Category Archives: Empire

Word Government Alert: UN Spends Haiti Money On Expanding Its Personnel

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Next time there’s a natural disaster and you think the government should “do its share,” “help out” or be compassionate, remember this:

“The United Nations has quietly upped this year’s peacekeeping budget for earthquake-shattered Haiti to $732.4 million, with two-thirds of that amount going for the salary, perks and upkeep of its own personnel, not residents of the devastated island.

The world organization plans to spend the money

on an expanded force of some 12,675 soldiers and police, plus some 479 international staffers, 669 international contract personnel, and 1,300 local workers, just for the 12 months ending June 30, 2010.

Some $495.8 million goes for salaries, benefits, hazard pay, mandatory R&R allowances and upkeep for the peacekeepers and their international staff support. Only about $33.9 million, or 4.6 percent, of that salary total is going to what the U.N. calls “national staff” attached to the peacekeeping effort.”

Welfare Kings: The Case Of Charles Schwab

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From Brad Blog (“Food Incorporated”):

“When they were first introduced during the early days of the New Deal, farm subsidies were intended to stabilize prices in order to offset the extraordinary low prices brought on by over-production and by the Great Depression; to keep farmers on their farms and in their homes.

Today, it would be fair to say that farm subsidies, like Wall Street bailouts, flow to those who need them the least.

In Thieves in High Places, Jim Hightower provides the classic example — billionaire stockbroker Charles R. Schwab; the proud owner of Casa de Patos, “1,500 acres of picturesque wetlands in Northern California.” Schwab grows rice on the land, not for harvesting purposes but because the rice attracts ducks. Schwab is one of those rich folks who likes to invite friends and clients to go duck hunting. (Careful you don’t invite Dick Cheney, Mr. Schwab.)

So Schwab has no intent to harvest the rice, but that doesn’t prevent this man with an estimated $4.7 billion net worth from collecting $500,000/year in federal farm subsidies because he does not market the rice.

Hightower laments, “Sadly, it’s legal, and it’s a fine upstanding example of what George [W. Bush] and his base like to call ‘entrepreneurship.'”

The CIA, the Banks, and Drug Running

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Opium and the CIA, Peter Dale Scott:

“Protection for Drug Trafficking in America

Thus it is not surprising that the U.S. Government, following the lead of the CIA, has over the years become a protector of drug traffickers against criminal prosecution in this country. For example both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,” on matters of “terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence.” When Associate Attorney General Lowell Jensen refused to proceed with Nazar’s indictment, the San Diego U.S. Attorney, William Kennedy, publicly exposed his intervention. For this he was promptly fired. Continue reading →

How The Scofield Bible Came To America…

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An excerpt from “Zionism’s un-Christian Bible,” at Online Journal explains how one of the defining political doctrines of our time was fostered by the selective promotion of one heretical interpretation of the Bible:

“Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield’s commentary on Genesis 12:3. For the sake of clarity, Scofield’s notes have been italicized in the following passage:

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“‘I will bless them that bless thee.’ In fulfilment closely related to the next clause, ‘And curse him that curseth thee.’

Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew — well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

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Drawing on Scofield’s speculative interpretation, John Hagee claims, “The man or nation that lifts a voice or hand against Israel invites the wrath of God.”

However, as Stephen Sizer points out, in his definitive critique, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?

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“The promise, when referring to Abraham’s descendants speaks of God blessing them, not of entire nations ‘blessing’ the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel.”

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Apparently unaware of this more orthodox reading, The New Scofield Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, enhanced Scofield’s interpretation, by adding,

“For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.”

Reading such tendentious comments, a bible-believing Christian could easily assume, for example, that God will punish the 114 countries which endorsed the Goldstone Report.

Stephen Sizer writes,

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“Sustained by a dubious exegesis of selective biblical texts, Christian Zionism’s particular reading of history and contemporary events . . . sets Israel and the Jewish people apart from other peoples in the Middle East . . . it justifies the endemic racism intrinsic to Zionism, exacerbates tensions between Jews and Palestinians and undermines attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, all because ‘the Bible tells them so.’”

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The incredible Scofield

In his 2008 book, The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State, Jonathan R. Adelman describes the crucial support Israel receives from Christian fundamentalists as “totally fortuitous.” The incredible career of the man who wrote “the Bible of Fundamentalism,” however, casts considerable doubt on that assertion.

Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879, the Atchison Patriot was less than impressed. Describing the former Atchison resident as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally,” the article went on to recount a few of Scofield’s “many malicious acts.” These included a series of forgeries in St. Louis, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Being a “born again” preacher, however, did not preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. In his devastating biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M. Canfield comments,

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“The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.”

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That someone, Canfield suspects, was associated with one of the club’s committee members, the Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. As Canfield intimates, Scofield’s theology was

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“most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects – the Zionist Movement.”

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Others, however, have been more explicit about the nature of Scofield’s service to the Zionist agenda. In “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” Prof. David W. Lutz claims,

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“Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”

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Absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine “this peer among scalawags” ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why OUP chose to endorse such a sectarian work.

Atonement

If there had been no Scofield Bible, American presidents influenced by Christian Zionism, such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan and George W. Bush, would most likely have been less sympathetic to Israeli demands, and consequently more attentive to U.S. interests. Moreover, the American people might have been spared the well-publicized pro-Israeli rants of John Hagee, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, not to mention the lucrative End Times “prophecy” peddled by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.

But it is the people of the Middle East who have suffered most at the hands of an expansionist Israel, emboldened by the unswerving allegiance of America’s Christian Zionists, who were led to believe that Scofield’s words were God’s will.

Although much needless suffering has already been caused by the Scofield Bible, perhaps it’s not too late for Oxford University Press to publicly disavow its harmful book. Among its many victims are 3.5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by Christian Zionists, who believe that the land belongs exclusively to “God’s chosen people.” At the very least, OUP could demonstrate remorse for its role in promoting ethnic cleansing by compensating those refugees with the considerable profits accrued over the past century from sales of its Zionist bible.”

My Comment

Not many people know about the role of the Scofield Bible in fostering one marginal interpretation of the Scriptures, the dispensationalist views of John Derby, a 19th century minister of the Plymouth Brethren.

Dispensationalism went onto become so influential among American Protestants that it changed the political dynamics of the country. However, while the article demonstrates how financial interests actively promoted the Scofield Bible, it wouldn’t have become so influential if the culture into which it was introduced wasn’t already receptive to it at many levels.

This is the argument I make in “Language of Empire” (MR Press, 2005), in which I analyzed the influence of Christian Zionism on the practice of torture as well as on the rhetoric that justified the war on terror.

[Because my publisher had actually set a limit to the number of pages and characters I could use, I had to prune each sentence so the writing ended up a lot denser than it might have been].

You can find the core of the argument in “Christian Zionism: An Ideological Tower of Babel” (Counterpunch, January 15, 16, 2005), finished a year before the book actually came out.  While Christian Zionism is important to the justification of American empire and of Israel’s role in it, it isn’t the only source of justification. There are broader streams in American religious and intellectual history with which Christian Zionism coincides. Those streams are identified below in the Counterpunch piece, which forms a concluding chapter in the book:

“Both secular and religious exceptionalists also share a unique relationship to the law that suggests that law and legal institutions are themselves implicated in the policies of Abu Ghraib and clarifies why it may not be possible to look to them alone for salvation.

[Legalism – the tendency to turn every moral/political/social debate into a courtroom drama over technical legality]

Both groups share the heritage of covenant theology which reads holy scripture as the record of legal contracts between God and man, a heritage which both privileges the law while simultaneously also promoting a sense of not being subject to it. The written contract binds us, but the interpretation of that contract remains with the state whose favored status has been granted by the law.”

[Voluntarism – the belief that the essence of divinity is not rationality, but will, and that God’s acts are beyond or even contradictory to reason]

“Dispensationalists read the final book of the Bible, Revelations, as a literal account of a post-war progression to a world-consuming conflagration, Armageddon. In doing so, they discount the importance of reason, learning, or social consensus in their interpretations in favor of what they see as a literal reading of the Biblical text. Parallel to this is their reading of the unfolding of human history as also a literal record where that text transparently reveals itself.”

[Dispensationalism – the belief that Biblical prophesies can be seen unfolding in history today and that God’s promises in the Bible relate to the political state of Israel]

“Just as fundamentalism disdains mediation, an anti-intellectual culture might find an oral tradition based on a continuing interpretative dialogue between past and present actually less attractive than the fixed guidelines of a written contract, whether made between one nation and another or between nations and God.”

[Literalism, Anti-intellectualism – the acceptance of the literal meaning of texts, the devaluation of interpretation, and a dislike for intellectual theories and intellectuals]

“From Biblical righteousness, the Promethean sense of the state as virtue incarnate; from Christian dominionism, the impetus to expand; from apocalyptic ruminations, the Promethean obsession with terror. And through all of these runs an unexamined sense of supreme moral satisfaction, a Puritan certainty about the nature and precise physical location of evil in the other that is translated not simply in the messianic language of Americanism but even in the shibboleths of liberalism. Evil is outside, out there in the world, radically disordered, deserving of eradication.”

[Dominionism, Puritanism, Apocalyptic Millenarianism —  the belief that society should be ordered by the Christian religion working through the state; the belief in the essential depravity of human beings and the need for salvation by grace, that is unearned and not universal; a belief in the return of Christ as prophesied in Revelations, accompanied by a world-wide confrontation with the forces of evil, followed by a golden age of a 1000 years]

How these beliefs impact policy-making in the west can be seen most clearly and stunningly in the  Declaration of the first  Jerusalem Summit (October 12-14, 2003) which reads in part thus:

“ISRAEL AS THE KEY TO THE HARMONY OF CIVILIZATIONS

Billions of people believe that Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity.

Israel’s unique geographic and historic position at the crossroads of civilizations enables it to reconcile their conflicts. Israel’s unique spiritual experience enables it to find a golden mean between the fault lines dividing civilizations: between tradition and modernity, religion and science, authority and democracy.

We call upon all nations to choose Jerusalem, the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel, as a center for this evolving new unity. We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.”

Polish President Lech Kaczynski Killed In Plane Crash

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This link doesn’t work after updating my blog. Will replace it.

[Note: The video is from Russia Today, which some claim contains Russian disinformation].

Update: Russian investigators say that there was nothing wrong with the landing instruments on the plane and that it was pilot error that caused the crash. Also, it seems that the number of bodies found is 96.

Update 8:

At Asia Times, M. K. Bhadrakumar notes that as the so-called “color” revolutions in Central Asia (Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) have all gradually become undone, Kyrgyzstan has become destabilized, leaving the whole region from Af-Pak to Kyrgyzstan, on the very borders of China, volatile.

Point two. Like it or not, the US needs cooperation with Russia to help it out here before the excursion in Afghanistan is concluded, say, in 2011. It also needs help, as NATO expands into Central Asia, to contain both China and India, and (possibly) play them off against each other.

A strongly anti-Russian, reactionary Pole, like Kaczynski, might have been a very disturbing factor, a thorn also in the side of the much more tractable Polish PM, Donald Tusk.

Point three.

Tusk is on more amicable terms both with the Obama administration and with Russian PM Putin, with whom he met separately at Katyn last week. Tusk is also more Euro-friendly.

Point four. With Iran cementing natural gas deals not only with Pakistan, but with China and India (over US objections), and with a Euroskeptic Polish president (Kaczynski) making unexpected overtures to Russia, America’s power/leverage vis-a-vis Russia might suddenly seem less certain on both fronts, eastern and western, especially with the Russian natural gas pipeline in the Baltic, an initiative that tends to increase Russian influence in Europe.

Point five. The recent discovery of huge reserves of natural gas in Poland has foreign corporations scrambling for drilling rights there.  That makes Poland a much bigger player in the region, especially in its ability to help or hurt a European recovery. Take that into account along with the recent devaluation of the Zloty, which is regarded as helpful to Polish exporters and the economy, but bad for Europe..

Update 7:

On April 8 Obama signed a new arms reduction treaty with Dmitri Medvedev (President of Russia) and met with East European heads of state, including Donald Tusk (Polish PM)  to discuss the future of NATO and to allay fears Eastern Europe might have over the US-Russia deal.

In December 2009 Obama asked for stronger Polish support in Afghanistan

Update 6:

The more I think about it, the more this crash looks odd to me.

Digging for more information, I find the following:

Donald Tusk, the PM, was much less antagonistic to Russia and much more supportive of free market policies and integration of the country into the EU than Kaczynski.

From wiki:

“After being elected prime minister, relations between Tusk and President Lech Kaczynski were often acrimonious due to different political ideologies and the constitutional role of the
presidency. Using presidential veto powers, Kaczynski blocked legislation drafted by the Tusk government, including pension reform, agricultural and urban zoning plans, and restructuring state television.[16]

Tusk and Kaczynski repeatedly sparred over issues ranging from European integration, homosexuality, foreign policy, to constitutional issues, with Tusk taking more socially liberal opinions than the conservative Kaczynski.

In his premiership, Tusk has proposed various reforms to the Polish constitution. In 2009, Tusk proposed changes to the power of the presidency, by abolishing the presidential veto”

It’s wholly plausible that as the second and worse leg of the economic crisis unfolds, and as sovereign default threatens several countries in Europe, a less prickly person as president of Poland might have seemed an attractive option to NATO.

Of course, at this point, all this is no more than speculation…

Update 5:

Former Czech president, Vaclav Havel comments on mounting speculation over the bizarre crash:

‘That speculation [that it was sabotage and not an accident] will influence the elections,’ he said, predicting some Poles would see an analogy to the 1943 plane-crash death of Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s premier-in-exile. Some believe that Sikorski’s plane was deliberately brought down.

Update 4:

Eyewitness accounts says no explosion:

“A witness named himself Roman said he was washing his car in the village near the airport, when he saw a plane crashed down in the woods. “It was foggy here at that time, I couldn’t see it very clearly. I didn’t hear any explosion, but saw a lot of smoke. The plane flew forward a distance after one of the wings had been knocked off by the trees. Then the other wing also broke down, and the plane crashed in the woods 300 to 400 meters away from the airport, ” Roman recalled. A Xinhua reporter at the site saw pieces of the plane wreckage scattering in the sealed-off woods, where four rescuers were carrying out a body from the wreckage.”

 

One police officer pointed at a topless white birch tree about 300 meter away and told Xinhua that it was the first tree hit by the plane. Behind it, a number of treetops were cut off straight in the accident.”

Another eyewitness account says there was an explosion (Lila: this contradicts the other account, but that could be because the witness was closer to the crash).

The explosion was apparently so powerful that pieces were scattered near the outskirts of the town at a distance of a mile.

The plane is said to have crashed about half a mile on the runway. Some sections of the plane burned for more than an hour.

Update 3:

Some background on energy rivalry between Russia and Poland, which as focused on natural gas reserves/pipe line deals that had recently been cemented.

NY Times (April 11):

“Without consulting the Poles, Mr. Schroder (former German chancellor) had supported a major Russian-German gas pipeline, called Nord Stream, now being built under the Baltic Sea. For the first time, Russia could send gas directly to Western Europe, reducing its dependence on Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States as transit countries for sending Russian gas to its lucrative European markets.When the deal was struck between Mr. Schroder and then-President Vladmir Putin in September 2005, some Polish politicians said it was the beginning of a new Russian-German alliance.” (Lila: This would bring back to many Poles the history of German-Russian collusion at Gdansk to divide Poland)

April 5, UK Times:

“American technology to produce shale gas is unleashing a scramble for drilling rights in Poland, where experts believe vast reserves of unconventional gas exist that could help to weaken Russia’s grip on Europe’s energy supplies.

(Lila: Russia supplied 33% of European oil in 2009 and cut supplies to Ukraine during a fight over prices)

ConocoPhillips is poised to launch Poland’s first shale gas drilling programme next month near Gdansk on the Baltic coast. Two other American oil groups — Exxon-Mobil and Marathon — and Talisman Energy, of Canada, are set to follow. The technology has transformed America’s energy industry and driven gas prices to their lowest level in years.”

Update 2:

WSJ April 9, 2010:

“In one of those rare moments of unity, the National Bank of Poland and the Polish government agreed on the need to weaken the Polish zloty, which over recent weeks has rebounded close to its pre-crisis strength. The currency’s strength is now seen a possible threat to economic recovery. After several verbal interventions over the past few days, the central bank intervened with real money Friday, for the first time in more than a decade.”

Update 1 (the following is paraphrased from a Polish newspaper that I translated with Google translator):

Smolensk’s Severny airport was, until October 15, the 103rd airport Military Transport Aviation Regiment. And, half an hour before the presidential plane landed, a military plane,  Ilyushin Il-76, from Moscow, which was carrying a branch of the Federal Protection Service officers (the equivalent of BOR-u), tried to land. The pilot, originally from Smolensk was thoroughly familiar with local conditions and tried to land twice, before returning to Moscow. A Pole living in a hotel near the site says that the left wing hit a tree and the plane fell to the ground and disintegrated, immediately catching fire. Emergency services on the spot appeared after several minutes.

[Lila: Now this part sounds a bit odd to me, although it could just be confusion at the scene of an accident].

The Russians stated that it made no sense to send ambulances to the site, since everyone was dead. The crash occurred in the forest, and the Russian services couldn’t enter the disaster area because of the mud at the site.

[Lila: How could they be so sure everyone was dead, especially, when many more bodies were recovered than were on the flight list (132 bodies versus 89 on the list)?]

ORIGINAL BLOG POST

Accident, Sabotage, or False Flag?

MSNBC reports that Polish President (from 2005-2010) Lech Kaczynski (1949-2010) and top Polish military and civilian leaders, historians, and activists were killed when the presidential plane crashed on landing in thick fog in Smolensk in western Russia on Saturday, killing 130, according to this report.

(Other reports have placed the death toll at 96, 97 88 (the number on the passenger list according to the Poles), 132, and 135).

Communication with the plane was lost at 10:50 local time (0656 GMT).

Pravda.ru says the plane came down at 11 AM local time about 1.5 km from the airport and 225 km from Moscow.

The Governor of Smolensk told official media there were no survivors of the crash and that the plane had clipped the top of the trees, crashed, and then broken into pieces.

Preliminary data collected show that the plane hit the treetops while approaching the airport in bad visibility,  says an official with the Russian general prosecutor’s office, according to ITAR-Tass news agency, (reported by CBS).

A spokesman for the Smolensk regional government said publicly that air traffic controllers there had advised the pilot not to land in the thick fog at the military airport and to divert to Moscow or to Minsk (the capital of Belarus) instead.

BBC reported that Russian PM Putin visited the scene of the crash and said he would personally supervise the investigation. He also said the investigation would be a joint Polish-Russian investigation. The Russian emergency ministers said both of the plane’s information recorders (black boxes) had been found and would be examined.

The Polish group was on its way to the 70th anniversary of the massacre at Katyn forest near Smolensk, when thousands of Polish officers (including some who were also Jewish) were killed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in 1940.

My Comment 2:

The significance of Katyn was that it was blamed on the Nazis by the Soviets, and, that despite this betrayal of its own ally, Poland, the US continued to treat the Soviets preferentially and cover-up for it.

Furthermore, at the end of WW II, the western powers again betrayed Poland – over whom the war was supposed to have been fought –  by allowing it remain under the Soviet sphere of influence.

So, Katyn is not simply about Poland and Russia, as nation states, it’s also, equally, about Poland’s betrayal by the US and the Allies.

And it’s about the Polish Catholic suspicion of the atheistic Bolsheviks who primarily carried out the massacres ….

Religion, ethnicity, and nationalism all converge in this profound national trauma.

It’s important to remember that President Roosevelt officially rejected the conclusion of his own research team, and stated he was convinced that the Nazis were culpable. That is, he sided with Stalin against the Poles.  And he actually ordered that the report that he himself had commissioned be suppressed. It was only more recently that the true history of the massacre of the flower of Poland by the Soviet NKVD has become common knowledge. This secret history is vital to understanding the  symbolism involved in this crash.

This is not just about Poland and Russia. It is about the anti-Communist and anti-Nazi feelings of Catholics in Poland and their betrayal by the West.

Smolensk is only 11/2 hours away from Warsaw and the symbolism of the crash has struck many people, including former President Kwasniewski, who called Katyn “cursed.”

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it the most tragic event of Poland’s post-World War II history,  according to BBC.

My Comment 1:

1. It’s very strange that so many of the top brass would be on a single flight, especially on a plane as known for being unreliable and dangerous as the Soviet built Tupolev-154, which has suffered 16 crashes since 1994 (AP).

According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154 in the last 40 years, 6 in the last 5 years alone, and Aeroflot has withdrawn its Tu-154 fleet from service, although the TU-154 used to be the workhorse of the Soviets and the eastern bloc in the 1970s and 1980s. The Polish government had been thinking of replacing the planes for flights carrying government officials, but didn’t have the money for it.

Wouldn’t high level personnel have normally been booked on separate flights to avoid difficulties in the military/government in case of an accident? This particular plane was also 26 years old, had been overhauled recently at a Russian aviation facility, and had only few hours on it.

However, the Russian facility Aviakor has said that the plane was in good condition for the flight.

Another aviation expert also told Al-Jazeera that the TU-154 can operate in extreme weather conditions and can land on an unpaved airstrip. He believes the crash was a “fluke”.

2. How is it that the information that the president’s wife had an uncle who was killed at Katyn was so widely and uniformly known that it appeared in a majority of global reports about the crash?

(Katyn is a national symbol of WW II and the anti-Communist struggle and stirs deep nationalistic feelings in Poland).

Another oddity in the media reports was the varying numbers given for the dead, when according to early reports, the Russians were able to collect all the bodies, and had verified that all on board had died. In that case, why such different numbers?

Also, how is it that the original flight list was for only 89 people (one didn’t show up)? How did some 30 plus extra passengers apparently fly…or is this a reference to something else?

3. What a bizarre coincidence that several people whose death would be calculated to arouse nationalist remembrance of the past (Katyn, communist crimes, Solidarity), should all die on a trip to Katyn, along with significant members of the political and military establishment? The people who died were all people significant to Poland’s anti-communist history. Kaczynski and his twin brother, Soviet era child actors, both played important roles in Polish politics.

“The twins (Kaczynski and his brother) pushed unashamedly for conservative values and a righting of historical wrongs with 20th century foes Russia and Germany in ways that ruffled feathers and often seemed out of step with the times,” says the WSJ.

The BBC noted that Kaczynski was a right-wing Catholic, who opposed rapid free-market reforms and favored retaining social welfare programs:

“He had advocated a right-wing Catholic agenda, opposed rapid free-market reforms and favoured retaining social welfare programmes.”

The LA Times noted his campaign against liberal sexual mores:

“At home, Kaczynzki, who was mayor of Warsaw before becoming president, sought to expose former communists and cleanse what he and his brother regarded as pervasive liberalism. He took a hard line against homosexuality and often assailed the media over salacious magazines and TV shows. His critics regarded him as a politically dangerous mix of Polish nationalism and religious conservatism.”

CBS adds this:

“The president was a conservative and a lifelong skeptic of Russia with many detractors at home and abroad.”

Consider also this piece of symbolism, among many other coincidences:

“Rossiya-24 showed footage from the crash site, with pieces of the plane scattered widely amid leafless trees and small fires burning in woods shrouded with fog. A tail fin with the red and white national colors of Poland stuck up from the debris.”(BBC)

4. In case this proves not to be an accident, Poles might be tempted  look to the FSB (and Putin) as the possible culprit, since the plane was recently overhauled in Russia. Yet, Russia is unlikely to have downed a Polish plane with top military and civilian commanders on its own territory. That would be a political and military blunder almost unthinkable.

5. Exploring another angle, it’s been known for a while now that the CIA has a presence in Eastern Europe, as also suggested in a piece I wrote in 2005 on CIA black sites there.

Poland is a staunch ally of the US in other areas as well, thus provoking some dislike in Russia:

“The European Union member nation of 38 million people sent troops to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and recently boosted its contingent in Afghanistan to some 2,600 soldiers.

U.S. Patriot missiles are expected to be deployed in Poland this year. That was a Polish condition for a 2008 deal — backed by both Kaczynski and Tusk — to host long-range missile defense interceptors. The deal, which was struck by the Bush administration, angered Russia and was later reconfigured under President Barack Obama’s administration. Under the Obama plan, Poland would host a different type of missile defense interceptors as part of a more mobile system and at a later date, probably not until 2018.” (CNN)

Russians also distrusted his advocacy of NATO membership for the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia and his support of Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili during the  2008 Russo-Georgian war (CS Monitor).

6. However, in recent times, relations with Russia had thawed:

“Polish-Russian relations had been improving of late after being poisoned for decades over the Katyn massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers.”(Stanford Advocate, April 10, 2010).

Last year in September, Russian PM Putin met Kaczynski in Gdansk (Danzig) on the anniversary of the Hitler’s invasion of Poland and had made partial amends for the USSR’s role in breaking up Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939).

and this:

“Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn’t invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Tusk.” (CBS) http://wcco.com/national/polish.Kaczynski.dead.2.1623978.html)

6. Exploring this from another angle, could this tragedy have anything to do with the another strange incident in Eastern Europe a few weeks ago?

Two Gulf Stream V type jets equipped with sophisticated intelligence equipment violated Hungarian laws by flying low into Hungary without landing and then flew 1300 miles over Turkey, Hungary and Romania and disappeared, all around the same time a Syrian-Hungarian man implicated in money-laundering was mysteriously killed in Budapest, in what some have suggested was a Mossad hit.  That incidence should be read in light of the recent expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from the UK, and the threat of diplomatic sanctions against Israel in Australia, following the revelation that the Mossad  had forged multiple passports from different countries in carrying out the killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai, earlier this year.

But Kaczynski was on  very good terms with the Jewish community in Poland, once almost wiped out by the Holocaust. In 2008, he became the first head of state to attend service at a synagogue in Poland, and before that, as mayor of Warsaw, he donated land for a projected museum on Jewish history. Israel and the Jewish community expressed deep shock at the deaths and  called Kaczynski a great leader.

That would seem to make him an unlikely target for an Israeli false-flag operation.

Update: AP has a list of the top officials and political significant people who died in the crash. Here are some of them:

Lech Kaczynski (President), Maria Kaczynska (his wife), Andrzej Kremer (deputy foreign minister and chief of staff), General Franciszek Gagor (army chief of staff since 2006, Polish rep at NATO, 2004-06), General Andrzej Blasik (head of airforce, trained in Montgomery, Alabama in 2005), (Vice-Admiral Andrzej Karweta, Navy Chief since 2009, served as Supreme Allied Command Atlantic, Norfolk, Virginia, 2002-05), Gen. Tadeusz Buk (land forces commander, 2009, commander of Polish troop in Iraq since 2007), Slawomir Skrzypek (president of the National Bank since 2007, close friend of the president), Alexander Szczyglo, head of National Security Office, former defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski (opposition candidate for president, deputy parliamentary speaker, defense minister during Iraq war), Ryszard Kaczorowski (last president in exile, who passed on presidency to first democratic president Lech Walesa), Janusz Kurtyka (head of the state-run National Remembrance Institute, commemorating communist crimes), Anna Walentynowicz (Solidarity activist whose firing sparked the movement which led to Polish freedom), Piotr Nurowski (head of Poland’s Olympic Committee), Krystyna Bochenek (deputy parliamentary speaker)

Headley Spy Case Raises Questions In India About CIA Role

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Asia Times columnist M. K. Bhadrakumar writes that US citizen David Headley, a key player (Indian sources say, the mastermind), in the November 2008 Mumbai  terrorist attack that killed 166  people* has reached a plea bargain with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that allows the US Government to hold back from producing evidence against him in a court of law that would have revealed details of his ties to US intelligence. [*163, according to the NY Times, March 26, 2010; 165, according to the Wash Po, March 27, 2010]

Headley will be protected from cross-examination by the prosecutor, and the 166 victims will not be represented by a lawyer at the Chicago trial that’s now commencing.

Nor can he be extradited to India or questioned by Indian agencies about his links to US and Pakistani intelligence.

(Note: He will be accessible to India through video conferencing, deposition, and Letters Rogatory)

Headley, the son of a former Pakistani diplomat and an American socialite from Philadelphia (according to the NY Times piece), was a drug-pusher in the 1990s who then went on to work for the Drug Enforcement Agency.

He’s said to have prepared for the attack with five visits to India between 2006 and 2008, each time returning via Pakistan and meeting with several handlers, some of whom included members of the terrorist group Lakshar-e-Toiba (LeT), which has close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence)

Headley has reportedly named five-six serving officers of the Pakistan army as among the leaders of the Karachi Project, which organizes attacks on India through fugitive Indian jihadis being sheltered in Karachi by the ISI and the LeT.

The Asia Times article goes on to ask some questions about the CIA’s possible involvement that are likely to strain US-Indian relations:

“How much did the CIA know?
The plea bargain details that while working as an American agent Headley attended at least five “training courses” conducted by the LeT in Pakistan, including sessions in the use of weapons and grenades, close-combat tactics and counter-surveillance techniques, from February 2002 until December 2003.

Training courses in April and in December 2003 were each of three months’ duration and in such close proximity to the 9/11 attacks that it stretches credulity to believe the CIA didn’t care to know what their agent was doing in the LeT training camps.

Today, the heart of the matter is how much did the CIA know in advance about the Mumbai terrorist strike and whether the Obama administration shared all “actionable intelligence” with Delhi?

A senior Indian editor wrote on Sunday, “Headley … was convicted on drug charges and sent to jail in the US. We know also that he was subsequently released from jail and handed over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which said that it wanted to send him to Pakistan as an undercover agent. All this is a matter of public record. What happened between the time the US sent Headley into Pakistan and his arrest at Chicago airport a few months ago? How did an American agent turn into a terrorist? The US will not say.”

Yet, cooperation in the fight against terrorism lies within the first circle of US-India strategic cooperation. The Mumbai attacks led to unprecedented counter-terrorism cooperation between India and the US – “breaking down walls and bureaucratic obstacles between the two countries’ intelligence and investigating agencies”, as a prominent American security expert, Lisa Curtis, underscored in US congressional testimony on March 11 regarding the Mumbai attacks and Headley.

To quote Curtis, “Most troubling about the Headley case is what it has revealed about the proximity of the Pakistani military to the LeT.”

Curtis put her finger spot on the US government’s deliberate policy to view the LeT through the prism of India-Pakistan adversarial ties. This is despite all evidence of the LeT’s significant role since 2006 as a facilitator of the Taliban’s operations in Afghanistan by providing a constant stream of fighters – recruiting, training and infiltrating insurgents across the border from the Pakistani tribal areas.

The US policy is impeccably logical. It prioritizes the securing of Islamabad’s cooperation on what directly affects American interests rather than squandering away Pakistani goodwill by Washington covering for the Indians.

This political chicanery lies at the core of the unfolding Headley drama. What emerges, even if one were to give the benefit of the doubt to the CIA, is that Headley was its agent but he possibly got involved with Pakistan-based terrorist organizations and became a double agent

No doubt, the US administration is behaving very strangely. It has something extremely explosive to hide from the Indians and what better way to do that than by placing Headley in safe custody and not risk exposing him to Indian intelligence?”

Blair’s “Oily” Deals Greased His Iraq War-Mongering

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Turns out Tony Blair had his hand in the oil jar, while he was talking up the Iraq war….and after. The Daily Mail (UK) reports:

Last night Tory MP Douglas Carswell said of Mr Blair’s links to UI Energy Corporation: ‘This doesn’t just look bad, it stinks.

‘It seems that the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been in the pay of a very big foreign oil corporation and we have been kept in the dark about it.

‘Even now we do not know what he was paid or what the company got out of it. We need that information now.

“This is revolving door politics at its worst. It’s not as if Mr Blair has even stepped back from politics, because he is still politically active in the Middle East.

‘I’m afraid I have no confidence at all in the committee that vets these appointments. It’s no good telling us these deals may be commercially sensitive – we are talking about the appointment of our former Prime Minister and the public interest, rather than any commercial interests, must come first.’

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said: ‘These revelations show that our former Prime Minister is for sale – he is driven by making as much money as possible.

‘I think many people will find it deeply insensitive that he is apparently cashing in on his contacts from the Iraq war to make money for himself.’

“The committee said yesterday that Mr Blair had taken a paid job advising a consortium of investors led by UI Energy in August 2008. The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war.

“Mr Blair’s fee has not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

“The secrecy is particularly odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.

“Mr Blair successfully persuaded the committee that the appointment was ‘market sensitive’ and could not be made public.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259030/Tony-Blairs-secret-dealings-South-Korean-oil-firm-UI-Energy-Corp.html#ixzz0iduagoIm

David Tice On King World News: Trouble Ahead….

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David Tice on Eric King’s King World News, December 23, 2009

  • This is not another inventory recession; this is unprecedented
  • There’s trouble all over the globe – Europe, China, Japan..
  • Hunker down, cut back expenditures, get out of stocks, own gold
  • Look for deflation followed by competitive currency devaluation, then inflation.

Bill Anderson On The New KKK: Kleptocrats, Kartels, and Kon Men

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“As I see it, the bankers are not clueless at all. They understand the game, they understand that the government is going to clean up the mess that they and their friends in Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations have created, and they understand that their antics are going to give them what they always have wanted: a nice, cozy, financial cartel which will provide sweet political contributions for the political classes, bonuses and high pay for themselves, and very little for everyone else. Continue reading →

US Military to Coordinate Haiti Earthquake Relief

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Update: Thanks to reader Jeff for this video of an outfit helping with Haiti’s water needs. It might be a better place for donations than any government relief effort.

Original Post:

I haven’t commented on the Haiti earthquake, mainly because I haven’t been on top of the details. Besides, there’s so much coverage in the MSM about it. My beat here remains the untold story.

But one angle does trouble me. The intervention of the military. I can’t bring myself to say they shouldn’t be involved, which would be the principled thing to say, but it bothers me a lot:

“Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to demonstrate just how much more the U.S. military is able to do than simply kill the enemy. Only the U.S. can initially control flights into and out of the Port-au-Prince airport from aboard a nearby Coast Guard cutter, while waiting for an Air Force special-ops team to set up shop at the airport and step up operations to 24/7. Only U.S. warships have the capability to generate up to 400,000 gallons of fresh water a day from seawater. Only the U.S. military can send a spy drone from California to fly lazy orbits over Port-au-Prince snapping close to 1,000 pictures a day, which when compared with similar ones shot last summer, create a map of the hardest hit areas that can be instantly relayed to those working on the ground.

Only the U.S. military has enough aluminum matting to boost the runway capacity of Port-au-Prince airport. Only the U.S. military has the surveillance capability to quickly assess additional Haitian airfields and seaports for use in rescue relief operations. Only the U.S. military has the wide variety of vessels and aircraft to utilize those fields and ports, including air-cushioned vehicles capable of ferrying 60 tons of supplies from ship to shore at 40 knots. (See TIME’s exclusive photos of the aftermath of the earthquake.)

But the limits of U.S. capability can also be seen: The Pentagon diverted an unmanned Global Hawk drone bound for Afghanistan to Haiti instead, to photograph the damage there. “We were about to send that Global Hawk over to the war” until the earthquake, explained Air Force Col. Bradley Butz. “It will stay here until the President says it’s time to send it forward.”

While the drone had no comment about its sudden change of mission, some of those bound for Haiti welcomed the new assignment after more than eight years of war. “Marines are definitely warriors first,” Captain Clark Carpenter said Friday as his unit prepared to ship out to Haiti from North Carolina. “But we are equally as compassionate when we need to be, and this is a role that we like to show – a compassionate warrior that can reach out that helping hand to those who need it.”

Read more at Time for the corporate media’s view of the intervention.

And read Michel Chossudovsky, for the deep structure of the intervention, recent US interventions in Haiti, and the extent and implications of a US military presence there (he argues that it’s to monitor and intervene in Cuba and Venezuela).

I recall the tsunami relief effort in 2004 and the intrusion of military vessels and spy satellites into Indonesia and other regions in Asia. Humanitarian interventions are a prime locus for state meddling, because most people will feel reluctant to second-guess what’s happening. They don’t want come off as hard-hearted carping critics, with nothing positive to offer.

A life saved in Haiti is good PR for a life or two killed elsewhere. If such calculations are mathematical (and with the state they always have to be), then we are indeed better off with the US military, many would say.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan, I see, is donating a million to the relief effort.

And Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America are giving a million apiece too. That will be millions taken from the tax-payer and rival banks long defunct. But from wherever it comes,  lives will be saved, right?

Thus do they wash their hands clean of guilt.

Who knows.

Maybe Lloyd Blankfein IS doing god’s work.

Or, at least, he’s Dean of the Jeffrey Levitt School of Philanthropy.

[For those with short memories, Levitt stole some $15 million in the 1980s, in the biggest white-collar crime in Maryland history, and almost single-handedly brought down the savings and loan business in the state.  One reason he was able to get away with his thieving for so long was that he was careful to make judicious and well-publicized charitable donations].