From Press TV September 6, 2014
Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor, Veteran’s Today, Atlanta about the Ukraine conflict now under ceasefire, how NATOs agenda and sanctions are affecting the situation there.

The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

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Press TV: Press TV guest Mr. Frederick Petersen (Congressional defense policy advisor, Washington) paints a picture that NATO is not a threat to East Ukraine or even to Russia. How do you react to that?

Dean: Well, it’s probably one of the most incredible statements that I heard in the whole crisis. Coming from a marine officer it’s rather shocking – because we have a lot of marines at Veteran’s Today – when it comes to a marine officer that works for a think-tank that’s associated with the neocons and the AIPAC lobby.

And the area is covered with them. They basically say that NATO is in some kind of defensive mode here when we have two decades of NATO expansion. Ukraine has been in its crosshairs now for over ten years.

Russia has not been spending billions of dollars to instigate color revolutions in Eastern Europe; they have not been trying to push their missile shield into these countries, it’s the West that’s been doing this and they have a lot of people that are behind them on this. They have their own agendas, defense contractors…

And part of this whole Ukraine thing there has been a whole psy-ops to pretend that there is some kind of Russian threat, which they have no offensive capacity whatsoever. All their military spending is completely defensive and it’s just an outrage to have to listen to this from a retired American military colonel.

Press TV: Mr. Petersen is speaking about history and we do know the history of the Soviet Union. Is he making a legitimate point saying we cannot completely disregard the idea that may be Russia doe have expansionist policies?

Dean: This is just your neo-Cold War psycho-babble that we’ve been hearing for over a year now; they’ve really come out in the open with this ridiculous Soviet era routine.

Veteran’s Today is an intelligence site. We’ve had over three generations of top security people going all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War. Some of them even Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor Leo Wanta. We know the history of this; we’ve had people who’ve actually been historians of some of our major intelligence organizations. We know the history of this backwards and forwards.

This trying to paint the ‘attack the American people and the Europeans’ that there is some kind of aggressive threat from Russia is an attack on the democracies of these people because it is a psychological operation to do nothing more but prepare them to fund NATO expansion and also to being a missile shield up to the Soviet border, which is a terribly destabilizing move and it’s also cost the European people tremendous economic devastation.

So, we don’t have any problem at all taking these people on and all the open forums that we can and we can eat them alive and barbecue them for the benefit of the public and we’re happy to do it anytime any place and we’re happy to do it today.

Press TV: Mr. Petersen says Russia should join NATO rather than to oppose its expansion. How do you feel about that?

Dean: Russia was already cooperating tremendously with the West.

They have a 110 million dollar trade deficit with Europe; they coordinated with the war on terror; and there are a lot of levels. So there has been tremendous progress made until some group of people somewhere decided they wanted to dial that back.

And so they started a color revolution also in Russia, which Mr. Putin had kind of nipped in the bud when the oligarchs were taking over the country – they took over the media, then they were going to start actually running candidates that actually rule Russia.

So you had a subversive force actually trying to subvert Russia using their system, which Putin was one of the key people that he pushed them back and ran the oligarchs off who were basically given safety in the West.

So what we have here at the expense of the European economy, which is now thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people are going to suffer with this new aggression plan.

The other thing I’ll mention about NATO as a military force other than air power is a joke. Most or all their bases are closed; they couldn’t even cover the ammunition for a no fly zone in Libya.

So this whole fraud that they’re pulling here is to start dialing up the spending so that they can build up a force and they used the country of Ukraine as a sacrificial lamb to try to build this up.

We think at Veteran’s Today that this is a criminal act and we’re going to be hunting down and exposing everybody that we can find that was involved in this.

And NATO for what they’re doing now, there are a growing number of people in the active military that don’t want to be mercenaries for commercial interests and fight for trade markets. So they’re going to be getting a lot of pushback – more than they expected.

And if we don’t barbecue them we’ll certainly be able to debate them very well.

Press TV: What are your final comments and your reaction to what our guest has said?

Dean: I’ll just close by saying that again we consider this whole Russian threat thing to be a total hoax.

We could fill a stadium with military analysis that basically says Russia is in a totally defensive position and all their money is spent for defensive spending.

This is very similar to the hoax of the Iranian nuclear threat, which is completely bogus and Iran is also spending all of their money on defense because they are the ones that are getting threatened with pre-emptive strike.

That doctrine of pre-emptive strike came out of the West with the neo-Cons in the late 1990s and it is still living now and we have a lot of people getting on board the train.

And the poor people of Ukraine are the ones that have really paid a terrible price; and the Europeans are going to be paying also for the tremendous blowback we’ve had from their sanctions stupidity that have made so many people suffer for no reason except for some military head-trippers that want to reinvent the Cold war again.

Source with video of interview: http://www.presstv.com/detail/2014/09/06/377874/ukraine-invasion-threat-a-hoax/

From the Guardian, October 20, 2014
By Richard Norton-Taylor

The British government has just published amendments updating a treaty that goes to the heart of the UK’s special relationship with the US.

They relate to the Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) first signed in 1958, which, according to the government, enables the UK and the US “nuclear warhead communities to collaborate on all aspects of nuclear deterrence including nuclear warhead design and manufacture”.

One amendment refers to potential threats from “state or non-state actors”. But the amendments are for the most part arcane and their significance cannot be understood in the absence of information which is kept secret.

The MDA does not have to be debated or voted on in parliament, as I have remarked before. Though the agreement is incorporated in US law, it has no legal status in Britain.

Yet the matters covered by the treaty, which is renewed only at 10 year intervals, are hugely important. Successive British governments have made clear a proper debate on the issues involved would not be welcome.

“A debate on the renewal of the MDA would be used by some as an opportunity to raise wider questions concerning the possible renewal of the nuclear deterrent…and our obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,” notes an internal MoD paper, dated 2004. The paper was released only earlier this year through a freedom of information act request by the independent Nuclear Information Service.

…

Kate Hudson, general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) says the UK-US agreement flew in the face Britain’s commitments as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“It is appalling that David Cameron is signing secretive nuclear deals behind Parliament’s back. In no other area of government would such a sinister sidestepping of democratic process be tolerated.”

For the full article:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/defence-and-security-blog/2014/oct/20/nuclear-weapons-uk-us

Posted under Fair Use Rules.

4 April 1967

Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam
Riverside Church
New York City, USA

Excerpt:

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954-in 1945 rather-after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China-for whom the Vietnamese have no great love-but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Continue reading →

Former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam died Tuesday, October 21. He was 98 years old.

He served as Prime Minister of Australia from 1972-1975.

Why is he important? Because of the policies he instituted during his brief time in office, Australia moved forward in very significant ways.

He is also an example of US and British refusal to allow anyone to thwart their policies and interests.

Though Whitlam had further plans for Australia, his tenure was cut short by a virtual coup crafted by the American and British governments. They were alarmed at his plans for an independent Australia and his opposition to a secret CIA presence in Australia. On the day Whitlam was going to reveal the information on the CIA to the Australian Parliament, John Kerr, Governor-General of Australia, using an obscure law, fired Whitlam before he could do so.

When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state”. Known as the “coupmaster”, he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia – which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors – described by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s business leaders to rise against the government.”

Note: Ambassador John F.Tefft served as coup master in his position as US ambassador in Ukraine. How many deaths is he responsible for already? Now he is ambassador to Russia. In August, an interview with Russian lawmaker Evgeny Fedorov stated “the U.S. ambassador held a closed door meeting in one of the theatres in Moscow, where he openly said the first blow will be struck in St. Petersburg during the elections in September.” [i]Geopolitical analyst Steven MacMillan says, “Tefft, who has worked for the State Department and the National War College in Washington, is an expert at planning colour revolutions to overthrow regimes targeted by the western elite.” [ii]

The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 was operating against his government. “The Brits were actually de-coding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,” he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, “We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In the 1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the CIA’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A deputy director of the CIA said: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”On 10 November, 1975, Whitlam was shown a top secret telex message sourced to Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA’s East Asia Division, who had helped run the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile two years earlier. Shackley’s message was read to Whitlam. It said that the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia’s NSA where he was briefed on the “security crisis”. On 11 November – the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia – he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal “reserve powers”, Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The “Whitlam problem” was solved, and Australian politics never recovered, nor the nation its true independence.[iii]

Below are two articles highlighting the incredible legacy of Gough Whitlam.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins, details what happens to leaders who take their responsibilities to the people seriously. Whitlam was lucky that he survived.

Articles:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/what-did-gough-whitlam-actually-do-rather-a-lot-20141021-11977w.html
What did Gough Whitlam actually do? Rather a lot

http://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/thank-you-gough-whitlam
16 Completely Life-Changing Things Australians Can Thank Gough Whitlam For

[i] http://youtu.be/WNAPbuwLMHg 

[ii] http://journal-neo.org/2014/08/28/is-st-petersburg-the-venue-for-a-western-sponsored-colour-revolution-in-russia/

[iii] http://www.globalresearch.ca/gough-whitlam-and-the-forgotten-coup-how-america-and-britain-crushed-the-government-of-their-ally-australia/5409439
Gough Whitlam and the Forgotten Coup: How America and Britain Crushed the Government of Their ‘Ally’, Australia

Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club
24 October 2014, Sochi

Vladimir Putin took part in the final plenary meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club’s XI session. The meeting’s theme is The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules.

This year, 108 experts, historians and political analysts from 25 countries, including 62 foreign participants, took part in the club’s work.

The plenary meeting summed up the club’s work over the previous three days, which concentrated on analysing the factors eroding the current system of institutions and norms of international law.

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, friends, it is a pleasure to welcome you to the XI meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

It was mentioned already that the club has new co-organisers this year. They include Russian non-governmental organisations, expert groups and leading universities. The idea was also raised of broadening the discussions to include not just issues related to Russia itself but also global politics and the economy.

Then organisation and content will bolster the club’s influence as a leading discussion and expert forum. At the same time, I hope the ‘Valdai spirit’ will remain – this free and open atmosphere and chance to express all manner of very different and frank opinions.

Let me say in this respect that I will also not let you down and will speak directly and frankly. Some of what I say might seem a bit too harsh, but if we do not speak directly and honestly about what we really think, then there is little point in even meeting in this way. It would be better in that case just to keep to diplomatic get-togethers, where no one says anything of real sense and, recalling the words of one famous diplomat, you realise that diplomats have tongues so as not to speak the truth.

We get together for other reasons. We get together so as to talk frankly with each other. We need to be direct and blunt today not so as to trade barbs, but so as to attempt to get to the bottom of what is actually happening in the world, try to understand why the world is becoming less safe and more unpredictable, and why the risks are increasing everywhere around us.

Today’s discussion took place under the theme: New Rules or a Game without Rules. I think that this formula accurately describes the historic turning point we have reached today and the choice we all face. There is nothing new of course in the idea that the world is changing very fast. I know this is something you have spoken about at the discussions today. It is certainly hard not to notice the dramatic transformations in global politics and the economy, public life, and in industry, information and social technologies.

Let me ask you right now to forgive me if I end up repeating what some of the discussion’s participants have already said. It’s practically impossible to avoid. You have already held detailed discussions, but I will set out my point of view. It will coincide with other participants’ views on some points and differ on others.

As we analyse today’s situation, let us not forget history’s lessons. First of all, changes in the world order – and what we are seeing today are events on this scale – have usually been accompanied by if not global war and conflict, then by chains of intensive local-level conflicts. Second, global politics is above all about economic leadership, issues of war and peace, and the humanitarian dimension, including human rights.

The world is full of contradictions today. We need to be frank in asking each other if we have a reliable safety net in place. Sadly, there is no guarantee and no certainty that the current system of global and regional security is able to protect us from upheavals. This system has become seriously weakened, fragmented and deformed. The international and regional political, economic, and cultural cooperation organisations are also going through difficult times.

Yes, many of the mechanisms we have for ensuring the world order were created quite a long time ago now, including and above all in the period immediately following World War II. Let me stress that the solidity of the system created back then rested not only on the balance of power and the rights of the victor countries, but on the fact that this system’s ‘founding fathers’ had respect for each other, did not try to put the squeeze on others, but attempted to reach agreements.

The main thing is that this system needs to develop, and despite its various shortcomings, needs to at least be capable of keeping the world’s current problems within certain limits and regulating the intensity of the natural competition between countries.

It is my conviction that we could not take this mechanism of checks and balances that we built over the last decades, sometimes with such effort and difficulty, and simply tear it apart without building anything in its place. Otherwise we would be left with no instruments other than brute force.

What we needed to do was to carry out a rational reconstruction and adapt it the new realities in the system of international relations.

But the United States, having declared itself the winner of the Cold War, saw no need for this. Instead of establishing a new balance of power, essential for maintaining order and stability, they took steps that threw the system into sharp and deep imbalance.

The Cold War ended, but it did not end with the signing of a peace treaty with clear and transparent agreements on respecting existing rules or creating new rules and standards. This created the impression that the so-called ‘victors’ in the Cold War had decided to pressure events and reshape the world to suit their own needs and interests. If the existing system of international relations, international law and the checks and balances in place got in the way of these aims, this system was declared worthless, outdated and in need of immediate demolition.

Pardon the analogy, but this is the way nouveaux riches behave when they suddenly end up with a great fortune, in this case, in the shape of world leadership and domination. Instead of managing their wealth wisely, for their own benefit too of course, I think they have committed many follies.

We have entered a period of differing interpretations and deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms. At the same time, total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired to portray white as black and black as white.

In a situation where you had domination by one country and its allies, or its satellites rather, the search for global solutions often turned into an attempt to impose their own universal recipes. This group’s ambitions grew so big that they started presenting the policies they put together in their corridors of power as the view of the entire international community. But this is not the case.

The very notion of ‘national sovereignty’ became a relative value for most countries. In essence, what was being proposed was the formula: the greater the loyalty towards the world’s sole power centre, the greater this or that ruling regime’s legitimacy.

We will have a free discussion afterwards and I will be happy to answer your questions and would also like to use my right to ask you questions. Let someone try to disprove the arguments that I just set out during the upcoming discussion.

The measures taken against those who refuse to submit are well-known and have been tried and tested many times. They include use of force, economic and propaganda pressure, meddling in domestic affairs, and appeals to a kind of ‘supra-legal’ legitimacy when they need to justify illegal intervention in this or that conflict or toppling inconvenient regimes. Of late, we have increasing evidence too that outright blackmail has been used with regard to a number of leaders. It is not for nothing that ‘big brother’ is spending billions of dollars on keeping the whole world, including its own closest allies, under surveillance. Continue reading →

From Ria Novosti, 1 October 2014

More than 12,000 people have been listed as victims in Russia’s ongoing investigation into war crimes in eastern Ukraine, Russian Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said Wednesday.

“More than 60,000 people were interviewed as part of [the] investigation,” Markin said.

“More than 12,000 of the 60,000 [people] interviewed were given the victim status,” the spokesman added.

On Monday, Markin announced that the Russian Investigative Committee launched a case of genocide of the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine’s self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

According to Markin, “unidentified individuals from the ranks of the upper levels of Ukraine’s political and military leadership, the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Ukrainian National Guard, and the Right Sector gave commands directed at the full annihilation of Russian-speaking citizens living in the territories of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics.”

Markin stressed that no less than 2,500 people died as a result.

Ukraine has been engulfed in a violent internal conflict since mid-April, when Kiev began its military operation against independence supporters in the southeastern regions of the country. The United Nations estimates that some 3,500 people have been killed and more than 8,000 have been wounded since the start of the operation.

Source: http://en.ria.ru/russia/20141001/193526246/Over-12000-People-Listed-As-Victims-in-Russias-Ukraine-War.html

http://www.globalresearch.ca/over-12000-victims-of-war-crimes-in-ukraine-russia-launches-criminal-case-on-genocide-of-russian-speakers/5405966