DarkGovernment

Did the U.S. Sneak Weapons to Georgia

Russia says there are ’suppositions’ that U.S. ships which delivered humanitarian aid to Georgia have also brought weapons to the country.
In a Monday press conference, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko suggested that the U.S. military ships delivered more than just humanitarian aid to Georgia, adding that their cargo included ‘military components’.
Nesterenko said such suspicions have prompted a decision by Russia to call for an arms embargo against Georgia. He also urged further presence of an international police and more Western military observers in South Ossetia.

Earlier on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for an arms embargo on Georgia until a change of leadership takes place in the Caucasus state.

Georgia’s military offensive into South Ossetia in August 7 to reclaim the de-facto region, prompted Russia to send its troops into the area. Each side has announced contradictory figures on how many people died in the conflict.

Diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington, already tense over US plans for a missile shield in Europe, strained further over the Georgia crisis.

Earlier, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blamed the United States for provoking the Georgia conflict in order to give an advantage to ‘one of’ the U.S. presidential candidates. Washington, however, has denied the allegation.

The United States is Georgia’s principal military supporter, and has provided the country with significant quantities of military aid in recent years.

According to the Associated Press, Human Rights Watch has announced that it had received an official letter from Georgia’s Defense Ministry that admitted the use of M85 cluster munitions in its military offensive in South Ossetia.

Tags: georgia, humanitarian aid, Military, russia, U.S., Weapons

Does the U.S. Have a Russian War Plan

The realization about the massive failure of the US media to report truthfully is a sobering slap in the face. The United States, brimming with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction is pursuing a policy of world dominance and control, has a population that is kept in the dark–indeed brainwashed, concerning the most important and most dangerous events of our time.
The power of the Israel Lobby is an important component of keeping Americans in the dark. Recently I watched a documentary that demonstrates the control that the Israel Lobby exercises over Americans’ view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The documentary is available here:documentary

As a result of the US media’s one-sided coverage, few Americans are aware that for decades Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homes and lands under protection of America’s veto in the United Nations. Instead, the dispossessed Palestinians are portrayed as mindless terrorists who attack innocent Israel.

If one reads Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz, or publications from Israeli organizations, such as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, one gets a radically different view of the situation than the propagandistic version delivered by US media and evangelical pulpits who mainly get the bulk of their information from the very media that reports in a very controlled and one sided manner.

Most Americans know of the 2000 attack by Muslim terrorists on the USS Cole in Aden harbor that resulted in 17 dead and 39 wounded American sailors. But few have heard of Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 American sailors dead and 174 wounded. Pressured by the Israel Lobby, President Johnson ordered Admiral McCain, father of the Republican presidential nominee, to cover up the attack. To this day there never has been a congressional investigation.

The failure of the American media is again evident in the coverage of the Georgian-Russian conflict. The US media presented the conflict as a Russian invasion of Georgia, whereas in actual fact the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian military launched a sneak attack to kill and to drive the Russian population out of South Ossetia, a separatist province.

Russian peacekeepers, together with Georgian ones, had been stationed in South Ossetia since the early 1990s. On orders from Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet “president” of Georgia, the Georgian peacekeepers turned their weapons on the unsuspecting Russian peacekeepers and murdered them.

This action by Saakashvili, elected with money from the neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy, an election-rigging tool of US hegemony, was a war crime. In truth, the Russians should have hung Saakashvili, as he is far more guilty than was Saddam Hussein. But it is Russia, not Saakashvili, that the US media has demonized.

Americans have become perfect subjects for George Orwell’s Big Brother. They sit stupidly in front of the TV news or the New York Times or Washington Post and absorb the lies fed to them. What is wrong with Americans? Why do they put up with it? Are Americans the nation of sheep that Judge Andrew P. Napolitano says they are? Americans flaunt “freedom and democracy” and live under a Ministry of Propaganda.

Two decades ago, President Reagan reached agreement with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to end the dangerous cold war. But every one of Reagan’s successors has sought to pick a new fight with Russia. In violation of the agreement, NATO has been taken to Russia’s borders, and the US is determined to put former constituent parts of Russia herself into NATO. In an effort to neutralize Russia’s nuclear deterrent and compromise her independence, the US is putting anti-ballistic missile bases on Russia’s borders.

The gratuitously aggressive US military policy toward Russia will lead to nuclear war. I am confident that if Americans elect John McCain, or the Republicans steal another presidential election, there will be nuclear war in the second decade of the 21st century. The neocon lies, propaganda, macho flag-waving, and use of US foreign policy in the interests of a few military-security firms, oil companies, and Israel are all leading in that direction.

The November election is perhaps the last chance to avoid nuclear war. But the opportunity might already have been missed. The Republicans have chosen as their candidate one of the most ignorant warmongers alive. The Democrats’ choice was between one of the most divisive women in America and a man of mixed race with a funny name. Considering American’s taste for war, the Democratic candidate could fail to defeat the GOP war candidate.

Many Americans will vote against Obama because he is black. Why does mixed ancestry confer the black label? If America’s population was predominantly black, would Obama be considered white?

Race and propaganda are more likely to determine the outcome of the November election than any awareness or consideration of real issues by voters.

The real issues are suffocated by the media. The American middle class is being destroyed by jobs offshoring and work visas for foreigners, while the incomes of the super rich are soaring. The US dollar’s reserve currency status is eroded. The US is massively in debt at home and abroad. Health insurance is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Injured veterans are being nickeled and dimed, while Halliburton’s profits escalate. Americans are losing their homes, while the US government bails out banks. Wars with Iran, Russia, and China are being planned in order to secure US hegemony.

Americans no longer have a government that is for the people and by the people. They have a government for and by special interests and an insane ideology.

But Americans have war, which lets them take out all their frustrations, resentments, and disappointments on “Muslim terrorists” and “Russian aggressors.” Few Americans are disturbed that 1.25 million Iraqis and an unknown number of Afghans have died as a result of American invasions based on Bush regime lies and deceptions. Even Americans, like Senator Biden, Obama’s selection for vice president, who understand that the wars are based on lies, still want the US to win. So, it was all a mistake and a deception, but let’s win anyway and keep on killing.

I know people who still complain that the US did not nuke North Vietnam. When I ask why Vietnam should have been nuked, they reply, “if we had nuked them we would have won.”

What would America have won? The answer is world loathing and the loss of the cold war.

For many Americans, war is like a sports contest in which they take vicarious pleasure and cheer on their side to victory. Millions of Americans are still bitter that “the liberal media” and war protesters caused America to lose the Vietnam war, and they are determined that this won’t happen again. These Americans have no realization that there was no more reason for the US to be fighting in Vietnam 40 years ago than to be fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan or tomorrow in Iran.

Obama, if elected, is no guarantee against nuclear war. Obama has shown that he is as much under the Israel Lobby’s thumb as McCain. Obama’s foreign affairs advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not a neocon, but he was born in Warsaw, Poland, and has the Pole’s animosity toward Russia. The Bush administration has already changed US war doctrine to permit preemptive nuclear attack. With the US government determined to ring Russia with puppet states and military bases, war is inevitable.

Presidential appointees face confirmation in the Senate. Any of Obama’s appointees who might be out of step with plans for US and Israeli hegemony could expect opposition from large corporations and the Israel Lobby. There is no assurance that an Obama administration would not be positioned on “the issues” by the same special interests that have positioned the Bush administration.

Americans are filled with hubris, not with knowledge. Most of us have little awareness of the calamity that our government’s pursuit of complete dominance and control is bringing to its citizens and to life on our planet.
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, a 16-year columnist for Business Week, and a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service and Creator’s Syndicate in Los Angeles. He has held numerous university professorships, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by the President of France and the US Treasury’s Silver Medal for “outstanding contributions to the formulation of US economic policy.”

Tags: control, georgia, power, russia, war, Weapons

Government Cyber Attacks in Georgia

Right along with bombs guns and bullets come cyber attacks on the government computer systems of Georgia, who at the time of this article is in a military conflict with Russia.

As Georgian troops retreated to defend their capital from Russian attack, the websites of their government, also under fire, retreated to Google.

In an Internet first, Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reopened its site on Google’s free Blogger network and gave reporters a Gmail address to reach the National Security Council.

The attacks have deluged the websites of the president, various ministries, and news agencies with bogus traffic. The jam not only shut down those sites but also clogged Georgia’s Internet access, exposing its reliance on Russian Internet pipelines.

Some in the cyber security community say this may be nothing more than grass roots “hactivism,” which usually springs up during international confrontations. Others, however, warn that the attack highlights the leverage some countries have gained over adversaries by laying down fiber-optic cables and providing cheap Internet services.

“The lesson here for Washington is that any modern conflict will include a cyberwarfare component, simply because it’s too inexpensive to be passed up,” says Bill Woodcock, research director at Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit Internet research institute in San Francisco. “The best [defensive] strategy is always preparedness. We’ve spent eight years completely ignoring that, while the Chinese and Indian governments have been paying really close attention and investing many tens of billions of dollars.”

Georgia’s Internet infrastructure has two big weaknesses. First, most of its external connections go through Russia. Second, there’s a lack of internal connections called Internet exchange points. So when a Web surfer in Georgia calls up a Georgian Web page, that request routes through another country, which is similar to driving to Mexico to get across town in San Francisco, says Mr. Woodcock, whose organization helps countries build their own Internet exchange points.

“If you look at how the routing is done on the Internet, there are a few major networks that are providing interconnectivity to everyone else,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, director of intelligence analysis at Secure Computing Corporation, a data-security firm based in San Jose, Calif.

A Problem for 110 Nations

By one count, 110 nations are saddled with the problem. Former Soviet states in particular are poorly connected and increasingly reliant on Russia, he says. That’s in part due to the legacy of the Soviet period. But now it has more to do with Russia’s ability to offer superior Internet service through its investments in infrastructure. The situation is somewhat analogous to the more-widely-noticed reliance that neighbors have on Russia’s energy pipelines.

China and India have been laying even more fiber-optic cable than Russia, allowing them to offer cheap prices and snatch away much of the Asian Web traffic that at one time flowed through Palo Alto and Los Angeles, says Woodcock.

Shoring up the cyberdefenses of friendly governments could involve laying new fiber to be price-competitive with adversaries, establishing Internet exchange points, and building up expert strike teams that can respond rapidly to attacks, cybersecurity experts say.

The Baltic nation of Estonia, which last year weathered significant cyberattacks, has dispatched two computer experts to help Georgia, according to Katrin Pärgmäe, an Estonian spokeswoman.

The attacks seen on Georgia were shorter, but more intense, than those seen in Estonia, says Jose Nazario with Arbor Networks, a network-security firm in Lexington, Mass. They have also gone in both directions at times, with some limited attacks on Russian sites. Despite Russia’s military halt, cyberattacks were still reported against some Georgian sites as of press time Tuesday. “I don’t see a cybertruce, but I’m not seeing devastating effects as well,” he says.

Cyberattack Began July 20

Georgia was under cyberassault as early as July 20, when the president’s website was barraged with traffic, according to André DiMino with Shadowserver, an Internet-based security watchdog group.

The computer used to lead that initial assault, known as a denial of service (DOS) attack, was in the US and was shut down fairly quickly, he says. Then DOS attacks resurged over the weekend, this time with a leading machine in Turkey.

The locations of the machines mean little, however, since nefarious hackers and crime syndicates are able to hijack computers across borders.

Experts like Mr. DiMino and Gadi Evron, a former Israeli computer-security official, say they’ve seen no indication yet that the attacks are more sophisticated than something that could be done by hactivists.

“It’s obvious they are suffering from serious attacks, but saying this is an Internet war is blowing it out of any possible proportion before we have more information,” says Mr. Evron.

Others, including Mr. Alperovitch and Woodcock, see the DOS attacks as more sophisticated in the way they have choked the limited data pipelines that Georgia depends on.

Indeed, much of Georgia’s remaining connectivity has come through non-Russian pipes, Woodcock says.

Sources and methods aside, there’s broad agreement that cyberattacks can be so cheap and distracting as to be a no-brainer once bullets start flying.

Alperovitch describes such attacks as “psy-ops,” comparable to bombing radio towers to stifle an opponent’s ability to get its message out.

Georgia’s online retreat to Google was also no doubt demoralizing.

In a long-term conflict, says Woodcock, such an attack could serve longer-term goals.

“You can bet that these attacks have cost Georgia’s private sector far more than the perhaps $2,000 it cost the [perpetrators] to do them,” he says.

“And in the long run, that loss of national productivity affects not only Georgia’s financial ability to wage war, but its people’s willingness to engage in it,” he adds.

Tags: cyber attack, cyberwarfare, georgia, russia