Showing posts with label Theresa Villiers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theresa Villiers. Show all posts

Saturday, 28 February 2015

VICEROYAL BANDIT SANDWICH


NI secretary warns of ongoing ‘severe’ threat from dissidents
PSNI investigating booby-trap bomb incident in Armagh which left Sinn Féin supporter injured

Gerry Moriarty


The threat from dissident republicans remains severe in Northern Ireland but moderate in Britain, the Northern Secretary Theresa Villiers has informed Westminster.

Ms Villiers provided the British parliament with the latest MI5 assessment of the dissident threat on Thursday a day after the latest suspected dissident attack left a young south Armagh man seriously injured.

Francis McCabe junior suffered face and chest injuries when a booby-trap bomb exploded as he was taking down a poster on Wednesday morning from a pole close to his home in Crossmaglen.


The attack relates to continuing tensions in south Armagh between Sinn Féin and its supporters and members of dissident groups. Dissidents have been putting up posters accusing some Sinn Féin supporters of being “informers” because they are cooperating with the PSNI.

Booby-trap

Local Sinn Féin MP Conor Murphy accused those responsible for the bomb of attempted murder. He said the poster was placed on the pole in the premeditated expectation that someone would take it down, thus triggering the booby-trap bomb. Mr Murphy called on the police to act against the dissidents before “someone is killed”.

The PSNI has now cordoned off the scene of the explosion with a number of roads around the area also closed. “Police are working to deal with the risk to the public whilst minimising disruption where possible and are grateful for the continued co-operation of the public,” said PSNI Inspector Lorraine Dobson.

Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said on Thursday that the bombing was carried out by “criminals masquerading as republicans” and was “an attack on the peace process and an attempt to intimidate the entire community of south Armagh and north Louth”.

“The attack has followed a campaign of intimidation in the south Armagh area against people in the community who have taken huge personal risks advocating accountable policing with the community,” said Mr McGuinness.

The attack happened as Ms Villiers was preparing to inform the British parliament on Thursday of the level of the dissident threat.

Attack ‘highly likely’

She said it was “severe” in Northern Ireland which means an attack is “highly likely” and “moderate” in Britain meaning “an attack is possible but not likely”.

Ms Villiers said there were 22 “national security” or serious dissident attacks in 2014 while there has been one so far this year. “PSNI and prison officers as well as members of the armed forces continue to be the principal targets for dissident republican terrorists and the threat to life persists,” she said.

“A number of these violent groupings continue to attack, or aspire to carry out attacks, including the so-called ‘new’ IRA, Óglaigh na hÉireann and factions of the Continuity IRA,” added the Northern Secretary.

She said that in addition to more serious incidents dissidents were also engaged in other activity including “brutal punishment shootings as a means to try to exert fear and control within local communities”.

Dissidents are also heavily involved in criminality and this latest evaluation of their threat came after British Revenue and Customs searched a vehicle in south Armagh on Tuesday and recovered raw leaf tobacco worth an estimated £236,000 in lost duty and taxes.

Earlier this month, 12 tonnes of unprocessed tobacco worth an estimated £2 million in lost revenue was seized in an unconnected operation in Armagh.

Ms Villiers said that although “risks endure” the PSNI, MI5 and the Garda continued to disrupt dissident activity and had had a number of notable successes against these groups. She referred to incidents such as the arrest of 15 men in Newry last November, the discovery of a weapons hide in Co Fermanagh last October, and the uncovering of an arms cache in Dublin.

She added: “The close working relationship between PSNI and AGS (An Garda Síochána), and their joint efforts both North and South of the Border, has led to considerable success in combating the threat from dissident republican terrorists over the last six months. I am confident that both police services will do all that they can to build on this through 2015 as they make progress with a number of ongoing investigations.”

Ms Villiers said that “with every attack that is mounted and the many more that are foiled, the PSNI and its security partners become more knowledgeable, resilient and able to tackle the threat and bring perpetrators to justice”.




Rise of Fascism is Again the Issue

By John Pilger

February 27, 2015 "ICH" - The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

"To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.

In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten".

The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew... that if we waited one more day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.

For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".

Following Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, "confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency".

The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.

In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation - and the implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America's modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as "sanctions". The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.

"Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over." These were opening words of Obama's 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. "The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion," said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed - civilians and soldiers - during Obama's time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives', Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion... Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation." He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. "Every girl," recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, "could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported."

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, "there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]". Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the "threat of a promising example".

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised support for tribal "fundamentalist" groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that "the United States' larger interests... would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." The italics are mine.

The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a "freedom fighter".

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and "destabilise" the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, "a few stirred up Muslims". His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called "Operation Cyclone". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah - who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help - was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.

The "blowback" of Operation Cyclone and its "few stirred up Muslims" was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer's message was and remains: "You are with us or against us."

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and "collatoral damage". In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians ("gooks") were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.

Today, the world's greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama's victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA "kill list" presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each "hit" is registered on a faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".

"For goose-steppers," wrote the historian Norman Pollock, "substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception." This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the "tragedy" of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places - just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood's violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, 'American Sniper', which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a "patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days".

There are no heroic movies about America's embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens - as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry". If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe - with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism". It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading "neo-con" luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.

Nuland's coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea - illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 - voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion". The Nato commander, General Breedlove - whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - announced that 40,000 Russian troops were "massing". In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine - a third of the population - have long sought a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history". In the American and British media, this was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint".

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army". There were "individual citizens" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev's Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for "full scale war" with nuclear-armed Russia.

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established... If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason."

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack... In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons." In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. "Putin must be stopped," said the headline. "And sometimes only guns can stop guns." He conceded that the threat of war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that "America has the best kit".

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones." He lauded Blair as a "Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote, "Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran."

The outbursts - or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" - are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: "The F-35. GREAT For Britain". This American "kit" will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas "investment". She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son is on the board of Ukraine's biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine's rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine's mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia's long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger Visit his website http://johnpilger.com/

Friday, 8 August 2014

GERRY ADAMS READY TO REJOIN IRA





IRISH TIMES - Gerry Adams warns peace process faces ‘serious threat’

SF president claims actions of unionists and British creating a threat to power sharing

The Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has warned the power sharing Stormont administration is facing its most “serious threat” in recent years. Photograph: Alan Betson /The Irish Times
The Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has warned the power sharing Stormont administration is facing its most “serious threat” in recent years. Photograph: Alan Betson /The Irish Times
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has warned the power sharing Stormont administration is facing its most “serious threat” in recent years.
Mr Adams in what Sinn Féin described as a “keynote statement” issued today said the political process “is in trouble” and that it faces “its greatest challenge since the Good Friday Agreement negotiations in 1998”.
Mr Adams made his hard-hitting statement following a period of serious disagreement between DUP First Minister Peter Robinson and Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness over issues such as welfare reform, failure to reach agreement on departmental budgets and developing a peace and reconciliation centre at the Maze prison site.
The Sinn Féin leader was particularly critical of unionist leaders, the British government and Northern Secretary Theresa Villiers, and of the Irish Government.
He accused Mr Robinson of “bad manners, bad politics and bad economics”.
Mr Adams also appeared to solely blame unionism and the British government for IRA violence and the violence of the Troubles generally. “The Orange state was built on partition, unionist domination, inequality and injustice. It was an apartheid state in which citizens were denied the right to a vote, to a job, to a fair justice system and to a home,” he said.
“The failure of unionism and of the British government to agree fundamental reform in the 1960s led to a militarisation of the situation and to decades of conflict,” he added.
Mr Adams accused British prime minister David Cameron’s government of being “explicitly partisan in championing a unionist agenda”.
“The anti-Good Friday Agreement axis within unionism, the pro-unionist stance of the British secretary of state, the refusal of Downing St to honour its own obligations are combining to create the most serious threat to the political institutions in the north in recent years,” said Mr Adams.
He accused unionists and the British government of failing to get talks underway on the Haass issues of parading, the past and flags.
“Most worryingly there is no evidence from Downing Street or the NIO (Northern Ireland Office) or the unionist leaderships of any likelihood of a real negotiation on all of these issues commencing in September,” he said.
“This therefore presents a very significant challenge to everyone who wants to see progress and to all those who support the Good Friday and other agreements, this includes leaders of civic society, the community sector, the trade union movement, the business sector, as well as political parties,” he added.
Mr Adams continued, “David Trimble in his day and Peter Robinson, despite some positive periods, have undermined their role as First Minister. Instead of actively and determinedly working with the Deputy First Minister to maximise the potential for a new beginning they have minimised the promise and potential of the Good Friday Agreement.
“The fact is that the anti-agreement axis has been very active in asserting a negative agenda. Too many in the pro-agreement axis, with some notable exceptions, have been passive. This includes the Irish government.”
Mr Adams said that that the DUP had repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to participate positively in any of the power sharing institutions. He said that Instead it has adopted a tactical approach “aimed at serving the political agenda of a fundamentalist rump in their party rather than the needs of the whole community”.
“As Martin McGuinness has noted, ‘We are in government with unionists because we want to be. They are in government with us because they have to be.’”
Sinn Féin has come under severe criticism for refusing to sign up to British government welfare reform which has resulted in reductions and pressures on Stormont budgets. Mr Adams however defended the Sinn Féin position and said welfare reform should be resisted by the Northern Executive.
“These changes are not about reform. They are about cuts and they are part of a Thatcherite agenda designed to dismantle the welfare state. And Sinn Féin will oppose them.
And he warned, “The effect of all of this and of the British government’s handling of the political situation has been to reinforce political logjams. The political process is in trouble.”
Mr Adams warned against Ms Villiers setting up a commission of inquiry on parading, as unionists are demanding, because “that would dangerously damage the integrity of theParades Commission, undermine the residents and further undermine the Haass proposals”.
“If the unionist leaderships refuse to engage positively in new negotiations then the Irish and British governments, as co-equal guarantors of the agreement, must ensure that outstanding issues are implemented,” said Mr Adams.

Wednesday, 30 October 2013

LETTERBOMB SENT TO VICEROYAL VILLIERS




belfasttelegraph
Wednesday 30 October 2013
Icon Hi 12°C | Lo 6°C CHANGEBelfast

How on earth did letter bomb addressed to Theresa Villiers get all the way to Stormont?

Police stand at a security gate at Stormont Castle after yesterday's letter bomb

Concerns have been raised over how a letter bomb addressed to the Secretary of State made it all the way to Stormont Castle.

The device sparked a major security alert and forced the First Minister from his office.
Dozens of staff at the seat of power in Northern Ireland, including Peter Robinson (right), had to be evacuated on Tuesday afternoon after a suspect parcel was found by workers in the post sorting room.
Army bomb disposal experts were sent to the scene.
They described the device as "viable" and it was taken away for further examination.
Police have said the device was "similar" to those found in the past week which have been blamed on dissident republicans.
Security sources have said the device was small and was packaged in a jiffy-type bag, similar to previous items, and that had it exploded it would have caused serious injury.
Stormont Castle is home to the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister and is also the location for meetings of the Executive.
While Secretary of State Theresa Villiers is not based in the building, her office is in the nearby Stormont House and its post is handled in Stormont Castle.
MLA Paul Girvan, who is Peter Robinson's Private Parliamentary Secretary, told the Belfast Telegraph it was a "concern" that the package managed to make it all the way through the postal system to Stormont.
He said all the mail was delivered to a central reception area in the building and that it would have been close to the First Minister who was working in his office ahead of the alarm being raised on Tuesday morning.
"It's in the same building. There would have been a lot of people in that area," said the DUP representative.
"There should be special attention given to parcels addressed to high-ranking officials like the Secretary of State, especially given the latest spate of these incidents and everyone has to be more vigilant.
"I would expect there to be a serious study going on, by the police, security at Stormont and those involved with the post as to how this managed to happen."
The Department of Finance and Personnel, which runs the Stormont estate, said it was investigating the incident to determine if any further action was required.
Royal Mail, which handles some of the post at Stormont and discovered letter bombs in its sorting offices last week, said it had "strict procedures and protocols" in place to deal with suspect packages.
A spokeswoman said: "We have strict procedures and protocols in place to deal with suspect devices and trained personnel who manage these situations on the ground.
"Our employees are regularly briefed on these protocols which are under constant scrutiny and review. The safety of our people is our number one priority."
Ms Villiers was in London at the time of the alert, meeting with US diplomatRichard Haass, and she condemned the attacks.
First Minister Peter Robinson said that had the bomb gone off the victims would have been postal workers, office staff and civil servants. "Do they really think the Secretary of State opens her post," he asked.
"The attack might get more publicity because of who it was addressed to but the impact would have been on a public servant."
Those behind the terror bid "will not further any aim or objective by their vile and callous deeds", he said.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness described the incident as "the offerings of bitter and twisted little minds" and their actions "will further nothing".
Justice Minister David Ford, who happened to be visiting a Royal Mail sorting centre yesterday to praise postal staff for their diligence over recent days in discovering the letter bombs, added his condemnation.
BACKGROUND
The parcel sent to Theresa Villiers is the fourth letter bomb device which has been intercepted in the past week after similar devices were sent to the Chief Constable Matt Baggott, John Burrows, Londonderry's highest-ranking police officer, and the offices of the Public Prosecution Service in Derry.
Those were blamed on dissident republicans and police said yesterday's device was "similar in make-up to the devices found in recent days".
They have appealed for information.

Tuesday, 13 August 2013

MURDER OF GOVERNMENT MINISTER BY BRITISH SECRET SERVICES LIKELY









 
Attacks on British Police “justified”, 


according to Protestant Coalition in 


British Occupied Ireland




Sam McCrory, chairman of the Protestant Coalition also said that British Police in British Occupied ireland “took a very good beating and rightly so”.Mr McCrory, explicitly defended the loyalist violence on Facebook.
The Protestant Coalition supported by the hardline position of the UVF’s political wing, the PUP, which condemned the rioting. This follow previous comments by another loyalist politician In a conversation on Facebook, who responded to someone else's post about an imaginary attack on a memorial parade in Castlederg in which several people including Sinn Féin figures are murdered. To which the elected politician from the leading Protestant Party the DUP replied: "We would have done a great service to Northern Ireland and the world." Unfortunately right now across most of the Irish political spectrum and the British 'intelligence' community it seems to be the only point of agreement.
And in a separate video produced by the Protestant Coalition, Mr McCrory boasted of diverting Friday night’s anti internment march entering Royal Avenue. After the riot, McCrory said: “It’s been a victory for the Protestant, unionist, loyalist community here in the centre of Belfast. Dissident republicans didn’t get parading through the middle of our city. They were re-routed. In the end they accepted defeat. We claim the victory, so we do, for the decent citizens of Belfast.”
On Facebook on Saturday, responding to a comment, that Loyalist violence in Belfast was wrong, Mr McCrory said: “David I disagree with you regarding the word WRONG. I do believe that you should replace it with the word JUSTIFIED. As one who was on the ground throughout yesterday and evening, I witnessed the brutality of the police against men, women and children, without provocation and just to satisfy someone’s agenda.
This is not the first time that I have witnessed events like this when police wade in hours before a parade takes place in order to get it started.They took a very good beating and rightly so because we [the people have had enough and what happened last night is just the beginning of the tide turning. When the deck is unfairly stacked against you the only way is to challenge the dealer whatever way that you can.”
A Unionist MLA, John McCallister however last night condemned McCrory’s comments, saying “There’s no justification whatsoever for what happened in Belfast on Friday night. When I condemn the violence, there are no ifs, buts or wherefores: it was wrong. Injuring police, wrecking our image internationally, jeopardising investment, it is wrong,” McCallister also said that far from being a “victory” for unionism, as McCrory claimed, Friday’s loyalist riot had been a disaster for everyone and that the “vast majority” of people would find it “crazy” to see a riot as victory.
Meanwhile MI5's spokesperson, the non elected Viceroyal Villiers has gagged the only republican who became a Minister in the Stormont Executive, despite MI5 efforts to block her. After British Secret Services, had already refused the British Prime Minister permission, to allow a public inquiry, into Britain's Secret Service murders, of an Irish journalist and two human rights lawyers, they have now gagged Culture Minister Caral Ni Chuilin  from  publishing the details of Britain's murder of Paddy McAdorey in Belfast in 1971, their murder of a social worker, student Michael Donnelly in 1980, and the murder of mother Sarah Larmour in 1979.
Following the release of sensitive inquest documents, relating to three British murders by the British Minister Caral Ni Chuilin, emergency proceedings were issued by the Chief Constable and Viceroyal Villiers, to gag their own minister, who happens to be and Irish republican of sorts, who would not follow MI5 orders like her colleagues. Culture Minister Caral Ni Chuilin personally handed over the court files to victims' group Relatives for Justice Law firm. A decision over when the information relating to three killings stretching back more than 40 years should be given full public access has been postponed until Thursday.
The two English overlords in British occupied ireland, Matt Baggott and Theresa Villiers believe sensitive details, which could identify British force members, should have been removed before circulation by their Republican minister. The Injustice Minister Ford, another sockpuppet for Britain's Secret Service MI5 said, he is "extremely disappointed" Minister Ni Chuilin had the cheek to disobey, his orders or British Secret Service's advice, before passing on the files.
Minister Ni Chuilin's department is responsible for the Public Record Office where the data is held. Lawyers for Viceroyal Villiers and the British Secret Services, secured a temporary injunction or gagging order, to block their circulation. Outside the court, lawyer Niall Murphy of KRW Law, representing one of the victims family, expressed concern at the timing of the move, pointed out that the injunction prevents yet again,the material by next of kin seeking a fresh inquiry into the British murder.
Mr Murphy said; "The attempt by the Secretary of State and the Chief Constable to overturn the minister's decision is a major setback to the cause of seeking to ensure the state's compliance with its positive obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights."
Minister Ford who along with the two British overlords, is also responsible for the internment without trial of Martin Corey for more than three years, said: "I'm extremely disappointed that she doesn't seem to be taking advice from my department, the British police, and she has gone ahead and issued those documents."There are now real fears for the life of the disobedient Minister, who is also believed to have received a severe tongue lashing, from her compromised, male colleagues, because of her disobedience to British MI5 and the big wigs of British Sinn Fein's inner circle. 
After the British State murders of Human Rights lawyers, Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, along with Journalist Martin O'Hagan, with Britain's Secret Services providing the intelligence, training and mentoring loyalist agents, to shoot and bomb the lawyers, many observers are now drawing comparison, between Minister Ni Chuilin and the British Governments bombing, with specialist Secret Service equipment of Human Rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson. Many are also convinced, that it is just a question of time, before MI5 have the disobedient British Minister liquidated, by a loyalist bomb under her state carriage as a warning to any other restless natives who may be hiding in British Sinn Fein.