=By= RT

Source : youtube.com

It would be nice to be able to write this evento off to the “no big deal” file except that Breedlove (the irony of the name is sickening) is a US General, and he was the General in charge of NATO’s allied forces. In other words, this is not some guy off the chain of command. He was the chain of command. The main thing that I see that is suspicious with this report is the implication that the White House (aka the US President) was somehow adverse to what Breedlove was fomenting (in the ranks and likely State). From what went down, and has happened since, it seems to me that his enthusiasm and communications were right in line tih efforts to taunt Russia into an attack against US forces (or assets). -rw

Hacked private emails of the US general formerly in charge of NATO reveal a campaign to pressure the White House into escalating the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, involving several influential players in Washington.

The emails, posted by the site DCLeaks, show correspondence between General Philip M. Breedlove, former head of the US European Command and supreme commander of NATO forces, with several establishment insiders concerning the situation in Ukraine following the February 2014 coup that ousted the elected government in favor of a US-backed regime.

Breedlove served as the NATO Supreme Commander between May 2013 and March 2016. His personal email incorporated his Air Force call sign “Bwana” – a Swahili word for “boss.”

The hacked emails reveal his frequent and intense communications with retired General Wesley Clark, as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and involving a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, State Department official Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.

Clark, who commanded NATO during the 1999 war in Yugoslavia, reached out to Breedlove in April 2014. On April 8, he forwarded “intelligence” obtained by Anatoly Pinchuk and Dmitry Tymchuk, activists close to the new regime, claiming a Russian invasion was in the works.

The information was conveyed by Phillip Karber, an ex-Marine and president of the Potomac Foundation, whom Clark calls a “colleague” and “our guy.” Karber wrote about observing the Russian border from inside a Ukrainian tank, and eagerly transmitted Tymchuk and Pinchuk’s calls for support. Contacted by The Intercept on Friday, Karber confirmed the authenticity of several emails in the leaked cache.

Reporting on his meeting with Ambassador Pyatt on April 6, Karber wrote: “State is the one trying to be pro-active and recognizes need to do more faster,” while General Martin Dempsey – at that point the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – was “dragging his feet in order to save [military] relations with Russians.”

In an email dated April 12, Clark referred to his exchange with “Toria” Nuland – the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, who personally backed the Ukrainian revolution – pushing for open US support for the regime in Ukraine to use force against protesters in the east. Prior to the coup, Washington had strongly warned Kiev not to use force against the anti-government demonstrators in the city.

Kiev’s summer “anti-terrorist operation” ended in crushing defeat in August, and the first armistice between the government and rebels was signed in Minsk in September. Meanwhile, the so-called Islamic State jihadist group arose in Iraq and Syria, drawing US attention away from Eastern Europe with gruesome beheadings of Westerners. Frustrated by the White House’s reluctance to back his belligerent agenda in Ukraine, Breedlove reached out to Powell, a retired general and former secretary of state.

“I seek your counsel on two fronts,…. how to frame this opportunity in a time where all eyes are on ISIL all the time,… and two,… how to work this personally with the POTUS,” Breedlove wrote to Powell in September 2014. Powell’s response was not made available.

Breedlove was introduced to Powell by Harlan Ullman, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author of the “shock and awe” doctrine used by the Bush administration in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In October 2014, Ullman urged Breedlove to reach out to Vice President Joe Biden. Aside from Powell, Ullman wrote, “I know of no better way of getting into 1600,” referring to the White House’s address on Pennsylvania Avenue.

In November, Ullman also suggested Breedlove should get together with David O’Sullivan, the new EU envoy to Washington. Noting that Europe “seems to be a six letter expletive in the White House,” Ullman adds that “perhaps quiet collaboration between him and NATO (SecGen) as well might be useful.”

“Obama or Kerry needs to be convinced that Putin must be confronted,” Ullman wrote in February 2015, before the ‘Minsk II’ talks.

He also gave Breedlove pointers on getting into the good graces of Ash Carter, the new Defense Secretary. “I would take or pretend to take careful notes.  Ash is an academic. And he is trained that students who take good notes rise to be A grades.  This may be maskarova.  But it is useful maskarova,” Ullman wrote, misspelling the Russian word for camouflage (maskirovka).

This story is like if Dr. Strangelove had a baby with Thick of It but it’s all real. https://t.co/AYE3tYT1eb pic.twitter.com/KHm9eU2jlq

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) July 1, 2016

Washington did approve hundreds of millions of dollars in “non-lethal” aid to Ukrainian troops, including the notorious “volunteer battalions,” in the 2016 military budget.

Breedlove continued to push for more aggressive US involvement, claiming a heavy Russian troop presence in Ukraine – which was later denied even by the government in Kiev. In March this year, the general was telling US lawmakers that Russia and Syria were “deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

Breedlove was replaced at the helm of EUCOM and NATO in May, and officially retired from the military on July 1. He was replaced by US Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, whose public statements suggest a similar level of hostility for Russia.

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=By= Mathew Maavak

Obama’s “Asia Pivot” strategy from Pakistan Defense

A more concise version of this article was published as a CCTV Panview Oped.

The rhetorical war between the China and the United States over the South China Sea dispute is increasing in tempo and magnitude by the week.  The US is wasting no time, resource and effort in sponsoring seminars, talks and think tank confabs to drive a wedge between China and other claimant nations in the region.  Ambitious young ASEAN scholars and diplomats, anxious to boost their resumes and post-retirement corporate prospects, are actively being lured towards this end via the offer of generous stints at prestigious American universities and think tanks.

Vietnam is the suitor du jour in America’s new carousel game called the “Asian Pivot.” While China is financing and building essential infrastructure in Vietnam, the US is ironically offering weapons to a nation it pummeled during a genocidal two-decade war that left two million Vietnamese citizens dead, as well as an untold number injured and maimed. This tally does not include the yet incalculable effects of Agent Orange on future generations of Vietnamese.

A New York Times report on May 11, 2014 noted that “the war has not ended for many of the 2.8 million” individuals who “are convinced that their cancers and nervous disorders and skin diseases — not to mention congenital maladies afflicting some of their children — are a result of their contact with Agent Orange.”

The NYT was referring to US Army personnel and support staff here; not the Vietnamese victims!

While Chinese businesses have poured in investments worth $7.9 billion into Vietnam in 2014 alone, the US has only offered to clean up chemically contaminated parts of the country some 40 years after the Vietnam War ended. Presumably, both the offer of weapons and nationwide decontamination is subject to strict Vietnamese compliance over the United States’ glaring anti-China stance in the South China Sea.

Yesterday’s bitter enemies are today’s strategic partners whenever history is reinterpreted with facile sleaze.

But history cannot be easily brushed aside, even if the UN Court of Arbitration in The Hague rules in favour of the Philippines over its claims in the South China Sea. The ruling is expected to be made this summer.

Why Extra-Regional Arbitration May Backfire

China and lines of demarcation.

The Philippines’ resort to The Hague may backfire badly for all claimants in the region. Involving the United Nations and the United States into what was originally a regional issue may irk China, but it ironically opens up a few legal Pandora’s Boxes in Beijing’s favour.

For one, the amnesiac Western media has forgotten that Taiwan’s maritime claims mirror those of China. Can the UN issue a definitive verdict that discounts Taiwanese claims, especially when Taipei is not a member of the United Nations? Will the 22 nations that recognize Taiwan as a separate political entity endorse any such international ruling? This, in turn, opens up another legal conundrum over the status of Taiwan.

A shrewd legal expert on territorial claims, international law and geopolitics can easily punch holes the size of a US aircraft carrier once the UN and the US are brought into the picture, and embarrass both entities to no ends.

To begin with, did the United States and the UN General Assembly or any other permanent member of the United Nations Security Council contest the validity of the 11-dash line unveiled on Dec 1, 1947 by the Republic of China – itself a permanent council member at the time?  Without a proper de jure challenge, the “international community” – a term the US glibly invokes all too often – seems to have proffered at least de facto recognition over China’s 1947 claims.

Many of the contested islands in the South China Sea, namely the Paracels, Pratas and Spratly, were actually reclaimed by the Republic of China’s naval forces in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender in WWII. Hardly any disputes rose till Vietnam lodged a counter-claim in 1951 but this was blunted by China’s concession of the Bach Long Vi island to Vietnam in 1957.  Beijing’s maritime claims were in fact tempered by Zhou Enlai’s new 9-dash line during this period. Again, there seems to be scarcity of UN debates, protests, documents or motions regarding the 9-dash line till a decade or two back – when the United States began to challenge China’s economic hegemony in the region.

The disputed islands slipped into a state of limbo from the late 50s onward. Hardly any news buff was acquainted with its existence. The United States was too busy fighting Vietnam. Later it was busy courting the People’s Republic of China, culminating in Nixon’s 1971 visit. The geopolitical pendulum, and the implicit maritime claims, now superficially swung in Beijing’s direction.  There was no way the US was going to honour the claims of Hanoi.  America neither countenances nor honours the claims of any nation that militarily kicks its rump. Being the gracious loser that it was, Washington refused to engage in diplomatic relations with Hanoi from the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 till 1995. Hanoi’s maritime claims were presumably treated with the same level of hostile contempt.

Just how did the US treat Vietnamese claims till 1995? Is the US now making a hypocritical volte-face, dangling the prospects of arms and regional naval support in lieu of war reparations and the blighted lives of future generations of Vietnamese babies over a few islands?

Or will it resort to another round of musical chairs when future regional developments require an opportunistic recalibration yet again? As for China and claimant ASEAN nations, all parties should continue holding regional dialogues towards a final settlement in the South China Sea, no matter how long it takes.

Asia should resolve its own problems without entangling Janus-faced outsiders.

Mathew Maavak

Mathew Maavak is a doctoral researcher in security foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). His areas of study include strategic foresight; open source intelligence (OSINT); science, technology and innovation (STI); national policy-making; Eurasian integration; and global risks and uncertainties.

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=By= Dr. Dahlia Wasfi

Fallujah after Operation “Iraqi Freedom”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] would like to introduce a powerful voice of conscience to The Greanville Post community. Dahlia Wasfi is an Iraqi American doctor and peace and environmental activist. She was born in New York to a Jewish American mother and a Muslim Iraqi father. She lived for a period of time in Iraq as a child, and has returned to Iraq twice since the Bush Administration’s “Shock and Awe” campaign. This included a three month stay in Basrah.  Dr. Wasfi is uniquely placed at the cusp of the U.S. “adventures” in the Middle East. In this piece below she speaks to US interests in Iraq and Afghanistan. -rw

The Reality of the United States Government

Republished with permission of Dr. Dahlia Wasfi

 You may follow Dr. Wasfi at her Facebook page.

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WITNESSES TO HISTORY
CALEB MAUPIN

US Missile Defense Plan – Europe.

The US is on a march to war with Russia (and apparently China), and the ballistic missile installations are one important link in the chain. However, the preparation of the soil for war is a larger project that includes squashing the protections against state intrusions into peoples lives (as with surveillance programs) and the squashing of dissent in its various forms. In the US we have an uptick in the monitoring of the population and silencing and punishing whistleblowers. Clearly this is happening in Poland as well. If the state increases the propaganda while silencing dissent to its actions, then the likelihood of mass public dissent drops dramatically. Poland is one nation where this is happening; it certainly is not the only one. -rw

The United States and its NATO allies have recently established ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. The United States claims that these systems are set up for the purpose of protecting Romania and Poland.

However, Russian leaders interpret the systems as a threat to them because these “defense systems” are strike enabling. The new ballistic missile systems enable NATO forces in Poland and Romania to strike Russia with cruise missiles, and then deflect any response.

Russia and China raised similar objections to the missile system being established in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. In Cold War terms, these missile systems give “first strike capability” to the United States and its NATO allies in Eastern Europe.

The installation of the missiles in Poland has been quite unpopular. Naturally, the installation of the system in Poland has been accompanied by a crackdown on political forces that object to it.

Mateusz Piskorski

Mateusz Piskorski, a Pan-Slavic activist and former member of the Polish parliament has been detained without specific charges. Authorities allege, without citing anything specific, that he has been engaged in espionage.

To anyone trained in criminology or the history of espionage, it should be highly obvious that Piskorski has not engaged in any illegal activity. Piskorski is a well-known political activist. He leads a small political party and runs a Pan-Slavic publishing house. As a well-known public figure, Piskorski is the last person that any intelligence agency would cooperate with. Piskorski has been detained because he is an outspoken critic of NATO and the European Union, and is loudly voicing his opposition to Polish cooperation with hostility to Russia.

Piskorski is not the only one who has been targeted by the pro-NATO government in Poland. On April 1st, the right-wing political party that runs the country passed a sweeping anti-Communist law. The law outlaws displays honoring adherents of the “Anti-Polish Communist Ideology.” The law specifically lists a number of Polish historical figures who cannot legally be honored. Among them are not only leaders of the post-war socialist regime, but also the Dabrowski Brigade of Polish volunteers who fought fascism in Spain, and any members of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, once led by Rosa Luxemburg. A number of anti-Nazi resistance groups, led by Communists, that operated during the Second World War are also outlawed.

On March 31st, four leaders of the Communist Party were convicted of “promoting totalitarianism.” Their crime was operating a website and printing a leftist newspaper. They were sentenced to nine months in prison with hard labor.

The “Law and Justice Party” which leads Poland is leading the crackdown on Communists, leftists, and Pan-Slavists while at the same time allowing Neo-Nazis and other fascists to operate openly. While Communists and Pan-Slavists are forced into the shadows, 400 Neo-Nazis paraded through the streets on April 13th in a public rally.

Imagine if Vladimir Putin were to crackdown on his pro-liberal, western opponents in such a way? In Putin’s Russia, the “Union of Right Forces” and other parties that embrace western ideologies operate openly. Groups promoting free market capitalism, falsifying Russian history and accusing great historical figures of genocide, openly operate all across Russian soil, and often receive western funding as they do so.

The “human rights” allegations against Russia pale in comparison to what is being openly done by the pro-NATO polish regime, as the missile systems are being erected, paving the way to World War Three.

The hypocrisy of western media and the “human rights” NGO noise machine should be very obvious.

Caleb Maupin

Is an American journalist and political analyst. Tasnim News Agency described him as "a native of Ohio who has campaigned against war and the U.S. financial system." His political activism began while attending Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio. In 2010, he video recorded a confrontation between Collinwood High School students who walked out to protest teacher layoffs and the police. His video footage resulted in one of the students being acquitted in juvenile court. He was a figure within the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City. Maupin writes on American foreign policy and other social issues. Maupin is featured as a Distinguished Collaborator with The Greanville Post.  READ MORE ABOUT CALEB MAUPIN HERE.

Source: New Eastern Outlook

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Dispatches from Eric Zuesse

PUTIN IS ON TO OBAMA’S ENORMOUS LIES, AND THAT IS A FACT. BUT THE US PUBLIC DON’T HAVE A CLUE OF WHAT’S COMING.

On Friday, May 27th, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin again said that American President Barack Obama lies when saying that the reason America’s anti-ballistic missile (“ABM”) or Ballistic Missile Defense (“BMD”) system is being installed in Romania, and will soon be installed in Poland, is to protect Europe from Iranian missiles that don’t even exist and that Obama himself says won’t exist because of Obama’s deal with Iran. Putin is saying: I know that you are lying there, not being honest. You’re aiming to disable our retaliatory capacity here, not Iran’s. I’m not so dumb as to believe so transparent a lie as your assurances that this is about Iran, not about Russia.

Putin says that ABMs such as America is installing, disable a country’s (in this case, Russia’s) ability to retaliate against a blitz invasion — something increasingly likely from NATO now as NATO has extended right up to Russia’s very borders — and that Russia will not allow this disabling of Russia’s retaliatory forces.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (C) —a prominent Washington stooge, along with other vassal European “leaders”—reviews an honour guard during an inauguration ceremony of the US anti-missile station Aegis Ashore Romania (in the background) at the military base in Deveselu, Romania on May 12, 2016. The appalling corruption of European regimes across the continent is pushing the world to the nuclear abyss. © Daniel Mihailescu / AFP

He said that “NATO fend us off with vague statements that this is no threat to Russia … that the whole project began as a preventive measure against Iran’s nuclear program. Where is that program now? It doesn’t exist. … We have been saying since the early 2000s that we will have to react somehow to your moves to undermine international security. No one is listening to us.”

In other words, he is saying that the West is ignoring Russia’s words, and that therefore Russia will, if this continues, respond by eliminating the ABM sites before they become fully operational. To do otherwise than to eliminate any fully operational ABM system on or near Russia’s borders would be to leave the Russian people vulnerable to a blitz attack by NATO, and this will not be permitted.

He said: “At the moment the interceptor missiles installed have a range of 500 kilometers, soon this will go up to 1000 kilometers, and worse than that, they can be rearmed with 2400km-range offensive missiles even today, and it can be done by simply switching the software, so that even the Romanians themselves won’t know.”

In other words: Only the Americans, who have designed and control the ABM system, will be able to know if and when Russia is left totally vulnerable. Not even the Romanians will know; and Putin says, “Russia has ‘no choice’ but to target Romania” — and later Poland, if they follow through with their plans to do the same.

By implication, Putin is saying that, whereas he doesn’t need to strike Romania’s site immediately, he’ll need to do it soon enough to block the ABM system’s upgrade that will leave Russia vulnerable to attack and (because of the fully functional ABM) with no ability on Russia’s part to counter-strike.

He is saying: Remove the ABM system, or else we’ll have to do it by knocking it out ourselves.

Putin knows that according to the Article Five, “Mutual Defense,” provision of the NATO Treaty, any attack against a NATO member, such as Romania, is supposed to elicit an attack by all NATO members against the nation that is attacking. However, Putin is saying that, if NATO is going to be attacking Russia, then it will be without any fully operational ABM system, and (by implication) that Russia’s response to any such attack will be a full-scale nuclear attack against all NATO nations, and a nuclear war resulting which will destroy the planet by unleashing all the nuclear weaponry of both sides, NATO and Russia.

Putin is saying that either Romania — and subsequently Poland — will cancel and nullify their cooperation with U.S. President Obama’s ABM installation, or else there will be a surgical strike by Russia against such installation(s), even though that would likely produce a nuclear attack against Russia by NATO, and a counter-strike nuclear attack by Russia against NATO.

When Putin said “No one is listening to us” on the other side, the NATO side, Putin meant: I don’t want to have to speak by means of a surgical strike to eliminate a NATO ABM system, but that’s the way I’ll ‘speak’ if you are deaf to words and to reason and to common decency.

He will not allow the Russian people to become totally vulnerable to a nuclear attack by the United States and its military allies. He is determined that, if NATO attacks Russia, then it will be game-over for the entire world, not only for Russia.

He is saying to Obama and to all of NATO: Please hear and understand my words, and be reasonable, because the results otherwise will be far worse for everyone if you persist in continuing to ignore my words.

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