The instalment above is the start of chapter 25 in "The Age of Deceit". More to come. The title of this piece in regard to a T-34 tank is related to a certain Samuel Cummins, who sold army surplus to various militias in many countries — either on behalf of the "deep state" or for himself — or even the Russians. Other people of interests are cannon merchants such as Captain Vassil Valtchanov (100 year old in 2015), Georg Puchert who died when his car was blow-up in Germany in 1959 and many double-agents...

Note: Article above was written in German by Gus Leonisky, then reduced to Enflish (also called Englaish) like a Bremen sausage is boiled and boiled and boiled. Much more could be said in this chapter and it will be said eventually... Just be patient...

 

La Main Rouge (English: The Red Hand) was a terrorist organization operated by the foreign Department of the French External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service (French: Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, SDECE) in the 1950s, which pursued the goal to eliminate the supporters of Algerian independence and the leading members of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) during the Algerian War.

Several bomb attacks took place in the Federal Republic of Germany, like the assassination attempts of the arms dealer Otto Schlüter on 26 September 1956 and 3 June 1957, and the killing of Georg Puchert (alias Captain Morris) on 3 March 1959. These would ultimately never be solved.[1]

On 27 November 1959, the then 30-year-old Christian Durieux gave an interview in which he claimed the attempts against the lives of Schlüter and Puchert and the bomb attack in the port of Hamburg against the cargo ship Atlas on 1 October 1958, all on behalf of La Main Rouge. He also claimed responsibility for the assassination of FLN official Aït Ahcène in Bonn, in November 1958.[1][2]

The freighters Emma en route from Tangier to Gibraltar on 30 July 1957, and Alkaira in Ostend on 13 April 1959 were destroyed by explosive charges planted by La Main Rouge.[1]

In particular, the apparent inaction of the French authorities was seen abroad as a note of the French Government that they have caused the aggressive crackdown on supporters of the FLN.

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Main_Rouge

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The press is always sceptical about "conspiracies"... and this is fair enough. BUT I CAN ASSURE YOU that there are still many (actually more) conspiracies from governments that "WE" don't hear about though we hear of some (a few) after the facts... Remember the Iran-Contra affair and a few more likes. There is a certain John Barron at the ABC who prize himself to be an expert on "facts"... He's not. He is like many other journalists, an expert on sitting on fences...

 

 

By the same token, despite there being a lot more evidence, we don’t yet know what the Mueller investigation will uncover about Russian election tampering and possible Trump collusion.

At times both sides are guilty of doing what the worst conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones do around events like Oklahoma, September 11 and Sandy Hook.

They find a single, sinister explanation that confirms a pre-existing view.

The drive to impeach Mr Trump for being illegitimately elected before the evidence has been presented has clear echoes of Trump’s own disgraceful “birtherism” conspiracy against Mr Obama.

Sometimes there are singular reasons for why something happens, and sometimes there are many.

But particularly at a time when distrust of the media and public institutions is so high, we tend to want to believe in a secret over-arching explanation, and believe that there’s more to the story than we are being told.

And of course, sometimes there actually is.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-06/donald-trump-russia-conspiracy-the...

 

Yes John (Barron)... at most times there are conspiracies going on — conspiracies that we know nothing about and will never know about. A few years later, we discover links to illegal armement transfers... or the governments spying on your “dick pics” (a euphemism on spying on what you do, in order to determine what you will do). Most of the iphone transmission/reception (about 99.99999 per cent of items) is innocuous and bland and deliberately massaging your mind into a blancmange of cultivated ignorance with pictures of a cat or someone doing an impression of an idiot. It’s like a happy pill. While you take the pill, you don’t plan a revolution, nor will you pay attention to the governments shenanigans...

 

 

snow jobs...

 

I use this euphemism to describe the commerce of weaponry in relation to history. I could have used any other words such as “Esse Quam Videri” — “to be, rather than be seen”, a motto used by “Mister President”, Samuel Cummings, the biggest illegal arm trader in the world then, from the USA. He died in 1997.

 

The illegal arms trade is the main — often unknown to the extend of, though estimated worth more than $US100 billion per year — factor in the defeat and the success of revolutions such as Yemen’s Houthis presently — or that of the white supremacist struggles in Angola and South Africa in the late 1990s, until the last bastion of resistance falls... 

 

Here we have to look at our news-industry which reports a tiny (sensational) ripple of “what’s happening” but rarely shows us the score of intent, nor the behind the scene bum fights. Questions are being asked for example as to why a massacre happens in Las Vegas, when a so-called deranged psychopath kills more than 50 people and injures more than 200 “for no reason” with a gun arsenal in his hotel room. At least, when scores die in Europe from a truck driven by an “Arab” in Nice, France, we are told that this is terrorism from a nasty group called ISIS, that we have to eradicate like cockroaches, though we need them first to help us get rid of Assad, in Syria. It’s hypocritically complicated.

So, do we understand the dynamics of a mind that becomes lured by a weapon? Does a weapon in hand make people go berko? The NRA will categorically announce that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. That’s fair enough to a point, at which junction the weapon maketh the killer — far more vicarious and tempting to use, yet as efficient, as a hammer and nail maketh the carpenter. So our lousy media is designed to distract us rather than inform us. The less we know, the less damage we can make while looking at pictures of K.K.’s butt. It’s gross — as we ponder about the colour of our next couch, in a magazine.

 

Weapons are dangerous and varied. From guns of many calibre to trucks, cars and fertilisers. Plastic explosives were first invented by Nobel in 1875. Plastic explosives are soft hand-moldable form of explosive material. Common plastic explosives include Semtex and C-4. There are other weapons such as “chemical weapons” which can be made simply from a variety of readily available products, from swimming pool chlorine to vinegar.

 

Sam Cummings, the most successful illegal arms trader, with a back door entry to the White House, managed to sell weapons under the table to most places, including the Contra in Nicaragua, South Korea and to Persia (Iran) before the revolution of 1979. Although he never sold weapons to “Iran” (Persia AFTER the revolution) -- as it was prohibited by U.S. law -- he kept in touch with Iranian arms buyers for years so that he would be in position to re-do business with them should the political situation change.

Cummings’s business strategy was that the military market is based on human folly -- not normal market precepts. Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists -- and its depths have never been plumbed.

In 1958, Cummings sold 100 ArmaLite AR-10 rifles to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, but in 1959 the entire shipment was captured intact on the Havana docks by the victorious rebel forces of Fidel Castro. Cummings wrote to Castro and asked him if he would pay for the rifles or return them. Cummings was invited to visit Cuba in return. Impressed with the firepower of the AR-10, Castro paid for the rifles and asked for more, but the American arms embargo to Cuba prohibited further sales. Castro later gave the rifles to rebels seeking to overthrow the leader of the Dominican Republic, General Rafael Trujillo. In June 1959, the rebels invaded the Dominican Republic, but betrayed by local residents, the rebel were caught. Captured AR-10 rifles from Cummings’ Batista shipment were found on the bodies of guerrillas killed in firefight. When Cummings came to the Dominican Republic that same month to discuss arms sales with the nation’s arms procurement officer, an enraged Trujillo stormed into the room carrying an AR-10 rifle taken off the body of a dead insurgent, demanding to know why Cummings had supplied guns to his enemies. Cummings became a British subject.

 

We know about Oliver North and the Iran-Contra deal made to free some US hostages kept in Lebanon by Hezbollah in 1985. Monzer al-Kassar also known as the “Prince of Marbella”, was an international arms dealer, connected to numerous crimes, including the Achille Lauro hijacking and the Iran-Contra scandal. On November 20, 2008, he was convicted to 30 years imprisonment in the U.S. federal court for selling arms to undercover agents posing as suppliers for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

 

Viktor Anatolyevich Bout was arrested in Thailand in 2008 before being extradited in 2010 to the United States to stand trial on terrorism charges after having been accused of intending to smuggle arms to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for use against U.S. forces. Bout had reportedly made a significant amount of money through his multiple air transport companies, which shipped cargo mostly in Africa and the Middle East during the 1990s and early 2000s. Bout worked with Charles Taylor in Liberia, with the United Nations in Sudan and with the United States in Iraq. He “may have” facilitated huge arms shipments during the 1990s into various civil wars in Africa with his private air cargo fleets.

Bout says he has done little more than provide transport, but the British Foreign Office called Bout a “sanctions buster” and described him as the principal conduit for planes and supply routes that take arms from east Europe, principally Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine, to Liberia and Angola. There is a chance that Bout knows too much about the CIA relationship with illegal arms trading.

 

Sarkis Garabet Soghanalian (Armenian), nicknamed the Merchant of Death, was an international private arms dealer who gained fame for being the “Cold War’s largest arms merchant” and the lead seller of weaponry to the former government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. He had been hired “by the CIA” to sell arms to “help” Iraq in the midst of the Iran–Iraq War. 

With the encouragement of the Reagan Administration and the backing of American intelligence agencies, he oversaw the transaction of several significant arms deals, including the sale of French-built artillery valued at $1.4 billion. He also sold weapons to groups such as the Polisario forces in Mauritania, the Phalange militia during the Lebanese Civil War, to Latin American countries such as Nicaragua, Ecuador, and to Argentina during the Falklands War. He was not popular with the Brits.

Once, he named several top American government officials who were involved in his arms transactions.

The US Justice Department charged Soghanalian for “conspiracy of shipping unauthorized weapons” to Iraq. He was found guilty and sentenced to jail. Soon “released”, he was used by the Clinton administration unsuccessfully to break-up a counterfeiting operation in Lebanon. In 2001, he was arrested once more by the US government on “bank fraud charges” but was released again a year later after he revealed the weapons transactions deals were organised between the CIA and Peru — deals which “may have” had a bearing in the collapse of the Alberto Fujimori government.

 

Adnan Khashoggi, of Turkish origin was born in Mecca. His father, Muhammad Khashoggi, was King Abdul Aziz Al Saud’s personal doctor. Adnan’s sister was author Samira Khashoggi who married businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed and was the mother of Dodi Fayed. See the English Royal family for curdled milk... 

Khashoggi headed a company called Triad Holding Company, that built the Triad Center in Salt Lake City, which eventually went bankrupt. He was an “efficient” arms dealer, brokering deals between US firms and the Saudi government, most actively in the 1960s and 1970s. One of Khashoggi’s first weapons deals was providing David Stirling with weapons for a covert mission in Yemen during the Aden Emergency in 1963. Among his clients were defence contractors Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin Corporation), Raytheon, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation and Northrop Corporation (the last two of which have now merged into Northrop Grumman).

Between 1970 and 1975, Lockheed paid Khashoggi $106 million in commissions. Khashoggi “became for all practical purposes a marketing arm of Lockheed. He would provide not only an entrée but strategy, advice and analysis to Lockheed’s international marketing.

A shrewd businessman, he established companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to “handle his commissions” as well as developing contacts with notables such as CIA officers James H. Critchfield, Kim Roosevelt and United States businessman Bebe Rebozo, a close associate of U.S. President Richard Nixon. His yacht, the Nabila, was the largest in the world at the time and was used in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again. 

After Khashoggi ran into financial problems he sold the yacht to the Sultan of Brunei, who in turn sold it for $29 million to Donald Trump, who sold it for $20 million to Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal as part of a deal to keep his Taj Mahal casino out of bankruptcy. Did this do the trick?

Khashoggi was implicated in the Iran–Contra affair as a key middleman in the arms-for-hostages exchange along with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and, in a complex series of events, was found to have borrowed money for these arms purchases from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) with Saudi and United States backing. His role in the affair created controversy when Khashoggi donated millions to the American University in Washington, DC, to build a sports arena which would bear his name. Khashoggi was a member of the university’s board of trustees from 1983 until his indictment on fraud and other charges in May 1989.

In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland, accused of concealing funds. In 1990, a United States federal jury in Manhattan acquitted Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos, widow of the exiled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, of racketeering and fraud.

These days, someone like President Trump does the deals and the handshakes himself. No need for puny middlemen when announcing a huge weapon deal with the Saudis.

 

So, the subject of arms trading, illegal or otherwise, is hard to know where to start... Apart from the obvious, it also involves massive tax evasion, illegal businesses with legit manufacturing or commerce front shops, shipping, diamond payments, spies, tobacco, drugs and Switzerland’s secrecy laws — Liechtenstein and Monaco tax havens, as well as armament factories in Bulgaria (or anywhere else, including the US) involved in making new guns and restoring old stock from World War II. 

On the illegal level, these deals can range from hand-guns to “carabines” and machine guns in the thousands, to a billion ammunition and old US PT boats to even aeroplanes. The Kalashnikov AK47 has been a successful Russian gun, easily copied by other “Eastern countries” for this illicit trade but the Americans are still kings in the business... Some of the US army hardware stock disappeared during and after the 2003 Iraq war. The official estimate is that more than $1 billion worth of weapons “are not accounted for”. It’s likely that what has gone missing is to the tune of $20 billion, some of it resurfacing in the hands of ISIS. Few soldiers have been caught in the “act” of pilfering, but a lot of thieving would have gone through the hands of private contractors. A lot of weaponry was also abandoned in dumps and the name “junk” is often used by traders to describe their wares coming from such “abandoned stock piles”.

 

The illegal weapon trade is often discreetly sanctioned by governments to gain advantage. It’s not new. At some stage European governments sponsored pirates who flew the Jolly Roger flag to scuttle official ships of the competition — without having to officially declare war. The American revolution was so sponsored with French-made weapons supplied by devious means, against the English. A certain Beaumarchais comes to mind — illegal arm trader by day, writer of comedies by night. 

 

Some traders got blown up by the secret services of some countries operating in “friendly countries” that were also friendly to the illegal arm traders — because in the end business is business. We’ve already mentioned the “Red Hand” that blew up ships in Hamburg and blew up the cars of traders in various cities, especially in Germany. Of course, though it is never acknowledge in the press, is that the “Red Hand” was “possibly” (for sure) a secret section of the French secret services. Remember the Rainbow Warrior affair. 

 

Here we can’t go pass Captain Morris, Georg Pulchert. He was supplying weapons to the resistance in Algeria when the French were doing all they could to retain this colonial territory. Pulchert operated from Germany but had his headquarters in Tangier. He started in the tobacco smuggling business through out the Mediterranean Sea, from Spain, Malta, Italy and the Canary islands, with five small “crayfish boats”, then moved on to surplus US PT boats that could outrun any custom ships at 45 knots. His arms trading thus was the focus of the French secret services that created the “Red Hand” German terrorist group to counter Pulchert. This is where he lost his ships, one in Hamburg, one in Ostende, two in Tangier and got killed in 1959 by a bomb under his car. One of the problem for the Algerian rebels is that the French as well had entered the illicit weapons game and supplied guns with bent barrels and non-matching bullets. Pulchert had been used by the rebels to provide “standarisation”. Some the cash too came from counterfeiting and some Arms traders lost. Hence Cummings was often trading in diamonds and had his own expert doing the valueing.

 

Hands guns are small potatoes. The big ones of course are presently nuclear bombs. So far it seems that the illegal traders have not been able to procure any, due to extraordinary controls, though the very detailed plans of nuclear bombs have been secretly traded for cash. Enrichment of uranium and plutonium is also a very complex delicate operation, though it has been demonstrated that loonies could actually do the process in a bathtub — killing themselves in the process due to the increasing radiation. This manufacture of atomic bombs tends to have everyone tightening their butt at the mention thereof. North Korea comes to mind. Iran is also the present focus of an agreement made by Obama which Trump wants to scuttle, but the USA should actually concentrate more on themselves, the Pakistanis and the Indians in this nuclear bomb business.

 

The 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution overthrew the (royal) Pahlavi dynasty that was undemocratically installed and supported by the United States. The revolution replaced “2500 years of monarchy” with an Islamic Republic regime under the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. 

In fact, the Iranians had tried to become free of their monarchy much earlier, like in the 1920s, but Shah Reza Pahlavi was installed by allied British and Soviet troops during WWII. In 1953, his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, had to flee to Italy, because of a new elected democratic government. MI6 aided an American CIA operative to organize a military coup d’état to oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstate Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as “king” of Persia. 

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, maintained a close relationship with the U.S. in opposition to the Soviet Union. Like his father, this Shah was autocratic and pushing for the Westernisation of Iran. He disregarded the religious and democratic constitution. Leftist and Islamist groups attacked his government — mostly from outside as they were fiercely suppressed within Iran — for violation of the constitution, for political corruption, for outrageous opulence and for oppression of people by the secret police (SAVAK).

Of course the weapons “sold” to Persia before the revolution by Cummings, possibly on behalf of the White House, eventually ended up in the hands of the “revolutionary”. These revolutionary would have been getting weapons and support from the Soviet Union as well.

 

Iran’s nuclear program was launched in the 1950s with the help of the United States as part of the Atoms for Peace program. The participation of the United States and Western European governments in Iran’s nuclear program continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Bushehr, the first plant, would supply energy to the city of Shiraz. In 1975, the Erlangen/Frankfurt firm Kraftwerk Union AG, a joint venture of Siemens AG and AEG, signed a contract worth $4 to $6 billion to build the pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant. Construction of the two 1,196 MWe was to have been completed in 1981.

In 1975 Sweden’s 10% share in Eurodif went to Iran. The French government subsidiary company Cogéma and the Iranian Government established the Sofidif (Société franco–iranienne pour l’enrichissement de l’uranium par diffusion gazeuse) enterprise with 60% and 40% shares, respectively. In turn, Sofidif acquired a 25% share in Eurodif, which gave Iran its 10% share of Eurodif. The Shah lent 1 billion dollars (and another 180 million dollars in 1977) for the construction of the Eurodif factory in France, to have the right to 10% of the production.

Meanwhile, President Gerald Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Teheran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete nuclear fuel cycle. The Ford strategy paper said the introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export — or conversion to petrochemicals. This was protection of oil supply to the USA, following the Oil Embargo, 1973–1974 which had crippled Western Economies. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Arab members of OPEC imposed an embargo against the United States in retaliation for the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military and to gain leverage in the post-war peace negotiations.

 

Following the 1979 Revolution, most of the international nuclear cooperation with Iran was cut off. In 1981, Iranian officials decided that the country’s nuclear venture should continue. Because of international agreements regardless of ruling government, new successful negotiations took place with France in the late 1980s and with Argentina in the early 1990s.

In the 1990s, Russia formed a joint research organization with Iran, providing Iran with Russian nuclear experts and technical information. U.S. and European companies also scrambled to restart business in Iran. 

 

EURODIF Production operates the Georges Besse plant, located in the south of France. It has used the gaseous diffusion process to enrich uranium for more than 30 years. Its output supplies enriched uranium to over 100 nuclear power plants in France and around the world. The plant is gradually being replaced by the Georges Besse II plant, which began commercial production in April 2011. The Georges Besse II plant uses the centrifuge enrichment process.

 

One of the major reasons the Geneva talks on Iran’s nuclear programme had to be reconvened in Nov 2013 was on France’s objections over US allegations of plutonium production plant at Arak, and they seem to be annoyed about the complications of the industrial partnership in this French technology for four decades, since the agreement was initiated by the Shah in 1975.

This deal never got reported in the context of the Iran nuclear negotiations. The origins of the deal illustrate the complexity of international nuclear collaboration. 

Although Iran’s active involvement in Eurodif was halted following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Iran has retained its active involvement in Sofidif, headquartered in Rue La Fayette in Paris, to the present day. Sofidif annual reports are audited by KPMG. Dr Ali Daee of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran has been appointed Iran’s new permanent representative to Sofidif in September 2012.

 

The Iranian revolution lacked the usual causes — defeat at war, financial crisis, peasant rebellion, disgruntled military — in a nation that was enjoying relative prosperity. It was popular, resulting in the exile of many Iranians. It replaced a pro-Western monarchy with an anti-Western authoritarian theocracy based on the concept of Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists (or velayat-e faqih). It was a relatively non-violent revolution, and helped to redefine the meaning and practice of modern revolutions.

 

With Iran now strongly aligned with Russia, with the US military and NATO strongly poised against Russia while Trump is not so anti-Russia and with the weird dynamics of sanctions and agreements, who knows where this is going to lead us, especially considering that the US wish to replace Assad in Syria — himself supported by Iran and Russia — by a religious Sunni caliphate aligned with Saudi Arabia, has more or less failed — so far. 

 

Meanwhile, the arms-trade prospers like never before. A $300 billion worth of NEW US weapons sold by Trump to the Saudis recently — after negotiations had been started by Obama — is only the surface of the game. This will be paid for by guaranteed oil supply at a low price and by reselling older weapon stocks on the black market. There could be a glut of second-hand weapons akin to after WWII, when huge stocks of German guns and bullets were sold to tinpot rulers by illegal traders with the blessing of their masters, including the US government which then could “control” the tinpots, rather than have to deal with “democratically-elected” governments — such as Iran. Here comes Libya and Gadaffi, Panama and Noriega... Chile and Pinochet. The list is long and the name Cummings — who as mentioned had a back-door entrance to the White House (and the CIA) — appears in much of all this. 

The other aim of the game is to create confusing civil wars when the tinpots have passed their use-by-date. This weakens the strength of countries and enforces very favourable negotiations for the Empire.

 

The Assad/Syria saga is another story, in which weapons traders and former Nazis found their paradise, like they did in Egypt under Nasser. More to come.

 

 

Gus Leonisky

your local snowman...

 

EU pledges to do everything to preserve Iran nuclear deal

European countries will do their utmost to preserve a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program, a senior EU diplomat said on Wednesday. “This is not a bilateral agreement, it’s a multilateral agreement. As Europeans, we will do everything to make sure it stays,” Reuters quoted Helga Schmid, secretary-general of the EU’s foreign policy service, as telling an Iranian investment conference. The deal was brokered by a bloc consisting of Iran, the US, France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China. US President Donald Trump is weighing up whether the agreement serves US security interests. He faces an October 15 deadline for certifying that Iran is complying.

Source: RT

Read article above... My guess is that Trump will "save the deal" by doing some unrelated "safeguard added" as a front for leaving things as they are... But who knows...

 

 

There’s a final, crucial reason Trump should certify that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal: because it’s true. Even Cotton conceded as much this week, arguing against certification “not primarily on the grounds related to Iran’s technical compliance, but rather based on the long catalogue of the regime’s crimes and perfidy against the United States.”

A question for the Iran hawks: If the United States refuses to certify an agreement when a country is “technically” in compliance, why would any other country ever make a deal with us again? A great country keeps its word.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-nuclear-issu...

 

Read from top...

 

 

WHEN THE Australian Government announced in September 2015 that its armed forces were going to join the United States led “coalition” in the Syrian War, the official explanation was that it was to assist the U.S. in fighting the terrorists, who had by that stage captured large swathes of both Iraq and Syria, including major cities.

That explanation was never particularly persuasive, not least because there was already at that time a significant body of evidence available that ISIS, the principal targeted terrorist group, was essentially a creature of the America’s allies in the region, notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. With the passage of time, it became even more apparent that the U.S. itself was playing a significant role in arming and otherwise supporting the terrorist groups.

A detailed 2 July 2017 report by Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhiev for the Trudnewspaper revealed the CIA was allegedly using a variety of front organisations to supply ISIS and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Congo, Syria and elsewhere. Weapons were sourced from mainly European manufacturers and then delivered to the terrorists using the Azerbaijani airline, Silk Way Airlines, using diplomatic clearances. The weapons were distributed to various NATO bases and then transited to the terrorist groups. None of this was reported in the Australian media.

I've just got fired for telling the truth about weapons supplies for #terrorists in #Syria on diplomatic flights https://t.co/wSJTRIzKnr

— Dilyana Gaytandzhiev (@dgaytandzhieva) August 24, 2017

 

The other explanation for Australia’s involvement in Syria was given by the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop when asked for the legal basis by the ABC. Bishop stated that it was pursuant to a request from the Iraqi Government and under the collective self-defence provisions of Article 51 of the UNCharter. The Iraqi Government promptly rebutted the first of these claims and the second wasmanifestly legal nonsense. Unsurprisingly, the Government has advanced neither justification since.

Notwithstanding the lack of any legal right under international law to actually be in Syria, that involvement has continued to this day. On the rare occasions when the issue is ever raised in the mainstream media, the standard explanation is that Australia is part of the “U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS”. Details about the actual activities of the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) have not been forthcoming. One exception to the general rule of silence was in September 2016 when the RAAF admitted being involved in a “coalition” attack on Syrian Government soldiers in Deir ez Zor, killing more than 80.

That attack was described as a “mistake”, although it was difficult at the time to see how that was possible in the particular circumstances. More significant than the “mistake” was that the U.S. led attack simultaneously allowed ISIS forces to launch an attack on Syrian Government positions. This precise coordination between the air attack by the coalition and the ground attack by ISIS led to the inference that the two attacks were, in fact, coordinated. The Australian mainstream media has never raised such an allegation, even when the evidence for such assistance to the terrorists becomes compelling.

That evidence is simply never discussed in the mainstream media — as when the Bulgarian report was published and met with a deafening silence. Shortly after the Bulgarian report was published, President Trump ordered the CIA to cease supplying weapons to the terrorist groups in Syria. 

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/keeping-us-safe-us-led-...

 

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The original aim in the "supply of weapons" to ISIS, (BEFORE and after its creation) by the US via illicit ways, was to remove Assad from the government of Syria — and replace him with a Saudi friendly Sunni ultra-religious Syrian government. This has been the US aim from a long time ago. The sabre-rattling by Trump against the nuclear agreement Obama made with Iran is in the same vein. Here, not so much to replace the Shias from Iran but to break their independent "resolve" and their link to Russia. The Europeans actually accept that the nuclear agreement is as good as it can get and they don't want Trump to scuttle it.

That many people die in the process in Syria will easily be lumbered on Assad (and Russia) by Western propaganda, under instruction from the Empire. But the Russians are far more careful in their targeting of ISIS than the US that has bombed civilian population "by mistake".

Removing Assad is illegal under UN charter. But by painting him black in the Western press as "killing his people" "killing beautiful babies" "creating refugees" has all been a con by the US governments (including Obama's) adding to various devious ways to unsettle Assad's government, by helping "moderate" rebels to mount a revolution against Assad, from around 2009 onwards. "Suddenly", with the help of Sunni Gulf States, including Qatar, this outfit of "rebellious" Sunnis in Syria joined in with the former Ba'ath Sunni misfits in Iraq and by 2014, created the Caliphate of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Here the Western press became aware of the ISIL (IS, ISIS) atrocities and the over the top of this new outfit which was promptly declared a terrorist organisation by the Western "allies". In Iraq, these ISIS terrorists managed to access huge amount of former US weapon stockpiles (read articles from top) without the need of intermediary weapon merchants nor the need for cash.

Assad, having to fight ISIS AND other "moderate" rebels such as Al Qaeda and Al Nusra to which the Yanks have been supplying weapons and TRAINING in Turkey started to loose the war. Obama was letting "Assad kill his people" until Russia came along in 2015, AT THE INVITATION OF THE LEGITIMATE ASSAD GOVERNMENT OF SYRIA (whether we like it or not). The Russians have their own reasons to support Assad — including strategic and economic, as well as humanitarian reason.

Unlike the CIA, the Russian "intelligence" is more "grounded", that is it has information that is far more accurate, considering the CIA has been duplicitous in making us believe in bullshit. Within three months, the Russians have turned the table for Assad. Presently, early October 2017, more than 92 per cent of Syria has been liberated from ISIS and, daily, Russian planes destroy ISIS "commanders" and troops. "Peaceful" Syrian enclaves where former "moderate" fighters can settle as long as they stop fighting have been created by agreements between Syria, Iran, Russia and Turkey. The USA are using some of these enclaves (under their control as accepted by the agreement) to let ISIS bomb Syrian government positions. This has led the Russians to question the goodwill of the US in trying to achieve PEACE. We know through that stupid woman, Nikki Haley, the US representative at the UN that "the US does not want peace in Syria as long as Assad stays in power". The USA will play a duplicitous game to the hilt to achieve this goal. The Russians know the game, but our Western press will paint Assad with the US tar brush. What should be declared as "terrorists" are given to us as "freedom fighters against a despotic government in Syria". All Assad has been firmly doing is to prevent Syria falling into the hands of extremist religious Sunnis that do their dirty work on behalf of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, including Qatar. The recent beef between the Gulf states and Qatar has nothing to do with supporting "terrorism" but with Qatar wanting to trade OPENLY with Iran and create peace in the region (basically, Qatar was abandoning the Sunni coalition designed to defeat Assad). 

Meanwhile the USA will support the Saudis to the hilt (presently supplying Thaad weaponry) while the Russians are CAREFULLY wooing the Saudis to come to the table. Apparently the golden staircase of the Saudi king that allows him to come down from his plane had a malfunction... 

In this saga, Australia keeps licking the US government's arse for favours. Australia should have nothing to do with this duplicitous game and to some extend take a leaf of the Menzies government that did not hesitate TRADING WITH RUSSIA (USSR) at the height of the cold war. 

Stuff the USA, until they are genuinely for PEACE. With the amount of whipped-up psychos in that country (more people died in 28 days of shooting in Chicago than died in the Las Vegas shooting), at all echelons of US society, including government, this might be a harder task than ever. By refusing to work with the USA, Australia has a duty to help the US to become less psychopathic. That will be the day with the ningnongs masquerading as politicians on both side of Australian parliament. 

 

 

On 6 October 2017, the Russian spokesman (Igor Konachenkov), denounced the support that the US, British and Norwegian armies were providing Daesh in the al-Tanf zone (located at the Syria-Jordan border) [1].

He stated: “the Pentagon representatives have declared several times now that the US, British and Norwegian trainers, covered by the tactical air force and a system for multiple rocket-launch, were training combatants of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). In actual fact, the area where al-Tanf stood has now been transformed into a “black hole” with a 100 km radius on the Jordan-Syrian border. Instead of the FSA, are mobile Daesh troops which, springing out, like a jack-in-a-box, carrying out subversive terrorist attacks against civilians and Syrian troops”.

In the night of 27 and 28 September, around 300 Daesh combatants left the area of Rukban, and, in a large number of 4x4s, pulled up in the town of Al-Qaryatayn (province of Homs). A Daesh Commando “could by-pass all the posts of the Syrian troops hidden throughout the surrounding areas of al-Busairi and this was in no way due to chance”. He explained that the terrorists had the precise details of the Syrian troops “that could only be obtained with the aid of air intelligence following processing by experts. This information had then been carefully transmitted to carry out sabotage and terrorist acts”.

Two weeks ago, the Russian Ministry of Defence had published satellite images evidencing that Daesh and Nato forces were peacefully co-existing in the area controlled by the United States [2].

Read more: http://www.voltairenet.org/article198229.html

 

 

 

According to US grand strategy, as defined by Admiral Cebrowski in 2001, and published in 2004 by his assistant Thomas Barnett, all of the Greater Middle East must be destroyed except for Israël, Jordan and Lebanon.

Consequently, the imminent victory against Daesh will change nothing of the Pentagon’s intentions.

President Trump is against the manipulation of the jihadists. He has stopped the financial and military support that his country was giving them, and has managed to convince Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to do the same. He has modified NATO policies in the matter. However, nothing yet hints as to whether or not he will also oppose the Pentagon’s grand strategy. As far as the US Interior is concerned, the whole of Congress is in league against him, and he has no possibility of preventing a procedure for destitution other than negotiating with the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump has composed his administration of ex-senior civil servants from the Obama administration, a number of opportunistic politicians, many improvised representatives, and very very few trustworthy personalities.

His special representative against Daesh, Brett McGurk, is an ex-collaborator of President Obama, and is supposed to serve Trump’s new policy. On 18 August, he organised a meeting with the tribal leaders to « fight Daesh ». However, the photographs he published attest to the fact that, on the contrary, several of Daesh’s leaders also participated in the meeting.

In the same vein, helicopters of the US Special Forces exfiltrated two European leaders of Daesh and their families from the outskirts of Deiz ez-Zor, before they could be taken prisoner by the Syrian Arab Army on 26 August. Two days later, they also exfiltrated about twenty more Daesh officers.

Everything looks as though the Pentagon were storing away its jihadist structure and conserving it for other operations elsewhere. Simultaneously, it is preparing a new episode against Syria with a new army, which, this time, will be composed around Kurdish forces.

read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article197938.html

 

 

 

refuting allegations:

 

The US-led coalition against Daesh terror group has denied it is assisting terrorists in Syria after the Russian Defense Ministry had said that Washington's support is the main obstacle to the elimination of militants in the war-plagued country.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The assertions by Russia that the United States is complicit with the terrorists in Syria are absolutely untrue, a spokesperson for the US-led coalition told Sputnik on Thursday.

"Claims of complicity are completely false and you would need to ask the Russians about ‘odd’ attacks," the spokesperson stated. "The Coalition has one mission, the defeat of ISIS [Daesh] in Iraq and Syria."

The refutation comes a day after the Pentagon denied the US forces' alleged complicity with Daesh, saying that any suggestion that the coalition is cooperating with terrorists is "baseless and unhelpful."

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201710051057976670-us-led-coalition-d...

 

Indian space scientist Nambi Narayanan told Sputnik that the huge setback received by India’s space research program in the 90s should not be viewed in isolation, as it was part of a larger conspiracy to stem the ambitions of India and Russia to the benefit of Western countries.

New Delhi (Sputnik) — Nambi Narayanan, a former scientist at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), who recently made headlines due to the startling revelations he made in his autobiography, has said that the US and Europe hatched a conspiracy to derail India's space research technology in the 90s, as India chose to collaborate with Russia instead of the US or France.

 

"In the 90s when India was looking out for the cryogenic technology we clearly had three options, the US, the French and the Russians. The Russian technology was not just better, but also economical and so we went for it. But this whole case (espionage case) delayed our speed and morale," Nambi Narayanan told Sputnik in an exclusive interview.

In 1994, Narayanan along with other scientists was accused of leaking secret information about India's space technology to an enemy country and the ensuing investigations delayed the launch of India's cryogenic technology by 16 years. The case was produced out of thin air in order to stall India's rapid advancements in the development of an indigenous cryogenic rocket engine, he alleges in the book.

 

 

Speaking to Sputnik, Narayanan said that the alleged espionage case, in which he was eventually acquitted, must be reinvestigated, as it is important to establish the motive by finding out who hatched the conspiracy to falsely implicate him and who benefited the most by derailing the space research program that was being carried out by India in collaboration with Russia.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/science/201710301058673054-cooperation-india-rus...

 

Read from top... Please read slowly and carefully. The article at top contains many inferences to many leads and information loops that cannot be divulged (linked) without getting hit on the head by the forces of the Empire darkness... If you don't know what I mean, read a comic book instead.

Of course all the articles by Gus in this line of comments (I don't fancy the word "blog" which seems to impute "uncertain info with a slanted mad opinion") should appear in the MMMM (mediocre mass media de shit) to raise the standard of "news" which has been going to the dogs for yonks.

I will add here that the psychos who run the world don't care about human life — except their own. I say this in a manner in which kings (and queens) went to war for profit (lands) in the past. Armies faced each others on the battlefield with no other purpose than to steal, and deception was hidden behind the names of bravery, courage and distinction which were the glorious resultants in the history books. Little has changed except that instead of fighting the battles on home soil, the wars have been delegated to other lands (aka the Middle East presently, probably Korea when the times come), a bit like the manufacturing of goods has been shifted to China. NATO is a modern version of this warmongering attitude and should be disbanded forthwith before someone gets hurt.

see also: 

 

when our media writes history on the run and faces the robotic news...

 

Adam Osmaev, the Chechen native who is accused by Moscow of plotting to assassinate President Vladimir Putin, was wounded as his car was riddled with bullets in Ukraine’s Kiev region Monday. His wife, Amina Okueva, who was also in the vehicle was killed in the attack, Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Minister, said on Facebook.

"The heart of the patriot of Ukraine Amina Okueva has just stopped… Adam Osmaev was wounded but will live,” he wrote. It’s the second attempt on his life this year. Osmaev was injured in a shootout in central Kiev in June.

The Chechen native was arrested in Odessa in 2012 in a joint operation by Russian and Ukrainian security forces, accused of making explosive devices along with his accomplices which they planned to use in an alleged plot to assassinate President Putin. He avoided extradition to Russia, however, and was released after the 2014 coup in Ukraine, together with Okueva. They have been active in Kiev’s military operation in eastern Ukraine.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/newsline/408264-ukraine-putin-plotter-shooting/

Washington is pressuring the government in Kabul to dispose of Kalashnikov assault rifles, which Moscow had previously gifted to Afghanistan, the Russian foreign minister said. The Afghans are expected to buy American instead.

Speaking to Russian lawmakers on Friday, FM Sergey Lavrov said Russia delivered as many as 50,000 AKs to the Afghan government as aid, but the US is now insisting that Kabul get rid of these rifles, and to replace the Russian-made arms with American ones, he said

 

 

“There is a question of where those 50,000 arms will go now, and we have asked the Afghans this already. But there is another one: why would the US want to undermine the Afghan Army by taking the weapons that they are accustomed to, and forcing them to take those they have to get acquainted with,” the minister said.

He added that some in Washington similarly torpedoed the supply of Russian helicopters to Afghanistan, and he suggested that the placement of hurdles in the way of Russian arms is just “for sheer love of the art”.

Last year, officials in Afghanistan reported receiving from Russia 10,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition. “This donation represents a deep friendship between two nations,” Hanif Atmar, national security adviser in President Ashraf Ghani’s government, said at the time. “This important donation is from an important friend of Afghanistan in a crucial time for Afghanistan and the region.”

The decision to deliver free AKs to Afghanistan was reported as early as 2015, with the shipment initially scheduled for that same year. It was not immediately clear whether other, undisclosed deliveries of Russian small arms took place or if there was some confusion about how many Kalashnikovs Russia gave to Afghanistan.

READ MORE: Pentagon 'defies Congress to buy Russian helicopters for Afghanistan'

Different models of Kalashnikov rifles, including the older AK-47, have a strong historic foothold in Afghanistan. The US has tried on several occasions to arm Afghan security forces with US-made small arms, but the popularity of the Soviet weapons didn’t dwindle. The Kalashnikov design is famous for being extremely reliable and for working even in harshest conditions, compared to American firearms, which require regular professional maintenance.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/413347-kalashnikov-rifles-afghanistan-us/

 

Read from top...

Let us highlight several publications on arms and ammunition trafficking to the destinations of Syria and Iraq.

 In a lengthy study [1], Conflict Armament Research revisits to what extent Isis has benefited from trafficking over the last three years. This mysterious organization has studied 84 sites in Iraq and 27 in Syria. It has picked up on a number of more than 1,800 arms with the help of the Iraqi government and pro-US Coalition forces. Its conclusion: Daesh arms often came from stocks that were initially meant for “factions” (sic) supported by Western countries. This meticulous study had been co-funded by the European Union and the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Despite the press making much noise about it, its results deceive: it does no more than confirm once again what we have already learnt from transport documents.

 In a Foreign Policy article [2], Adam Rawnsley, Eric Woods and Christiaan Triebert, reveal the sale of US military arms and ammunition to jihadists through a simple computer market on Telegram. You can buy all sorts of arms in bulk or individually, from Kalachnikovs to tanks, passing for detonators for artisanal bombs. It is not clear if these products have or have not been transferred voluntarily by the Pentagon or the CIA to private traders to allow them to do unofficially what Washington officially denies doing. The article does not specify that the merchandise is transported to the Middle East. The matter has appeared sufficiently serious for the Syrian Arab Republic to raise the matter with the UN Secretary General and the Security Council (letter of 11 December 2017, reference S/2017/1036).

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article199205.html

 

Read from top...

Thorough inspection [of the convoy] revealed that the required transportation documents were missing, the cargo was too wide and, above all, too heavy,” the police explained. One of the trucks was also overloaded by about 16 tons, and the drivers dispatched by a Polish cargo company, “had already exceeded their driving and exhaustion limits.”

“The long list of shortcomings” prompted police to ban the convoy from passing through until vehicles more suitable for the cargo were made available, the licenses were in place, and all other conditions were met.

The cargo company and the truck drivers were eventually given fines, the statement said.  

The unusual incident made headlines in the German press and triggered an avalanche of comments in social media. Some praised the police for doing a good job, while others wondered why the US military had used civilian infrastructure.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/415579-germany-us-howitzers-stopped/

A member of a Syrian anti-government militant group and former participant of a clandestine US effort to arm rebels in Syria has revealed how weapons supplied by the United States to the so called “moderate opposition” forces were handed over to a local branch of al-Qaeda.

"I communicated with al-Qaeda’s branch, al-Nusra*, to protect and safely escort me and my soldiers for two hours from North Aleppo to West Aleppo. In exchange, I gave them five pickup trucks and ammunition,” Free Syrian Army commander Anas Ibrahim Obaid, also known as Abu Zayd, told Fox News.

According to Zayd, he was the head of a militant group that was trained and armed by the United States in Turkey in 2015 and then deployed to Syria.

 

Initially his US handlers wanted to send Zayd and his men into Syria unarmed, promising to provide them with weapons on site, as the previous group of some 54 militants had been intercepted by al-Nusra terrorists shortly after entering Syrian territory and robbed of all its US-issued weapons.

After Zayd’s militants managed to persuade their US handlers to arm them, they were then stopped by Turkish border guards who found that the group was carrying Syrian flags instead of rebel flags.

READ MORE: Syrian Rebels Plead With the US to Supply More Weapons Via CIA

The US handlers took responsibility for the "flag mistake" and the group eventually managed to cross into Syria, but the emerging morale problems caused many members to defect, leaving Zayd with only 25 militants instead of the initial 72.

This development prompted Zayd to decide to cut his ties with the program and return to his hometown in western Aleppo, and as he had to cross through al-Nusra-controlled territory, he opted to parlay with the terrorist group and give them weapons in exchange for safe passage.

"The Americans were so angry when they found out, they cut my salary. But this was our only option through their territory to get home without getting killed," Zayd said.
He also added that the Pentagon shut down the whole program about a month after that deal, adding however that "the Americans…  can’t get their weapons back."

Fox News also reports, citing its sources that Zayd still controls a sizeable cache of "American-funded" weapons which "routinely surface on the black market, and constitute something of a lucrative business."

READ MORE: US Weapons Went From Syrian Rebels to Daesh in Less than Two Months — Study

From 2013 to mid-2017, the US supplied weapons and training to Syrian rebel groups via the covert CIA program "Timber Sycamore." US President Donald Trump announced the end of the program in July.

In 2015, the US admitted that a large proportion of the weaponry originally intended for the "moderate" rebels eventually found its way into the hands of terrorist groups.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201805161064498100-syrian-terrorists-...

 

One has to remember that the USA HATE socialism far more than terrorism. The USA will sponsor terrorists  to defeat socialism. Terrorism is an "incidental" annoyance (which can be manipulated) while Socialism is a system of governance that massively conflicts with "capitalism". Full stop... What? Free Healthcare??? Free education????

 

Read from top.

Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles, militant Cuban exile and US Central Intelligence Agency operative, died May 23 in South Florida, US.

Born to an affluent family in Cuba February 15 1928, Posada studied medicine and chemistry at the University of Havana, where he was a contemporary of Fidel Castro.

While Castro was a figure of significance in student politics at the time, Posada could have had no idea that in 1959, the bearded radical would, as head of the revolutionary 26th of July Movement, overthrow Cuba's authoritarian, US-backed government, led by President Fulgencio Batista.

Once that historic event came to pass however, Posada would become Castro's nemesis, engaging in a blood-spatted, half-century long international quest to overthrow him by any means possible after taking power. It would be a crusade funded, materially supported and at times directed by the US government, and the CIA.

 

Bahia de Cochinos

In the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution, 250,000 Cubans — primarily upper and middle-class individuals and families financially impacted by Castro's popular redistributive policies. Among them was Posada, who in 1961 relocated to the US.

Despite his family supporting the revolution and remaining in the country — his sister subsequently rose to the rank of Colonel in the Cuban army — Posada began plotting the downfall of Castro's new government. The new arrival was not unnoticed by the Washington, who sought to recruit disaffected Cuban exiles to their clandestine efforts to suppress the revolution.

Posada would end up playing a leading role in planning the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. On April 20 1961, five merchant ships carrying 1,400 US-trained and armed Cuban exiles arrived at an inlet on the southern coast of Cuba, aiming to stage a counter-revolution. It was not to be — two of the ships were quickly sunk, including the vessel carrying most of the supplies. Two CIA planes attempting to provide air-cover were also shot down. Within 72 hours all invaders had been killed, wounded or surrendered.

After the failure, Posada was trained by US intelligence in sabotage and the use of explosives, and worked closely with the CIA in Miami, being a major participant in the infamous Operation 40. The group was an unofficial 'hit squad', carrying out assassinations and terror attacks across the mainland US, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. He would remain an official CIA employee until 1967.

In 1968, he relocated to Venezuela, becoming a naturalized citizen. CIA files indicate his troublemaking in the hemisphere continued unabated, with involvement in bombing campaigns, overthrows of leaders troublesome to US financial interests in the region, and much more.

Aviation Atrocity

On October 6 1976, Air Cubana Flight 455 on its way from Barbados to Jamaica was bombed shortly after takeoff, killing all 73 people on board, including the Cuban national fencing team — many of whom were mere teenagers.

Police in Trinidad arrested two Venezuelans — Herman Ricardo and Freddy Lugo — both of whom were connected with Posada, and worked for his ICI security agency. The pair admitted planting two bombs on the plane, in a plot mapped out by Posada and his fellow Cuban exile militant Orlando Bosch.

Documents declassified in 2006 indicate the CIA was well aware of the attack in advance, and Posada's leading role in its planning and execution.

Posada was subsequently arrested too — in his possession was a map of Washington DC, which documented the daily route to work of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean Foreign Minister and refugee from the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who'd been assassinated in a car bomb attack September 21 1976.

The militant would spend several years in prison, before escaping in 1985 — he disguised himself as a priest, and the Cuban American National Foundation, a group with close ties to the Ronald Reagan administration, paid out sizeable bribes to local authorities. Posada then resettled in El Salvador, where he once again became involved in White House-directed operations in the region.

 

Perhaps most significantly, during this time he was assigned as deputy to CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who'd overseen the capture and execution of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. The pair's primary job was to coordinate drops of military supplies to the Contras, a violent rebel group funded by the Reagan administration which opposed the progressive Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

US financial and material support for the Contras had been banned by in 1985, due to the group's concerted campaign of terrorism against civilians — which included targeting healthcare clinics and aid workers for assassination, kidnap, torture, execution, rape, theft and arson. However, the Reagan administration placed Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North in charge of a secret operation to maintain the transfer of US arms and money to the Contras.

CIA documents demonstrate Posada played a lead role in managing supply flights from the Salvadoran base of Ilopango to the Contra rebels at the border — and these planes were used by the Contras to boost their war budget, by loading them with cocaine that was then flown to mainland America.

 

'A Hug'

After leaving El Salvador, Posada settled in Honduras, where FBI agents allege he was responsible for 41 bombings in the country. He also used his new home as a base of operations for numerous attacks in Cuba, which included the notorious 1997 tourist bombings.

The sextet of incendiary attacks across the island was intended to deter rising tourism — several were killed, including Italian-born Canadian national Fabio di Celmo, and many were wounded.

In reaction to di Celmo's death, Posada told a journalist the next year "the Italian was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I sleep like a baby." His primary regret, seemingly was the reluctance of US news organisations to report the strikes, adding "if there is no publicity, the job is useless."

On November 17 2000, Posada's luck seemingly ran out — he was caught with 200 pounds of explosives in Panama City and arrested. Investigators suspected he'd been planning the assassination of Fidel Castro, visiting the country for the first time since 1959. He spent several years in prison for the plot — but in August 2004, he was pardoned by outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso.

 

Moscoso, who'd been close to the George W. Bush administration, denied she'd been pressured by US officials to release him — but subsequently, the tape of an incriminating phone call made by the President to the US Ambassador came to light.

"Ambassador, good morning. This is the President to inform you the four Cubans were pardoned last night and have left the country. Three are on their way to Miami and the other, well, in an unknown direction. Goodbye. A hug."

Posada resurfaced in the US in 2005 — within weeks, he was arrested due to international pressure on the Bush administration to hold him to the same standard as other accused terrorists. However, officials refused to turn him over to Venezuela or Cuba, or try him on terrorism charges — he did however end up in court on the comparatively trifling charge of lying to immigration officials. He was acquitted of all charges in 2011, and lived out his days in Miami, financially supported by the city's large Cuban exile population.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/military/201805251064773136-posada-cia-castro-te...

 

Read from top.

A turboprop Junkers Ju-52 transport plane – capable of seating 17 passengers as well as two pilots and one flight attendant – went down over the Swiss Alps on Saturday.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/435153-junkers-plane-crash-switzerland/

 

JU

 

Turboprop??? Did the restorers of the plane change the engines? Or is this a reporting mistake? Junkers, such as that shown in the picture, have RADIAL  engines. I know I could be wrong or picky but I used to know "my" planes...

 

I saw one of these Junkers fly over an old city in Germany a few years ago. They are great for sight-seeing as they are quite slow. 

For a while after WW2 these planes were sold by weapon merchants to transport personnel and equipment. Read from top.

 

Condolences to the families of the people killed in the Swiss Alps...

 

The tanks were first deployed in combat three summers ago. In early August 2015, they rolled along Yemen's N1 highway, heading north to Al Anad Air Base. Their orders were to help government troops beat back the rebels.

The battle for the base only lasted a few days, after which the Sunni government declared victory over the Houthi rebels. The success came partly due to its foreign backers, most notably the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi had sent a brigade of Leclerc tanks to rout the Houthi rebels from the air force base.

The Emirates once shelled out more than $3 billion (2.6 billion euros) for 436 Leclerc tanks and other armored vehicles. The motors were from Germany, manufactured by the Motoren und Turbinen Union (MTU) in the city of Friedrichshafen on the shores of Lake Constance. The transmissions were from a company called Renk AG in Augsburg. The tanks were assembled by Giat, a state-owned enterprise in France that is now a part of the French-German joint venture Nexter.

Abu Dhabi is a party to Yemen's civil war, which has left thousands of people dead. It's unclear how many of those deaths were because of the tanks the Emiratis sent, but it is possible to reconstruct just how the machines found their way to the Arabian Peninsula. The whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks has published a rare document that pulls the curtain back on the international arms trade. DER SPIEGEL, along with the French online investigative journal Mediapart and the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, were given early access to this document.

It describes an arms deal of immense proportions: The commission alone amounted to a whopping $235 million [Gus bold]. Of that, $195 million flowed from Giat, through a letterbox company in the British Virgin Islands, and on to the enigmatic Arab businessman Abbas Ibrahim Yousef Al Yousef.

Bribes in Germany?

He is considered one of the Emirates' richest men. There are some indications that Yousef didn't keep all the money from the commission for himself, but that he passed some of it on to Arab officials. The documents also raise the question of whether bribes were paid to anyone in Germany to ensure the export of the motors and the transmissions went smoothly. In 2009, Yousef said: "I undertook the lobbying of the German authorities and was instrumental in ensuring that the necessary approval or waiver was obtained."

That's according to a ruling handed down by one of the International Chamber of Commerce's arbitration courts, which met secretly in Paris. When a deal was reached on the sale of Leclerc tanks to the UAE, Giat and Yousef agreed on a commission of 6.5 percent, the equivalent of $235 million. The managers of the French state-owned company sent regular payments to Yousef until March 2000, but they stopped after about $195 million. This didn't sit well with the businessman. He turned to the arbitration court and demanded he be paid the remaining $40 million. While pleading his case, he included some highly sensitive details. These are reflected in the ruling handed down by the arbitration court, which was anonymously provided to WikiLeaks.

Arms deals tend to have a long lifecycle. Fighter jets, battleships and tanks are ordered and delivered over a period of several years and must be kept in good repair. The beginning of the billion-dollar deal with the Leclerc tanks can be traced back to an era in which the French socialist Francois Mitterrand was in charge in France and Helmut Kohl, a Christian Democrat, was chancellor of Germany.

Read more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/shadowy-tank-deal-raises-sus...

 

Read from top.

On 4 October 2018 a meeting of the Nato Ministers of Defense was held in Brussels. Following this meeting, the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg mentioned that Russia may have violated the INF Treaty.

Signed in 1987, the Treaty on Nuclear Weapons of Intermediate Range (INF) should have put an end to the Cold War. Under the treaty, both the USSR and the USA undertook that at the same time they would destroy all their intermediate range nuclear weapons.

However in 2007, Russia declared that the Bouclier’s anti-missile weapons (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense) that the United States planned to install in Poland and Czechoslovakia breached the INF Treaty.

The Pentagon’s response: of course, some of the Bouclier’s anti-missile weapons are missiles but the requirement is, that they be deployed defensively. This requirement would take them outside the application of the INF Treaty.

Once the Pentagon implemented this programme, Russia considers that the treaty was meaningless and ceased to exist, even though neither party had taken any steps to declare it as such.

Moscow has just acknowledged that it will deploy the Buruvestnik 9m729 missiles. Noone knows much about these missiles other than that the Pentagon considers they violate the INF Treaty, the same treaty that the US is violating through its Bouclier programme. [1]

Valentin Vasilescu thinks that Russian had tested the missile fire of the nuclear cruise missiles, Burevestnik, from the MiG-3. [2]

Translation 
Anoosha Boralessa

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article203333.html

On 2 October 2018, the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappeared after entering the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul.

According to the US press, a trap would have been laid out for him, when he was lured into the consulate to hand over to him his new identity documents following his recent marriage. About a dozen Saudi Secret Service Agents entered the consulate to question him. They tortured him, killed him and cut him apart, limb by limb, before sending his remains to the Saudi King.

From that time, Turkey and the United States have been requesting clarifications from Saudi Arabia which is denying the accusations that the US is levelling against it.

Jamal Khashoggi was the nephew [of] Adnan Khashoggi (1935-2017). The latter was an arms-trafficker that played a fundamental role in the Iran-Contras case and was considered the richest man in the world at the beginning of the eighties. Jamal himself was the protégé of the former leader of the Saudi Secret Services, Prince Turki ben Faical, who went on to be the King’s Ambassador in London.

Later on Jamal went on to serve Prince Al-Waleed ben Talal, who was submitted to a long period of torture at the Ritz-Carlton during the palatial coup in November 2017.

In recent years, Jamal Jamal Khashoggi has taken up the defence of the Muslim Brotherhood and Israel. This is why he had been hired by Washington Post.

According to our sources, several members of the Saudi Royal Family whose assets were partially or totally confiscated in November 2017 during the Palace Coup, were preparing a plot against the Crown Prince Mohamed ben Salman (known as “MBS”) and Jamal Khashoggi was caught up in this conspiracy.

Turkey had managed to step up a system to bug the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Turkey’s conduct in this instance constitutes a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Although it cannot publish them, Ankara has recordings that contain information, extracted under torture, relating to the plot against MBS.

Translation 
Anoosha Boralessa

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article203497.html

 

To understand what this all means, read from top and also follow what Trump has been saying about selling weapons to the Saudis. It's all about protecting JOBS IN THE USA, nothing much else.

 

In the post above, radial-turbo?, I challenged the information about the Junker plane... Here is my shot (It took me some time to source it out considering my storage unit had gone bunk and has to be transferred onto a read only disk... but this is another story re not using cloud). I took this picture above a German city...:

 junker

 

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In what looks like a rare case of defying Washington’s demands, Hungary has “disappointed” the US State Department by not extraditing two Russian nationals targeted in a US sting op and instead handing them over to Moscow.

The recent case of the two alleged gun runners, a father and a son both named Vladimir Lyubishin, was brought up Tuesday by State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, who lambasted Budapest’s decision to reject the extradition request from Washington.

Hungary is a partner and friend of the United States, but this decision raises questions about Hungary’s commitment to law enforcement cooperation,” she said, lamenting that Hungary has instead honored Moscow’s request.

“The United States is disappointed in the Hungarian government’s decision to extradite the Lyubishins to Russia,” Nauert said.

According to Hungarian media, the two men were running a business buying and reselling military surplus material decommissioned by the Hungarian army. In 2015 they were approached by an arms broker named Hamit Nasirlioglu, who sought to supply weapons to a Mexican arms cartel. The proposal was part of a sting operation by the DEA, the US law enforcement agency fighting illegal drug trafficking.

READ MORE: Butina prosecutors wrote their own James Bond novel with sex allegations – and the media loved it

The deal was busted in November 2016, and the US sought extradition of the three suspects. Nasirlioglu was handed over in March 2017, but the Lyubishins managed to stall the extradition by applying for an asylum in Hungary. This was rejected, and Russia laid a claim on the pair on the basis of their nationality.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/445002-hungary-rejects-us-extradition-russians/

 

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Washington has again shown that all is fair in war and business, calling for the extradition of a Chilean ex-arms dealer who sold cluster bombs to Iraq in the ‘80s, despite claims the CIA supported and approved the deals.

Before being inducted into Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’, Iraq’s war with neighboring Iran made it a useful proxy to help Washington crush the nascent revolutionary government in Tehran. To accomplish the task, Baghdad needed bombs, and wealthy businessman Carlos Cardoen happened to have supplies in stock.

According to former National Security official Howard Teicher, part of the reason Cardoen found himself in the right place at the right time to seal the lucrative deal was that the CIA had stepped in to help manufacture and facilitate the sale of cluster bombs to the Iraqi government.

However, as times changed and US relations with Iraq went south, weapons sold to Saddam Hussein ended up being turned on Washington during the Gulf War, at which point helping equip the now enemy-regime became a criminal act. That is how 76-year-old Cardoen found himself in US officials’ crosshairs since 1993, despite his claims to innocence, and the possible role the CIA itself played in helping him make his fortune.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/455102-chile-extradite-arms-dealer-cia/

 

 

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I may have posted this one before, but I cannot find it:

 

 

 

• 28 September, 2018

Today WikiLeaks publishes a secret document from the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) International Court of Arbitration, pertaining to a dispute over commission payment in relation to a $3.6 billion arms deal between French state-owned company GIAT Industries SA (now Nexter Systems) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The agreement was for the sale of 388 Leclerc combat tanks, 46 armoured vehicles, 2 training tanks, spare parts and ammunition. It was signed in 1993 and scheduled to be completed in 2008.

The case brought before the ICC arbitration tribunal was a claim from Abbas Ibrahim Yousef Al Yousef, a UAE businessman, that GIAT had not honoured a contract to pay him a 6,5% commission on the deal or almost $235 million total. GIAT stopped paying after sending Al Yousef over $195 million through his company Kenoza Consulting & Management Inc., which was registered in the British Virgin Islands. Al Yousef demanded the nearly $40 million that remained outstanding.

GIAT's lawyers maintained that they had to stop payments as they became illegal when the OECD Anti-Corruption Convention was transposed into French law in the year 2000. They claimed "Kenoza intended to commit and indeed committed corruption acts". Al Yousef firmly denied that any part of the commission had been used to bribe UAE officials or used in any corrupt acts. As GIAT did not produce any evidence for the claim, the ICC Tribunal did not rule on the issue but noted that "...if the excessive nature of the compensation for the Claimants service must be taken as evidence of a corrupt purpose of the Agency Agreement, this purpose must have been known and intended by both Parties to the agreement".

The Tribunal did investigate what services Al Yousef provided to justify the excessive commission. Despite claims to the contrary, the Tribunal found that Al Yousef did not play an important role in the development of the Leclerc tank. The tanks were fitted with German engines, which created an obstacle as this would violate laws forbidding German arms sales to the Middle East. Al Yousef claimed he had successfully lobbied German authorities to obtain a waiver from these laws in "...a process which involved decision makers at the highest levels, both in France and Germany". During a witness statement, Al Yousef could not remember the names of any German officials and told the Tribunal he had used lobbyists instead of meeting with German authorities directly.

Surprisingly, Al Yousef told the Tribunal that had he been on a retainer, he would have asked GIAT to pay him a million dollars a month as a consultant. That would have brought him $51 million to $60 million rather than nearly $235 million. As a result, the Tribunal concluded that "...the contractual commission rates is far above anything that could be justified (...). The remuneration is excessive by the standard which Mr Al Yousef himself set and by any standard which was raised in the arbitration". His claims were dismissed and Al Yousef was ordered to pay the entire cost of arbitration by the Tribunal ($550 000) plus a portion of GIAT’s legal costs (€115 000).

 

 

Read more:

https://wikileaks.org/dealmaker/Al-Yousef/

 

 

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Mortar shells shown in an Islamic State propaganda video have put a Bulgarian journalist on the scent of an alleged US-run arms shipping network supplying militants in the Middle East, she told RT in an exclusive interview.

This story began back in June, when Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists in Yemen demonstrated several Serbian-made 82mm mortar shells in their propaganda video. Independent investigative journalist, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, believes that the deadly munitions ended up with the jihadists after going through US hands.

Tracing origins

Clearly visible on one of the shells is a mark that reads '82 mm M74HE mortar shells KV lot 04/18.' The letters KV stand for the Serbian state arms manufacturer Krusik, located in the town of Valjevo, while the digits 04/18 refer to lot 04 produced in 2018. One should not jump to any conclusions, however, as it is not the Serbs who were responsible for the shells suddenly appearing in the hands of terrorists, according to Gaytandzhieva.

A trove of "explosive" leaked documents she said she received from an "anonymous source" shows that the lot in question was part of a deal between the Serbian arms factory and a Pentagon contractor, Alliant Techsystems LLC. It was part of a purchase of more than 100,000 such shells "for the needs of the US government."

"In the shipping documentation and on the labels on the mortar shells' containers, there is a name of… the importer… that purchases the weapons on behalf of the US government," the journalist told RT, citing the documents.

"There are indications and information about a US federal contract, under which these weapons were purchased, and this is absolutely verifiable in the case of Alliant Techsystems LLC, the company, which purchased the mortar shells and this particular lot of weapons pictured in the ISIS video in Yemen."

Some leaked documents published by Gaytandzhieva do indeed mention a contract between Alliant Techsystems LLC and the Pentagon, which was allegedly aimed at supplying the Afghan National Army. "This lot was purchased under a $50 million contract between Alliant Techsystems and the US DoD for the delivery of non-standard US weapons to Afghanistan," the journalist said.

Gaytandzhieva believes, however, that this case is just the tip of the iceberg. It could be a part of a far-reaching arms supply scheme involving up to "three million pieces of weapons – rockets and mortar shells – that have been diverted either to Syria or to Yemen."

'Corporate international weapons shipment network'

The leaked documents, which include emails, internal memos, photos and correspondence between the American arms dealers and the Serbian arms factory Krusik, have helped Gaytandzhieva to "expose the existence of a secret US special command unit code-named "Task Force Smoking Gun." That unit has allegedly operated an arms depo since at least 2017, which is used in shady arms shipping operations by the US and its allies.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/468064-us-purchased-arms-terrorists-yemen/

 

 

 

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Read also:

https://www.rt.com/usa/450727-cnn-trump-weapons-obama-syria/

 

 

 

 

 Good soldier Svejk sinks his dirty fingers in the Russian pie

 

 

World  » Europe   

Bulgaria and the Czechs Republic find the Russian trail in explosions at their ammo depots. Meanwhile, those explosions cover up their illegal arms deals with belligerent nations.

 

 

What happened at the Czech ammo depot

Bulgarian arms company EMCO, owned by businessman Yemelyan Gebrev, released documents via Bellingcat that indirectly confirmed the guilt of the Czech side in the 2014 Vrbetice blasts.

EMCO reacted after Czech President Milos Zeman confirmed the presence of the Bulgarian trail in the Vrbetice explosions. Czech intelligence services concluded that there were EMCO ammunition at the warehouses. Gebrev confirmed, including to The New York Times, that his weapons was indeed at the warehouse, but this did not mean that it was Gebrev's weapons that exploded.

EMCO also clarified in a letter to the Bulgarian prosecutor's office that it had no knowledge about other weapons at the warehouses of Czech company Imex, nor did they know who let the "Russian agents" into the warehouses, and what they were "inspecting" there.

The documents released to Belingcat evidence that in the letter to EMCO dated October 3, 2014, 13 days before the explosion, Czech partners from Imex insisted on providing a plan to remove Gebrev's weapons from the warehouse due to a debt in payment. Otherwise, they threatened that they would sell them to their anonymous clients (possibly to Ukraine).

 

The list of weapons clearly indicates that it goes about shells for 152-mm Soviet-made howitzers and 122-caliber mortar shells.

On October 7, a letter in response to Imex stated that EMCO was not going to sell its property.

"If Imex is unable to continue to store our property, we will deliver this service to another Czech company," the document says.

Nothing was said about any payment debt. It just so happens that the relations between the two parties were illegal.

One may assume that the Czechs nevertheless sold the ammunition, and then staged an explosion so as not to share it with Gebrev. Quite in the spirit of the good soldier Švejk.

Here is another option: the Czech authorities (not the top administration, of course) covered up the "negligence," because, as the Czech law stipulates, the state should track the final point of arms shipment. In addition, an arms deal cannot be anonymous.

German publication World Economy indicates that according to its sources, it was anti-personnel mines (banned by the international convention) that exploded at the warehouse as a result of improper storage. Is it Russia that should be held accountable for all this?

Does Russia profit from Czech explosions?

As for the role of the Russians, in 2014, when the explosions were being investigated into, it was stated that the ammunition warehouse was actually a storage area consisting from ten to up to 100 separate buildings — "barracks" that were placed at a considerable distance from each other for security reasons.

Investigation established that a fire broke out in one of them, and an explosion occurred about two hours later. The fire was quickly extinguished. All other warehousing facilities were left intact.

All the above raises many questions:

• Did Petrov and Boshirov risk their lives to set fire to one of the barracks instead of blowing it up?
• Did they act so to let the fire be quickly extinguished?
• What was the point of the act? Was it worth it at all?

The shady story suggests that the Czechs did not keep their noses clean when handling those weapons at those warehouses. It also suggests that they were selling those weapons bypassing their own and international laws.

The Bulgarians were not better.

Bulgaria also sells weapons illegally

Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva spoke about this in 2016. At a warehouse of al-Nusra terrorist group in Aleppo (the organization is banned in Russia), she found boxes with 122-mm Grad missiles. Those boxes arrived in Aleppo from Bulgaria.

Gaytandzhieva was puzzled with the indifference that the Bulgarian authorities showed to the results of her investigation. Employees of the Bulgarian special services held a conversation with her, and that was all they did. That was a violation of the European moratorium on arms trade with "rebels" in Syria, which was enough and necessary to bring those responsible to justice. None of that happened.

One may easily explain the "indifference" of the Bulgarian authorities — they knew about Gebrev's dirty deals and covered them up. Only the lazy would not talk about the corruption of the Bulgarian politicians. That is why Bulgaria followed the path of their Czech "colleagues" and found the "Russian trail" in the explosions at their warehouses in 2011-202.

 

Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/world/77674-czech_bulgaria_russia/

 

 

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The US is Cashing In on Conflicts by Selling Outdated Equipment

 

The build-up of tensions and fears of foreign military invasion has always been used by US military and political circles to grow the arms business. Since fear is the ultimate motivator, it is stronger than all other feelings. A society that constantly reproduces “horrors” creates is shaping its own reality it lives in. And it is well known that American society cannot exist without fear since the psychological incompatibility of various social groups and people has become a defining feature of the United States.

In the face of this artificially inflated American propaganda fear, governments and citizens willingly spend vast sums of money on weapons, even if they have problems financing their national budgets and social programs and/or the weapons that are being sold to them are obsolete. And if someone does not have enough money for “their own safety,” the banks are happy to lend.

That is why “gun sales, which spiked sharply during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, have continued to increase in the United States”, writes The Guardian. And although there are a huge number of firearms already circulating in American society as well as a seemingly never-ending cycle of mass shootings.

The same thing is happening in foreign arms markets. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) 2016-2020 Trends in International Arms Transfers, indicates that the US holds a strong lead in global arms exports despite the coronavirus pandemic, leading the top five most significant exporters of this “commodity” in the past five years. The share of US exports in the international arms transfers has risen from 32 percent to 37 percent over that period, as it sells arms and military equipment to 96 countries, leaving those other arms suppliers far behind.

Washington is quite insistent on forcing NATO countries to buy its weapons, the weapons that they openly criticize. For example, the French Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly, while acknowledging in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche that the United States is an important actor in NATO, but because of its actions the Alliance Charter that was designed to maintain solidarity turns into an instrument that forces NATO members to purchase American weapons. At the same time, according to her, Europe “does not yet have the military mechanisms that would correspond to its economic and political power.” However, she argues, the US should not oblige NATO members to buy their weapons.

At the same time, not everyone in Europe is unconditionally willing to buy American weapons, and in the Old Continent, they are beginning to develop weapons without the United States. At present, about 50 joint defense projects of the European Union are under development in varying degrees of implementation. However, when any of the NATO member states tries to buy weapons and military equipment on the side or create its own weapon systems, Washington’s vengeance is usually quick to follow, as it wouldn’t allow “any independence from the United States.”

Thus, the PL-01 stealth tank created in Poland to counteract Russia, it seems, will not see the light of day. This was the conclusion made an American military expert Peter Suciu in an article for 19FortyFive The Pl-01 project was introduced back in September 2013 and was developed by Obrum. It bore a resemblance to Russia’s most advanced T-14 Armata project that allows the commander, driver and gunner to enjoy protection of the main hull, while the unmanned turret is controlled remotely. The tank was supposed to be equipped with a 120mm cannon; it had to be able to launch anti-tank-guided missiles. It was also planned to mount a 7.62 mm machine gun or a 12.7 mm heavy machine gun.

Instead, under the pretext of the “Russian threat,” the USA, as The National Interest noted, is forcing Poland to buy its own weapons – the M1 Abrams tank. Poland, the keystone to the defense of NATO’s eastern flank, has undertaken a long-term, multi-billion-dollar program to modernize its military. Poland has acquired the Patriot air and missile defense systems and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) long-range rocket artillery platform. Most recently, it signed a contract for fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets. And now the Polish authorities have decided to purchase four battalions of American Abrams, the deliveries are planned for 2022. This information was revealed by Poland’s deputy prime ministe that leads the Law and Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, while adding that the deal’s worth ranges from 2.9 billion to 5 billion dollars.

Poland’s purchase of American M1 Abrams tanks, which entered service with the US Army in 1981, is “quite a remarkable turn of events,” writes Popular Mechanics magazine, because these fighting machines were initially created “to fight Soviet and Polish troops on the battlefields of Western Europe,” when Poland was still a member of the Warsaw Pact.

At the same time, back in 2017, the United States Army Command said that the main American Abrams tank is already obsolete and needs to be replaced. In his speech before the Senate Defense Committee, Lieutenant General John Murray, Deputy Chief of Army Staff, said that the M1 Abrams could not be called the best machine in its class. Many countries already have tank equipment of a similar level and even higher, particularly Russia with its Armata tanks. The problem of the US military’s technological backwardness is now so apparent that it is impossible to keep quiet about it. This is further confirmed by events in Afghanistan, where the Taliban (a movement banned in the Russian Federation) bet the US Army even with their outdated military equipment.

However, to replace the existing tank fleet with a new one, the Pentagon must first sell off the old equipment to its allies, thus the deal with Poland. By the way, the sale of a significant batch of American tanks to Australia is also coming, and along with them, a butch of oudtated helicopters are also going to be sold, bringing the total asking price to 1.9 billion dollars, which has also recently been announced in the Pentagon. True, it is not clear with whom Australia on its continent intends to fight with American tanks?

However, the blatantly obsolete US military equipment used by the US Army is now being talked about in many media. For example, the influential American magazine The National Interest believes that the following American weapons should be “sent to the dustbin of history”: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) LGM-30G Minuteman III, in service since the 1960s; Boeing F/A-18 A/B/C/D/ Hornet; Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM; M-16 rifles, M-4 rifles, and many other examples of American military equipment. So let’s not be surprised if the media start publishing reports about these antique weapons going on sale.

 

 

Vladimir Platov, expert on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/08/02/the-us-is-cashing-in-on-conflicts-and-by-selling-outdated-equipment/

 

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See also:

the king of slanted news was having fun...

 

https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276

 

 

free

 

 

 Turkey's intelligence agency abducts arms dealer in Ukraine

 

An arms dealer who had started to expose Turkey's clandestine arms trafficking networks was snatched during a Turkish intelligence operation. The whistleblower had claimed kickbacks reached the highest offices in Turkey.

 

Nuri Bozkir is a man who many believe poses a threat to the Turkish president. The abducted arms dealer is viewed as one of the few people who could unveil systematic wrongdoing by the Turkish government because he was an integral part of its covert weapons shipments to war zones.

The Turkish national intelligence agency, MIT, captured the arms dealer-turned-whistleblower in Ukraine, Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdogan told pro-government media last week.

"Our intelligence found that this person was hiding in Ukraine and we talked to [Ukrainian President] Zelenskyy about him being caught," Erdogan said. "Our intelligence service and great cooperation with its partners made this arrest possible."

In interviews with Ukrainian news site Strana at the end of 2020, Bozkir had disclosed delicate aspects of Turkey's clandestine arms transfers to militant groups operating in Syria and Libya, noting that MIT operatives would take a cut from the deals.

Bozkir, a former special forces captain in the Turkish armed forces, said he would legally buy weapons in eastern European countries and have them shipped to Turkey, where Turkish intelligence would divert them to battlefields across the region.

Out of 50 shipments transferred to militant groups in Syria, his last one before fleeing to Ukraine in 2015 was allegedly conducted without the organizational involvement of MIT. The shipment was intercepted by Turkish police, triggering a hasty operation by his MIT handlers to get him out of the country.

Fighting extradition

In Ukraine, Bozkir later applied for political asylum, fearing Turkish authorities would eventually turn against him despite his involvement in many state-sanctioned operations.

Following his asylum request, Turkey issued an Interpol red notice calling for his arrest in connection with the 2002 murder of Turkish academic Necip Hablemitoglu, a case that has remained cold for two decades. Bozkir has categorically denied any involvement, according to his Ukrainian lawyer.

"I have carefully read the documents provided by the Turkish side," Roman Denysyk, who represented Bozkir at his extradition hearings, told DW. "The evidence is very doubtful. There is no direct evidence of his involvement in the murder of this professor."

The former arms dealer was still fighting the extradition request when he was abducted, with Ukrainian judges having yet to issue a final ruling. The Turkish and Ukrainian governments did not respond to DW's repeated requests for comment regarding the extrajudicial Turkish operation on Ukrainian soil.

"The only thing I can say is that according to the laws of Ukraine, what the Ukrainian security service has done is illegal — it is an excess of power, and they can be held criminally liable," Denysyk added.

Extraordinary renditions

Nuri Bozkir is not the first person to be targeted for revealing details about Turkey's clandestine arms trafficking networks.

In 2015, Turkish journalist Can Dündar broke the news on how Turkey was arming militant groups in Syria. He was later charged with revealing state secrets and sentenced to 27 years in prison. He narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, and now lives in exile in Berlin.

Commenting on Bozkir's arrest, Dündar told DW that the Turkish government uses tactics such as extraordinary renditions and exaggerated criminal charges to silence critics and prevent whistleblowers from coming forward.

"This is standard practice by the Turkish government — silence those who want to bring to light the state's dirty deeds. Those in power know that Bozkir is one of the black boxes of their corrupt system, and when that black box is opened, all their filth will be exposed," Dündar said.

The Washington-based pro-democracy organization Freedom House has identified Turkey's involvement in at least 58 cases of extraordinary renditions since 2014, largely targeting dissidents and perceived enemies of the state.

Turkey's transnational campaign is "notable for its heavy reliance on renditions, in which the government and its intelligence agency persuade the targeted states to hand over individuals without due process, or with a slight fig leaf of legality," Freedom House said in a 2021 report.

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/turkeys-intelligence-agency-abducts-arms-dealer-in-ukraine/a-60634563

 

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CAIRO -- The US authorities' move to "redefine" accountability over the killing of an Al Jazeera journalist exposes US bias and failure to keep its own values, an opinion piece published on the Al-Jazeera English-language news channel has said.

Back in May when Shireen Abu Akleh, an American citizen, was fatally shot while covering conflicts in the West Bank, the US State Department was quick to condemn the killing and urged that those responsible "should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

Months later, US officials redefined the meaning of accountability in the case after Israel said this week that it was "highly possible" that one of its soldiers pulled the trigger, noted Ali Harb, author of the article published on Wednesday.

By calling on Israel to review its policies to mitigate civilian harm, the Biden administration effectively dropped its earlier demand for properly holding the perpetrator accountable, said Harb, a US-based writer.

Washington made an about-face in its own definition just because Abu Akleh was a Palestinian American who was killed by Israel, said Lina Abu Akleh, the journalist's niece, in an interview with Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

"This just goes on to show the bias and their lack of commitment to accountability and to their own values," she told the news channel.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202209/11/WS631d9c84a310fd2b29e77134.html

 

SEE ABOVE: 

Snow-capped mountains with a fringe on top, all in the clouds.

 

WHY?:

Khashoggi was born in Mecca, to Mohammad Khashoggi, who was King Abdul Aziz Al Saud's personal doctor,[5] and Samiha Ahmed. Khashoggi's sister was author Samira Khashoggi who married businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed and was the mother of Dodi Fayed.[6] Another sister, Soheir Khashoggi, is a well-known Arab novelist (Mirage, Nadia's Song, Mosaic).[6] He was a paternal uncle of murdered journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

 

WAS JK ABOUT TO REVEAL ABOUT THE NEW LITTLE SAUDI PRINCE AND HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS OWN FAMILY OF "CANNON MERCHANTS"? 

 

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.........................

 

by Philippe Leymarie

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which publishes each year the most extensive and coherent table of global military spending, confirms this: it shattered all records in 2023, reaching $2440 billion – i.e. almost 7% increase over one year. Since 2009, these expenses have continued to grow and, for the first time in nine years, this increase affects all regions of the globe.

The most spectacular development concerns, unsurprisingly, countries grappling with open war, which – for now – are truly in a “war economy”1 (unlike, for example, France). Thus, the Russian military budget expanded by 24% in 2023: nearly 6% of its gross domestic product (GDP) is devoted to defense, which represents – with 109 billion dollars – 16% of all Russian state spending. Opposite, the Ukrainian defense budget has exploded: 51% increase in 2023. This state's military spending takes up 58% of its budget; the defense effort as a whole reaches 37% of the country's GDP. These figures are all indications of Ukraine's fragility in the face of the Russian aggressor, which has unrivaled “strategic depth”. But the $35 billion in foreign aid received in 2023 allows kyiv to reach 91% of Russian spending – thus reducing the gap between the financial means of the two belligerents.

American burden…and benefit

Also unsurprisingly, the ten biggest spenders on the planet have all increased their military spending in 2023:

• Starting with the American giant, which continues to dominate the world: military credits reached 916 billion dollars last year, increasing “only” by 2,3%. They represent 68% of total NATO military spending, with Europeans contributing 28% – the highest share in a decade, notes SIPRI (the remaining 4% relating to Canada and Turkey);

• The institute notes that 11 of the 31 members of the Transatlantic Alliance – which officially committed a decade ago to devoting at least 2% of their GDP to their military spending – met or exceeded this target last year. last, which is a first; 28 members have reserved at least a fifth of their military budgets for equipment spending (compared to only 7 in 2014);

• China, in second place in spending, continues the spectacular development of its military capabilities: it has allocated $296 billion to its defense credits in 2023, an increase of 6% compared to the previous year. A usual development for this country: this is the twenty-ninth consecutive increase in its annual budget, which is now equivalent to half of the total military expenditure in the Asia-Oceania zone;

• Several countries, fearing Chinese aggressiveness, followed suit, but on obviously smaller scales: Taiwan increased its spending by 11% to $16,6 billion; Japan's defense budget, also growing by 11%, reached $50,2 billion last year (more than France's military budget, for example, which is 47,2 billion euros - itself increasing by 7,5%);

• After Russia, in fourth position, comes India, with $83,6 billion in spending, an increase of 4% (billions which were used in particular to purchase French Rafale fighters); then Saudi Arabia, whose budget is growing by 16% to 75,8 billion – the strongest annual growth recorded in the region for ten years (in the Middle East, according to SIPRI calculations, military spending has overall increased by 9%).

In the first line

For completeness, it would be appropriate to add the substantial budgets of large European countries such as the United Kingdom ($74,9 billion, up 14%), Germany ($66,8 billion, up 48%). ), Italy (35 billion, + 31%), Spain (23,7 billion, + 42%). And, in other latitudes, in 2022, those of Iran (44 billion dollars), South Korea (47,9 billion, + 34%), Australia (32,3 billion), from Canada (27,2), Brazil (22,9), or the United Arab Emirates (20,3 billion).

If we focus on growth in military credits in percentages, we see major gaps between 2022 and 2023, corresponding to open or latent conflicts: military spending in the Democratic Republic of Congo increased by 105%, while fighting in east of the country have resumed; the military budget in South Sudan increased by 78%, as did that of Algeria (+ 76%, $18,3 billion). Of all European countries, it is Poland – on the front line in the Russia-Ukraine conflict – which has seen by far the largest annual increase: the 31,6 billion dollars devoted to its defense marks an increase of 75% , which represents 4% of its GDP, to compare with France, which will struggle to reach next year only the threshold of 2% of GDP now considered by NATO as a minimum.2

SIPRI also notes that in 2023, military spending in Central America and the Caribbean, for example in Mexico, was 54% higher than in 2014: “The high proliferation of crime has led to an increased use of military forces against criminal gangs in several countries in the sub-region.” Israel's defense budget as it continues its war in Gaza3, reached $27,5 billion in 2023, an increase of 24%.

Off the shelves

The same organization provided an update last March on arms exports. He noted that the conflict on Ukrainian soil had disrupted the world market, with Ukraine becoming the fourth importer, and France replacing Russia as the second exporter (but with a share of only 11% of global arms transfers between 2019 and 2023, compared to 42% in the United States).

Between 2019 and 2023, arms imports into Europe have almost doubled (+94%) compared to the previous five years: more than half (55%) are made up of purchases in the United States, up 33%. over the previous period – which underlines European dependence on American power; and also, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, the “craving” of Europeans, wanting to acquire weapons as quickly as possible, including “on the shelves”.

In this situation, Russia's arms exports have fallen by half in ten years. Over the last five years, the number of Moscow's partners or clients has fallen from 31 to 12 countries: we find India, which remains the leading recipient of sales (34% of Russian exports), as well as China (which has however, significantly reduced its acquisitions in Russia), or Algeria. This decline in exports is borne by a country which must reserve most of its arms production for its own forces, in the context of a war in Ukraine which consumes a lot of equipment and which is already in its third year . In 2023, the Russian army would have fired more than two million shells, double the amount from the previous year, and Oryx website estimates the number of Russian land vehicles damaged or destroyed in Ukraine during the first two years of war at ten thousand.

source: The Diplomatic World

 

https://en.reseauinternational.net/la-grande-fringale-des-armees/

 

The third largest arms seller in the world, France is not in this position by chance. This trade was at the heart of Paris's ambition to embody an autonomous power vis-à-vis the United States and the former USSR. A strategy which has led its administration to put itself at the service of industrialists since the 1960s. Outside of any democratic control and at the risk of trampling on human rights.

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2023/11/LAVRILLEUX/66244

 

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SEE ALSO: https://johnmenadue.com/america-bombs-while-china-builds/

America bombs while China builds