NATO’s Response Force increased to 30,000 troops, up from 13,000; major NATO exercise planned for autumn with 25,000 troops

From Rick Rozoff

North Atlantic Treaty Organization
March 11, 2015
Secretary General discusses security challenges with top NATO military commanders
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Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg discussed security challenges with NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Philip Breedlove, and participated in a conference of senior military commanders during a visit to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe on Wednesday (11 March 2015). The Secretary General thanked the commanders for the remarkable work of Allied forces in the face of a highly complex and uncertain security environment…

The Secretary General warned that Russia’s aggressive actions against Ukraine have undermined the post-Cold War security order in Europe

In response to challenges both to the east and the south, NATO is implementing the strongest reinforcement of its collective defence since the end of the Cold War, Mr. Stoltenberg said. “We are doubling the size of the NATO Response Force from 13,000 to 30,000 troops” and “setting up a new 5,000-strong quick reaction Spearhead Force, with some units ready to move within as little as 48 hours.” He added that NATO is establishing six command and control centres in the Baltic States and three other eastern Allies, in order to coordinate training and exercises, and facilitate rapid reinforcements.

The Secretary General said the Alliance would “keep up the momentum”, noting a current exercise of NATO ships in the Black Sea, a major U.S. deployment to the Baltic region for training, and an upcoming exercise in the autumn – expected to be the Alliance’s largest in many years – with over 25,000 troops participating. “These measures are defensive, proportionate, and in line with our international commitments,” Mr. Stoltenberg said, adding: “these Headquarters and our Supreme Commander Europe, General Breedlove, play a key role in these efforts.”

https://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/east-and-south-nato-chief-commanders-expand-rapid-strike-forces/

John Pilger on modern fascism and the lies of America’s warmongers

Why the rise of fascism is again the issue
By John Pilger
February 26, 2015

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The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya. Continue reading