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Monday 17 August 2015

Kim Kardashian paid to promote prescription drugs

The FDA sent Kim Kardashian a warning letter last week, demanding that she remove an Instagram post in which she endorsed a bottle of Diclegis morning sickness pills but failed to mention any of the potential side effects associated with the product. Kardashian is a paid promoter of the product, which is made by Duchesnay USA. Her post "misleadingly fails to provide material information about the consequences that may result from the use of the drug and suggests that it is safer than has been demonstrated," according to the FDA.

While most of the effects that she failed to mention are relatively benign -- such as drowsiness and interactions with alcohol or "excitement, irritability and sedation" in infants who breast feed from women taking the drug -- one neglected fact is actually quite important: it's never been tested for use with hyperemesis gravidarum, the most severe form of morning sickness. Faced with "FDA regulatory action, including seizure or injunction, without further notice," Kardashian has since deleted the post, though not before it gained 434,000 likes.

Savannah River Nuclear Facility Under Lockdown Amid "Security Event"

According to the Savannah River site, a potential security threat is in progress that has caused emergency response. SRS says site barricades are closed to incoming traffic. According to SRS, there is no indication of any threat outside of the SRS boundaries.

The Aiken Standard reports,

The Savannah River Site confirmed the facility is experiencing a “security event” at the site’s H Area; however, the Aiken County Sheriff’s Office is calling the event a “lockdown.”

 

As of now, no one is allowed in or out of the facility and site barricades are closed off to incoming traffic.

 

Savannah River Site issued a press release stating “a potential security event is in progress that has triggered emergency response activities at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site,” and the release is “being sent to you as part of our emergency response organization information process.” 

 

SRS also stated there is no indication of a “consequence beyond the Savannah River Site boundaries,” and the Site will provide further information when it becomes available.

 

The site’s H Area is the location of H Canyon, the only hardened chemical separations facility still operating in the U.S. The primary mission of the H-Canyon Complex is to dissolve, purify and blend-down surplus highly enriched uranium from both within American borders and materials that come from other countries.

 

A secondary mission for H-Canyon is to dissolve excess plutonium and transfer it for vitrification in the Defense Waste Processing Facility at SRS.

From earlier this month:

*  *  *

From the official SRS fact sheet:

H Canyon and HB Line remain and are supporting the DOE Enriched Uranium and Plutonium Disposition Programs by reducing the quantity of fissile materials in storage throughout the United States. This supports both the environmental cleanup and nuclear nonproliferation efforts and the creation of a smaller, safer, more secure and less expensive nuclear weapons complex. The canyon is used to support the disposition of highly enriched uranium and plutonium from across the DOE Complex.

 


Srs Fact Sheet

Additional Details Emerge on How U.S. Government Policy Created, Armed, Supported and Funded ISIS

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Telling Hasan that he had read the document himself, Flynn said that it was among a range of intelligence being circulated throughout the US intelligence community that had led him to attempt to dissuade the White House from supporting these groups, albeit without success.

Despite this, Flynn’s account shows that the US commitment to supporting the Syrian insurgency against Bashir al-Assad led the US to deliberately support the very al-Qaeda affiliated forces it had previously fought in Iraq.

The US anti-Assad strategy in Syria, in other words, bolstered the very al-Qaeda factions the US had fought in Iraq, by using the Gulf states and Turkey to finance the same groups in Syria. As a direct consequence, the secular and moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army were increasingly supplanted by virulent Islamist extremists backed by US allies.

It should be noted that precisely at this time, the West, the Gulf states and Turkey, according to the DIA’s internal intelligence reports, were supporting AQI and other Islamist factions in Syria to “isolate” the Assad regime. By Flynn’s account, despite his warnings to the White House that an ISIS attack on Iraq was imminent, and could lead to the destabilization of the region, senior Obama officials deliberately continued the covert support to these factions.

“It was well known at the time that ISIS were beginning serious plans to attack Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey played a key role in supporting ISIS at this time, but the UAE played a bigger role in financial support than the others, which is not widely recognized.”

Springmann says that during his tenure at the US embassy in Jeddah, he was repeatedly asked by his superiors to grant illegal visas to Islamist militants transiting through Jeddah from various Muslim countries. He eventually learned that the visa bureau was heavily penetrated by CIA officers, who used their diplomatic status as cover for all manner of classified operations — including giving visas to the same terrorists who would later execute the 9/11 attacks.

Investigative journalist Dr. Nafeez Ahmed has been relentless in exploring and highlighting U.S. government complicity in the origins and eventual success of ISIS. In case you aren’t familiar with his work, here’s a quick bio:

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye.

He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally influential Londoners.

Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University.

Dr. Ahmed has been leading the way in documenting how declassified documents from the Pentagon prove that U.S. intelligence officials warned the White House that supporting al-Qaeda just to depose of Syria’s Bashir al-Assad would have serious blowback and end up funding and empowering radical Islamic extremists. The White House ignored this advice.

Two years later ISIS exploded onto the scene, and the American public was once again relentlessly fear-mongered into turning its sole, determined focus toward fighting this barbaric external enemy birthed by U.S. government policy. Civil liberties and treasure must once again be bequeathed to the military-intelligence-industrial complex to combat an enemy it funded and armed in the first place. The cruel joke; however, is that just like al-Qaeda before it, ISIS was a direct creation of intentional U.S. foreign policy.

The entire charade is frighteningly similar to giving the Federal Reserve more power to “save” an economy it destroyed in the first place. Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?

But I digress. Back to the topic at hand, which is the fact that the retired head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Michael T. Flynn, has admitted that the White House made a willful decision to support al-Qaeda fighters in Syria against Assad despite warnings from the intelligence community. These fighters, and others, later became ISIS.

Here are some excerpts from Dr. Ahmed’s incredible article. Prepare to have your mind blown:

A new memoir by a former senior State Department analyst provides stunning details on how decades of support for Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden brought about the emergence of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).

The book establishes a crucial context for recent admissions by Michael T. Flynn, the retired head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), confirming that White House officials made a “willful decision” to support al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists in Syria — despite being warned by the DIA that doing so would likely create an ‘ISIS’-like entity in the region.

J. Michael Springmann, a retired career US diplomat whose last government post was in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, reveals in his new book that US covert operations in alliance with Middle East states funding anti-Western terrorist groups are nothing new. Such operations, he shows, have been carried out for various short-sighted reasons since the Cold War and after.

But in a recent interview on Al-Jazeera’s flagship talk-show ‘Head to Head,’former DIA chief Lieutenant General (Lt. Gen.) Michael Flynn told host Mehdi Hasan that the rise of ISIS was a direct consequence of US support for Syrian insurgents whose core fighters were from al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Back in May, INSURGE intelligence undertook an exclusive investigation into a controversial declassified DIA document appearing to show that as early as August 2012, the DIA knew that the US-backed Syrian insurgency was dominated by Islamist militant groups including “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

Asked about the DIA document by Hasan, who noted that “the US was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups,” Flynn confirmed that the intelligence described by the document was entirely accurate.

Telling Hasan that he had read the document himself, Flynn said that it was among a range of intelligence being circulated throughout the US intelligence community that had led him to attempt to dissuade the White House from supporting these groups, albeit without success.

Despite this, Flynn’s account shows that the US commitment to supporting the Syrian insurgency against Bashir al-Assad led the US to deliberately support the very al-Qaeda affiliated forces it had previously fought in Iraq.

Far from simply turning a blind eye, Flynn said that the White House’s decision to support al-Qaeda linked rebels against the Assad regime was not a mistake, but intentional:

Prior to his stint as DIA chief, Lt. Gen. Flynn was Director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command.

Flynn is the highest ranking former US intelligence official to confirm that the DIA intelligence report dated August 2012, released earlier this year, proves a White House covert strategy to support Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Syria even before 2011.

Right-wing pundits have often claimed due to this background that the decision to withdraw troops from Iraq was the key enabling factor in the resurgence of AQI, and its eventual metamorphosis into ISIS.

This is key to understand. Jeb Bush and other neocons are attempting to claim that the Iraq invasion wasn’t what led to the creation of ISIS, but that it was the decision to withdraw that caused it. While ridiculous on its face since there wouldn’t have been troops to withdraw if the U.S. government hadn’t invaded in the first place, Flynn’s revelations disprove this theory even more scathingly.

But Flynn’s revelations prove the opposite — that far from the rise of ISIS being solely due to a vacuum of power in Iraq due to the withdrawal of US troops, it was the post-2011 covert intervention of the US and its allies, the Gulf states and Turkey, which siphoned arms and funds to AQI as part of their anti-Assad strategy.

There you go. That’s where ISIS really came from.

In 2008, a US Army-commissioned RAND report confirmed that the US was attempting to “to create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at the tactical level.” This included forming “temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated “nationalist insurgent groups” that have fought the US for four years, now receiving “weapons and cash” from the US.

In the same year, former CIA military intelligence officer and counter-terrorism specialist Philip Geraldi, stated that US intelligence analysts “are warning that the United States is now arming and otherwise subsidizing all three major groups in Iraq.” The analysts “believe that the house of cards is likely to fall down as soon as one group feels either strong or frisky enough to assert itself.” Giraldi predicted:

During this period in which the US, the Gulf states, and Turkey supported Syrian insurgents linked to AQI and the Muslim Brotherhood, AQI experienced an unprecedented resurgence.

In the same month, the European Union voted to ease the embargo on Syria to allow al-Qaeda and ISIS dominated Syrian rebels to sell oil to global markets, including European companies. From this date to the following year when ISIS invaded Mosul, several EU countries were buying ISIS oil exported from the Syrian fields under its control.

The US anti-Assad strategy in Syria, in other words, bolstered the very al-Qaeda factions the US had fought in Iraq, by using the Gulf states and Turkey to finance the same groups in Syria. As a direct consequence, the secular and moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army were increasingly supplanted by virulent Islamist extremists backed by US allies.

In February 2014, Lt. Gen. Flynn delivered the annual DIA threat assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee. His testimony revealed that rather than coming out of the blue, as the Obama administration claimed, US intelligence had anticipated the ISIS attack on Iraq.

It should be noted that precisely at this time, the West, the Gulf states and Turkey, according to the DIA’s internal intelligence reports, were supporting AQI and other Islamist factions in Syria to “isolate” the Assad regime. By Flynn’s account, despite his warnings to the White House that an ISIS attack on Iraq was imminent, and could lead to the destabilization of the region, senior Obama officials deliberately continued the covert support to these factions.

US intelligence was also fully cognizant of Iraq’s inability to repel a prospective ISIS attack on Iraq, raising further questions about why the White House did nothing.

Intelligence was not precise on the exact timing of the assault, one source said, but it was known that various regional powers were complicit in the planned ISIS offensive, particularly Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey:

“It was well known at the time that ISIS were beginning serious plans to attack Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey played a key role in supporting ISIS at this time, but the UAE played a bigger role in financial support than the others, which is not widely recognized.”

No surprise there. We knew about this years ago (see: America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy – My Thoughts on Iraq).

Back to Dr. Ahmed…

“The Americans allowed ISIS to rise to power because they wanted to get Assad out from Syria. But they didn’t anticipate that the results would be so far beyond their control.”

This was not, then, a US intelligence failure as such. Rather, the US failure to to curtail the rise of ISIS and its likely destabilization of both Iraq and Syria, was not due to a lack of accurate intelligence — which was abundant and precise — but due to an ill-conceived political decision to impose ‘regime change’ on Syria at any cost.

Springmann says that during his tenure at the US embassy in Jeddah, he was repeatedly asked by his superiors to grant illegal visas to Islamist militants transiting through Jeddah from various Muslim countries. He eventually learned that the visa bureau was heavily penetrated by CIA officers, who used their diplomatic status as cover for all manner of classified operations — including giving visas to the same terrorists who would later execute the 9/11 attacks.

Thirteen out of the 15 Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers received US visas. Ten of them received visas from the US embassy in Jeddah. All of them were in fact unqualified, and should have been denied entry to the US.

Springmann was fired from the State Department after filing dozens of Freedom of Information requests, formal complaints, and requests for inquiries at multiple levels in the US government and Congress about what he had uncovered. Not only were all his attempts to gain disclosure and accountability systematically stonewalled, in the end his whistleblowing cost him his career.

Springmann’s experiences at Jeddah, though, were not unique. He points out that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, received his first US visa from a CIA case officer undercover as a consular officer at the US embassy in Khartoum in Sudan.

The ‘Blind Sheikh’ as he was known received six CIA-approved US visas in this way between 1986 and 1990, also from the US embassy in Egypt. But as Springmann writes:

“The ‘blind’ Sheikh had been on a State Department terrorist watch list when he was issued the visa, entering the United States by way of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Sudan in 1990.”

We should all thank Dr. Ahmed for this service for publishing this article. Please spread it around to everyone you know. It’s imperative the world understand just how ISISI came into being.

Personally, it seems clear to me that U.S. foreign policy has been so inept and destructive over the past couple of decades, it often brings to mind the quote:

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

I’ve asked this sort of question before. For example, here’s an excerpt from the article, The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya.

There are only two logical conclusions that can be reached about American foreign policy leadership in the 21st century.

1) American leadership is ruthlessly pursuing immoral wars all over the world with the intent of creating outside enemies to focus public anger on, as a conscious diversion away from the criminality happening domestically. As an added bonus, the intelligence-military-industrial complex makes an incredible sum of money. The end result: serfs are distracted with inane nationalistic fervor, while the “elites” earn billions.

2) American leadership is completely and totally inept; being easily manipulated into overseas conflicts by ruthless corporate interests and cunning foreign “rebels” in order to advance their own selfish interests, which are in conflict with the interests of the general public.

I can’t come up with any other logical conclusion. Either way, such people have no business running the affairs of these United States, and their actions are merely increasing instability and violence across the planet. The longer they remain in charge with no accountability, the more dangerous this world will become.

This observation remains as relevant as than ever before.

Now here’s the interview with Michael T Flynn referenced in Dr. Ahmed’s article:

 

 

For related articles, see:

America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy – My Thoughts on Iraq

Afghan President Hamid Karzai Slams U.S. Foreign Policy in Farewell Speech

“Stop Thanking Me for My Service” – Former U.S. Army Ranger Blasts American Foreign Policy and The Corporate State

More Foreign Policy Incompetence – U.S. Humanitarian Aid is Going Directly to ISIS

Turkey Bombs Kurds Fighting ISIS, Then Hires Same Lobbying Firm Supporting U.S. Presidential Candidates

How the Policies of U.S. Ally Egyptian Dictator, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Have Led to a Surge in ISIS Recruitment

Accusations Emerge That the U.S. Is Aiding ISIS – The Latest “Conspiracy Theory” Circulating in Iraq

The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya

Self-Immolation Comes To Ohio

While we have grown used to reading of Asian citizens setting themselves on fire in protest (most recently here), news that a 58-year-old man lit himself on fire in front of Ohio City Hall in Columbus is shocking. There are no details as to the reason for this sad act, but as ABC6 reports, the man has been transported to OSU Medical Center in critical condition.

Police are investigating the incident as a possible suicide attempt, according to local TV-station WSYX.

Air Force admits big F35 problems and Think Tank says F35 is visible to China and Russia Sensors



Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has admitted to a wide range of past and present problems with the F-35 while maintaining that the fifth-general will eventually guarantee

 the U.S. continued air supremacy over rivals.

* Report says F35 is visible to enemy sensors which is a big problem for a stealth fighter

* This visible problem is combined with admitted fighting problems

* Software and cost problems remain unresolved

* US Navy likely to reduce its order of F35s to 12 per year 

A Washington think tank released a report Tuesday that found the 5th-generation jet – billed as the world's most advanced fighter – will be outmaneuvered in dogfights with current Russian and Chinese jets as well as the U.S. aircraft it is slated to replace. The report comes after details were leaked last month on a test flight where the F-35 was bested in most aerial maneuvering by an F-16.

"The F-35 will find itself outmaneuvered, outgunned, out of range, and visible to enemy sensors," according to Bill French, a policy analyst with the National Security Network, a progressive think tank that claims to challenge overly militarized conservative defense policies. "Staying the present course [on the aircraft program] may needlessly gamble away a sizable margin of American airpower at great expense and unnecessary risk to American lives."

Awesome. NFL player James Harrison returns sons’ ‘participation’ trophies

This might be the best thing you’ll read all day. Apparently Steelers linebacker James Harrison didn’t like the fact that his sons got sports trophies for merely participating. So what did he do? He returned them.

Here’s his statement:

I came home to find out that my boys received two trophies for nothing, participation trophies! While I am very proud of my boys for everything they do and will encourage them till the day I die, these trophies will be given back until they EARN a real trophy. I’m sorry I’m not sorry for believing that everything in life should be earned and I’m not about to raise two boys to be men by making them believe that they are entitled to something just because they tried their best…cause sometimes your best is not enough, and that should drive you to want to do better…not cry and whine until somebody gives you something to shut u up and keep you happy.

I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. In our progressive “style over substance” society, seemingly nothing is about results anymore. It doesn’t matter what the actual outcome is, so long as your said you tried and your intentions (or ostensible intentions) were pure (see Obamacare or the minimum wage or this guy or any other popular policy these days).

Ben Carson wants forced vaccines, with schools serving as enforcement checkpoints



Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is making waves yet again, this time because he announced his pro-mandatory stance on vaccines. Carson, who is second in the GOP polls behind Donald Trump, also wants schools to be set up to enforce the provisions.

“A lot of people are put off when they hear the word ‘government force,’ and perhaps there’s a better way to put these things,” Carson said. “But the fact of the matter is, studies have shown us over the course of time that the benefit-to-risk ratio for vaccination is way in the favor of doing it as opposed to not doing it.” (viacnn)

This would maen no religious or philosophical exemptions. This could also mean proposing stricter checkpoints at schools nationwide if Carson were to be elected. His perspective on the matter runs in contrary to his GOP opponent, Rand Paul, who has said he does not believe vaccinations should be mandatory, although he himself receives vaccines.

 

Ditching the dollar: Russia, China to create new gold market

Key central banks, particularly the Federal Reserve and Bank of England, and Western market players have long been accused of clandestine gold price manipulating aimed at preserving the dollar’s role “as world reserve currency primus,” American-German economic researcher and historian F. William Engdahl writes.

“The COMEX gold futures market in New York and the Over-the-Counter (OTC) trades cleared through the London Bullion Market Association do set prices which are followed most widely in the world. They are also markets dominated by a handful of huge players, the six London Bullion Market Association gold clearing banks — the corrupt JP MorganChase bank; the scandal-ridden UBS bank of Zurich; The Bank of Nova Scotia — ScotiaMocatta, the world’s oldest bullion bank which began as banker to the British East India Company, the group that ran the China Opium Wars; the scandal-ridden Deutsche Bank; the scandal-ridden Barclays Bank of London; HSBC of London, the house bank of the Mexican drug cartels; and the scandal and fraud-ridden Societe Generale of Paris,” Engdahl narrated.

Furthermore, Western banks are issuing numerous paper “gold-futures” and other speculative contracts which are in fact disconnected from real physical gold.

Gold bars China Russia

In a word, operations with the precious metal in London and New York are in questionable hands, the economic researcher noted.

The West’s ultimate goal is to preserve the dollar’s monopoly in the market thus breathing life into the US-led global financial system. But no one likes monopolists.

Predictably, the current state of affairs cannot satisfy rising economies, such as China, Russia and other emerging powers.

However, “rather than scream and cry ‘fraud’ at the owners of the COMEX/CME or the London Bullion Market Association Big Six clearing banks, these countries are involved in the genial move to create an entirely different gold market, one that not JP MorganChase or HSBC or Deutsche Bank control, but one that China, Russia and others of a like mind control,” Engdahl stressed.

This new approach is connected closely with the China-led New Silk Road project and the Shanghai-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).In May 2015 Beijing announced it had established a state-run gold investment fund, aiming to bolster China’s role in global gold trade. The new initiative is a part of China’s ambitious One Belt and One Road plan. The “Silk Road Gold Fund” will invest in mining projects in the regions along the New Silk Road encouraging central banks of its members to increase their holdings in the precious metal.

“As China has expressed it, the aim is to enable the Eurasian countries along the Silk Road to increase the gold backing of their currencies. That sounds very much like some clear-thinking and far-sighted governments are thinking of creating a stable group of gold backed currencies that would facilitate orderly trade free from Washington currency wars,” the economic researcher elaborated.

And Russia is actively cooperating with China in this field, he underscored, adding that just before the creation of China’s new gold fund the countries inked a deal to explore the gold reserves in Russia’s Magadan region.Over the past several years Russia has been rapidly replenishing its vaults with golden bullions. In accordance with official data, Russian physical gold reserves currently amounted to 1250.9 tons in June 2015.

Today Russia is considered the world’s third largest gold producer with 245 metric tons produced in 2014, while China produces over 450 tons a year.

“South Africa, also a member of the BRICS along with China and Russia, stands to add to the new energy surrounding a renaissance in gold as a support of solid, well-based currencies to replace the diluted and devalued dollar system,” the researcher stressed.

According to Engdahl, the New Economic Silk Road, integrated with Russia’s new Eurasian Economic Union, are more than just energy and railroad infrastructure: they are the central nervous system of the future largest and fastest-growing economic space on Earth.Interestingly enough, according to the ANZ Research report “East to El Dorado: Asia and the Future of Gold” the gold price may soar as high as $2,000 a troy ounce by 2025. ANZ Research underscored that gold, despite its current slump, remains both an investment and a defensive asset. The rise of emerging economies, such as China and India will facilitate the demand for gold investments.

“While most eyes are fixed on COMEX or the London Bullion Market Association listed daily gold price fix, the real worth of gold as a currency reserve and a standard of monetary soundness is growing in worth by the day,” Engdahl concluded adding that this trend is a real pain in the neck of the US Treasury, Federal Reserve and Wall Street.