2535-ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? | View Thread

http://www.sott.net/article/296493-What-if-Putin-is-telling-the-truth-Then-what

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Fri, 15 May 2015 21:15 UTC

On April 26 Russia’s main national TV station, Rossiya 1, featured President Vladimir Putin in a documentary to the Russian people on the events of the recent period including the annexation of Crimea, the US coup d’etat in Ukraine, and the general state of relations with the United States and the EU. His words were frank. And in the middle of his remarks the Russian former KGB chief dropped a political bombshell that was known by Russian intelligence two decades ago.

Putin stated bluntly that in his view the West would only be content in having a Russia weak, suffering and begging from the West, something clearly the Russian character is not disposed to. Then a short way into his remarks, the Russian President stated for the first time publicly something that Russian intelligence has known for almost two decades but kept silent until now, most probably in hopes of an era of better normalized Russia-US relations.

Putin stated that the terror in Chechnya and in the Russian Caucasus in the early 1990’s was actively backed by the CIA and western Intelligence services to deliberately weaken Russia. He noted that the Russian FSB foreign intelligence had documentation of the US covert role without giving details.

What Putin, an intelligence professional of the highest order, only hinted at in his remarks, I have documented in detail from non-Russian sources. The report has enormous implications to reveal to the world the long-standing hidden agenda of influential circles in Washington to destroy Russia as a functioning sovereign state, an agenda which includes the neo-nazi coup d’etat in Ukraine and severe financial sanction warfare against Moscow. The following is drawn on my book, Amerikas’ Heilige Krieg.

CIA’s Chechen Wars

Not long after the CIA and Saudi Intelligence-financed Mujahideen had devastated Afghanistan at the end of the 1980’s, forcing the exit of the Soviet Army in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself some months later, the CIA began to look at possible places in the collapsing Soviet Union where their trained “Afghan Arabs” could be redeployed to further destabilize Russian influence over the post-Soviet Eurasian space.

They were called Afghan Arabs because they had been recruited from ultraconservative Wahhabite Sunni Muslims from Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Arab world where the ultra-strict Wahhabite Islam was practiced. They were brought to Afghanistan in the early 1980’s by a Saudi CIA recruit who had been sent to Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden.

With the former Soviet Union in total chaos and disarray, George H.W. Bush’s Administration decided to “kick ’em when they’re down,” a sad error. Washington redeployed their Afghan veteran terrorists to bring chaos and destabilize all of Central Asia, even into the Russian Federation itself, then in a deep and traumatic crisis during the economic collapse of the Yeltsin era.

In the early 1990s, Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, had surveyed the offshore oil potentials of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the entire Caspian Sea Basin. They estimated the region to be “another Saudi Arabia” worth several trillion dollars on today’s market. The US and UK were determined to keep that oil bonanza from Russian control by all means. The first target of Washington was to stage a coup in Azerbaijan against elected president Abulfaz Elchibey to install a President more friendly to a US-controlled Baku – Tbilisi – Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, “the world’s most political pipeline,” bringing Baku oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean.

At that time, the only existing oil pipeline from Baku was a Soviet era Russian pipeline that ran through the Chechen capital, Grozny, taking Baku oil north via Russia’s Dagestan province, and across Chechenya to the Black Sea Russian port of Novorossiysk. The pipeline was the only competition and major obstacle to the very costly alternative route of Washington and the British and US oil majors.

President Bush Sr. gave his old friends at CIA the mandate to destroy that Russian Chechen pipeline and create such chaos in the Caucasus that no Western or Russian company would consider using the Grozny Russian oil pipeline.

Graham E. Fuller, an old colleague of Bush and former Deputy Director of the CIA National Council on Intelligence had been a key architect of the CIA Mujahideen strategy. Fuller described the CIA strategy in the Caucasus in the early 1990s: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power.”6

The CIA used a dirty tricks veteran, General Richard Secord, for the operation. Secord created a CIA front company, MEGA Oil. Secord had been convicted in the 1980s for his central role in the CIA’s Iran-Contra illegal arms and drugs operations.

In 1991 Secord, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, landed in Baku and set up the CIA front company, MEGA Oil. He was a veteran of the CIA covert opium operations in Laos during the Vietnam War. In Azerbaijan, he setup an airline to secretly fly hundreds of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda Mujahideen from Afghanistan into Azerbaijan. By 1993, MEGA Oil had recruited and armed 2,000 Mujahideen, converting Baku into a base for Caucasus-wide Mujahideen terroristoperations.

General Secord’s covert Mujahideen operation in the Caucasus initiated the military coup that toppled elected president Abulfaz Elchibey that year and installed Heydar Aliyev, a more pliable US puppet. A secret Turkish intelligence report leaked to the Sunday Timesof London confirmed that “two petrol giants, BP and Amoco, British and American respectively, which together form the AIOC (Azerbaijan International Oil Consortium), are behind the coup d’état.”

Saudi Intelligence head, Turki al-Faisal, arranged that his agent, Osama bin Laden, whom he had sent to Afghanistan at the start of the Afghan war in the early 1980s, would use his Afghan organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) to recruit “Afghan Arabs” for what was rapidly becoming a global Jihad. Bin Laden’s mercenaries were used as shock troops by the Pentagon and CIA to coordinate and support Muslim offensives not only Azerbaijan but also in Chechnya and, later, Bosnia.

Bin Laden brought in another Saudi, Ibn al-Khattab, to become Commander, or Emir of Jihadist Mujahideen in Chechnya (sic!) together with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. No matter that Ibn al-Khattab was a Saudi Arab who spoke barely a word of Chechen, let alone, Russian. He knew what Russian soldiers looked like and how to kill them.

Chechnya then was traditionally a predominantly Sufi society, a mild apolitical branch of Islam. Yet the increasing infiltration of the well-financed and well-trained US-sponsored Mujahideen terrorists preaching Jihad or Holy War against Russians transformed the initially reformist Chechen resistance movement. They spread al-Qaeda’s hardline Islamist ideology across the Caucasus. Under Secord’s guidance, Mujahideen terrorist operations had also quickly extended into neighboring Dagestan and Chechnya, turning Baku into a shipping point for Afghan heroin to theChechen mafia.

From the mid-1990s, bin Laden paid Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab the handsome sum of several million dollars per month, a King’s fortune in economically desolate Chechnya in the 1990s, enabling them to sideline the moderate Chechen majority.21 US intelligence remained deeply involved in the Chechen conflict until the end of the 1990s. According to Yossef Bodansky, then Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,Washington was actively involved in “yet another anti-Russian jihad, seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces.”

Bodansky revealed the entire CIA Caucasus strategy in detail in his report, stating that US Government officials participated in,

“a formal meeting in Azerbaijan in December 1999 in which specific programs for the training and equipping of Mujahideen from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon, culminating in Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US ‘private security companies’. . . to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad for a long time…Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism.”

The most intense phase of the Chechen wars wound down in 2000 only after heavy Russian military action defeated the Islamists. It was a pyrrhic victory, costing a massive toll in human life and destruction of entire cities. The exact death toll from the CIA-instigated Chechen conflict is unknown. Unofficial estimates ranged from 25,000 to 50,000 dead or missing, mostly civilians. Russian casualties were near 11,000 according to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers.

The Anglo-American oil majors and the CIA’s operatives were happy. They had what they wanted: their Baku – Tbilisi – Ceyhan oil pipeline, bypassing Russia’s Grozny pipeline.

The Chechen Jihadists, under the Islamic command of Shamil Basayev, continued guerrilla attacks in and outside Chechnya. The CIA had refocused into the Caucasus.

Basayev’s Saudi Connection

Basayev was a key part of the CIA’s Global Jihad. In 1992, he met Saudi terrorist Ibn al-Khattag in Azerbaijan. From Azerbaijan, Ibn al-Khattab brought Basayev to Afghanistan to meet al-Khattab’s ally, fellow-Saudi Osama bin Laden. Ibn al-Khattab’s role was to recruit Chechen Muslims willing to wage Jihad against Russian forces in Chechnya on behalf of the covert CIA strategy of destabilizing post-Soviet Russia and securing British-US control over Caspian energy.

Once back in Chechnya, Basayev and al-Khattab created the International Islamic Brigade (IIB) with Saudi Intelligence money, approved by the CIA and coordinated through the liaison of Saudi Washington Ambassador and Bush family intimate Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, Saudi Washington Ambassador for more than two decades, was so intimate with the Bush family that George W. Bush referred to the playboy Saudi Ambassador as “Bandar Bush,” a kind of honorary family member.

Basayev and al-Khattab imported fighters from the Saudi fanatical Wahhabite strain of Sunni Islam into Chechnya. Ibn al-Khattab commanded what were called the “Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya,” his own private army of Arabs, Turks, and other foreign fighters. He was also commissioned to set up paramilitary training camps in the Caucasus Mountains of Chechnya that trained Chechens and Muslims from the North Caucasian Russian republics and from Central Asia.

The Saudi and CIA-financed Islamic International Brigade was responsible not only for terror in Chechnya. They carried out the October 2002 Moscow Dubrovka Theatre hostage seizure and the gruesome September 2004 Beslan school massacre. In 2010, the UN Security Council published the following report on al-Khattab and Basayev’s International Islamic Brigade:

Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was listed on 4 March 2003. . . as being associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of” Al-Qaida. . . The Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was founded and led by Shamil Salmanovich Basayev (deceased) and is linked to the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs (RSRSBCM). . . and the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR). . .

On the evening of 23 October 2002, members of IIB, RSRSBCM and SPIR operated jointly to seize over 800 hostages at Moscow’s Podshipnikov Zavod (Dubrovka) Theater.

In October 1999, emissaries of Basayev and Al-Khattab traveled to Usama bin Laden’s home base in the Afghan province of Kandahar, where Bin Laden agreed to provide substantial military assistance and financial aid, including by making arrangements to send to Chechnya several hundred fighters to fight against Russian troops and perpetrate acts of terrorism. Later that year, Bin Laden sent substantial amounts of money to Basayev, Movsar Barayev (leader of SPIR) and Al-Khattab, which was to be used exclusively for training gunmen, recruiting mercenaries and buying ammunition.

The Afghan-Caucasus Al Qaeda “terrorist railway,” financed by Saudi intelligence, had two goals. One was a Saudi goal to spread fanatical Wahhabite Jihad into the Central Asian region of the former Soviet Union. The second was the CIA’s agenda of destabilizing a then-collapsing post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Beslan

This TV grab image taken from Russian NTV channel 07 September 2004 shows wires and hostages in the gymnasium of the Beslan school, northern Ossetia.

On September 1, 2004, armed terrorists from Basayev and al-Khattab’s IIB took more than 1,100 people as hostages in a siege that included 777 children, and forced them into School Number One (SNO) in Beslan in North Ossetia, the autonomous republic in the North Caucasus of the Russian Federation near to the Georgia border.

On the third day of the hostage crisis, as explosions were heard inside the school, FSB and other elite Russian troops stormed the building. In the end, at least 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children, with a significant number of people injured and reported missing. It became clear afterward that the Russian forces had handled the intervention poorly.

The Washington propaganda machine, from Radio Free Europe to The New York Times and CNN, wasted no time demonizing Putin and Russia for their bad handling of the Beslan crisis rather than focus on the links of Basayev to Al Qaeda and Saudi intelligence. That would have brought the world’s attention to the intimate relations between the family of then US President George W. Bush and the Saudi billionaire bin Laden family.

On September 1, 2001, just ten days before the day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Saudi Intelligence head US-educated Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, who had directed Saudi Intelligence since 1977, including through the entire Osama bin Laden Mujahideen operation in Afghanistan and into the Caucasus, abruptly and inexplicably resigned, just days after having accepted a new term as intelligence head from his King. He gave no explanation. He was quickly reposted to London, away from Washington.

The record of the bin Laden-Bush family intimate ties was buried, in fact entirely deleted on “national security” (sic!) grounds in the official US Commission Report on 911. The Saudi background of fourteen of the nineteen alleged 911 terrorists in New York and Washington was also deleted from the US Government’s final 911 Commission report, released only in July 2004 by the Bush Administration, almost three years after the events.

Basayev claimed credit for having sent the terrorists to Beslan. His demands had included the complete independence of Chechnya from Russia, something that would have given Washington and the Pentagon an enormous strategic dagger in the southern underbelly of the Russian Federation.

By late 2004, in the aftermath of the tragic Beslan drama, President Vladimir Putin reportedly ordered a secret search and destroy mission by Russian intelligence to hunt and kill key leaders of the Caucasus Mujahideen of Basayev. Al-Khattab had been killed in 2002. The Russian security forces soon discovered that most of the Chechen Afghan Arab terrorists had fled. They had gotten safe haven in Turkey, a NATO member; in Azerbaijan, by then almost a NATO Member; or in Germany, a NATO Member; or in Dubai – one of the closest US Allies in the Arab States, and Qatar-another very close US ally. In other words, the Chechen terrorists were given NATO safe haven.

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/17/2015 10:33:38 AM
	Russia flexes Central Asia military might amid Afghan fears By Akbar Borisov with Chris Rickleton in Bishkek6 hours ago Former Afghan Taliban militants are photographed holding weapons before they hand them over as part of a government peace and reconciliation process at a ceremony in Kunduz on May 6, 2015 (AFP Photo/Nasir Waqif) View Gallery Russia has deployed hundreds of troops for drills in Central Asia with its ex-Soviet allies in a show of force as anxiety grows over a surge in fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan. Related Stories Ex-Soviet Central Asia raises alarm over IS recruitment AFP Afghan officials warn of influx of insurgents from Pakistan Associated Press [$$] Afghan Forces Press Counter-Offensive To Defend New Front Line Against Taliban The Wall Street Journal IS, Taliban pairing up in northern Afghanistan AFP Afghan officials: Foreign fighters involved in Kunduz attack Associated Press Around 2,500 personnel from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) are taking part in joint exercises due to run to Wednesday in Tajikistan. The move is seen as re-enforcing Moscow's role as the main guarantor of the fragile region's security after US troops leave Afghanistan. The Russian deployment of about 500 troops for the drills started last week, bolstered by soldiers from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Belarus. Tajikistan is in a strategic spot, bordering Afghanistan's Kunduz province where over 200 people have died and 10,000 been displaced by a militant offensive. Russia's foreign ministry says it is "particularly concerned" by the violence, which Afghan local authorities claim has seen the Taliban link up with jihadists from the Islamic State group battling in Syria and Iraq. The uptick in Afghan fighting has rattled Moscow's ex-Soviet allies in Central Asia, and some have looked towards Russia for reassurance. View gallery Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) welcomes Afghan National Security Advisor Hanif Atmar dur … Tajikistan hosts a Russian military base and has called for Moscow to step up its military assistance to the country. It is the only CSTO member of the three Central Asian states bordering Afghanistan, which also include Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Kremlin and its partners in Central Asia have been accused in the past of exaggerating a post-Washington 'spillover' effect in the region. But some experts argue states such as Tajikistan and Turkmenistan would be unable to contain a hypothetical breakout of fighting in Afghanistan's fractious northern provinces without significant outside help. "The armed forces of many of these states are critically weak with thoroughly corrupted command structures," Vasily Kashin, an expert at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, told AFP. View gallery Afghan security forces patrol on April 30, 2015 in Kunduz which borders Tajikistan and where over 20 … "One moderate incursion could be devastating. Russia would have no choice other than swift military intervention." Tajikistan on Friday said it had stopped issuing foreigners travel permits for a remote region along the Afghan frontier, citing heavy fighting on the other side of the border. - Shunning Russia's bloc - At present there are just under 10,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan. While Afghan leader Ashraf Ghani secured a pledge from President Barack Obama in March to slow down scheduled withdrawals for 2015, the United States remains committed to pulling out all but 1,000 troops by the end of 2016. Yet even though the region has major concerns about the conflict in Afghanistan, some countries have shunned the opportunity to be part of the CSTO bloc, which is often associated with Moscow's divide-and-rule policies in Central Asia. View gallery Special Forces soldiers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states, which includes … Uzbekistan, a country of 30 million which has a short border of around 140 kilometres (90 miles) with Afghanistan, quit the bloc in 2012. "Stability in Uzbekistan means stability in Central Asia," said Rafik Sayfullin, a political analyst based in the Uzbek capital Tashkent and a former member of the state's security council. "If Russia is interested in this, why does it practically give away tanks to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and sell them for twice the price to Uzbekistan?" In closed-off Turkmenistan, which like Uzbekistan has turned to China and the West as well as Russia to upgrade its military, a defence official rebuffed rumours Ashgabat had appealed to Russia or other foreign partners to help guard its border with Afghanistan. "Any activities of the security services of Turkmenistan are strictly connected with the country's permanently neutral status," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "Turkmenistan can receive military aid from any country, but never troop reinforcements," the official said. Springtime attacks have become an annual strategy for the Taliban and other militant Afghan groups opposed to the US-backed regime in Kabul. But claims that fighters from the Islamic State group are also terrorising the country -- made by Afghan officials but yet to be confirmed by IS itself -- could complicate the threat emanating from Afghanistan, said Deidre Tynan, regional project director for the International Crisis Group. While the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes China as well as Russia, is "growing more active" in Central Asia, the CSTO remains the "foremost security bloc in the region," according to Tynan. "So far the CSTO has talked a lot without really doing that much," the analyst said. "It remains to be seen how it would handle a crisis from over the border in Afghanistan if one were to occur."
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/17/2015 10:46:02 AM
	Who is tellling the truth? WRITTEN BY Michael Weiss, James Miller New Putin Invasion Coming This Summer Moscow says it's sticking to a ceasefire agreement. Meanwhile, it's piling up troops and weapons for something that doesn’t look so peaceful. The war in Ukraine may have faded largely from international headlines, but Vladimir Putin’s drip-drip invasion continues. In the last two weeks, forensic evidence, some of which has been reported by monitor organizations and senior Western diplomats, the rest corroborated by eyewitness photography and video, only confirm what the U.S. fears most: a summer offensive is inevitable. On May 5, the Ukrainian government released new data which says that theyhave lost 28 towns to Russian-backed separatists since February 18. That was the day the strategic town of Debaltsevo, which guarded a key highway to separatist-controlled regions, slipped from Ukraine’s control. The map of separatist territory is as alarming as it is illustrative, especially when it is combined with the daily reports of ceasefire violations and fighting coming out of both the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Kiev. On May 6, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addressed the National Security and Defense Council and warned that Russia has 50,000 troops on the border and its proxies have more than 40,000 fighters inside the country. That’s not only a combined 50% increase in possible invaders over July of last year, the month which proceeded the “Russian invasion” on the Ukrainian mainland. It’s more than enough soldiers to invade and gobble up a significant amount of Ukrainian territory. “There is a convincing evidence that Ukraine strictly complies with the Minsk [ceasefire] agreements and militants constantly violate them,” Poroshenko noted. Separatists do not allow international observers to verify their withdrawal of heavy weaponry. “Militants regularly shoot Ukrainian positions, engage in reconnaissance and subversive activity and provoke armed confrontations in order to disrupt peaceful settlement of the conflict.” One day later, May 7, the OSCE witnessed a significant amount of fighting both near Donetsk and around a town called Shirokino, 20 kilometers east of Mariupol—part of a trend of heavier fighting which started in late April. The OSCE also reported that one of their surveillance drones was jammed for ten minutes while attempting to monitor the movement of separatist tanks near Donetsk, in violation of the 50 kilometer demarcation line agreed upon by both sides. Washington may do nothing if the ceasefire agreement is turned to toilet paper. And that’s as good as an engraved invitation for Putin to proceed as he’d already planned to anyway. While the OSCE reports that it has seen an increase of heavy weaponry within the demarcation line for weeks, Ukraine maintains that it is only returning fire and it is the Russian-backed separatists who are on the offensive. On May 8, the day after OSCE’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was jammed, the OSCE witnessed three Ukrainian tanks in government-controlled territory—an admitted violation of the negotiated ceasefire. That same day the OSCE witnessed 30 separatist tanks moving toward the front lineswithin the demarcation line—ten times more than the Ukrainian government was deploying. The OSCE also observed a testing-ground for advanced weaponry—proof, according to the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, of “Russia’s train and equip program in plain sight.” Each day since has provided more evidence that the Minsk agreement is little more than a piece of paper. For weeks the OSCE, NATO, and citizens of eastern Ukraine brave enough to snap pictures and video have been warning that a large amount of heavy Russian armor and artillery has been headed back to the front lines. The separatist leadership has maintained that this equipment was only moving around to prepare for military parades on Saturday, May 9, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s capitulation to the Soviet Union in World War II. While the movement of this equipment would be a violation of the Minsk agreement whatever the floated reason, since the parades ended the weaponry hasn’t been moved back beyond the demarcation line. It’s not just the amount of firepower now in separatists’ hands that is alarming observers. It’s also the kind of weaponry—specifically, the Strela 10 anti-aircraft missile system. The Strela-10 is designed to supply close support to troops and vehicles near the front line of fighting. It’s meant to shoot down fast-moving, low-flying aircraft such as helicopters or non-stealth jets. There is significant evidence that the Russian military regularly includes the Strela-10 in important convoys because it can protect against immediate air threats while longer-range weapons (such as the Buk system, which shot down MH17 passenger jet in 2014) can perform the same function from further afield. In fact, the first time the Russian-backed fighters were ever seen using T-72 tanks,Strela-10s were filmed escorting the vehicles from a border crossing in Lugansk just seven days before MH17 was immolated. There are no documented cases of the Strela-10 system having been captured by Russian-backed separatists, and the T-72 has not been used by the Ukrainian military in this conflict. On May 2, three Strela 10s were spotted escorting a convoy of two T-64B tanks, three BMP-2s, three BTR-80s, three 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzers, three BM-21 Grad MLRS, three trucks towing artillery pieces, perhaps 2A65 152mm howitzers, and several other military trucks and fuel tankers through Lugansk. On May 5 Strelas were seen parading through Donetsk, escorting a similar convoy. But if they were only in Donetsk for the May 9 parade, it’s curious that a similar convoy was spotted by the OSCE within the line of demarcation near Donetsk on May 10, suggesting that the weapons have not returned to their holding areas as specified in the Minsk protocol. Could these weapons systems have been mobilized just to deter Ukraine and fortify standing separatist positions? Well, Minsk was designed to forestall any such scenario and explicitly called for de-escalation rather than retrenchment. Also, Western military officials seem to think the presence of this materiel has another purpose altogether. In late April, NATO Supreme Commander and US Air Force General Philip Breedlove warned that the Russian military had taken advantage of the ceasefire to train and equip the separatists and to “reset and reposition” their forces. Nor were these mere training exercises. “Many of their [the Russians’] actions are consistent with preparations for another offensive,” Breedlove said, adding that Russia never rattles its saber without the attendant follow-through. Breedlove also suggested that Russia had further integrated its own military’s “[c]ommand-and-control, air defense, support to artillery…making a more coherent, organized force out of the separatists.” Then, on May 11, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also warned that the separatists are now so well equipped that they could launch an all-out offensive against the Ukrainian military on little notice and without direct military assistance. Again, if all this was just to hold the line, then why agree to Minsk in the first place, when that protocol was designed to do just that without the benefit of tanks or APCs? There’s the added alarm of what the separatist leadership itself says about its imminent plans. On April 23, Vice News broadcast an interview with Alexander Zakharchenko, the self-declared head of the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Asked if he saw the Minsk agreement holding, Zakharchenko was unambiguous: he did not want it to hold. He categorically rejected one of the main planks of that diplomatic settlement—that the Donbass remain part of Ukrainian territory. “Do you suggest we give up, so our territory can fall into Ukraine’s hands?” he told Vice News. “So that they can put us back into the stalls, like we are some kind of cattle? So that they can drag us to join the E.U., to be living off American handouts? We do not want that. We declared that we want to be friends with Russia and that’s what we are doing. That’s what the majority of the local population want. At least 95 percent.” Zakharchenko, who wants to see the return of the Soviet Union, mooted the possibility of other conducting “referenda” to certify their breakaway status from Ukraine. “Aside from Zakharchenko’s belligerent rhetoric,” a senior Western diplomat told The Daily Beast, “the most worrisome evidence is the continued active tempo of Russian training activities with the separatist armies, and the presence of advanced Russian surface-to-air missile systems near the contact line in blatant violation of the Minsk agreement.” As ever, the Putinists command one side to abide by a compact they never had any intention of honoring themselves. Only now, they’ve managed to embarrassingly snare the State Department into defending their own arguing position. While John Kerry was breaking bread (and potatoes) with Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Russian president’s personal residence in Sochi this week, Poroshenko made an ambiguous statement about plans to regain Donetsk International Airport, once the cynosure for some of the fiercest fighting the war as yet seen and some of the bravest Ukrainian resistance to better-armed separatists. “I have no doubt,” Poroshenko said at the premier of “Airport,” a new documentary about the battle for that installation, “we will free the airport, because it is our land. And we will rebuild the airport.” Kerry was in Russia on his first state visit since 2013, and clearly there to ask for various favors from a government the United States has sanctioned yet nevertheless believes it still needs to resolves various foreign crises from Syria to Iran and Ukraine. So the opportunity to scandalize America’s top diplomat—something of a contact sport in Russia these days—was too good for the Kremlin-owned press to pass up. Asked by the state-owned media about Poroshenko’s provocative although nebulous pledge, Kerry replied as the media hoped he might by saying that he hadn’t seen the Ukrainian president’s remarks but would warn him to “think twice” before kickstarting any military operation. The U.S. embassy in Moscow tried to downplay the inevitable awkwardness this created between two allies, noting, for instance, that Poroshenko has elsewhereruled out taking back any of the Donbass by force. But Moscow just sat back and enjoyed the squirming. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N. said, “It’s an important thing that Kerry made this statement and that he said the U.S. believed it was crucial to observe the accords reached in Minsk on February 12,” neglecting of course to mention how his own government has “observed” those accords. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, were left furious at Kerry for kowtowing to the Kremlin (again) and now worry that the Obama administration has gone out of its way to telegraph its own disposition should fighting indeed escalate in the coming weeks. Kerry went so far as depict the Ukraine crisis as the result of bilateral culpability: “whoever has instigated” war, he said, should stop, as it has gone on too long already. He also floated the possibility of U.S. sanctions relief on Russia “if and when Minsk is fully implemented.” Washington, it is feared in Kiev, will do nothing if Minsk is turned to toilet paper. And that’s as good as an engraved invitation for Putin to proceed as he’d already planned to anyway.
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/17/2015 11:00:57 AM
	Raising controversy Death Penalty for Boston Marathon Suspect Drives Nail in the Coffin of US Justice System By Joachim Hagopian Global Research, May 16, 2015 With the jury’s verdict now in sentencing an innocent man to death, the US justice system is sinking ever lower in its moral decay. So many giant holes in the prosecution’s case were simply ignored. Photos of the shredded backpacks allegedly containing the bombs never matched the backpacks of the Tsarnaev brothers. But the fact that they did match a number of Kraft International private security contractors photographed at the scene meant nothing. When evidence of a staged “realistic” enacted event complete with role actors and stagehand direction, fake bombs and fake blood, pre-marathon announcements of a “bomb drill” confirmed by a public notice in the Boston Globe, and no real evidence that either Tsarnaev brother committed a crime as much as admitted by the feds, there is absolutely no justice left in America today! The very actors seen on video walking around uninjured immediately after the fake bombs detonated are seen many months later showing up at court as fake witnesses brandishing fake injuries. If this innocent US citizen can be framed, found guilty prior to even the fake show trial and then be put to death by a fascist totalitarian police state government, then the stage is being set for any of us US citizens to be next. Below is the original article detailing this gross travesty of justice posted on GR on April 12th, 2015. With the official government narrative of the 9/11 attack filled with a plethora of lies that have since been subsequently exposed, the next biggest “war on terror” event on US soil that the feds failed to stop was the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. And now the lone living suspect from that horrific crime that killed three people, left 17 limbless and injured 264 victims (though that number’s been accused of being purposely inflated) has now been found guilty of all 30 counts after the jury’s 11 hour deliberation earlier this week. As we mark the second anniversary of this tragic event and the second and final phase of the trial beginning on Monday that will decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – whether he’ll live out the rest of his life in prison or be put to death, a critical review of preceding events and developments surrounding his high profile, extremely significant case seems both timely and much needed. Despite Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleading not guilty to the 30 counts (17 carrying the death penalty) he was charged within a week after the April 15th bombings last year, his lead defense attorney Judy Clark several days ago conceded to the jury that her client was guilty in her closing argument. Apparently blaming the dead brother whose due process was denied became Dzhokhar’s only defense strategy. The defense team insisted that he was coerced and bullied by his older brother into committing alleged acts of terrorism. Considering no real solid proof other than photos placing Dzhokhar and older brother Tamerlan both wearing backpacks at the scene of the crime where the two bombs exploded was even presented at the trial, no justice for either the Tsarnaevs nor the many victims can possibly come from this guilty verdict. If the purpose of the US judicial system in criminal trials is to ensure that all factual evidence surrounding an alleged crime or crimes be accurately and fairly presented so that the jurors can properly assess the best semblance of the truth as presented by both prosecution and defense in order for the jury to adjudicate and decide a defendant’s true guilt or innocence, this trial was a complete travesty of justice. And if a basic tenet of the justice system in the United States holds that a defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty, then again this verdict outcome is an obscene farce and a shameful joke exposing America’s justice system for its gross injustice. Just as the 9/11 commission failed to adequately address and answer dozens of questions that its official narrative failed to deliver, and years earlier the Warren Commission failed JFK and America, so does the prosecution’s case of evidence of Tsarnaev’s guilt fail to be convincing, much less provide definitive and unequivocal proof that the 21-year old Chechen American with his brother committed the Boston Marathon crimes. And the prime reason why is that so much of the testimony and so called evidence was based on the FBI and local law enforcement’s dishonest versions of events that were based near exclusively on the government’s one star witness’s faulty, changeable, non-credible accounting of events. The identity of this sole witness that even through the trial was never revealed, testified in court by his fake name “Danny.” Later it was learned that Danny’s real name was Dun Meng. A Chinese national finishing his masters at Northeastern University in engineering, during his alleged carjacking, Meng claimed that the deceased brother Tamerlan confessed that he and his younger brother were responsible for both the Marathon bombings as well as the murder of the MIT campus policeman. Throughout his trial testimony, the key witness maintained constant eye contact with what seemed almost like his handler, Northeastern University criminology professor James Fox. Fox clearly acted as Meng’s coach and gatekeeper ensuring that Fox would be present in a tentative interview with WhoWhatWhy journalist Russ Baker though it turned out Fox made sure it never happened. In a television interview with the immigrant gas station attendant that Meng ran to when he escaped, it was Fox once again guarding his henhouse, making sure the attendant stayed on script, an odd role for a criminology professor. But in a case where the entire story was badly scripted by the feds, necessitating absolute control over all outgoing information to the public, Professor Fox was merely playing his part. And that part also included state propagandist. Samplings from articles he wrote for the Boston Globe, starting with his response to the difficulty of finding a cemetery that would accept Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body, he wrote: I truly understand and appreciate why many folks want nothing to do with the corpse of a man who apparently hated America and our way of life… If and when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were scheduled to die, his name and image would be plastered all over the news, further increasing his undeserved celebrity in the minds of those on the political fringe who view our government as evil and corrupt… The bombing seems to have been an attack against American life, not specifically American lives. Those killed and injured were unfortunate surrogates of the intended target: America and the freedoms we enjoy. When the strength of the state’s evidence to convict and execute a man relies solely on one incognito witness whose tightly controlled testimony repeatedly kept changing depending on whom he talked to, how can a guilty verdict be considered legitimate or fair? Virtually the entire guilt or innocence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev rested on what this one alleged witness claimed, yet he kept changing his story on numerous occasions despite his gatekeeper’s best intentions. The other so called incriminating evidence used against Dzhokhar was a bogus, totally unbelievable written confession that he is purported to have written in the dark on the inside wall of the boat he was hiding out in. Dzhokhar was supposedly laying there nearly bleeding to death from the alleged gunshot exchange with police a few hours earlier. Yet on video footage the young man is seen emerging unassisted from the boat appearing bloodless and uninjured only to be admitted minutes later to the emergency hospital room in critical condition suffering from a deeply sliced neck wound that prevented him from speaking for weeks. How did that happen while in police custody? And that came after a swarm of police shot a slew of bullet holes into the boat while Tsarnaev supposedly lay there gravely injured. Read more
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/17/2015 11:06:11 AM
	What if Putin is telling the truth? Then what? Posted on May 16, 2015 [by J Haynes]by Jean http://www.sott.net/article/296493-What-if-Putin-is-telling-the-truth-Then-what F. William Engdahl New Eastern Outlook Fri, 15 May 2015 21:15 UTC © RIA Novosti/Sergey Guneev On April 26 Russia’s main national TV station, Rossiya 1, featured President Vladimir Putin in a documentary to the Russian people on the events of the recent period including the annexation of Crimea, the US coup d’etat in Ukraine, and the general state of relations with the United States and the EU. His words were frank. And in the middle of his remarks the Russian former KGB chief dropped a political bombshell that was known by Russian intelligence two decades ago. Putin stated bluntly that in his view the West would only be content in having a Russia weak, suffering and begging from the West, something clearly the Russian character is not disposed to. Then a short way into his remarks, the Russian President stated for the first time publicly something that Russian intelligence has known for almost two decades but kept silent until now, most probably in hopes of an era of better normalized Russia-US relations. Putin stated that the terror in Chechnya and in the Russian Caucasus in the early 1990’s was actively backed by the CIA and western Intelligence services to deliberately weaken Russia. He noted that the Russian FSB foreign intelligence had documentation of the US covert role without giving details. What Putin, an intelligence professional of the highest order, only hinted at in his remarks, I have documented in detail from non-Russian sources. The report has enormous implications to reveal to the world the long-standing hidden agenda of influential circles in Washington to destroy Russia as a functioning sovereign state, an agenda which includes the neo-nazi coup d’etat in Ukraine and severe financial sanction warfare against Moscow. The following is drawn on my book, Amerikas’ Heilige Krieg. CIA’s Chechen Wars Not long after the CIA and Saudi Intelligence-financed Mujahideen had devastated Afghanistan at the end of the 1980’s, forcing the exit of the Soviet Army in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself some months later, the CIA began to look at possible places in the collapsing Soviet Union where their trained “Afghan Arabs” could be redeployed to further destabilize Russian influence over the post-Soviet Eurasian space. They were called Afghan Arabs because they had been recruited from ultraconservative Wahhabite Sunni Muslims from Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Arab world where the ultra-strict Wahhabite Islam was practiced. They were brought to Afghanistan in the early 1980’s by a Saudi CIA recruit who had been sent to Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden. With the former Soviet Union in total chaos and disarray, George H.W. Bush’s Administration decided to “kick ’em when they’re down,” a sad error. Washington redeployed their Afghan veteran terrorists to bring chaos and destabilize all of Central Asia, even into the Russian Federation itself, then in a deep and traumatic crisis during the economic collapse of the Yeltsin era. In the early 1990s, Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, had surveyed the offshore oil potentials of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the entire Caspian Sea Basin. They estimated the region to be “another Saudi Arabia” worth several trillion dollars on today’s market. The US and UK were determined to keep that oil bonanza from Russian control by all means. The first target of Washington was to stage a coup in Azerbaijan against elected president Abulfaz Elchibey to install a President more friendly to a US-controlled Baku – Tbilisi – Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, “the world’s most political pipeline,” bringing Baku oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean. At that time, the only existing oil pipeline from Baku was a Soviet era Russian pipeline that ran through the Chechen capital, Grozny, taking Baku oil north via Russia’s Dagestan province, and across Chechenya to the Black Sea Russian port of Novorossiysk. The pipeline was the only competition and major obstacle to the very costly alternative route of Washington and the British and US oil majors. President Bush Sr. gave his old friends at CIA the mandate to destroy that Russian Chechen pipeline and create such chaos in the Caucasus that no Western or Russian company would consider using the Grozny Russian oil pipeline. Graham E. Fuller, an old colleague of Bush and former Deputy Director of the CIA National Council on Intelligence had been a key architect of the CIA Mujahideen strategy. Fuller described the CIA strategy in the Caucasus in the early 1990s: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power.”6 The CIA used a dirty tricks veteran, General Richard Secord, for the operation. Secord created a CIA front company, MEGA Oil. Secord had been convicted in the 1980s for his central role in the CIA’s Iran-Contra illegal arms and drugs operations. In 1991 Secord, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, landed in Baku and set up the CIA front company, MEGA Oil. He was a veteran of the CIA covert opium operations in Laos during the Vietnam War. In Azerbaijan, he setup an airline to secretly fly hundreds of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda Mujahideen from Afghanistan into Azerbaijan. By 1993, MEGA Oil had recruited and armed 2,000 Mujahideen, converting Baku into a base for Caucasus-wide Mujahideen terroristoperations. General Secord’s covert Mujahideen operation in the Caucasus initiated the military coup that toppled elected president Abulfaz Elchibey that year and installed Heydar Aliyev, a more pliable US puppet. A secret Turkish intelligence report leaked to the Sunday Timesof London confirmed that “two petrol giants, BP and Amoco, British and American respectively, which together form the AIOC (Azerbaijan International Oil Consortium), are behind the coup d’état.” Saudi Intelligence head, Turki al-Faisal, arranged that his agent, Osama bin Laden, whom he had sent to Afghanistan at the start of the Afghan war in the early 1980s, would use his Afghan organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) to recruit “Afghan Arabs” for what was rapidly becoming a global Jihad. Bin Laden’s mercenaries were used as shock troops by the Pentagon and CIA to coordinate and support Muslim offensives not only Azerbaijan but also in Chechnya and, later, Bosnia. Bin Laden brought in another Saudi, Ibn al-Khattab, to become Commander, or Emir of Jihadist Mujahideen in Chechnya (sic!) together with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. No matter that Ibn al-Khattab was a Saudi Arab who spoke barely a word of Chechen, let alone, Russian. He knew what Russian soldiers looked like and how to kill them. Chechnya then was traditionally a predominantly Sufi society, a mild apolitical branch of Islam. Yet the increasing infiltration of the well-financed and well-trained US-sponsored Mujahideen terrorists preaching Jihad or Holy War against Russians transformed the initially reformist Chechen resistance movement. They spread al-Qaeda’s hardline Islamist ideology across the Caucasus. Under Secord’s guidance, Mujahideen terrorist operations had also quickly extended into neighboring Dagestan and Chechnya, turning Baku into a shipping point for Afghan heroin to theChechen mafia. From the mid-1990s, bin Laden paid Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab the handsome sum of several million dollars per month, a King’s fortune in economically desolate Chechnya in the 1990s, enabling them to sideline the moderate Chechen majority.21 US intelligence remained deeply involved in the Chechen conflict until the end of the 1990s. According to Yossef Bodansky, then Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,Washington was actively involved in “yet another anti-Russian jihad, seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces.” Bodansky revealed the entire CIA Caucasus strategy in detail in his report, stating that US Government officials participated in, “a formal meeting in Azerbaijan in December 1999 in which specific programs for the training and equipping of Mujahideen from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon, culminating in Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US ‘private security companies’. . . to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad for a long time…Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism.” The most intense phase of the Chechen wars wound down in 2000 only after heavy Russian military action defeated the Islamists. It was a pyrrhic victory, costing a massive toll in human life and destruction of entire cities. The exact death toll from the CIA-instigated Chechen conflict is unknown. Unofficial estimates ranged from 25,000 to 50,000 dead or missing, mostly civilians. Russian casualties were near 11,000 according to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers. The Anglo-American oil majors and the CIA’s operatives were happy. They had what they wanted: their Baku – Tbilisi – Ceyhan oil pipeline, bypassing Russia’s Grozny pipeline. The Chechen Jihadists, under the Islamic command of Shamil Basayev, continued guerrilla attacks in and outside Chechnya. The CIA had refocused into the Caucasus. Basayev’s Saudi Connection Basayev was a key part of the CIA’s Global Jihad. In 1992, he met Saudi terrorist Ibn al-Khattag in Azerbaijan. From Azerbaijan, Ibn al-Khattab brought Basayev to Afghanistan to meet al-Khattab’s ally, fellow-Saudi Osama bin Laden. Ibn al-Khattab’s role was to recruit Chechen Muslims willing to wage Jihad against Russian forces in Chechnya on behalf of the covert CIA strategy of destabilizing post-Soviet Russia and securing British-US control over Caspian energy. Once back in Chechnya, Basayev and al-Khattab created the International Islamic Brigade (IIB) with Saudi Intelligence money, approved by the CIA and coordinated through the liaison of Saudi Washington Ambassador and Bush family intimate Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, Saudi Washington Ambassador for more than two decades, was so intimate with the Bush family that George W. Bush referred to the playboy Saudi Ambassador as “Bandar Bush,” a kind of honorary family member. Basayev and al-Khattab imported fighters from the Saudi fanatical Wahhabite strain of Sunni Islam into Chechnya. Ibn al-Khattab commanded what were called the “Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya,” his own private army of Arabs, Turks, and other foreign fighters. He was also commissioned to set up paramilitary training camps in the Caucasus Mountains of Chechnya that trained Chechens and Muslims from the North Caucasian Russian republics and from Central Asia. The Saudi and CIA-financed Islamic International Brigade was responsible not only for terror in Chechnya. They carried out the October 2002 Moscow Dubrovka Theatre hostage seizure and the gruesome September 2004 Beslan school massacre. In 2010, the UN Security Council published the following report on al-Khattab and Basayev’s International Islamic Brigade: Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was listed on 4 March 2003. . . as being associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of” Al-Qaida. . . The Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was founded and led by Shamil Salmanovich Basayev (deceased) and is linked to the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs (RSRSBCM). . . and the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR). . . On the evening of 23 October 2002, members of IIB, RSRSBCM and SPIR operated jointly to seize over 800 hostages at Moscow’s Podshipnikov Zavod (Dubrovka) Theater. In October 1999, emissaries of Basayev and Al-Khattab traveled to Usama bin Laden’s home base in the Afghan province of Kandahar, where Bin Laden agreed to provide substantial military assistance and financial aid, including by making arrangements to send to Chechnya several hundred fighters to fight against Russian troops and perpetrate acts of terrorism. Later that year, Bin Laden sent substantial amounts of money to Basayev, Movsar Barayev (leader of SPIR) and Al-Khattab, which was to be used exclusively for training gunmen, recruiting mercenaries and buying ammunition. The Afghan-Caucasus Al Qaeda “terrorist railway,” financed by Saudi intelligence, had two goals. One was a Saudi goal to spread fanatical Wahhabite Jihad into the Central Asian region of the former Soviet Union. The second was the CIA’s agenda of destabilizing a then-collapsing post-Soviet Russian Federation. Beslan © AFP/NTV This TV grab image taken from Russian NTV channel 07 September 2004 shows wires and hostages in the gymnasium of the Beslan school, northern Ossetia. On September 1, 2004, armed terrorists from Basayev and al-Khattab’s IIB took more than 1,100 people as hostages in a siege that included 777 children, and forced them into School Number One (SNO) in Beslan in North Ossetia, the autonomous republic in the North Caucasus of the Russian Federation near to the Georgia border. On the third day of the hostage crisis, as explosions were heard inside the school, FSB and other elite Russian troops stormed the building. In the end, at least 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children, with a significant number of people injured and reported missing. It became clear afterward that the Russian forces had handled the intervention poorly. The Washington propaganda machine, from Radio Free Europe to The New York Times and CNN, wasted no time demonizing Putin and Russia for their bad handling of the Beslan crisis rather than focus on the links of Basayev to Al Qaeda and Saudi intelligence. That would have brought the world’s attention to the intimate relations between the family of then US President George W. Bush and the Saudi billionaire bin Laden family. On September 1, 2001, just ten days before the day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Saudi Intelligence head US-educated Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, who had directed Saudi Intelligence since 1977, including through the entire Osama bin Laden Mujahideen operation in Afghanistan and into the Caucasus, abruptly and inexplicably resigned, just days after having accepted a new term as intelligence head from his King. He gave no explanation. He was quickly reposted to London, away from Washington. The record of the bin Laden-Bush family intimate ties was buried, in fact entirely deleted on “national security” (sic!) grounds in the official US Commission Report on 911. The Saudi background of fourteen of the nineteen alleged 911 terrorists in New York and Washington was also deleted from the US Government’s final 911 Commission report, released only in July 2004 by the Bush Administration, almost three years after the events. Basayev claimed credit for having sent the terrorists to Beslan. His demands had included the complete independence of Chechnya from Russia, something that would have given Washington and the Pentagon an enormous strategic dagger in the southern underbelly of the Russian Federation. By late 2004, in the aftermath of the tragic Beslan drama, President Vladimir Putin reportedly ordered a secret search and destroy mission by Russian intelligence to hunt and kill key leaders of the Caucasus Mujahideen of Basayev. Al-Khattab had been killed in 2002. The Russian security forces soon discovered that most of the Chechen Afghan Arab terrorists had fled. They had gotten safe haven in Turkey, a NATO member; in Azerbaijan, by then almost a NATO Member; or in Germany, a NATO Member; or in Dubai – one of the closest US Allies in the Arab States, and Qatar-another very close US ally. In other words, the Chechen terrorists were given NATO safe haven. F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/17/2015 3:53:33 PM
	Thousands rally against US military base on Japan's Okinawa 6 hours ago An estimated 35,000 protesters raise placards saying "Do not yield to authority" during a rally to protest against a controversial US airbase in Naha in Japan's southern island of Okinawa on May 17, 2015 (AFP Photo/) View Gallery Thousands of people rallied in Okinawa in southern Japan on Sunday in protest against a controversial US airbase on the island, as a two-decade-old bitter row over the relocation of the site drags on. Okinawa is home to more than half of the 47,000 US service personnel stationed in Japan as part of a defence alliance, a proportion many islanders say is too high. Futenma airbase has become emblematic of that ill-will since Washington announced plans to move it in 1996, hoping to ease tensions with the host community after the gang-rape of a schoolgirl by servicemen. But locals have blocked the move to relocate the base, insisting the facility should go off-island instead, queering relations between Tokyo and Okinawa -- a once independent kingdom that was annexed by Japan in the 19th century. "The government says we are to blame that the issue has stalled for 19 years and they tell us to find an alternative place (for the base relocation). That's outrageous," shouted the anti-US base mayor of Nago, Susumu Inamine. "The government is thrusting their responsibility on us," Inamine told a packed 15,000-seat baseball stadium. View gallery Okinawa governor Takeshi Onaga delivers a speech at a rally in Naha to protest against a controversi … Organisers estimated that about 35,000 people also turned up for a rally in Naha, Okinawa's capital. Deadlock has deepened recently after preparatory building work on the coast begun in the face of vehement opposition from the local government in Okinawa. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month insisted the current re-location plan was "the only solution," while anti-base Okinawa governor Takeshi Onaga hit back saying that three recent popular votes in Okinawa all showed overwhelming opposition to the move. "The current government is pushing the plan. Is it really a democratic country?" said protester Kiku Nakayama, 86, who as a teenager worked as a nurse for soldiers towards the end of World War II. "We have to remove the risks of exposing Okinawa to war again," she said. While most Japanese value the protection the US alliance gives them, especially in the context of Beijing's growing regional assertiveness, a sizable proportion of Okinawans want a dramatic reduction in their numbers.
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Russia flexes Central Asia military might amid Afghan fears

What if Putin is telling the truth? Then what?

Thousands rally against US military base on Japan's Okinawa

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Russia flexes Central Asia military might amid Afghan fears

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What if Putin is telling the truth? Then what?

Thousands rally against US military base on Japan's Okinawa