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Third strand of Crimea energy bridge launched

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Posted on Fort Russ

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ
14th April, 2016
The third strand of the energy bridge in the Crimean Federal district was put into operation ahead of schedule. Its launch helped to increase the maximum power transmitted across the energy bridge. This was reported by the Russian Ministry of Energy.
“After the early launch of the third line, the total volume of alloted power to Crimea increased to 1060 MW excluding alternative and backup power sources. The maximum peak consumption on the Peninsula in the spring is expected to be no more than 1100 MW, that is, after today’s launch, the shutting down of the power supply will almost be completely stopped,” — said energy Minister Alexander Novak.
That third strand of the power bridge will be launched today, said the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, speaking at Straight Line.
“Overall, we are approaching the volume of flow that was carried from the Ukrainian territory”, — said the Russian leader.
According to him, the fourth strand of another 200 MW, which will completely replace the volume that came from Ukraine, will be running within two to three weeks.

S-300s installed; Kiev junta is preparing to shoot down planes over Crimea; Kherson leader appeals to European community

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From Fort Russ

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ
9th April, 2016
 
The Kiev junta is preparing to shoot down planes over Crimea. Two S-300 systems were installed in the Henichesk district, Kherson region. Residents, as well as the military, reported that these systems are on alert and are supplied with everything needed to ensure the smooth operation of these SAMs. Officially, the regime claims that the deployment of the systems is supposedly designed to protect the territory of Ukraine on the border with Crimea. However, this is not true, according to Kherson politician Aleksey Zhuravko.

 

Activist warned, with reference to its sources, that there is a high probability that the S-300 can be used for provocations similar to the downed Malaysian Boeing over Donbass. The politician wrote this on his social network, attaching a photo of the area where the SAM is deployed.
“From serious sources: SAM is not installed to protect the territory of Ukraine, but to commit provocations against the Russian Federation. The whole situation with the advent of SAM in the Kherson area reminds me of the preparation for the implementation of the scenario according to the example of the downed Boeing 777 flight MH-17 over Donbass. According to a high-ranking military source, these systems will not be operated by local Kherson troops, but by the Ukrainian military personnel brought here from another area.
I am extremely worried about the situation on the border with Crimea in connection with the arrival of SAM systems. I want to warn everyone that today’s bloody Kiev government is ready for anything and will stop at nothing. If a plane is shot down in the skies over Crimea, you know that the responsibility for this will fall on the current leadership of Ukraine: the President, the government, and Parliament,” said Zhuravko.
“I appeal to the entire European community, including europarliamentarians. Please work pro-actively and prevent new casualties,” said the politician, summarizing his message.

“Suicide Bomber Battalion” formed on the Crimean border

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From Fort Russ

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ
9th April, 2016
 
The situation on the border with Crimea is far from ideal. Here, in cooperation with volunteers from the Aidar and Azov battalions, Crimean Tatar activists operate who, after their leader Refat Chubarov’s meeting with the Turkish leadership, started to form a national military unit. At the same time the Turkish authorities were equipping these units, the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko personally took a ride on the frigate “Hetman Sahaidachny” in Istanbul and brought them new uniforms.
Now the situation on the border with Crimea is on the verge of a social explosion. The excesses of the Tatar youths, among which activists of the extremist Turkish organization “Grey wolves” are seen, get on the nerves of the region’s people. It came to the point that the leaders of the Majlis demanded the Ukrainian authorities allocate them a portion of the territory of the Kherson region to create their own enclave.
The news that Crimean Tatars will ask for the most “appetizing” areas near the black sea coast is not much of a surprise as it has already happened in Crimea. Meanwhile, the Genichesk, Kalanchak, and Chaplynka districts are undergoing attacks on representatives of local business, during which the blockades by the activists extort financial support for their activities.
Now the passion has begun to subside a bit due to the fact that the activities of the organizers of the blockade of Crimea went far beyond the legal framework and drew the attention of the police and also the world community. In the end, they were forced to remove their posts and join the border guards, the so-called “public control” over the movement of people and goods across the border.
However, this activity also cannot fool anybody. Currently, there is a rapid formation of Crimean Tatar units. The “Crimea” Battalion had been previously created. Despite the number of volunteers falling short of a fully-fledged division, the soldiers have already been in the area of the ATO.
Currently the head of the Mejlis, Mustafa Dzhemilev announced the formation of a new battalion called “Asker”. He does not hide the fact that he supports bloody acts and the destabilization of the situation in Crimea. Volunteers who have been recruited in this formation called themselves the “Suicide Bomber Battalion” because they assert that they are prepared to “help” their compatriots on the Peninsula.
Despite the statement of Petro Poroshenko that Crimea will be returned peacefully, on March 21st, Chubarov spoke about a military solution to the issue. In his words, the Crimean Tatar units will follow the advancing units of the Ukrainian troops and will bring order to the territory.

Right Sector arrive at the contact line for provocations against LPR Army

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From Fort Russ

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ
14th April, 2016
 
Kiev continues to move nationalist battalions to the line of contact, including committing provocations against the military personnel of the LPR’s militia. This was reported today at a Luganskinfo briefing, and was said by the official representative of the Defense Ministry of the Republic – Andrei Marochko.
“There is an ongoing increase in nationalist battalions at the line of contact of the parties,” he said.
“A division of the “Right sector” appeared in the settlement of Shchastya, and are located in one of the administrative buildings of the village. Also, earlier there were units of the Right sector and “Aidar” battalion in the villages of Raihorodka, Novoaidar, and Severodonetsk,” said Marochko.
“Nationalist battalions arrived to stage provocations against servicemen of the militia of the Luhansk People’s Republic,” said the official representative of the Defense Ministry of the Republic.
“Despite all this, the people’s militia continues to observe the Minsk agreements. Our units comply with the “ceasefire”, without simultaneously weakening vigilance”, he said.

Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant radioactive release and emergency shutdown

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From Fort Russ

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ
11th April, 2016
 
A radioactive release and emergency shutdown of unit 6 occurred at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant.  Management of the State Emergency Service requested people not to panic, but to calmly take preventive measures:
“For preventive measures State Emergency Service experts recommend to refrain from a prolonged stay in an open area within three days, to use a medical mask, use a weak solution of iodine in cold water and red wine”.
Vladimir Rogov, the leader of the Zaporizhia “Slavic Guard” writes:
These Nazi brutes are doing everything to turn all post-Ukraine space into an exclusion zone!
Meanwhile, $700 million was allocated from the budget of Ukraine for the repair and modernization of power units №1 and №2 of Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant – the junta stole more than $420 million. Moreover, in the corruption scheme, in addition to the so-called “Minister” of Energy and Coal Industry, Vladimir Demchishin, and the “President” of “Energoatom” that participate directly, there are also “President” Poroshenko and the leaders of the American company Westinghouse who are implementing the corruption schemes through its Swedish subsidiary Westinghouse Electric Sweden AB.
Quote: “…the excess background radiation at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant and the sanitary protective zone in a radius of 2.5 km is about 10 times and is not critical to the health of the population. Repair work will be tentatively held until 13th April.”

White supremacy and genocide in Australia — the dirty secret of Utopia

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By John Pilger
Global Research, April 09, 2016

 

The Derogation of Indigenous Rights in Australia

I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the “red heart” of Australia. The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the oldest, most continuous human presence on earth.

Rosalie was distressed, defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, Utopia, with a searing description of a discarded people: “We are not wanted in our own country.” She has described the legacies of a genocide: a word political Australia loathes and fears.

A week ago, Rosalie and her daughter Ngarla put out an alert that people were starving in Utopia. They said that elderly Indigenous  people in the homelands had received no food from an aged care program funded by the Australian Government and administered by the regional Council. “One elderly man with end-stage Parkinson’s received two small packets of  mincemeat and white bread,” said Ngarla, “the elderly woman living nearby received nothing.” In calling for food drops, Rosalie said, “The whole community including children and the elderly go without food, often on a daily basis.” She and Ngarla and their community have cooked and distributed food as best they can.

This is not unusual. Four years ago, I drove into the red heart and met Dr. Janelle Trees. A general practitioner whose indigenous patients live within a few miles of $1,000-a-night tourist resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said, “Malnutrition is common. I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

“There’s asbestos in many Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fibre of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government] doesn’t care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself: why not?”

When Rosalie phoned me from Utopia, she said,

“It’s not so much the physical starvation as the traumatising of my people, of whole communities We are duped all the time. White Australia sets up organisations and structures that offer the pretence of helping us, but it’s a pretence, no more. If we oppose it, it’s a crime. Simply belonging is a crime. Suicides are everywhere. (She gave me details of the suffering in her own family). They’re out to kill our values, to break down our traditional life until there’s nothing there anymore.”

Barkly Regional Council says its aged care packages get through and protests that the council is “the poorest of the three tiers of government and is very much dependent on [Northern] Territory and [Federal] governments for funds to provide such services to the bush. Barbara Shaw, the council’s president, agreed that it was “totally unacceptable that people should be starving in a rich and well-developed country like Australia” and that “it is disgusting and wrong that Indigenous people experience deep poverty such as this.”

The starvation and poverty and the division often sewn among Indigenous people themselves as they try to identify those responsible stem in large part from an extraordinary episode known as “the Intervention”. This is Australia’s dirty secret.

In 2007, the then Prime Minister, John Howard, sent the army into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, claimed his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by paedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers”.

Subsequently exposed as a fraud by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists, the “intervention” nonetheless allowed the  government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40 per cent lower mortality rate. Distribution of food was never a problem.

It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on Indigenous organisations. The remote homelands are seen as an ideological  threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia and demands “assimilation”.

It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.

I know these communities and their people, who have shown me the conditions imposed on them. Many are denied consistent running water, sanitation and power. That basic sustenance should join this list is not surprising.

According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia is the richest place on earth. Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens; they like to hang Indigenous art on the white walls of their offices in the bleakly modern Parliament House. Their self-endowment is legendary. The Labor Party’s last minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of $331,144. During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third.

When Professor James Anaya, the respected United Nations Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described the “intervention” as racist, the opposition spokesman on indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to “get a life” and not “just listen to the old victim brigade.”  Abbott was promoted to prime minister of Australia; he was evicted last year.

When I began filming Indigenous Australia some thirty years ago, a global campaign was under way to end apartheid in South Africa. Having reported from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the compliance, defensiveness and indifference of people who saw themselves as liberal. For example, black incarceration in Australia is greater than that of black people in apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison, are beaten up in custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In despairing communities, children as young as ten take their own lives.

Yet no international opprobrium, no boycotts, have disturbed the surface of “lucky” Australia. As Rosalie’s call reminds us, that surface should be shattered without delay.

www.johnpilger.com

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © John Pilger, Global Research, 2016

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-dirty-secret-of-utopia/5519484

Congress Government Accounting Office (GAO) says U.S. government accounting is fraudulent

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By Washington’s Blog
Global Research, April 08, 2016
Washington’s Blog 7 April 2016

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the non-partisan auditor and investigator for Congress.

The GAO says that the U.S. government’s records are so poorly kept that it can’t really audit them. 

Specifically, the GAO provided a report to Congress yesterday stating:

The federal government was unable to demonstrate the reliability of significant portions of its accrual-based financial statements as of and for the fiscal years ended September 30, 2015, and 2014, principally resulting from limitations related to certain material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting and other limitations affecting the reliability of these financial statements. For example, about 34 percent of the federal government’s reported total assets as of September 30, 2015, and approximately 19 percent of the federal government’s reported net cost for fiscal year 2015, relate to three CFO Act agencies—the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—that received disclaimers of opinion on their fiscal year 2015 financial statements. As a result, we were prevented from providing an opinion on the accrual-based financial statements.

The federal government did not maintain adequate systems or have sufficient appropriate evidence to support certain material information reported in its accrual-based financial statements. The underlying material weaknesses in internal control, which have existed for years, contributed to our disclaimer of opinion on the accrual-based financial statements as of and for the fiscal years ended September 30, 2015, and 2014.  Specifically, these weaknesses concerned the federal government’s inability to:

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  • adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal entities;
  • reasonably assure that the government wide financial statements are (1) consistent with the underlying audited entities’ financial statements, (2) properly balanced, and (3) in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (U.S. GAAP); and
  • reasonably assure that the information in the (1) Reconciliations of Net Operating Cost and Unified Budget Deficit and (2) Statements of Changes in Cash Balance from Unified Budget and Other Activities is complete and consistent with the underlying information in the audited entities’ financial statements and other financial data.

These material weaknesses continued to (1) hamper the federal government’s ability to reliably report a significant portion of its assets, liabilities, costs, and other related information; (2) affect the federal government’s ability to reliably measure the full cost as well as the financial and nonfinancial performance of certain programs and activities;(3) impair the federal government’s ability to adequately safeguard significant assets and properly record various transactions; and (4) hinder the federal government from having reliable financial information to operate in an efficient and effective manner.

Moreover, the Pentagon hasn’t even attempted to comply with government audits …  and “$8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon [between] 1996 [and 2013] has never been accounted for.”  The military wastes and “loses” trillions of dollars.

In addition:

  • Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy when they were not. The Treasury Secretary also falsely told Congress that the bailouts would be used to dispose of toxic assets … but then used the money for something else entirely
  • The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this. For example, the Federal Reserve turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud, and the SEC has repeatedly ignored accounting fraud (a whistleblower also “gift-wrapped and delivered” the Madoff scandal to the SEC, but they refused to take action). Indeed, Alan Greenspan took the position that fraud could never happen

Yesterday’s GAO report also predicted:

By 2089 … debt held by the public as a share of GDP reaches 314 percent in our baseline extended simulation or 568 percent in our alternative simulation

As the head of the GAO put it, “We’re going to owe more than our entire economy is producing and by definition this is not sustainable.”

The Hill reported in November:

The former U.S. comptroller general says the real U.S. debt is closer to about $65 trillion than the oft-cited figure of $18 trillion.

Dave Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said when you add up all of the nation’s unfunded liabilities, the national debt is more than three times the number generally advertised.

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“If you end up adding to that $18.5 trillion the unfunded civilian and military pensions and retiree healthcare, the additional underfunding for Social Security, the additional underfunding for Medicare, various commitments and contingencies that the federal government has, the real number is about $65 trillion rather than $18 trillion, and it’s growing automatically absent reforms ….”

But former Senior Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and current Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff says that – when unfunded liabilities are taken into account – the fiscal gap for the U.S. is actually 3 times higher … $205 trillion as of 2013 (and getting worse all the time).

We believe that an accurate would show that the government already owes more than the entire economy is producing …Government Accounting Is Fraudulent

The original source of this article is Washington’s Blog

Copyright © Washington’s Blog, Washington’s Blog, 2016

http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-government-accounting-is-fraudulent/5519261

U.S. delivers 3,000 tons of weapons and ammo to Al-Qaeda and Co. in Syria

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By Moon of Alabama
Global Research, April 08, 2016
Moon of Alabama

The United States via its Central Intelligence Service is still delivering thousands of tons of additional weapons to al-Qaeda and others in Syria.

The British military information service Jane’s found the transport solicitation for the shipment on the U.S. government website FedBizOps.gov. Janes writes:

The FBO has released two solicitations in recent months looking for shipping companies to transport explosive material from Eastern Europe to the Jordanian port of Aqaba on behalf of the US Navy’s Military Sealift Command. Released on 3 November 2015, the first solicitation sought a contractor to ship 81 containers of cargo that included explosive material from Constanta in Bulgaria to Aqaba. … The cargo listed in the document included AK-47 rifles, PKM general-purpose machine guns, DShK heavy machine guns, RPG-7 rocket launchers, and 9K111M Faktoria anti-tank guided weapon (ATGW) systems. The Faktoria is an improved version of the 9K111 Fagot ATGW, the primary difference being that its missile has a tandem warhead for defeating explosive reactive armour (ERA) fitted to some tanks.

Screenshot of Jane’s Report

The Jane’s author tweeted the full article (copy here).

One ship with nearly one thousand tons of weapons and ammo left Constanta in Romania on December 5. The weapons are from Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. It sailed to Agalar in Turkey which has a military pier and then to Aqaba in Jordan. Another ship with more than two-thousand tons of weapons and ammo left in late March, followed the same route and was last recorded on its way to Aqaba on April 4.

We already knew that the “rebels” in Syria received plenty of weapons during the official ceasefire. We also know that these “rebels” regularly deliver half of their weapon hauls from Turkey and Jordan to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra):

Hard-core Islamists in the Nusra Front have long outgunned the more secular, nationalist, Western-supported rebels. According to FSA officers, Nusra routinely harvests up to half the weapons supplied by the Friends of Syria, a collection of countries opposed to Assad, ..

U.S. and Turkey supported “rebels” took part in the recent attack on Tal al-Eis against Syrian government forces which was launched with three suicide bombs by al-Qaeda in Syria. This was an indisputable breaking of the ceasefire agreement between Russia and the U.S. It is very likely that some of the weapons and ammunition the U.S. delivered in December were used in this attack.

Millions of rifle, machine-gun and mortar shots, thousands of new light and heavy weapons and hundreds of new anti-tank missiles were delivered by the U.S.. Neither Turkey nor Jordan use such weapons of Soviet providence. These weapons are going to Syria where, as has been reported for years by several independent sources, half of them go directly to al-Qaeda.

From historic experience we can be sure that the consequence of this weaponizing of takfiris will be not only be the death of “brown people” in the Middle East, but also attacks on “western” people and interests.

Skyscrapers falling in New York and hundreds of random people getting killed in Paris, Brussels, London and (likely soon) Berlin seem not be enough to deter the politicians and “experts” that actively support this criminal war on Syria and its people.

The original source of this article is Moon of Alabama

Copyright © Moon of Alabama, Moon of Alabama, 2016

http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-delivers-3000-tons-of-weapons-and-ammo-to-al-qaeda-and-co-in-syria/5519413

Nixon’s advisor Ehrlichman said White House enemies were “antiwar left and black people”; WH created fake “war on drugs” to demonize and destroy

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Several articles below

From Natural Blaze

Former Nixon Aide Admits War On Drugs Was A Big Lie; Was Never About Drugs

March 23,
By Brandon Turbeville

In an interview conducted by Harper’s Dan Baum nearly 22 years ago, former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted what many have known ever since the beginning – that the Nixon administrations’ War On Drugs was a giant lie.

To clarify, it was not Nixon’s police state that was a lie. That was very real. It was the justification used for the war, the fearmongering, and the panic-inducing hype produced by the White House that was a monumental obfuscation.

Ehrlichman doesn’t mince words when he discusses the War On Drugs and it is not inference suggesting that the justification given for the War on Drugs was a lie. In fact, Ehrlichman even states that the policy was in order to attack political rivals and alleged “threats” to the Nixon administration like “blacks and hippies.”

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” Ehrlichman said.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

As Tom LoBianco writes for CNN, “It’s a stark departure from Nixon’s public explanation for his first piece of legislation in the war on drugs, delivered in message to Congress in July 1969, which framed it as a response to an increase in heroin addiction and the rising use of marijuana and hallucinogens by students.”

Of course, the War On Drugs and the ensuing police and incarceration states that followed had a much larger purpose than merely helping Nixon fight back against potential political threats. Indeed, most drugs were already illegal by Nixon’s election.

Hiding and preventing the knowledge of positive effects of some substances, shredding Constitutional and human rights, creating a culture of incarceration, and implementing a gradual but eventually total police state were most certainly part of the plan as well, which history has demonstrated. For instance, Reagan and especially Clinton were under no threat from the populations mentioned by Ehrlichman but they nevertheless sent the drug war and the natural results of it listed above into overdrive.

Nevertheless, after setting the United States further down the path of totalitarianism, we at least appreciate Ehrlichman’s honesty even if it is decades later. Perhaps now, we can begin dismantling the drug war.

Photo credit: gmcmullen via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-SA, modified by editor

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Here’s the article where Dan Baum reveals this information.

from Harpers

April 2016 issue

Legalize It All
How to win the war on drugs

By Dan Baum

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.

Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction…

For the rest of the article, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

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The interviewer didn’t publish this information, information that shocked him at the time, for 22 years. Instead, he forgot, and only discovered this in his notes when he was writing the Harper article.

From CNN on how this went missing for 22 years — see highlighted text below.

Report: Aide says Nixon’s war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies

By Tom LoBianco, CNN
March 24, 2016

Washington (CNN)One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper’s Magazine.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Ehrlichman’s comment is the first time the war on drugs has been plainly characterized as a political assault designed to help Nixon win, and keep, the White House.

It’s a stark departure from Nixon’s public explanation for his first piece of legislation in the war on drugs, delivered in message to Congress in July 1969, which framed it as a response to an increase in heroin addiction and the rising use of marijuana and hallucinogens by students.

However, Nixon’s political focus on white voters, the “Silent Majority,” is well-known. And Nixon’s derision for minorities in private is well-known from his White House recordings.

The comments come as there has been a marked shift in attitudes toward handling drug use — ranging from the legalization of marijuana in various states to White House candidates focusing heavily on treatment as an answer to New Hampshire’s heroin epidemic while they were campaigning across the state.

Ehrlichman died in 1999, but his five children in questioned the veracity of the account.

“We never saw or heard anything from our dad, John Ehrlichman, that was derogatory about any person of color,” wrote Peter Ehrlichman, Tom Ehrlichman, Jan Ehrlichman, Michael Ehrlichman and Jody E. Pineda in a statement provided to CNN.

“The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”

Ehrlichman’s comments did not surface until now after Baum remembered them while going back through old notes for the Harper’s story. Baum said he had no reason to believe Ehrlichman was being dishonest and viewed them as “atonement” from a man long after his tumultuous run in the White House ended.

“I think Ehrlichman was waiting for someone to come and ask him. I think he felt bad about it. I think he had a lot to feel bad about, same with Egil Krogh, who was another Watergate guy.” Baum told CNN.

Baum interviewed Ehrlichman and others for his 1996 book “Smoke and Mirrors,” but said he left out the Ehrlichman comment from the book because it did not fit the narrative style focused on putting the readers in the middle of the backroom discussions themselves, without input from the author.

Baum equated Ehrlichman’s admission with traumatic war stories that often take decades for veterans to talk about and said it clearly took time for Ehrlichman and other Nixon aides he interviewed to candidly explain the war on drugs.

“These guys, they knew they’d done bad things and they were glad finally when it was no longer going to cost them anything to be able to talk about it, to atone for it.” Baum said. “Nobody goes in to public service, I don’t think, on either side of the political aisle, to be repressive, to be evil. They go in because they care about the country.”

[3]

[1] This article (Former Nixon Aide Admits War On Drugs Was A Big Lie; Was Never About Drugs) can be republished under a Creative Commons license with  attribution to Brandon Turbeville and Natural Blaze.com.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies,Five Sense SolutionsandDispatches From a Dissident, volume 1and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 600 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

Former Nixon Aide Admits War On Drugs Was A Big Lie; Was Never About Drugs

[2] http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Dan Baum is the author of four books, most recently Gun Guys (2013). His most recent article for Harper’s Magazine, “How to Make Your Own AR-15,” appeared in the June 2013 issue.

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html

Posted under Fair Use Rules.

Obama goes to Nazi immigrant haven during Argentina trip

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Two articles

Obama brings two fuel-guzzling planes to serve as Air Force One in Argentina

By Dave Boyer – The Washington Times
March 24, 2016

President Obama brought along a second, smaller Air Force One for his family to enjoy a day of sightseeing in Argentina on Thursday.

After dancing the tango at a state dinner in Buenos Aires Wednesday night, the president and first lady Michelle Obama took their daughters aboard the government plane colloquially known as “baby” Air Force One Thursday to fly to the scenic town of Bariloche in southern Argentina. It’s a Boeing 757 used when traveling to places where the runway is too short for the primary Air Force One.

The larger Air Force One, a 747-200, was parked alongside the smaller plane at the airport in Buenos Aires, according to pool reporters traveling with the president. It costs about $206,000 per hour to fly the larger plane, which the president is expected to use for the 10-plus-hour flight back to Washington late Thursday night.

It’s common for the government to have a backup plane available when the president travels, although not often for a family sightseeing excursion.

Bariloche is a lakeside resort town nestled in the foothills of the Andes mountains, famous for its chocolates and Swiss-style architecture.

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But Bariloche is more than that.

In Argentine Nazi Refuge Bariloche

By / October 19th, 2013

Bariloche, a popular Argentine tourist resort ringed by the Andes, where Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke found refuge after World War II, has kept mostly silent on its long history as a home to Nazis. For 40 years, Priebke lived undisturbed among its citizens, until he was finally extradited to Italy in the 1990s over a World War II massacre for which he has never expressed regret.

…

Thousands of Nazis, Croatian Ustasha fascists and Italian fascists arrived in Argentina with the blessing of president Juan Peron, who led the nation from 1946 to 1955 and again briefly in the 1970s, according to the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Working first as a waiter, then as owner of a delicatessen and finally as owner of a consulting firm, Priebke was liked and respected in the German community. He was the president of Bariloche’s German-Argentine cultural association and would celebrate Adolf Hitler’s April 20 birthday alongside the town’s other Germans….

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From Wikipedia

Nazis in Bariloche

In 1995, Bariloche made headlines in the international press when it became known as a haven for Nazi war criminals, such as the former SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke. Priebke had been the director of the German School of Bariloche for many years.

In his 2004 book Bariloche nazi-guía turística, Argentine author Abel Basti claims that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun lived in the surroundings of Bariloche for many years after World War II.[5] Basti said that the Argentine Nazis chose the estate of Inalco as Hitler’s refuge.[5]

Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, a 2011 book (and subsequent film) by British authors Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, proposed that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped from Berlin in 1945 and hid at Hacienda San Ramon, six miles east of Bariloche, until the early 1960s. These accounts are disputed by most historians, who generally believe that Hitler and Braun committed suicide in the last days of World War II, even though their bodies were never found.[6]

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/24/obama-takes-two-air-force-one-planes-argentina/

http://www.constantinereport.com/in-argentine-nazi-refuge-bariloche/

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