job". Considering the structure of capitalism's HORROR of full employment, this criticism was totally unacceptable. Presently the most successful country in Europe, Germany, is proud to have an official unemployment of just under 6 per cent. Britain enjoys a figure of 5 per cent, while France and Finland hover over 10 per cent. In the past, a lot of unemployed would have been sent to war or to conquer something. 

This might change with Brexit.

In the spirit of Brexit, here comes a study of the former chief of NATO forces: Philip Breedlove... It's not a joke. Breedlove appearance could remind us of the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dr. Strangelove is a 1964 political satire black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the USSR and the USA. The space between satire and reality in this flick is too thin for comfort.


Apparently Breedlove was introduced to Powell by... Harlan Ullman — as mentioned above, Ullman is one of the fellow on the list of the DC Madam and the "inventor" of the “shock and awe” doctrine used by the Bush administration in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The doctrine is simple: use far more firepower, far more troops, far more equipment than necessary in order to swamp the enemy and be able to soon declare "Mission accomplished". Here this was sold as at least "matching" Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which the US commanders would have had to know did not exist, otherwise the "shock and awe" would have been a futile name. 

The aftermath of such war is where things become complicated, including discovering that the Iraq war was based on lies and the death of many people and soldiers made the game go rancid. For example about 57 US soldiers lost their live in the original assault till end of hostilities — but more than 5,000 died during the uneasy peace that followed. And under the international rules of modern engagement, this war could not be about territorial conquest, though acquiring resources was a possible goal. Oil was the purpose of the war, according to many people, including Greenspan.

In October 2014, Ullman urged Breedlove to reach out to Vice President Joe Biden. Ullman wrote, “I know of no better way of getting into 1600,” referring to the White House’s address on Pennsylvania Avenue. A strange advice, considering that, as being the big cheese of NATO forces, one would think Breedlove did not have to go through back doors. He could have been invited to the die hard Christmas parties...

In November, Ullman also suggested Breedlove should get together with David O'Sullivan, the new EU envoy to Washington, noting that Europe “seems to be a six letter expletive in the White House.” 

I would explain here that David O'Sullivan being Irish, shouldn't be affected by Brexit. 

Meanwhile the Ruskies have been the "bête noire" of Ullman and Breedlove. Ullman and Breedlove worked hard to make sure it was the same feeling in the White House. 

Not much convincing has been needed anyway. One president is always trigger happy. I suppose when you are the commander in Chief of a big army, you don't want to see idleness creep in amongst the troops. Playing cards, regiment revues and boot polishing can only go so far in moral maintenance. Unlike the generals, roving in sexual entertainment could make the foot soldiers loose their concentration. This is why you have to give them new toys to test from time to time. Apparently, the Yanks acquired two Russian Su25 from Ukraine to see what they were doing wrong with the F-35... The recent Anaconda exercises next to Putin's front yard — and now a conjoint navy exercise in the South China Sea with the Chinese have been designed to relieve the torpor and boredom... These latter "games" I suppose would also help to gauge one another's ability to wage real war.

Still, “Obama or Kerry needs to be convinced that Putin must be confronted,” Ullman wrote in February 2015.

Ullman also gave Breedlove pointers to be getting on well with Ash Carter — a quantum chromodynamic physicist and a professor of such, with a medieval history degree, a full-on hawk against Iran and Russia and anything that moves contrary to the US dictum, including having worked for Condoleeza Rice as an advisor  — now the new Defense Secretary. 

“I would take or pretend to take careful notes" Ullman said. "Ash is an academic. And he is trained that students who take good notes rise to be A grades. This may be maskarova.  But it is useful maskarova,” Ullman wrote, misspelling the Russian word for camouflage (maskirovka) we are told. 

Here I think Ullman was cleverly playing on words — mixing masquerade and maskirovka. He's a writer with eloquence. But telling Breedlove how to suck army eggs is a bit much, despite Carter being a massive intellect. We all know that egg powder is used in army camps, by watching the 29th rerun of MASH — where doctors play doctors and nurses with the nurses while resenting the war.

So Washington approved hundreds of millions of dollars in “non-lethal” aid to Ukrainian troops, including the notorious “volunteer battalions,” in the 2016 US military budget. The volunteer battalions are like Mafia thugs with a mission to create chaos.
Breedlove continued to push for more aggressive US involvement, because of a heavy Russian troop presence in Ukraine – which was later denied, even by the new government in Kiev. In March this year, the general was telling US lawmakers that Russia and Syria were “deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

This is a cunning sneaky double-cross. A BIG LIE from Breedlove.

The US, by supporting the rebels in Syria, are actually the guilty party which is weaponising migration to Europe. It has the main purpose of weakening Europe while letting the Europeans believe it's the Russians doing it. 

To the contrary, the Russians brought hope to the Syrian population with a forced cease-fire the US did not want. The intervention of the Russians would have slowed this migration somewhat.

Breedlove was replaced at the helm of EUCOM and NATO in May, and officially retired from the military on July 1. He was replaced by US Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, who foster a similar hostility against Russia. Scaparrotti is a four-star general and is now the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) of NATO Allied Command Operations and the commander of the United States European Command (SACOM).

With NATO back in the spotlight and Brexit posing a conundrum to Europe, the EU countries have to rethink their relationship with Washington, which so far has send them broke, designed to be so — through financial manipulation of some of its members (Greece, Portugal, Italy) — through unnecessary sanctions against Russia which in return stopped buying EU goods — and through a flood of refugees coming from wars started and supported by the US. Bad things come in three...

In short — the US does not like to have a strong Europe as a competitor, while claiming the contrary. Nor any competitors. Europe had become the US bitch and dumpster. It's a neat trick.

One other known client of DC Madam was Randall L. Tobias — a governmental figure and former chief executive officer of Eli Lilly and Company. A Republican, he was appointed the first United States Director of Foreign Assistance, and served concurrently as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the rank of ambassador. Tobias resigned in 2007, after being linked to the D.C. Madam scandal. Deborah Jeane Palfrey strikes one.
As President Bush's AIDS Coordinator, Tobias was responsible for setting policy for countries to receive monies from US agencies, how much and under what the rules those funds would be distributed. As AIDS Coordinator, he promoted the idea that a requirement for recipients of U.S. aid was to denounce prostitution. 

It was somewhat ironic and hypocritical that Tobias would patronize an escort service while he was denying funding to organisations that helped prostitutes. This crummy Bush administration's policy led to the closure of numerous programs that had been teaching job skills to sex workers — forcing many prostitutes out of brothels and back into the street.

Result: degradation of job specs for struggling women. Tobias one.

Tobias encouraged sexual abstinence, and dismissed the use of condoms, in preventing HIV/AIDS. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias told a news conference in Berlin on April 21, 2004.

Though no longer under Tobias leadership, Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical firm, was involved in medical ethics controversies. in 2009, Eli Lilly pleaded guilty to illegally marketing the drug Zyprexa for off-label uses not approved by the US FDA, including the treatment of dementia in the elderly. The company paid a $515 million criminal fine, one of the largest in US history.

As well, Eli Lilly is now the sole manufacturer of BGH (Bovine Growth Hormones also known as rBST) having purchased the rights to manufacture it from Monsanto.

Bovine somatotropin or bovine somatotrophin (abbreviated bST and BST), or bovine growth hormone (BGH), is a peptide hormone produced by cows' pituitary glands. More of the stuff is added to normal dairy cattle by injection to increase milk production. 

The FDA, the World Health Organisation and the National Institutes of Health have independently stated that dairy products and meat from BGH-treated cows are safe for human consumption. In the United States, public opinion led some manufacturers to market only milk that is BGH (or rBST)-free. A European Union report on the animal welfare effects of rBST also states that its use often results in "severe and unnecessary pain, suffering and distress" for cows, "associated with serious mastitis, foot disorders and some reproductive problems".

According to some sources, Bovine Growth Hormones have not been allowed on the market in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, nor the European Union since 2000. Argentina also banned the use of rBST, but for how long.

Fantastic... 
Back to the Madam and the warriors... 
Actually, let's put the Madam aside for a while, and go to war. Like in any good old war and ransack, the winner is often allowed to rape the vanquished's wives and steal their cattle. In order to make the game more enticing, should you loose your life in battle, you will have 24 virgins waiting to look after you at a banquet. A win-win choice if you are an uncivilised idiot.

if you are a civilised prick, you en-robe the deed with delicacy, hypocrisy and delicious titillation. This is why some bald men like to be flagellated by a Madam  — as mixing punishment in ecstasy at the same time, give them a strange state of sublimation.

It's natural. The brain under pain produces opiate to kill off the pain. Stop the pain and the opiates take over. Add sex to the mix and the hormones are boosted like eye-popping toe-curling fireworks.

Actually, it is well-known that having sex clears the mind and eliminate frustration — unless you are a soldier who is not allowed to think, just act — frustrations that we manage with various degree of failure using morality and religions to avoid having sex in the first place... 

Now after a cash transaction with a Madam, we are ready to conduct war again. Love and war is like a dancing duo, the style of which determines the social outcomes and death on the battlefields, as long as the concept of sin does not interfere too much. 

Better go and kill people with morality on our side. Then we can have the well deserve "Repos du Guerrier" with a few women competing for the genes of the strong male. 
Hence King David's many wives...

Gus Leonisky
Your local peaceful old atheist war lord...

 

US drone war violates international law...

 

The reason the casualty figures from US drone warfare can’t be more precise is that Washington wants to make sure that as little information as possible is made public about drone raids, says Russell Whiting from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The US has admitted that its military drones have killed dozens of civilians in several countries – the first time the Obama administration has released information showing such a significant death toll.


RT: The official estimate is that at least 64, and up to 116 civilians were killed... Why aren’t the figures more precise?

Russell Whiting: I think the reason why the figures can’t be more precise is just the nature of drone warfare. These drones are obviously unmanned, controlled from thousands of miles away. They are undertaking bombing raids often in countries with which the US and other countries are not even at war. They have no legal basis to be there and obviously it is in the interest of those countries to make sure that there is as little information about these raids as it is possible made public.

RT: Investigative journalists say more than 250 civilians have actually been killed. Why do you think the White House has failed to explain the differing numbers?

RW: In the report that has been published by the campaign group Reprieve, we read that the US has even considered changing the definition of what they mean by “civilian” when they are carrying out these raids. The nature of warfare is that inevitably civilians are caught in a cross-fire. Inevitably, when large amounts of explosives are going off, it is incredibly difficult to be precise on the numbers, especially when it is taking place in the area where you have got no ground forces, when you have no support. And the infrastructure of many of these regions, including places like Syria and the Pakistan-Afghan border where the US have been historically operating drones, there is very little infrastructure on the ground to support any rescue efforts that may need to take place.

Curtis Doebbler, a peace activist and international human rights lawyer, believes that “when you had denied for more than a decade that you have killed any civilian, it is quite difficult to come out and say that there are thousands killed.”

Doebbler thinks the numbers are probably closer to thousands. He believes the US government does not want to point out that “it has killed so many civilians because every one of those civilians killed is likely a serious violation of international law.” 

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/349316-us-drones-civilian-casualties/

 

Gus: the real figure of collateral damage is more than 10 times more.

incredible government bullshit...

 

The US and Britain went to war in Iraq with the single intention of toppling President Saddam Hussein, which was done without any approval from the UN Security Council. France voted against it, and Russian President Putin called the proposed US-led invasion a "big political mistake." In 2003, the war was justified with "credible" intelligence information, according to which Iraqi had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. However, none of the promised weapons were found in the subsequent free-for-all, and Iraq has plunged further into terrorist chaos and sectarian violence.

In the spring of 2011, NATO unleashed an assault against Libya under the pretext that the country's leader Muammar Gaddafi was about to launch a genocide against his civilians to crush West-backed rebels in the city of Benghazi. This time, European leaders acted as pace-setters, with France's then President Nicolas Sarkozy in the forefront.

Norway, which is usually reserved and judicious, rushed into the skirmish headfirst, as the then-Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg gave his government no time to reconsider. Over the course of four months in 2011, Norway dropped 567 bombs on Libya. During the operation's initial phase, 17 percent of NATO's bombs were dropped by Norway. Afterwards, every tenth bomb in Libya was dropped by Norwegian pilots. Later, Norway received much praise for its perhaps disproportionate contribution from US President Barack Obama himself.
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160713/1042877564/norway-libya-stoltenberg.html
---------------

Kellie Tranter believes Australians have a right to know why our troops are in Syria but obtaining this "free" information requires a substantial financial investment, so she is asking for our help.

LATE LAST YEAR, I embarked on a crowd-funding exercise to raise funds to issue a Freedom of Information (FOI) request on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in relation to our aerial bombing of Syria.

We commenced carrying out airstrikes in Syria in September in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution. The Australian public still has not been provided with any evidence upon which this decision was based. As hundreds of thousands of Syrians flee their country and flood the borders of Europe our Government’s claims that our operations ‘are not directed against Syria or the Syrian people’ ring a little hollow.

DFAT responded by supplying heavily redacted documents, as you would expect. But the smattering of words they left exposed did provide a useful summary of the publicly stated reasons for our misadventure into Syria.

The reason was simply, 

‘The Government of Syria has, by its failure to constrain attacks upon Iraqi territory originating from ISIL bases within Syria, demonstrated that it is unwilling or unable to prevent those attacks.’

As I understand it, we may have bombed in areas where ISIL had already been driven out by the Kurds and the Syrian Army. I also note that our Government failed to mention the complete ineffectiveness of Iraqi Security Forces to secure their own border against ISIL, when we were pointing the finger at Syria. Yet any mention that the United States had spent about $25 billion to train and equip Iraq’s security forces was casually overlooked.

In any case, like getting your first tattoo, one FOI request inevitably leads to another. DFAT pointed out to me that they were not the "lead agency".  So this prompted further FOI requests on the Department of Defence and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C).

Australia and the war in Syria: Continuing obfuscation over legality, writes barrister James O'Neill. https://t.co/MBseTq9qpB

— IndependentAustralia (@independentaus) February 8, 2016

PM&C sent a practical refusal because the request would result in 71 documents comprising 327 pages to be examined and redacted which, unlike war itself, would be

'a substantial and unreasonable diversion of resources.' 

The Department of Defence – on the other hand – are prepared to provide copies of cables and briefings to and from the Minister of Defence and/or his office for a mere $1,300. After I requested that those fees be waived, the Defence Department "generously" agreed to reduce the fees to $1,000. A deposit of $250 must be paid if I wish to pursue the request.

I do think these FOI requests should be pursued but I simply cannot afford to keep paying FOI charges on top of spending a lot of unremunerative time pursuing matters that should properly be the province of investigative journalists. However, I am prepared to do my bit if others are prepared to chip in to help pay the FOI charges.

 

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/what-are-we-doing-in-syria,9223

 

see also: the war in a country called legalese...

 

Dear Kellie,

Just a bit of advice. A lot of the DoD FOI are redacted to such extend that you might end up paying a lot of dosh for a weather report in Syria on such and such a date. I know. I've seen DoD reports... black pages after black redacted pages especially if you enter the world of intelligence and motivation for war.

 

The Australian government is to provide support for the "rebels" that have been financed by the USA to topple Assad. Daesh or ISIL is only a diversion to invite us to "support" the war effort. It's lunacy. 

a clandestine network of western agitators...

 


Network Close To NATO Military Leader Fueled Ukraine Conflict


By  and 


Working with dubious sourcing, a group close to NATO's chief military commander Philip Breedlove sought to secure weapons deliveries for Ukraine, a trove of newly released emails revealed. The efforts served to intensify the conflict between the West and Russia.


In private, the general likes to wear leather. Philip Mark Breedlove, 60, is a well-known Harley-Davidson fan, and up until a few weeks ago, he also served as the commander of NATO and American troops in Europe. Even during his tenure as the military leader of the alliance, the American four-star general would trade his blue Air Force uniform for motorcycle gear and explore Europe's roads with his friends.

Photos show a man with broad shoulders, a wide gait and an even wider smile. The pictures of the general's motorcycle tours were recently made public on the online platform DC Leaks. Restraint, it seems, was never Breedlove's thing.

The photos are the entertaining part of an otherwise explosive collection of Breedlove's private email correspondence. Most of the 1,096 hacked emails date back to the dramatic 12 months of the Ukraine crisis after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Thousands died in the skirmishes between Kiev's troops and Moscow-aligned separatists. More than 2 million civilians fled eastern Ukraine.

Russia supports the separatists with weapons, fighters and consultants. When people began calling for Washington to also massively intervene in 2015, the Ukraine conflict risked escalating into a war between East and West.

Early Concern

The newly leaked emails reveal a clandestine network of Western agitators around the NATO military chief, whose presence fueled the conflict in Ukraine. Many allies found in Breedlove's alarmist public statements about alleged large Russian troop movements cause for concern early on. Earlier this year, the general was assuring the world that US European Command was "deterring Russia now and preparing to fight and win if necessary."

The emails document for the first time the questionable sources from whom Breedlove was getting his information. He had exaggerated Russian activities in eastern Ukraine with the overt goal of delivering weapons to Kiev.

The general and his likeminded colleagues perceived US President Barack Obama, the commander-in-chief of all American forces, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel as obstacles. Obama and Merkel were being "politically naive & counter-productive" in their calls for de-escalation, according to Phillip Karber, a central figure in Breedlove's network who was feeding information from Ukraine to the general.

"I think POTUS sees us as a threat that must be minimized,... ie do not get me into a war????" Breedlove wrote in one email, using the acronym for the president of the United States. How could Obama be persuaded to be more "engaged" in the conflict in Ukraine -- read: deliver weapons -- Breedlove had asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove's predecessor at NATO, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev.

One name that kept popping up was Phillip Karber, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and president of the Potomac Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by the former defense contractor BDM. By its own account, the foundation has helped eastern European countries prepare their accession into NATO. Now the Ukrainian parliament and the government in Kiev were asking Karber for help.

Surreptitious Channels

On February 16, 2015, when the Ukraine crisis had reached its climax, Karber wrote an email to Breedlove, Clark, Pyatt and Rose Gottemoeller, the under secretary for arms control and international security at the State Department, who will be moving to Brussels this fall to take up the post of deputy secretary general of NATO. Karber was in Warsaw, and he said he had found surreptitious channels to get weapons to Ukraine -- without the US being directly involved.

According to the email, Pakistan had offered, "under the table," to sell Ukraine 500 portable TOW-II launchers and 8,000 TOW-II missiles. The deliveries could begin within two weeks. Even the Poles were willing to start sending "well maintained T-72 tanks, plus several hundred SP 122mm guns, and SP-122 howitzers (along with copious amounts of artillery ammunition for both)" that they had leftover from the Soviet era. The sales would likely go unnoticed, Karber said, because Poland's old weapons were "virtually undistinguishable from those of Ukraine."

Karber noted, however, that Pakistan and Poland would not make any deliveries without informal US approval. Furthermore, Warsaw would only be willing to help if its deliveries to Kiev were replaced with new, state-of-the-art weapons from NATO.

Karber concluded his letter with a warning: "Time has run out." Without immediate assistance, the Ukrainian army "could face prospect of collapse within 30 days."

"Stark," Breedlove replied. "I may share some of this but will thoroughly wipe the fingerprints off."

In March, Karber traveled again to Warsaw in order to, as he told Breedlove, consult with leading members of the ruling party, on the need to "quietly supply arty (eds: artillery) and antitank munitions to Ukraine."

Much to the irritation of Breedlove, Clark and Karber, nothing happened. Those responsible were quickly identified. The National Security Council, Obama's circle of advisors, were "slowing things down," Karber complained. Clark pointed his finger directly at the White House, writing, "Our problem is higher than State," a reference to the State Department.

Sights on Germany

Breedlove and his fellow campaigners also had the German federal government in their sights early on. In April 2014, Clark sent a mail to Nuland and Breedlove and wrote that Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev had implied there was a "problem with German attitude" concerning its "sphere of influence."

Efforts by Merkel and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to find a peaceful solution to the Ukraine crisis were portrayed by hardliners as a readiness in Berlin to let Russia bully Ukraine.

In order to build up pressure for the desired weapons aid, Clark and Karber began painting grim scenarios. If the West were to abandon Ukraine, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Clark prophesized, China would then be encouraged to expand its sphere of influence in the Pacific. It could also lead to NATO's collapse. The situation could only be prevented with the help of military aid, they argued. On November 8, 2014 Clark sounded the alarm internally after talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, his advisers and senior military and intelligence officials. The Ukrainians were expecting an attack as early as the end of the month.

Breedlove answered, "I will focus on this immediately." He also wrote, "One of our biggest problems" is that one of the United States' allies had been denying the findings of its intelligence. The remark was aimed at Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency, which had been much more reserved in its assessment of the situation -- a position that in retrospect would prove correct.

'The Front Is Now Everywhere'

Karber's emails constantly made it sound as though the apocalypse was only a few weeks away. "The front is now everywhere," he told Breedlove in an email at the beginning of 2015, adding that Russian agents and their proxies "have begun launching a series of terrorist attacks, assassinations, kidnappings and infrastructure bombings," in an effort to destabilize Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.

In an email to Breedlove, Clark described defense expert Karber as "brilliant." After a first visit, Breedlove indicated he had also been impressed. "GREAT visit," he wrote. Karber, an extremely enterprising man, appeared at first glance to be a valuable informant because he often -- at least a dozen times by his own account -- traveled to the front and spoke with Ukrainian commanders. The US embassy in Kiev also relied on Karber for information because it lacked its own sources. "We're largely blind," the embassy's defense attaché wrote in an email.

At times, Karber's missives read like prose. In one, he wrote about the 2014 Christmas celebrations he had spent together with Dnipro-1, the ultranationalist volunteer battalion. "The toasts and vodka flow, the women sing the Ukrainian national anthem -- no one has a dry eye."

Karber had only good things to report about the unit, which had already been discredited as a private oligarch army. He wrote that the staff and volunteers were dominated by middle class people and that there was a large professional staff that was even "working on the holiday." Breedlove responded that these insights were "quietly finding their way into the right places."

Highly Controversial Figure

In fact, Karber is a highly controversial figure. During the 1980s, the longtime BDM employee, was counted among the fiercest Cold War hawks. Back in 1985, he warned of an impending Soviet attack on the basis of documents he had translated incorrectly.

He also blundered during the Ukraine crisis after sending photos to US Senator James Inhofe, claiming to show Russian units in Ukraine. Inhofe released the photos publicly, but it quickly emerged that one had originated from the 2008 war in Georgia.

By November 10, 2014, at the latest, Breedlove must have recognized that his informant was on thin ice. That's when Karber reported that the separatists were boasting they had a tactical nuclear warhead for the 2S4 mortar. Karber himself described the news as "weird," but also added that "there is a lot of 'crazy' things going on" in Ukraine.

The reasons that Breedlove continued to rely on Karber despite such false reports remain unclear. Was he willing to pay any price for weapons deliveries? Or did he have other motives? The emails illustrate the degree to which Breedlove and his fellow campaigners feared that Congress might reduce the number of US troops in Europe.

Karber confirmed the authenticity of the leaked email correspondence. Regarding the questions about the accuracy of his reports, he told SPIEGEL that, "like any information derived from direct observation at the front during the 'fog of war,' it is partial, time sensitive, and perceived through a personal perspective." Looking back with the advantage of hindsight and a more comprehensive perspective, "I believe that I was right more than wrong," Karber writes, "but certainly not perfect." He adds that, "in 170 days at the front, I never once met a German military or official directly observing the conflict."

Great Interest in Berlin

Breedlove's leaked email correspondences were read in Berlin with great interest. A year ago, word of the NATO commander's "dangerous propaganda" was circulating around Merkel's Chancellery. In light of the new information, officials felt vindicated in their assessment. Germany's Federal Foreign Office has expressed similar sentiment, saying that fortunately "influential voices had continuously advocated against the delivery of 'lethal weapons.'"

Karber says he finds it "obscene that the most effective sanction of this war is not the economic limits placed on Russia, but the virtual complete embargo of all lethal aid to the victim. I find this to be the height of sophistry -- if a woman is being attacked by a group of hooligans and yells out to the crowd or passersby, 'Give me a can of mace,' is it better to not supply it because the attackers could have a knife and passively watch her get raped?"

General Breedlove's departure from his NATO post in May has done little to placate anyone in the German government. After all, the man Breedlove regarded as an obstacle, President Obama, is nearing the end of his second term. His possible successor, the Democrat Hillary Clinton, is considered a hardliner vis-a-vis Russia.

What's more: Nuland, a diplomat who shares many of the same views as Breedlove, could move into an even more important role after the November election -- she's considered a potential candidate for secretary of state.

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