Paul Craig Roberts

Few, if any, of the correct questions were asked in the grand jury hearing to decide whether policeman Darren Wilson would be indicted for killing Michael Brown.

The most important unexamined question is whether police are trained to use force immediately as a first resort before they assess a situation or determine if they are at the correct address. Are the police trained that the lives of police officers are so much more valuable than the lives of possible suspects, or a houseful of people into whose residence a heavily armed SWAT team enters, that police officers must not accept the risk of judicious behavior when encountering citizens? If this is the case as all evidence indicates that it is, then the police when they gratuitously murder members of the public are merely doing what they have been trained to do. As police are trained to use violence as a first resort, the police cannot be held accountable when they do.

There are a large number of videos available online that show that the first thing that police do when they arrive is to use force.

No sooner is Michael Brown in the grave than Cleveland cops kill a 12-year old boy who has a toy gun that shoots plastic pellets. The child is threatening no one–indeed there is no one else present. The boy seems to be playing a fantasy game in his head. A busy body calls the police. The police arrive and instantly shoot the kid down.

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Stephen Lendman

Repeated administration/Pentagon Big Lies claim otherwise. Saying only non-lethal aid supplied. Including communications equipment. Body armor. Night vision goggles. Humvees. Radar. Counter-mortar detection units. Binoculars. Small boats. Various other gear.

Kiev is infested with CIA, FBI, US special forces and various other so-called Washington advisors. Directly involved in aiding, abetting and directing Donbass fighting.

Pentagon spokesman Admiral John Kirby lied saying: "Nothing has changed about the non-lethal assistance that we continue to flow to Ukrainian armed forces and security forces." Washington "continue(s) to focus on non-lethal assistance…" - False! More on this below.

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PolitNavigator Interviews Graham Phillips

The news about Graham Phillips being wounded caught PolitNavigator reporters at a time they were making a transcript of the interview with this British reporter. It was recorded the day before Graham was wounded.

Graham Philips was working on the militia side and never hesitated to say what he thought about Euromaidan. He also said that the Ukrainian intelligence services consider him an enemy.

Graham Phillips: I was in Odessa when it all began. I remember well my impressions when I arrived in Kiev. I did not recognize the city: there was trash everywhere, fires, clashes, brawls and Molotov cocktails. It was a nightmare. You could see Bandera posters everywhere, some Nazis…

I previously lived and worked in Kiev for two years. It's a beautiful city with wonderful people. Those who stood on the barricades and brutalized Berkut officers were not from Kiev. These people came from Lviv, Ternopil and other places in Western Ukraine. They didn’t care about burning or breaking things, because they were not from Kiev. It was an act of terror, a real terror.

I was wondering back then: how could the US and the EU support this? How can the democratic West support terrorists? But that’s how it was. They encouraged them and provoked all these events.

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John W. Whitehead

If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality. We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities—particularly in communities of color. - Thomas Nolan, criminology professor and former police officer

Should police officer Darren Wilson be held accountable for the shooting death of unarmed citizen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014?

That the police officer was white and his victim black should make no difference. In a perfect world, it would not matter. In an imperfect world such as ours, however, racism is an effective propaganda tool used by the government and the media to distract us from the real issues.

As a result, the national dialogue about the dangers of militarized, weaponized police officers being trained to act like soldiers on the battlefield, shooting first and asking questions later, has shifted into a largely unspoken debate over race wars, class perceptions and longstanding, deep-seated notions of who deserves our unquestioning loyalty and who does not.

Putting aside our prejudices, however, let’s not overlook the importance of Ferguson and this grand jury verdict. Tasked with determining whether Wilson should stand trial for Brown’s shooting, the grand jury ruled that the police officer will not face charges for the fatal shooting. However, the greater question—whether anything will really change to rein in militarized police, police shootings, lack of accountability and oversight, and a military industrial complex with a vested interest in turning America into a war zone—remains unanswered.

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Paul Craig Roberts (A Short Comment)

Events in Ferguson unfolded as most aware Americans thought they would. A white prosecutor guided a grand jury to the decision that the white policeman who shot and killed a young black male had just cause and committed no crime.

The black majority but politically powerless community in Ferguson consists of Americans who are constantly harassed and abused by police. The black community responded predictably to the exoneration of the white policeman. The results were riots, looting, and the destruction of property.

This response hardened the whites in their view that black people are criminally inclined and a threat to the safety of the lives and properties of whites. The issue has been cast as white-black racism. Actually, the situation is far more serious than racism.

I can remember times when police in America were reliable. They had themselves under control and saw their role as helpful to citizens and investigators of crimes. They took care not to bring charges against innocent people and to kill citizens without cause. Police would put their lives on line in order to avoid making a mistake in the use of their power.

Those times are gone forever. The police have been militarized, especially after 9/11, but even before. Police are taught to regard the public, especially any suspect or traffic offender as a potential threat to the police. The new rule taught to police is to apply violence to the suspect or offender in order to protect the police officer, and to question suspects only after they are safely secured, it they are still alive after being beaten, tasered, or shot.

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Stephen Lendman

Killer Darren Wilson attends a city council meeting in Ferguson...

Monday's grand jury exoneration of Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson didn't surprise. Injustice triumphed.

A previous article called justice in America a four-letter word. Killer cops mock it. Nearly always with impunity. A badge lets them brutalize and kill. Blacks, Latinos, ethnic minorities and Muslims suffer most. They're targets of choice.

Police violence occurs multiple times daily across America. In big cities. Small ones. Urban areas. Rural ones. Militarized police make their own rules. Operating extrajudicially. Killing with impunity.

On August 9, officer Darren Wilson murdered 18-year-old Michael Brown. In cold blood. Without probable cause. Brown was unarmed. Posed no threat. Had no criminal record. An independent autopsy showed he was shot six times.

Ferguson police lied. Claiming Brown's shooting followed an altercation he initiated. Saying he tried to grab officer Wilson's gun. He wasn't close enough to do it. No powder burns on his hands, arms or body proved it. Forensic evidence showed Brown was either walking away from officer Wilson or had his hands raised in a "don't shoot" position. Eyewitnesses confirmed the same thing.

At the time, ACLU staff attorney Nusrat Choudhury said killing Brown raised disturbing questions about how often police brutalize unarmed black and Latino men in America. "(F)ar too often," she stressed. Rarely ever are cops held accountable. More on this below.

Obama failed to express outrage. Ignored systemic police violence and brutality in America. Nearly always with impunity. Saying "we are a nation built on the rule of law. (W)e need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make." "There are Americans who agree with it, and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed…"

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Andre Damon

St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert P. McCulloch’s statement Monday night that no charges will be filed against Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown is a travesty of justice.

The entire process through which the grand jury arrived at its decision is a legal fraud. The outcome is not the result of fair judicial proceedings, but political calculations. The grand jury returned the outcome the state was seeking: no charges for the police murder of an unarmed African American youth.

Despite the fact that the decision was not announced until after 9:00pm eastern time, there were protests Monday night throughout the United States.

In Ferguson and surrounding cities, police responded by deploying SWAT teams in riot gear, firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Convoys of armored police vehicles rolled through the streets. The roofs of some of the vehicles were lined with sand bags, with marksmen pointing assault rifles at unarmed demonstrators.

The mayor of Ferguson called for the deployment of the National Guard—previously activated by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, who declared a pre-emptive “state of emergency” last week.

President Barack Obama spoke immediately after McCulloch’s statement, mouthing a few perfunctory and semi-coherent comments, the main aim of which was to solidarize himself with the grand jury ruling.

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Thad Beversdorf

Lately, we hear a lot about Orwell’s “1984” and Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” but perhaps the best crystal ball to our current state of affairs is Plato’s "Republic". You see both Rand and Orwell were describing a world outside of themselves. A world they couldn’t understand or accept. And while those works are brilliant and incredibly prophetic, I expect that to understand a world borne of narcissistic sociopathy one must examine the construct of such a world by a narcissistic sociopath. Fortunately Plato, perhaps the world’s most (in)famous narcissistic sociopath, provided us a vivid illustration and explanation of his ideal state in Plato’s "Republic”. Plato provides us the why to Orwell’s and Rand’s ‘unideal’ states.

Plato provides the arguments for the philosopher kings. He also describes various levels of reality, arguing that each societal demographic must live within the reality level delegated to them. He argues each demographic has a limited intellectual capacity and thus can only handle the reality level provided to them. With the philosopher kings being the only societal demographic with the right to and capacity for absolute truth. Likewise, the philosophers kings in the world we find ourselves today control each and every aspect of life including our subsequent perception of the world. There is no such thing as happenstance. The market moves a certain direction not because of unexplained market forces but because the philosopher kings have made it so. Economic policies are creating incredible wealth for the already wealthy while destroying the middle class not because of honest misjudgements or the need for more time but because the philosopher kings make it so. The Fed dropped the U3 unemployment rate as a benchmark because it does not meet their standard of truth but expects the rest of us to consider that true unemployment. Declining GDP is ignored while adjusted indicators signalling GDP is healthy are paraded all over the street because the philosopher kings make it so. A Malaysian airliner is shot out of the sky not by things yet unknown but because the philosopher kings make it so.

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Paul Craig Roberts (A Short Comment)

According to news reports, Washington has decided to arm Ukraine for renewed military assault on Russian ethnics in Donetsk and Luhansk.

A Russian foreign ministry official condemned Washington’s reckless decision to supply weapons to Kiev as a violation of agreements that would make a political resolution of the conflict less likely. This statement is perplexing. It implies that the Russian government has not yet figured out that Washington has no interest in resolving the conflict. Washington’s purpose is to use the hapless Ukrainians against Russia. The worse the conflict becomes, the happier Washington is.

The Russian government made a bet that Europe would come to its senses and the conflict would be peacefully resolved. The Russian government has lost that bet and must immediately move to preempt a worsening crisis by uniting the separatists provinces with Russia or by reading the riot act to Europe.

It would be a costly humiliation for the Russian government to abandon the ethnic Russians to a military assault. If Russia stands aside while Donetsk and Luhansk are destroyed, the next attack will be on Crimea. By the time Russia is forced to fight, Russia will face a better armed, better prepared, and more formidable foe.

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The Saker

Dear friends,

I am noticing with some dismay that some (many?) of you are still firmly the mental clutches of the "conspiracy theories" logical fallacy. The reactions to Koenig's articles about Ebola and HIV are typical of that kind of logical derailment. So it is hight time that I state a few basic assumptions of this blog.

1) A "conspiracy theory" is, a priori, a good thing. Why? Because the world is chock full of conspiracies. What is a conspiracy? It is a secret plan of a group of people. Does any of you really believe that with 16+ "intelligence" agencies in the USA there are not thousands of conspiracies hatched every day by tens of thousand of professional people just here, in the USA? Don't you know that corporations conspire too? What do you think antitrust laws are all about? Do you know that the criminal code is also full of conspiracy crimes?

So here is the deal: if you want to understand what happens behind the smokescreen thrown before you by the corporate media and government official you HAVE TO spend most of your time looking into conspiracy theories. Put simply - if you reject conspiracy theories you are blind. Period.

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Pepe Escobar

These are bleak times. I've been in serious conversation with some deep sources and interlocutors - those who know but don't need to show off, privileging discretion. They are all deeply worried. This is what one of them, a New York strategic planner, sent me:

The propaganda attack against Putin equating him with Hitler is so extreme that you have to think that the Russians cannot believe their ears and cannot trust the United States anymore under any circumstances. I cannot believe how we could have gotten ourselves into this situation to protect the looters in the Ukraine that Putin would have rid the Ukraine of, and even had the gall to place in a leadership role one of the worst of the thieves. But that is history. What is certain is that MAD [mutually assured destruction] is not a deterrent today when both sides believe the other will use nuclear weapons once they have the advantage and that the side that gains a decisive advantage will use them. MAD is now over.That may sound somewhat extreme - but it's a perfectly logical extension, further on down the road, of what the Russian president intimated in his already legendary interview with Germany's ARD in Vladivostok last week: the West is provoking Russia into a new Cold War. [1]

Mikhail Gorbachev just stressed a few days ago the new Cold War is already on. Princeton's Stephen Cohen says the Cold War in fact never left. The Roving Eye reported about Cold War 2.0 months ago (here, here, here and here). Brits - still stranded in the 19th century new Great Game - prefer to spin the "strident toxic personality" of "diminutive Putin"; [2] he is the "ruthless, charming and ultimately reckless" man who "put the cold war back in vogue". The Council on Foreign Relations, predictably, mourns the end of the post-Cold War world, blasts the current "disorder", and dreams of the good ol' unchallenged exceptionalist days. [3]

For arguably the best detailed background on how we came to this perilous state of affairs, it's hard to beat Vladimir Kozin of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. [4] Read him carefully. And yes, it's Cold War 2.0, the double trouble remix; between the US and Russia, and between NATO and Russia.

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Michael Hoffman

“Conflict in Holy Land: The Israeli-Palestinian Struggle...in Recent Months”

2100 Palestinians victims from the summer of 2014 rendered invisible.

As background to yesterday’s tragic events in Jerusalem, Prof. Daniel McGowan of Deir Yassin Remembered, has confirmed that the Jerusalem synagogue where the attack on the rabbis occurred, is located on land in the Hasidic Har Nof district of West Jerusalem, that was stolen from the Palestinians 66 years ago.

Har Nof is on the site of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, which was obliterated by Israeli “ Irgun" terrorists on April 9, 1948. More than a hundred Palestinian men, women and children were systematically murdered and the village was razed, so that in 2014 Talmudists could worship themselves in a synagogue, on a site where civilians were massacred and then completely forgotten by a ‘Holocaust’-obsessed world. (“Holocaust" saint Elie Wiesel served as a propaganda writer for the Irgun).

The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, CBS, Fox, ad nauseam, report none of this, even as they express hypocritical outrage that Putin’s Russia is opening more of what they term “propaganda” media outlets around the world; toward their own propaganda they are utterly indifferent.

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Stephen Lendman

Washington’s Ukrainian Stooges Shot Down The Malaysian
Airliner: The holes in the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight
MH17 are believed to have come from 30mm cannon fire.

On July 17, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed near Donetsk. En route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Killing all 283 passengers. Plus 15 crew members. At the time, Washington blamed Donbass self-defense forces. Claiming a Russian-supplied Buk surface-to-air missile fired from territory they controlled. Moscow blamed Ukraine. The Dutch Safety Board launched an investigation. Issuing a preliminary September 9 report. A final one to come later.

Initially saying MH17 "broke up in the air probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside." Voice and flight data recorders as well as air traffic control data suggest MH17 operated normally until 13:20:03 GMT. No emergency call was made. Ukrainian air traffic control communications between 13:20 and 13:22:02 GMT were unanswered.

Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) lied. Claiming Donbass "terrorists" targeted a Russian Aeroflot airliner. Downed MH17 by mistake. Media scoundrel reporting ended. Having accused Russia of direct involvement. Big Lies only go so far. Not daring to blame Moscow for downing its own aircraft. Killing hundreds of passengers. Claiming a botched false flag. Blaming Ukraine for what happened.

A missile didn't down MH17. No credible evidence suggests it. Shrapnel marks indicate a 30 millimeter caliber projectile. Fired at close range. From a military aircraft. Eyewitnesses reported a Ukrainian one flying close to MH17 when downed.

The New York Times and other Western media falsely blamed Russia and Donbass self-defense forces. Kiev in collusion with Washington bore full responsibility. The obvious went unreported.

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Costantino Ceoldo interviews Paul Craig Roberts

"Enough Americans Are Not Stupid" (rumproast.com)

I recently had the chance to interview Paul Craig Roberts. I remember briefly, for the uninitiated, that Dr. Roberts was a senior official of the US government, economic advisor to the President during the first term of Ronald Reagan. It is to him the creation of Reaganomics, the economic policy initiated by Reagan to revive the US economy, then stagnant. Dr. Roberts was also a member of a secret committee of control over the CIA, set up to verify the information provided by US intelligence on the continuation of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He has still now a profound understanding of the mechanisms of power in Washington and he’s distinguished for his political analysis, often discordant compared with that of the official mainstream.

Costantino Ceoldo – In one of your recent articles you said that there is an “establishment” within both the Republican Party and also the Democrats, voted to preserve the power and hostility to any independent and authoritative presidential figure. How is it that we have come now to a situation like this and it seems to have originated many decades ago?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts – Government’s ability to tax, borrow, and print money gives government command over private resources. The beneficiaries of these resources can be, in certain circumstances the people. More often, the beneficiaries are the profits of private interests who are allied with government. As time passes these interests harden and become an Establishment. In the US the Establishment consists of the private interest groups–such as the financial sector, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, the extractive industries, and agribusiness–that write the laws that government enacts. The political party in-groups serve these interests in exchange for the large political campaign donations that elect the government. The two political parties in the US compete to be the whore of the private interest groups, because the majority party can do more favors and thus receive more benefits. When political outsiders, such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who can be tolerated as long as they are limited to governorships in States, seize the presidential nomination from the Establishment candidates and get elected, they jeopardize the establishment’s control. For example, when the Democratic Establishment realized that Franklin D. Roosevelt would not survive his 4th term, they forced out his popular vice president, Henry Wallace, and installed the non-entity and easily controlled Harry Truman. They were able to use Truman to create the very profitable Cold War, which kept the military/security complex in the money for years.

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Patrick Martin

The US Senate blocked action Tuesday on a bill that would have imposed only minor limitations on a National Security Agency program that collects records of the phone calls of every American. The vote was 58 to 42 to take up the measure for consideration, with supporters falling two votes short of the 60 required to force action.

The vote was nearly by party lines in the outgoing lame duck Senate, with 52 Democrats, two independents who generally vote with the Democrats and four Republicans supporting consideration of the bill. The 41 Republican opponents were joined by one Democrat, Bill Nelson of Florida.

The effect of the vote is to delay consideration of any legislation on NSA spying until the next session of Congress, when Republicans will be in the majority and will control key committees like Intelligence and Judiciary, which originate and write legislation.

The defeated measure, drafted by the outgoing chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, would have placed very slight restrictions on the NSA program that collects metadata on virtually ever phone call placed in or through US telecommunications companies or the Internet.

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