Russia is harassing U.S. diplomats all over Europe

And what has the Obama administration done? Absolutely nothing. They are aware of it, the mafia style intimidation by Russia is now public, and a decision was purposely made to refuse to do anything to help protect Americans.

 

Russian intelligence and security services have been waging a campaign of harassment and intimidation against U.S. diplomats, embassy staff and their families in Moscow and several other European capitals that has rattled ambassadors and prompted Secretary of State John F. Kerry to ask Vladimir Putin to put a stop to it.

At a recent meeting of U.S. ambassadors from Russia and Europe in Washington, U.S. ambassadors to several European countries complained that Russian intelligence officials were constantly perpetrating acts of harassment against their diplomatic staff that ranged from the weird to the downright scary. Some of the intimidation has been routine: following diplomats or their family members, showing up at their social events uninvited or paying reporters to write negative stories about them.

But many of the recent acts of intimidation by Russian security services have crossed the line into apparent criminality. In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington, described to me by several current and former U.S. officials who have written or read them, diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet.

In Moscow, where the harassment is most pervasive, diplomats reported slashed tires and regular harassment by traffic police. Former ambassador Michael McFaul was hounded by government-paid protesters, and intelligence personnel followed his children to school. The harassment is not new; in the first term of the Obama administration, Russian intelligence personnel broke into the house of the U.S. defense attache in Moscow and killed his dog, according to multiple former officials who read the intelligence reports.

The Government Will Never Let It Happen!

What a tangled web the global geopolitical situation has become.  Geopolitics and finance have always been interrelated but recently much more so.  As many readers know, I have speculated we would be hit over the head with a “truth bomb” from the East and most likely from Mr. Putin himself.  Just this week Britain has alleged Mr. Putin personally ordered a “hit” on an ex KGB agent for calling him a pedophile  (http://nypost.com/2016/01/21/murdered-ex-spy-accused-putin-of-pedophilia/).  Another story came out that Turkey shot down a NATO helicopter which made no press coverage at all in the West.  Also, Victoria Nuland recently travelled to Russia and was refused an audience by Mr. Putin.  This, after John Kerry had a meeting where he went into it saying “Assad must go” and came out saying Mr. Assad can stay …  Why all of this now?  I would simply say this reeks of desperation and also a VERY dangerous strategy to attack Mr. Putin personally.  I say “dangerous” because it raises the likelihood of a response from him.  Can you imagine the outrage were Russia to accuse president Obama or the Prime Minister Cameron of Britain for ordering the murder of someone who called them a pedophile?

Obama: “America Has Few Economic Interests In Ukraine”… And This Very Big One

As part of his UN speech seeking to restore a crumbling Pax Americana, president Obama, eager to cover up US involvement in the Ukraine presidential coup of early 2014 (who can forget Victoria Nuland “strategy” interception in which she laid out the post-coup lay of the land, while saying to “fuck the EU”), just said that “America has few economic interest in Ukraine.”

Few, perhaps, but quite substantial.

Presenting exhibit A, from May 2014, just weeks after the Ukraine presidential coup was complete, the press release from Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private gas producers in Ukraine.

‘F**k US imperialism’: Germany’s ex-finance minister slams defense secretary’s Europe visit

Left-wing German politician and former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine has some harsh language message for US on its politics concerning Russia and Ukraine. He has also called on the EU to oppose Washington.

In a Facebook post which cannot be quoted fully quote due to strong language, Lafontaine, whose latest political post was co-chairman of the democratic socialist party The Left, called US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter the “Secretary of War”, and Washington’s policies “imperialism.”

Russia’s “Weaponization” of Information

Testimony Presented to the House Foreign Affairs Committee

April 15, 2015

Helle C. Dale

My name is Helle Dale. I am Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.

Audiences within reach of Russia’s growing media empire are increasingly subjected to manipulation and rampant anti-Americanism.[1] This trend has intensified since the Russian annexation of Crimea and its invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Through its global network, Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin broadcasts globally in five major languages, including on cable TV stations in the United States. Free Western media has no comparable presence in Russia.

Russian propaganda is corrosive to the image of the United States and to our values. Or as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland described it before this committee on March 4, “the Kremlin’s pervasive propaganda campaign, where is truth is no obstacle.” And Russian propaganda is being spread aggressively around the world as we have not seen it since Soviet days. This is not just in Central Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe, but even here in the West. The daily content and commentary from RT and others is often polished and slickly produced. And it’s not like old-fashioned propaganda, aimed solely at making Putin and Russia look good. It’s a new kind of propaganda, aimed at sowing doubt about anything having to do with the U.S. and the West, and in a number of countries, unsophisticated audiences are eating it up.

Russia outguns US in information war

Not only is the U.S. outgunned in the information war, it has allowed propaganda news outlets such as state-run (KGB) Russia Today to broadcast within the gates and manipulate the minds of American citizens for years already.

The Soviet propaganda factory Russia Today has gotten so bad that even one of the news anchors quit live in TV because she was sick of the lies she had to push forward on the Evil Empire’s behalf:

 

 

The West does not have one message and it’s up against a co-ordinated information war, academic says.

Washington: The troubled US agency responsible for delivering news around the world is being outgunned in Eastern Europe by Russian outlets unrestrained by notions of fact-based journalism.

The unequal competition raises fears among US officials that Moscow is winning the information war about events in Ukraine, even as the Russian economy staggers under economic sanctions imposed after the takeover of Crimea.

“Russia has engaged in a rather remarkable period of the most overt and extensive propaganda exercise that I’ve seen since the very height of the Cold War,” US Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate subcommittee in late February. It’s “spending hugely on this vast propaganda machine”, he told another panel the same day, and it’s succeeding “because there’s nothing countering it”.

Ukraine Admits Its Gold Is Gone: “There Is Almost No Gold Left In The Central Bank Vault”

Much like Lybia’s after Ghadaffi was overthrown and killed… gone. If one had to guess, it’s sitting either in an American or European vault. The New York Federal Reserve, or Bundesbank — take your pick. Please see the source link for additional informative charts.

 

 

 

Back in March, at a time when the IMF reported that Ukraine’s official gold holdings as of the end of February, so just as the State Department-facilitated coup against former president Victor Yanukovich was concluding, amounted to 42.3 tonnes or 8% of reserves…

…and notably under the previous “hated” president, Ukraine gold’s reserves had constantly increased hitting a record high just before the presidential coup…

Russian-Backed Rebels Launch Assault on Donetsk Airport

The Russian-backed separatists are reportedly firing artillery at the airport grounds that are controlled by Ukrainian government troops. Five government soldiers and some rebels died in the fighting, according to Ukraine’s Defense Council, and there were additional reports of civilian casualties on Wednesday.

Ongoing clashes in Donetsk, where the separatists say they have established an independent “People’s Republic,” violate the ceasefire agreement reached last month in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. Both sides agreed to put down arms and release prisoners.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said this week that the rebel offensive could derail the ceasefire

…

Donald Jensen, resident fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Transatlantic Relations, said in an interview that the Russian-backed rebels in some ways never intended to comply with the ceasefire. Still, Russian President Vladimir Putin might want to maintain a frozen conflict and not push for more territory in Ukraine.

Did Ukraine Just Airlift Its Entire Gold Hoard To The U.S. Fed?

Today an outspoken hedge fund manager out of Hong Kong stunned King World News when he said that the entire Ukrainian gold hoard may have just secretly been flown from Ukraine to the United States.  William Kaye, who 25 years ago worked for Goldman Sachs in mergers and acquisitions, also spoke about the incredible implications of this astonishing development.  Below is what Kaye had to say in this powerful interview.

Kaye:  “There are now reports coming from Ukraine that all of the Ukrainian gold has been airlifted, at 2 AM Ukrainian time, out of the main airport, Boryspil Airport, in Kiev, and is being flown to New York — the presumable destination being the New York Fed….

“Now that’s 33 tons of gold which is worth somewhere between $1.5 billion – $2 billion.  That would amount to a very nice down payment to the $5 billion that Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland boasted that the United States has already spent in their efforts to destabilize Ukraine, and put in place their own unelected  government.”

Putin Crosses Obama’s Pink Line

Exclusive: Michael Savage declares, ‘The neocons don’t care which side you’re on’

Let me make sense of what’s happening in Ukraine for you as that country descends into armed chaos, threatening to oust the legitimately elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and place the country in the hands of rebel forces spearheaded by Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Chechen Islamist radicals.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, along with Obama adviser and designated liar Susan Rice, are neo-conservatives, neocons for short. The neocons, first in the form of the Trilateral Commission and more recently as the Carlyle Group, thrive on military conflict. When the world is at war, the neocons and the defense contractors who work with them make enormous amounts of money.

The neocons don’t care which side you’re on, as long as they can work with you to create a political situation that they can grow into a war from which they will profit.

The Ukrainian “revolution” was fostered and encouraged by Nuland, Rice and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. These three were instrumental in staging a destabilization campaign. Working with Ukrainian neo-Nazis, they fostered the Ukrainian uprising that has caused elected the Ukrainian president to flee from Kiev.

Arizona Sen. John McCain was also part of this duplicity. McCain went to Kiev in December last year and helped incite the mobs that would overthrow the legitimately elected president. If there were such a thing as a Nobel Anti-Peace Prize, McCain would win it hands down for his work in Egypt and Syria, topped off by what he’s done in Ukraine.

US lets EU take center stage on Ukraine peace accord

Remember that the EU is led by Germany, therefore America is encouraging Germany to take center stage — and it has.

In allowing the EU to mediate Ukraine’s peace accord, the US achieved its objectives and lightened its own burden. Whether it can stay in the shadows depends on the likelihood of a Ukrainian financial crisis.

The US had two priorities in Kyiv, says Charles A. Kupchan, who under the first Clinton administration directed the National Security Council’s (NSC) European affairs.

“Number one, to stop the killing and the loss of life. And number two, to bring to an end a political stalemate and find a way forward for Ukraine,” he told DW.

…

“From the perspective of Washington, it’s important that the Atlantic community move to a new division of responsibility in which Europe shoulders a greater burden,” Kupchan said. “And in the first instance, those burdens should be in Europe.”

US withdrawal from Europe-based missile shield will impact Israel’s defense

On March 20, President Barack Obama arrives in Israel for the first foreign trip of his second term. The purpose of his visit is plain, except to Netanyahu’s domestic rivals: Facing a 50 percent cutback in military spending, the Obama administration cannot credibly threaten to go to war against a recalcitrant Iran. But the US president may still wave the Israeli military option in Tehran’s face.Not that the ayatollahs are likely to be impressed. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have both dismissed talks with Washington “with a gun” at their head, meaning that they are not scared of the Israeli gun the Americans are putting to their heads.

In fact, the Islamic rulers of Tehran are reported by debkafile’s intelligence and Iranian sources to be fully confident that they are home and dry as a nuclear power after a secret US Pentagon research study was leaked that “casts doubt on whether the multibillion-dollar missile defense system planned for Europe” (originally by the Bush administration) “can ever protect the US from Iranian missiles as intended.”

U.S. outrage as Egypt bars Americans from leaving

At first glance, what comes to mind is the Iranian hostage crisis of 1977 . Will this be escalated by Egypt? What will the Obama administration reaction be? This could very well be Obama’s incompetent Carter moment. Make no mistake, this is a hostage crisis.

(Reuters) – Six Americans working for publicly funded U.S. organizations promoting democracy in Egypt have been barred from leaving the country, provoking angry demands in Washington that Cairo’s new military rulers stop “endangering American lives”.

Among those hit by travel bans – one of those targeted called it “de facto detention” – is a son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, as well as other foreign staffers of the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, officials at the two organizations said.

The United States said Egypt should reverse them: “We are urging the government of Egypt to lift these restrictions immediately and allow these folks to come home as soon as possible,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Continue reading article: U.S. outrage as Egypt bars Americans from leaving (Reuters)