In a normal world this would be completely unbelievable. However, these aren't normal times, and tragically this report is completely believable if not completely expected. These are very strange times indeed. Oh - and we always have to remember Genesis 12:3 while reading articles such as this.
The Obama administration is preparing to settle scores with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, for his campaign against US-led nuclear diplomacy with Iran, by holding him to blame for the impasse in Israel-Palestinian negotiations. This will ignore the uniform assessments by US and Israeli intelligence analysts that it is the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas who is holding out against all Secretary of State John Kerry’s Herculean efforts for a peace accord with Israel...
Abbas (Abu Mazen) is sure that he can get more from the international community by diplomatic manipulation and effective propaganda. He believes he holds enough cards and leverage to manage without having to reach terms for deals with the US or Israel.
He is only playing along with the Americans and Israelis for one purpose – not to lose US and other Western financial assistance. Earlier this month, the European Union said it would discontinue the $1 billion annual contribution to the Palestinian Authority if a peace accord with Israel was not signed within a year. Abbas appreciates that the Europeans would follow the American lead for an aid cutoff.
The US-EU aid packages totaling $1.5 billion account for nearly all of the PA’s regular revenue. The most up-to-date intelligence data reaching Washington and Jerusalem confirm that if Abbas were to find an alternative source of income, he would grab it and drop out of the peace negotiations like a shot.
But the Obama administration and Netanyahu government alike are ignoring these assessments and pressing on with the talks, mindful of the end-of-April deadline set for reaching the finishing line.
Another such rumor is that the US will put before the parties next month a final plan for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.
Kerry refuses to be discouraged by Abbas’s evasions and has indeed drafted a non-binding five-page working paper, which is not a plan. He will put it before Netnayahu and Abbas early next month without asking for any commitments for or against the outline.
Both will be invited to record their reservations and comments. This will supply the fodder for extending the negotiations for several more months after the first six-month period expires.
Sitting on Netanyahu’s desk too, according to our sources, is a confidential report on the Obama administration’s plans for personal retribution for the offensive he pursued against the signing of an accord to provide Iran with legitimacy for its nuclear program.
Washington plans to get back at the Israeli prime minister by pinning on him – not Abbas - the blame for the inevitable impasse in the talks with the Palestinians. He will be depicted as a political failure who heads a dysfunctional government and a serial denier of peace.
This smear campaign will be conducted internationally and in Israel, by rallying Israel’s foes abroad and Netanyahu’s political enemies at home.
Netanyahu is well aware that the Palestinian question is not the issue. He knows he is facing the music – politically and personally - from the Obama administration for his effort to sway the US Congress against the policy of US rapprochement with a regime in Tehran which is dedicated to Israel’s extinction.
Netanyahu faces three dilemmas:
1. Iran keeps on bragging that the Geneva accord brought its nuclear program and right to enrich uranium nternational acceptance, while at the same time flouting its provisions right and left. Cutting-edge centrifuges have been installed for speeding the enrichment of uranium close to weapons-grade, and the construction of the heavy water reactor in Arak continues apace. The Iranians are capitalizing on the failure of the Geneva conference to set a date for the onset of the interim six-month period for further negotiations, and using the time to further their military nuclear projects.
The Geneva accord was designed to disqualify the military option for ending Iran’s chase after nuclear weapons. So what happens now?
2. The level of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis is expected by all intelligence branches to escalate. However, the Israeli government and military are tied hand and foot by the formality of ongoing US-sponsored peace talks with the Palestinians. Although they know exactly who is pulling the wires behind the current violence, the Israeli military can’t strike at its heart. And so Israeli officials and military spokesmen are resorting to euphemist depictions, such as “popular, disorganized violence, to avoid action.
3. The US campaign of deprecation against the Israeli government and its head has begun. How to deal with it?
The People’s Liberation Army’s H-6K strategic bomber can attack the Japanese mainland with CJ-10 cruise missiles without even leaving Chinese airspace, reports the Kanwa Defense Review run by Andrei Chang also known as Pinkov, a military analyst based in Canada.
China had no real nuclear projection capability until H-6K entered service with the PLA Air Force, Kanwa’s report said. H-6K bombers have already been deployed with the 8th and 10th air divisions of the PLA Air Force. However, strategic bombers alone can not help China penetrate enemy defenses using surface-to-air missiles. For this reason, the long-range cruise missile has become a crucial part of China’s nuclear arsenal.
With a range of between 1,500 and 2,000 kilometers, the CJ-10 meets the requirements of the PLA Air Force to possess the capability to launch strategic missile attacks against US military facilities and those of its allies in the Western Pacific. All major cities in India are also within range if the H-6K launches the missile from Tibet.
If the bomber were commanded to attack Japan’s main island of Honshu, the best choice from which to launch the CJ-10 missile would be the airspace of the Shandong peninsula at a distance of 1,700 kilometers, the article said, while Heilongjiang province in northeastern China is only 1,100 kilometers from the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
On the list of possible targets:
- US Military Bases
- Japan
- India
- Malaysia
- Vietnam
- South Korea
- Philippines
The aggressive stance by the Chinese military has been ratcheting up for some time now. As reported on this site just recently, the PLA crowed over China’s first aircraft carrier combat task force. And who could forget in November, the nuclear attack impact map displaying American cities that were being suggested as targets for the PLA’s strategic submarine force and nuclear weapons.
The Chinese dragon is flexing its military muscle. They are probing the US military’s response to violations of international waters and air space. Pretty soon they will be done war gaming and will come for what they feel is rightfully theirs and then they will move on the global chess board to take the American King. We better counter before we are in an absolute checkmate.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald condemned the mainstream media during an address at a German computer conference on Friday and accused his colleagues of failing to challenge erroneous remarks routinely made by government officials around the globe.
Thousands of attendees at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg packed into a room to watch the 46-year-old lawyer-turned-columnist present a keynote address delivered less than seven months after he started working with former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden.
Revelations contained in leaked documents supplied by Snowden to Greenwald and other journalists have sparked international outrage and efforts to reform the far-reaching surveillance operations waged by the NSA and intelligence officials in allied nations. But speaking remotely from Brazil this week, Greenwald argued that the media establishment at large is guilty of failing significantly with respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping governments in check.
When Greenwald and his colleagues began working with Snowden, he said they realized that they’d have to act in a way that wasn’t on par with how the mainstream media has acted up until now.
“We resolved that we were going to have to be very disruptive of the status quo — not only the surveillance and political status quo, but also the journalistic status quo,” Greenwald said. “And I think one of the ways that you can see what it is that we were targeting is in the behavior of the media over the past six months since these revelations have emerged almost entirely without them and despite them.”
“[W]e knew in particular that one of our most formidable adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies on which we were reporting and who we were trying to expose, but also their most loyal, devoted servants, which calls itself the United States and British media.”
“It really is the case that the United States and British governments are not only willing but able to engage in any conduct no matter how grotesque,” Greenwald said. Nevertheless, he added, journalists tasked with reporting on those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant lies made by officials from those governments.
Halfway through his remarks, Greenwald recalled a recent quip he made while being interviewed by BBC about the necessity of a functioning media in an environment where government officials can spew untruths to reporters without being questioned.
Greenwald said that the established media continues to reject the notion that government officials spew lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those fibs on more than one occasion, he noted, yet reporters around the world continue to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig from the truth.
“Their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend to exercise oversight,” Greenwald said.
An Associated Press investigation of the Defense Department’s military surplus program has found that over $4 billion worth of equipment has been distributed to local police forces since 1990—everything from bayonets to Humvees.
This military surplus program is two decades old, but the Obama administration has expanded it drastically. In fiscal year 2011, the Pentagon gave away a record $500 million in military gear, which, according to the program’s director, surpassed “the previous mark by several hundred million dollars.”
Even more shocking than the $4 billion in military hardware given to local police by the Pentagon is the $34 billion in anti-terror grants given to local police by the Department of Homeland Security. This grant money, awarded with little oversight from Congress, has put advanced equipment in the hands of civilian officers and allowed local police departments to transform into small militarized forces.
Why all this firepower? What sorts of events are your local police preparing for? Many people are concerned about the potential for social breakdown in the event of economic collapse, terrorist attacks and other apocalyptic catastrophes. Will the militarization of local police forces make us safer? Is this arms buildup even legal? Even if a paramilitary police force can protect us from out-of-control criminals, is there another danger to the American people: out-of-control government?
While some may be surprised that the Army is even considering how to best quell civil unrest, such preparations have been underway for a number of years. One of the most honest accounts of these preparations came from a U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute paper published in 2008. This report discussed scenarios such as “epidemics” and “widespread civil violence” and how the Department of Defense would be “forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized this increasing militarization of police forces. It is concerned that military equipment and a battlefield mentality will encourage law enforcement officers to view themselves as soldiers fighting an enemy rather than peacekeepers protecting citizens’ constitutional rights.
The book Rise of the Warrior Cop records how law-enforcement agencies across the nation, at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier since the 1960s. Author Radley Balko outlines what martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment have produced. As described by theWall Street Journal, the “warrior cop” is “armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties” (Aug. 7, 2013).
One major phenomenon highlighting this trend is the proliferation of SWAT units. According to the Journal, the number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown in step with police militarization efforts—from 3,000 raids nationwide in 1980 to an estimated figure of 80,000 raids in 2011.
“I’m very concerned that, on a national basis, police organizations are looking more and more like combat troops and less and less like community police officers,” said Robert Wadman, Weber State University criminal justice professor emeritus. “This behavior is a great loss to every city in America. It sustains an ‘us versus them’ mentality in the minds of police officers.”
Even more disturbingly, this SWAT culture has not been contained to just the FBI or the U.S. Marshal’s Office. A surprising number of federal offices now have their own SWATteams: the National Park Service, the Postal Inspection Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. These agencies are now starting to use their firepower on some very unlikely criminals.
In January 2012, when financial questions arose regarding the Mountain Pure Water Company, 50 federal agents, led by U.S. Small Business Administration special agent Cynthia Roberts, swooped in with guns drawn. According to Mountain Pure’s comptroller, Jerry Miller, one pistol-packing agent answered his questions by saying: “We’re the federal government. We can do what we want, when we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
In April 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent a SWAT unit to arrest Dan Allgyer of Rainbow Acres Farm for illegally shipping unpasteurized milk to customers across state lines. “U.S. marshals and other federal officers also have conducted similar actions against purveyors of unauthorized milk, cheese and even elderberry juice” (National Review, Feb. 11, 2013).
Can you imagine what George Washington would have thought of machine-gun-toting SWAT agents arresting an Amish farmer for selling unpasteurized milk?
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[Footnote: I have no idea if this could be true or not. In fact, initially, I completely dismissed this story. However, more and more is being written about this, some stories coming from fairly credible sources, so the story shouldn't be ignored. As stated earlier, we are living in some very strange times, and we have to at least look at stories like this from a healthy distance - but looking and observing, as we always do. Interestingly, this story was predicted in advance. One must also raise the possibility that this story, in and of itself is some kind of a false flag - in this age of disinformation and manipulation. Either way, the story is in circulation and we have to at least take a look]
