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Global Elite Agitating for War Against Russia
Insane bill in Senate will ultimately result in nuclear destruction
Victoria Nuland — who acted as the front person for the State Department’s coup in Kiev — bluntly expressed the opinion of the United States toward the European Union back in February.
Nuland employed a choice expletive when she dismissed the glacial movement of EU apparatchiks and their apparent political paralysis in response to the State Department’s covert effort to install a cooperative regime in Ukraine.
The MH17 downing was engineered to move the EU and public consensus in the direction of open confrontation with Russia. The EU does not want to appear indifferent and lackadaisical to the exploitatively propagandized tragedy, so it will lend its support for a new round of sanctions and, most importantly, the neocon introduced Senate bill 2277, the so-called “Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014” more appropriately dubbed the World War III bill.
The legislation was introduced by Sen. Bob Corker, who is slated to become the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if Republicans take control of that house in November.
If passed the Corker bill will declare Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine “major non-NATO allies” and move NATO troops and equipment into the former Soviet republics of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It will put an ABM system on the fast track in Eastern Europe and step up military and intelligence assistance to Ukrainian forces fighting against separatists in Donbass and elsewhere in Eastern Ukraine.
Other suggestions arising from Congress include adding Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Finland, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Sweden to NATO.
The Corker bill will encourage the color revolution crowd to subvert the Russian Federation. “S. 2277 would direct the secretary of state to intensify efforts to strengthen democratic institutions inside the Russian Federation, e.g., subvert Vladimir Putin’s government, looking toward regime change,” writes Patrick Buchanan.
“The U.S. directive to the State Department to work with NGOs in Russia, blatant intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, would be answered with a general expulsion of these agencies from Moscow,” Buchanan adds.
In 2012 Russia booted the premier color revolution organization – the U.S. Agency for International Development – out of the country. The State Department’s USAID, writes Eva Golinger, “is the principal entity that promotes the economic and strategic interests of the US across the globe as part of counterinsurgency operations… Wherever a coup d’etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there.”
Corker and the neocon Republicans – including Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, and others who co-sponsored S. 2277 – are looking to push a reluctant EU into a war posture with its trading partner.
“Most Europeans have little stomach for confronting Russia,” writes Doug Bandow for Forbes. “Economic ties with Moscow are profitable, there is no treaty obligation to Ukraine, and no alliance member desires war. So Washington has taken the lead against Moscow even though America has little at stake in Russia’s misbehavior.”
“Efforts to expand NATO are strikingly misguided. Traditional military alliances were created to advance a nation’s security. They were not intended to act as clubs for international business, associations for shared values, or tools for political integration. Military alliances were supposed to prevent and win wars. During the Cold War the U.S. established the alliance to protect the war-ravaged European states from America’s hegemonic adversary, the Soviet Union, and its satellite-allies.”
NATO has morphed from a post-war relic ostensibly designed to protect Europe into a belligerent alliance aligned against the Russian Federation. It works not only to destroy its economic relationship with Western Europe, but foment regime change within its borders.
“Western elites desire to loot Russia, a juicy prize, and there stands Putin in the way. The solution is to get rid of him like they got rid of President Yanukovich in Ukraine,” writes Paul Craig Roberts.
The last time a spat in Eastern Europe turned excessively violent, 65,000,000 people died and set the stage for the death of 85,000,000 a few years later. In total, during the 20th century, an excess of 250,000,000 people were killed by government.
A repeat of a similar situation will not result in a conventional war, but a nuclear one. “We have 450 active ICBMs, but because of geographical constraints, they can really only be used to attack Russia,” writes Eugene K. Chow.
The United States has a total inventory of 4,650 nuclear weapons, including nearly 2,000 actively deployed warheads, and Russia has about the same, Chow explains.
Nuclear weapons, like all weapons, were invented to be used and gain superiority and dominance over an enemy. “The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone,” all of these weapons have been used, writes Tom Engelhardt, and some of them still are.
Recently a senior adviser to Vladimir Putin said the U.S. plans a nuclear first strike on Russia. Paul Craig Roberts insists the placement of ABM systems in Eastern Europe are intended to intercept Russian missiles after a first strike.
“The Western elites and governments are not merely totally corrupt, they are insane. As I have previously written, don’t expect to live much longer,” Roberts warns.
http://www.infowars.com/global-elite-agitating-for-war-against-russia/
Wednesday 30 July 2014
Shock and terror: Islamic State boasts mass executions in Iraq (GRAPHIC) — RT News
Shock and terror: Islamic State boasts mass executions in Iraq (GRAPHIC) — RT News
Shock and terror: Islamic State boasts mass executions in Iraq (GRAPHIC)
As part of their psychological war to create a medieval-style caliphate, the Islamic State has released a new shocking video showing scenes of mass executions, warning Iraqi soldiers and others who dare to resist that they will be rounded up and killed.
The Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL, stormed through areas of northern Iraq last month, building on territory they had already seized in western Iraq and Syria.
The 36-minute video clip was released for the Eid holiday marking the end of Ramadan, sheds a disturbing light on the mentality of the Islamic State extremists and the methods they use as the organization presses on with its campaign of hatred and murder.
The video begins with IS fighters sweeping through a town in quick hit raids. The insurgents then stand over dozens of terrified Iraqis many of whom are only teenagers. One militant mocks a soldier for wearing civilian clothes over his uniform and then shoots him dead.
Other soldiers are then led to a pit in the desert and murdered one by one. A jihadist, not satisfied that they are dead, then does the round again. Most of the men appear to be deserters from the Iraqi army.
Other sequences from the IS propaganda video include a commander firing up militants with promises that paradise awaits them, when they take the city of Samarra, which is only 100 km north of the capital Baghdad.
Some of the prisoners were led to the edge of a river where each one was shot in the head with a pistol and then shoved in.
The footage also shows the insurgents moving into a town in pick-up trucks and US Humvees, seized from the Iraqi army last month, although it is not clear if this actually is Samarra, which is still reportedly in Iraqi government hands.
Islamic State militants gain ground by driving past other vehicles and opening fire randomly on passengers who then lose control of their vehicles or lie dead on the seats in pools of their own blood.
The video also shows IS bulldozing mosques and blowing up Shiite shrines.
MORE: ISIS jihadists demolish mosques, shrines in northern Iraq (PHOTOS)
Islamic State insurgents appear to avoid heavy clashes and therefore casualties by conducting quick, ruthless and indiscriminate operations and by using psychological warfare.
READ MORE: Jihadists attract investors, fighters with annual reports & glossy PR
On Tuesday the Islamic State secured another strategic victory by blowing up a bridge between Tikrit and Samarra, as well as severing a tunnel which was also used by the Iraqi military.
Iraqi government troops have tried and failed to recapture Tikrit from the militants. As the Iraqi army proves to be increasingly inept and ineffective, Shiite militias now rival government forces in their will and ability to confront Sunni insurgents.
Iraqi Christians have also fled the IS controlled city of Mosul, the second biggest in Iraq, following threats of execution if they did not convert to Islam or pay a religious tax.
The only forces making headway or at least holding their ground in the battle against the IS insurgents are the Kurds to the north and the forces of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Islamic State militants in Syria briefly captured the Al-Shaar gas field near Homs and killed at least 200 Syrian army soldiers before it was recaptured by President Assad’s forces Monday.
http://rt.com/news/176528-islamic-state-iraq-video/
Shock and terror: Islamic State boasts mass executions in Iraq (GRAPHIC)
As part of their psychological war to create a medieval-style caliphate, the Islamic State has released a new shocking video showing scenes of mass executions, warning Iraqi soldiers and others who dare to resist that they will be rounded up and killed.
The Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL, stormed through areas of northern Iraq last month, building on territory they had already seized in western Iraq and Syria.
The 36-minute video clip was released for the Eid holiday marking the end of Ramadan, sheds a disturbing light on the mentality of the Islamic State extremists and the methods they use as the organization presses on with its campaign of hatred and murder.
The video begins with IS fighters sweeping through a town in quick hit raids. The insurgents then stand over dozens of terrified Iraqis many of whom are only teenagers. One militant mocks a soldier for wearing civilian clothes over his uniform and then shoots him dead.
Other soldiers are then led to a pit in the desert and murdered one by one. A jihadist, not satisfied that they are dead, then does the round again. Most of the men appear to be deserters from the Iraqi army.
Other sequences from the IS propaganda video include a commander firing up militants with promises that paradise awaits them, when they take the city of Samarra, which is only 100 km north of the capital Baghdad.
Some of the prisoners were led to the edge of a river where each one was shot in the head with a pistol and then shoved in.
The footage also shows the insurgents moving into a town in pick-up trucks and US Humvees, seized from the Iraqi army last month, although it is not clear if this actually is Samarra, which is still reportedly in Iraqi government hands.
Islamic State militants gain ground by driving past other vehicles and opening fire randomly on passengers who then lose control of their vehicles or lie dead on the seats in pools of their own blood.
The video also shows IS bulldozing mosques and blowing up Shiite shrines.
MORE: ISIS jihadists demolish mosques, shrines in northern Iraq (PHOTOS)
Islamic State insurgents appear to avoid heavy clashes and therefore casualties by conducting quick, ruthless and indiscriminate operations and by using psychological warfare.
READ MORE: Jihadists attract investors, fighters with annual reports & glossy PR
On Tuesday the Islamic State secured another strategic victory by blowing up a bridge between Tikrit and Samarra, as well as severing a tunnel which was also used by the Iraqi military.
Iraqi government troops have tried and failed to recapture Tikrit from the militants. As the Iraqi army proves to be increasingly inept and ineffective, Shiite militias now rival government forces in their will and ability to confront Sunni insurgents.
Iraqi Christians have also fled the IS controlled city of Mosul, the second biggest in Iraq, following threats of execution if they did not convert to Islam or pay a religious tax.
The only forces making headway or at least holding their ground in the battle against the IS insurgents are the Kurds to the north and the forces of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Islamic State militants in Syria briefly captured the Al-Shaar gas field near Homs and killed at least 200 Syrian army soldiers before it was recaptured by President Assad’s forces Monday.
http://rt.com/news/176528-islamic-state-iraq-video/
Tuesday 29 July 2014
Extension of the Gas War to the Levant
Extension of the Gas War to the Levant
by Thierry Meyssan
After three years of war against Syria, "Westerners" have deliberately expanded their offensive to Iraq and Palestine. Behind the apparent political contradictions between religious and secular parties, strong economic interests explain this strategy. In the Levant, numerous groups have several times changed camps, but gas deposits are immutable.
Every war being undertaken by a coalition naturally has multiple objectives in order to meet the specific interests of each member of the coalition.
From this point of view, the fights now raging in Palestine, Syria and Iraq have in common that they are led by a bloc formed by the United States against the peoples who resist them, to continue the remodeling of the “Greater Middle East” and change the global energy market.
About this last point, two things can change: the layout of the pipelines and the exploitation of new deposits. [1]
The War to Control Pipelines in Iraq
Since the beginning of the war against Syria, NATO has been trying to cut the [East-West] Tehran-Damascus (NIORDC, INPC) nexus to the advantage of an alternative [South-North] corridor allowing the transfer of both Qatari gas (Exxon-Mobil ) and that of Saudi Arabia (Aramco) via the Syrian coast [2].
A decisive step was taken with the Islamic Emirate offensive in Iraq that has split the country longitudinally and separated Iran on the one hand and on the other hand, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. [3]
This visible goal determines who will sell their gas to Europe, and therefore the volume of supply and the selling price. That explains that the three major gas exporters (Russia, Qatar, and Iran) are involved in this war.
The War of Conquest Over Syrian Gas
NATO has added a second goal: the control of gas reserves in the Levant and their exploitation. Though everyone knows that for decades the Southern Mediterranean contains large gas fields in the territorial waters of Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Cyprus, only "Westerners" have known, since 2003, how these fields were laid out and how they extended under the continent.
As revealed by Professor Imad Fawzi Shueibi [4], at the time, a Norwegian company, Ansis, lawfully conducted in Syria a survey of the country, in cooperation with the national oil company. Ansis also worked with another Norwegian company, Sagex. Both, having corrupted an intelligence official, secretly conducted research in three dimensions and discovered the incredible extent of Syrian reserves. These are larger than those of Qatar.
Thereafter, Ansis was acquired by Veritas SSGT, a Franco-American company based in London. The data were immediately revealed to the French, US, British and Israeli governments who soon concluded their alliance to destroy Syria and steal its gas.
After the United States had, in 2010, entrusted to France and the UK the care of recolonising Syria, they formed a coalition called "Friends of Syria". It convened a "Working Group on Economic Reconstruction and Development" held in May 2012 in the United Arab Emirates, under German Presidency. [5] Sixty countries then divided the cake they had not yet conquered. Of course, most participants were unaware of the Ansis discoveries and Sagex. The Syrian National Council was represented in the working group by Osama al-Kadi, former head of British Gas for the application of military strategies in the energy market.
It was not until the summer of 2013 that the Syrian government was informed of the findings of Ansis and Sogex, understanding then how Washington had managed to form the coalition trying to destroy the country. Since then, President Bashar al-Assad has signed contracts with Russian companies for their future exploitation.
Gas in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon
For its part, British Gas was exploring Palestinian reserves, but Israel opposed their use, fearing that the royalties be used to buy weapons.
In July 2007, the new special envoy of the Quartet (UN, EU, Russia, USA), Tony Blair, negotiated an agreement between Palestinians and Israelis to exploit the Marine-1 and Marine-2 fields in Gaza. The Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, agreed that British Gas would pay royalties due to the Palestinian Authority to a bank account controlled by London and Washington so as to garantee that this money would be used for economic development.
At the time, the former Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, General Moshe Ya’alon, published a sensational forum on the website of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in which he observed that this agreement did not solve the problem because ultimately Hamas would receive a portion of the money as long as it was in power in Gaza. He concluded that the only way to ensure that the manna would not fund the Resistance was to launch a "comprehensive military operation to uproot Hamas in Gaza" [6].
In October 2010, things got complicated again with the discovery of a mega gas field offshore by Noble Energy Inc., The Leviathan, in Israeli and Lebanese territorial waters, in addition to that discovered by British Gas in 2001, Tamar. [7]
Lebanon, at the instigation of Hezbollah, immediately notified the UN and asserted its rights to exploitation. However, Israel started extracting gas from these common pockets without taking Lebanese objections into account.
The war for Palestinian gas
The current Israeli offensive against Gaza has several objectives. First, the Mossad organized the announcement of the kidnapping and death of three young Israelis to prevent the Knesset from passing a law prohibiting the release of "terrorists". [8] Then, the current Minister of Defence, General Moshe Ya’alon, used this as a pretext to launch an offensive against Hamas, applying his 2007 analysis [9].
The new Egyptian president, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, hired Tony Blair to advise him, without the latter resigning for as much from his position as representative of the Quartet [10]. Pursuing his advocacy for British Gas, he then suggested a "peace initiative" perfectly unacceptable to the Palestinians, who refused while Israel accepted it. This manoeuvre was clearly intended to provide an opportunity for the IDF to continue its offensive to "uproot Hamas from Gaza." It is not irrelevant that Tony Blair is not remunerated for this work by Egypt, but by the United Arab Emirates.
As usual, Iran and Syria supported the Palestinian Resistance (Hamas and Islamic Jihad). In this way, they also showed Tel Aviv they have the ability to hurt it as much in Palestine as it did in Iraq through the Islamic Emirate and the Barzanis.
Only by reading events from an energy point of view can they be understood. For it is not politically in the interest of Israel to destroy Hamas, which it helped create to relativize Fatah. Nor is it in the interest of Syria to help it resist since it allied itself with NATO and sent jihadists to fight against the country. Gone is the period of the "Arab Spring", which was supposed to bring to power the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch) in all of the Arab countries. Ultimately Anglo-Saxon imperialism is ever driven by economic ambitions, which it imposes to the detriment of local political dynamics. The cleavage, which sustains structures in the Arab world, is not between religious and secular parties, but between resistors to and collaborators with imperialism.
Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
Source
Al-Watan (Syria)
[1] « La guerre en Syrie : une guerre pour l’énergie ?», by Alexandre Latsa, RIA Novosti/Réseau Voltaire, 18 September 2013.
[2] “Jihadism and the Petroleum Industry”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Al-Watan/Voltaire Network, 23 June 2014.
[3] Nothing new, see : “Syria: NATO sets its sights on gas pipeline”, by Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto/Voltaire Network, 13 October 2012 ; « Syrie : la course à l’or noir », by Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto/Réseau Voltaire, 2 April 2013.
[4] Syrie : 10 ans de résistance (Syria: 10 years of Resistance), six parts program by Thierry Meyssan, Syrian national TV, June 2014. See also : “Struggle over the Middle East: Gas Ranks First”, by Imad Fawzi Shueibi, Voltaire Network, 17 April 2012.
[5] “The “Friends of Syria” divvy up Syrian economy before conquest”, by German Foreign Policy, Voltaire Network, 30 June 2012.
[6] « Does the Prospective Purchase of British Gas from Gaza Threaten Israel’s National Security ? », by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 19 October 2007. « Ya’alon : British Gas natural gas deal in Gaza will finance terror », by Avi Bar-Eli, Haaretz.
[7] “Israel’s Levant Basin—a new geopolitical curse?”, by F. William Engdahl, Voltaire Network, 20 February 2012.
[8] « Le chef du Mossad avait prédit l’enlèvement de trois jeunes Israéliens », by Gerhard Wisnewski, Réseau Voltaire, 8 July 2014.
[9] « IDF’s Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis », by Nafeez Ahmad, The Guardian, 9 July 2014. « Gaza : le gaz dans le viseur », by Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto/Réseau Voltaire, 17 July 2014.
[10] “President al-Sisi chooses Tony Blair as economic advisor”, Voltaire Network, 4 July 2014.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article184806.html
by Thierry Meyssan
After three years of war against Syria, "Westerners" have deliberately expanded their offensive to Iraq and Palestine. Behind the apparent political contradictions between religious and secular parties, strong economic interests explain this strategy. In the Levant, numerous groups have several times changed camps, but gas deposits are immutable.
Every war being undertaken by a coalition naturally has multiple objectives in order to meet the specific interests of each member of the coalition.
From this point of view, the fights now raging in Palestine, Syria and Iraq have in common that they are led by a bloc formed by the United States against the peoples who resist them, to continue the remodeling of the “Greater Middle East” and change the global energy market.
About this last point, two things can change: the layout of the pipelines and the exploitation of new deposits. [1]
The War to Control Pipelines in Iraq
Since the beginning of the war against Syria, NATO has been trying to cut the [East-West] Tehran-Damascus (NIORDC, INPC) nexus to the advantage of an alternative [South-North] corridor allowing the transfer of both Qatari gas (Exxon-Mobil ) and that of Saudi Arabia (Aramco) via the Syrian coast [2].
A decisive step was taken with the Islamic Emirate offensive in Iraq that has split the country longitudinally and separated Iran on the one hand and on the other hand, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. [3]
This visible goal determines who will sell their gas to Europe, and therefore the volume of supply and the selling price. That explains that the three major gas exporters (Russia, Qatar, and Iran) are involved in this war.
The War of Conquest Over Syrian Gas
NATO has added a second goal: the control of gas reserves in the Levant and their exploitation. Though everyone knows that for decades the Southern Mediterranean contains large gas fields in the territorial waters of Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Cyprus, only "Westerners" have known, since 2003, how these fields were laid out and how they extended under the continent.
As revealed by Professor Imad Fawzi Shueibi [4], at the time, a Norwegian company, Ansis, lawfully conducted in Syria a survey of the country, in cooperation with the national oil company. Ansis also worked with another Norwegian company, Sagex. Both, having corrupted an intelligence official, secretly conducted research in three dimensions and discovered the incredible extent of Syrian reserves. These are larger than those of Qatar.
Thereafter, Ansis was acquired by Veritas SSGT, a Franco-American company based in London. The data were immediately revealed to the French, US, British and Israeli governments who soon concluded their alliance to destroy Syria and steal its gas.
After the United States had, in 2010, entrusted to France and the UK the care of recolonising Syria, they formed a coalition called "Friends of Syria". It convened a "Working Group on Economic Reconstruction and Development" held in May 2012 in the United Arab Emirates, under German Presidency. [5] Sixty countries then divided the cake they had not yet conquered. Of course, most participants were unaware of the Ansis discoveries and Sagex. The Syrian National Council was represented in the working group by Osama al-Kadi, former head of British Gas for the application of military strategies in the energy market.
It was not until the summer of 2013 that the Syrian government was informed of the findings of Ansis and Sogex, understanding then how Washington had managed to form the coalition trying to destroy the country. Since then, President Bashar al-Assad has signed contracts with Russian companies for their future exploitation.
Gas in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon
For its part, British Gas was exploring Palestinian reserves, but Israel opposed their use, fearing that the royalties be used to buy weapons.
In July 2007, the new special envoy of the Quartet (UN, EU, Russia, USA), Tony Blair, negotiated an agreement between Palestinians and Israelis to exploit the Marine-1 and Marine-2 fields in Gaza. The Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, agreed that British Gas would pay royalties due to the Palestinian Authority to a bank account controlled by London and Washington so as to garantee that this money would be used for economic development.
At the time, the former Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, General Moshe Ya’alon, published a sensational forum on the website of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in which he observed that this agreement did not solve the problem because ultimately Hamas would receive a portion of the money as long as it was in power in Gaza. He concluded that the only way to ensure that the manna would not fund the Resistance was to launch a "comprehensive military operation to uproot Hamas in Gaza" [6].
In October 2010, things got complicated again with the discovery of a mega gas field offshore by Noble Energy Inc., The Leviathan, in Israeli and Lebanese territorial waters, in addition to that discovered by British Gas in 2001, Tamar. [7]
Lebanon, at the instigation of Hezbollah, immediately notified the UN and asserted its rights to exploitation. However, Israel started extracting gas from these common pockets without taking Lebanese objections into account.
The war for Palestinian gas
The current Israeli offensive against Gaza has several objectives. First, the Mossad organized the announcement of the kidnapping and death of three young Israelis to prevent the Knesset from passing a law prohibiting the release of "terrorists". [8] Then, the current Minister of Defence, General Moshe Ya’alon, used this as a pretext to launch an offensive against Hamas, applying his 2007 analysis [9].
The new Egyptian president, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, hired Tony Blair to advise him, without the latter resigning for as much from his position as representative of the Quartet [10]. Pursuing his advocacy for British Gas, he then suggested a "peace initiative" perfectly unacceptable to the Palestinians, who refused while Israel accepted it. This manoeuvre was clearly intended to provide an opportunity for the IDF to continue its offensive to "uproot Hamas from Gaza." It is not irrelevant that Tony Blair is not remunerated for this work by Egypt, but by the United Arab Emirates.
As usual, Iran and Syria supported the Palestinian Resistance (Hamas and Islamic Jihad). In this way, they also showed Tel Aviv they have the ability to hurt it as much in Palestine as it did in Iraq through the Islamic Emirate and the Barzanis.
Only by reading events from an energy point of view can they be understood. For it is not politically in the interest of Israel to destroy Hamas, which it helped create to relativize Fatah. Nor is it in the interest of Syria to help it resist since it allied itself with NATO and sent jihadists to fight against the country. Gone is the period of the "Arab Spring", which was supposed to bring to power the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch) in all of the Arab countries. Ultimately Anglo-Saxon imperialism is ever driven by economic ambitions, which it imposes to the detriment of local political dynamics. The cleavage, which sustains structures in the Arab world, is not between religious and secular parties, but between resistors to and collaborators with imperialism.
Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
Source
Al-Watan (Syria)
[1] « La guerre en Syrie : une guerre pour l’énergie ?», by Alexandre Latsa, RIA Novosti/Réseau Voltaire, 18 September 2013.
[2] “Jihadism and the Petroleum Industry”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Al-Watan/Voltaire Network, 23 June 2014.
[3] Nothing new, see : “Syria: NATO sets its sights on gas pipeline”, by Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto/Voltaire Network, 13 October 2012 ; « Syrie : la course à l’or noir », by Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto/Réseau Voltaire, 2 April 2013.
[4] Syrie : 10 ans de résistance (Syria: 10 years of Resistance), six parts program by Thierry Meyssan, Syrian national TV, June 2014. See also : “Struggle over the Middle East: Gas Ranks First”, by Imad Fawzi Shueibi, Voltaire Network, 17 April 2012.
[5] “The “Friends of Syria” divvy up Syrian economy before conquest”, by German Foreign Policy, Voltaire Network, 30 June 2012.
[6] « Does the Prospective Purchase of British Gas from Gaza Threaten Israel’s National Security ? », by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 19 October 2007. « Ya’alon : British Gas natural gas deal in Gaza will finance terror », by Avi Bar-Eli, Haaretz.
[7] “Israel’s Levant Basin—a new geopolitical curse?”, by F. William Engdahl, Voltaire Network, 20 February 2012.
[8] « Le chef du Mossad avait prédit l’enlèvement de trois jeunes Israéliens », by Gerhard Wisnewski, Réseau Voltaire, 8 July 2014.
[9] « IDF’s Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis », by Nafeez Ahmad, The Guardian, 9 July 2014. « Gaza : le gaz dans le viseur », by Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto/Réseau Voltaire, 17 July 2014.
[10] “President al-Sisi chooses Tony Blair as economic advisor”, Voltaire Network, 4 July 2014.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article184806.html
Friday 25 July 2014
The Age of Impunity by Tom Engelhardt
The Age of Impunity
An Exceptional Decline for the Exceptional Country?
The Empire as Basket Case
By Tom Engelhardt
For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. I’m speaking of the various whistleblowers and leakers who have had an urge to let Americans know what deeds and misdeeds their government is committing in their name but without their knowledge. They continue to pay a price in accountability for their acts that should, by comparison, stun us all.
As June ended, the New York Times front-paged an account of an act of corporate impunity that may, however, be unique in the post-9/11 era (though potentially a harbinger of things to come). In 2007, as journalist James Risen tells it, Daniel Carroll, the top manager in Iraq for the rent-a-gun company Blackwater, one of the warrior corporations that accompanied the U.S. military to war in the twenty-first century, threatened Jean Richter, a government investigator sent to Baghdad to look into accounts of corporate wrongdoing.
Here, according to Risen, is Richter’s version of what happened when he, another government investigator, and Carroll met to discuss Blackwater’s potential misdeeds in that war zone:
“Mr. Carroll said ‘that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit. ‘Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone of voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on mine,’ Mr. Richter stated in his memo. ‘I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.’”
When officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world, heard what had happened, they acted promptly. They sided with the Blackwater manager, ordering Richter and the investigator who witnessed the scene out of the country (with their inquiry incomplete). And though a death threat against an American official might, under other circumstances, have led a CIA team or a set of special ops guys to snatch the culprit off the streets of Baghdad, deposit him on a Navy ship for interrogation, and then leave him idling in Guantanamo or in jail in the United States awaiting trial, in this case no further action was taken.
Power Centers But No Power to Act
Think of the response of those embassy officials as a get-out-of-jail-free pass in honor of a new age. For the various rent-a-gun companies, construction and supply outfits, and weapons makers that have been the beneficiaries of the wholesale privatization of American war since 9/11, impunity has become the new reality. Pull back the lens further and the same might be said more generally about America’s corporate sector and its financial outfits. There was, after all, no accountability for the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. Not a single significant figure went to jail for bringing the American economy to its knees. (And many such figures made out like proverbial bandits in the government bailout and revival of their businesses that followed.)
Meanwhile, in these years, the corporation itself was let loose to run riot. Long a “person” in the legal world, it became ever more person-like, benefitting from a series of Supreme Court decisions that hobbled unions and ordinary Americans even as it gave the corporation ever more of the rights and attributes of a citizen on the loose. Post-9/11, the corporate world gained freedom of expression, the freedom of the purse, as well as the various freedoms that staggering inequality and hoards of money offer. Corporate entities gained, among other things, the right to flood the political system with money, and most recently, at least in a modest way, freedom of religion.
In other words, two great power centers have been engorging themselves in twenty-first-century America: there was an ever-expanding national security state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by anyone, ever more deeply enveloped in secrecy, ever more able to see others and less transparent itself, ever more empowered by a secret court system and a body of secret law whose judgments no one else could be privy to; and there was an increasingly militarized corporate state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by outside forces, ever more sure that the law was its possession. These two power centers are now triumphant in our world. They command the landscape against what may be less effective opposition than at any moment in our history.
In both cases, no matter how you tote it up, it’s been an era of triumphalism. Measure it any way you want: by the rising Dow Jones Industrial Average or the expanding low-wage economy, by the power of “dark money” to determine American politics in 1% elections or the rising wages of CEOs and the stagnating wages of their workers, by the power of billionaires and the growth of poverty, by the penumbra of secrecy and classification spreading across government operations and the lessening ability of the citizen to know what’s going on, or by the growing power of both the national security state and the corporation to turn your life into an open book. Look anywhere and some version of the same story presents itself -- of ascendant power in the boardrooms and the backrooms, and of a sense of impunity that accompanies it.
Whether you’re considering the power of the national security state or the corporate sector, their moment is now. And what a moment it is -- for them. Their success seems almost complete. And yet that only begins to tell the strange tale of our American times, because if that power is ascendant, it seems incapable of being translated into classic American power. The more successful those two sectors become, the less the U.S. seems capable of wielding its power effectively in any traditional sense, domestically or abroad.
Anyone can feel it, hence the recent Pew Research Center poll indicating a striking diminution in recent years of Americans who think the U.S. is exceptional, the greatest of all nations. By 2011, only 38% of Americans thought that; today, the figure has dropped to 28%, and -- a harbinger of future American attitudes -- just 15% among 18-to-29-year-olds. And no wonder. By many measures the U.S. may remain the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet, but in recent years its ability to accomplish anything, no less achieve national or imperial success, has shrunk drastically.
The power centers remain, but in some still-hard-to-grasp way, the power to accomplish anything seems to be draining from a country that was once the great can-do nation on the planet. On this, the record is both dismal and clear. To say that the American political system is in a kind of gridlock or paralysis from which -- given electoral prospects in 2014 and 2016 -- there can be no escape is to say the obvious. It’s a commonplace of news reports to suggest, for example, that in this midterm election year Congress and the president will be capable of accomplishing nothing together (except perhaps avoiding another actual government shutdown). Nada, zip, zero.
The president acts in relatively minimalist ways by executive order, Congress threatens to sue over his use of those orders, and (as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would once have said) so it goes. In the meantime, Congress has proven itself unable to act even when it comes to what once would have been the no-brainers of American life. It has, for instance, been struggling simply to fund a highway bill that would allow for ordinary repair work on the nation's system of roads, even though the fund for such work is running dry and jobs will be lost.
This sort of thing is but a symptom in a country of immense wealth whose infrastructure is crumbling and which lacks a single mile of high-speed rail. In all of this, in the rise of poverty and a minimum-wage economy, in a loss -- particularly for minorities -- of the wealth that went with home ownership, what can be seen is the untracked rise of a Third World country inside a First World one, a powerless America inside the putative global superpower.
An Exceptional Kind of Decline
And speaking of the “sole superpower,” it remains true that no combination of other militaries can compare with the U.S. military or the moneys the country continues to put into it and into the research and development of weaponry of the most futuristic sort. The U.S. national security budget remains a Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not-style infusion of tax dollars into the national security state, something no other combination of major countries comes close to matching.
In addition, the U.S. still maintains hundreds of military bases and outposts across the planet (including, in recent years, ever more bases for our latest techno-wonder weapon, the drone). In 2014, it still garrisons the planet in a way that no other imperial power has ever done. In fact, it continues to sport all the trappings of a great empire, with an army impressive enough that our last two presidents have regularly resorted to one unembarrassed image to describe it: “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”
And yet, recent history is clear: that military has proven incapable of winning its wars against minor (and minority) insurgencies globally, just as Washington, for all its firepower, military and economic, has had a remarkably difficult time imposing its desires just about anywhere on the planet. Though it may still look like a superpower and though the power of its national security state may still be growing, Washington seems to have lost the ability to translate that power into anything resembling success.
Today, the U.S. looks less like a functioning and effective empire than an imperial basket case, unable to bring its massive power to bear effectively from Germany to Syria, Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya to the South China Sea, the Crimea to Africa. And stranger yet, this remains true even though it has no imperial competitors to challenge it. Russia is a rickety energy state, capable of achieving its version of imperial success only along its own borders, and China, clearly the rising economic power on the planet, though flexing its military muscles locally in disputed oil-rich waters, visibly has no wish to challenge the U.S. military anywhere far from home.
All in all, the situation is puzzling indeed. Despite much talk about the rise of a multi-polar world, this still remains in many ways a unipolar one, which perhaps means that the wounds Washington has suffered on numerous fronts in these last years are self-inflicted.
Just what kind of decline this represents remains to be seen. What does seem clearer today is that the rise of the national security state and the triumphalism of the corporate sector (along with the much publicized growth of great wealth and striking inequality in the country) has been accompanied by a decided diminution in the power of the government to function domestically and of the imperial state to impose its will anywhere on Earth.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175867/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_age_of_impunity/
An Exceptional Decline for the Exceptional Country?
The Empire as Basket Case
By Tom Engelhardt
For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. I’m speaking of the various whistleblowers and leakers who have had an urge to let Americans know what deeds and misdeeds their government is committing in their name but without their knowledge. They continue to pay a price in accountability for their acts that should, by comparison, stun us all.
As June ended, the New York Times front-paged an account of an act of corporate impunity that may, however, be unique in the post-9/11 era (though potentially a harbinger of things to come). In 2007, as journalist James Risen tells it, Daniel Carroll, the top manager in Iraq for the rent-a-gun company Blackwater, one of the warrior corporations that accompanied the U.S. military to war in the twenty-first century, threatened Jean Richter, a government investigator sent to Baghdad to look into accounts of corporate wrongdoing.
Here, according to Risen, is Richter’s version of what happened when he, another government investigator, and Carroll met to discuss Blackwater’s potential misdeeds in that war zone:
“Mr. Carroll said ‘that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit. ‘Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone of voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on mine,’ Mr. Richter stated in his memo. ‘I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.’”
When officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world, heard what had happened, they acted promptly. They sided with the Blackwater manager, ordering Richter and the investigator who witnessed the scene out of the country (with their inquiry incomplete). And though a death threat against an American official might, under other circumstances, have led a CIA team or a set of special ops guys to snatch the culprit off the streets of Baghdad, deposit him on a Navy ship for interrogation, and then leave him idling in Guantanamo or in jail in the United States awaiting trial, in this case no further action was taken.
Power Centers But No Power to Act
Think of the response of those embassy officials as a get-out-of-jail-free pass in honor of a new age. For the various rent-a-gun companies, construction and supply outfits, and weapons makers that have been the beneficiaries of the wholesale privatization of American war since 9/11, impunity has become the new reality. Pull back the lens further and the same might be said more generally about America’s corporate sector and its financial outfits. There was, after all, no accountability for the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. Not a single significant figure went to jail for bringing the American economy to its knees. (And many such figures made out like proverbial bandits in the government bailout and revival of their businesses that followed.)
Meanwhile, in these years, the corporation itself was let loose to run riot. Long a “person” in the legal world, it became ever more person-like, benefitting from a series of Supreme Court decisions that hobbled unions and ordinary Americans even as it gave the corporation ever more of the rights and attributes of a citizen on the loose. Post-9/11, the corporate world gained freedom of expression, the freedom of the purse, as well as the various freedoms that staggering inequality and hoards of money offer. Corporate entities gained, among other things, the right to flood the political system with money, and most recently, at least in a modest way, freedom of religion.
In other words, two great power centers have been engorging themselves in twenty-first-century America: there was an ever-expanding national security state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by anyone, ever more deeply enveloped in secrecy, ever more able to see others and less transparent itself, ever more empowered by a secret court system and a body of secret law whose judgments no one else could be privy to; and there was an increasingly militarized corporate state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by outside forces, ever more sure that the law was its possession. These two power centers are now triumphant in our world. They command the landscape against what may be less effective opposition than at any moment in our history.
In both cases, no matter how you tote it up, it’s been an era of triumphalism. Measure it any way you want: by the rising Dow Jones Industrial Average or the expanding low-wage economy, by the power of “dark money” to determine American politics in 1% elections or the rising wages of CEOs and the stagnating wages of their workers, by the power of billionaires and the growth of poverty, by the penumbra of secrecy and classification spreading across government operations and the lessening ability of the citizen to know what’s going on, or by the growing power of both the national security state and the corporation to turn your life into an open book. Look anywhere and some version of the same story presents itself -- of ascendant power in the boardrooms and the backrooms, and of a sense of impunity that accompanies it.
Whether you’re considering the power of the national security state or the corporate sector, their moment is now. And what a moment it is -- for them. Their success seems almost complete. And yet that only begins to tell the strange tale of our American times, because if that power is ascendant, it seems incapable of being translated into classic American power. The more successful those two sectors become, the less the U.S. seems capable of wielding its power effectively in any traditional sense, domestically or abroad.
Anyone can feel it, hence the recent Pew Research Center poll indicating a striking diminution in recent years of Americans who think the U.S. is exceptional, the greatest of all nations. By 2011, only 38% of Americans thought that; today, the figure has dropped to 28%, and -- a harbinger of future American attitudes -- just 15% among 18-to-29-year-olds. And no wonder. By many measures the U.S. may remain the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet, but in recent years its ability to accomplish anything, no less achieve national or imperial success, has shrunk drastically.
The power centers remain, but in some still-hard-to-grasp way, the power to accomplish anything seems to be draining from a country that was once the great can-do nation on the planet. On this, the record is both dismal and clear. To say that the American political system is in a kind of gridlock or paralysis from which -- given electoral prospects in 2014 and 2016 -- there can be no escape is to say the obvious. It’s a commonplace of news reports to suggest, for example, that in this midterm election year Congress and the president will be capable of accomplishing nothing together (except perhaps avoiding another actual government shutdown). Nada, zip, zero.
The president acts in relatively minimalist ways by executive order, Congress threatens to sue over his use of those orders, and (as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would once have said) so it goes. In the meantime, Congress has proven itself unable to act even when it comes to what once would have been the no-brainers of American life. It has, for instance, been struggling simply to fund a highway bill that would allow for ordinary repair work on the nation's system of roads, even though the fund for such work is running dry and jobs will be lost.
This sort of thing is but a symptom in a country of immense wealth whose infrastructure is crumbling and which lacks a single mile of high-speed rail. In all of this, in the rise of poverty and a minimum-wage economy, in a loss -- particularly for minorities -- of the wealth that went with home ownership, what can be seen is the untracked rise of a Third World country inside a First World one, a powerless America inside the putative global superpower.
An Exceptional Kind of Decline
And speaking of the “sole superpower,” it remains true that no combination of other militaries can compare with the U.S. military or the moneys the country continues to put into it and into the research and development of weaponry of the most futuristic sort. The U.S. national security budget remains a Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not-style infusion of tax dollars into the national security state, something no other combination of major countries comes close to matching.
In addition, the U.S. still maintains hundreds of military bases and outposts across the planet (including, in recent years, ever more bases for our latest techno-wonder weapon, the drone). In 2014, it still garrisons the planet in a way that no other imperial power has ever done. In fact, it continues to sport all the trappings of a great empire, with an army impressive enough that our last two presidents have regularly resorted to one unembarrassed image to describe it: “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”
And yet, recent history is clear: that military has proven incapable of winning its wars against minor (and minority) insurgencies globally, just as Washington, for all its firepower, military and economic, has had a remarkably difficult time imposing its desires just about anywhere on the planet. Though it may still look like a superpower and though the power of its national security state may still be growing, Washington seems to have lost the ability to translate that power into anything resembling success.
Today, the U.S. looks less like a functioning and effective empire than an imperial basket case, unable to bring its massive power to bear effectively from Germany to Syria, Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya to the South China Sea, the Crimea to Africa. And stranger yet, this remains true even though it has no imperial competitors to challenge it. Russia is a rickety energy state, capable of achieving its version of imperial success only along its own borders, and China, clearly the rising economic power on the planet, though flexing its military muscles locally in disputed oil-rich waters, visibly has no wish to challenge the U.S. military anywhere far from home.
All in all, the situation is puzzling indeed. Despite much talk about the rise of a multi-polar world, this still remains in many ways a unipolar one, which perhaps means that the wounds Washington has suffered on numerous fronts in these last years are self-inflicted.
Just what kind of decline this represents remains to be seen. What does seem clearer today is that the rise of the national security state and the triumphalism of the corporate sector (along with the much publicized growth of great wealth and striking inequality in the country) has been accompanied by a decided diminution in the power of the government to function domestically and of the imperial state to impose its will anywhere on Earth.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175867/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_age_of_impunity/
Thursday 24 July 2014
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk 7/21/14: What the Media Won't Report Abou...
WHAT THE MEDIA WON’T REPORT ABOUT MALAYSIAN AIRLINES FLIGHT MH17
It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said
by RON PAUL
Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held a press conference to claim – even before an investigation – that it was pro-Russian rebels in the region who were responsible. His ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, did the same at the UN Security Council – just one day after the crash!
While western media outlets rush to repeat government propaganda on the event, there are a few things they will not report.
They will not report that the crisis in Ukraine started late last year, when EU and US-supported protesters plotted the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Without US-sponsored “regime change,” it is unlikely that hundreds would have been killed in the unrest that followed. Nor would the Malaysian Airlines crash have happened.
The media has reported that the plane must have been shot down by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists, because the missile that reportedly brought down the plane was Russian made. But they will not report that the Ukrainian government also uses the exact same Russian-made weapons.
They will not report that the post-coup government in Kiev has, according to OSCE monitors, killed 250 people in the breakaway Lugansk region since June, including 20 killed as government forces bombed the city center the day after the plane crash! Most of these are civilians and together they roughly equal the number killed in the plane crash. By contrast, Russia has killed no one in Ukraine, and the separatists have struck largely military, not civilian, targets.
They will not report that the US has strongly backed the Ukrainian government in these attacks on civilians, which a State Department spokeswoman called “measured and moderate.”
They will not report that neither Russia nor the separatists in eastern Ukraine have anything to gain but everything to lose by shooting down a passenger liner full of civilians.
They will not report that the Ukrainian government has much to gain by pinning the attack on Russia, and that the Ukrainian prime minister has already expressed his pleasure that Russia is being blamed for the attack.
They will not report that the missile that apparently shot down the plane was from a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system that requires a good deal of training that the separatists do not have.
They will not report that the separatists in eastern Ukraine have inflicted considerable losses on the Ukrainian government in the week before the plane was downed.
They will not report how similar this is to last summer’s US claim that the Assad government in Syria had used poison gas against civilians in Ghouta. Assad was also gaining the upper hand in his struggle with US-backed rebels and the US claimed that the attack came from Syrian government positions. Then, US claims led us to the brink of another war in the Middle East. At the last minute public opposition forced Obama to back down – and we have learned since then that US claims about the gas attack were false.
Of course it is entirely possible that the Obama administration and the US media has it right this time, and Russia or the separatists in eastern Ukraine either purposely or inadvertently shot down this aircraft. The real point is, it’s very difficult to get accurate information so everybody engages in propaganda. At this point it would be unwise to say the Russians did it, the Ukrainian government did it, or the rebels did it. Is it so hard to simply demand a real investigation?
Tuesday 22 July 2014
(No News) Lies is Good News: Western Media Coverage of MH17 Crash
(No News) Lies is Good News: Western Media Coverage of MH17 Crash
The US and UK mainstream news media lie about the circumstances concerning the MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine in such a way that it is virtually impossible to gain any plausible information on what had really happened.
The Western mainstream news outlets, including newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, as well as online social networking sites and even user-edited Wikipedia, are all being used to propagate baseless and idiotic rumors about the incident. Not one single “news story” that has been reported or reiterated over the past several days was based on facts or factual evidence. Not even on circumstantial evidence, since everything that has so far been presented as circumstantial evidence is not such in any way.
An avalanche of most bizarre and nonsensical stories and theories have been presented under the headlines of “circumstantial evidence” but invariably, without a single exception, such stories referred the readers, the listeners, and the Internet users to fake, fabricated, and sham video footages, audio tapes, and social media statements. But the most appalling is that out of all this manure of disinformation and 100-% lies - even before a proper investigation of the MH17 crash has begun - ungrounded and blatant accusations have been hurled on one side (or another), arbitrarily chosen by respective proponents.
The US government has taken the lead in this cacophony of preconceived accusations thus validating the whole body of lies and disinformation. US politicians - even before the proper investigation has started at the site of the MH17 crash - have reached the top of the mountain of lies upon lies and taken their stand against... (guess who!) of course, Russia.
Unfortunately for Russia, the Russian government does not have that degree of access and control in the Western media realm. Russian position on many pressing issues on the international arena is currently underrepresented and its voice is barely heard in the West. Russian English-language programs on TV or radio, even on the Internet, are barely present and regrettably missing both in the US and in Western Europe.
Coupled with the US and UK governments efforts to distort and suppress whatever news are coming from Russia or its near-abroad neighbors, this lack of proper representation of the Russian voice in those countries makes the Russian government look like what US and British politicians want it to look like, i.e. immoral, vicious, and stupid. Although there are no objective reasons to treat Russia in the same way the Soviet Union was treated by the West, Russian leaders are still persistently portrayed by US politicians as a reactionaries who have to explain or exculpate themselves. That is a completely wrongful portrayal of a country that wants to make economic and social progress and not war in any way.
Russia’s principled stance is aimed at economic cooperation, social development, and cultural integration with the Western nations. No adventurism or armed threat has ever been used by Moscow to advance its interests in Europe or Americas in the past two decades. The US neocons and liberals with their militaristic approach and “humanitarian” bombing of foreign nations all across the globe has become the sole source of trouble and war on this planet.
Washington’s debilitating foreign policies of the past couple decades have become the only problem that the nations all over the world have to deal with and Russia has been the only nation that has preserved its own voice and stood up to the US unprovoked aggression the world over.
The situation around the crash of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 has demonstrated once again that the US foreign policy is utterly unprofessional, inexpert, unproductive, and destructive to nations around the world. Current US political leaders have inherited the political agenda of Cold War mentality and continue to disrupt stability and peace all over the world destroying nations, undermining statehood both abroad and in the US, causing trouble at home and abroad, in the absence of a formidable international opposition and in the blind belief of the US and UK politicians in the power of sheer military might of NATO. They truly believe that any adventurism on their part will be justified and covered up if they just keep using NATO as their primary weapon in international relations, forcing nations into obedience, intervening in other nations’ home affairs, organizing and financing coups and civil wars all around the globe.
They use every pretext to do that. The US political leaders are not smart. They are greedy. Their professional acumen has deserted them but they still keep pushing on following their prehistoric agenda of military domination and war. They use the MH17 tragedy to spread lies, misinform and manipulate public opinion to justify their aggression against Russia which is their primary economic and geostrategic rival in Europe. Washington tries to derail Russia in Europe economically but US politicians are so stupid that they can not think of any other method to do this but through falsely accusing Russia of the forceful actions that have been taking place in Ukraine that is currently ravaged by a civil war, which was unleashed by a group of US-backed Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs who had taken power in Kiev through a CIA-backed coup (Maidan).
The US media is currently spreading lies about the situation around MH17. They are based on several assumptions concluding that that the plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile fired by Ukrainian separatists in the east. Such conclusion was ostensibly made from what they call circumstantial evidence, including the following: Three SA11 missile batteries recently entered Ukraine from Russia; A missile launch from the rebel-held area was detected by US Intelligence; Russian rebels are hiding black boxes on instructions from Moscow; One of the separatists’ military leaders “twitted proudly at the time that this plane was first shot down that his forces had taken down a Ukrainian military transport plane”. According to investigations carried out by activists in blogosphere alone, such claims are either utterly untrue or based upon actual events that are unrelated to the crash of MH17.
There is no any circumstantial, let alone scientific, evidence that Russia supplied any weapons to the separatists in Ukraine. The area is closely monitored by US and other NATO observers, both from space and on the ground, that any such movement of large and heavy equipment across Russia-Ukraine border would have been immediately detected and made known to the public as Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine. Russians are not stupid to do anything like that. And they are professional enough to know how to use heavy weapons and aircraft.
Russians are smart enough not to plunge themselves into an international scandal of such proportions. But someone in the West tries to convince ordinary people in Europe and US otherwise. That is why such anserine news reports appear as the one in New Republic: “Inside [the plane] were not live people, but corpses. The plane was not flown by live pilots; it was on autopilot. (Translated from Russian Website)”. Where on earth have they found that website? Crazy theories and baseless rumors can be found everywhere, both in Russia and US. It would be better if Western news media reported about expert points of view based on real pieces of evidence discovered by US, European, Malaysian, and Russian specialists.
Unfortunately, US and UK news outlets have dedicated their front pages to bizarre rumors, speculations, and most of all to premature accusations of Ukrainian separatists and Russia. They repeat over and over that circumstantial evidence for what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and to the 298 people on board is already powerful but they have failed to produce at least one piece of that evidence so far. It is all baseless rumors and wild accusations, as shameful and disgraceful as the US foreign policy is to date.
The way many Western journalists have been covering the MH17 crash has been an information warfare offensive against Russia designed to form public opinion even before the investigation has begun. Western journalists and politicians are certainly not crash investigators. There is no way to determine within a few hours how a plane was brought down, and yet that is exactly is happening in the Western media.
Citing evidence like fabricated social media posts is not sufficient to determine who brought the plane down. It is clear even to a child. Nonetheless, people in the US and Europe are being fed lies and accusations all along. There is nothing particularly new about it, though. US news media are known to have run absolutely false stories about Iraqi soldiers who were throwing their babies out hospital windows, about half a million of Kosovo Albanians who were murdered by the Serbs, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, they are spreading lies about Ukraine and its separatists.
Here is what Western media should report on MH17 crash, that is investigation carried out by Russian Defense Ministry. Unlike US and UK speculators with their preconceived narrative, Russian intelligence officers have already provided enough evidence to make Ukrainian government and their military leaders look worried, if not guilty. Among those pieces of evidence are satellite images of a group of three or four Buk-M1 air defense missile batteries Ukrainian forces deployed near Donetsk the day the Malaysian Airlines plane crashed.
Russia is noted to be using what appears to be legitimate photographic evidence (something the West has so far failed to provide in any capacity) that MH17 crashed within the operating zone of the Ukrainian army’s self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air ‘Buk’ missile systems.
Russia has also made public its data on the flight paths of the at least one Ukrainian fighter jet in close approach to MH17 before the crash. A Ukraine Air Force SU-25 fighter jet was detected airborne that day and it’s distance from the Malaysian plane was 3 to 5 kilometers. The presence of the Ukrainian military jet is confirmed by video shots made by the Rostov Monitoring Center.
So, it turns out that the plane might have been taken down by air-to-air missile rather than by surface-to-air one. On the other hand, it might turn out that neither of the missile types is responsible for the crash, if the plane had been rigged with a explosives. All this hullabaloo about missiles and Buk air defense missile batteries could be just a smokescreen intended to cover a terrorist act that involved a bomb on board of MH17. Any way, facts are needed to investigated this crash.
During a recent press conference, Russian Defense Ministry has demanded the US authorities to bring up any evidence as proof of their earlier accusations. According to Russian experts, US satellite was flying over the MH17 crash site. Therefore, there would be no problem providing satellite imagery to make things clear. The question is why it has not been done yet. There has been no proof that the missile (if any) was fired from the separatist-held area. There has been no proof that SA-11 Buk missile systems - or any weapon systems - were transported to or from the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
As a result of its investigation, the Russian Defense Ministry has set a number of questions to Ukrainian government:
1. Ukrainian authorities immediately identified the separatists as the perpetrators of the tragedy. What was the basis of such findings?
2. What were the instances and circumstances of using Buk missile systems in the war zone?
3. Why Buk air defense systems were deployed in the area, as the separatist militia groups have no fighter planes to use there?
4. What were the reasons for the inactivity of Ukrainian authorities on the formation of an international commission?
5. Will the armed forces of Ukraine be able to provide inventory documentation to international experts to account for all the missiles, air-to-air and ground-to-air ammo and anti-aircraft missiles?
6. Why did Ukrainian air traffic controllers allow air route deviation of the MH17 flight to the north of the proclaimed "anti-terrorist operation zone"?
7. Why the airspace over the combat zone was not completely closed to civilian aircraft, the area being just partially covered by radar signal for air traffic navigation?
7. How can Kiev officials comment on the reports allegedly made by the Spanish air traffic controllers working in Ukraine that the Boeing plane that was taken down over the territory of Ukraine was accompanied in air by two Ukrainian military aircraft?
8. Why has Security Service of Ukraine begun to investigate Ukrainian radar data and recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic controllers and MH17 pilots?
9. What lessons were drawn by Ukrainian authorities from the previous similar disaster that involved Russian Tu-154 aircraft in 2001 over the Black Sea? Back then, Ukraine had also denied any involvement of its Armed Forces in that tragedy until irrefutable evidence was brought up that proved Kiev responsible for the tragedy.
So far, there has been no response by Ukraine to these questions.
Hopefully, the questions raised by Russian experts should place Ukraine and the US in an awkward position.
As to the West, sometime, somewhere there will have to be presented at least some facts instead of merely continuing the "emotional appeals" propaganda based on dubious YouTube clips.
The US and UK mainstream news media lie about the circumstances concerning the MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine in such a way that it is virtually impossible to gain any plausible information on what had really happened.
The Western mainstream news outlets, including newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, as well as online social networking sites and even user-edited Wikipedia, are all being used to propagate baseless and idiotic rumors about the incident. Not one single “news story” that has been reported or reiterated over the past several days was based on facts or factual evidence. Not even on circumstantial evidence, since everything that has so far been presented as circumstantial evidence is not such in any way.
An avalanche of most bizarre and nonsensical stories and theories have been presented under the headlines of “circumstantial evidence” but invariably, without a single exception, such stories referred the readers, the listeners, and the Internet users to fake, fabricated, and sham video footages, audio tapes, and social media statements. But the most appalling is that out of all this manure of disinformation and 100-% lies - even before a proper investigation of the MH17 crash has begun - ungrounded and blatant accusations have been hurled on one side (or another), arbitrarily chosen by respective proponents.
The US government has taken the lead in this cacophony of preconceived accusations thus validating the whole body of lies and disinformation. US politicians - even before the proper investigation has started at the site of the MH17 crash - have reached the top of the mountain of lies upon lies and taken their stand against... (guess who!) of course, Russia.
Unfortunately for Russia, the Russian government does not have that degree of access and control in the Western media realm. Russian position on many pressing issues on the international arena is currently underrepresented and its voice is barely heard in the West. Russian English-language programs on TV or radio, even on the Internet, are barely present and regrettably missing both in the US and in Western Europe.
Coupled with the US and UK governments efforts to distort and suppress whatever news are coming from Russia or its near-abroad neighbors, this lack of proper representation of the Russian voice in those countries makes the Russian government look like what US and British politicians want it to look like, i.e. immoral, vicious, and stupid. Although there are no objective reasons to treat Russia in the same way the Soviet Union was treated by the West, Russian leaders are still persistently portrayed by US politicians as a reactionaries who have to explain or exculpate themselves. That is a completely wrongful portrayal of a country that wants to make economic and social progress and not war in any way.
Russia’s principled stance is aimed at economic cooperation, social development, and cultural integration with the Western nations. No adventurism or armed threat has ever been used by Moscow to advance its interests in Europe or Americas in the past two decades. The US neocons and liberals with their militaristic approach and “humanitarian” bombing of foreign nations all across the globe has become the sole source of trouble and war on this planet.
Washington’s debilitating foreign policies of the past couple decades have become the only problem that the nations all over the world have to deal with and Russia has been the only nation that has preserved its own voice and stood up to the US unprovoked aggression the world over.
The situation around the crash of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 has demonstrated once again that the US foreign policy is utterly unprofessional, inexpert, unproductive, and destructive to nations around the world. Current US political leaders have inherited the political agenda of Cold War mentality and continue to disrupt stability and peace all over the world destroying nations, undermining statehood both abroad and in the US, causing trouble at home and abroad, in the absence of a formidable international opposition and in the blind belief of the US and UK politicians in the power of sheer military might of NATO. They truly believe that any adventurism on their part will be justified and covered up if they just keep using NATO as their primary weapon in international relations, forcing nations into obedience, intervening in other nations’ home affairs, organizing and financing coups and civil wars all around the globe.
They use every pretext to do that. The US political leaders are not smart. They are greedy. Their professional acumen has deserted them but they still keep pushing on following their prehistoric agenda of military domination and war. They use the MH17 tragedy to spread lies, misinform and manipulate public opinion to justify their aggression against Russia which is their primary economic and geostrategic rival in Europe. Washington tries to derail Russia in Europe economically but US politicians are so stupid that they can not think of any other method to do this but through falsely accusing Russia of the forceful actions that have been taking place in Ukraine that is currently ravaged by a civil war, which was unleashed by a group of US-backed Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs who had taken power in Kiev through a CIA-backed coup (Maidan).
The US media is currently spreading lies about the situation around MH17. They are based on several assumptions concluding that that the plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile fired by Ukrainian separatists in the east. Such conclusion was ostensibly made from what they call circumstantial evidence, including the following: Three SA11 missile batteries recently entered Ukraine from Russia; A missile launch from the rebel-held area was detected by US Intelligence; Russian rebels are hiding black boxes on instructions from Moscow; One of the separatists’ military leaders “twitted proudly at the time that this plane was first shot down that his forces had taken down a Ukrainian military transport plane”. According to investigations carried out by activists in blogosphere alone, such claims are either utterly untrue or based upon actual events that are unrelated to the crash of MH17.
There is no any circumstantial, let alone scientific, evidence that Russia supplied any weapons to the separatists in Ukraine. The area is closely monitored by US and other NATO observers, both from space and on the ground, that any such movement of large and heavy equipment across Russia-Ukraine border would have been immediately detected and made known to the public as Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine. Russians are not stupid to do anything like that. And they are professional enough to know how to use heavy weapons and aircraft.
Russians are smart enough not to plunge themselves into an international scandal of such proportions. But someone in the West tries to convince ordinary people in Europe and US otherwise. That is why such anserine news reports appear as the one in New Republic: “Inside [the plane] were not live people, but corpses. The plane was not flown by live pilots; it was on autopilot. (Translated from Russian Website)”. Where on earth have they found that website? Crazy theories and baseless rumors can be found everywhere, both in Russia and US. It would be better if Western news media reported about expert points of view based on real pieces of evidence discovered by US, European, Malaysian, and Russian specialists.
Unfortunately, US and UK news outlets have dedicated their front pages to bizarre rumors, speculations, and most of all to premature accusations of Ukrainian separatists and Russia. They repeat over and over that circumstantial evidence for what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and to the 298 people on board is already powerful but they have failed to produce at least one piece of that evidence so far. It is all baseless rumors and wild accusations, as shameful and disgraceful as the US foreign policy is to date.
The way many Western journalists have been covering the MH17 crash has been an information warfare offensive against Russia designed to form public opinion even before the investigation has begun. Western journalists and politicians are certainly not crash investigators. There is no way to determine within a few hours how a plane was brought down, and yet that is exactly is happening in the Western media.
Citing evidence like fabricated social media posts is not sufficient to determine who brought the plane down. It is clear even to a child. Nonetheless, people in the US and Europe are being fed lies and accusations all along. There is nothing particularly new about it, though. US news media are known to have run absolutely false stories about Iraqi soldiers who were throwing their babies out hospital windows, about half a million of Kosovo Albanians who were murdered by the Serbs, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, they are spreading lies about Ukraine and its separatists.
Here is what Western media should report on MH17 crash, that is investigation carried out by Russian Defense Ministry. Unlike US and UK speculators with their preconceived narrative, Russian intelligence officers have already provided enough evidence to make Ukrainian government and their military leaders look worried, if not guilty. Among those pieces of evidence are satellite images of a group of three or four Buk-M1 air defense missile batteries Ukrainian forces deployed near Donetsk the day the Malaysian Airlines plane crashed.
Russia is noted to be using what appears to be legitimate photographic evidence (something the West has so far failed to provide in any capacity) that MH17 crashed within the operating zone of the Ukrainian army’s self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air ‘Buk’ missile systems.
Russia has also made public its data on the flight paths of the at least one Ukrainian fighter jet in close approach to MH17 before the crash. A Ukraine Air Force SU-25 fighter jet was detected airborne that day and it’s distance from the Malaysian plane was 3 to 5 kilometers. The presence of the Ukrainian military jet is confirmed by video shots made by the Rostov Monitoring Center.
So, it turns out that the plane might have been taken down by air-to-air missile rather than by surface-to-air one. On the other hand, it might turn out that neither of the missile types is responsible for the crash, if the plane had been rigged with a explosives. All this hullabaloo about missiles and Buk air defense missile batteries could be just a smokescreen intended to cover a terrorist act that involved a bomb on board of MH17. Any way, facts are needed to investigated this crash.
During a recent press conference, Russian Defense Ministry has demanded the US authorities to bring up any evidence as proof of their earlier accusations. According to Russian experts, US satellite was flying over the MH17 crash site. Therefore, there would be no problem providing satellite imagery to make things clear. The question is why it has not been done yet. There has been no proof that the missile (if any) was fired from the separatist-held area. There has been no proof that SA-11 Buk missile systems - or any weapon systems - were transported to or from the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
As a result of its investigation, the Russian Defense Ministry has set a number of questions to Ukrainian government:
1. Ukrainian authorities immediately identified the separatists as the perpetrators of the tragedy. What was the basis of such findings?
2. What were the instances and circumstances of using Buk missile systems in the war zone?
3. Why Buk air defense systems were deployed in the area, as the separatist militia groups have no fighter planes to use there?
4. What were the reasons for the inactivity of Ukrainian authorities on the formation of an international commission?
5. Will the armed forces of Ukraine be able to provide inventory documentation to international experts to account for all the missiles, air-to-air and ground-to-air ammo and anti-aircraft missiles?
6. Why did Ukrainian air traffic controllers allow air route deviation of the MH17 flight to the north of the proclaimed "anti-terrorist operation zone"?
7. Why the airspace over the combat zone was not completely closed to civilian aircraft, the area being just partially covered by radar signal for air traffic navigation?
7. How can Kiev officials comment on the reports allegedly made by the Spanish air traffic controllers working in Ukraine that the Boeing plane that was taken down over the territory of Ukraine was accompanied in air by two Ukrainian military aircraft?
8. Why has Security Service of Ukraine begun to investigate Ukrainian radar data and recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic controllers and MH17 pilots?
9. What lessons were drawn by Ukrainian authorities from the previous similar disaster that involved Russian Tu-154 aircraft in 2001 over the Black Sea? Back then, Ukraine had also denied any involvement of its Armed Forces in that tragedy until irrefutable evidence was brought up that proved Kiev responsible for the tragedy.
So far, there has been no response by Ukraine to these questions.
Hopefully, the questions raised by Russian experts should place Ukraine and the US in an awkward position.
As to the West, sometime, somewhere there will have to be presented at least some facts instead of merely continuing the "emotional appeals" propaganda based on dubious YouTube clips.
Russia Says Has Photos Of Ukraine Deploying BUK Missiles In East, Radar Proof Of Warplanes In MH17 Vicinity | Zero Hedge
Russia Says Has Photos Of Ukraine Deploying BUK Missiles In East, Radar Proof Of Warplanes In MH17 Vicinity | Zero Hedge
Russia Says Has Photos Of Ukraine Deploying BUK Missiles In East, Radar Proof Of Warplanes In MH17 Vicinity
Ukraine hasn’t said how it immediately knew rebels downed Malaysian
plane, notes the Russian Foreign Ministry, as it unveils 10 awkward
questions for Ukraine (and perhaps the US 'snap judgment') to answer
about the MH17 disaster. However, what is perhaps more concerning for
the hordes of finger-pointers is that:
- RUSSIA HAS IMAGES OF UKRAINE DEPLOYING BUK ROCKETS IN EAST: IFX
- RUSSIA: UKRAINE MOVED BUK NEAR REBELS IN DONETSK JULY 17: IFX
- RUSSIA DETECTED UKRAINIAN FIGHTER JET PICK UP SPEED TOWARD MH17
Obviously, if there is proof that this is so, aside from CIA-created
YouTube clips, these would deal another unpleasant blow to US foreign
policy.
Russia wants to know why Ukraine moved its BUK missiles systems the day of the MH17 crash:
RUSSIAN GENERAL STAFF HAS SPACE IMAGES OF SECTORS OF UKRAINIAN FORCES'
POSITIONS IN SOUTHEASTERN UKRAINE, INCLUDING BUK MISSILE LUNCH SITES 8
KILOMETERS FROM LUHANSK - RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY
The day
the Malaysian airliner crashed, the Ukrainian forces deployed an air
defense group of three or four Buk-M1 missile batteries near Donetsk,
Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, head of the Russian General Staff's Main
Operations Department, told reporters on Monday.
"These
surface-to-air systems are capable of hitting targets at a distance of
up to 35 kilometers at an altitude of 22 kilometers. For what purpose
and against whom were these missile systems deployed? As is known, the
militia has no aviation," he said.
Russia has the flight paths of the Ukrainian fighters and MH17.
Furthermore, it is asking the same question we asked last Thurday:
RUSSIA SAYS MH17 DIVERGED 14 KM FROM FLIGHT PATH NEAR DONETSK
“A Ukraine Air Force military jet was detected gaining height, it’s
distance from the Malaysian Boeing was 3 to 5km,” said the head of the
Main Operations Directorate of the HQ of Russia’s military forces,
Lieutenant-General Andrey Kartopolov speaking at a media conference in
Moscow on Monday.
“[We] would like to get an
explanation as to why the military jet was flying along a civil
aviation corridor at almost the same time and at the same level as a
passenger plane,” he stated.
“The SU-25
fighter jet can gain an altitude of 10km, according to its
specification,” he added. “It’s equipped with air-to-air R-60 missiles
that can hit a target at a distance up to 12km, up to 5km for sure.”
The presence of the Ukrainian military jet can be confirmed by video
shots made by the Rostov monitoring center, Kartopolov stated.
And asks for US proof of their accusations:
- RUSSIA SAYS U.S. SATELLITE FLEW OVER MH17 AT TIME IT WAS DOWNED...
which would provide all the proof needed to show who is responsible -
so why hasn't the US explained this or shown it?
- RUSSIA ASKS U.S. FOR EVIDENCE ROCKET FIRED FROM REBEL-HELD AREA
- RUSSIA: NO U.S. PROOF THAT MISSILE FIRED FROM REBEL-HELD AREA
- DEFENCE MINISTRY SAYS RUSSIA DID NOT DELIVER ANY SA-11 BUK MISSILE
SYSTEMS TO SEPARATISTS IN EASTERN UKRAINE "OR ANY OTHER WEAPONS"
And went on to rebuke all the Twitter photos created by Maidan to 'prove' the BUKs were moving in Russian hands.
Additionally, as Russia noted using what appears to be legitimate
photographic evidence (something the west has so far failed to provide
in any capacity) MH17 crashed within the operating zone of the Ukrainian
army’s self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air ‘Buk’ missile
systems, the Russian general said.
“We have space images of
certain places where the Ukraine’s air defense was located in the
southeast of the country,” Kartapolov noted.
The first three
shots that were shown by the general are dated July 14. The images show
Buk missile launch systems in about 8km northwest of the city of Lugansk
– a TELAR and two TELs, according to the military official.
The question that has to be answered is why the missile system appeared
in the area controlled by the local militia forces shortly before the
catastrophe, he stated.
* * *
Summing it all up, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has 10 questions for Ukraine (google translated)
The global public expects a speedy and independent investigation into
the causes of the disaster Malaysian aircraft in the airspace of
Ukraine.
In order to conduct an objective investigation of
possible leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
has ased ten questions to the Ukrainian side.
1. Ukrainian
authorities immediately identified the militia as the perpetrators of
the tragedy. What is the basis of such findings?
2. Could official Kiev to report all the details of using [BUKs] in
a war zone? Most importantly - why these systems are deployed there, as
the militia no planes?
3. What are the
causes of inactivity of Ukrainian authorities on the formation of an
international commission? When such a committee will work?
4. Are the armed forces of Ukraine international experts to present
papers on accounting for missiles, air-to-air and ground-to-air ammo
and anti-aircraft missiles?
5. Whether these
funds objective control on the movement of the Ukrainian Air Force
aircraft on the day of the tragedy brought international commission?
6. Why Ukrainian air traffic controllers allowed deviation of the
route of the aircraft to the north side of the "anti-terrorist operation
zone"?
7. Why was not completely closed to
civilian aircraft airspace over the combat zone, especially because in
this area there was no solid field of radar navigation?
8. Could official Kiev to comment on reports in the net, ostensibly
on behalf of the Spanish air traffic controllers working in Ukraine,
which shot down over the territory of Ukraine "Boeing" was accompanied
by two Ukrainian military aircraft?
9. Why
Security Service of Ukraine has begun without international
representatives work with recordings of talks with Ukrainian crew
dispatchers "Boeing" and Ukrainian radar data?
10. How were the lessons from previous similar disasters Russian
Tu-154 in 2001 in the Black Sea? Then the leaders of Ukraine until the
last minute denied any involvement of the Armed Forces of the country to
the tragedy until irrefutable evidence showed no guilt official Kiev.
Unfortunately, there has been no response by the Ukraine side to these
questions so far. We expect that there will be some answers.
* * *
Needless to say, this places Ukraine and The US (as main protagonist of
"finger pointer") in an awkward position as finally someone, somewhere
will have to present some actual facts instead of merely continuing the
"emotional appeals" propaganda.
We expect many of these
questions to be answered once the contents of flight MH17's black box
are revealed and/or when Ukraine finally releases an undoctored version
of the Air Traffic control recording with the doomed flight.
Russia Says Has Photos Of Ukraine Deploying BUK Missiles In East, Radar Proof Of Warplanes In MH17 Vicinity
Ukraine hasn’t said how it immediately knew rebels downed Malaysian
plane, notes the Russian Foreign Ministry, as it unveils 10 awkward
questions for Ukraine (and perhaps the US 'snap judgment') to answer
about the MH17 disaster. However, what is perhaps more concerning for
the hordes of finger-pointers is that:
- RUSSIA HAS IMAGES OF UKRAINE DEPLOYING BUK ROCKETS IN EAST: IFX
- RUSSIA: UKRAINE MOVED BUK NEAR REBELS IN DONETSK JULY 17: IFX
- RUSSIA DETECTED UKRAINIAN FIGHTER JET PICK UP SPEED TOWARD MH17
Obviously, if there is proof that this is so, aside from CIA-created
YouTube clips, these would deal another unpleasant blow to US foreign
policy.
Russia wants to know why Ukraine moved its BUK missiles systems the day of the MH17 crash:
RUSSIAN GENERAL STAFF HAS SPACE IMAGES OF SECTORS OF UKRAINIAN FORCES'
POSITIONS IN SOUTHEASTERN UKRAINE, INCLUDING BUK MISSILE LUNCH SITES 8
KILOMETERS FROM LUHANSK - RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY
The day
the Malaysian airliner crashed, the Ukrainian forces deployed an air
defense group of three or four Buk-M1 missile batteries near Donetsk,
Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, head of the Russian General Staff's Main
Operations Department, told reporters on Monday.
"These
surface-to-air systems are capable of hitting targets at a distance of
up to 35 kilometers at an altitude of 22 kilometers. For what purpose
and against whom were these missile systems deployed? As is known, the
militia has no aviation," he said.
Russia has the flight paths of the Ukrainian fighters and MH17.
Furthermore, it is asking the same question we asked last Thurday:
RUSSIA SAYS MH17 DIVERGED 14 KM FROM FLIGHT PATH NEAR DONETSK
“A Ukraine Air Force military jet was detected gaining height, it’s
distance from the Malaysian Boeing was 3 to 5km,” said the head of the
Main Operations Directorate of the HQ of Russia’s military forces,
Lieutenant-General Andrey Kartopolov speaking at a media conference in
Moscow on Monday.
“[We] would like to get an
explanation as to why the military jet was flying along a civil
aviation corridor at almost the same time and at the same level as a
passenger plane,” he stated.
“The SU-25
fighter jet can gain an altitude of 10km, according to its
specification,” he added. “It’s equipped with air-to-air R-60 missiles
that can hit a target at a distance up to 12km, up to 5km for sure.”
The presence of the Ukrainian military jet can be confirmed by video
shots made by the Rostov monitoring center, Kartopolov stated.
And asks for US proof of their accusations:
- RUSSIA SAYS U.S. SATELLITE FLEW OVER MH17 AT TIME IT WAS DOWNED...
which would provide all the proof needed to show who is responsible -
so why hasn't the US explained this or shown it?
- RUSSIA ASKS U.S. FOR EVIDENCE ROCKET FIRED FROM REBEL-HELD AREA
- RUSSIA: NO U.S. PROOF THAT MISSILE FIRED FROM REBEL-HELD AREA
- DEFENCE MINISTRY SAYS RUSSIA DID NOT DELIVER ANY SA-11 BUK MISSILE
SYSTEMS TO SEPARATISTS IN EASTERN UKRAINE "OR ANY OTHER WEAPONS"
And went on to rebuke all the Twitter photos created by Maidan to 'prove' the BUKs were moving in Russian hands.
Additionally, as Russia noted using what appears to be legitimate
photographic evidence (something the west has so far failed to provide
in any capacity) MH17 crashed within the operating zone of the Ukrainian
army’s self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air ‘Buk’ missile
systems, the Russian general said.
“We have space images of
certain places where the Ukraine’s air defense was located in the
southeast of the country,” Kartapolov noted.
The first three
shots that were shown by the general are dated July 14. The images show
Buk missile launch systems in about 8km northwest of the city of Lugansk
– a TELAR and two TELs, according to the military official.
The question that has to be answered is why the missile system appeared
in the area controlled by the local militia forces shortly before the
catastrophe, he stated.
* * *
Summing it all up, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has 10 questions for Ukraine (google translated)
The global public expects a speedy and independent investigation into
the causes of the disaster Malaysian aircraft in the airspace of
Ukraine.
In order to conduct an objective investigation of
possible leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
has ased ten questions to the Ukrainian side.
1. Ukrainian
authorities immediately identified the militia as the perpetrators of
the tragedy. What is the basis of such findings?
2. Could official Kiev to report all the details of using [BUKs] in
a war zone? Most importantly - why these systems are deployed there, as
the militia no planes?
3. What are the
causes of inactivity of Ukrainian authorities on the formation of an
international commission? When such a committee will work?
4. Are the armed forces of Ukraine international experts to present
papers on accounting for missiles, air-to-air and ground-to-air ammo
and anti-aircraft missiles?
5. Whether these
funds objective control on the movement of the Ukrainian Air Force
aircraft on the day of the tragedy brought international commission?
6. Why Ukrainian air traffic controllers allowed deviation of the
route of the aircraft to the north side of the "anti-terrorist operation
zone"?
7. Why was not completely closed to
civilian aircraft airspace over the combat zone, especially because in
this area there was no solid field of radar navigation?
8. Could official Kiev to comment on reports in the net, ostensibly
on behalf of the Spanish air traffic controllers working in Ukraine,
which shot down over the territory of Ukraine "Boeing" was accompanied
by two Ukrainian military aircraft?
9. Why
Security Service of Ukraine has begun without international
representatives work with recordings of talks with Ukrainian crew
dispatchers "Boeing" and Ukrainian radar data?
10. How were the lessons from previous similar disasters Russian
Tu-154 in 2001 in the Black Sea? Then the leaders of Ukraine until the
last minute denied any involvement of the Armed Forces of the country to
the tragedy until irrefutable evidence showed no guilt official Kiev.
Unfortunately, there has been no response by the Ukraine side to these
questions so far. We expect that there will be some answers.
* * *
Needless to say, this places Ukraine and The US (as main protagonist of
"finger pointer") in an awkward position as finally someone, somewhere
will have to present some actual facts instead of merely continuing the
"emotional appeals" propaganda.
We expect many of these
questions to be answered once the contents of flight MH17's black box
are revealed and/or when Ukraine finally releases an undoctored version
of the Air Traffic control recording with the doomed flight.
Ukrainian Su-25 Fighter detected in Close Approach to MH17 before Crash: Photographic Evidence By RT Global Research, July 21, 2014 - Science, Culture, Social - Forums of Pravda.Ru
Ukrainian Su-25 Fighter detected in Close Approach to MH17 before Crash: Photographic Evidence By RT Global Research, July 21, 2014 - Science, Culture, Social - Forums of Pravda.Ru
Ukrainian Su-25 Fighter
Ukrainian Su-25 Fighter
detected in Close Approach to MH17 before Crash: Photographic Evidence
By RT Global Research, July 21, 2014
Monday 21 July 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Movie-Made Me | TomDispatch
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Movie-Made Me | TomDispatch
How the Movies Saved My Life
Seeing the World in Black and White (With Subtitles)
By Tom Engelhardt
Every childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called me a “quince” (a fruit sour enough, they insisted, to make your face pucker, as mine did when challenged by any food out of the ordinary). I was neither a daredevil nor a chance-taker, and by my teens scorned myself for being so boringly on the straight and narrow. I never raced a car, or mocked a cop, or lit out for the territories.
Still, by the luck of the draw, as a child of the 1950s, I was plunged into a landscape more exotic than most American kids could then have imagined. It was still devastated by war, populated to a startling extent by present and former enemies, and most amazingly, the Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Russians (not to speak of the French and English) I encountered there were thrillingly alive in a way everything in my life told me we Americans weren’t.
Let me explain, geographically speaking and as personally as I can. I grew up at 40 East 58th Street, just off Madison Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan, two blocks from the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise got her hair cut. Apartment 6D -- “as in David,” we always said.
My parents moved there in 1946, just after World War II. It was two doors down from the Plaza movie theater, and getting to 6D was an exotic affair. You exited a small, gated elevator into a modest-sized corridor, apartments on either side, only to find yourself on a catwalk in the open air looking down on what might have been the low roofs of Paris. A stroll along that catwalk and a right turn into another corridor got you to our rent-controlled duplex with its living-room skylight under which my mother -- “New York’s girl caricaturist,” as she was known in the gossip columns of the war years -- regularly set up her easel. My room was upstairs.
The fifties are now recalled as a golden age when Americans, white ones anyway, burst into the suburbs, while all the consumerist gratifications deferred by the Great Depression and World War II were sated. It was the age of the television set (“Bigger screen… Brighter picture… Better reception”) and pop-up toasters, of Frigidaires and freezers big enough “for the whole family” (“holds 525 pounds!”), of “extension” phones, wonder of wonders, (“I just couldn’t get along without my kitchen telephone”), and cigarettes so “soothing to the nerves” that doctors and baseball players alike were proud to endorse them.
With good jobs and rising wages in a still war-battered world, the United States stood so much taller than the rest of the planet, manufacturing the large items of the peaceable life (cars, above all) and the advanced weaponry of war, often in the same dominant corporations. It was a world in which Bell Telephone, that purveyor of extension phones, could also run upbeat ads aimed at boys extolling its weapons work. (As one began: “Chip Martin, college reporter, sees a ‘talking brain’ for guided missiles... ‘Glad to see you, Chip. Understand you want to find out how our Air Force can guide a warhead a quarter of the way around the world. Well, look here...’”)
Inexpensive gas, cheap well-marbled steaks, and reliable warheads that might end life as we knew it -- that seems like a reasonable summary of the obvious in American life in those years. And if you were a kid and wanted more, Hollywood was there to deliver: it was a time when, on screen, the Marines always advanced before the movie ended, and the sound of a bugle meant the bluecoats were coming to save the day. It was the moment when, for the first time in history, teenagers had money in their pockets and could begin to spend it on clothes, records, and other entertainment, propelling the country into a new age in which the Mad Men of that era would begin advertising directly to them.
Bad Times in an American Golden Age
I knew that world, of course, even if our little “icebox,” which iced over easily, was no Frigidaire. Living in the middle of Manhattan, I could catch the all-American-ness of life by taking a three-block walk to the RKO 58th Street movie theater at the corner of Third Avenue where, popcorn in hand, I’d settle in for a double-feature version of the world as it was supposed to be.
There, too, I could regularly see my father’s war. Like so many of those we now call “the greatest generation,” he was silent on the subject of his war experience (except for rare rants about “war profiteers” and “the Japs”), but that mattered little. After all, what did he have to say when the movies taught me everything I needed to know about what he had done in his war?
Because the then-liberal rag the New York Post assigned my mother to draw the Army-McCarthy hearings (being broadcast live on ABC), we got a TV for the first time in April 1954. Of course, the sitcoms I was allowed to watch, like Hollywood’s war films, Westerns, and comedies, had a remarkable tendency to end tidily and on an upbeat note. Unlike movies about my father’s war, however, I had something to compare those sitcoms to and, much as I loved Father Knows Best, it bore not the slightest resemblance to anything my hard-pressed mother, angry father, and I were living out. In it, I could find no hint of the messy psychic geography of my own childhood.
For my nuclear family in those first years of the nuclear age, it was bad times all the way. In the middle years of the decade, my father, a salesman, was out of work and drinking heavily; my mother brought home “the bacon” (really, that’s the way they spoke about it then), which -- I have her account book from those years -- was excessively lean. They were struggling to keep up the appearance of a middle-class life while falling ever more deeply into debt. The fights about “Tommy’s doctor bill” or “Tommy’s school bill” began as soon as they thought I was asleep.
Among my most vivid memories was creeping out into the light of the hall, propping myself up by the stairs and listening, mesmerized, as my parents went at it below with startling verbal violence. Think of that as my first perch as a future writer.
Like most kids in most places, I assumed then that my life, including such eternally angry nights, was the way it was for everyone. My problems, as I saw it, didn’t actually begin until I stepped out onto 58th Street, where, as far as I could tell, a landscape strangely empty of interest stretched as far as the eye could see.
If America then sat atop the world, triumphant and alone, the blandness that aloneness bred, a kind of unnaturally fearful uniformity of everything, is difficult today to conjure up or even describe. At the time, though, I hardly understood why the world I was being promised struck me as so dull. I thought it was me. And above all, I didn’t have a clue when or how this would end and life, whatever that was, would begin.
Feeling “Foreign” in Fifties America
Fortunately for me, geography came to my rescue. My street, was -- no hyperbole here -- unique at that moment. You could have traveled a fair distance in 1950s America, hundreds or possibly thousands of miles, without stumbling upon a movie house dedicated to “foreign films,” and yet between Sixth Avenue and Lexington Avenue, in fewer than three and a half city blocks, I had three of them -- the Paris just west of Fifth Avenue, the Plaza by my house, and between Park and Lexington, the Fine Arts.
You would no more have wondered about why they were clustered there than why your parents duked it out each night. And yet how strange that was in a still remarkably white bread and parochial American world. Immigration, remember, had largely been shut down by act of Congress in 1924 (see, for example, the Asian Exclusion Act) and America’s doors didn’t begin to open again until the early 1950s. In a time when you can get bagels in El Paso and Thai, Japanese, or Mexican food in Anytown, USA, it’s hard to remember just how rare the “foreign” in “foreign films” once was. In that earlier era of American fear and hysteria, that word and the dreaded phrase “Communist influence” were linked.
And so, to enter the darkness of one of those theaters and be suddenly transported elsewhere on Earth, to consort with the enemy and immerse yourself in lives that couldn’t have seemed more alien (or attractive), under more empathetic circumstances -- well, that was not a common experience. Think of those movie houses not simply as one confused and unhappy teenage boy’s escape hatch from the world, but as Star Trekian-style wormholes into previously unsuspected parallel universes that happened to exist on planet Earth.
By the time I was thirteen, the manager of the Plaza had taken a shine to me and was letting me into any movie I cared to see. A Taste of Honey (a coming-of-age story about a working-class English girl -- Rita Tushingham with her soulful eyes -- impregnated by a black sailor and cared for by a gay man), Alan Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (a film of unparalleled murkiness, notable for a matchstick game the unnamed characters play that caused a minor cocktail party craze in its day), Billy Liar (a chance to fall in love with the young Julie Christie as a free spirit), Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (a medieval tale of rape and revenge) -- it didn’t matter. I seldom had the slightest idea what I was walking into, and in that Internet-less world there was no obvious place to find out, nor was there anyone to guide me through those films or tell me what I should think, which couldn’t have been more disorienting or glorious.
On any afternoon I might suddenly be French or Russian or -- weirdest of all for a Jewish kid living in New York City -- German. Each film was a shock all its own, a deep dive into some previously unimagined world. If I needed confirmation that these movies were from another universe, it was enough that, in an era of glorious Technicolor, they were still obdurately and inexplicably black and white, every one of them. What more evidence did I need that foreigners inhabited another planet?
The actors in those films, unlike Hollywood’s, existed on a remarkably human scale. Sometimes, they even fought as fiercely and messily as my parents and they had genuinely bad times, worse than anything I had yet imagined. Above all -- a particularly un-American trait in the movies then -- everything did not always end for the best.
In fact, however puzzlingly, sometimes those films didn’t seem to end at all, at least not in the way I then understood endings. As in the last frozen, agonizing, ecstatic image of a boy’s face in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (which I didn’t see until college), it was easy to imagine that almost anything might happen within moments of such “endings,” that life would go on -- which was, for me, completely unexpected at the movies.
And don’t forget that these films made you work. Except for the British movies, there were always subtitles, exotic in themselves, which made them seem like so many illustrated novels. And here was the strangest thing: that black-and-white world you had to read to decipher had an uncanny ability to suck the color out of Manhattan.
And those films offered history lessons capable of turning what I thought I knew upside down. In my American world, for instance, the atomic bomb was everywhere, just not in clearly recognizable form. If you went to the RKO to catch Them! or This Island Earth, for instance, you could see the bomb and its effects, after a fashion, via fantasies about radioactive mutant monsters and alien superweapons. Still, you could grow up in 1950s America, as I did, without ever learning much or seeing a thing about what two actual atomic bombs had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- unless, that is, your local movie theater happened to show Alain Resnais’s 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour (scripted by the novelist Marguerite Duras).
Under the Mushroom Cloud
But before I go on, a caveat. Perhaps the reason memoirs are so often written by the young these days is that, once you reach a certain age, only fiction might allow you to truly make your way back to childhood. I have not the slightest doubt that those hours in the dark profoundly affected my life, and yet I find it difficult indeed to conjure the boy who first slipped into those movie houses on his own. Much of the time, it seems to me, he belongs to someone else’s novel, someone else’s life.
Trying to make my way back to whatever he thought when he first saw those films, I feel like an archeologist digging in the ruins of my own life. When I view the same films today, I sometimes get a chill of recognition and I’m still won over, but often I wonder just what he saw in them. What in the world could my teenage self have thought while watching Hiroshima Mon Amour, parts of which -- apologies to Duras and Resnais -- are unbearably pretentious? (“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing... Hiroshima, that’s your name...”)
A film about a one-night stand between a French actress making a “peace” movie in the rebuilt city of Hiroshima (who had once loved a German soldier in wartime France and paid the price), and a married Japanese architect who had been in the army in World War II while his family lived (and perhaps died) in that city -- what did I make of that? What did I know? There was flesh to be seen, however obliquely, in bed, in the shower -- and back then that was something. But there were also those dismally incantatory lines from Duras.
Here’s what I don’t doubt, though: that film gave me a gut-level primer in nuclear politics and nuclear destruction available nowhere else in my world. No mutant monsters, spaceships, or alien superweapons, just grainy, graphic glimpses of the victims from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and of other “victims” being made up -- burn patterns and keloids being painted on bodies -- for the actress’s antinuclear “peace” movie, the film within the film.
It was there that I watched my first antinuclear demonstration -- again for that other movie -- as protesters marched by with signs that offered a little lesson in atomic politics and some basic information about nuclear weapons. Above all, I was, however briefly, taken under the mushroom cloud to see something then essentially taboo in this country: the real results of our “victory weapon,” of what we had done to them, of my father’s war as I would never otherwise have seen it.
If the scenes of the two lovers titillated me, those brief glimpses under that cloud haunted me. Certainly, the dreams I had in those years, in which the bomb went off over a distant city while a blast of heat seared my body, or I found myself wandering through some bleak, atomically blasted landscape, owed something to that film.
Like all of us, I wonder what made me the way I am. What left me, as a book editor, able to slip inside the skin of someone else’s words? What gave me, as a critic, the distance to see our world askew? What made me, never having been in the military, create a website that focuses a critical eye on the American way of war?
There are, of course, no answers to such questions, just guesses. But I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t believe that those hours in the dark had something to do with it. I wouldn’t be focused on a movie I can now barely watch if I wasn’t convinced that it had a hand in sending me, as a book editor, on my own Hiroshima journey. (In 1979, I would publish in translation a Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, which, I believe, was the first time any sizable number of images of the experience under Hiroshima’s mushroom cloud made it into mainstream American culture.)
Consorting With the Enemy
Compare all this to the war I saw at my local RKO, the one John Wayne led, the one in which the highly decorated Audie Murphy played himself on-screen mowing down Germans by the score. And then, right down the block, there was the other war I sat in on, the one our enemies fought, the one that lacked my father. As a boy, I was undoubtedly typical in imagining the defeat of Hitler as essentially an American triumph in Europe -- until, that is, I walked into the Fine Arts and saw Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying.
Part of a post-Stalinist cinematic breakout moment, its heroine and hero, Veronica and Boris, are young, in love, filmed at arty angles, and in the movie’s early scenes might as well be frolicking on the banks of the Seine. But that mood only lasts until the Nazis invade. Boris volunteers for the army and, finding himself and his unit in a swamp surrounded by Germans, dies heroically but miserably in the mud. The news of his death never reaches the waiting Veronica in Moscow, who goes into shock on finding her apartment destroyed and her parents dead from a German air raid, is raped (so the film implies) in that state during another air raid by Boris’s cousin, a pianist and draft evader, and grimly marries him… and that’s hardly halfway into the film.
There is also the child Veronica saves from being run over just as she’s about to commit suicide, who also turns out to be named Boris. Yes, call it an absurd war melodrama, but it was also passionately filled to the brim with mud, fire, overcrowded living quarters, rooms full of wounded soldiers, slackers, and high-livers in a panorama of wartime Russia.
Grim, shocking, and above all youthful, it was the Russian film that not only took Europe by storm and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958, but took me by storm as well. The Russians -- the Reds, the Commies -- were then our mortal enemies. So imagine my surprise on discovering, up close and personal, that they had fought a monumental, terrible war against the Nazis, and that they couldn’t have been more human -- or winning.
A year or two later, I would watch Ballad of a Soldier, another Russian war film, this time about a kid hardly older than I was then who gets a six-day pass from the front for wiping out a couple of German tanks (in a paroxysm of fear). In an odyssey through a devastated landscape -- city buildings blasted, trains blown up, bridges down, amputees visible -- he makes his way home just in time to greet his mother, kiss her goodbye, and head back to the front (where, you’ve learned as the film begins, he dies). You simply could not see such films and hate the Russians.
Then, on the theme of teenagers at war, there was The Bridge, a fierce 1959 antiwar film directed by Bernhard Wicki that genuinely shocked me, perhaps as much because I found myself identifying with those German boy soldiers as by the brutality of the fighting into which they were plunged. In the last days of World War II, a group of small-town, high-spirited high school classmates, no older than I was then, are ushered hurriedly into the army, given the briefest training, and (while Nazi officials flee) rushed to a bridge of absolutely no significance to stop advancing American tanks.
They are patriotic and absurdly eager to defend their town and country. All but one of them die for nothing, as does an American trying to convince them to stop fighting. (“We don’t fight kids!” he yells before one of them shoots him.) The film ends on these words, which then chilled me to the bone: “This happened on April 27, 1945. It was so unimportant that it was not mentioned in any war communiqué.”
To see that war through German eyes, even briefly, was to enter forbidden territory. Nonetheless, those boys were, to me, as unnervingly human as the French pilot in Serge Bourguignon’s 1962 film Sundays and Cybele, suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder after killing a child in the French version of the Vietnam War. Back in Paris, he strikes up an “innocent” relationship with a 12-year-old girl (which, I can now see, had surprisingly sexual overtones), is mistaken for someone out to kill her, and shot dead by the police, the sight of which passes his trauma on to her.
These films and others like them gave me a space apart where I was privileged to absorb secrets no one in my world knew (which, to a lost teen, was nothing less than life preserving). They confirmed in me a sense that the world was not as we were told, nor was ours the single most exceptional way of living on Earth.
Like that perch by the stairs above my parents’ fights, those films helped turn me into a critic -- of Hollywood certainly, of our American world more generally, and of my own world more specifically. And the space they opened for a child who despaired of himself (and the triumphalist American future everyone assured him was rightfully his) would prove useful decades later.
After all, I now write about our American wars without ever having visited a war zone -- except, of course, in the movies. There, in the 1950s and early 1960s, I advanced with the marines and the Russians, bombed Tokyo but also experienced (however briefly) Hiroshima after it was atomized. I took out Panzers, but for two hours one afternoon was a German boy waiting to die at a bridge of no significance as American tanks bore down on him.
So let me now, for the first time, offer a small bow of gratitude to Alain Resnais, Mikhail Kalatozov, Serge Bourguignon, Bernhard Wicki, François Truffaut, and all the others I met at the movies so long ago who turned my world inside out. You saved my life.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published momentarily. This piece first appeared in slightly different form in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses American exceptionalism in his childhood and now click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175469/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_movie-made_me/
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How the Movies Saved My Life
Seeing the World in Black and White (With Subtitles)
By Tom Engelhardt
Every childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called me a “quince” (a fruit sour enough, they insisted, to make your face pucker, as mine did when challenged by any food out of the ordinary). I was neither a daredevil nor a chance-taker, and by my teens scorned myself for being so boringly on the straight and narrow. I never raced a car, or mocked a cop, or lit out for the territories.
Still, by the luck of the draw, as a child of the 1950s, I was plunged into a landscape more exotic than most American kids could then have imagined. It was still devastated by war, populated to a startling extent by present and former enemies, and most amazingly, the Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Russians (not to speak of the French and English) I encountered there were thrillingly alive in a way everything in my life told me we Americans weren’t.
Let me explain, geographically speaking and as personally as I can. I grew up at 40 East 58th Street, just off Madison Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan, two blocks from the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise got her hair cut. Apartment 6D -- “as in David,” we always said.
My parents moved there in 1946, just after World War II. It was two doors down from the Plaza movie theater, and getting to 6D was an exotic affair. You exited a small, gated elevator into a modest-sized corridor, apartments on either side, only to find yourself on a catwalk in the open air looking down on what might have been the low roofs of Paris. A stroll along that catwalk and a right turn into another corridor got you to our rent-controlled duplex with its living-room skylight under which my mother -- “New York’s girl caricaturist,” as she was known in the gossip columns of the war years -- regularly set up her easel. My room was upstairs.
The fifties are now recalled as a golden age when Americans, white ones anyway, burst into the suburbs, while all the consumerist gratifications deferred by the Great Depression and World War II were sated. It was the age of the television set (“Bigger screen… Brighter picture… Better reception”) and pop-up toasters, of Frigidaires and freezers big enough “for the whole family” (“holds 525 pounds!”), of “extension” phones, wonder of wonders, (“I just couldn’t get along without my kitchen telephone”), and cigarettes so “soothing to the nerves” that doctors and baseball players alike were proud to endorse them.
With good jobs and rising wages in a still war-battered world, the United States stood so much taller than the rest of the planet, manufacturing the large items of the peaceable life (cars, above all) and the advanced weaponry of war, often in the same dominant corporations. It was a world in which Bell Telephone, that purveyor of extension phones, could also run upbeat ads aimed at boys extolling its weapons work. (As one began: “Chip Martin, college reporter, sees a ‘talking brain’ for guided missiles... ‘Glad to see you, Chip. Understand you want to find out how our Air Force can guide a warhead a quarter of the way around the world. Well, look here...’”)
Inexpensive gas, cheap well-marbled steaks, and reliable warheads that might end life as we knew it -- that seems like a reasonable summary of the obvious in American life in those years. And if you were a kid and wanted more, Hollywood was there to deliver: it was a time when, on screen, the Marines always advanced before the movie ended, and the sound of a bugle meant the bluecoats were coming to save the day. It was the moment when, for the first time in history, teenagers had money in their pockets and could begin to spend it on clothes, records, and other entertainment, propelling the country into a new age in which the Mad Men of that era would begin advertising directly to them.
Bad Times in an American Golden Age
I knew that world, of course, even if our little “icebox,” which iced over easily, was no Frigidaire. Living in the middle of Manhattan, I could catch the all-American-ness of life by taking a three-block walk to the RKO 58th Street movie theater at the corner of Third Avenue where, popcorn in hand, I’d settle in for a double-feature version of the world as it was supposed to be.
There, too, I could regularly see my father’s war. Like so many of those we now call “the greatest generation,” he was silent on the subject of his war experience (except for rare rants about “war profiteers” and “the Japs”), but that mattered little. After all, what did he have to say when the movies taught me everything I needed to know about what he had done in his war?
Because the then-liberal rag the New York Post assigned my mother to draw the Army-McCarthy hearings (being broadcast live on ABC), we got a TV for the first time in April 1954. Of course, the sitcoms I was allowed to watch, like Hollywood’s war films, Westerns, and comedies, had a remarkable tendency to end tidily and on an upbeat note. Unlike movies about my father’s war, however, I had something to compare those sitcoms to and, much as I loved Father Knows Best, it bore not the slightest resemblance to anything my hard-pressed mother, angry father, and I were living out. In it, I could find no hint of the messy psychic geography of my own childhood.
For my nuclear family in those first years of the nuclear age, it was bad times all the way. In the middle years of the decade, my father, a salesman, was out of work and drinking heavily; my mother brought home “the bacon” (really, that’s the way they spoke about it then), which -- I have her account book from those years -- was excessively lean. They were struggling to keep up the appearance of a middle-class life while falling ever more deeply into debt. The fights about “Tommy’s doctor bill” or “Tommy’s school bill” began as soon as they thought I was asleep.
Among my most vivid memories was creeping out into the light of the hall, propping myself up by the stairs and listening, mesmerized, as my parents went at it below with startling verbal violence. Think of that as my first perch as a future writer.
Like most kids in most places, I assumed then that my life, including such eternally angry nights, was the way it was for everyone. My problems, as I saw it, didn’t actually begin until I stepped out onto 58th Street, where, as far as I could tell, a landscape strangely empty of interest stretched as far as the eye could see.
If America then sat atop the world, triumphant and alone, the blandness that aloneness bred, a kind of unnaturally fearful uniformity of everything, is difficult today to conjure up or even describe. At the time, though, I hardly understood why the world I was being promised struck me as so dull. I thought it was me. And above all, I didn’t have a clue when or how this would end and life, whatever that was, would begin.
Feeling “Foreign” in Fifties America
Fortunately for me, geography came to my rescue. My street, was -- no hyperbole here -- unique at that moment. You could have traveled a fair distance in 1950s America, hundreds or possibly thousands of miles, without stumbling upon a movie house dedicated to “foreign films,” and yet between Sixth Avenue and Lexington Avenue, in fewer than three and a half city blocks, I had three of them -- the Paris just west of Fifth Avenue, the Plaza by my house, and between Park and Lexington, the Fine Arts.
You would no more have wondered about why they were clustered there than why your parents duked it out each night. And yet how strange that was in a still remarkably white bread and parochial American world. Immigration, remember, had largely been shut down by act of Congress in 1924 (see, for example, the Asian Exclusion Act) and America’s doors didn’t begin to open again until the early 1950s. In a time when you can get bagels in El Paso and Thai, Japanese, or Mexican food in Anytown, USA, it’s hard to remember just how rare the “foreign” in “foreign films” once was. In that earlier era of American fear and hysteria, that word and the dreaded phrase “Communist influence” were linked.
And so, to enter the darkness of one of those theaters and be suddenly transported elsewhere on Earth, to consort with the enemy and immerse yourself in lives that couldn’t have seemed more alien (or attractive), under more empathetic circumstances -- well, that was not a common experience. Think of those movie houses not simply as one confused and unhappy teenage boy’s escape hatch from the world, but as Star Trekian-style wormholes into previously unsuspected parallel universes that happened to exist on planet Earth.
By the time I was thirteen, the manager of the Plaza had taken a shine to me and was letting me into any movie I cared to see. A Taste of Honey (a coming-of-age story about a working-class English girl -- Rita Tushingham with her soulful eyes -- impregnated by a black sailor and cared for by a gay man), Alan Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (a film of unparalleled murkiness, notable for a matchstick game the unnamed characters play that caused a minor cocktail party craze in its day), Billy Liar (a chance to fall in love with the young Julie Christie as a free spirit), Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (a medieval tale of rape and revenge) -- it didn’t matter. I seldom had the slightest idea what I was walking into, and in that Internet-less world there was no obvious place to find out, nor was there anyone to guide me through those films or tell me what I should think, which couldn’t have been more disorienting or glorious.
On any afternoon I might suddenly be French or Russian or -- weirdest of all for a Jewish kid living in New York City -- German. Each film was a shock all its own, a deep dive into some previously unimagined world. If I needed confirmation that these movies were from another universe, it was enough that, in an era of glorious Technicolor, they were still obdurately and inexplicably black and white, every one of them. What more evidence did I need that foreigners inhabited another planet?
The actors in those films, unlike Hollywood’s, existed on a remarkably human scale. Sometimes, they even fought as fiercely and messily as my parents and they had genuinely bad times, worse than anything I had yet imagined. Above all -- a particularly un-American trait in the movies then -- everything did not always end for the best.
In fact, however puzzlingly, sometimes those films didn’t seem to end at all, at least not in the way I then understood endings. As in the last frozen, agonizing, ecstatic image of a boy’s face in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (which I didn’t see until college), it was easy to imagine that almost anything might happen within moments of such “endings,” that life would go on -- which was, for me, completely unexpected at the movies.
And don’t forget that these films made you work. Except for the British movies, there were always subtitles, exotic in themselves, which made them seem like so many illustrated novels. And here was the strangest thing: that black-and-white world you had to read to decipher had an uncanny ability to suck the color out of Manhattan.
And those films offered history lessons capable of turning what I thought I knew upside down. In my American world, for instance, the atomic bomb was everywhere, just not in clearly recognizable form. If you went to the RKO to catch Them! or This Island Earth, for instance, you could see the bomb and its effects, after a fashion, via fantasies about radioactive mutant monsters and alien superweapons. Still, you could grow up in 1950s America, as I did, without ever learning much or seeing a thing about what two actual atomic bombs had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- unless, that is, your local movie theater happened to show Alain Resnais’s 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour (scripted by the novelist Marguerite Duras).
Under the Mushroom Cloud
But before I go on, a caveat. Perhaps the reason memoirs are so often written by the young these days is that, once you reach a certain age, only fiction might allow you to truly make your way back to childhood. I have not the slightest doubt that those hours in the dark profoundly affected my life, and yet I find it difficult indeed to conjure the boy who first slipped into those movie houses on his own. Much of the time, it seems to me, he belongs to someone else’s novel, someone else’s life.
Trying to make my way back to whatever he thought when he first saw those films, I feel like an archeologist digging in the ruins of my own life. When I view the same films today, I sometimes get a chill of recognition and I’m still won over, but often I wonder just what he saw in them. What in the world could my teenage self have thought while watching Hiroshima Mon Amour, parts of which -- apologies to Duras and Resnais -- are unbearably pretentious? (“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing... Hiroshima, that’s your name...”)
A film about a one-night stand between a French actress making a “peace” movie in the rebuilt city of Hiroshima (who had once loved a German soldier in wartime France and paid the price), and a married Japanese architect who had been in the army in World War II while his family lived (and perhaps died) in that city -- what did I make of that? What did I know? There was flesh to be seen, however obliquely, in bed, in the shower -- and back then that was something. But there were also those dismally incantatory lines from Duras.
Here’s what I don’t doubt, though: that film gave me a gut-level primer in nuclear politics and nuclear destruction available nowhere else in my world. No mutant monsters, spaceships, or alien superweapons, just grainy, graphic glimpses of the victims from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and of other “victims” being made up -- burn patterns and keloids being painted on bodies -- for the actress’s antinuclear “peace” movie, the film within the film.
It was there that I watched my first antinuclear demonstration -- again for that other movie -- as protesters marched by with signs that offered a little lesson in atomic politics and some basic information about nuclear weapons. Above all, I was, however briefly, taken under the mushroom cloud to see something then essentially taboo in this country: the real results of our “victory weapon,” of what we had done to them, of my father’s war as I would never otherwise have seen it.
If the scenes of the two lovers titillated me, those brief glimpses under that cloud haunted me. Certainly, the dreams I had in those years, in which the bomb went off over a distant city while a blast of heat seared my body, or I found myself wandering through some bleak, atomically blasted landscape, owed something to that film.
Like all of us, I wonder what made me the way I am. What left me, as a book editor, able to slip inside the skin of someone else’s words? What gave me, as a critic, the distance to see our world askew? What made me, never having been in the military, create a website that focuses a critical eye on the American way of war?
There are, of course, no answers to such questions, just guesses. But I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t believe that those hours in the dark had something to do with it. I wouldn’t be focused on a movie I can now barely watch if I wasn’t convinced that it had a hand in sending me, as a book editor, on my own Hiroshima journey. (In 1979, I would publish in translation a Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, which, I believe, was the first time any sizable number of images of the experience under Hiroshima’s mushroom cloud made it into mainstream American culture.)
Consorting With the Enemy
Compare all this to the war I saw at my local RKO, the one John Wayne led, the one in which the highly decorated Audie Murphy played himself on-screen mowing down Germans by the score. And then, right down the block, there was the other war I sat in on, the one our enemies fought, the one that lacked my father. As a boy, I was undoubtedly typical in imagining the defeat of Hitler as essentially an American triumph in Europe -- until, that is, I walked into the Fine Arts and saw Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying.
Part of a post-Stalinist cinematic breakout moment, its heroine and hero, Veronica and Boris, are young, in love, filmed at arty angles, and in the movie’s early scenes might as well be frolicking on the banks of the Seine. But that mood only lasts until the Nazis invade. Boris volunteers for the army and, finding himself and his unit in a swamp surrounded by Germans, dies heroically but miserably in the mud. The news of his death never reaches the waiting Veronica in Moscow, who goes into shock on finding her apartment destroyed and her parents dead from a German air raid, is raped (so the film implies) in that state during another air raid by Boris’s cousin, a pianist and draft evader, and grimly marries him… and that’s hardly halfway into the film.
There is also the child Veronica saves from being run over just as she’s about to commit suicide, who also turns out to be named Boris. Yes, call it an absurd war melodrama, but it was also passionately filled to the brim with mud, fire, overcrowded living quarters, rooms full of wounded soldiers, slackers, and high-livers in a panorama of wartime Russia.
Grim, shocking, and above all youthful, it was the Russian film that not only took Europe by storm and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958, but took me by storm as well. The Russians -- the Reds, the Commies -- were then our mortal enemies. So imagine my surprise on discovering, up close and personal, that they had fought a monumental, terrible war against the Nazis, and that they couldn’t have been more human -- or winning.
A year or two later, I would watch Ballad of a Soldier, another Russian war film, this time about a kid hardly older than I was then who gets a six-day pass from the front for wiping out a couple of German tanks (in a paroxysm of fear). In an odyssey through a devastated landscape -- city buildings blasted, trains blown up, bridges down, amputees visible -- he makes his way home just in time to greet his mother, kiss her goodbye, and head back to the front (where, you’ve learned as the film begins, he dies). You simply could not see such films and hate the Russians.
Then, on the theme of teenagers at war, there was The Bridge, a fierce 1959 antiwar film directed by Bernhard Wicki that genuinely shocked me, perhaps as much because I found myself identifying with those German boy soldiers as by the brutality of the fighting into which they were plunged. In the last days of World War II, a group of small-town, high-spirited high school classmates, no older than I was then, are ushered hurriedly into the army, given the briefest training, and (while Nazi officials flee) rushed to a bridge of absolutely no significance to stop advancing American tanks.
They are patriotic and absurdly eager to defend their town and country. All but one of them die for nothing, as does an American trying to convince them to stop fighting. (“We don’t fight kids!” he yells before one of them shoots him.) The film ends on these words, which then chilled me to the bone: “This happened on April 27, 1945. It was so unimportant that it was not mentioned in any war communiqué.”
To see that war through German eyes, even briefly, was to enter forbidden territory. Nonetheless, those boys were, to me, as unnervingly human as the French pilot in Serge Bourguignon’s 1962 film Sundays and Cybele, suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder after killing a child in the French version of the Vietnam War. Back in Paris, he strikes up an “innocent” relationship with a 12-year-old girl (which, I can now see, had surprisingly sexual overtones), is mistaken for someone out to kill her, and shot dead by the police, the sight of which passes his trauma on to her.
These films and others like them gave me a space apart where I was privileged to absorb secrets no one in my world knew (which, to a lost teen, was nothing less than life preserving). They confirmed in me a sense that the world was not as we were told, nor was ours the single most exceptional way of living on Earth.
Like that perch by the stairs above my parents’ fights, those films helped turn me into a critic -- of Hollywood certainly, of our American world more generally, and of my own world more specifically. And the space they opened for a child who despaired of himself (and the triumphalist American future everyone assured him was rightfully his) would prove useful decades later.
After all, I now write about our American wars without ever having visited a war zone -- except, of course, in the movies. There, in the 1950s and early 1960s, I advanced with the marines and the Russians, bombed Tokyo but also experienced (however briefly) Hiroshima after it was atomized. I took out Panzers, but for two hours one afternoon was a German boy waiting to die at a bridge of no significance as American tanks bore down on him.
So let me now, for the first time, offer a small bow of gratitude to Alain Resnais, Mikhail Kalatozov, Serge Bourguignon, Bernhard Wicki, François Truffaut, and all the others I met at the movies so long ago who turned my world inside out. You saved my life.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published momentarily. This piece first appeared in slightly different form in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses American exceptionalism in his childhood and now click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175469/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_movie-made_me/
© 2014 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
DoctorBeet's Blog: LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
DoctorBeet's Blog: LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
Earlier this month I discovered that my new LG Smart TV was displaying ads on the Smart landing screen.
From DoctorBeet's Blog
After some investigation, I found a rather creepy corporate video (since removed, mirror here) advertising their data collection practices to potential advertisers. It's quite long but a sample of their claims are as follows:
LG Smart Ad analyses users favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences. For example, LG Smart Ad can feature sharp suits to men, or alluring cosmetics and fragrances to women.
Furthermore, LG Smart Ad offers useful and various advertising performance reports. That live broadcasting ads cannot. To accurately identify actual advertising effectiveness.
In fact, there is an option in the system settings called "Collection of watching info:" which is set ON by default. This setting requires the user to scroll down to see it and, unlike most other settings, contains no "balloon help" to describe what it does.
At this point, I decided to do some traffic analysis to see what was being sent. It turns out that viewing information appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off.
Here you can clearly see that a unique device ID is transmitted, along with the Channel name "BBC NEWS" and a unique device ID.
Here is another example of a viewing info packet.
GB.smartshare.lgtvsdp.com POST /ibs/v2.2/service/watchInformation.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: GB.ibis.lgappstv.com
Accept: */*
X-Device-Product:NETCAST 4.0
X-Device-Platform:NC4M
X-Device-Model:HE_DTV_NC4M_AFAAABAA
X-Device-Netcast-Platform-Version:0004.0002.0000
X-Device-Country:GB
X-Device-Country-Group:EU
X-Device-ID:2yxQ5kEhf45fjUD35G+E/xdq7xxWE2ghu0j4an9kbGoNcyWaSsoLgyk8JJoMtjRrYRsVS6mHKy/Zdd6nZp+Y+gK6DVqnbQeDqr16YgacdzKU80sCKwOAi1TwIQov/SlB
X-Authentication:YMu3V1dv8m8JD0ghrsmEToxONDI= cookie:JSESSIONID=3BB87277C55EED9489B6E6B2DEA7C9FD.node_sdpibis10; Path=/
Content-Length: 460
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
&chan_name=BBC TWO&device_src_idx=1&dtv_standard_type=2
&broadcast_type=2&device_platform_name=NETCAST 4.0_mtk5398&chan_code=251533454-72E0D0FB0A8A4C70E4E2D829523CA235&external_input_name=Antenna&chan_phy_no=&atsc_chan_maj_no=&atsc_chan_min_no=&chan_src_idx=1&chan_phy_no=&atsc_chan_maj_no=&atsc_chan_min_no=&chan_phy_no=47&atsc_chan_maj_no=2&atsc_chan_min_no=2&chan_src_idx=1&dvb_chan_nw_id=9018&dvb_chan_transf_id=4170&dvb_chan_svc_id=4287&watch_dvc_logging=0
This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel, even if you have gone to the trouble of changing the setting above to switch collection of viewing information off.
It was at this point, I made an even more disturbing find within the packet data dumps. I noticed filenames were being posted to LG's servers and that these filenames were ones stored on my external USB hard drive. To demonstrate this, I created a mock avi file and copied it to a USB stick.
This file didn't really contain "midget porn" at all, I renamed it to make sure it had a unique filename that I could spot easily in the data and one that was unlikely to come from a broadcast source.
And sure enough, there is was...
Sometimes the names of the contents of an entire folder was posted, other times nothing was sent. I couldn't determine what rules controlled this.
I think it's important to point out that the URL that the data is being POSTed to doesn't in fact exist, you can see this from the HTTP 404 response in the next response from LG's server after the ACK.
However, despite being missing at the moment, this collection URL could be implemented by LG on their server tomorrow, enabling them to start transparently collecting detailed information on what media files you have stored.
It would easily be possible to infer the presence of adult content or files that had been downloaded from file sharing sites. My wife was shocked to see our children's names being transmitted in the name of a Christmas video file that we had watched from USB.
So what does LG have to say about this? I approached them and asked them to comment on data collection, profiling of their customers, collection of usage information and mandatory embedded advertising on products that their customers had paid for. Their response to this was as follows:
Good Morning
Thank you for your e-mail.
Further to our previous email to yourself, we have escalated the issues you reported to LG's UK Head Office.
The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us again.
Kind Regards
Tom
LG Electronics UK Helpdesk
Tel: [premium rate number removed]
Fax: 01480 274 000
Email: cic.uk@lge.com
UK: [premium rate number removed] Ireland: 0818 27 6954
Mon-Fri 9am to 8pm Sat 9am-6pm
Sunday 11am - 5pm
I haven't asked them about leaking of USB filenames due to the "deal with it" nature of the above response but I have no real expectation that their response would be any different.
So how can we prevent this from happening? I haven't read the T&Cs but one thing I am sure about is that I own my router and have absolute jurisdiction of any traffic that I allow to pass, so I have compiled an initial list of internet domains that you can block to stop spying and advertising on TVs that we, as customers have actually paid for.
ad.lgappstv.com
yumenetworks.com
smartclip.net
smartclip.com
llnwd.net
smartshare.lgtvsdp.com
ibis.lgappstv.com
This will free you from seeing ads plastered on your screen and having your viewing habits monitored, whilst it should still allow firmware updates to be applied.
(Update: removed llnwd domain, see comments)
(Update: 14 Dec 2013 - Changed Imgur images to Blogger to reduce dependencies. Minor formatting, Added mirror of linked Video)
http://doctorbeet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging-usb-filenames-and.html
LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
Earlier this month I discovered that my new LG Smart TV was displaying ads on the Smart landing screen.
From DoctorBeet's Blog
After some investigation, I found a rather creepy corporate video (since removed, mirror here) advertising their data collection practices to potential advertisers. It's quite long but a sample of their claims are as follows:
LG Smart Ad analyses users favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences. For example, LG Smart Ad can feature sharp suits to men, or alluring cosmetics and fragrances to women.
Furthermore, LG Smart Ad offers useful and various advertising performance reports. That live broadcasting ads cannot. To accurately identify actual advertising effectiveness.
In fact, there is an option in the system settings called "Collection of watching info:" which is set ON by default. This setting requires the user to scroll down to see it and, unlike most other settings, contains no "balloon help" to describe what it does.
At this point, I decided to do some traffic analysis to see what was being sent. It turns out that viewing information appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off.
Here you can clearly see that a unique device ID is transmitted, along with the Channel name "BBC NEWS" and a unique device ID.
Here is another example of a viewing info packet.
GB.smartshare.lgtvsdp.com POST /ibs/v2.2/service/watchInformation.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: GB.ibis.lgappstv.com
Accept: */*
X-Device-Product:NETCAST 4.0
X-Device-Platform:NC4M
X-Device-Model:HE_DTV_NC4M_AFAAABAA
X-Device-Netcast-Platform-Version:0004.0002.0000
X-Device-Country:GB
X-Device-Country-Group:EU
X-Device-ID:2yxQ5kEhf45fjUD35G+E/xdq7xxWE2ghu0j4an9kbGoNcyWaSsoLgyk8JJoMtjRrYRsVS6mHKy/Zdd6nZp+Y+gK6DVqnbQeDqr16YgacdzKU80sCKwOAi1TwIQov/SlB
X-Authentication:YMu3V1dv8m8JD0ghrsmEToxONDI= cookie:JSESSIONID=3BB87277C55EED9489B6E6B2DEA7C9FD.node_sdpibis10; Path=/
Content-Length: 460
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
&chan_name=BBC TWO&device_src_idx=1&dtv_standard_type=2
&broadcast_type=2&device_platform_name=NETCAST 4.0_mtk5398&chan_code=251533454-72E0D0FB0A8A4C70E4E2D829523CA235&external_input_name=Antenna&chan_phy_no=&atsc_chan_maj_no=&atsc_chan_min_no=&chan_src_idx=1&chan_phy_no=&atsc_chan_maj_no=&atsc_chan_min_no=&chan_phy_no=47&atsc_chan_maj_no=2&atsc_chan_min_no=2&chan_src_idx=1&dvb_chan_nw_id=9018&dvb_chan_transf_id=4170&dvb_chan_svc_id=4287&watch_dvc_logging=0
This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel, even if you have gone to the trouble of changing the setting above to switch collection of viewing information off.
It was at this point, I made an even more disturbing find within the packet data dumps. I noticed filenames were being posted to LG's servers and that these filenames were ones stored on my external USB hard drive. To demonstrate this, I created a mock avi file and copied it to a USB stick.
This file didn't really contain "midget porn" at all, I renamed it to make sure it had a unique filename that I could spot easily in the data and one that was unlikely to come from a broadcast source.
And sure enough, there is was...
Sometimes the names of the contents of an entire folder was posted, other times nothing was sent. I couldn't determine what rules controlled this.
I think it's important to point out that the URL that the data is being POSTed to doesn't in fact exist, you can see this from the HTTP 404 response in the next response from LG's server after the ACK.
However, despite being missing at the moment, this collection URL could be implemented by LG on their server tomorrow, enabling them to start transparently collecting detailed information on what media files you have stored.
It would easily be possible to infer the presence of adult content or files that had been downloaded from file sharing sites. My wife was shocked to see our children's names being transmitted in the name of a Christmas video file that we had watched from USB.
So what does LG have to say about this? I approached them and asked them to comment on data collection, profiling of their customers, collection of usage information and mandatory embedded advertising on products that their customers had paid for. Their response to this was as follows:
Good Morning
Thank you for your e-mail.
Further to our previous email to yourself, we have escalated the issues you reported to LG's UK Head Office.
The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us again.
Kind Regards
Tom
LG Electronics UK Helpdesk
Tel: [premium rate number removed]
Fax: 01480 274 000
Email: cic.uk@lge.com
UK: [premium rate number removed] Ireland: 0818 27 6954
Mon-Fri 9am to 8pm Sat 9am-6pm
Sunday 11am - 5pm
I haven't asked them about leaking of USB filenames due to the "deal with it" nature of the above response but I have no real expectation that their response would be any different.
So how can we prevent this from happening? I haven't read the T&Cs but one thing I am sure about is that I own my router and have absolute jurisdiction of any traffic that I allow to pass, so I have compiled an initial list of internet domains that you can block to stop spying and advertising on TVs that we, as customers have actually paid for.
ad.lgappstv.com
yumenetworks.com
smartclip.net
smartclip.com
llnwd.net
smartshare.lgtvsdp.com
ibis.lgappstv.com
This will free you from seeing ads plastered on your screen and having your viewing habits monitored, whilst it should still allow firmware updates to be applied.
(Update: removed llnwd domain, see comments)
(Update: 14 Dec 2013 - Changed Imgur images to Blogger to reduce dependencies. Minor formatting, Added mirror of linked Video)
http://doctorbeet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging-usb-filenames-and.html
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