Assad Abu Khalil — "The United States assassinated Pakistan's first PM, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, more than sixty years ago"

"The United States assassinated Pakistan's first PM, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, more than sixty years ago, according to US State Department documents. Quoting the declassified State Department documents, Pakistan Today reported on Friday that Khan was murdered because of his refusal to use his office for securing oil contracts in neighboring Iran for US corporations. According to the report, Khan said he would neither use his friendship with officials in Tehran for dishonest purposes nor interfere in personal affairs of Iran."

The Angry Arab

"The United States assassinated Pakistan's first PM, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, more than sixty years ago"

Assad Abu Khalil | Professor of Political Science, California State University, Stanislaus

See also

US is forming a Syrian militia: US is opposed to Arab militias--unless they are formed by it or by Israel

John Helmer — The President’s Inferiority Complex , His Advisor’s Russia-Hating Obsession, And The Putsch Plotter With The Itchy Trigger Finger

Second installment on Zbig and Jimmy Carter. Another eye-opener.

Accounts such as these make it clear that there are no "good guys." "Our guys" are thugs, too.

These games of liquidating others in the cause of defeating the Kremlin has invigorated Carter, even today when Carter himself is on his last legs. Drawing the Russians on to the field of battle was his and Brzezinski’s aim; Afghanistan, after the Soviet military intervention began in December 1979, was their main chance. Their successors in the White House have the same chance against Russian forces on the battlefields of Syria and Ukraine. Though he has tried, Brzezinski is no longer in a position to advise them that if they don’t dare, they can’t win. Carter is still alive to demonstrate that if they dare, they are likely to lose.

It isn’t sure that’s what KGB trainee Putin scribbled down during his lectures at the Andropov Red Banner Institute in 1984. It’s certain he has noted it down now.

Helmer's accounts explain much about the current Russophobia in the government and press.

Dances with Bears
THE PRESIDENT’S INFERIORITY COMPLEX , HIS ADVISOR’S RUSSIA-HATING OBSESSION, AND THE PUTSCH PLOTTER WITH THE ITCHY TRIGGER FINGER
John Helmer

Pat Lang — Manufactured hysteria - once again

As the "icing on the cake" the media now proclaim that the Intelligence Community is a vessel of integrity and patriotic self-sacrifice that, since it hints to us that "the Russians done it," must be believed without question. Well, pilgrims, those who really know the Intelligence Community know that these agencies are run be self-serving political hacks who may once have been people of integrity but who, by the time, they reach the top will say or proclaim anything that advances their personal interest.

Are we mad enough to believe such people? Perhaps Trump is not.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Manufactured hysteria - once againCol. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.), former military intelligence officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency

See also

Looks like DJT has his crap detector turned on.

Reuters
No proof Russian hacking influenced U.S. election: Trump spokesman

Andrew Korybko — Sexual Terrorism In The Heart Of Europe

By and large, it appears as though the “refugee” crisis is wildly succeeding in its ultimate US-scripted objective of destabilizing the EU from within. Washington has engineered and choreographed the forceful imposition of identity-driven divide-and-rule tactics right into the heart of Europe, all with the end goal of making the continent’s strongest actors overwhelmingly vulnerable to on-demand Color Revolution threats. It’s this Damocles’ Sword of a matrix of uncontrollable violence between the citizens and the state, locals and “refugees”, the far-left and the far-right, and “refugees” and the state, that is expected to scare Europe’s most important decision makers (Angela Merkel chief among them) into continuing their subservience to the US.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Sexual Terrorism In The Heart Of Europe
Andrew Korybko

See also

The news of Muslim sex attacks is being censored, whitewashed, and covered up. In Germany, the attacks were coordinated — that was a New Year’s jihad-terror attack.

Pamela Geller
MORE EUROPEAN CITIES report Muslim Sex Attacks on New Year’s Eve: ZURICH, HELSINKI UPDATE: Austria, too

Or is it that young Muslim males are sexual predators (in the same league with young black males as the assumption goes)?

American Thinker
Europe finally w
aking up to the reality of Islamic sexual predation?
Carol Brown

NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation GLADIO and the Strategy of Tension — Julian Charles interviews Daniele Ganser

Hmm.

Global Research
NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation GLADIO and the Strategy of Tension
Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed interviews and the University of Basel, and founder and Director of the Swiss Institute for Peace and Energy Research

See also

Journal of 9/11 Studies, Volume 39, May 2014
The “Strategy of Tension” in the Cold War Period
Daniele Ganser

Operation Gladio

Operation Bloodstone

Operation Paperclip

Operation Northwoods

Operation Mongoose

Lucas Koerner — Maduro Voices Solidarity with Argentina’s Kirchner Amid Destabilization Effort

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro voiced support for his Argentine counterpart, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, on Wednesday in the face of what the latter has denounced as a destabilization effort against her government following death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman.…

President Cristina Fernández also received the backing of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on Saturday. 

“All of our support for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who faces a new destabilization effort,” stated the Ecuadorian leader on his television program. 

Correa claimed that accusations against the Argentine President form part of a broader strategy to destabilize the progressive and leftist governments of the region. 

“This is another chapter of the conservative restoration that today utilizes even judicial instances in order to try to destabilize the progressive governments of our America, as they are also trying to do with [Brazilian President] Dilma [Rousseff] in the case of Petrobras,” he stated.

nsnbc international
Maduro Voices Solidarity with Argentina’s Kirchner Amid Destabilization Effort

Lucas Koerner | Venezuelanalysis

William Blum — American Exceptionalism and American Torture

 Lest we forget...

If you open the window of torture, even just a crack, the cold air of the Dark Ages will fill the whole room.

Cold air or stench?

No, Obama didn't end torture.

BTW, if you haven't seen Brazil (1985 film), it's as apropos as Orwell's 1984.

Counterpunch

American Exceptionalism and American Torture
William Blum

Also

Truthout
We Need Moral Certainty on Torture

Victoria Bassetti, Brennan Center for Justice | Op-Ed

We need to reestablish that foundational, incontrovertible moral certainty we once had about torture. The Senate report was a bold and important step toward reestablishing that certitude. More is needed. 

There is a less known coda to the Milgram experiments. When dissent was added into the equation, when someone objected to the shocks being administered, the experiment participants’ willingness to inflict abuse diminished substantially. 

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act," Milgram wrote after more than a decade’s work.

Washington's Blog
Senior U.S. Government Officials: Release the Full Torture Report

With permission from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

MEMORANDUM FOR: Senator Mark Udall 

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) 

SUBJECT: Stopping Torture 

We, the undersigned are veteran intelligence officers with a combined total of over 300 years of experience in intelligence work. We send you this open letter at what seems to be the last minute simply because we had been hoping we would not have to.…

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.) 

Thomas Drake, Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service, NSA (resigned) 

Daniel Ellsberg, former State Dept. & Defense Dept. Official (VIPS Associate) 

Mike Gravel, former Senator from Alaska; former Army intelligence officer 

Larry Johnson, CIA analyst & State Department/counterterrorism, (ret.) 

John Kiriakou, former CIA counterterrorism operations officer; federal prison, Loretto, Pennsylvania 

Edward Loomis, former Chief, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA 

David MacMichael, USMC & National Intelligence Council (ret.) 

Ray McGovern, Army Infantry/Intelligence officer & CIA presidential briefer (ret.) 

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.) 

Todd Pierce, MAJ, U.S. Army Judge Advocate (ret.) 

Coleen Rowley, Minneapolis Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.) 

Peter Van Buren, Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) 

Kirk Wiebe, Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.) 

Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.)

The Saker — Oh how much they hate and fear Russia and Putin

A person like [Strobe] Talbott is very much "plugging in" the US deep state and if he says that next year there will be an insurgency in Chechnia, we can be darn sure that the US will try to create one.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Oh how much they hate and fear Russia and Putin

Vineyardsaker

Scott McConnell — Washington Puzzled as Putin Doesn’t Back Down

There is a mystery to the way Washington works—how an entire political class came to see as American policy that that Russia be humiliated at its own doorstep as logical, without ever reflecting upon whether this was a good idea in the larger scheme of global politics nor whether the West had the means and will to see it through.…

So it’s a mystery—a seemingly iron-clad Washington consensus formed behind a policy, the integration of Ukraine in the West, to whose implications no one seems to have given any serious thought. 

Russia’s leaders and diplomats have been telling America to butt out of Ukraine in unambiguous terms for a decade or more. Did American diplomats and CIA agents push for an anti-Russian coup d’etat in Kiev knowing that and pursue it anyway? The sheer recklessness of such an action would border on criminal—but oddly enough, no one who truly counts in Washington, Republican or Democrat, seems even to consider it even slightly misguided.

The American Conservative
Washington Puzzled as Putin Doesn’t Back Down

Scott McConnell | a founding editor of The American Conservative

Farhad Malekafzali — How America made Martyrs of two Iranian Democrats and overthrew Iran’s Liberal Government in 1953

If you are hazy on the history of the CIA-MI6 engineered coup that toppled Iran's democratically elected president Mohammad Mossadegh and eventually installed the autocratic Shah on the throne, here is a reminder. Needless to say, the Iranians have neither forgotten nor forgiven after the Shah's atrocities and the rip off of the country by Western oil interests. The Shah was overthrown in the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979.

Informed Comment
How America made Martyrs of two Iranian Democrats and overthrew Iran’s Liberal Government in 1953

Farhad Malekafzali

Peter Apps — Ukraine Tension Prompts Boost Of U.S. Special Forces In Eastern Europe

As NATO refocuses on its eastern borders after Russia's annexation of Crimea, the United States is quietly deploying more troops to train special forces in former Soviet bloc states anxious about Moscow's intentions.

Major exercises began last month in Poland, Slovakia and the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia involving several hundred personnel from U.S. special forces, the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) said in a statement to Reuters.

Long-term plans include further training drills that will consistently keep about 100 U.S. elite troops on the ground at any one time in NATO states close to Russia, with teams working in several countries, U.S. official said.

The Huffington Post
Ukraine Tension Prompts Boost Of U.S. Special Forces In Eastern Europe
Peter Apps, Reuters

Benign Brodwicz — How stupid is our CIA-appointed president?

Geopolitical and geostrategic analysis that cuts through the fog of propaganda.

Animal Spirits Page

How stupid is our CIA-appointed president?
Benign Brodwicz

Jon Perr — CIA's Rodriguez: I Know Torture Worked Because I Destroyed the Tapes

A name that will live in infamy.

Perrspectives
CIA's Rodriguez: I Know Torture Worked Because I Destroyed the Tapes
Jon Perr

See also Jon Perr, White Hoods, Dunce Caps and Paul Ryan for an analysis of the Ryan budget.

Mike Masnick — Nancy Pelosi Admits That Congress Is Scared Of The CIA

Pelosi: "You don’t fight it without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth."

Nothing new. All politicians including presidents were intimidated by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.

techdirt
Nancy Pelosi Admits That Congress Is Scared Of The CIA
Mike Masnick

John Pilger — When the US Pulled off a Coup in Australia

OMG. Australia, too!

AlterNet
When the US Pulled off a Coup in Australia
John Pilger

Zero Hedge — The Conspiracy Theory Is True: Agents Infiltrate Websites Intending To "Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations"

Glenn Greenwald report. Creepy people and sick stuff. Fascistic if as reported.

Zero Hedge
The Conspiracy Theory Is True: Agents Infiltrate Websites Intending To "Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations"

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald — The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program

Targeting "terrorists" by metadata.

In his speech at the National Defense University last May, President Obama declared that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.” He added that, “by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.”

But the increased reliance on phone tracking and other fallible surveillance tactics suggests that the opposite is true.

The Intercept
The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald

The Fact That The US Intelligence Community So Readily Admits To Fantasies Of Killing Ed Snowden Shows Why They Can't Be Trusted (via Techdirt)

The Fact That The US Intelligence Community So Readily Admits To Fantasies Of Killing Ed Snowden Shows Why They Can't Be Trusted (via Techdirt)

We've mentioned things in the past like former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden "jokingly" talking about how he'd like to put Ed Snowden on a "kill list" while simultaneously suggesting that the NSA should be a part of determining who to target.…

---

Yves Smith — Tom Engelhardt: Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady Shows How Our One-Superpower World Works

Yves here. Tom Engelhardt’s latest piece discusses how, as he puts it in his setup:

Retired CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in absentia in Italy for a rendition/kidnapping operation, is picked up in Panama on an Interpol warrant, hits the news for a day, and then is allowed to fly back to the U.S. where he disappears — and despite the Edward Snowden case, the Washington media doesn’t even blink.

Astonishingly, not only did this story come and go with remarkable speed, but there has been nada in the way of follow-up. Until now, where Engelhardt’s piece delves into how and why Lady has been disappeared in order to escape from justice in Italy.

Double-standard and Orwellian double-speak. The US government is shown up as an imperial regime bent on maintaining global hegemony through superpower status. Now there is not longer any pretense about it. There goes US soft power. RIP.

Naked Capitalism

Tom Engelhardt: Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady Shows How Our One-Superpower World Works
Yves Smith

Yazan al-Saadi — Stratfor Wanted Assange Out by Any Means

Quite a bunch they have there at Stratfor. Proof of why we need people like Manning and Assange.

Al Akhbar English
Stratfor Wanted Assange Out by Any Means
Yazan al-Saadi