TBR News December 25, 2015

Dec 25 2015

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. December 25, 2015: “Another Christmas is upon us, cash register bells cheerfully ringing and those of the population not living in parks or bus stations are drooling over the aspect of munching on steriod-packed turkey.

And what are we celebrating?

Chrismas was once a pagan Roman holiday and the Christmas tree a pagan object of worship. Now a declining number of Christians celebrate the Royal Birthday.

But did this actually transpire?

Not even the year of Jesus’ birth is known although many theologians have concluded that Jesus was born sometime in the autumn , between 11 and 13 CE. Also, there is disagreement about where Jesus was born. Different theologians, as opposed to historians, argue Bethlehem in Judea, and Nazareth. 

That was prior to certain archeological discoveries in the Dead Sea area.

From the Dead Sea scrolls, we learn that Jesus was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Egyptian Jewish father and Egyptian mother.

He was not born in a stable in Bethlehem nor were there any wise men visiting nor a special star hovering overhead.

The basis of all of this revisionist material is clearly set forth in a scroll found at Cave #3 on the Dead Sea in 1953. 

It is on parchment (used only for important documents…the rest were on papyrus) and was written at the time of Jesus, about 50-55 CE. 

The document is the only extant period reference to Jesus; all the others were created, often out of whole cloth, two hundred years later, and in the case of significant paragraphs in Josephus, later Christian forgeries. 

This revealing scroll has been forensically tested as to age, type of ink, handwriting etc and was very clearly created at the time and place indicated. 

The text of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in four different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean.

The scroll in question here, from cave #3 is in Nabataean, used from the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE

From this we discover that Jesus was a Jew but born in Alexandria, Egypt, ten years after the date ascribed in the Gospels to his nativity. 

Bar Nasha’(son of man) was Jesus name for himself. 

Jesus was not a Nazerene, as is often stated in the New Testament, but an Alexandrian Jew. His parents emigrated to Palestine, and the young Jesus joined the Essene religious movement where Jesus’ elder brother was a member of this religious and agricultural cult. He subsequently became heavily involved in their revolts against the occupying Roman power, was one of the leaders in a revolt attempt, fled when the Roman troops attacked in a pre-emptive strike, leaving many of his fellow cult members to be captured by the Romans and all later crucified.

He escaped with a small number of Essenes to the desert where he remained until he died. 

The interesting aspect of this is that the Essene cult was an all-male agricultural commune and very specifically homosexual in nature and practice. 

In the scroll, Jesus’ sexual orientation is specifically addressed and names of his male lovers covered. 

It should be noted that the scrolls themselves were prepared by members of the Essene cult who were themselves homosexuals and therefore not critical of Jesus orientation.

During the Procuratorship of Antonius Felix (52 to 58 CE) Jesus amassed a mob of about 30,000 Palestinian Jewish dissidents, planning to attack Jerusalem and drive out the Roman garrison. One of Jesus’s Essene close associates, a man named Judas, informed Felix of the impending raid and it was stopped by Roman troops with a heavy loss of life for the rebels. Many were taken prisoner, tried and later crucified for rebellion against the Roman government but the period records show, very clearly, that their leader, Jesus from Alexandria, escaped and vanished into the desert. 

And a Merry Christmas to you, too!”

Conversations with the Crow

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversatins with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped  and later transcribed them.

These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Crow-Gregory-Douglas-ebook/dp/B00GHMAQ5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450147193&sr=8-1&keywords=conversations+with+the+crow

 

Conversation No. 17

Date: Monday, June 24, 1996

Commenced: 11:24 AM CST

Concluded: 12: 05 PM CST

GD: Good morning, Robert. I just got back from a business trip. What’s new inside the Beltway?

RTC: I missed your daily chats, Gregory. How was your trip?

GD: St. Petersburg was great. Moscow is improving from the old days but expensive as Hell and getting to be a Western-style mess. Still, I got to tour the older parts of the Kremlin and look at some of the stock in the military museum there.  Money is necessary to live but collectables are far more interesting. Great art collections in St. Petersburg. Our St. Petersburg is full of ancient retired Jews, hoping the hot sun will extend their petty lives instead of giving them skin cancer.

RTC: Back to your cheerful self, I see. Did you have any trouble going through Immigration? You are on the watch list, you know.

GD: I know. No, I flew with a friend who has a private plane. I never go through the lines getting back. I sent Tom Kimmel a nice postcard from Moscow and put my prints all over the thing. I hope it distracts him.

RTC: What a terrible thing to do, Gregory. They will spend a week testing the card and once they decide it was authentic, they will get our Moscow…I assume you sent it from Moscow…people to check hotel rosters. If they find you, then they’ll check the Immigration records to see when you arrived back here. If they don’t find you and they know you’re back…

GD: Oh, I called Kimmel to cinch this up. He hadn’t gotten my card yet so I told him all about the joys of Moscow. Of course, he probably didn’t believe me but when he gets that card, my I will have so much fun.

RTC: And expect a smarmy call from him asking you about your plane trip. Oh, and what airline did you take? Oh, and where did you land, coming back? My, they have so little imagination, don’t they?

GD: No brains, either. That’s what comes from marrying your sister.

RTC: Gregory, how rude. Can’t you show some class? You know they’re trying to quit all that.

GD: (Laughter) Yes.

RTC: Did you know old Hoover was part black?

GD: Besides being queer?

RTC: In addition to that. But I think Hoover was more asexual that homosexual. A really vicious old man. Do you know how he kept from being kicked out by succeeding Presidents? He kept files on everyone of consequence, both in business, the media and, especially, government. The real dirt as it were. And no one, not the President, the Attorney General or Congress to whom he had to go every year to get the yearly appropriations would every dare to cross J. Edgar. Bobby Kennedy crossed him and Bobby was killed for his trouble. No, Hoover was a vicious man. We, on the other hand, use the same methodology but we are far smoother in applying it. We have a strong influence, for want of a better term, with the banking industry. We have the strongest and most effective influence with the print and television media. We have a much stronger hold on the Hill than Hoover ever had. At times, we’ve had iron control over the Oval Office. Hell, the NSA snoops domestically and we get it all. We have a strong in with the telephone people and we don’t need warrants to listen to anybody, domestically, we want, when we want. Now that the internet is in full bloom, trust it, Gregory, that we will establish our own form of control over that. It’s an invisible control and we never, ever talk about it and anyone who gets really close to the truth gets one in the back of the head from a doped-up burglar. And if something gets loose, who will publish it? Surely not our boys in the media.  A book publisher?  A joke, Gregory. Never. Rather than off some snoop, it’s much more subtle to marginalize them in print, imply they are either liars or nuts and make fun of them. Discredit them so no one will listen to them and then later, the car runs over them in the crosswalk. Oh, sorry about that, officer,  but my foot slipped off the brake. I am desolated by that. And we pay for fixing the front end of his car.

GD: Such an insight. Too much coffee, today, Robert?

RTC: No, just an old man and his memories.

GD: How come you never nailed Hoover about the homosexual business? RTC: We had a working relationship with him, observed, I might add, in the breach more than not. The old faggot put his men in foreign embassies as legates while our men were the USIA. 1We tried to take them over but it never worked out. We just made their lives miserable instead..

GD: Question here. Now that Communism is effectively dead in Russia and they are imploding, why go after them? Once the Second World War was over, we made friends with the evil Germans and Japanese and built them up again. Why not work with the non-Communist Russians?

RTC: Oh, that drunk Yeltsin was in our pocket but in the case of the former, we did build up their industries but we also owned them, lock, stock and barrel. Germany and Japan were our puppets but the Russians could never be brought to heel because they were too large and too diverse. Also, take into account that our main thesis at the Company was that the evil Russian Communists had to be stopped lest they take over Nova Scotia and bombard New York. With a decades-long mindset like that, you can’t expect our people to change overnight into actually accepting the Russians. Not likely. And besides, we tried to nail down all their oil and gas but we lost hundreds of millions in the process when they got wise and stopped it. We have to find a new international enemy to scare the shit out of American with; an enemy that only the CIA can save us from. The Jews are screaming about the Arabs, who are natural enemies of the Christians. We could dig up historians who will write about the Crusades and Hollywood people who will make movies about the triumph of Christianity over the Crescent. The Jews are getting too much power these days but remember that the Arabs have all the big oil and we need it. Yes, no doubt a resurrection of the Crusades will be next. Without enemies to protect from, we are of no use. Besides, Arabs are highly emotional and we can easily push them into attacking us, hopefully outside the country. Then, the well-oiled machinery that we have perfected over the years can start up and off we go on another adventure.

GD: My, how Heini Müller would have loved to listen in on this conversation. A thoroughgoing pragmatist and you two would have a wonderful time.

RTC: Remember that he and I had occasion to talk while he was here in Washington. I liked him as a matter of fact.

GD: In spite of the propaganda about the Gestapo in overcoats with dogs dragging screaming Jews into the streets, beating them with whips and driving them, in long parades, into the gas chambers? Of course that was wartime fiction but it got the Jews sympathy.

RTC”:And don’t forget, Gregory, it also got them political power and money. And they love both. I worked with them on a number of occasions and while they are all smart people, I wouldn’t trust one of them to the corner for a pound of soft soap. During the Stalin era, they spied on us for Josef by the carload, stealing everything, worming their way into Roosevelt’s New Deal and high government office and everything they could lay their hands on, went straight to Moscow. Now, it’s the identical situation but the information goes to Tel Aviv.

GD: Stalin hated them. He didn’t trust them.

RTC: Ah, but he did use them to kill people off, didn’t he?

GD: Yes, but when he was done with them, he planned to make the fictive Hitler’s death programs look like a fairy tale. Going to round up all the Jews and dump them into the wilds of a Siberian winter and let God freeze them all.

RTC: Oh, they won’t ever face up to that one, Gregory. No, Communism was wonderful because they used it as a ladder to climb up to where the white man held sway. Truman initially supported their cause until he found out how they were murdering Palestinians to steal their farms so he stopped US support of Israel. And then Israel tried to kill him.

GD: Müller mentioned that.

RTC: But Harry got cold feet after that.

GD: And now they have a place at the white man’s table, don’t they? RTC: Hell, now they own the table and the restaurant and ten blocks around it. Roosevelt hated them, you know and he and Long kept them out of the country. Roosevelt said they were a pest and we did not want them here. Funny, because long ago, the Roosevelt family was Jewish.

GD: I know. German Jews from the Rhineland. Name was Rosenfeld. Went to Holland after they were run out of Germany and changed the name to a Dutch spelling.

RTC: Yes. I know that. Old Franklin’s second cousin was an Orthodox rabbi as late as 1938. Of course no one ever mentions that just like no one ever talks about Eleanor’s rampant lesbianism. God, what a sewer the White House was then. A veritable racial and ethical trash bin.

GD: Now they’re all dead.

RTC: There should be a way to prevent that sort of thing but of course we were not in existence when Franklin was king. Wouldn’t happen now. I’m afraid that the Jews will dig into the Company the same way they dug into Roosevelt’s bureaucracy and the second time around, we will have a terrible time rooting them all out.

GD: I can see pogroms in Skokie and Miami even as we speak.

RTC: Dream on, my boy, dream on. At any rate, I shall await the demonization of the Arab world. We can send the military into Saudi Arabia on some flimsy pretest, like the demolition of some US Embassy in a very minor state, like Portugal, by positively identified Saudi Arabs and then a new Crusade! Oh, and the precious oil!

GD: And the oil. Remember the Maine, Robert.

RTC: Yes and remember what old Hearst said? ‘ You supply the pictures and I’ll supply the war?” Oh yes and we got Cuba and the Philippines, although why we wanted the latter escapes me. The problem with that country is that it’s full of Filipinos  and monkeys. Of course it’s often hard to differentiate between them but life is never easy. The Navy calls them the niggers of the Orient. I was at Pubic Bay once…

GD: (Laughter) what? You mean Subic Bay, don’t you?

RTC: A service joke. My God, Gregory, every square foot of land for miles around that base was filled with bars and tens of thousands of local prostitutes. ‘Oh you nice American! I love to fuck you! Take me back to America!’ And many of our corn-fed sailors went for the okeydoke and found out what Hell was like once they got Esmiralda back to Iowa. Ah well, thank God I never listened to their whining siren songs.

GD: I would imagine they had more claps than a football crowd….

RTC: (Laughter) My, isn’t it fun being bigots?

GD: I would prefer ‘realistic observers.’ Robert.

RTC: Call it what you will, Gregory, underneath the nice, polished veneer, we are all really cheap plywood.

GD: Hypocrisy is, after all, the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

RTC: Did you go to Harvard, Gregory? Such polished wit.

GD: I know. No, Not Harvard. The University of Unfortunate Experiences. I read a good deal, Robert, and I have moved in elegant circles and know just what to say and do at the appropriate time. Good manners are just the polish on the knife blade.

RTC: The University has embittered you, hasn’t it?

GD: Of course. Remember the Canadian counterfeit caper? A good case of embitterment. They stole from me so I returned the favor…in spades if you’ll pardon a rampant, bigoted remark. They stole four dollars and ten cents from me and I responded by stealing over two million dollars from them. In cash and their expenses. Loved every minute of it, too. I don’t think the Canadians expected me to come back and certainly not the way I did.

RTC: I read all about it. You made the press and we took note.

GD: I’m sure you did. Always strike at the weakest spot, unexpectedly and with force. Take them by surprise and then withdraw. They will rush their troops to the point of attack and then you circle around and hit them somewhere else.

RTC: How much did you get away with?

GD: Oh, Robert, such a pointed question. I got my four dollars and ten cents back and it cost them millions in a frantic attempt to stop what they called the efforts of the largest ring in their history. And if I made a profit out of it, why consider Delilah. Didn’t she make a prophet?

RTC: Oh, Gregory, a pun is the lowest form of humor. I should expect better from you.

GD: It would not be a good idea for me to go back to Canada, Robert. They will still be waiting for me. After all, I never used a lubricant. Sometimes, rarely but sometimes, I can sit back and enjoy a good laugh. I have two Canadian two dollar bills and a dime in a nice shadow box along with a newspaper clipping from the Vancouver Sun, next to my desk, It warms me on a cold night.

 

(Concluded at 12:02 PM CST)

 

Rogue toy drones are interfering with military operations

December 24, 2015

by Craig Whitlock

Washinigton Post

The Air Force revolutionized drone warfare. Now it’s finding itself on the defensive.

Rogue toy drones — a hot-selling Christmas gift this season and last — are starting to interfere with military operations at several bases across the country. With sales of consumer drones expected to approach 700,000 this year, military officials say they are bracing for the problem to get worse and are worried about the potential for an aviation disaster.

Last month, an Air Force A-29 Super Tucano aircraft reported a near midair collision with a small rogue drone over the Grand Bay Bombing and Gunnery Range in Georgia, Air Force officials said.

In June, an Air Force KC-10 aerial refueling tanker flying over the Philadelphia suburbs at an altitude of 3,800 feet was forced to take evasive action and barely avoided striking a football-sized drone that passed within 10 feet of its right wing, officials said.

There have been at least 35 cases of small drones interfering with military aircraft or operating too close to military airfields in 2015, according to reports filed with the armed forces or the Federal Aviation Administration.

That’s a small fraction of the estimated 1,000 reports received by the FAA this year of small drones interfering with civilian air traffic or coming too close to passenger airports.

But military officials, who once thought the remote locations of their airfields and restricted airspace offered a measure of protection from wandering drones, said they are no longer immune.

Cmdr. William Marks, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, said Navy pilots or air-traffic controllers at U.S. bases have reported close calls or encounters with unauthorized drones 12 times in the past three months. Prior to that, the Navy was recording an average of less than one incident per month.

We’re seeing an exponential curve, so yes, it is a concern,” he said

One military airfield that has experienced multiple risky encounters with drones is the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Ariz.

In May, a Marine Corps Harrier jet coming in for a landing at Yuma reported a small blue drone about 100 feet off its right side. In July, a Navy T-45 Goshawk training aircraft flew within 100 feet of another drone about five miles west of Yuma, according to FAA records.

Col. Robert Huber, a senior Army aviation official, said his service has not received any reports of problems with rogue drones on Army installations so far. But given the experiences of other branches of the military, he said the Army anticipates “that there could be more challenges.”

Prior to last year, close encounters with rogue drones were almost unheard of. But rapid advances in technology and falling prices have led to a boom in sales — and a corresponding surge in reports of air-traffic chaos.

Under FAA guidelines, drone pilots flying for recreation are supposed to keep their aircraft below 400 feet and at least five miles away from airports. Regulators, however, have been largely unable to enforce those guidelines.

In an attempt to bring a measure of order to the skies, the FAA on Monday began requiring all recreational drone owners to register online with the agency and to affix identification numbers on their aircraft.

More than 45,000 people registered in the first two days, overwhelming the system and forcing the FAA to take it offline temporarily for repairs. The FAA said it expects that as many as 400,000 small drones could be sold during the holidays.

In anticipation of more difficulties to come, the Air Force last week began a new campaign to educate its pilots, flight crews and air-traffic controllers about the hazards posed by small drones.

Steven Pennington,  the Air Force’s director of bases, ranges and airspace, said many consumer drones are only two or three feet in diameter. At that size, pilots usually can’t see them until they’re within 600 feet — giving the pilots just a second or two to react before the military aircraft whiz by.

Pennington said the Air Force is telling its pilots: “Boys and girls, there’s a change in the world. There are small things flying. We know some of them are flying in our terminal areas and they shouldn’t be. We’re working on that. We know that there are some of them flying in around our military training routes and special-use airspace. We’re working on that. But the first thing is to tell people to be aware.”

The Air Force is also considering more forceful countermeasures. On Tuesday, the service posted a contract solicitation for portable equipment that could be used to disrupt the flight paths of rogue drones near military installations.

According to the solicitation, the Air Force Global Strike Command wants to buy portable jammers that would interfere with drones’ navigational signals and force them to return to where they launched from.

Although the FAA has recorded scores of near-misses, there have been no reports of a midair collision between a drone and a regular aircraft in the United States.

Pennington likened the aviation threat posed by small drones to those of large birds, which can weigh anywhere from two to 15 pounds. The difference, he said, is that drones contain hard plastic or metal, like their lithium battery packs.

If a drone were to get sucked into a military jet engine, he said, “we’re relatively certain it would be a significant problem.”

 

Russian intel spots 12,000 oil tankers & trucks on Turkey-Iraq border – General Staff

December 25, 2015

RT

Russian intelligence has spotted up to 12,000 tankers and trucks on the Turkish-Iraqi border, the General Staff of Russia’s armed forces has reported.

The [aerial] imagery was made in the vicinity of Zakho (a city in Iraqi Kurdistan), there were 11,775 tankers and trucks on both sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border,” Lieutenant-General Sergey Rudskoy told journalists on Friday.

It must be noted that oil from both Iraq and Syria come through this [Zakho] checkpoint,” General Rudskoy said.

Heavy-duty trucks loaded with oil continue to cross the Turkish-Syrian border as well, Rudskoy said. At the same time, the number of tankers on the northern and western routes used for transporting oil from Syria is declining, the general added.

According to satellite data, the number of oil tankers moving through the ‘northern route’ towards the refinery in the [Turkish] city of Batman has considerably diminished,” Rudskoy said, adding that the number of tankers using the ‘western route,’ between the Turkish cities of Reyhanli [on the Syrian border] and the city of Iskenderun, has decreased to 265 vehicles.

The Russian Air Force in Syria has destroyed about 2,000 tankers used by the Islamists for oil transportation. In the last week, Russian warplanes eliminated 17 convoys of oil tankers and a number of installations used by terrorists for oil extraction and processing

The Russian Air Force’s effective strikes in Syria have forced the terrorists to look for new routes for crude oil transportation. Today, tankers loaded with oil in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor province, under Islamic State control, are moving towards the Iraqi border in the direction of Zakho and Mosul.

“However, despite a considerable diversion, the finishing point of the trafficking route remains Turkey,” Rudskoy said.

 

Arab League condemns Turkey over Iraq troop deployment

The Arab League has called a Turkish military deployment in northern Iraq an ‘assault’ on Baghdad’s sovereignty. Turkey’s plans to redeploy the troops to Iraqi Kurdistan are not enough, Iraq’s foreign minister has said.

December 24, 2015

DW

The Arab League on Thursday accused Turkey of violating international law and Iraq’s sovereignty over a military deployment earlier this month that has raised tensions between Baghdad and Ankara.

“The Turkish incursion into Iraq constitutes a glaring infringement of rules of international law and breaches Iraq’s sovereignty,” the head of the Arab League, Nabil al-Araby, told a meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo. “Turkey has to withdraw its troops immediately from Iraq.”

A statement from the Arab foreign ministers said the Turkish deployment “is an assault on Iraqi sovereignty and a threat to Arab national security.”

Turkey has had a few hundred troops based near “Islamic State”-controlled Mosul in the Nineveh province since last year as part of what it said was an international training mission.

Diplomatic row

However, a diplomatic row erupted earlier this month when Ankara announced it had increased the number of troops to around 1,000 for what it said was force protection. It also sent tanks. Last week, an IS assault on the training camp in Bashiqa left several Turkish soldiers wounded.

In response to protests from the government in Baghdad and a call from US President Barack Obama to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, some of the forces were “reorganized” in a redeployment in the autonomous Kurdistan region, with which Turkey has good relations and where it has had a small base since the 1990s.

In Cairo, Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said a redeployment was not enough and demanded that all Turkish troops leave Iraqi territory.

“They (the troops) would be relocated from one Iraqi area to another Iraqi area. Sovereignty is sovereignty, and the territories are one,” he said.

Baghdad’s opposition to the Turkish presence has much to do with the internal politics of Iraq and Turkey’s intentions, real or perceived. Other countries, ranging from Germany to the United States, have training missions in Iraq with Baghdad’s approval.

Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdistan region have long-running territorial disputes that have only been exacerbated as Kurdish forces have made significant territorial gains south of the official borders of the three northern provinces that constitute the Kurdistan region.

Baghdad is outraged Turkish troops are in Nineveh, an area controlled by the Kurds, but officially not a part of the Kurdish region.

Atheel Nujaifi

The nearly 1,000 Turkish troops were training Kurdish peshmerga forces as well as Sunni Arab forces loyal to Atheel Nujaifi, the former governor of Nineveh, and his brother Osama, a former Iraqi vice president.

The Nujaifi brothers are rivals of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is under pressure from Shiite parties and Iran-backed militias. The brothers have also pushed for federalization in Iraq, including the creation of a Sunni Arab region along lines similar to the Kurds.

Turkey was preparing the Nujaifi forces to play a role in any future assault to rest control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, from IS. The prospect that Nujaifi’s forces could have a presence on the ground alongside the Kurds in Mosul presented a challenge the central government.

cw/jm (AFP, dpa)

 

Turkish ‘cleansing’ operation rocks southeastern cities

December 25, 2015

by Seyhmus Cakan

Reuters

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey-  Explosions and gunfire resounded around the southeastern Turkish town of Cizre on Friday after a clash overnight that the army said killed six Kurdish militants and one soldier, as a security operation there entered its 11th day.

Since a two-year ceasefire between Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants and Ankara fell apart in July, the mainly Kurdish southeast has been plunged back into a three-decades-old conflict which has killed more than 40,000 people.

A helicopter clattered overhead and armored vehicles sped along a hilltop road above Cizre, near the Syrian border, as security forces pressed on with a campaign across the region involving thousands of troops, backed by tanks.

Reuters TV footage showed smoke billowing from buildings hit by blasts, while streets were empty and shops shuttered.

The town, in Sirnak province, is the focus of what the government has described as an operation to “cleanse” the area of militants. But locals dispute that description and complain that the attacks are indiscriminate.

“The recent war being conducted in the Sirnak area, especially in Cizre, is not a cleansing. They are shelling randomly,” said shopkeeper Abdullah Varkin, 38, speaking as a small group of children and men looked on.

“The people are miserable. The sick cannot even go to hospital. The wounded are trying to treat themselves at home and some died due to a lack of doctors and blood loss,” he said.

Locals also complained about a lack of food and water.

FULL CURFEWS

Both Cizre and Silopi, 30 km (19 miles) away near the Iraqi border, have witnessed intense fighting since a round-the-clock curfew was declared in both towns 12 days ago.

Three soldiers were wounded in Thursday evening’s firefight and one of them died in hospital, the army said in a statement.

In the town of Sirnak, security sources said four students and two staff suffered burns and smoke inhalation when PKK militants, their faces hidden by scarves, threw petrol bombs in a state-run cultural center on Friday, triggering a fire.

They said a gunfight erupted between security forces and militants as the building was evacuated.

State media say 168 PKK militants have been killed in the latest security operations. The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) says at least 38 civilians have been killed.

The body of Taybet Inan, a 57-year-old mother of 11 shot dead by security forces last week, was left lying on a street in Silopi for a week before being retrieved on Friday, said HDP lawmaker Ferhat Encu. Snipers killed her brother-in-law and wounded her husband when they sought to retrieve the body.

Many parts of Silopi were without electricity, and dozens of people were sheltering in the basements of houses, the HDP said.

Since the PKK launched its insurgency in 1984, fighting has been largely focused in the countryside, but the latest conflict has been focused in urban areas, where the PKK youth wing has set up barricades and dug trenches to keep security forces out.

The PKK is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Ankara launched a peace process with the group’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan in late 2012 but the talks ground to a halt early this year.

(Additional reporting by Gulsen Solaker in Ankara; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by David Dolan and Mark Trevelyan)

 

 

Israelis are calling it a ‘new kind of Palestinian terror’

December 25, 2015

by William Booth and Ruth Eglash

Washington Post

JERUSALEM — Young Palestinians with kitchen knives are waging a ceaseless campaign of near-suicidal violence that Israeli leaders are calling “a new kind of terrorism.” There were three attacks on Christmas Eve — two stabbings and one car ramming.

There have been about 120 attacks and attempted assaults by Palestinians against Israelis since early October, an average of more than one a day. At least 20 Israelis have been killed; more than 80 Palestinians have been shot dead by security forces and armed civilians during the assaults.

There is a numbing repetition to the news: knife-wielding Palestinian at a military checkpoint or bus stop shot dead at the scene — or “neutralized,” as the Israeli media call it. Many of the assaults or their aftermaths have been captured on cellphone videos.

A review of the incidents since the beginning of October, alongside interviews with Israeli and Palestinian officials, reveal attacks that do not fit into past patterns. There is a sense on both sides that something unprecedented is happening, a shapeless rebellion of individuals driven by an unknowable combination of hate and despair.

The past cycles of violence, the first and second intifadas, the stone throwers in the 1980s and suicide bombers in the 2000s, were embraced by the Palestinian leadership and steered by armed factions. The current uprising appears to be leaderless, the assailants “liked” by friends and followers on Facebook but decoupled from traditional Palestinian politics.

Palestinian officials are struggling to find the words to describe the attacks — calling them “acts” or “events” and the assailants “victims” or “martyrs.” They have been reluctant to publicly encourage the attacks, but they have not condemned the killings or called for them to stop.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described the violence as “a new kind of terrorism.”

Israeli security forces have not been able to stop the attacks, which are mostly carried out by unmarried youths who decide on their own to pick up a knife or an ax or a potato peeler.

Netanhyahu says the attacks are inspired by radical Islam, but his own military intelligence officers are reluctant to make such a direct link, saying instead that the motivations are a mix of personal and political beliefs.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has called the daily attacks a “justified popular uprising . . . driven by despair that a two-state solution is not coming.”

Israel’s minister of public security, Gilad Erdan, said in an interview that the violence is nearly impossible to forecast and disrupt because, unlike operations directed by groups such as the Islamist militant organization Hamas, there are no cells to penetrate, no phones to tap, no targets for undercover operations. The pool of possible assailants is as large as the number of frustrated Palestinians.

In the past we could find the organizations and send agents in and try to prevent it before it happened,” Erdan said in an interview. “Today it is individuals making their own decisions.”

The attacks appear to be spontaneous and opportunistic, poorly planned and badly executed — although often deadly. Most attackers display little or no training. The most common weapon is a kitchen knife. The second most common is the family car.

There have also been drive-by shootings and coordinated ambushes, but these number only a few of more than a hundred attacks.

If the death of an Israeli soldier or Jewish settler is what the Palestinian assailants seek, the attacks are often failures. Most victims survive; many of the soldiers, who wear body armor, are only lightly wounded, if at all.

The same is not true for the attackers. Dozens of Palestinian assailants have been shot dead. In most cases, the Palestinians attempted to kill an Israeli, according to Israeli authorities; in a few others, Palestinians say the alleged assailant either did not possess a weapon or posed no serious threat to troops or civilians. In parallel violence, 45 Palestinians have been killed in violent demonstrations against Israeli forces since the beginning of October, as Israel deployed snipers firing live rounds.

There is a numbing repetition to the news: knife-wielding Palestinian at a military checkpoint or bus stop shot dead at the scene — or “neutralized,” as the Israeli media call it. Many of the assaults or their aftermaths have been captured on cellphone videos.

A review of the incidents since the beginning of October, alongside interviews with Israeli and Palestinian officials, reveal attacks that do not fit into past patterns. There is a sense on both sides that something unprecedented is happening, a shapeless rebellion of individuals driven by an unknowable combination of hate and despair.

Attacks are ‘a new kind of terrorism’ in Israel

The past cycles of violence, the first and second intifadas, the stone throwers in the 1980s and suicide bombers in the 2000s, were embraced by the Palestinian leadership and steered by armed factions. The current uprising appears to be leaderless, the assailants “liked” by friends and followers on Facebook but decoupled from traditional Palestinian politics.

Palestinian officials are struggling to find the words to describe the attacks — calling them “acts” or “events” and the assailants “victims” or “martyrs.” They have been reluctant to publicly encourage the attacks, but they have not condemned the killings or called for them to stop.

Israel defends the harsh countermeasures as legitimate self-defense. Palestinians say that Israel should detain more alleged attackers. The Israeli human rights group Btselem charges that an unwritten “shoot to kill” policy has led to “street executions” of wounded or prone assailants.

At least 20 Israelis have been killed in the knife, vehicular and gun assaults since the beginning of October. An American student, Erza Schwartz, 18, studying at a yeshiva during a gap year, was killed while distributing food to Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. A Palestinian mobile phone salesman, Shadi Arafa, 24, was killed in the same attack while on his way home. An Eritrean refugee was mistakenly shot and then beaten to death by an Israeli mob during an attack at a bus station.

Four of the Israelis killed were active-duty soldiers; several of the dead were in the army reserves, but it is unlikely the assailants would have known this as they were dressed in civilian clothes.

Twelve lived or studied in the Jewish settlements that the international community consider illegal, although Israel disputes this, on lands that Palestinians want for a future state.

The attackers killed six rabbis. Two of the dead were women and six were older than 50; two were men in their 70s.

One of the dead Israelis, Aharon Banita Bennett, 22, was pushing a baby stroller when he was knifed; a couple, Eitam and Naama Henkin, were shot dead in their car in the West Bank, their four children sitting in the back seat.

More than 50 attacks involved teenagers as perpetrators.

The Israeli dead include Nehemia Lavi, 41, a prominent activist for Jewish settlements in the Arab Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City; another was a peace activist, Richard Lakin, 76, whose Facebook page called for the sides to “co-exist.”

Although the Palestinian leaders say they are committed to nonviolence, they consider the attacks acts of “popular resistance” against the 48-year military occupation by Israel.

If you slap me, I will react,” said Jibril Rajoub, president of the Palestinian Football Federation and a former chief of security, who on Palestinian television has praised the “bravery and composure” of the assailants.

This is caused by our humiliation and suffering, under this fascist system, that day and night is trying to eliminate the Palestinian people. This is the source of everything,” Rajoub said. “The only way to discourage this is to give us some hope.”

The attackers sometimes give clues to their motivations on social media, but not always. Some family members praise the acts, and others claim ignorance.

In November, Rasha Ewaisi, 23, approached an Israeli military checkpoint near Qalqilya. Alerted to suspicious behavior, Ewaisi emerged from her car with a knife, Israeli officials said. She was shot immediately.

There was a letter in her purse. “I don’t know what will happen to me at the end of the road,” it read. “I am fully aware of what I am doing. I am [doing this] in defense of my homeland, the young men and women . . . I can’t suffer anymore.”

Mohammad Shtayyeh, director of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, insisted, “We’re not sending people out to the streets with knives.”

He said Palestinian authorities “are not initiating the violence. It is the Israelis who are pushing us in that direction.”

Israeli parliamentarian Anat Berko, a criminologist who has written extensively about the motivations of suicide bombers in the Palestinian conflict, sees the “normalization of violence” among youths in Palestinian society, a phenomenon she called “martyr-mania.”

A survey released Monday by the respected pollsters at the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah found that two-thirds of Palestinians support the knife attacks. More than half of those surveyed support armed struggle against Israel and want their leader, Abbas, to resign from office.

American diplomats have called this a recipe for chaos.

When they look at the Palestinian Authority this young generation sees a dysfunctional authority that is corrupt and does not represent them,” said Kobi Michael, former head of the Palestinian desk at Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs.

They have no expectation from the Israelis, they feel neglected by the Arab countries and they understand that the international community is more concerned with ISIS or extremist terrorism that it no longer gives attention to the Palestinian issue. They feel very alone.”

This creates a huge darkness and they want to change or undermine the order, even though they don’t know what should replace it,” he said.

 

China’s Mass Counterfeiting of American coins

December 20, 2015

by Brian Harring

With the collapsing American economy, many Americans are rushing to invest in gold; either coins or bar, and also silver. One of the most popular forms of this investment are American coins.  Where there is a need, there is always someone to fill it and in this case, the filling consists of  the massive counterfeiting of gold coins, silver coins, and even Swiss gold bars in China. Initially, it appeared they were only faking Morgan dollars, but then it turned out they were also making $20 Liberty, and Indian Head gold $2.50, $5, and $10 coins, of all dates. Evidently, this is extremely easy with today’s computer-and-laser-die-cutting technology, and the fakes are being die-struck in vast quantities, not cast, and visually at least, are superb copies.

The good news is that these fakes are readily detectable with a 0.01 – gram scale, as the Chinese in their greed are using lower carats of gold and lower grades of silver than the genuine coins, to maximize profit, and thus, in most cases, the fake coins and bars are lighter than the real ones. In a few cases, the silver coins of high numismatic interest are actually OVER weight – it appears that the supply of accurate planchet stock is a major difficulty for the forgers.

Here are links to a two-part article about this in Coin World Magazine:

http://www.coinworldonline.com/counterfeits/articles/20081203/counterfeit_1.as

http://www.coinworldonline.com/counterfeits/articles/20081203/counterfeit_2.as

Note: They are even faking PCGS and ANACS slabs!!:

http://www.coinworldonline.com/counterfeits/articles/20081203/counterfeit_3.as

 A friend who has an extremely wealthy friend in Europe (on the order of several hundreds of millions) asked this person to make enquiries at his bank. The bank told him candidly that indeed, the Chinese are also faking sovereigns, half sovereigns, French 20 Franc gold, and various denominations of Nicholas II Russian Rubles, of all dates, as well as Swiss gold bars. They said any gold bars they are offered for purchase are both weighed and the serial numbers checked with the manufacturers. The Chinese do not know the serial and manufacture date numbering systems on the gold bars, and so that error is quickly detectable.

The US Secret Service has just this week been made aware of this problem, which was new to them, and if they decide to launch an investigation, they have indicated that while they cannot do anything about the operations in China, they can, and will, seize any counterfeit US coins they come across. Dealers in these fakes would also be liable to fines and jail time. Foreign fakes are not under their purview, but if that business turns out to be substantial, there could conceivably be an FBI investigation of fraud in interstate commerce, targeting companies who are mail-ordering fake foreign coins. Individuals who have been cheated might also sue their suppliers – in short, this could turn into a huge mess.

General appearance aside, it is very easy it is to spot fakes – just with a scale reading to 1/00th of a gram, and a table of the correct weights and sizes of the coins or bars they are buying. (In the case of large-size bargold, unless buying from the manufacturer or a reputable bank, the serial numbers need to be verified, so that one does not buy a Chinese bar with a lead or mercury core)

Herewith a listing of what I have uncovered so far:

1; The U.S .Morgan silver dollar. All dates and all mint marks;

2: The U.S. gold coins viz the $2.50, $5.00 and $10.00 Indian head issues

3. The U.S. copper penny viz 1909 S  vdb

4. Three gold Imperial Russian roubles from the reign of Nicholas II

5. A gold 20 franc coin with the head of Napoleon I on the obverse

6. The South African Krugerrand

7. British sovereigns and half sovereigns of different monarchs and dates

And in addition, they are also making fake gold bars from the Credit Suisse people.

It was always considered that numismatics as a relatively fraud-free area of collecting, but it appears that a coin collector today has to carry a digital scale around. This doesn’t affect me very much, but I too have wondered at the sudden appearance of all the Morgan dollars. Fortunately, the ones I have came down to me from my grandfather, and I’ll be very careful picking up individual pieces that fill blanks. As for Krugerands and similar gold pieces that are traded for bullion prices, it is obvious that the Chinese have lowered the purity and thus debase the value; otherwise, a fake Krug would have as much gold as a real one.

 

1 USIA: United States Information Agency. The cover position for CIA operatives working from the inside of an American embassy or consulate.

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