Rapiscan Systems lobbied aggressively to win a major contract with the Transportation Security Administration to provide X-ray body scanners at airports, only to lose the contract in 2013 after the company failed to deliver software to protect the privacy of passengers. Rapiscan now has a friend on the inside.

A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate: Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes. The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters. The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.

Twelve years after George W Bush initiated the illegal invasion of Iraq, ostensibly under the premise of preemptive self-defense, a stark majority ? as many as 75% in 2014 ? feel the so-called war was a mistake. As evidence rapidly accumulates that Bush?s yearning to launch an aggressive attack was likelier due to a personal grudge than anything else, that number will surely swell. This past Tuesday, the former president?s intelligence briefer lent yet more plausibility to that theory in an interview on MSNBC?s Hardball, making an admission that the Bush White House misrepresented intelligence reports to the public on key issues.

America’s First Black President Throwing Slaves Under the Bus on TPP? ign Relations

Many war veterans are outraged to hear Presidential candidates from the GOP, the same party that so enthusiastically sold the Iraq war to the American people in the first place, now backpedaling, claiming the whole thing may have been a bad idea in hindsight.

Barack Obama has made a speech, saying that this Memorial Day is the first in 14 years without major US war. Critics and social media users slammed him as hypocritical, saying the US remains involved in military conflicts and proxy wars.

The Obama administration has repeatedly sent wrong signals to Russia, China and Iran, slamming the countries for non-existent expansionism and so far showing the disheartening dysfunction in America’s foreign policy, former CIA Case Officer and Army Intelligence Officer Philip Giraldi underscored, according to Sputnik.

US President is shooting himself in the foot, but he should wake up and realize what is going on "before Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush arrives on the scene to make everything worse"the former CIA officer Philip Giraldi concluded.

First, we must learn the facts and face the truth that the U.S. is the biggest war maker in the world.

Second, we must commit ourselves and organize others to a true revolution of values and confront the corporations and politicians who continue to push our nation into war and inflate the military budget with the hot air of permanent fear mongering.

Third, we must admit what our country has been doing wrong, and we must make amends for the violence that the U.S. has waged on countries all over our world.

Be careful what you wish for

Regime change is full of unintended consequences.

In the case of Syria, our opposition to the Assad government is so obstinate that we are apparently promoting the defeat of a government that is not our enemy in order to replace it with one that is.

Beijing and Washington are not mere ships passing each other in the South China Sea – they are the two countries vying to play the commanding role in Asia.

While China seeks to redress what it sees as violations of its sovereignty, Washington does have policy options, but are any of them effective?

Celebrities and other public figures are only human. Just like many American’s, President Obama and his wife, Michelle, are still paying off their mortgage.

When President Barack Obama apologized on April 23 to the families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, an American and an Italian, both hostages killed in a drone attack in Pakistan in January, he blamed their tragic deaths on the “fog of war.”

Posted below is the transcript of the speech of Colonel-General Igor Sergun, Head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia.

This speech was delivered at the Moscow Security Conference in May 2015.

As a general rule, the GRU never makes a public statement, nor does the person heading it. It is thus interesting that on one of the very few occasions where General Sergun agreed to speak in public, he chose to focus on the risks of the so-called “Islamic” extremism and that in a relatively short presentation, he made four references to the fact that these “Islamic” terrorists are basically a creature of the West.

As the head of the executive branch of the Federal Government, the U.S. president is supposed to be responsible for protecting the citizens of this country. That statement needs to be dumbed down…er clarified for Obama, to make it clear that the citizens he is responsible for protecting are U.S. citizens… and not murderous MS-13 gang members that come here from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

(read more)

As attempts are underway to “sabotage” a nuclear deal between Iran and the global powers by “subterfuge of all kinds”, former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is “the rational player in the room” thanks to his anti-war stance towards Tehran, a geopolitical commentator says.

Gates said earlier on Monday that war on Iran would not be an alternative if the ongoing nuclear negotiations fail for any reason.

“Gates is being more rational than a lot of folks” in the US political system, said Dean Henderson, the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf, in a Monday phone interview with Press TV.

He added that those behind the US banking system would benefit form a “neo-colonial setup” in the Middle East with Israel and the Arab countries in power, that is why they would make attempts to hamper a deal between Tehran and the P5+1 – the US, Britain, Russia, France, China, and Germany.

Beyond the count of years I walked the world,

and my children built their shrines to me.

Decades and centuries and millennia pass,

and still the shrines are built.

Temples insubstantial to men,

clear to my eyes.

No foundations or walls or roofs,

but shrines nonetheless.

Holy ground, consecrated

Today, every day, somewhere in the world,

the earth is prepared for my coming.

My hallowed grounds are everywhere.

In valleys and on mountains,

on broad plains and deep in hidden passes,

in deserts, on city streets.

Nameless, unremembered places.

When I was deployed in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, I served with several reservists whose full-time job back in the U.S. was law enforcement. They had all also served in Iraq, and they were generally hawkish. But almost all of them would regularly say that the U.S. military belongs, not in the Middle East, but on our southern border.

The US is up in arms over Chinese construction of islands in the South China Sea. US spy planes buzzing the islands are asked to keep away.

Meanwhile, the US continues to construct more military bases in the region.

From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world’s stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world’s terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the “straight to beheading YouTube clip” purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria’s president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which could dethrone Russia as Europe’s dominant – and belligerent – source of energy, reaching an interim climax with the unsuccessful Mediterranean Sea military build up of 2013, which nearly resulted in quasi-world war.

The Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski-style strategy has always been to lure Russia into another Afghanistan in Ukraine, leading to a collapse of the Russian economy with the Big Prize being a Western takeover of Russia’s oil and natural gas wealth, and by extension Central Asia’s. Ukrainians would be used as cannon fodder, as were Afghans since the 1980s Arab-Afghan jihad.

Yet the Obama administration overplayed its hand, and realpolitik now spells out the deepening of the Russia-China strategic partnership across the entire Eurasian land mass; Eurasia as a prospective, massive commercial emporium stretching from Beijing to Berlin, or from Shanghai to St. Petersburg and beyond towards Rotterdam and Duisburg.

Without the exceptionalist obsession of some key Beltway factions, none of the elements of Cold War 2.0 would be in play, as Russia is a natural ally of the US in many fronts. That in itself reveals the state of “strategic thinking” by the current US administration.

American politicians in particular and European politicians in general are some of the most ignorant fools when the issue comes to anything outside their own borders. When it comes to Russia, it is an engima wrapped in a mystery...but only because, dear readers, no one has every bothered to try to understand Russians and the Russian world view.

Rumors of a deterioration in US-Israel relations are very much exaggerated.

At the tail end of a frenzied legislative week, the U.S. Senate quietly voted to pass Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as "Fast Track," a bill that would give President Barack Obama increased power to ram through trade deals without congressional input.

What is the issue, that gets little attention in the mainstream, is that the presidential candidates find it necessary to pay obeisance to ultra-powerful individuals who represent the interests of Israel, not the United States.

What exists now is a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country on steroids that undercuts American security.

For while the mainstream media is analyzing in microscopic detail Jeb’s stumbling over his Iraq war response, it naturally ignores that third rail in contemporary American politics, the power of the Israel lobby.

The United States on Friday blocked a global document aimed at ridding the world of nuclear weapons, saying Egypt and other states tried to "cynically manipulate" the process by setting a deadline for Israel and its neighbors to meet within months on a Middle East zone free of such weapons.

POSTER COMMENT:Israel is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has never publicly declared what is widely considered to be an extensive nuclear weapons program. A conference might force Israel to acknowledge it.
Note: U.S. intelligence has acknowledged that Israel has nuclear weapons.

In short, Clinton personally knew that attack by Al Qaeda that ended in the gruesome deaths of four Americans to basically cover up an international Fast and Furious was not because of some stupid Youtube video — but she stood up and lied to the entire nation with a ridiculous, barely believable cover story anyway and with a straight face.

But HEY! Let’s make her president! She’s a big fat liar, seems she’s pretty qualified for the job.

(read more)

“Israeli troops go on a rampage in the West Bank, kill Palestinians, demolish Palestinian homes”

Paul Jay of the Real news Network interviews Norman Finkelstein about his new book: Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza.

The new apparent Hope – is it what my friend Finian Cunningham says – the first ‘eye blinking’ by Washington facing Russia?

We are so thirsty for hope, hope for another, more just, more equitable world, we see hope in the first ‘blinking of an eye’. Hope is good. Hope is the basis for action. And action must be the consequence of hope – hope that not all is lost. Action to break that impasse of neoliberal all-engulfing greed must be simple. We have become strangers to ourselves. We must return to our roots, recognizing where and why we failed to diagnose the beast. Our awakened, re-kindled sense of consciousness may lead us to what we have lost – our inherent sense of solidarity.

Let’s hope together for that to happen – to happen soon, for the suffering is too great to endure much longer. We, the 99.99 % have it in our power to stop this misery and save our planet.

Reports have shown that veterans are being denied the medications they need to survive, receiving letters declaring them “incompetent” to handle their own affairs, and being put on a list to prevent them from purchasing firearms.

The Pentagon announced on Thursday it is sending 2,000 anti-tank weapons to Iraq, following the rout of U.S.-backed forces in Ramadi by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The weapons will arrive as early as next week, said Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren. He said the U.S. is also expediting the delivery of other equipment, including ammunition and other equipment to counter ISIS's increasing reliance on vehicle-borne bombs.

That said, there exists too much overwhelming evidence to prove that the Islamic State is the US Empire’s latest creation of a designated enemy to propagate unending global war and destruction in all resource rich regions on earth. Reagan and Bush senior used Osama’s al Qaeda machine beginning in the early 1980’s as Washington’s proxy war mercenaries on the ground against the Soviet Empire that led eventually to its demise within the decade. Then in the 90’s al Qaeda was used to help “balkanize” Yugoslavia into 13 obliterated, ineffectual little pieces carved up and served as Empire bases against resurrected cold war enemy Russia as well as the Middle East. Then came the pivotal role of Osama’s 19 box-cutters - 15 of whom were Saudi Arabian - used as inside job 9/11 stooges, close to half of whom have since surfaced alive and well on the planet. Only the 3000 Americans murdered and sacrificed that fateful day by the neocons Bush and Cheney et al with Israeli-Saudi help remain dead. The extensively long history of the United States government covertly utilizing al Qaeda/ISIS/Islamic State as America’s oft-repeated actual ally in its fabricated bogus “war on terror” is nothing but a diabolically driven hoax on this planet. The Islamic State is the fake US enemy deployed by the DC crime cabal as its Empire paid-for-hire tool.

Five major banks agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice for manipulating the exchange rates of U.S. dollars and euros. The banks were Citicorp, J.P. Morgan Chase, Barclays, Bank of America, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. A sixth bank, UBS Group, agreed to plead guilty to manipulating interest rates after the Justice Department granted it immunity on the exchange rate criminal charges. The banks will pay an estimated $5.8 billion in fines to the United States. However, only corporations were charged criminally. Not one individual banking executive was indicted in the currency manipulation scam.

PENTAGON SHAM: DEFENSE DEPT ALTERED BOOKS IN LONG-AWAITED AUDIT, REPORTS CLAIM
The US Defense Department’s watchdog knowingly turned a blind eye to financial irregularities, leading to the Pentagon signing off on an audit. This has led to questions regarding just how transparent the government auditing process actually is. A special investigation by Reuters revealed that a senior member of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Inspector General team had colluded with an independent auditing company, Grant Thornton LLP, to falsely keep the US Marine Corps books clean. The DoD remained the only federal organization that had not abided with a 1992 law passed by Congress to undergo an audit. This was despite the DoD receiving in excess of $500 billion a year, which is by far the largest appropriation of any department.

This week, President Obama signed a bill that will create a national alert system for the capture of anyone who hurts or makes a threat against a police officer. The new bill further solidifies the fact that the lives of police officers are seen as more valuable than that of the average citizen.

The new bill would create a system that would be comparable to the Amber Alerts used to find abducted children, but would likely be taken far more seriously.

Drunk driving has decreased by one-third since 2007 and three-quarters since 1973, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) 2013-2014 Roadside Survey of Alcohol and Drug Use by Drivers. The NHTSA used FORCIBLY collected oral fluid or blood samples from 11,100 drivers at 60 locations across the country to make the determination .

Two Manhattan DEA employees secretly owned a low-rent strip club in South Hackensack, NJ, that employed illegal immigrants from Brazil and Russia as dancers, the feds say in a new criminal complaint. The dive, called the Twins Plus Go-Go Lounge, has repeatedly been cited by state regulators for lewdness because the dancers over-exposed themselves — and also took money for sex in the private lap dance rooms, the complaint says.

There’s still time for President Barack Obama to order the Justice Department to prosecute these perpetrators of torture. And there’s a clear precedent in how the government has confronted similar actions in the past.

To summarize the domestic and international situation — not only is the U.S. government waging a new Cold War abroad with Russia and China, but there’s abundant evidence it’s also entering a ‘cold war’ with large parts of the American population. As during the first Cold War, with the rise of what President Dwight Eisenhower called ‘the military industrial complex’,27 the external ‘Cold War 2.0’ is supplementing the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ as a driver of enhanced government power at home. Consider:

1) The U.S. is in a second Cold War with Russia and China it initiated in Syria, Ukraine and now with the ‘pivot to Asia’, in order to defend the dollar’s world reserve currency status.......

Nearly a year after the debacle suffered by US imperialism and the regime it imposed during more than eight bloody years of war and occupation of Iraq—the fall of the country’s largest city, Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—a similar collapse has unfolded in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, Iraq’s largest province.

'It is time for President Obama, and Defense Secretary Carter, to take action to transfer the 57 men still held who have already been approved to leave Guantánamo, and to release or charge in federal court those who remain'

The New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau slavishly responds to unfolding Israeli stories as though the computers there are set on robotic control to: “Divert, Divert”.

Pope Francis has presented President Abbas with “a bronze medal that represents an angel of peace”, canonized two Palestinian nuns, and recognized Palestine as a state.

That is the big news out of the Vatican.

Not so for the NYTimes. After its initial report on canonization and recognition, the Times turns quickly to the “importance ” of the difference between “may you be” and “you are an angel of peace”...

The truth must be told from the outset: I hope Israel is suspended from FIFA.

A soccer ban doesn’t kill anyone. A boycott spills no blood. It is a legitimate weapon to establish justice and apply international law. Israel supported and supports boycotts, and encourages them: against Hamas, against Gaza, and, of course, against Iran. It even joined the boycott against South Africa, albeit in spite of itself. Now its turn has come.

A short video and song by Finian Cunningham - Inspiration by Bente Petersen, dedicated to the children of Yemen.

Song for Yemen (Lyrics)
…
What’s it coming to?
What’s it coming to?
When they’re killing children every day
And the whole world looks away

What’s it coming to?
What’s it coming to?
When kings and presidents say they’re right
To bomb the poor day and night

And the whole damn world just stays quiet
And the whole damn world bows to might is right

What’s it coming to?
What’s it coming to?
When they’re killing children every day
And the whole world looks away

And the whole world looks away
And the whole world looks away

If Ukraine deploys elements of US missile defense systems on its territory, then Russia will need to respond in order to ensure its own security, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.

Last year, U.S. taxpayers paid $470,000 in pensions and benefits to former president Jimmy Carter, who left office in 1981.

George H.W. Bush received $837,000. He left office in 1989.

Bill Clinton received $950,000 in pensions and benefits, and George W. Bush got $1.3 million.

In all, U.S. taxpayers paid $3.5 million last year in pensions and benefits to the four living former presidents.

All four former presidents are millionaires, so why do they continue to receive such astronomical benefits - at the expense of taxpayers (many of whom are struggling to survive)?

Government watchdog group Judicial Watch recently released over 100 pages of previously secret documents that confirm that the Obama Administration and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew or should have known that the Benghazi terror attack was carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists rather than a spontaneous protest against a video depicting the Prophet Muhammad as was claimed by officials after the attack.

The dwindling number of honeybees in the US has been a constant worry for farmers in recent years – and now the White House is buzzing into action. On Tuesday, the Obama administration unveiled a new strategy aimed at protecting honeybees’ habitat.

As of today, upper echelon diplomatic sources think that Israel is in cahoots with Saudi Arabia, which announced this week that King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud will boycott the summit that President Barack Obama has planned for May 14. The United States had invited all of its Middle East Gulf allies to Camp David for a summit also intended to deal with the ramifications of the negotiations with Iran and the emerging nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Decades of letting neocons dictate a hawkish foreign policy have put the American Republic in profound danger, just as presidents from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower predicted, warnings that Americans must finally take to heart...

We may lament our poverty of leadership, but there are ways to make it function. “Princes,” since long before Machiavelli have always used advisers; some even listened to them. Surely the capable people among us — like the “wise men” who whispered in the ears of those earlier leaders — can guide today’s leaders toward more viable policies and away from the chaos that engulfs us.

Before the screening of War of Lies, the film’s German director, Matthias Bittner, was called to the stage and introduced. He said very little, mainly cryptically that “in Germany this film will never be broadcast in a festival – even a student festival – or in a cinema.”

Someone in the audience asked: “Why?”

Bittner didn’t answer. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and quickly left the stage, pointedly looking at the audience, as if to say: “You decide – after you see the film.”

What the audience saw is that War of Lies exposes, from the inside, that the war on Iraq was based on lies, and that the German security forces were instrumentally involved. From this the audience could infer that this politically embarrassing fact is the reason the German establishment will do all it can to squelch the film.

On Tuesday, May 12, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was asked at a press conference in Sochi Russia, to respond to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s recent statements promising renewed war against Donbass, which were made first on April 30, “The war will end when Ukraine regains Donbass and Crimea,” and which were repeated on May 11th, by his saying, “I have no doubt, we will free the [Donetsk] Airport, because it is our land.” In other words, Poroshenko had repeatedly made clear that he plans a third invasion of Donbass, and, ultimately, also to invade and retake Crimea. (The Western press, however, had not reported any of these threats that were being made by Poroshenko.)